Category: LETTERS Page 25 of 274

To Llewelyn Powys
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Glion-sur-Montreux, Switzerland. September 13, 1936

You have written the history of the cosmos in 120 pages, and naturally there has not been room to put in everything. As you know, I am in hearty agreement with your naturalism and with your affection for Epicurus. You are tender to “country-matters”, in every sense of these words; that is so much to the good; but perhaps it throws the intellectual and political sides of the life of reason too much into the shade. What you seem to leave out is expressed in one phrase by that free lance, Mr. De Casseres, in a booklet which, since it is dedicated to you, I suppose you must have seen. He says: (p. 49) “Repulsion, hatred, opposition—Room for me, or thou diest”—are the conditions of individuality! And I think that in history the power of words and doctrines is nothing to the power of circumstances and of biological impulses. For instance, in all ages some people have seen the fabulous character of religion: Giordano Bruno,

Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Bacon, not to speak of Montaigne and Rabelais, saw it, whereas Luther and Calvin were stone-blind: but society was not ready for light, and wanted to satisfy its national and economic ambitions under the cloak of superstition, suitably modified. At least, that is my diagnosis.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Bertolini’s Palace.
Naples, Italy. September 12, 1912

Some other day I may answer the part of your letter about psychology: today I am hardly in the mood. You are quite right in saying that we disagree about the existence of unfelt feeling. I am not sure, however, that an unfelt feeling is a fact and not a word. I agree that there is something in an animal before he is aware of it—a very great deal, in fact. This is what I meant by the fact on which we agreed and the words about which we disagreed.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. September 11, 1924

How classical you have become! No wonder, with your residence in Italy and your Latin reading. But aren’t you going rather far in condemning flying buttresses? No doubt the motive was only economy—economy in carrying out an extravagant plan; and you may condemn this as not worthy of Aristotle’s magnanimous man. But I have always believed that the frankness of exhibiting such a device, and using it decoratively, had been rewarded by the effect. Sometimes the light and shade play wonderfully among those buttresses, and the labyrinthine effect is in itself poetical. As to thin columns, I agree: I have never liked them. When people speak of “lightness” and “clarity of design” in Gothic churches, I feel that they are picking out the faults: the true beauties are loftiness, intricacy, mystery, and tenderness of detail, so that one lovely nook after another is found nestling in the vast ill-defined whole. “Clarity” should go not with “lightness” but with elegance and modesty on the human scale.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.