Category: LETTERS Page 27 of 274

To Amy Maud Bodkin
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. November 22, 1934

Dear Madam,

It was very kind of you to send me your book, and you would be surprised if you knew the feeling of strangeness, as if I had forgotten my way about, with which I have read it. Not that you are not perfectly lucid, everywhere delicately perceptive and sympathetic, yet wonderfully sober, in your judgements. But you move in an enchanted world which I am afraid I never inhabited, even when I was young and felt more at home in poetry than I do now. You make me feel afresh that I was never a poet; or rather, to speak with entire frankness, that my sense for poetry has always been immersed in rhetoric, playing on the surface with rhyme, rhythm, assonance, and expressible sentiment, but grossly unaware of these haunting images and profound “experiences” of which you speak. So much so, that even after reading your book with extreme attention and a desire to understand, I am not yet sure what these archetypal patterns are: I mean, what they are ontologically. Everything in my old-fashioned mind seems to be covered by what was called “human nature” and “the passions”. We are all much alike in our capacities for feeling, as in our bodily structure. The doctors find, almost always, every organic detail in each of us exactly in its allotted place; and so the various sensuous phenomena that strike the imagination are bathed in each of us in exactly similar emotions. Do you think that these phenomena owe their power to the fact that they have occurred before in the experience of our ancestors? Do they operate telepathetically from one instance to another? I suspect that our historical knowledge now-a-days sophisticates our passions. When I hear the words: fidelium animæ per Dei misericordiam requiescant in pace, the magic of the chant lies no doubt in the universal (occasional) longing of mortal creatures to return to their mothers’ bosom or to that of Abraham but I may cloud or complicate that human emotion with a touch of the pathos of distance, at the thought that the same plaintive cry may have reechoed long ago in the catacombs. But this effect seems to me adventitious and unnecessary.

I mention these doubts only as a proof of the intense interest with which I have followed your analysis.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.

To Henry Ward Abbot
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. November 21, 1932

Dear Harry,
The porter of this hotel has just come up in some agitation, holding a letter of yours in his trembling hand, his whitening Jewish beard shaking in tempo; and he protests that he never rejected any book of yours addressed to me. I often send books to myself during the summer, to get rid of encumbrances, and the porter has orders to keep them till my return. But he may have a holiday in mid-summer, or one of the underlings may have been officiating, and may have told the postman–what was quite true–that I was not living in the hotel at that time.

I am sorry this matter has caused you so much annoyance, and am not sure whether, in telling me all about it, your idea was that I should send you the $1.11 required to rescue that book from limbo. I don’t venture to do so, until I get my yearly account, and see how near you come to the truth in suggesting that George Sturgis may have lost most of my savings for me. Last year I inherited enough from my sister Josephine to double the amount of my property: but as the nominal value of the whole had shrunk by about one half, I stood on January 1st just where I stood a year or two before: better, in respect to income, which had not shrunk as much as the nominal capital. I don’t know what has happened since: but if I am completely ruined, it might be an occasion for a fresh spurt in my literary life. I have a lot of unpublished stuff that might do for articles, and I might hurry up with the novel! Yours
G. S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. November 20, 1931

During two sunny afternoons on the Pincio I have absorbed your counterblast to religion. As a popular tract it is capital, beating the eloquent parsons at their own game. But isn’t it a bit discouraging that the work of Voltaire, which he did so thoroughly, should need to be done all over again after two hundred years? Is reason in the same parlous position as faith that it has to be dinned into the ears of each generation, or it will die out?

From my own point of view, if you were here, I should have some observations to make upon your presuppositions. You seem to regard “Religion” as merely myth and magic, that is, bad science: and of course you have a clear case in proving that bad science is worse than good science.

But is religion merely bad—hasty, poetical, superstitious—science? I should say religions (because each religion seems rather irreligious to the others) often had at least two important ingredients besides magic and myth. They were the intellectual and ritual expression of a particular ethos, nationality, or civilization; and they were also forms of “spiritual life”. Now I like very much what you say about science, if it became a religion, losing all its scientific virtue. A philosophy more or less inspired by science, like Epicureanism or Stoicism, may be a religion, or a substitute for religion: it may sanction a particular morality, and it may be refined into a form of spiritual life—I mean, into a great life-long dialogue between God and the soul of man. But science, as you conceive science—á la Dewey—is only experiment and invention; it is not a philosophy: and if any speculative ideas more or less illegitimately associated with it were set up as eternal truths, science would cease to be science to become bigotry. One of the happy, if somewhat disconcerting, discoveries of our—or my—later years has been precisely this: that science is intellectually blind and dumb, and that you may be a leading scientific expert without knowing what you think on any important question. It seems to me, therefore, that you ought not to pit “religion” and “science” so squarely against each other, as if they were rivals in the same field. A scientific philosophy might be a rival, or an ally, of certain religions or religious philosophies; but what chiefly attaches mankind to its religions is precisely the need of completing their traditional ethos, and their spontaneous spiritual life, with an appropriate speculative doctrine: and science is dumb on that subject and, in its scientific domain, ought to be dumb. Perhaps this explains in part why, in spite of you and Voltaire, religions still exist in the world

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Cambridge, Massachusetts. November 19, 1911

As to me, the present is a blank like the Hinterland of Tripoli, with sniping going on desultorily, always in the same places. But the past and the future are both full of features. California, on the whole, disappointed me. The country is fine, the climate perfect; but the people are all—except the Italian restaurant-keepers and the Chinese—from Newton Centre, Mass. It was no relief morally. My notion of the U.S. now I have traversed the whole, is that it is a smaller place than I thought. The potential features are all marked, as in a child’s face, and there are no ideal surprises in store for us, as far as this country is concerned. It will be, for five hundred years, much the same thing, more congested. As to the future, I sail on January 24th , and am making in the first place for Madrid. In the late Spring I shall return to Paris to stay with Strong, and catch whatever winds of doctrine or revolution may be blowing in that most ventilated of atmospheres. Beyond that nothing determinate except freedom, which for the moment is a very distinct thing in my eyes.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.