Category: LETTERS Page 32 of 274

To Henry Ward Abbot
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, Villa le Balze
London, S.W.1.
Fiesole, Italy. October 4, 1930

Dear Harry,

If I send you my books, it is because various little articles of yours in the papers have proved to me that you haven’t forgotten our old confabulations on ultimate things; and I wish you wouldn’t let your attention become entangled in matters of style; style is only a cumbrous vehicle, though an inevitable one, for what I have to say; and without pretending that my views are of much importance measured by the standard of absolute truth, which after all is in nobody’s hand, I think you might be interested in them as confessions and moral insights of an old friend. You say I am hard to read: I have heard that before, yet it surprises me because I take the greatest pains to be clear, not only in language but in thought, and am a very simple commonplace person in my opinions. Everybody ought to say: “Of course: that’s what I’ve always thought, only I didn’t expect a philosopher to see it”. I said this to Strong (with whom I am staying at present among these Tuscan hills) and he explained that the difficulty in reading my books came from the ornaments, which interfered with the attention and made the reader lose the outline of the thought. Is that it? If so I can only say that the ornaments, for me, are a spontaneous concomitant of the sense, like gestures in animated discourse: they are necessary, if you want to reach the true ground and flavour of the ideas. All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets. But people compare books with other books, not with experience. Yours sincerely

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 Bruno Lind (Robert C. Hahnel)
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. October 3, 1951

I hope you will not go in your book into the possibility of my replacing Aristotle as the accepted pagan philosopher for Catholics. The Church is founded on Judaism; it accepts a naturalism with miraculous powers secretly controlling it, and controlling each soul. My naturalism does not admit a moral or humanistic control over the cosmos; and it puts spirit at the top, and accidental ultimate self-awakening of organic formations, themselves perfectly automatic. Spirit comes and goes in the world like dew in the morning. That is not compatible with the supernatural realism and monarchical theism of the Church. There is another friend of mine, Prof. Michele Petrone, who thinks that my views might, if understood, start a sort of new spiritual discipline; but I think they offer too sporadic and unfruitful a consummation to satisfy mankind. Nietzsche said: “The great question is whether mankind can endure the truth”.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Anne Ford
Via di Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. October 2, 1950

Dear Miss Ford:
You overwhelm me with superior chocolates from Sherry’s in New York. The last night I spent in America was luxuriously spent in an apartment at Sherry’s; not of my own choosing, but suggested by a fashionable friend who also took me that evening to a small dinner party, a theatre party, a private concert, and a reception at her Ambassador’s to meet (the backs of) the Duke of Connaught, the Duchess, and Princess Patricia, after which spree ( Jan. 1912) I never went to any other party in my life. It may well be, after your chocolates, that I shall never wish to descend to any but Sherry’s in the short rest of my life. You are too kind and I rely on your not forgetting to come to see me (if still visible) when you return to Rome.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Oxford, England. October 1, 1913

I have been working very steadily; my book, however, hasn’t got all the benefit of it, as I have been writing other stuff—some half-poetical dialogues that I have long had in mind and one of which was actually written and published long ago in a review. When this spurt of inspiration is over, however, I shall go back to the solid work, and I count on being stimulated especially by talking with Bertie Russell in Cambridge. I saw him at his brother’s, but we didn’t have more than one or two opportunities for quiet discussion. He is a logician and mathematician, strong where I am weakest, so that it is not always easy for us to understand each other on these abstruse points. However, we feel sympathy even in our diversity, and that is why I am anxious to put my view on some subjects (not on all) before him and to learn his more accurately. However, in the end every philosopher has to walk alone.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To Charles Augustus Strong
60 Brattle St Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Autumn 1899–June 1904]

I have been reading more Fichte and Hegel, but my inner self rebels increasingly against their empty pertinacity and shocking habit of covering a paradox with a truism, and making you believe the absurd under the guise of the self-evident. So I shall be kindly disposed to the things-in-themselves.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington DC.