Category: LETTERS Page 35 of 274

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 28, 1950

Dear Dick,

You end your long letter, just received, with a pleasing suggestion (as ladies used to do in postscripts) which I mustn’t leave unnoticed. I didn’t send you Cardiff’s book because I was disgusted with it and have not sent it to anybody, not even to Cory.* When he sent me half a dozen pages, I smelt a rat at once, but didn’t wish to discourage him, because the project of a selection of maxims or thoughts or epigrams had always tempted my vanity, to show the water-lilies that might be picked in the stagnant pools of philosophy. But I told him that I felt that his selections, though good, were not diversified enough: too much commonplace rationalism (when I am not a rationalist) and not enough cynicism or scepticism or psychological malice: and I gave him a sample of what I wished he would include, what Mario says about our “having to change the truth a little in order to remember it”. When the book arrived I saw that the old rascal had left that out! He also represented me as merely renovating Tom Paine, instead of Thomas Aquinas! Cheap and witless criticism of religion, without all the pages of sympathetic treatment of it, for instance in “The Idea of Christ in the Gospels”. I was furious; but in time, and on looking at other parts of the book, I have reconciled myself to it somewhat. But I am delighted to hear that you have had that project in mind, for some distant future entertainment. And you, who before you had seen me, chose that passage at the end of the Dialogue on Normal Madness, may be relied on not to miss the strong and really radical things. And that egregious Cardiff actually quotes the last few words, which seem, alone, a melodramatic piece of verbiage, when it is all the profound philosophy (not mere physics) of Democritus when it comes after the picture of Alcibiades winning the chariot-race at Olympia and his dismay at thinking it all dissolved into atoms. Weep, my son, if you are human, but laugh also, if you are a man.

This might lead me back to the body of your letter and the question of the moral sense. But I don’t feel like going into it. I read lately in the Times Literary Supplement a review of a Scottish philosopher who maintains the mysterious absoluteness of what is “right” as distinguished from what is naturally good. I have always wondered at the aura that hangs about the word “duty”. It means only owed. If you have pledged yourself to pay something you are bound in honour to pay it—if you can. The propriety of this conduct is obvious; but the mystic awe that hangs about “you ought” is superstitious.—Very glad you are deep in French. Tell me what you are reading.

Yours, G Santayana

*. Cory understands most of my philosophy very well; but he doesn’t want to pledge himself to it, where English academic opinion disapproves; so that sometimes he allows himself unbecoming language.

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 William James
Box Hill, England. July 27, 1905

Dear Mr James,

I have just re-read, or read for the first time in some cases, the series of articles you have been good enough to send me. They have given me new light on many points—most important of all on the relation of “Humanism” to “Truth”. It is perfectly clear that opinions are not all equally good on pragmatic principles, since some fulfill their pledges with advancing experience while others do not. I am inclined to think that you would meet with less misapprehension and hostility on this score if you gave out, in dogmatic form, how you conceive “the final system of reality” (which you assume on page 3 of the article on “Experience of Activity”) to be made up. I imagine you would say it is a historical system, its substance being feelings which may or may not be appropriated by persons. It would remain to work out a physics of these feelings, and to show how proposition might be essentially true or false descriptions of this historical flux.

I have got a clearer notion, I think, than I had when we talked in Athens, of what makes my way of seeing things puzzling to you—a mystery, you called it. You expect me to look at everything as I look on the things I don’t believe in—religious myths, e.g.—which can have, of course, a symbolic or pragmatic truth. My nature, on the other hand, compels me to believe in something in quite a different sense, and this something is, in my view, double—material nature with its animation on the one hand, and logical or mathematical forms on the other. These are discovered by us, starting from sensation, and, in the first case, are tested by pragmatic standards.

But we look to them in order to understand the origin of our experience (or its standard in signification) and I, for one, heartily accept them in that rôle. So I embrace materialism on pragmatic grounds—and on transcendental grounds also. The prohibition to believe which, in some expressions of it, pragmatism seems to impose, as if every opinion had to be symbolic and had to be superseded, is what I object to. It is too Hegelian. History, at least, must have a definite constitution, apart from the pragmatic value of knowing it.

With renewed thanks, Yours sincerely, G Santayana

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
London
Box Hill, England. July 26, 1905

Please excuse this sheet of fool’s cap: I have no frivolous note-paper at hand and the contents are going to justify the pomposity—and perhaps the name—of the medium.

I had no notion that in submitting my innocent foot-note to your previous censorship I was asking you to aid me in any attack upon your doctrine. Perhaps, if you would only allow me my language, your doctrine would be almost my own. What I wanted was, not to misrepresent you. Now, my prudence seems to have its reward, for apparently I did misrepresent you in supposing that you made human thought “a view or result of much mind-stuff in fusion.” Your correction, if I understand it, brings up a point quite new to me. Mind-stuff contains relations between its own parts; and adding these relations together you get a sort of continuum given within mind-stuff, although the total landscape is only represented, and not within mind-stuff anywhere in an absolute sense. The partners hold hands, so to speak, but no one contains the whole minuet. Is this your idea? If so, it seems to me you are jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. For the “extensity” of sensations, or their essential lapse, is a character of their object; and this is a material character. If the extensity of a sensation can be predicated of mindstuff itself, then mind-stuff is extended! You would not maintain that, I suppose; yet how can you avoid it? Your inclusion of relations within mind-stuff either lifts mind-stuff into mind, its object acquiring the relations observed and it itself being lifted to a transcendental sphere and made an act of apperception or (as my book will call it) an intent; or else this inclusion reduces it more obviously than ever to matter. “Isn’t this what Bergson (whom I am surprised to hear you invoke, when his dichotomy of Matière et Mémoire is all on my side) tries to do, making the immediate material, and the reflective possession or representation of it spiritual and eternal—which is more than I can agree to. However, with many thanks for this information, I hasten to correct my foot-note and will make it read: “a certain bulk of sentiency in flux, illustrating spatial and temporal relations, and not merely representing them.” Is this better? There will be time to make further corrections, if I have gone wrong. I will also correct the phrase about “doing honour to spirit” and substitute “thinking to give spirit a more congenial basis by making it its own stuff, thereby forgetting that spirit is expressive and, being expressive must have a different status from that of its basis or subject-matter.” The style suffers: but I, too, am ready to make any sacrifice of personality on the altar of truth. I may, however, think of a better wording than that above.

Where I can’t accept your criticism is in respect to the word matter. Why should Berkeley’s ignorance of Aristotle be allowed to infect more generations? Matter is in a way approached from without, since it is potential and inferred, as every substance must be, including mind-stuff, or as truth is. But it means the surd in things, the existential strain that makes them be here and now, in this quantity and with this degree of imperfection. I have a previous note on the use of this word, too long to quote. You will see it when the book appears, for on this subject I know what I am talking about and speak quite deliberately.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Cristallo
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 25, 1926

Dear Strong,

I have just finished “Sous le Soleil de Satan”. Is the author a young man? If so, I think he may do very good things. I like his ideas (when they are ideas) and his prejudices: the portrait of Anatole France at the end is excellent. So the other minor characters: even the Devil is plausible, if you fall back on mediaeval ways of conceiving him. But there is a lot of rant and confusion: I had some difficulty in following the thread of events or emotions in places, and felt like skipping, or dropping the book altogether. Neither the hero nor the heroine is intelligible. It looks as if the author himself didn’t know exactly what was up. That the world is given over to the devil and that there are shady sides and bitter dregs in every life is perfectly true: but we must distinguish the part which is inseparable from existence of any sort—from flux and finitude—in this evil, and the part that is remediable. No doubt a very exacting spirit might rebel against existence itself: but I don’t know what he could find to substitute for it. Certainly this book suggests nothing: it does not represent religion as offering any real refuge: even there all seems to be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Why so tense, little Sir?

The Drakes are gone after staying five days—I am writing an article about Platonism and “Spiritual religion” apropos of a book of Dean Inge’s on that subject. It is an interruption, but I have definitely dropped the reins on the neck of my weary old Pegasus, and am letting him amble as he will. I shouldn’t accomplish any thing better by applying the bit and spurs.

And you?

Yours ever, G.S.

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

To William Archer
5 Grove Street
Oxford, England. July 24, [1901]

Dear Sir,

You will not get my photograph from Pach—I am sorry you have taken the trouble to write to him. The many photographers I find in Oxford do not tempt me much more than he; but although I dislike the idea of having my face associated with my verses, I am writing to a friend in Paris, who has the photograph of a drawing made in ’96 by Andreas Andersen which I am asking him to send you. It is a clever drawing, and as it represents a past and somewhat fantastic aspect of my humble personality, I object to it less than to a glaring photo. Moreover, it corresponds exactly to the date of the later sonnets.

. . .

Thank you very much.

Yours faithfully,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The British Library of the British Museum, London.