Category: LETTERS Page 40 of 274

To Corliss Lamont
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 4, 1950

Since the American Army first came to Rome, I have received more callers than ever before in my life, and they still straggle in, newspaper correspondents especially, with photo graphic intentions and instruments but a treacherous memory in reporting one’s words. And they do not come to discuss immortality but only to observe that I am dressed only in pyjamas and live in a shabby room in a lower-middle-class English establishment (according to Mr. Edmund Wilson) where the Sisters have painted veils.

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

To William James
Ávila, Spain. July 3, 1888

I am glad to know that I have been reappointed to the Walker Fellowship, as that seems to show that I have not yet quite lost my reputation. I have left Germany, however, without any desire to go back there, nor do I think that I should learn or study much if I returned. I had thought of Paris as a possible resting place, but on the whole it seems to offer few advantages for me. I therefore intend to return to America. I have reached the stage where I must work by myself; but I have not enough motive force within me to accomplish anything without encouragement and stimulation from without. And it seems to me that I could employ the fellowship better at Harvard than anywhere else, since there I should have more people to talk with, and an atmosphere less favorable to apathy. Then the advantage of a library managed on rational principles is not to be despised. I hope you will write to me soon and tell me what you think of my plan. If you have any other to suggest that seems to you better, I hope you will do so. But I dare say you will agree with me that I could make as good use of my time at Harvard as anywhere. Three terms of Berlin have fully convinced me that the German school, although it is well to have some acquaintance with it, is not one to which I can attach myself. After the first impression of novelty and freedom, I have become oppressed by the scholasticism of the thing and by the absurd pretension to be scientific. In fact, my whole experience, since I left college and even before, has been a series of disenchantments. First I lost my faith in the kind of philosophy that Prof. Palmer and Royce are interested in; and, then, when I came to Germany, I also lost my faith in psycho-physics, and all the other attempts to discover something very momentous. A German professor like Wundt seems to me a survival of the alchymist. What is the use of patience and ingenuity, when the fundamental aim and intention is hopeless and perverse? I might as well stick to Kant’s Critique of the Practical Reason, or take at once to dogmatic theology. Indeed, the whole thing has sometimes seemed to me so wrong and futile, that I have suspected that I had made a mistake in taking up philosophy at all, since all the professors of it seemed to be working along so merrily at problems that to me appeared essentially vain. But I have remembered that this very feeling of mine would make as good a ground for a philosophy as any other, if I only had the patience and audacity to work it out. This is what I hope to do in some measure next year. I have already written a good deal, but in a loose and disjointed manner. All needs rewriting.

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 Scofield Thayer
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London
Paris. July 2, 1920

In Italy, two or three months ago, I received a copy of The Dial together with a letter, which in the confusion of travel I am afraid I did not answer. Now I receive two separate copies of the June number, with your new letter of June 17. It is now nearly ten years since I have been in America, and I can’t think even of one name with which to begin the list which you ask me to make out, of persons who might be interested in The Dial, and whom you do not know much better than I do. Your idea of bringing the old and the new together is interesting: but if you find that the public prefer their meat apart from their vegetables, why should you earnestly desire to serve them both up on the same plate? I think the vicissitudes of art at present, and of the faint though eager echoes that spread over America, like wireless vibrations, are not of much importance. It is all too voulu: something will gather head of itself some day when people least expect it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoia
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 1, 1937

For heaven’s sake, dear Cory, do stop Ezra Pound from sending me his book. Tell him that I have no sense for true poetry, admire (and wretchedly imitate) only the putrid Petrarch and the miserable Milton; that I don’t care for books, hardly have any, and would immediately send off his precious volume to the Harvard Library or to some other cesspool of infamy. That is, if he made me a present of it. If he sent it only for me to look at and return, I would return it unopened; because I abhorr all connection with important and distinguished people, and refuse to see absolutely anyone except some occasional stray student or genteel old lady from Boston.

I shouldn’t mind helping Ezra Pound if he were hard up, through you, for instance, if he wasn’t to know where the money came from: but I don’t want to see him. Without pretending to control the course of nature or the tastes of future generations, I wish to see only people and places that suggest the normal and the beautiful: not abortions or eruptions like E. P.

It is a shame that you should be persecuted like this and not allowed to enjoy a holiday; but you realize how dreary poor S. finds his days. In the old times, when I often lived or stayed with him, I used to excuse myself in my own mind for profiting so much by his money (living for nothing in the apartment, etc) by thinking that I made his life and mind more interesting to him, and that he was, in his demure secretive way, a good friend absolutely to be trusted. And I still think that I was a useful stimulus to him, as you are now. But it has become evident that he cared for me only . . . to serve as a whetstone for his dulness; and he has become intolerant of anybody’s being anything more. You now have to sharpen his edge, with an uncertain prospect of future benefits. It is too bad; but you feel, I know, that it is worth putting up with, not only in view of possible advantages later, but because there is a technical discipline involved, however tedious. Yours affly,

G.S.

P.S. Am reading the proof of the R[ealm] of T[ruth] and making a lovely index. The book is partly senile: I am correcting a few bad passages; but I can say of it, like the Curate of the Bishops egg: “Parts of it, my lord, are excellent”.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To John W. Yolton
6, Via di Santo Stefano Rotondo
Rome. June 30, 1951

The organising and directive force in living bodies is biological, not mental: I call it the psyche, in the sense given to this word in Aristotle’s De Anima. When such a psyche reaches its full development, it generates a hypostatic light, sensation, emotion, or images, and the whole drift of passions and thoughts. To say that I separate mind from matter is therefore exquisitely contrary to the fact. Nor is it in any definite sense “happiness” that crowns this development: there is a sort of happiness in the fulfilment of any natural function; but usually there is much else at work as well in the psyche, and much sacrifice and renunciation is involved in any real moral peace. It may be society in general that is given up for a particular love, or vice versa; or it may be a general submission of everything definite in the routine of a busy life. I do not deny that for some psyches that last may be the least of evils; but I see no reason for thinking it the compulsory duty of everybody. And the desire to do good and improve the world is the active side of the natural tendency to establish an equilibrium between oneself and the world: it may serve you; you may serve it; perhaps both things can be realised at once, and then tutti contenti.

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