Category: LETTERS Page 46 of 274

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo 6
Rome. June 4, 1951

Dear Clemens,

No, thank you, I think you had better give the Duke of Windsor’s Memoirs to some one else.

My article on Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote (not Mark Twain, except indirectly) was today left to be typed and will probably reach you within a fortnight.

I return the review of my book in Newsweek, which I had already seen; but I have no scrap-book and candidates for such a mausoleum have to choose between my head and the waste-paper basket. There has not been, as far as I know, any serious or adequate review of my book, and that circumstance is intelligible, because it is not a book to read at one sitting or to place at once in the school-master’s list of graded praise and blame, which seems to be what critic’s think their vocation.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. June 2, 1916

There seems to be a lull in despatching my proofs, and I am reading Pascal’s Pensées—they are very wrong-headed—and MacDougal’s stupid book on mind and body.

McDougal loquitur:
It would give me a pain
To have merely a brain:
I get all my stamina
From having an anima

S. respondet:
Though that might be less trying
When it comes to dying,
When it comes to thinking
Your anima’s stinking.

The fact is he hasn’t the least idea what mind, spirit, or intelligence is. He looks for it in the wrong place, with the wrong categories, in a sort of psycho-physical materialistic way. It is as if a man trying to conceive beauty looked for it among the kinds of precious metals.

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
Rome. June 1, 1927

Let us not discuss the question of essences or “the spiritual life.” I have said all I feel—and perhaps more than I feel when I am not warmed up to the subject—in the little book, and I quite understand that it can appeal only to those who are predisposed to that sort of sentiment. You would agree with Abbot (an old classmate of mine at Harvard) who writes me that he has often found heads without ideas, but never ideas without heads. What more is needed to damn all Platonism?

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 George Washburne Howgate
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. May 31, 1933

[M]an is an animal before he is a spirit, and can be a spirit only because he is alive, i.e. an animal. The nature of the human animal, however, is to be intelligent, to be speculative; and hence the vocation to transcend the conditions of his existence in his thought and worship.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Mrs. George W. Howgate