Category: LETTERS Page 47 of 274

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

To Boylston Adams Beal
Hotel Royal Daniele
Venice. May 30, 1935

What Gordon Bell says in the History about us, and in particular about me, is all true enough, and sympathetically meant; but it misses the atmosphere of the ’90’s, or early ’90’s, when the Philistine mind had freshly discovered sport, art, literature, and religion, and was respectfully, but humorously, in love with them. Bob & Warwick Potter, you and I, were just that: dilettanti really delighting in the nice side of things: and the distance—the American and Protestant perspective inevitable for most of us—made the experience romantic and a little tragic at bottom. Probably the young men of today are better adapted to the age. Those I come across seem to me all alike, and rather uninteresting, unless they are caught in the political revolution. That is the living question now, not our questions, when we thought the material arrangements of the world had all become final and satisfactory, and there was time for thinking of higher things. Now there isn’t time or inclination or much sense of higher things to think about. But there is the great social army to lead and to keep in order. It is what the old Romans had to do.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933–1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Lawrence Smith Butler
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. May 29, 1949.

Dear Lawrence

I am delighted to know that you are well and are coming in July! All my life I had assumed that only “four cats”, as the Italians say, could remain in Rome during the summer, and I would go to Cortina or to Switzerland, like any tripper; but now, since I came to this house, I have spent seven whole summers without moving, and found them very tolerable—in fact, better than the winters when, during the war, we had no central heating and often not enough light. However, I live in pyjamas and seldom go out, so that it is easy for me to keep cool and to profit by the comparative quiet, as far as curious strangers are concerned who come to have their copies of The Last Puritan, or of Persons & Places autographed by the author. It may be different for you who naturally will want to go about; and it is very hot in the sun until the evening, when both temperature and landscape are perfect.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript:  The University Club, New York NY.

To Ira Detrich Cardiff
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. May 28, 1950

After several days’ browsing [through Atoms of Thought]—I must now have read almost all the text as well as your Introduction and Foreword—I have come to the conclusion that your patience in gathering “texts” must be a sub-conscious heritage from some Puritan ancestor of yours who picked “texts” from the Bible in order to quote them against the minister’s sermons. Your interest was not at all to choose beautiful passages or passages that contained the key to my philosophy or to my idiosyncrasies. I was out of the picture, just as the real history and doctrines of the Jews and the Christians was out of the picture for your text-collecting ancestor. You both already had your complete philosophy apart from anyone else’s books: but texts might be pungent; and when they tallied with your views, they might be employed to assert them boldly under another’s masque, for greater apparent modesty. So you have collected all the anticlerical texts in my books, no matter in what context, satirical or historical or even dramatic, whether it be Zeus or Lucifer or Mephistopheles, or Hermes or Aphrodite that says them: my cynical father’s saying, or my own, if cynical in the right direction, will do for texts as well as the soft sentiments of a rich Polish-Jewish jeweller; and what I have said expressly to you and in print about myself that I am not and never wished or meant to be an American, is flatly contradicted. And when you say that I suggested the danger of spoiling a dictum if shorn too closely of its context, you forget to say or remember the danger I felt of being quoted only on the Left side; and you do not seem to feel that what you do quote about the pity that Bertrand Russell should waste his powers in repeating anticlerical commonplaces (although he did it only for pot-boilers) you do not feel that it is a pity that you should make me do the same thing in this book gratuitously. When I wrote The Life of Reason criticism of all non-naturalistic philosophy and religion was inevitable; and I did it and do it to bring out, if I can, the beauty of naturalism, not to insult the beliefs of other people. The cream of those beliefs, pagan, Indian, and Catholic especially, are just the baroque ornaments with which I like to adorn, and to vivify, my opinions; because Positivism without “post-rational” detachment is deadly and hypocritical. My anti-religious side is only a part of my pessimism; those myths are materially false, and a philosopher should not flirt with them; but they are the tragedy—Hebraic and Christian as well as Greek—of human illusions and vanity. Tragedy, the tragedy of existence, should be transcended, but it cannot be decently mocked.

I wanted to tell you frankly what I feel on this subject: but I do not regret that you should have taken the pains to make this collection. It is not a fair representation of my philosophy; but it is a fair record of one strain in it, and if it stimulates or entertains the public, so much the better. It would be unreasonable to expect the public to read us if we wrote only long books that bore them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Henry Ward Abbot
Oxford, England. May 27, 1887.

Dear Harry,

A word today to tell you that you have put a very fanciful and astonishing meaning on my “fall from grace”. I didn’t discover it from your own enigmatical references to it, but this morning comes a letter from the good and outspoken Herbert which announces that I have been batting with Russell. If you choose to believe it, I am perfectly willing and shouldn’t mind your knowing it if it were true—for I shouldn’t be in the least ashamed of it. But it doesn’t happen to be true. If you reread my letter you will see that what I had in mind was what I had already written to Herbert Lyman about—namely my running after Russell in a senseless and absurd fashion. Now don’t put an ignoble and unworthy interpretation on this also, or I shall think that you are blind to everything that enters into my life. “My running after Russell” means “my thoughts running after him”; so, after believing that I have been bumming with him, don’t imagine that I have been sniping him. He has taken me up because he has chosen to do so, and after his fashion has been overwhelmingly kind. But the trouble, from my point of view, what I call my “fall from grace and self-control” (I think I said self-control also) is simply this. Russell has a way of treating people which is insufferably insolent and insulting. Never for a moment did I imagine I could allow anyone to treat me in such a way. But I find that instead of caring for my own dignity and independence—instead of subordinating to my interest in myself and to my ways of doing things, all other interests and ways of doing things—instead of this old habit of mine, I find that I don’t care a rap for my interest in myself or my ways of doing things, but that I am quite willing to stand anything, however outrageous, that comes from a certain quarter. This is what has happened to me. I am a fool to say a word about it—especially when people think that I am talking about trifles. Is it actually possible that you believe me capable of making a fuss and feeling unhappy because I had been off on a bat? You insist on not believing what I say when I tell you that such things are of absolutely no importance or interest for me, except as they may affect health and get a man into trouble. When I write about gay things I will write gaily—when I write in this serious fashion don’t imagine I am referring to “country matters”.

Sincerely G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.