The Works of George Santayana

Category: LETTERS Page 57 of 274

Letters in Limbo ~ April 12, 1927

DeweyTo Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 12, 1927

I am sorry that Dewey should have been so much enraged by my article: I meant to be friendly and sympathetic, but magis amica veritas. Yet I am not sorry that he wrote his reply, because I have gathered something from it, partly from his denial that he thinks the immediate alone real, and partly from his assumption that by substance I understand something not in space and time and not distributed as things are distributed, in other words, that I don’t think it is matter but is some metaphysical being. Would you have got the same impression from my book (Scepticism) or is it merely Dewey’s extraordinary intellectual deafness and blindness? He can’t think: he can only see things move: and for that reason he wonders how I, who sometimes see things moving too, can also think about them and see the dialectical and eternal relations of their essences.

Cory, my unknown disciple, has turned up. He is tall, nice, and only 22, but not very clever—a sort of agreeable “grind”. He will come to see you in a month or so, when he goes north.

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.

 

Letters in Limbo ~ April 11, 1906

muensterbergTo Hugo Münsterberg
Cannes, France. April 11, 1906

I have come here to spend a part of my Easter holiday with my friend Strong. My provincial lectures, of which I have given those at Nancy, and at Montpellier, has been very pleasant so far for myself, but as an audience who really understands English is not easy to find, I have been reduced rather to a phonetic machine, with the function of emitting interesting if unintelligible sounds. The audiences nevertheless have been large and religiously attentive, while the rectors and other professors have shown me every possible courtesy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston MA.

Letters in Limbo ~ April 10, 1933

william-shakespeare-portrait11To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. April 10, 1933

Logan Pearsall Smith has sent me some sugared hay of his own about “Reading Shakespeare”. It is pleasantly written, except where he feels impelled to speak in hushed superlatives about Shakespeare, as if he were speaking about God. The need of possessing the biggest poet in the world puffs him out; and there is over-interpretation in the wake of Coleridge and Lamb; but he mentions a naughty American professor Elmer Edgar Stoll who seems to have seen light by the Mississippi, and goes to the other extreme.

Part II (18 chapters) of the novel is now finished and typed, and I am busy revising the beginning of Part III in which your friend Mario makes his appearance, aged 16. I am beginning to feel encouraged about finishing this endless task. It is not as clever and amusing as I meant to make it, but it turns out deeper and more consistent than I had suspected. There is a hidden tragic structure in it which was hardly foreseen but belongs to the essence of the subject, the epoch, and the dissolution of Protestantism.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

Letters in Limbo ~ April 9, 1949

il_fullxfull.407908886_bi7jTo Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 9, 1949

Dear Clemens,

No: I have no long-distance (or short-distance) radio, and no desire to listen to any broadcasting, which with my deafness I should not understand. It is not in my . . . power to regulate what people may say or publish about me, but I have repeatedly begged you not to busy yourself about me. I don’t think you are the right man to do so; but I suppose publicity is your profession and you are willing to take up any subject that seems to supply “copy”.

It is the same with visitors and interviews. People come to see me without asking leave or needing introductions, and between 5 and 7 p.m. I see them, and occasionally feel that perhaps it has been of some interest, and not merely a passtime, like going to see the oldest old woman in the village.

If you write me more letters and get no answer, please understand that, as far as my consent is required for any useless project, I do not give it, but that the thing may nevertheless be realized if the essor vital in the persons concerned is irresistible. I like to be quiet, but do not undertake to stop the steam-roller of modern enterprise.

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.

Letters in Limbo ~ April 8, 1931

Albert_Einstein_HeadTo Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 8, 1931

I am glad you have put your theory of perception into its final shape, and shall be interested in seeing—and hearing—the terms in which you now express it. As to Relativity, I may not be able to follow your arguments and am, in a sense, less personally interested, because I have come to a quietus of my own on the subject. When you are here, if you still want to work, I can give you a book of Maritain’s in which Einstein is treated intelligibly and intelligently, though of course from a far distant point of view. I am, in my old age, acquiring the faculty which Leibniz said he had of agreeing with Everybody. I agree with Maritain, but I agree with Einstein also: it is only a question of the place which one assigns to certain sorts of science or speculation. Maritain thinks what I call “specious” absolute: and it is, for the moralist or the poet: it is the spiritual reality. But the test of material Existence is practical: so that the tables are turned when you approach cosmology. The cosmology of Maritain is pure myth, as that of Einstein is sheer mathematics.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 19281932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

Page 57 of 274

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