Category: LETTERS Page 64 of 274

To Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123
Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. March 9, 1929

The only definite assertion to which I demur is that I have always had plenty of money. If that had been the case, I never should have attempted to teach philosophy, but I had to earn my own living, and that was the way that happened to be open.

You are wrong fundamentally, I think, about Christ: those ravings of Nietzsche’s were excusable in him: but why repeat them?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Hotel Danieli
Venice. March 7, 1940

You and T. S. E. are reformers, full of prophetic zeal and faith in the Advent of the Lord; whereas I am cynically content to let people educate or neglect themselves as they may prefer.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To George Sturgis
Grand Hotel
Rome. March 6, 1941

Never mind about not understanding my philosophy; you are happier as you are.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 5, 1939

Genuine thought is solitary, and as Emerson said, we “descend to meet.” That is, in the direction of comforting opinions and the latest thing in science, gossip and not truth. We might ascend to meet, if we were in pursuit of repentance and not of self-congratulation.

The terms of a science are not parts of things, but only ideas of things; and just as one sense gives us one idea, say colour, and another sense another idea, say hot or cold, so one science may give us a classification into genera and species and another science a mechanism of a geometrical or atomic kind. These sciences may all be true; they will none of them be the whole or even a part of the material reality. They will be theories, just as our experience will be ideas or sensations. And both science and experience are only languages in which, for human purposes, nature may at times be described.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.