Category: LETTERS Page 65 of 274

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.

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 3, 1947

I am also reading a life of Einstein that the publishers have sent me, asking for a review, or at least a “puff”, but it arrived too late for that purpose. I find it absorbing, although translated from ponderous German into bad English. However, through the fog of words I seem to catch the faint light of very distant stars, and that is exhilarating.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 2, 1932

I have definite theories about psychology, (that there are two distinct kinds, the scientific or biological kind, medical and behaviouristic and the literary kind, just intuition of what goes on in people’s minds, which Wm James excelled in, and in which ladies in future ought to be pre-eminent).

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.

To Mary Williams Winslow
Colonial Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts. March 1, [1911]

Dear Mrs Winslow—I shall be delighted to come next Tuesday, the 7th at half past seven. It is nice to know that you are well again, as your writing implies. As to your new son, I daresay he is a model of all a child should be, but for my part I am too prosaic and disillusioned to lavish any more unrequited affections upon objects unconscious of my regard.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.