Category: LETTERS Page 66 of 274

To William James
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusetts. Thursday [c. 1908].

Dear Mr James

I find your note here when it is too late to profit by it. I am very sorry, not so much for not gratifying Mr Gordon’s morbid desire to look upon the Devil, as for not giving him a chance to make the sign of the cross over me (or whatever is the Old South equivalent) and perhaps drive the Father of Lies out of me into some dumb and non-literary animal where he wouldn’t do so much harm.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Harry Slochower
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 27, 1929

Dear Mr Slochower,

May I, in acknowledgement of your kindness in sending me your book, tell you frankly the dominant impression which it has left in my mind? It is interest and curiosity about your own Lehrjahre in Germany. Dehmel himself is not a person with whom I have much in common temperamentally, and I don’t like his verses; even in the similarity of our systems of the universe there seems to be a profound divergence, since he identifies the human with the cosmic spirit, and I could hope at best to harmonize them. But the very strangeness and tumult of his mind, and the glimpses of the turbid currents of opinion in the midst of which he struggled, revives in me an impulse which I had when a young man: that of discovering, as a traveller and wandering student, like Ulysses, the ways of many divers men and cities. I, too, went to Germany; but circumstances prevented me from entering deeply and spontaneously into that society. I didn’t even learn the language thoroughly, but stopped at the point where German poetry and philosophy became intelligible to me for my own purposes, without (as in your case) proceeding to a hearty participation in them on their own terms. I have consequently remained all my life hungry for that intensive travel and moral adventure which a true student of the world should have passed through: and it is the glimpse your book gives me of what that might have been as far as Germany is concerned, that has most interested me. And I wonder what your “Goethe and America” will contain? Goethe was so mature, America is so raw: what is the point of comparison?

With many thanks, Yours sincerely

G Santayana

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

To Lieutenant Garcia
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo 6
Rome. February 26, 1946

Dear Lieutenant Garcia,

That you should think Plato good but not true, and should at the same time follow Darwin with approval would seem to indicate that you instinctively think as I think. This, and your Latin (or Greek－for Calabria is very Greek) blood don’t apparently suffice to make you feel at home in my Weltanschauung. What is the difficulty? You don’t tell me or give me any hint of where it lies. Why is Plato good in spite of being wrong? I should say because his ethics and politics are right in principle, but his cosmology is mythical and made to fit his humanism miraculously, having been planned on purpose to produce an ideal Athens and a perfect set of Athenians. Now, this is contrary to Darwin, and must be abandoned: Although the Platonic myth may be excellent parables, illustrating the growth of human virtues, I therefore stick to Darwin (or in my case, rather to Lucretius and Spinoza) in my cosmology; but when I turn to the realm of Spirit (which has its perfectly natural place in animal life) I drop Darwin, Lucretius, and even Spinoza and stick to Plato, or rather to the idea of Christ. I have lately been writing a book on this last subject, which may show you what I mean, and how I graft this Christian morality on the naturalistic stalk. Of course, if you hanker for a physically real good world, you will never find it, and it may seem to you discouraging spiritually that spirit should not rule the universe. That would seem to me a pity, and a lack of caution in not keeping truth and imagination in their respective places. Is that what makes you uncomfortable?

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

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

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 25, 1937

Dear Kallen,

Perry’s mind is more conventional than yours, and he has undoubtedly presented a William James painted, as it were, by a member of the Royal Academy. He has done it very nicely, much better than I had thought him capable of doing anything. But there are at least two fatal handicaps under which such a biographer suffers—an official biographer. He can’t tell, he can’t even wish to know, everything, not the misères, physical and moral that really beset and largely direct the lives of all of us. That is one handicap. The other is that he is still interested in the questions that agitated his hero, they are still living questions to the biographer too, so that he will necessary pull and stretch the man’s thoughts to agree with his own, and will give a disproportionate emphasis and finality to those thoughts so surviving in himself. This is the trouble with your corrections and interpretations. Wm James is still living within you, and in vindicating him (as you think) you are vindicating yourself. That is honourable enough, but not biography. I therefore entirely agree with you that it would be better if Wm James’s Nachlass had been published almost without comments, leaving it for a future age, if it is interested in him, to review the maximum of his ipsissima verba and then perhaps draw a portrait of him as he appears to that remote posterity, to whom his problems will be a dead as himself, though both perhaps memorable in their by-gone virtues and humanity. If I were younger, and my planned work quite finished, I might be tempted to work out a notion I have, not about James especially, but about the old mind of the New World in general. It looks to me (I have been reading Jonathan Edwards) as if America had started life with an official mentality of the most alien and artificial character, and that these three hundred years have not sufficed to allow a native mentality to grow up (like a weed, at first) and crowd out the traditional imported principles. Wm James would illustrate the bravest possible struggle of the young and native growth against the old roots and stumps still encumbering and empoverishing the ground. And I am not sure that, for all his vitality and courage, he too was not, on the whole, stifled. Neither Emerson nor Walt Whitman seem to me to have escaped altogether, especially not on the political side. In any case, the discrimination between tradition and nativism would be tempting to make in every American yet on exhibition.

With best wishes from

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY.