Category: LETTERS Page 7 of 274

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Queen’s Acre,
Windsor, England. February 6, 1912.

I have just got a telegram, like one you must have received also, saying that Mother died yesterday.

. . . What a tremendous change this is! Mother was the absolutely dominating force in all our lives. Even her mere existence, in these last years, was a sort of centre around which we revolved, in thought if not in our actual movements. We shall be living henceforth in an essentially different world. I hope you and I may be nearer rather than farther from one another in consequence.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To Henry Ward Abbot
Berlin. February 5th 1887.

I am afraid I can’t save you from solipsism by argument, but I don’t regret it much, since it is easy for you to save yourself from it by action. Philosophy, after all, is not the foundation of things, but a late and rather ineffective activity of reflecting men. It is not the business of philosophy to show that things exist. You must bring your bullion to the mint, then reason can put its stamp upon it and make it legal tender. But if you don’t bring your material, if you don’t give reason your rough and precious experience, you can get nothing from her but counterfeit bills—nostrums and formulas and revelations. Now a man’s stock of experience, his inalienable ideas, are given facts. His reason for holding on to them is that he can’t get rid of them. Why do we think at all, why do we talk about world, and ideas, and self, and memory, and will, except because we must? You say that you are will, and that your existence as such is given by immediate intuition. That is a rather complicated fact to be foundation of knowledge. If however it is a fact which you cannot doubt, it is a perfectly good foundation. Any fact you cannot doubt is—any inevitable idea is true. Now, if you imagine a being whose stock consists of this intuition of itself as will and of a world as ideas, I think you will be unable to make that being believe in other wills. That being would not rebel against solipsism; anything else would be impossible for it. It happens that we are not such beings; our inevitable ideas are not a self as will and as a reservoir of images. This notion is at best a possible one for us—possible together with innumerable other notions. If you find, however, that you can actually get rid of all other ideas and live merely on this stock, nothing can prevent your trying the experiment. Be a solipsist. Say “My own existence as will and the existence of a world of ideas in my mind—these I cannot doubt. But this is all that I find it necessary to believe. With this faith I can do my business, make love to my sweetheart, write to my friends, and sing in tune with the spheres.” If you can do that, what possible objection is there to your solipsism? Surely none coming from a sincere and disinterested philosophy. But can you do it? That is the question. I suspect that your business and letterwriting, your love and the music of the spheres, would fill your mind with other notions besides those first inevitable ones, and make these other notions no less inevitable. They would increase your inalienable stock of ideas and make your philosophy unsatisfactory, not because it had not accounted for the ideas you brought originally, but because you had more ideas now which it would need a different philosophy to account for. You must keep one thing always in mind if you want to avoid hopeless entanglements: we do not act on the ideas we previously have, but we acquire ideas as the consequence of action and experience. If you habitually treat these visions of other men as if they were your equals, you will therefore believe that they have will and intelligence like yourself. Now, your own survival in the world depends on your social relations, so that solipsism is a practically impossible doctrine. It could not flourish except among isolated beings, and man is gregarious.

What do you mean by self? What do you mean by existence in the mind? So long as you believe in a self-existent world of objects in space, you know what you mean by the objects in the mind. You mean those objects which are not self-existent in space. If, however, you abandon (or think you abandon, for I think the argument proves you have not really done so) the notion of objects self-existent in space, your phrase “objects in the mind” loses its meaning, since there is no longer any contrast between two modes or places of existence, one the mind and the other external space. Objects now do not come into the mind, they merely come into existence. Ideas, if they have no real objects, are real objects themselves. The quality of independence, unaccountableness, imperiousness which belonged to the things now belongs to the ideas. They are yours—they are in you—no more than the objective world was before. This is what makes idealists invent a universal consciousness in which the ideas eternally lie: if this world is to be an idea it has to be an independent, objective one. For see what the alternative is: There shall be only my own personal ideas—but how far do I reach? Did the world begin with the first sensation I had in my mother’s womb? Evidently my foetus is an idea in my mind quite as foreign to me as you are. Did the world begin with the first idea I can remember I had? But in that case the world has begun at different points, since sometimes I can remember an event which happened when I was four, but then I could remember what happened when I was three. Or shall the ideas in existence be only those I have at this moment? But this moment is nothing—it is a limit, it contains no ideas at all. Ideas are alive, they grow and change, they are not flashed ready made into the darkness. My ideas are therefore indeterminate in quantity and duration. As impossible as it is to say where one of them stops and another begins, so impossible is it to say where my consciousness becomes different from that of my mother, or wherein it is different from that of other men now. When in a crowd, in a contagion of excitement, we do not think in ourselves only but in other people at the same time. The bodies are separate but the consciousness is not. The result is that I have more ideas than I know; I can’t trace them downward to there depth and full content, nor outward to their limits. In what sense, then, are my ideas mine? Only as the left side of a street is to the left; I only can talk of myself because I think of you, of my ideas because I postulate yours. If I existed alone, I should have no self, as the theologians very well saw when to save the personality of God the made him three persons. That is about all I have thought about solipsism. You say, or hint, that you are resigned to being an egotist and egoist, but not to be a solipsist. The things are but two sides of the same; it is harder to deny the existence of other men in thinking than in willing, be cause in thinking we depend so much on words, and books, and education—all social things, while in willing we are more independent, at least we feel more independent, for in reality we are perhaps less so. The more fundamental part of us is where we have more in common, and where influences are more easily exercised. It is more easy to influence than to persuade.

Strong and I propose to go to England about the first of March, so that when you write again you had better address care of Brown, Shipley & Co. It is possible I may stay in England the rest of this year, but I cannot tell until I have seen the place. I naturally have to go with Strong, as our partnership is of mind and pocket; he is rather sick of this place because one is so isolated in it. Bad thing for a would be philosopher to complain of isolation. Poor Strong! he is like a man up to his middle in cold water who hasn’t the courage to duck. The cold water is the antitheological stream. Hoping all this is nothing but your idea I am sincerely your friend

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.

To Martin Birnbaum
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 4, 1946

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

I write to thank you very much for your reminiscences of Sargent, including those of Henry James and the plates of some of Sargent’s paintings and drawings. I wish that you had gone more systematically into the problem of naturalistic versus eccentric or symbolic painting. It is a subject about which my own mind is undecided. My sympathies are initially with classic tradition, and in that sense with Sargent’s school; yet for that very reason I fear to be unjust to the eccentric and abstract inspiration of persons perhaps better inspired. Two things you say surprise me a little: one that Sargent was enormous physically. I remember him as a little stout, but not tall: and I once made a voyage by chance in his company, and thereafter a trip to Tangier; so that I had for a fortnight at least constant occasions to go about with him; and being myself of very moderate stature I never felt that he was big. The other point is that he saw and painted “objectively”, realistically, and not psychologically. Now, certainly he renders his model faithfully; but in the process, which must be selective and proper to the artist, I had always thought that, perhaps unawares he betrayed analytical and satirical powers of a high order, so that his portraits were strongly comic, not to say moral caricatures. But in thinking of what you say, and quote from him, on this subject, I begin to believe that I was wrong, that he may have been universally sympathetic and cordial, in the characteristically American manner, and that the satire that there might seem to be in his work was that of literal truth only: because we are all, au fond, caricatures of ourselves, and a good eye will see through our conventional disguises and labels. And this would explain what to some persons seems the “materialism” of Sargent’s renderings; his interest in objets d’art for instance, rather than in the vegetable kingdom or in the life of non-sensuous reality at large. Crowding his house with pictures, and his memory with innumerable friends and innumerable anecdotes about them, shows a respect for the commonplace, a love of the world, that prevents the imagination from taking high flights or reflecting ultimate emotions.

Is there, I wonder, any truth in such a suspicion?

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 Susan and Josephine Sturgis
Ávila, Spain. [1868]

Dear Susan I have received your letter written in London. What your aunt and uncle said, that I am good-looking, that isn’t true. Papa says that I should write to you that you are good-looking and Josephine too; but I say that that’s teasing, but what is true is that your brother and godson loves you very much

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Sra. Rafael (Adelaida Hernandez) Sastre, Avila, Spain.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 2, 1934

It is a very good idea of yours to write occasionally to S. and to prove what is the fact that you are a devoted philosopher. And that leads me to explain, in a word or two, what I felt in your essay to be an inconsistency between the beginning and the end. You come to the conclusion that pictorial experience is pictorial, you will understand what I mean by that. But you propose a problem at first which does not arise, if that conclusion is true: namely, the problem of the comparative simplicity of experience in contrast with the physical structure either of nature at large or of the human body in particular. Why on earth should feeling or perception not be simple? Why should the toothache picture the tooth or the cavity in it, or the histology of the brain? It doesn’t, and it can’t: and the idea that we must somehow explain why it doesn’t is based on a gnostic illusion, to the effect that perception is not sensation in the organ of perception but miraculous divine intuition of things as they are in themselves. As you say, that is at best an ideal for the intellect: we should like to know things thoroughly, to imagine what they must be in themselves, as we like to enact dramatically what we suppose may be the feelings of other people. But when the object is not another human mind, that ideal is unattainable, and rather foolish: because the function of ordinary perception is not sympathetic but utilitarian. This is only a hint: the constitutional uselessness of the mental side of things is another point important in my view, but perhaps better left alone.

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.