Category: LETTERS Page 8 of 274

To Horace Meyer Kallen
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 5, 1903

I see it has taken me more than a month to answer your letter, which I was really very glad to get. What you tell me is amusing, and makes me think that perhaps you are inwardly enjoying the horrors of Princeton. Of course Princeton is very far away—but we may ask, as the Westerner said on a similar occasion “Far away from where?”—and of course it is intensely provincial, as I hear President Harper1 of the University of Chicago says New York and the whole East is, and notably Boston. Why isn’t it very nice to have class spirit and respect for professors? And why isn’t it interesting to see puritanism and industrialism trying to express themselves in one philosophy? You shouldn’t mind the ugly symbols in which these things are expressed; now-a-days we have no taste in symbols. We have to ignore them as we should the style of a telegram or the drawl of a preacher, and try to attend only to the thing signified, the force embodied. Doesn’t Princeton embody a force? Isn’t it a better place than Harvard, for instance, in which to study America? And America is something worth a lot of trouble to understand. If I thought I could quite succeed, I think I could be brought to sit for half an hour in President Wilson’s pink parlor, and to breathe a pretty strong scent of religiosity even for a whole year. You remember what Socrates said to his son about Xanthippe’s bad temper? “If people used equally bad language at one another on the stage, would that disturb you? Then why should bad language, uttered without malice, disturb you in the real world?” The religious people merely use a bad language; what they mean, if they only knew what it was, would be all right.

James has sent me two of his new articles from the Columbia Journal. The one (or more) in Mind I have not yet seen. Dickinson writes to me from Cambridge. “I love W. James as a man. But what a singularly bad thinker he is!” James’ new statements do not seem to me to be bad insight, whatever may be thought of the logic of them. They point to materialism, which I believe may be destined before long to have a great rehabilitation. The material world is a fiction; but every other world is a nightmare.

I am enjoying myself hugely and reading a good deal more than usual. Friends of mine turn up at regular intervals, and the sun shines, and humanity smiles about me almost without hypocrisy. I feel at home.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH

To Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. December 4, 1941

Dear Mr. von Hagen:

Your letter of October 9, addressed to the Hotel Bristol, has just reached me here, after travelling a good deal, for that hotel was pulled down two or three years ago, and though the shell is now rebuilt in a sky-scraper style, the place is not yet reopened. If I live long enough I shall probably return there, because the proprietor has all my books in storage, and the situation is convenient for my purposes. Being driven from there, just when the war was preparing, has unsettled me unpleasantly. The first winter I staid in Venice. a terribly bleak place at that season; the second winter (i.e. last winter) I lived at the Grand Hotel here in Rome; but this year I have come from there to the top of the Caelius, to a nursing home kept by an English Order of Sisters called the Little Company of Mary, not that I am particularly ill, but that I am short of funds, not because the source is dried up but because the conduit is stopped up, not yet entirely, but very seriously. These Sisters have establishments all over the Englishspeaking world, besides three in Italy. This is their Mother House, and a complete hospital, convent, and guest-house; and the Mother Superior has made a special arrangement with me, in view of my strange situation, by which I live here gratis, while a donation will be made for me, more or less equivalent, to their place near Chicago. I shall therefore have food and lodging even if my funds are blocked altogether. I found insuperable difficulties in the attempt to move to Switzerland or to Spain; this arrangement suits me better, in spite of some discomforts involved.

. . . This war affects me, morally, much less than the other, although I think (and hope) that the consequences may be far more important and lasting: a really new era in human history, but not at all what people, on either side, think they are fighting for. Words and things were never further apart than in our uneducated times.

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 Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
Rome. December 3, 1904

Your letter comes to remind me that a place I have often heard of called Harvard College actually exists: it seems from here a rather improbable myth; and quite an unnecessary complication in the world, that has a complete history already. I am glad that you take to your native country so well; I wonder why in a land where so much is potential the potential has not been allowed any place in philosophy, whereas an Aristotle, who lived in a finished world, made so much of the potential in his speculation. This is a sign, I suppose, that speculation is seldom a genuine expression of life, but rather a parasitic tradition expressing what is effete in the contemporary world.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 2, 1927

Perhaps I may abandon “Symptoms” for a while and turn to the “Realm of Matter”. Russell’s latest book ought to have helped to revive interest in this direction, but I have been disappointed. It is nice to see him insisting on his newly acquired conviction that “percepts are in our heads”: it ranges him among my examples of latent materialism in idealists. But does he conceive his whole philosophy, in the moment when he is most aware of it, to be a single constituent of the series of events which make up one of the electrons in his brain? It seems monstrous (to use one of his words) to give so rich a substance (to use one of my words) to so minute a phenomenon. It would seem to me more plausible to say that his awareness of his philosophy was an event engaging a great many gyrations of a great many electrons: it would therefore have no punctiform locus in space-time, and could not be identified with a single constituent of the physical world. But I agree with him, and with you, that the mental world, in so far as it has a locus in nature at all, has it in the head—or in objects arranged, like books and pictures, to excite certain events in the head. As to the mental or moral world in itself, Berty is a poor witness: here is a book entitled “The Outlines of Philosophy” in which there is nothing but spleen, behaviourism, relativity, and babies. He has come down terribly in the world: I suppose this is a set of lectures cooked up for America: there is nothing in it that he hasn’t said as well or better elsewhere, and there is an unreadable amount of improvised commonplaces, and chance polemics. I have had to skip a good deal: but I haven’t missed here and there an extraordinarily witty passage, like that about the behaviourist seeing the rat not seen by his friend, and thinking that he must give up that bootlegged whiskey

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.

To Lawrence Smith Butler
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. December 1, 1944

 . . . Much as I should like to see you, I shouldn’t advise you to come to Italy until you hear that things have returned somewhat to the normal. In Rome, as you know, there has been little damage done to buildings: but the country has been thoroughly pillaged by the two friendly foreign armies that have passed over it; communications and victualling are difficult; and people have no work and no means of carrying on their trades. Food is scarce and bad, and the value of money and the price of everything are uncertain. We also lack coal, and electric light shines decently only every third day. Life would therefore not be comfortable or easy for a traveller. I myself have been lucky in being taken in by these Sisters. They have a nicely furnished house and nice English ideas of food and comfort, and we manage very well, in spite of all difficulties. Of late, too, I have received various presents, as well as many visits, from American army men, and am revelling in the lost luxuries of tea, marmalade, cheese, anchovies, shaving-cream, and even peanuts. I have been photographed and interviewed to exhaustion; but I am happy like a sky without clouds, and still at work with the pen. In the second volume of Persons & Places, you are commemorated among “Americans in Europe.” I hope you won’t be angry at the past tense: but I write of everything as if it were ancient history. Motto: Veritas.

Yours affly,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY.