To William James
Berlin. January 9th 1887.
Dear Prof. James.
I was delighted to get your letter this morning, and hope you will forgive my not having written. The truth is I was ashamed to do so, because I have done those things which I ought not to have done, and I have not done those things which I ought to have done, and there is no science in me. But I have been having a good quiet time, picking up some German, and finding out which way the philosophical wind blows in these parts . . .
I find it pretty hard to make friends among the Germans, although they are good, simple-hearted people. The Americans are so much more lively that I always find myself going with them. There are a great many here, studying everything and nothing. I have been to some American dinners and Kneipes, but otherwise I have poked comfortably at home, reading Goethe, with whom I am in love. I find no difficulty in reading, and understanding lectures, but I am helpless when it comes to talk.
[I] still propose to take up physiology, but I am afraid . . . I shall do little in that direction. I do not know how to work. I think, apart from the spelling book and the Greek grammar, I have never studied anything except for pleasure and with enthusiasm; and I find it terribly hard to peg at things that I don’t seem to grasp. I recognize that all this is an additional reason for trying to get a feeling for the severe, minute way of handling things, and I shall try to do something in that direction. But my vocation is toward the human, political problems. Even the metaphysical and ethical puzzles appear to me rather as obstacles to be cleared than as truths to be attained. I feel now as if I could pass beyond them into the real world. And as far as the world we live in—I mean the social world—is to be got at by study, it strikes me it is to be found in history and political economy (not counting literature.) It is in this direction that I am drawn. Of course, if one could study everything, it would be very nice to understand the physical world too: but isn’t it a fact that popular and second hand science, bad as it is, is less treacherous than popular Pol. Econ. and history? I can better afford to be misled about chemistry or physiology than about free trade or the Reformation. That is why I am anxious to look into these subjects for myself.
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.