To Charles Augustus Strong
Cavendish Hotel
81, Jermyn St.
St. Jame’s S. W.
London, England. February 12, 1912.
Dear Strong,
Your letters of Jan. 23 and Feb. 9 reach me today together. Thank you for both of them. I am glad to hear your book is actually done . . . and am looking forward with great interest to reading it. Indeed, I shall do so sympathetically, and what is more with a pre-disposition to change my mind on several points on which I used to hold out against you, as for instance that “appearances” do not “exist”. In my language the essence which appears does not exist; what exists is the intuition of it (a fact with different properties, but often homonymous with the essence it views). Even this intuition, however, does not exist as a substance; it is an expression of substance, a phenomenon; and though you may reject this way of putting the matter, I think you will have to say practically the same thing when you come to define the relation between mind-stuff and mind.
As to the room you intend for me at the Avenue de l’Observatoire, I am sure it will be more than sufficient. If my books don’t all hold in the placard, they needn’t be unpacked, or some of them might perhaps find a place in the dining room, or in some passage. There are many corners in most houses where a book-case can be slipped in without intercepting the rightful uses of the place. One of my friends has book-shelves over the door of his bath-room!
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.