Letters in Limbo ~ February 19, 1936

To Benjamin De Casseres
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 19, 1936

Dear Mr. De Casseres

I have read your booklet on Exhibitionism with pleasure, sometimes bursting into a hearty laugh. You have the verve and the transcendental courage of the old American free lances, the Emersons, Thoreaus, Mark Twains, and Walt Whitmans. But is the substance of your doctrine other than the doctrine of Maya?For my part, I agree that we are of imagination all compact, and that our minds clothe or exhibit something else, that alone is active and lasting. You call it ourselves, I call it matter, others call it Brahma. Is there, functionally, any difference?

Yours sincerely G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY.