To Samuel Martin Thompson
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 25, 1934
Dear Mr. Thompson
The point which has most pleased me in your thesis—which I have read with interest—is the clearness with which you bring out the constant need of taking “ideas” to mean “essences”. This clears the whole matter up, so to speak, upwards; but you don’t seem to me to clear it up downwards, towards biology. Locke began with biological assumptions; he knew the origin of ideas through contact with things: this was “experience” in the original sense. If you had restored tradition on this point, as you do in the upward direction, I think you would have recovered altogether what Locke meant to say and ought to have said: which was not at all what his school gathered from his loquacity. If you restored the biological presuppositions of Locke, and of everybody, you would not need to pack the world “in some fashion within our experience”, because the involution and relevance of our experience within the world would never have been disregarded.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933–1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Samuel Martin Thompson.