To Scofield Thayer
C/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Madrid, Spain. April 22, 1913
It is of no importance that you should reproduce or even criticize my views at close quarters: it is more than enough that you find in me a starting-point and stimulus for your own thinking and writing. This is a service which very modest authors or teachers can sometimes do, when they happen to come opportunely into contact with younger spirits or to strike a chord to which the times respond. When the truth and absolute value of one’s views are so doubtful as they naturally are in the case of a philosopher, it is a solid comfort to find proof that at least one’s wind of people will doubtless tell you that this wind is too perfumed, and others that it is too sharp and blighting; but though it ill becomes me to say so, I am inwardly convinced that you will find it healthy. You may, and probably one or another of you will, disagree with each of my opinions; you may balk at “essence” (that most guileless of things!) or complain of the amateurishness of my technical philosophy. But meantime you will have found encouragement for what are the great virtues of young thinkers—sincerity and unworldliness. May you never lose them, or imagine that there is anything in the world for the sake of which they should be given up!
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT