To Justus Buchler
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 15, 1937
My knowledge of Pierce is chiefly at second hand and from quotations, but I heard one of his Harvard lectures. He had been dining at the James’s and his evening shirt kept coming out of his evening waistcoat. He looked red-nosed and disshevelled, and a part of his lecture seemed to be ex-tempore and whimsical. But I remember and have often used in my own thoughts, if not in actual writing, a classification he made that evening of signs into indexes and symbols and images: possibly there was still another distinct category which I don’t remember. The index changes with its object but does not resemble it; the symbol resembles the object loosely and by analogy. In general I agree with what you say, that there is no hostility or contradiction between Pierce’s philosophy and mine, in spite of, or because of, the fact that they are so different.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY