To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 2, 1927
Perhaps I may abandon “Symptoms” for a while and turn to the “Realm of Matter”. Russell’s latest book ought to have helped to revive interest in this direction, but I have been disappointed. It is nice to see him insisting on his newly acquired conviction that “percepts are in our heads”: it ranges him among my examples of latent materialism in idealists. But does he conceive his whole philosophy, in the moment when he is most aware of it, to be a single constituent of the series of events which make up one of the electrons in his brain? It seems monstrous (to use one of his words) to give so rich a substance (to use one of my words) to so minute a phenomenon. It would seem to me more plausible to say that his awareness of his philosophy was an event engaging a great many gyrations of a great many electrons: it would therefore have no punctiform locus in space-time, and could not be identified with a single constituent of the physical world. But I agree with him, and with you, that the mental world, in so far as it has a locus in nature at all, has it in the head—or in objects arranged, like books and pictures, to excite certain events in the head. As to the mental or moral world in itself, Berty is a poor witness: here is a book entitled “The Outlines of Philosophy” in which there is nothing but spleen, behaviourism, relativity, and babies. He has come down terribly in the world: I suppose this is a set of lectures cooked up for America: there is nothing in it that he hasn’t said as well or better elsewhere, and there is an unreadable amount of improvised commonplaces, and chance polemics. I have had to skip a good deal: but I haven’t missed here and there an extraordinarily witty passage, like that about the behaviourist seeing the rat not seen by his friend, and thinking that he must give up that bootlegged whiskey.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY