To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London. S.W.
6 Park Street
Torquay, England. March 15, 1917
“Creative Intelligence”—for which I am truly obliged to you—has come very agreeably to distract my thoughts from the events of the time and the persistence of bad weather, in this place to which one comes to bask and to cheat winter of its terrors.
Isn’t it after all Evolution that is creative, and intelligence merely a name—not without ambiguity—for a complex case of it?
Intelligence is the power of seeing things in the past, present, and future as they have been, are, and will be.
There is a certain heat and recklessness about your manner which, especially in matters of religion, will make others fume too; and the smoke in end may be greater than the light and may overpower it. I say this more in contrition than in criticism, since I am painfully conscious of having written a great deal too precipitately and egotistically, in the Life of Reason, for instance, to the evident prejudice of whatever sober truth or genuine humanity my views may have possessed at bottom.
If you are a little inclined to the same sort of eloquent self- indulgence, perhaps I am in part to blame for it: because you have heard and read me with such friendly perseverance that something of my faults, as well as my virtues, may have stuck to you. For the clearness of the deliverance, too, this way of writing with a loose rein, is unfortunate: there are too many things said or hinted by the way, too little economy of means, too little concentration in the argument. Herod and Blue Beard would have made excellent writers of philosophy: they would have killed all other people’s children and most of their own.
I read in a French book the other day that it is better to wait than to hope. I think so, but I am afraid, in spite of your better opinion of me, I am no pragmatist.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH