Category: LETTERS Page 1 of 274

To Charles Augustus Strong
Brookline, Massachusetts.  April 19, 1900

I am delighted beyond measure that my little book should please you. Thank you very much for all you say. It encourages me very much, coming from a person of your solid judgment and religious nature and education. If you find my book good, it can’t be rotten. But I must attempt to answer your criticism, so as to set myself right both with you and with my own conscience. When I said that religion should give up its pretension to be dealing with matters of fact, I meant, as you doubtless felt yourself, that the religious machinery (gods, hell, heaven, grace, sacraments etc) was not in the plane of fact but in the plane of symbols. But symbols are symbols of fact; and in a sense poetry deals with matters of fact, and the better and more poetical the poetry the more real and fundamental the facts with which it deals. It is not artificial in the sense of being arbitrary. It is a representation of reality, according to the requirements of a part of reality, the human imagination. And yet there is a plain sense in which it is right and obvious to say that poetry does not deal with (I should have said, perhaps, does not contain, does not constitute) matters of fact. Apollo is not a fact in the same plane as the sun: yet the religion of Apollo “deals with” the fact “sun”. Otherwise the religion of Apollo would be impossible; it would have no basis and no subject-matter. So that all I mean by relegating religion to the sphere of poetry is to distinguish, as we should all do in poetry, between the reality represented and the fiction by which that representation is made. Painting does not deal with flesh and hair, but with pigments; yet by its manipulation of those pigments it represents, and, if you like, deals with, hair and flesh. Possibly the whole ambiguity might be removed by saying deals in, instead of deals with. But my book was not meant to be a creed, even for skeptics, and its definitions are not meant to have theological precision. They are “thrown at” ideas.

You can’t sum up the moral values of the parts of the Universe and say the result is the moral value of the Universe itself. For these moral values cancel one another and disappear into merely physical energies when you trace them back to their source. The good and evil in the world are not the world’s merits and demerits, because by the time you have traced them back to the general laws from which good and evil alike flow, the laws have forfeited those moral characteristics. I disagree, then, with what you say about the credit for what is fair and good being due rather to the Universe than to us. It is as if you said vision belonged rather to the Universe than to the animals in it, because of course the Universe gave the animals eyes, and not they to themselves. The Universe deserves no credit for our virtues until it acquires them—until it becomes ourselves. When the sympathy with moral ends begins to be a principle of action, moral values arise; there are none in the mere conditions of goodness, and the rain and the corn and sunshine are not moral objects. To regard them as such is really to make them gods; it is mythology; and to my mind your awe- inspiring, amiable, sympathetic and admonishing Universe is a mythological object. I value it as such; as such it is a religious idea, and a true one; but it is not a matter of fact.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 18, 1949

Yesterday I gave a visitor, Mr. Peter Russell, my last copy of Dialogues in Limbo, because he expressed regret at not being able to order it from England; and I am writing to ask you to be good enough to have two more copies of this book sent to me, as being my favourite child, I don’t like to be parted from it for long.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Rosamond Thomas [Sturgis] Little
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 17, 1952

The illustrated weekly reviews, that you usually put in for padding into your food-parcels, entertain me a good deal. There is confusion of subjects and colours, but all contributes to produce a sense of millions and millions of people and dollars going it as hard as they can. I think it will all prove a comedy, not a tragedy. The world is in a terrible mess philosophically, but at least in Rome life is orderly and apparently prosperous, and the possibility of a communist conquest (perhaps without much fighting) seems unreal. When one thinks of the French Revolution, and the ease with which the Empire and Restoration reestablished respectibility and peace, and fashionable society, it seems as if civilisation would not really disappear, but there would be at most a carnival of rowdyism, a counter revolution, and modern routine once again.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Augusto Guzzo
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 16, 1948

As to reading the translation, I should be delighted to read it all and should do so in any case when it is printed, as translations give me a new sensation about the character of one’s thought. It is sometimes a salutary lesson. You learn to be like Le Misanthrope in Molière:

Et ses propres sentiments sont blâmes par lui
Lorsqu’il les retrouve dans la bouche d’autrui.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.