Category: LETTERS Page 2 of 274

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo 6 
Rome, May 3, 1946

Dear Rosamond:
Another box has arrived from you—you are indefatigable—with a jar of apricot jam and a large fruit-cake. In the bottom was a newspaper—the Crimson, I supposed, with Bob’s articles: but no: it looked rather crumpled and the title was The Christian Register. What a disappointment! Perhaps the Crimson will come next time. I don’t understand what it can mean to register Christianity. What Christians are expected to register is their sins, or if they are very old-fashioned, their miracles; and I can’t imagine a Boston publication registering either. Besides, I have been busy of late, in my own way, about Christianity, and I am afraid it has been too much for me at my years, for I have discovered in my book on The Idea of Christ the almost exact repetition on page 247 of three and a half lines from page 244, where they belong. How did this happen? And why didn’t the proof-readers, who included Mr. Wheelock of Scribner’s, Cory, and I, never notice it? Or did they think it was intentional? It was simple witlessness and fatigued attention in my case: it would be a good joke if anyone took it for a burst of eloquence. You know Demosthenes said three things were essential to the orator: repetition, repetition, and repetition. It may be essential to oratory, but it is also found in the talk of old fools.

We have had the much needed rain, and with May summer weather is upon us. I feel well, and encouraged about my book on politics, for which I have invented—ex post facto—a logical arrangement: 4 b/Books or Parts: 1, Preliminaries (which is almost complete), 2, The Generative Order of Society, or The Order of Growth, 3, The Militant Order, and 4, the Rational Order. Under these heads I am going to distribute so much of the stuff, accumulated for thirty years, as seems worth preserving, adding what I have learned since or am learning (from Stalin and Collingwood) that may bring the subject up to date. I don’t expect to live to finish this work, but that doesn’t matter. It will keep me occupied, innocently for the rest of my days.

Yours affly GSantayana

P.S. If you have any photos of yourself or the boys, I should like to have them very much.

 From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Curt John Ducasse
Rome, May 2, ’25

Thank you very much for your two articles. I agree with the thesis of the one on Teleology; a movement culminating in some interesting phase must be either a result of various automatisms or an instance of automatism. Mechanism, if we value the issue, may always be called teleology. The teleology that is impossible is only that which represents the result as a cause. As to your Liberalism in Ethics, although I agree with every part of the argument, I feel some dissatisfaction with the general conclusion. You seem to leave out the authority of a man’s own nature over his casual preferences, in other words, self-knowledge. I entirely agree that different natures have no moral authority over one another; but folly in judgement and action is nevertheless possible if a creature ignores the interests or the facts which he would wish to take into account if he remembered them.

G. Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence RI

To Paul Arthur Schilpp
Hotel Danieli
Venice. May 1, 1940

People who are much younger naturally don’t know how unlike the present the intellectual world was fifty years ago, when I wrote my verses. For instance, I had hardly heard of the “metaphysical” poets, and have not read them even now, except in quotations here and there. Rice is perfectly right in his conclusion that when my mind became poetical, I ceased to write in verse. My verse was youthful effusion, not art. Latin facility, not depth.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

To Henry Ward Abbot
Oxford, April 30– ’87

I have read Royce’s book, which I received a few days ago. I am glad to have it, and read it with interest if hardly with pleasure. It is indeed linked dulness long drawn out. It is intolerably diffuse. When a man has something to say he begins by telling you what the situation is, what objects he has in view in speaking to you, and what he proposes to say. He then says it. When he is through he informs you of what he has said, and of his reasons for saying it, and concludes with a hopeful review of the whole matter.

Apart from this and from the vileness of some of the words and phrases (e.g. “lonesome”, “I don’t just perceive why”) I like the style. The absence of cleverness is a praiseworthy self abnegation on the part of a clever man.  I honor his desire to see books solidly and honestly written, although I must deplore his attempt at writing one himself.

As you will doubtless have anticipated, I disapprove of the moral, at least of the doctrines involved in it. What business has anyone to call the rather weak affection a wife retains for her husband unworthy? Aren’t husbands & wives to love each other after they cease to think each other perfect? There is, too, a ludicrous inadequacy in the “crime” the unfortunate little fool committed, to bring about such dreadful tragedies.

Royce shows his inexperience. One must laugh at the notion of what’s her name’s chastity on the ground that her husband had once got entangled with a girl foolish enough to go mad of disappointment. If at least he had seduced the creature, or made love to her after he was married, or been engaged to both at once—but as it was the hullabaloo is absurd. Nothing is really so immoral as an extravagant morality. Royce’s theories of love and marriage disgust me.  They show what nonsense we talk when we lose respect for experience, tradition, and authority.

…I am being entertained with breakfasts and lunches here, thanks to my introductions from his lordship.¹ I find it up hill work to talk to the English fellows, although they are remarkably at home in all sorts of things. They won’t say what they are thinking about, but keep always thinking about what they shall say. The result is that with my love of laying down the law, I do most of the talking and doubtless appear an intolerable damned fool. By the way, Catholicism is in high favor in these parts, and conversions are continual. All this, according to you, would be impossible if they had only taken N.H.4.²

¹ John Francis Stanley Russell.
² Natural History 4.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
GRAND HÔTEL & HÔTEL TIVOLLIER TOULOUSE RUE DE METZ 
TOULOUSE, LE
29 Avril 1906

Mr. Rockefeller is not a lunatic; he is, I understand, a little timid, and doubtless has detectives to protect him against “cranks” that might loiter about his house. But he is comparatively well, and has a new wig to make him beautiful; and he is coming to spend seven weeks at Compiegne this Summer with the Strongs. Mrs. Rockefeller comes with him; they are going to travel under an assumed name, to protect themselves from begging letters and indiscrete curiosity. Strong tells me that he has written an essay on the duties of rich men, which he is going to read some Sunday afternoon to his father-in-law. It points out that very large fortunes are truly “trusts”; and that instead of being left to individuals of one’s family they should be made into public funds, administered by some trustees of distinction, for the benefit of the community at large.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville