Category: LETTERS Page 210 of 274

To William James
Rome. November 29, 1904

Since I left America I have had glimpses of England, Belgium, Holland, Germany and France, beside six weeks with my sister in Ávila and almost a month in Florence with the advantage of being near Loeser and Berenson. I am profoundly out of humour with “aesthetics”, yet I have been feeling the new douche of it which these friends of mine have drenched me with as a rather invigorating change; one gets so dry in America with no food for the senses, especially if one is obliged to pump up theory every day . . .

Your articles—apart from their intrinsic importance—have interested me particularly on account of a certain harmony which there is between what you make for and what I have fallen into myself. Doubtless you have from of old let seeds fall into my mind which have sprouted there into what I feel to be quite native convictions; and it comes to me now as a rather surprising happiness that I can invoke your authority in support of a great deal that I feared might seem rash in my opinions. It is the general attitude which Bergson also encourages, although of course it may be turned in various ways and expressed in various vocabularies. What I don’t quite understand in your way of stating the matter is whether the conceptual world has only its immediate status. Of course every conception, taken existentially, is a part of the flux, which as you say is largely chaotic in its immediacy; but things and truths have also a systematic and more or less static dimension. For instance, if a candle which was nine inches long when left burning in an empty room is found to be six inches long on the observer’s return, was it ever really eight inches in length? Of course the eight-inch candle will draw a potential sort of being — in from the philosopher’s views, themselves immediate experiences of his; the conception that the candle passed through that phase will be an absolute item in the universal inventory. But the question seems to me to be whether the eight-inch candle has only that imputed being; or rather whether imputed being is not what we mean by reality and the immediate flux itself by appearance. The forthright intellect seems to be the life of the mind, and what it rests in seems to be alone important, true, or efficacious. The eight-inch candle is something to be believed in, because in the material world which the intellect has discovered it is a needful element that counts and rewards our confidence in its reality. The materials which experience is composed of must therefore be credited with an existence which makes them material elements and gives them a mechanical order, since they exist also permanently, potentially, and beyond our range.

If this is what is implied in your views—and I conceive that it is—the result seems to be quite different from panpsychism and far more rationalistic. According to panpsychism the eight-inch candle exists only by virtue of its inconceivable psychic substance, that mass of irrelevant experience of which a candle at best is but a remote symbol or effect. The real eightinch candle is not eight inches long and is no candle at all. It is perhaps a conclave of politic worms electing an infallible pope to maintain that the universe is nothing but a musical composition. According to your view—if I understand it—and to mine, on the contrary, the material qualities of the candle themselves subsist, and it is a cylindrical white body that is really eight inches long at an assignable instant. The world of science, for us, then, would not be a mere fiction, but a real efficacious order discovered in the chaos of immediate experience, a system consisting bodily of the given elements, but of course involving many more, and the longer subsistence of them. Am I right?

Please wish the various members of the department a happy new year in my name and believe me

Very sincerely yours

G Santayana

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

To Max Forrester Eastman
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. November 28, 1936

Dear Mr. Eastman,
Your letter reaches me when I had just written to your publishers saying I was ashamed to confess that I couldn’t understand a word of your book. If I had been writing to you I should have expressed the matter differently. I can understand your own words, and no doubt I should see a part, at least, of your reasons for making the distinctions you make in the kinds of the comic. My difficulty is with this comic universe itself. There is where everything eludes me in so far as it is supposed to be comic and in so far as the comic is supposed to be a part of the good. To me all these jokes seem rather ghastly. And the enjoyment of laughter, rather than a painful twist and a bit of heart-ache at having to laugh, perhaps, at such things at all, being your whole subject, I say I don’t understand a word of your book. That is, I am not able to share the happy experience that inspires you to write it.
Never mind. You are probably in the same case (although you don’t say so) about my “Realm of Essence.” Why trouble about it? No one is going to hell, or even to the stake, for being a victim, in some direction, of “invincible ignorance.”
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
27 November 1933 . Rome, Italy
Hotel Bristol, Rome.
Rome. November 27, 1933

Dear Cory

Eliot’s book hasn’t yet arrived, but I have read the two reviews of it with pleasure. They are written with feeling: I will send them back to you with the book, in case you might like to reread them. Especially this “Basil de Selincourt.” who is he? Very penetrating to say that Eliot’s poetry hasn’t been written: but doesn’t this show that Eliot, as a poet, belongs to that truly English tribe which dislikes explicitness? That from Chaucer to Robert Bridges English poets have felt an ineffable something in nature and in the heart which outran philosophy or religion, is very true: and it also outruns language, so that Eliot hasn’t been able to write his own poetry, nor has Robert Bridges. Chaucer is different: he did write his poetry: only it had a margin or penumbra of the inexpressible, as all true poetry has: or rather, a margin or penumbra to be expressed by music, by magic, not by logical articulation.

. . . My Spanish friends—I wish you could read them!—are youngish Catholics inclined to the modern, psychological, mystical, Bergsonian way of feeling; and this mystery in poetry, this miracle in every day life, is just the thing to excite their imagination. Why is La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé a wonderful line, and ravishing poetry, whereas La fille de Pasiphaé et de Minos would be dull prose from a school-book? L’Abbé Bremond said that it was the Holy Ghost blowing where it listeth—or something to that effect: but I suspect there are tropes that let the current through in the brain, and tropes that don’t and that it is a matter of little orgasms in the nervous system.

Yours affly G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
45 Chesterton Road
Cambridge, England. November 26, 1913

You ought not to be so dubious about the possibility of art and poetry in a peaceful world. The stress of war and suffering is not a needed element to stir the imagination or to give pungency to the representation of life. When life is turbulent, art has to make harmonies out of strife, but if life were placid, it would more easily make harmonies out of placidity. Think of all the distant poignant vistas, and all the profound renunciations, and all the exquisite charming fugitive moments that would fall to a soul living the life of reason in the midst of this world clearly understood. And think of all the amiable arts, both of the Greek and of the Dutch sort, that would be fostered by a well-ordered polity. No: the idea that horrors are required to give zest to life and interest to art is the idea of savages, men of no experience worth mentioning, and of merely servile, limited sensibilities. Don’t tolerate it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Dorothy Shakespear Pound
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 24, 1946

Dear Mrs. Pound,

I have much appreciated your husband’s letter telling me that p. 6 of my book had reconciled him to the frivolity of the rest. I know he is very selective and “subjective”; and a ray of mutual understanding is of value with such a person. I have also received his new Canto, and should have written to him about it if a ray of light from it had been able to pierce my thick skull. But really I can’t catch the drift of his allusions.

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