Category: LETTERS Page 211 of 274

To Charles Augustus Strong
Cambridge, MA. November 10, 1895

Dear Strong,

I am delighted you thought of sending me your article, not only because I shall enjoy reading it very much, but even more because it proves you have not forgotten an old friend in spite of such a long absence of communication between us. Are you again active at Chicago this winter? If so, do you see my Harvard friends there, and does the place continue to please you? I got such a favourable impression of it when I was there two years ago. This summer I have been in Europe again, in Spain for a while, and afterwards with Loeser in Italy and Switzerland, coming back finally by way of England and an economical cattle steamer. It was interesting, but not all I should have wished in the way of a change of life. This may come before long, however as there seems to be a crisis coming on in my relations with Harvard, and I hardly expect to remain here after this year. I shall not unless they make me an assistant professor. My plan is to go to London for a year, and see what will turn up after that. The change of intellectual surroundings would do me a lot of good. Let me hear from you soon.

Yours ever

G Santayana

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 George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 9, 1930

I see by the papers that the result of the elections has had a depressing effect on shares, but an exhilarating effect on the hearts of the bibulous. If this is not a false dawn, I may yet return to America. A grandson of Mark Twain set me up the other day to a cocktail: it was excellent, and revived the sensations of my youth.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Boylston Adams Beal
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. November 8, 1941

There has been great irregularity and uncertainty in the receipt of funds from America, and I thought seriously of leaving Italy, first for Switzerland and then for Spain. But the Swiss authorities would not give me a permit for residence; so that possibility was discarded at once. As for the journey to Spain, air being excluded by the doctor as dangerous for my heart, I found the land journey full of difficulties, especially as to money. You may take only 250 lire out of Italy, and you may bring no pesetas into Spain. How then are you to get from one frontier to another or from the Spanish frontier to Madrid? At the Spanish consulate here they gave me an announcement of a conducted trip to Spain from Turin, meant for fugitives from the East, bound to Lisbon and South America. It involved terrible experiences: two nights sitting up in trains, and four long delays at customshouses. I couldn’t face the prospect; became almost ill about it; and after consulting the doctor, decided to remain in Rome, and put up with the consequences. I have a respectable sum in Italian money, and have received some remittances since from George Sturgis; but the possibility of soon being cut off altogether from any means of support had to be faced. I had thought at various times of this Nursing Home of the “Blue Sisters”, or “The Little Company of Mary”, as a possible refuge in time of illness. My doctor happens to be one of their regular physicians, and encouraged me to consider the matter. I walked up to the Celius, and found the place, which I had never seen before, close under the walls of Santo Stefano Rotondo, and a step from the Villa Celimontana or Mattei, which is now open to the public. They agreed to take me in and give me a good room with a bathroom for half what I was paying at the Grand Hotel: but I had an idea in reserve which, after an interview with the Mother General who lives here, this being their first foundation, has proved feasible. The Order has a house in a suburb of Chicago called Evergreen Park; and it occurred to me that George Sturgis might pay by cheque to Chicago the amount of my expenses here in Rome, or a periodical donation that should amply cover those expenses. “I agree to that!” cried the Mother General at once; and seemed not to mind the possibility of not receiving that money for the present. Thus I am living here, in a sort of nunnery, gratis. Even if the United States comes formally into the war, I can continue here, with all necessities covered; and what cash I have or may receive can no doubt be made to suffice for my personal expenses, now almost nil. The food is as in Spain, not always very appetizing; but there are enough good simple things, and the spirit of the place is pleasant and reassuring. I have thus recovered great peace of mind about external matters, and I already had it about things internal.

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 Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 7, 1948

Dear Dick—or Reincarnation of Oliver,

It had never occurred to me while you were here that you are like Oliver; but now that you suggest it, with your introspective letter to back you up, I see it clearly. I didn’t know you had so much psychological atmosphere—“vapours”—in your mental landscape. It is very romantic, northern, and you must be of Scandinavian descent; but don’t let the delicate mists thicken into fog. Spiritual pride and independence are like Oliver and the American transcendentalist of a hundred years ago; and in your letter you are more like Oliver than he was like himself in my book; because it would have been impossible in a novel to reproduce the actual flux of half-formed thoughts and images that floats down through the mind. Even in the two places where I pretend to quote Oliver’s compositions—the “thesis” on Platonic love and the verses about Rose Darnley—I make his style more terse and mature than it could have been, even when he was older: for he had the same difficulty in landing his fish that you complain of. But don’t worry about it. Angling is a sport; you don’t go fishing for the fish, but for a healthy foolish game in the fresh woods and the stream full of lovely reflections. It is a bit cruel—unintentionally, but nature always is so by the way. I don’t think there is anything mysterious or defective in images and thoughts being elusive and dissolving before they are quite formed. Nature, again, is everywhere wasteful, and breeds a hundred seeds for one that ever flowers. You mustn’t mind that. A choice selection of lucky ideas, that actually could take shape, will be enough to show what you were after.

Now as to “solipsism” and the “transcendental ego”, these are not wellchosen words for what is probably meant, or ought to be meant if we mean to be scientific in regard to the facts. There is a transcendental function or relation between any witness and what it or he perceives; it should not, however, be called transcendental, but ciscendental (as I used to say to my classes) because the relation or function signified is that of any and every spectator, in the dark on this hither side of the footlights, seeing only the phenomenal play on the lighted stage. If the play is not a dream, but one actually written by a playwright and acted by players who are not at all, in real life, the characters in the play, then the author and the performers, and the theatre and audience, are transcendent (not transcendental, i.e. or ciscendental) realities, conditioning the spectacle, but rooted in a much larger “real” (or dynamic) world.

Now, as a matter of fact, the transcendental function or relation of the witness is exercised by a material man, part of the same transcendent world in which the author and the actors have their dynamic places. If, then, I say that “I” or the “ego” am something dynamic and self-existent, but that the play is all make-believe or a dream in me (which view would be real solipsism) I am contradicting myself; because my natural person and power are a part of nature transcending all phenomenal presence to thought or dream; and it is absurd that a part of the material world, by going to a material theatre and seeing real actors perform fictitious parts, turns them and himself, as a man, into a mere phenomenon in his mind. Solipsism, then, understood strictly, is absurd; even “solipsism of the present moment”, because the visioned scene is not a self, and if there is a self that has that vision, this self is part of a transcendent world, and not alone in existence.

What I think a more correct way of speaking is to say that “transcendental” is only spirit (or attention) in anybody: a spirit (or attention) which can arise only in animated bodies, as they receive impressions and prepare reactions on other bodies or natural agents. Spirit (or attention) can never be disembodied: therefore it is never solipsistic in fact; yet it is, in each intuition or feeling, a focus, transcendental and invisible, for whatever it sees. The Germans confuse this transcendental function with dynamic mythical “spirits” existing in a void.

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 Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 6, 1934

“The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums”

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Location of manuscript: Unknown.