Category: LETTERS Page 212 of 274

To Anne Ford
Via di Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. October 2, 1950

Dear Miss Ford:
You overwhelm me with superior chocolates from Sherry’s in New York. The last night I spent in America was luxuriously spent in an apartment at Sherry’s; not of my own choosing, but suggested by a fashionable friend who also took me that evening to a small dinner party, a theatre party, a private concert, and a reception at her Ambassador’s to meet (the backs of) the Duke of Connaught, the Duchess, and Princess Patricia, after which spree ( Jan. 1912) I never went to any other party in my life. It may well be, after your chocolates, that I shall never wish to descend to any but Sherry’s in the short rest of my life. You are too kind and I rely on your not forgetting to come to see me (if still visible) when you return to Rome.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

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

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Oxford, England. October 1, 1913

I have been working very steadily; my book, however, hasn’t got all the benefit of it, as I have been writing other stuff—some half-poetical dialogues that I have long had in mind and one of which was actually written and published long ago in a review. When this spurt of inspiration is over, however, I shall go back to the solid work, and I count on being stimulated especially by talking with Bertie Russell in Cambridge. I saw him at his brother’s, but we didn’t have more than one or two opportunities for quiet discussion. He is a logician and mathematician, strong where I am weakest, so that it is not always easy for us to understand each other on these abstruse points. However, we feel sympathy even in our diversity, and that is why I am anxious to put my view on some subjects (not on all) before him and to learn his more accurately. However, in the end every philosopher has to walk alone.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To Charles Augustus Strong
60 Brattle St Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Autumn 1899–June 1904]

I have been reading more Fichte and Hegel, but my inner self rebels increasingly against their empty pertinacity and shocking habit of covering a paradox with a truism, and making you believe the absurd under the guise of the self-evident. So I shall be kindly disposed to the things-in-themselves.

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St Oxford
Oxford, England. September 29, 1917

My so-called second paper has given birth to various excursuses on “existence”, “consciousness”, etc, and I have run up against points which have puzzled me and made me vacillate in my views. What you call “semiexistence”, and I was inclined to accept or to call “specious existence” has given me special trouble. My conclusion now is that it is a mistake to speak of the essence as existing at all. What exists substantially is the organic or mind-stuff process; what exists actually and historically is the passing perception or intuition—a fact, a cognition, something spiritual, having a date and duration, but no substantial or efficacious existence; while the essence (though it would be pedantic not to say that it existed, while it is given or embodied) exists only by a current figure of speech, the true existence not belonging to it, but to the mind that perceives or to the thing that embodies it. Do you agree with this? I should be glad to know

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Danieli,
Venice, Italy. September 28, 1939

Sept. 28, 1939

I have ideas about what is going to happen anent the war, but I won’t communicate them, partly because you wouldn’t think them reasonable, and partly because I might prove a false prophet. But this is not a gay confident war, as that of 1914 was at the beginning. It is something people have been too stupid and stubborn to avoid, although they hated and feared it so much as to be entirely upset at the thought of it’s actually overtaking them. It is a result of bad government by good men more than of good government by bad men: although there is something of this too.

And now Russia!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.