Category: LETTERS Page 213 of 274

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel de Londres,
Naples, Italy. October 7, 1931

Dear Cory,

I am glad to have news of you and to see that Paris, your aunt, and Simone, with their united charms, don’t altogether wean you from divine philosophy. That being so, let me add a few words about “natural Moments”. When I say they are elements of description, I mean that I don’t conceive the flux to be composed of solid temporal blocks, with a click in passing from one to the next. That may be Strong’s conception, but although I should say that points and instants are necessary elements of description (geometry is an excellent method of description in regard to the realm of matter) I don’t think points or instants are natural units. Natural moments, on the other hand, though there need be no click between them (sometimes there is a click, as when a man dies, a man’s life being a natural moment) yet supply the only possible, and the most intimate, units composing the flux. For how describe the flux except by specifying some essence that comes into it or drops out of it? And the interval between the coming and the going of any essence from the flux of existence is, by definition, a natural moment. Be it observed also that these moments are not cosmic in lateral extension; they are not moments of everything at once: so that when one comes to an end, almost everything in the universe will run on as if nothing had happened. Spring every year and youth in every man are natural moments, so is the passage of any image or idea in a mind; but the change (so momentous in that private transformation) is far from jarring the whole universe, but passes silently and smoothly, removing nothing ponderable, and adding nothing in the way of force to the steady transformation of things. I am curious to see how you refute Whitehead on causation. Didn’t that seem to us to be one of his good points?

Yours affty G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Henry Ward Abbot
Schiffbauerdamm 3II
Berlin, Germany. October 6, 1886

Dear Abbot.
I said, I believe, in my last letter that I would write before long again, because I had more to say in answer to all you told me than I could put into one letter. I have put off writing all this time partly because I thought I might possibly hear from you, and partly because I was afraid of making myself a nuisance. But I have felt like writing to you very many times. You asked why I take an interest in you, which after all it is natural I should take; but since that time I have been forced to wonder myself why I take so much interest in you. And as far as I can see the reason is this. I suspect you are going through a critical period, and I feel that you are dissatisfied with yourself. Why are you dissatisfied with yourself? Another man, I for instance, would be satisfied to be as you are. You are not dissatisfied with yourself because you can’t do what other people do and what is expected of a man, but because you imagine you can’t do something very excellent which you feel somehow drawn to do. Now I am interested in seeing if you are going to attempt this something excellent, or not; whether you are going to prefer to live on moodily, taking refuge more or less in dissipation, or whether you are going to start out in some direction where you see something you really value. It isn’t at all a question of what you can accomplish; it is only a question of what attitude you are going to take, what sort of things you are going attend to. Now you know that I am as willing that people should worship the devil as that they should worship God; I only ask in whose service will they live more smoothly, gracefully, and intelligently. It’s all prejudice and point of view to say that one sort of life is better than another, because it pursues different objects. All that an emancipated man asks is which objects attract him most, and what are the means of attaining those objects. To do right is to know what you want. Now when you are dissatisfied with yourself, it’s because you are after something you don’t want. What objects are you proposing to yourself? are they the objects you really value? If they are not, you are cheating yourself. I don’t mean that if you chose to pursue the objects you most value, you would attain them; of course not. Your experience will tell you that. Therefore a wise man won’t value anything much. But this wise indifference, this safeguard against disappointment, would come too soon if it came before a man had started in the direction of his true satisfactions. Indifference is quite premature if it leads a man to misunderstand his own desires. In the first place there is always some small chance of success; but success in getting after much labor what you really don’t care for is the bitterest and most ridiculous failure. And in the second place, to have before one admired objects, and hopes of true satisfaction, is itself a very pleasant and ennobling thing. So if, as I suspect, you are wavering a little in regard to the direction you will start out in, I hope you will think this over; because, as I am not a moralist, nor a minister, nor an old man, nor anyone with a right to preach and give advice, I may possibly have struck the truth. I trust you will not be offended at my writing to you as I do. Gossip and jokes have I not, but that which I have I give you; don’t doubt that I am “with the greatest respect” your sincere friend
George Santayana
P.S. When you see Ward, please give him an affectionate scolding from me.

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 Benjamin P. Schwartz
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. October 5, 1936

It seems to me that the time to publish any letters of mine that may be destined for that honour has not quite arrived. Wait until I am dead. My demise will be a good occasion for advertising for any epistles that anybody may possess. I will tell you in confidence—in case you or Mr. Buchler should wish then to undertake the task—that my principal continuous correspondence has been with Mrs. Crawford H. Toy, now living at 1 Waterhouse Street, Cambridge, Mass. I know she has preserved my letters; but she is an old lady, and may not survive me. So are most of my former correspondents—not ladies, but old—and heaven knows whether they have kept my letters, or whether their children or heirs have not burned them. However, I have written a vast number in all these years, and if they could be summoned to arise and gather themselves together at the blast of the trumpet, you would have a pretty task in reading them over.

However, there is another question involved, which is that of the advisability of printing any letters, the need of selecting the right ones, and of editing them judiciously, I don’t mean by altering them substantially (errors or slips might well be corrected) as in leaving out indiscreet words or trivial prattle. You, as I understand, are young, you haven’t known me personally, and I will tell you quite frankly that I don’t think you are the person to assume, as yet, that sort of responsibility towards the public and towards my reputation. If it were a question of merely philosophical letters, it would be different, because you and Mr. Buchler have proved, in Obiter Scripta, that you are admirable interpreters of my work. But almost all my letters, even if touching on public or theoretical questions, have been personal, and collecting and editing them would require special tact and special knowledge of my feelings about my friends. Moreover, there is a literary executor already chosen to preside over my Nachlass, Daniel Cory; and it would naturally fall to him to collect my correspondence, as well as to edit my remaining manuscripts, if he thought it advisable. I hope, if I live long enough, to write my own life, so that a biography—especially as there are no events to record—would be superfluous.

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 Henry Ward Abbot
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, Villa le Balze
London, S.W.1.
Fiesole, Italy. October 4, 1930

Dear Harry,

If I send you my books, it is because various little articles of yours in the papers have proved to me that you haven’t forgotten our old confabulations on ultimate things; and I wish you wouldn’t let your attention become entangled in matters of style; style is only a cumbrous vehicle, though an inevitable one, for what I have to say; and without pretending that my views are of much importance measured by the standard of absolute truth, which after all is in nobody’s hand, I think you might be interested in them as confessions and moral insights of an old friend. You say I am hard to read: I have heard that before, yet it surprises me because I take the greatest pains to be clear, not only in language but in thought, and am a very simple commonplace person in my opinions. Everybody ought to say: “Of course: that’s what I’ve always thought, only I didn’t expect a philosopher to see it”. I said this to Strong (with whom I am staying at present among these Tuscan hills) and he explained that the difficulty in reading my books came from the ornaments, which interfered with the attention and made the reader lose the outline of the thought. Is that it? If so I can only say that the ornaments, for me, are a spontaneous concomitant of the sense, like gestures in animated discourse: they are necessary, if you want to reach the true ground and flavour of the ideas. All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets. But people compare books with other books, not with experience. Yours sincerely

G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Bruno Lind (Robert C. Hahnel)
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. October 3, 1951

I hope you will not go in your book into the possibility of my replacing Aristotle as the accepted pagan philosopher for Catholics. The Church is founded on Judaism; it accepts a naturalism with miraculous powers secretly controlling it, and controlling each soul. My naturalism does not admit a moral or humanistic control over the cosmos; and it puts spirit at the top, and accidental ultimate self-awakening of organic formations, themselves perfectly automatic. Spirit comes and goes in the world like dew in the morning. That is not compatible with the supernatural realism and monarchical theism of the Church. There is another friend of mine, Prof. Michele Petrone, who thinks that my views might, if understood, start a sort of new spiritual discipline; but I think they offer too sporadic and unfruitful a consummation to satisfy mankind. Nietzsche said: “The great question is whether mankind can endure the truth”.

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.