Category: LETTERS Page 273 of 274

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. March 8, 1952

Yesterday your friend Loring brought me your letter and “Patterns of Progress” and found me at 11 a.m reading in Lorenzo de’ Medici some musical verses on the diabolical act of Prometheus in bringing fire down to earth with the dreadful consequences of war, trade, and the devouring of cooked carcasses. All fire wills to go heavenward, where according to Aristotle it belongs, and on earth, according to the love-sick Lorenzo, there should be only vegetables and nude Adams and Eves.

I am with you rather than with Lorenzo, not caring at all for love-making in Paradise, but thinking that knowledge both as a means and an end is the best of acquisitions.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Charles Scribner Jr.
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 4, 1930

Thank you very much for your letter (of Feb. 21) and the cheque enclosed, from which I gather that some ladies’ college continues to use my early works as textbooks.

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 Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 28, 1949

Your letter of a week ago brings unexpected news and it has taken me a few days to digest it. I see what a completely new and actively social life your marriage will open before you, and how this, added to the warmth of a new affection, will bring you. . . .

More important than the setting is to have some idea of your future family circle. As to Mr. Little himself, being master of a House in Cambridge and being Secretary to the University are both positions of which I have no first hand knowledge, but they suggest administrative and executive duties rather than teaching, and you don’t tell me what Mr. Little was before there were Houses at Harvard. Garrick and the 18th century sound like a specialty in English history or literature. And then of his four children, which are boys or men and which girls or women? That must make a great difference in the ease with which you can slip into your new position. I have some experience of this sort of problem, as my sister Susana had six step-children as well as a middle-aged husband with fixed habits. Anyhow, give him my compliments and congratulations; and I can understand how you too can feel a fresh glow of youth and excitement at the prospect of this new life. What I cannot sincerely congratulate you on is the procession of visitors and official functions which will demand your time and attention. But I am an old bear, and could never feel the charm of society where it went beyond real friendship or a real feast to the eye and to the gullet.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. February 24, 1918

Your article on free will arrived in due course; naturally I agree: but I am not satisfied with the degree of distinctness which your theory－or your expression of it－has attained. Of course our acts, deliberations, and passions, taken in their concrete biological context, are efficacious effected causes: I mean that the process of nature runs through them. But the questions that people will wish to have answered regard 1st the relation of consciousness taken historically to the other elements in these concrete processes, 2nd the relation of intention and desire takens morally to the direction of those total processes, and 3rd the determination or indetermination of the same. On this last point your answer is definite: but what is your attitude about the other two?

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 Charles William Eliot
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusetts. February 1, 1898

Dear Mr Eliot,

Thank you very much for your letter informing me of my appointment as assistant professor. It is very gratifying to me that the University should have confidence enough in me to take this step, and I shall endeavour to do my best to justify its expectations.

Yours very truly,

G Santayana

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