Category: LETTERS Page 3 of 274

To Wincenty Lutoslawski
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. April 20, 1949.

Dear Sir,

It was a pleasure to hear from you after so many years, and to know that you, too, have weathered these times of war and ruin. As for me, I had already retired from “the world” when troubles began, and was put to no great inconvenience, and to no positive loss, by events; I merely moved from the hotel in the city, where I had lived for many years, to this hospital-refuge kept by an Order of English-speaking Sister, called the “Little Company of Mary” or “The Blue Sisters”, from the colour of their veil. I am happy in my cell here, and do not expect to move again.

The just impression that you got of me in the first instance, that I was a sceptic and sincere lover of beauty, I think is still true of me in spite of the pretentious titles to some of my books. My system is only a system of categories or grammar of human imagination, not claiming any scientific or literal or exclusive validity. But modern philosophy was always alien to me, and I could never accept the dogmatic side of Platonism or Hinduism or Christianity as anything but a moralistic mythology. But I am perfectly content that language and thought should remain symbolical and merely human, even in the most objective possible science. “Reality” can take care of itself, and of us.

Writing has been a pleasure for me, not a means to any other end than that of a poet and I have doubtless written too much. Nevertheless, I can’t stop, and I am still at it, composing a big book about Government. I will very gladly send you (from the publishers’ in New York) any one of my books that you may care to see: but which? There is even a novel, “The Last Puritan” and two short parts of a kind of autobiography, called “Persons & Places” of which the second part, published separately, was given the temporary title of “The Middle Span”. These books would give you the best account of my life and religious opinions, if they interest you. But I have properly no religious opinions, only historical and psychological views about religion. Nevertheless, in my own terms, I could accept your conviction about pre-existence, in that, without any belief in transmigration of souls, I do believe in a profound existent potentiality in psyches; not indeed, in my view, infinitely old or infinitely transmissible, but like Karma, dominating our passage through human society, which is not at all a favourable environment for the spirit which the psyche is capable of developing. I have even written a book about “The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, or God in Man”, a piece of psychological Christology, not a “Life of Jesus.” Perhaps the best book to send you would be the one volume edition of “Realms of Being” containing the four volumes on Essence, Matter, Truth, and Spirit. My own favourite, however, and best written book, is “Dialogues in Limbo” of which there is a fresh edition.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Brookline, Massachusetts. April 19, 1900.

Dear Strong

I am delighted beyond measure that my little book should please you. Thank you very much for all you say. It encourages me very much, coming from a person of your solid judgment and religious nature and education. If you find my book good, it can’t be rotten. But I must attempt to answer your criticism, so as to set myself right both with you and with my own conscience. When I said that religion should give up its pretension to be dealing with matters of fact, I meant, as you doubtless felt yourself, that the religious machinery (gods, hell, heaven, grace, sacraments etc) was not in the plane of fact but in the plane of symbols. But symbols are symbols of fact; and in a sense poetry deals with matters of fact, and the better and more poetical the poetry the more real and fundamental the facts with which it deals. It is not artificial in the sense of being arbitrary. It is a representation of reality, according to the requirements of a part of reality, the human imagination. And yet there is a plain sense in which it is right and obvious to say that poetry does not deal with (I should have said, perhaps, does not contain, does not constitute) matters of fact. Apollo is not a fact in the same plane as the sun: yet the religion of Apollo “deals with” the fact “sun”. Otherwise the religion of Apollo would be impossible; it would have no basis and no subject-matter. So that all I mean by relegating religion to the sphere of poetry is to distinguish, as we should all do in poetry, between the reality represented and the fiction by which that representation is made. Painting does not deal with flesh and hair, but with pigments; yet by its manipulation of those pigments it represents, and, if you like, deals with, hair and flesh. Possibly the whole ambiguity might be removed by saying deals in, instead of deals with. But my book was not meant to be a creed, even for skeptics, and its definitions are not meant to have theological precision. They are “thrown at” ideas.

. . . You can’t sum up the moral values of the parts of the Universe and say the result is the moral value of the Universe itself. For these moral values cancel one another and disappear into merely physical energies when you trace them back to their source. The good and evil in the world are not the world’s merits and demerits, because by the time you have traced them back to the general laws from which good and evil alike flow, the laws have forfeited those moral characteristics. I disagree, then, with what you say about the credit for what is fair and good being due rather to the Universe than to us. It is as if you said vision belonged rather to the Universe than to the animals in it, because of course the Universe gave the animals eyes, and not they to themselves. The Universe deserves no credit for our virtues until it acquires them—until it becomes ourselves. When the sympathy with moral ends begins to be a principle of action, moral values arise; there are none in the mere conditions of goodness, and the rain and the corn and sunshine are not moral objects. To regard them as such is really to make them gods; it is mythology; and to my mind your awe- inspiring, amiable, sympathetic and admonishing Universe is a mythological object. I value it as such; as such it is a religious idea, and a true one; but it is not a matter of fact.

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 Susan Sturgis de Sastre
University Club
Madison, Wisconsin. April 18, 1910

Dear Susie,

This place is, as you supposed, very much like a small Boston. The only peculiarity of it is that it is situated between three small lakes, and built on several hills, so that it is picturesque at a distance, although the houses are of the usually American wooden, nondescript kind. The university has some good buildings, and lawns, but is of course only half-finished, and full of architectural incongruities—one building brick and Gothic, the next stone and classical, the next a wooden shed, or a concrete store-house. The professors are very presentable, their wives more provincial than themselves, for they marry too young, and then, by their studies and contact with the world, outgrow the class they belonged to in their youth, and to which their wives belong. The students seem to be good fellows, not essentially different from those at Harvard, except that the extremes of fashion and poverty are wanting here. My lectures are not such a success as they were in New York, because my ultra-modern, “superior-person” point of view, is not familiar here, as it is in that very cosmopolitan and ventilated place—New York. However, some of the professors who come to hear me are very appreciative. Tomorrow, I am going to meet a class of advanced students who have been studying one of my books! It makes me feel strangely famous—although the sales of my books rather indicate that nobody reads them.

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, VA.