The Works of George Santayana
Volume VI, Book Two
Marianne S. Wokeck, Editor
William G. Holzberger, Textual Editor
Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor
Johanna E. Resler, Assistant Editor
David E. Spiech, Assistant Textual Editor
Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., Founding and Consulting Editor
This volume is dedicated,
with thanks,
to Mairi
Santayana’s drawing of the Virgin of the
Macarena, Seville, from Thomas Reid’s
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
Courtesy of Rare Books Collections,
Georgetown University Library,
Special Collections Research Center, Washington, D.C.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
A Critical Selection
Book Two: McCord — Zeller
Edited and with an Introduction by
John McCormick
Kristine Walters Frost, Associate Editor
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
© 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Introduction,” John McCormick.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopy, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. The
Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Santayana, George, 1863–1952.
George Santayana’s marginalia : a critical selection / edited and with an introduction by John McCormick.
2 v. — (The works of George Santayana ; v. 6)
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: Bk. 1. Abell–Lucretius — bk. 2. McCord–Zeller.
ISBN 978-0-262-01629-2 (v. 1 : hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-262-01630-8
(v. 2 : hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Philosophy. I. McCormick, John, 1918– II. Title.
B945.S2 2011
191—dc22
2010052839
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48 1984. ∞ ™
The Santayana Edition
Marianne S. Wokeck
Kristine W. Frost
Martin A. Coleman
Johanna E. Resler
David E. Spiech
Elizabeth Garmen
John Joachim
Director and Editor
Assistant Director and Associate Editor
Associate Editor
Assistant Editor
Assistant Textual Editor
Graduate Intern
Graduate Intern
Editorial Board
Hugh J. Dawson
Matthew C. Flamm
Morris Grossman
Angus Kerr-Lawson
John Lachs
Richard C. Lyon
Douglas M. MacDonald
John M. Michelsen
Andrew J. Reck
Beth J. Singer
Glen Tiller
Henny Wenkart
Consultants
Herman J. Saatkamp Jr.
William G. Holzberger
The Works of George Santayana
I
II
III
IV
V
Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, 1986
The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Æsthetic Theory, 1988
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1989
The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, 1994
The Letters of George Santayana
Book One: 1868–1909, 2001
Book Two: 1910–1920, 2002
Book Three: 1921–1927, 2002
Book Four: 1928–1932, 2003
Book Five: 1933–1936, 2003
Book Six: 1937–1940, 2004
Book Seven: 1941–1947, 2006
Book Eight: 1948–1952, 2008
VI George Santayana’s Marginalia: A Critical Selection
Book One: Abell — Lucretius, 2011
Book Two: McCord — Zeller, 2011
Contents
Book Two: McCord — Zeller
Introduction
Editorial Practice
List of Authors
xi
xv
xix
MARGINALIA
3
Appendix: George Santayana’s Library
Listed by Author
Listed by Title
427
A : 1–40
T : 1–22
Introduction
John McCormick
In his essay “Imagination,” George Santayana wrote, “There are
books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some
reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text.”1 That
remark might serve to define the quality of a great many of the thousands
of marginalia that Santayana never scrawled, but neatly and legibly
entered, in the hundreds of books he acquired over the course of a long
lifetime. It is not that he was given to buying dull books, but that his comments serve to illuminate, to defy, to negate, or interestingly to expand
his authors’ thought in routine or surprising or frequently delightful ways.
At the same time, the marginalia offer a unique way into the processes of
Santayana’s mind, a measure of his undoubted originality as philosopher,
imaginative writer, critic, essayist, and as human being.
We look to marginalia for indications of a writer’s development or
changes of mind, for a relaxed statement in place of public formality, for
unsuspected moods, passions, or enthusiasms, and for otherwise imperceptible traces of influence, prejudice, or omission. Santayana’s comments offer all that and more, even though he often insisted in letters that
his thought did not develop; his claim is borne out for the most part when
one pursues the marginalia over a period of years. The process at work
is accretion resulting in changes of emphasis or definition of terms (see
“essence,” early and late) rather than fundamental change. During his
years at Harvard as student and lecturer, another kind of marginalia from
the ruminative or critical occurs in passages clearly representing study or
lecture notes. Such notes might be compared to a concert pianist’s interpretation of a familiar score, so that we hear it anew and vividly: thus the
notes on Kant’s work. In another sense, the marginalia can be seen as
Santayana’s stylebook; they show us his daily linguistic discipline, his
practice in diction that salts his cogent prose.
Santayana’s marginal notes are frequently surprising as his reactions
change in the course of a long text. By turns he approves (although
rarely), he is quirky, always critical, sometimes slangy, literary, frivolous,
xii
Introduction
and sometimes bitchy: only that word will do. He shows full control of
the American language despite his preference for British spellings. Often
a generalized comment, thought, or meditation occurs on the page, set in
motion by the subject at large: e.g., Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (The History of the Synoptic Tradition) 11 p 110 (1:121). The
effort here, then, has been to list alphabetically by author all the books
extant that belonged to Santayana; to indicate where each book is located
and how extensively annotated; and to reproduce a sufficient number of
annotations to be of use to the reader or student of Santayana’s thought,
his art, and his life. The professional writer on Santayana will of course
want to go directly to the sources listed: no simple task.
The bibliographical listings, as complete as can be ascertained, can
answer with reasonable certitude when Santayana read a given text, from
date of publication, from changes in his penmanship as he aged, and from
secondary sources. In maturity, his habit was to order books from
Blackwell’s, Oxford, or from the United States through his nephew and
business agent, George Sturgis, or through his publisher in the United
States, Charles Scribner’s Sons. He read books so ordered at once. The
many books sent by aspiring writers he acknowledged courteously upon
reception, so that he would not necessarily have to read them. Santayana
led a wandering life from 1911, when he determined to retire from Harvard,
to 1940, when he settled in Rome and where he died in 1952. As he
acquired books in those peripatetic years, he would deposit them with his
lifelong friend Charles Augustus Strong, first in Strong’s quarters in Paris,
then in his villa, Le Balze, in Fiesole, Italy. After Santayana’s death, his literary executor, Daniel Cory, who had inherited the library, sold off many
of the books in lots to various libraries in the United States, and one lot of
some 300 to Blackwell’s, Oxford, which firm in turn sold them to the
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario. Because of the war and its aftermath, however, Cory had no access to Santayana’s books in Strong’s villa.
Strong died in 1939; the Germans were believed to have occupied the villa
and to have destroyed the contents. In 1979 Augustus Strong’s daughter,
Margaret de Cuevas de Larrain, presented the villa, its contents quite undestroyed, to Georgetown University, and Santayana’s part of the library, insofar as it can be identified, has now been deposited in the Special Collections
2
section of the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University.
Santayana’s wit is apparent in all his many kinds of writing, but his
humor, his occasional outcry at a writer’s folly, his concern as great for
Introduction
xiii
the niceties of English prose as for the placing of Greek accent marks,
these the marginalia indicate in abundance. Reputed to be isolated, antisocial, even a recluse, although he had no such attributes, Santayana nevertheless, living by choice in celibate solitude, spent a great deal of time
talking to, and talking back to, a wonderful miscellany of writers, from
Spinoza to Kant to J. S. Mill to Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound.
After retiring from his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moving
back to Europe, Santayana persisted in his habit of marking up the books
he was reviewing or texts on subjects he was writing about. Accordingly,
the present compilation might well be entitled Santayana’s Critical
Marginalia. If only the flavor of those remarks registers as they deserve it
should, the edition in hand will have succeeded in fulfilling the editor’s
ambitions for it, and the volume will not appear as a mere compromise
with the many volumes which would be necessary to publish Santayana’s
marginalia in their entirety.
Marginalia are customarily published in one of two ways: either in
multivolume sets, faithful to every utterance and punctuation mark of the
given writer; or in single volumes embracing all the marginalia of a given
3
writer on a single work. The volume in hand, obviously, does neither. It
is rather an attempt to accommodate the financial realities of the day,
which rule out multivolume sets, without sacrificing a reasonably extensive and usable compilation. In the same vein, marginalia already published includes Paul Grimley Kuntz’s edition of Santayana’s Harvard
dissertation, Lotze’s System of Philosophy, Bloomington and London:
Indiana University Press, 1971, Appendix, 95105, and Kuntz, “Santayana
and Lotze,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Summer 1972, 115–21.
In a long work occupying five years’ attention, the editor has committed many an undetected error, for which he alone is responsible. He is
more indebted than brief mention can adequately express to Santayana’s
former literary executrix, Mrs. Margaret Cory, for permission to print the
marginalia; to Mrs. Donna Hanna-Calvert, former Associate Editor of
the Santayana Edition; Brenda Bridges, former Editorial Assistant; and
Johanna E. Resler, Assistant Editor. Very particular thanks go to Nicholas
Scheetz and his associates in the Special Collections Division, Lauinger
Library, Georgetown University, and to Mrs. Susan Saunders
Bellingham, Special Collections Librarian, University of Waterloo; to
Susan Halpert, Reference Librarian, Houghton Library, Harvard
University; to Mr. Bernard Crystal and his colleagues in the Rare Book
xiv
Introduction
and Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University; to the
Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; to the librarians of the University of York, Yorkshire; to the founding General Editor
of the Santayana Edition, Professor Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., and not least
to the tireless and precise work of Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor of
this volume.
York, U.K.
September 2007.
1
Soliloquies in England (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 124.
Early lists of books in the villa presumably belonging to Santayana were in fact
Strong’s; such is the opinion of the librarians at the Lauinger Library, and the editor’s.
3
E.g., George Remington Havens, Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau
(Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1933).
2
Editorial Practice
The following enumeration of pages does not reflect the relative
importance of a given work sub specie aeternitatis; the numeration of marginalia in each volume indicates only the degree of attention that
Santayana paid to that specific work.
The selected texts from Santayana’s personal library are listed in
alphabetical order by author (or by title if the work is “edited by” rather
than authored) and then, most often, by date of publication. Editions of
standard writers are listed by that writer, not by the editor; e.g., Lucretius,
but not Munro, editor of the edition in question. Pseudonymous works
are listed by pseudonym, followed by the author’s authentic name. A
work in two or more volumes is most often treated as one book; there are
a few exceptions.
A headnote for each text includes the author’s name in bold face type,
the title of the work in italics, brief publication information (place and
date), library location of the text, and the number of marginalia contained within the text (or by an indication of lack of importance in the
editor’s view). Publisher or printer is not included in the headnote.
Anonymous works are listed alphabetically by title.
Not all marginalia within a given text have been selected for inclusion
in this edition. Text is chosen for content and style. Paraphrase occurs to
save space. Crucial phrases or entire passages are given in the original
language other than English, followed by translation in a footnote.
Translations, which are literal, not literary, are the editor’s, unless otherwise indicated.
Each marginalia from a particular text is numbered consecutively, followed by the page number(s) and any other information regarding
Santayana’s markings (‘marked’, ‘marked Z’, ‘underlined’, etc.) or placement (top, bottom).
Santayana’s spelling and usage is maintained throughout; e.g., “every
thing” (two words) for “everything.” He favored British spelling after his
visit to Frank Russell’s establishment in 1887. Slips of the pencil are
reproduced. His punctuation, which he knew to be uncertain in English,
caused him to use colons where correctness would indicate semicolons.
Single or double quotation marks are reproduced as Santayana wrote
them; he was inconsistent.
xvi
Editorial Practice
Flyleaf matter is indicated as such, but presentation messages are not
considered to be marginalia.
Marginalia within Santayana’s own works are not included here, since
they are incorporated in the complete critical edition.
Key to location of texts:
Columbia
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library,
Columbia University, New York City
Georgetown
Special Collections, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University,
Washington, D.C.
Harvard
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Le Balze
Georgetown University, Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Italy
Texas
Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Waterloo
Rare Book and Manuscript Room, University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, Ontario
Key to symbols and typefaces within the edition:
The reproduced text taken from a particular book is in regular tenpoint typeface from margin to margin. It is not within quotation marks,
but material quoted within the selected text is so marked.
Literal translations (in place of reproduced text) from another language
into English are in italic typeface from margin to margin. When the text
is reproduced in its original language, a translation is given in a footnote,
in italic.
Text which has been paraphrased by the editor is placed within double
vertical bars || … || and aligned from margin to margin.
Editorial comments are a smaller, nine-point size text within square
brackets [ … ] and block indented. Comments or clarifying words within
the text or marginalia also are placed in square brackets and in the smaller
font size.
Santayana’s marginalia, which normally follow a block of text, are in
bold ten-point typeface and block indented.
In the marginalia the bracketed question mark [?] indicates a questionable reading of Santayana’s hand.
Editorial Practice
xvii
Footnotes immediately follow the text to which they refer within each
numbered entry.
Any underlined text reflects underlining done by Santayana. A single
slash through a character, as well as strikethroughs and insertions (marked
by inferior carets) within the reproduced text or within the marginalia
itself, reflect Santayana’s markings.
The term ‘marked’ indicates that Santayana drew a vertical line in the
margin next to the lines of text reproduced (‘doubly marked’ indicates two
vertical lines). ‘Marked X’ indicates that Santayana wrote an ‘X’ in the
margin next to the text. ‘Marked Z’ indicates that he drew a wavy vertical
line (probably for emphasis) next to the lines of text. ‘Underlined Z’ indicates a wavy horizontal line drawn under a word or words.
The “List of Authors” on the following pages informs the reader of
authors of books in Santayana’s personal library which the editor has
included in this volume, whether or not they contained marginalia.
Authors of books in Santayana’s library which are not included in this volume are noted at the end of the list. Book Two of George Santayana’s
Marginalia contains an appendix with a complete listing of all of the works
known to have been in “George Santayana’s Library.”
List of Authors
Abell, Walter
Acton, Harold
Adam, Antoine
Adam, James
Aiken, Conrad
Ainger, Arthur Campbell
Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier]
Albert, Thomas
Alonso, Dámaso
Amery, L[eopold] S[tennett]
Ames, Van Meter
Archer-Hind, R. D. [Editor]
Aristotle
Asín Palacios, Miguel
Atkinson, Brooks
Babbitt, Irving
Bacon, Francis
Bailey, Cyril
Bailly, Auguste
Bainville, Jacques
Balfour, Arthur James
Barbusse, Henri
Baring, Maurice
Barnes, William
Bartlett, Alice Hunt
Bates, Ernest Sutherland
Bede, Cuthbert
Belgion, Montgomery
Benda, Julien
Benn, Gottfried
Berenson, Bernard
Bergson, Henri
Berkeley, George
Beruete, Aureliano de
Bevan, Edwyn Robert
Bewick, Thomas
Birnbaum, Martin
Bishop, Elizabeth
xx
List of Authors
Blanshard, Brand [Editor]
Bolaffio, Carlo
Bolton, Isabel
Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert]
Breasted, James Henry
Buchheim, Karl A. [Editor]
Buchler, Justus
Bullett, Gerald William
Bülow, Prince Bernhard von
Bultmann, Rudolf Karl
Burgard, Raymond
Burnett, Whit and Charles E. Slatkin [Editors]
Butcher, Samuel Henry
Butler, Bishop Joseph
Butler, Richard
Caird, Edward
Callimachus
Calverton, V[ictor] F[rancis]
Campbell, Lewis
Campion, George C.
Camus, Albert
Carco, Francis
Cardozo, Benjamin N.
Carus, Paul
Castelli, Enrico
Castelnau, Jacques Thomas de
Cavalcanti, Guido
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand
Chapman, John Jay
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Chénier, André Marie
Churchill, Winston
Clemens, Cyril
Clifford, William Kingdon
Coates, Adrian
Cole, G[eorge] D[ouglas] H[oward]
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Collingwood, R[obin] G[eorge]
Collis, John Stewart
Colony, Horatio
Confucius
Corneille, Pierre
Corwin, Norman Lewis
Cramb, J[ohn] A[dam]
Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado
List of Authors
Croce, Benedetto
Crosfield, Thomas
Cuneo, Niccolò
Dante Alighieri
Dasgupta, Surendranath
Datta, Dhirendra Mohan
Davenport, Russell W.
Delphic Club
Denifle, Henri
Dewey, John
Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes
Dillaway, Newton
Douglas, Norman
Ducasse, C[urt] J[ohn]
Dudley, Owen Francis
du Maurier, Daphne
Dunn, Robert
Dunning, Ralph Cheever
Durant, Will[iam] [ James]
Duron, Jacques
Dyer, Louis
Eastman, Max [Forrester]
Eaton, Charles Edward
Eddington, Arthur Stanley
Edman, Irwin
Edwards, Jonathan
Einstein, Albert [Editor]
Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns]
English Institute
Ewing, A[lfred] C[yril]
Falconi, Carlo
Fargue, Léon-Paul
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
Ficke, Arthur Davison
Fielding, Henry
Fisch, Max H. [Editor]
Fletcher, Phineas
Foote, Henry Wilder
Frank, Philipp
Frazer, James George
Freud, Sigmund
Frost, Robert
Fuller, Benjamin Apthorp Gould
Fülöp-Miller, René
Furon, Raymond
xxi
xxii
List of Authors
Garbe, Richard von
García Marruz, Fina
Gavin, Frank
Gibson, James
Gide, André
Gioberti, Vincenzo
Giraudoux, Jean
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur (Comte de)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Gollancz, Victor
Goodman, J[ack] R[awlin]
Gordon, Hirsch Loeb
Gorer, Geoffrey
Gray, Thomas
Green, Thomas Hill
Gregory, Alyse
Groethuysen, Bernhard
Guénon, René
Gumpert, Martin
Guzzo, Augusto
Hadfield, James Arthur
Hamilton, William
Harcourt, Robert d’
Harnack, Adolf von
Heard, Gerald
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Heidegger, Martin
Hemingway, Ernest
Henrich, Edith
Herodotus
Hersch, Jeanne
Hertzberg, Gustav Friedrich
Hilliard, A. L.
Hirn, Yrjö
Hispanic Society of America
Hogg, James
Holmes, Pauline
Holt, Edwin Bissell
Homer
Hone, William [Editor]
Hook, Sidney
Housman, A. E.
Hovelaque, Emile
Husserl, Edmund
Inge, William Ralph
List of Authors
Irazusta, Julio
Jackson, Henry
James, Alice
James, William
Jeans, James Hopwood
Jeffers, Robinson
Jerrold, Douglas
Jiménez, Juan Ramón
Johnson, Lionel
Juan de la Cruz
Kallen, Horace Meyer
Kant, Immanuel
Keith, Arthur Berriedale
Kettner, Frederick
Keynes, John Maynard
Keyserling, Graf Hermann A.
Kinney, Mary Cyril Edwin
Knowles, David
Knox, H. V.
Korean American Cultural Association
La Batut, Guy de [Editor]
La Fontaine, Jean de
Lamont, Corliss
Langstaff, John Brett
Lecky, William E. H.
Le Dantec, Félix
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
Le Roy, Edouard
Levy, Hermann
Lietzmann, Hans
Lindsay, A[lexander] D[unlop]
Lippmann, Walter
Locke, John
Loisy, Alfred Firmin
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Lotze, Hermann
Lowell, Robert
Lucian [Lucianus Samosatensis]
Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus]
McCord, David
McCulloch, Hugh
Machiavelli, Niccolo
Macran, Frederick Walter
Mallon, James J. and E. C. T. Lascelles
Manacorda, Guido
xxiii
xxiv
List of Authors
Mann, Thomas
Manning, Hugo
Maraini, Fosco
Marchant, James [Editor]
Maritain, Jacques
Marsh, Gerald
Masson, John
Maxwell, William
Mayberry, George [Editor]
Maycock, A. L.
Medici, Lorenzo de’
Meissner, Erich
Meyer, Kuno
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Mill, John Stuart
Millevoye, Charles Hubert
Mins, Henry F.
Moncrieff, Malcolm M.
Montague, William P.
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat
More, Paul Elmer
Morison, Samuel Eliot
Morley, Christopher
Motwani, Kewal
Müller, Gustav Emil
Mumford, Lewis
Munitz, Milton Karl
Munro, Thomas
Murchie, Guy
Murry, John Middleton
Neilson, W. A. and A. H. Thorndike
Nevill, Ralph
Nicolas, Marius Paul
Nock, Albert Jay
Ortega y Gasset, José
Otto, Emil
Peers, E. Allison
Péguy, Charles Pierre
Perry, Ralph Barton
Pestalozzi Foundation of America
Petrie, William Matthew Flinders
Phelps, William Lyon
Pilar, Princess of Bavaria and Desmond Chapman-Hutton
Pizá, Pedro Antonio
Plato
List of Authors
Pound, Ezra Loomis
Powys, Llewelyn
Prezzolini, Giuseppe
Privitera, Joseph Frederic
Prokosch, Frederic
Proust, Marcel
Quinn, David B.
Read, Carveth
Reid, Thomas
Reves, Emery
Richards, I[vor] A[rmstrong]
Rickert, Heinrich
Rideau, Emile
Rimbaud, Arthur
Roback, Abraham A.
Rolland, Romain
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Royal Asiatic Society
Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom
Royce, Josiah
Runes, Dagobert D.
Rush, Benjamin
Russell, Bertrand
Russell, David
Russell, John Francis Stanley
Salter, William MacKintire
Sankaracarya
Santayana, George
Sarolea, Charles
Scheler, Max
Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor]
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.
Schneider, Herbert W.
Schneider, Robert E.
Schofield, William H.
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Sebastian, Fannie B.
Seidenberg, Roderick
Sellars, Wilfrid and John Hospers [Editors]
Semon, Richard
Shaw, George Bernard
Sitwell, Osbert
Slochower, Harry
Smart, Charles Allen
xxv
xxvi
List of Authors
Smith, Logan Pearsall
Smith, Robinson
Smith, Thomas V.
Sophocles
Soutar, William
Spaulding, Edward G.
Spencer, Herbert
Spender, Stephen
Spengler, Oswald
Spinoza, Benedict
Spinoza Society
Spring, Henry Powell
Stalin, Joseph
Stanley, Carleton W.
Stearns, Harold
Sterne, Laurence
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stickney, Trumbull
Stone, Christopher
Strachey, Giles Lytton
Strong, Charles Augustus
Sturt, Henry Cecil
Sturzo, Luigi
Surmelian, Leon Z.
Swift, Jonathan
Thalheimer, August
Thomas, Lowell Jackson
Thomas Aquinas
Thompson, Anna Boynton
Thompson, Francis
Thompson, Samuel Martin
Thoreau, Henry David
Toy, Crawford Howell
Toynbee, Arnold Joseph
Twain, Mark
Umfazi [Clara Urquhart]
Urquhart, Clara [Editor]
Vaihinger, Hans
Valéry, Paul
Valois, Georges
Vercel, Roger
Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]
Vidal, Gore
Viereck, Peter
Vivante, Leone
List of Authors
von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang
Walden, Selma
Warren, Edward Perry [pseud. ALR]
Waterman, Charles
Watson, John Broadus
Weber, Alfred
Weyl, Hermann
Wheelock, John Hall
Whitehead, Alfred North
Whitman, Walt
Williams, Oscar [Editor]
Williams, William Carlos
Winchester College Archaeological Society
Woodbridge, Frederick J. E.
Woods, James Haughton
Worth, Claud Alley
Wycherley, William
Young, George Malcolm
Zeller, Eduard
Authors not included in the volume:
Alexander, Samuel
Bonitz, Hermann
Brooks, Van Wyck
Drake, Durant
Fadiman, Clifton
Fairbanks, Arthur
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de
Huysman, J.-K.
Lutoslawski, Wincenty
Manrique, Jorge
Noli, Fan Stylian
Owen, John
xxvii
Marginalia: McCord — Zeller
Santayana’s idea of the Baron de Charlus,
a major character from Marcel Proust’s
A L’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs
Courtesy of Rare Books Collections,
Georgetown University Library,
Special Collections Research Center,
Washington, D.C.
David McCord
Poet always Next But One
Williamsburg, Virginia: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Hugh McCulloch Written in Florence: The Last Verses of Hugh McCulloch
London: 1902. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Erotica
Milano: 1924. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Frederick Walter Macran
English Apologetic Theology
London: 1905. Georgetown. Sixty-two marginalia.
[Signed and dated 1905. Several passages are illegible.]
1 pp 98–99, marked
Just as a watch from the skill of its contrivance, and the elaborate construction of its mechanism, inferred an intelligent maker, so, only in a
higher manner, did that vast machine the universe […] imply that it was
the product of a vast and wise intelligence.
I wonder if the ingenious mechanism of the artist’s mind,
too, must prove another artist, and so ad infinitum.
2 p 150, marked
More dangerous [to faith than materialism], because more subtle, is that
pantheistic idealism which, starting from apparently the opposite pole of
thought to materialism, issues in results scarcely less hostile to religion
and morals.
3 p 150, marked
||The problem of reconciling the truth of the divine immanence with that
of the personality of both God and man|| can be answered […] by the
assertion of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which, while maintaining
firmly the im personality of God, asserts that the nature of the Divine
existence is^not^fully expressed by that term, […] He is supra-personal.
If there are three persons in God God is not one person:
disunity is impersonal, like humanity, though it resides, of
2:4
George Santayana’s Marginalia
course, in individuals. Individuals alone are facts. The
question then becomes: Find the divine persons.
4 p 153
||The moral difficulties posed by the Old Testament anthropomorphic
notions of the deity.|| But in the case of a progressive revelation, as in all
other developments, we can only judge of it as a whole and with reference especially to its final goal in Tennyson and Browning .
^
^
5 p 165, marked
||Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” quoted as evidence of the
evolutionists’ disparagement of the theory of Divine origin.|| Their ethics
were decidedly utilitarian, and the theory of Herbert Spencer, that truths
which seem to us intuitive are really an inheritance transmitted from the
slowly formed habits of our forefathers, was eagerly taken up by the
school of sense philosophers.
A man who grasps at every sophism supporting his prejudices naturally thinks his opponents will do likewise.
6 p 169, underlined
||Paradoxically, evolution has affirmed man’s dignity and made his position as the crown of creation more certain than previously.|| It further
proves […] that on this earth, as it now exists, there can never be a higher
creature than man, and thus goes a long way towards restoring to him
that place as the head and crown of creation, of which science since the
days of the Copernican theory, to say nothing of the various forms of
materialism, had tended to deprive him.
!
7 p 169, marked
Finally, the development of personality and character is seen to go hand
in hand with that of the religious consciousness, and man can read in his
own constitution and possibilities the assurance of his own immortality.
Can twiddle twaddle do and escape whipping?
8 p 173
||Macran finds a relationship between Christianity and the cosmic.||
What has Christianity ever had to do with “the cosmic”?
9 p 187, underlined
||Tennyson described as|| the great poet and thinker […].
Hurrah!
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:5
10 p 193, underlined
Champions, however, were not wanting for the defence of the doctrine
of the incarnation, and the creed of Nice, at this critical juncture.
Does he think it was at the Riviera? How English!1
1
The creed of Nicaea was proclaimed in A.D. 325 at that city in Asia
Minor, not at Nice on the Riviera.
11 p 204, marked
It may thus be quite true that, while Cerinthus and the Ebionites held
humanitarian notions concerning the Person of Jesus, Theodotus and
Artemon were the first heretics who denied the Divinity of Christ. If
this view of the belief of the primitive Church be accepted, Priestley’s
theory, that Christian dogma originated in the influence of the Platonic
philosophy upon the faith of the early Church, falls at once to the
ground.
[From “If this view”:]
Suavity and the desire to deceive are real gifts in the
clergy. Of course, Greek philosophy admitted the divinity
of the intellect and of the god, but why say these were in
Jesus in particular? That was the christian and new element in Gnosticism. They were christians by accident.
12 p 211, underlined
[Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, p. 17, quoted:]
“[…] a strange and significant thing: so much speculation about Christ,
so little earnest inquiry into His actual mind; […].”
As if Christ had an “actual mind”! Conceive a psychology
of the Holy Ghost and his hot feelings when his lineage
from both Father and Son is called into question!
13 pp 218–19
||Macran lists at length the achievements of modern theology, saying
that one can look to it|| […] for the presence with us of a Divine Spirit
and Person; for that sacrifice was not merely the assurance of Divine
forgiveness, but contained in its bosom the seed which was to blossom
forth in a regenerated and purified humanity :of the time of King
^
Edward VII .
^
14 p 237
[On the moral excellence of Christ:]
If, as we mark the ascent of the soul in piety and holiness, we invariably
notice that the sense of sin is deepened and the experience of contrition
is more marked, […].
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
Didn’t Jesus see through “sin” altogether? In a clear mind
repentance is only sadness, and one is nothing but the
“son of man”.
15 p 241, marked Z
[Charles Gore, Bampton Lectures, p. 169, quoted approvingly:]
In past ages, “the versatility and intellect of the Greeks, the majestic
discipline of the Romans, the strong individuality of the Teutons—each
in turn has been able to find its true ideal in Jesus of Nazareth, […].”
Bosh!
16 pp 251–52, marked
For in our age men are more logical in their deductions, and more
determined to draw inferences and extend the circle of results contained in any primary truth or idea.
Listen to this.
17 p 262, marked
[A quotation from Edward Caird, Evolution of Religion, Vol. II, p. 222:]
“While the individual influence is very limited in its operation, and the
bare universal is like a disembodied soul that has lost the power of
action in the finite world, the individual who is regarded as the organ
of a universal principle […] which has incarnated itself for perception
or imagination in an individual life, takes hold upon man by both sides
of his nature, and works with irresistible force upon all his thought and
life.”
This is good. When a man has a certain talent, as the
Master of Balliol has, it comes out even through the mists
of a perverse phraseology.
18 p 267, underlined and marked
The great texts which assert the Deity of our Lord or His oneness with
the Father may be forced into statements of the Divine immanence
which found in Him its highest manifestation, and thus be deprived of all
their significance. It would seem then advisable […] to direct attention
rather to statements concerning the office, than those with regard to the
Person, of Christ. Thus, He claims to stand in a peculiar ! relation to
^^
the human race as the Son of Man.
It seems to me plain, when I read the gospel, that Jesus
was a person who saw through myths, even when he had
to use them, and that his intuitions we[re] more, not less,
“rationalistic” than those of the philosophers. He knew
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:7
what he was talking about when he said “The Father” etc.
The prophets had meant something, too.
19 p 271
||Macran ventures that half a century after his death was necessary for the
transformation of Jesus into Christ, the Messiah.||
Three weeks would suffice. These good people have evidently no experience of a “religious” atmosphere. They
should read the Lives of the Saints, or hear the pious gossip about a convent.
20 pp 272–73
||The Jews had no reason to think that Jesus would be born of a virgin.||
At least this would seem to be the case, judging from the dialogue of
Justin Martyr with the Jew Trypo, when he endeavours to prove to the
latter that the “prophecy had been spoken not with reference to
Hezekiah as ye were taught, but to this my Christ”.
What a world these Jews and Christians lived in! What
assumptions! What standards!
21 p 274, marked
||Pagan links to the accounts of Christ|| have been adduced, such as the
Buddhist legend, are not by any means so close as is sometimes supposed, and really bear a stronger resemblance to the stories contained
in the apocryphal gospels than to the narrative of our Lord’s birth as
contained in St. Matthew and St. Luke.
There are connecting links.
22 p 299, underlined and marked
Paley, the one great theologian of that epoch [the 18th century], was a disciple of the school of sense philosophy, a Utilitarian, if not a Hedonist, in
his ethics, […].
“Cindy, don’t be vulgar.”
[End-papers:]
Things learned from this book.
1. The incorruptible nature of parsons.
2. That Newman was, and remained, a disciple of
Butler, and that both made the “conscience”, which they
didn’t venture to disentangle, an avenue to the supernatural. A comparison with Kant’s “Practical Reason”
here suggests itself.
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
3. That the High Church party, in building up its
defences again, has not thought of their foundation, but
that its apparent return to catholic doctrine is a merely
literary and pietistic pose. The whole pantheistic and
evolutionist doctrine has been let in underneath, only an
exception, honoris causa,1 being made for the person of
Christ.
4. That the contradiction between creation and
redemption is not yet perceived, but is horribly troublesome none the less, the incarnation (both philosophical
and traditional) being made, as far as possible, a substitute
for both doctrines. But in orthodox doctrine it is not a substitute but a link.
(over)
5. That religion is always several thousand years
behind conscience. Personal immortality, that flatulent
exaggeration of selfishness, is called the “chief hope of
mankind”, in an age when unselfishness is the virtue best
felt and best practised.
1
For reason of honor.
James J. Mallon and E. C. T. Lascelles
Poverty Yesterday & Today
London: 1930. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 85, marked
||The measure used to define poverty is a very low standard.||
2 p 94, marked
Family Endowment cannot fail to interest anyone whose object is the
reduction of poverty.
Guido Manacorda
Benedetto Croce, ovvero: Dell’improntitudine
Firenze: 1933. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Thomas Mann
Der Zauberberg
Erster Band. Berlin: 1930. Georgetown. Six marginalia.
[Marginalia are principally translations of words or phrases.]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:9
1 p 58, marked
Dem einzelnen Menschen mögen mancherlei persönliche Ziele, Zwecke,
Hoffnungen, Aussichten vor Augen schweben, aus denen er den Impuls
zu hoher Anstrengung und Tätigkeit schöpft; wenn das Unpersönliche
um ihn her, die Zeit selbst der Hoffnungen und Aussichten bei aller
äusseren Regsamkeit im Grunde entbehrt, wenn sie sich ihm als hoffnungslos, aussichtlos und ratlos heimlich zu erkennen gibt und der
bewusst oder unbewusst gestellten, aber doch irgendwie gestellten Frage
nach einem letzten, mehr als persönlichen, unbedingten Sinn aller
Anstrengung und Tätigkeit ein hohles Schweigen entgegensetzt, so wird
gerade in Fällen redlicheren Menschentums eine gewisse lähmende
Wirkung solches Sachverhalts fast unausbleiblich sein, […].1
Style & philosophy slump together.
[Santayana’s comment may be unfair. Mann gives us Hans Castorp’s
meandering reflections, meandering in part because he suffers the constant fever of a man slowly dying of tuberculosis; hence “slump.” But if
the comment describes Mann’s own style, it is mistaken, surely.]
1
To the solitary man, various personal aims, purposes, hopes and prospects might
dangle before the eye, prospects in which to find the impulse to greater striving and
achievement. But with impersonality all about him, and according to all signs the
time itself of hopes and prospects were lacking, when those signs made it clear to him
that they were hopeless, unpromising and hidden, and some manner of known or
unknown question posed, after a final, more than personal, unconditional sense of
all striving and activity were opposed by a hollow silence, so directly in the instance
of honest humanity a certain paralyzing consequence of such circumstances virtually
constant ….
Hugo Manning
The Crown and the Fable: A Poetic Sequence
London: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Fosco Maraini
Segreto Tibet
Bari: 1951. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
1 p 116, marked
||The relationship between westerners and the Tibetans is compared to
high officials at the circus; they the circus, we the onlookers.|| Dante, Bach,
the Roman Empire, the renaissance, Shakespeare, Leonardo, the Gothic cathedrals, St. Francis? Only the slightest impression; but a Kodak, how portentous!
2 p 176, marked
[An extract from sacred Tibetan scripture:]
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
Ho pietà di colui che non sa liberarsi
dal proprio egoismo,
nella città incendiata dei desideri […].1
I pity him who is not free from / His own ego, / In the burning city of desires ….
1
3 Table 50
So once the starlight drank the fire of love
And spirit knew the flesh that it was of.
Jacques Maritain
Art et scolastique
Paris: 1927. Waterloo. Thirty-four marginalia.
1 p 14
[Summary and critique:]
Is the separation of entelechies from their organs countenanced by Aristotle? All this is a view of the forest from
the air, and [illegible] the roots. All habits are habits in matter, though they may be sciences & arts of the spirit.
2 p 19
||Manual dexterity has no part in art; it is only a material, extrinsic quality.||
Art being a good, the agility is not more than a means to
the pre-ordained degree of excellence. You may trill too
much.
3 p 31, underlined
||The scholastics saw the virtue of the artificer not as muscle work or
suppleness of fingers. It was no more than pure empirical agility|| which
is formed in the memory and in the animal reason, which imitates art and dont
l’art a absolument besoin.1
This ought to be looked up, to see how near the
Aristotelians come to recognising the genetic order of
things.
1
Which art absolutely needs.
4 p 36, underlined
La beauté est essentiellement objet d’intelligence, car ce qui connaît—au
sense plein du mot, c’est l’intelligence, qui seule est ouverte a l’infinité de
l’être.1
Intuition not understanding, because there is no reference to the not-given, no animal faith concerned in this
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:11
“intellection”. The point is the beauty is an essence &
can lodge only in essences.
1
Beauty is essentially an object of intelligence, for whoever understands—in the full
sense of the word, it is the intelligence which alone is open to the infinity of being.
5 pp 36–37, marked
[…] our intelligence is not so intuitive as that of the angels; […] only the sensitive understanding perfectly possessed in man is required for the perception of
beauty. Thus man may doubtless enjoy purely intelligible beauty, but the beautiful co-natural to man is that which comes from the delectation of the intelligence
by sense and intuition. Such, also, is the distinctive beauty of our art, which operates through tangible matter to cause joy to the mind. He would also thus believe
that paradise is not lost. He has the taste for an earthly paradise, the peace and
delight simultaneously of the intelligence and the senses.
Excellent.
6 p 39
[Santayana’s gloss:]
What a pity that an actual correspondence with spirit
should be attributed to an origin in spirit! As if spirit were
matter, power, or potentiality, and not the actuality &
fruition of everything else.
7 p 45fn1, underlined
Ajoutons, s’il s’agit de la “lisibilité” de l’oeuvre, que si l’éclat de la forme
peut paraître dans une oeuvre “obscure” comme dans une oevure
“claire”, l’éclat du mystére peut paraître dans une oeuvre “claire” aussi
bien que dans une oeuvre “obscure”.1
“Phèdre!” 2
1
Let us add that if it is a question of the “readability” of a work, if the brilliance
of the form may appear in an “obscure” work just as in a “clear” work, the brillance of the mystery may appear in a “clear” work just as well as in an “obscure”
one.
2
Santayana’s favorite play, which he tells us he recited to himself when, in
old age, he slept little.
8 p 46, marked
||On the attributes of beauty in a work of art|| […] it is the reflection on those
attributes of a man’s thought or of a divine thought; it is above all the splendor of
the soul which shows through, of the soul, principle of life and of animal energy,
or the principle of spiritual life, of pain and of passion.
The Psyche well understood.
2:12
George Santayana’s Marginalia
9 p 49, underlined
Dieu est beau. Il est beau par lui-même et en lui-même, beau absolument.1
Pure Being is absolutely fitted for intuition, each essence
being so, & all their external relatives.
1
God is beautiful. He is beautiful by himself and in himself, beautiful absolutely.
10 p 52, underlined
As soon as one touches upon the transcendental, one touches upon l’être1 itself,
upon a likeness of God, upon an absolute […].
Pure being, i.e. essence.
1
Being .
11 p 99
[Santayana’s gloss:]
In the senses usually employed in action essence is unsatisfying; the psyche requires truth. This is a practical
man’s prejudice. Beauty, in nature and in pure art, is
non-significance.
12 p 119, marked
||Christianity does not make art easy, but while it raises difficulties, it
solves others, and makes known hidden beauties.||
13 p 181, underlined
||God prefers the charity of one soul to the greatest works of art.|| […] les
âmes, sa nourriture à lui, la pâture de son amour.1
How sentimental the axiom of the democracy of spirit
becomes in modern Catholicism!
1
… souls, his best and only nourishment, the pasture of his love.
Jacques Maritain
Réflexions sur l’intelligence et sur sa vie propre
Paris: 1930 (3rd edition). Waterloo. 126 marginalia.
1 p 20, underlined
Je peux savoir par la raison que Dieu existe, mais à condition de partir
de l’être que je touche et je vois.1
i.e. in animal perception, not in intuition.
1
I may know by reason that God exists, but on condition that such knowledge is
apart from the being that I touch and see.
2 p 21, marked
[On the conception of Being:]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:13
Pure Being = the Realm of Essence: as for Existence, it is
many, essentially because in flux.
3 p 25, underlined
J’ai parlé de la vérité de à l’intelligence. L’intelligence est vraie, selon
qu’elle juge la chose comme elle est. Mais les choses aussi sont vraies,
selon qu’elles sont conformes à l’intelligence dont elles dépendent:1 […].
Translate: Things are true (there is a truth of things) as
they possess essence.
1
I have spoken about the the truth of the intelligence. Intelligence is true according
to how it judges the thing as it is. But things are also true, according to how they
conform with the intelligence on which they depend.
4 pp 37–38, marked
Nietzsche’s madness is the consummation in a human body of everything awry
in the spirit since Luther and Descartes. He was a lamentable victim! A great
and generous writer who foundered in dementia because he wanted, in order to
live, to improve on the truth. After believing that he could regenerate the world
by the suppression of the ascetic ideal, and possessing a lively hatred for christianity, he wrote a madman’s letters, signed THE CRUCIFIED, believing
himself to be at the same time the Antichrist and the successor to Christ […].
5 p 41, marked Z
[Maritain quotes I. J. Marechal, Le Point de depart de la Métaphysique,
cahier II, 1923, p. 78.]
[L]e “contenu objectif de la conscience considéré en lui-même, abstrac-
tion faite de son inhérence à un sujet psychologique et de sa valeur
représentative d’un objet ontologique, le contenu de conscience considéré comme objet phénoménal.” 1
Almost essence but not quite, since “content of consciousness” is an adventitious circumstance.
1
The “objective content of the consciousness considered in itself, an abstraction made
of its inherence in a psychological subject and of its representative value as an ontological object; the content of consciousness considered as a phenomenal object.”
6 p 45
[Santayana’s gloss:]
Given essences are terms, not objects, in perception or
opinion. They become objects only in pure intuition, if this
fills the mind.
7 p 48–49, marked
Descartes et Kant se sont trompés de même, parce qu’ils ont conçu la
connaissance, et en particular la connaissance intellectuelle, qui est ce
2:14
George Santayana’s Marginalia
qu’il y a de plus élevé dans la nature, secundum modum infimarum creaturarum, quæ sunt corpora, parce qu’ils ont confondu les choses du connaître
avec les choses de l’action transitive.1
Which transitive action is only the physical basis of knowledge.
1
Descartes and Kant were both wrong, because they conceived of intellectual knowledge, which is the highest order in nature, to be the second mode in low beings, which
are bodies, because they confounded things [objects] of knowledge with those of
transitive action.
8 p 58
[Summary:]
Essence defined in intuition.
Intuition is not knowledge.
9 p 62, marked
||God, according to Cajetan on Aquinas’s Summa, has endowed us with
certain kinds of perfection.||
Life is the deity that has worked this miracle.
10 p 67, marked
||Post-Kantian commentators on Aquinas believed consciousness derived
from an automatic process.||
[Santayana summarizes:]
Imagery without intelligence.
11 p 68
[Santayana’s free translation of St. Thomas, de Veritate, I, 3:]
Description is on a different plane—the spiritual plane—
from existence. But it is true description—partakes of
truth—when it borrows the essence of the thing and asserts
it of that thing.
12 pp 73–74, marked
||Kant was correct to wish, contrary to Hume and Leibniz, to restore the
progressive and “synthetic” movement of reason. Of synthetic judgments
a priori,|| he searched in them for the full law and complete regulation in the subject and its alleged forms a priori, rather than believing them to reside completely
in the object […].
13 p 74, marked
[Of Maritain’s phrase, “spontanéité vitale”:]
Very good: the only true spontaneity of mind is curiosity—desire to discover the object.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:15
14 p 148, marked
Nous rendons grâces à Pascal d’avoir rappelé à tant de baptisés en partance pour les paradis de la science humaine, et à certains théologiens qui
plaquent les vertus chrétiennes sur l’homme de la nature comme un peu
d’or sur du cuivre, que ce n’est pas une chose plus ou moins difficile,
comme d’être un Archimède ou un César, mais bien une chose entièrement impossible à la seule nature que d’être chrétien: ex Deo natus. Nous
lui rendons grâces d’avoir affirmé magnifiquement la surnaturalité de la
foi. C’est à la lumière de cette doctrine qu’il faut considérer les Pensées.1
What Cory means by “supernatural”.2 But being Christian
is horribly human. The irrational force in conversion or
faith is an animal force, common to all religions and all
madmen.
1
We give thanks to Pascal for having recalled to so many of the baptized leaving for
the paradise of human science, and to certain theologians who plate Christian
virtues on natural man rather like gold on copper, that it is not so difficult to be an
Archimedes or a Caesar, but something entirely impossible to the solely natural as to
be a Christian, born of God. We thank him for having magnificently affirmed the
supernaturalism of the faith. It is in the light of this doctrine that we must consider
the Pensées.
2
Daniel Cory, Santayana’s literary executor, read proofs and did occasional jobs for Santayana while regarding himself as a philosopher and
viveur.
15 p 199, underlined
||Physical reality, which is the subject matter of natural science|| is
observed, weighed, measured, and noted; then it is translated into algebraic symbols: but it is not sue,1 in respect to its physical reality.
i.e. it’s intrinsic essence is not specified. Can the essence
of matter in existence be specified?
1
Known.
16 p 200, marked
||Moderns investigating matter|| continuent pourtant de l’appeler «science,» parce que ce qui leur importe ce n’est pas ce qui importait aux
Anciens: la conquête intellectuelle et spéculative de la vérité procurée
à des hommes libres par des qualités perfectionnant leur intelligence et
surélevant intrinsèquement leur humanité; mais c’est avant tout,
depuis Bacon et Descartes, la conquête pratique du monde sensible,
pour la béatitude temporelle du genre humain, qui usant de méthodes
automatiquement infaillibles, s’emploiera à dompter la matière et les
forces physiques,—(et qui par là même augmentera indéfiniment sa
2:16
George Santayana’s Marginalia
dépendance à l’égard de celles-ci, et entrera sous la loi de fer du
factibile matériel).1
[At top:]
Quote in Americanism
This is all true, but expressed unamiably. The quality
expressed in modern reflexion is not cognitive dogmatically, but aesthetic and emotional. We are satisfied with
practice and poetry.
1
… moreover continue to name their activity “science,” because what concerns them
is not that which concerned the ancients: the speculative and intellectual conquest of
truth, procured for free men through qualities which made perfect their intelligence
and intrinsically elevating their humanity. But since Bacon and Descartes above all,
the moderns would conquer the sensible world for the temporal beatitude of the
human race, using methods automatically infallible, and would control matter and
physical forces,—(and in consequence would indefinitely increase their dependence
on those forces, and would subscribe to the factitious iron law of materiality).
17 p 200, underlined
Or la «Physique» des modernes, si elle ne nous apprend rien sur l’être de
son objet, sur la nature de la réalité physique comme telle, nous met en
état d’utiliser merveilleusement cette réalité; aussi pour ceux qui jugent
des choses au point de vue utilitaire et pratique, mérite-t-elle par excellence le nom de «science».1
1
Now modern “Physics,” if it teaches us nothing about the being [or essence] of its
object concerning the nature as such of physical reality, permits us wonderfully well
to use that reality; for those who judge things from the point of view of utility and
practicality, it superbly merits the name of “science.”
18 p 205, marked
[…] when we set out in quest of verifying experimentally if two masses are or are
not equal, we do not know at the outset, or by another method, what it is that constitutes equality.
The verification itself must be intuitive. The essence is
given both to thought and to sense.
N.B. as if that didn’t touch the substance of things.
19 p 218
[Santayana summarizes and comments on a long footnote relating to P.
Langevin, La Physique depuis vingt ans: ]
Intuition of time in eternity fixes the order of time: does
it create that order? No: then that order lies in the events
themselves.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:17
20 p 222, marked
||Maritain considers Einsteinian relativity in space-time with reference
to simultaneity of thought between two minds.|| […] I am in the presence
of a major event, unknown until now, the relativity of identity. Each system of
reference has its own truth; and it is not even possible to conceive of a thought
that is what it is independently of a system of reference. What I think varies
with the relative speed of the apparatus that registers thought […].
Capital. But while the essences of thought are determinate, the essences of instants are identical. All, therefore,
in pure time, are the same instant!
21 p 252, marked
||On Einstein’s concept of time; it is not mathematical:|| separated from
things and independent of all real movement, from rational mechanics, but it is
none the less real time, the time of the philosophy of nature or of physics in the
Aristotelian sense of the word, the continuity of impermanence in movement […].
22 p 252, marked
All that reminds one that Einsteinian physics is a mathematics of phenomena
based on an integral empiricism.
23 p 253, marked
||It would be ridiculous not to admire Einstein’s scientific work. It is the
end-product of the research of Maxwell, Lorentz, and Poincaré, and of
the entire secular effort in modern quantum physics.||
24 p 298, marked
||Of the Thomist idea of man; Kant and Rousseau were anomalies.||
Man an omnipotent spirit in chains!
25 p 307, marked
||Rousseau confounded pessimism with Christian dogma, and rationalism with art and civilization. But as for Aquinas, the love of God which
infuses and creates the good in all things|| inclines toward all existence
because all that exists is good exactly in its place; an optimistic metaphysical
formula to which, this time, it is Rousseau who would counter [with] the motto
of romantic pessimism: […].
Everything would be good if it were perfect after its kind:
but nothing is. Thus the two maxims can be reconciled. Is
this, I wonder, what you are going to say?
2:18
George Santayana’s Marginalia
26 p 310, underlined
||Maritain represents as Manichean|| certains grands artistes modernes,
comme Baudelaire ou Oscar Wilde.
!
27 p 325, marked
||Thomist and modern idealism contrasted in terms of mental activity
and spontaneity.|| While Kant affirms mental activity only in the course of
destroying objectivity, because he has in view only fabricated activity, Thomism,
because it sees mental activity truly immanent and truly vital, makes the objectivity of the understanding reason itself and the purpose [fin] of its activity.
Aristotle is a moralist in metaphysics.
28 p 326
||Thomism “drains” modern idealism insofar as the interiority of consciousness is concerned. The Thomists say|| que l’intelligence est une faculté attirant les choses à soi d’une façon parfaite, «perfecte trahens res ad se ».1
That is, things are conceived as their essences: the matter
is accidental to their “being”. Yet makes possible their
existence. This existence, however, ought to be included
in the “thing”.
1
… that intelligence is a faculty that draws things to itself in a perfect manner.
Jacques Maritain
Sept leçons sur l’être,
et les premiers principes de la raison spéculative
Paris: n.d. (c. 1933–34). Waterloo. 151 marginalia.
1 p 14, marked Z
Progress by substitution is appropriate to the natural sciences; it is their law.
The more purely they realize their type, the greater their progress. But that
progress is not the law of wisdom. Its progress is a progress of deepening, of
progress by adhesion and of the most profound union, of increasing intimacy.
Good science does this too.
2 p 26, marked
||The idea that existence does not exist is not a contradiction,|| because the
word existencia, the concept that the name of existence designates existence itself
from the point of view of essence, insofar as it has a certain intelligible density,
a certain source [foyer] of intelligible determination, is existentia ut significata
[existence as signified], as apprehended in a concept […].
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:19
The essence of existence is a definition: essence caught in
non-essential relations. This does not exist except when
exemplified.
3 p 33
||Maritain quotes St. Thomas on necessity and on knowledge or cognition.||
Poor stuff.
4 p 34
||It is an error of many contemporaries who confound being [être]||, le sens
commun et les sciences de la nature,1 ||with metaphysics.||
Etre = substance rather than essence.
1
… common sense and natural science, ….
5 p 37
[Santayana tersely paraphrases:]
Animal faith excited by sense-data.
6 p 41
Terms. “Being” or “reality” as a mere term.
Logic, according to this, treats of terms only, not of
essences. It is properly only a grammar.
7 p 42, underlined
||Pure Being is not a substance.|| Voilà la différence entre l’être du logicien et celui du métaphysicien, il est considéré là dans l’esprit […].1
There is an equivocation here. The terms, in their essence,
are not “in the mind”: they exist only as objects of
thought—as non-existent objects.
1
There lies the difference between the logician’s Being and the metaphysician’s; it
is considered in the mind ….
8 p 46 note 1, underlined
[Aquinas on what Maritain calls the old meaning of the term, dialectic,
in which Aquinas distinguishes between dialectic and philosophy.]
Dialecticus auter circa omnia prædicta procedit ex probabilibus; unde non facit
scientiam, sed quamdam opinionem. Et hoc ideo est, quia ens est duplex: ens scilicet rationis et ens naturæ. Ens autem rationis dicitur proprie de illis intentionibus, quas ratio adinvenit in rebus consideratis; sicut intentio generis, speciei et
similium, quæ quidem non inveniuntur in rerum natura, sed considerationem
rationis consequuntur.1
[At consequuntur:]
2:20
George Santayana’s Marginalia
i.e. are attained. If you see “yellow” it would mean that
intent creates essence when it selects it: which would
defeat all dialectic since it would have no constant terms.
1
Dialectic, however, in all predictions proceeds from the probable, thus it does not
produce knowledge, but mere opinion. This idea derives from the two-fold nature of
being: obviously, rational being and natural being. Being, however, is properly said
to be rational by intention, as if reason found things by reflection, and the purpose
of genera, species and the like were not found in the nature of things, but resulted
from human thought.
9 p 54, underlined
||Concerning intuition:|| […] dans un moment d’émotion décisive et
comme de feu spirituel l’âme est en contact vivant, transverbérant, illuminateur, avec une réalité qu’elle touche […].1
Is there any such rot as this in St. Thomas?
1
… in a moment of decisive emotion and like a spiritual fire, the soul is in living
contact, reverberating, alight with a tangible reality ….
10 p 55, underlined
||More concerning intuition: Intelligence and the concept of being [être]
respond to such rat-like intuition [as above, 9 p 54].|| […] il faut toute la
métaphysique non seulement faite mais à faire et dans toute sa croissance
future pour savoir ce que contient de richesses virtuelles le concept
d’être.1
Are you talking of the universe?
1
… all metaphysics already known but also to be known, as well as complete future
faith are necessary in order to realize the potential richness of the concept of being.
11 pp 56–57
||On the relationship between spirituality, intellect, and readiness to recognize metaphysical and natural reality.||
This is a notion of a divine plan or will behind the natural
world; something truly “metaphysical and oracular”. It is
not the object of philosophy but only of the metaphysics
of the Socratic school.
12 p 61
||Of the perception of the ineffable:|| Here we come to the first root of the
whole of intellectual life, discovered finally in itself.
Do you mean animal faith, the assertiveness of living
mind?
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:21
13 p 74, underlined and marked Z
[Santayana criticizes Maritain:]
[…] (dès que je réfléchis sur l’être, je le vois clivé en types d’être qui
diffèrent selon tout leur être: être créé et être incréé, être substantiel et
être accidentel); mais encore, en vertu de sa structure essentielle
elle-même, le concept de l’être enveloppe en lui d’une manière indissociable, à tous les degrés de sa polyvalence […] les deux termes liés
et associés de la dualité essence-existence, […].1
[To “elle-même”:]
No criticism of grammar or myth.
[At “termes liés”:]
Only if by being we mean existent being.
1
… (as soon as I reflect on being, I see it cleaved into types of being which differ
according to their accidental make-up: created being and uncreated being, substantial being and accidental being; but again , by virtue of its essential structure, the
concept of being contains in itself an inseparable manner, in all the degrees of its versatility, the two terms implicit in and associated with the duality essence-existence.
14 p 75
[Reconciliation:]
[…] l’essence et l’existence, qui hors de notre esprit sont réellement distinctes.1
You come out all right, but after some confusion.
1
… essence and existence, apart from our minds, are really distinct.
15 p 76, underlined
[…] toute chose est bonne (métaphysiquement bonne, nous ne parlons
pas ici du bien moral), toute chose est bonne ou propre à être aimée, à
être l’objet d’un amour, dans la mesure même où elle est.1
[At “bonne”:]
say perfect.
1
… everything is good (metapysically good; here we are not discussing moral good),
everything is good or proper to be loved, to be an object of love, in the exact measure
that it is [exists].
16 pp 76–77
[Santayana’s generalized comment:]
norm. But all being hasn’t such a norm; and the propulsion of existence is not growth. Here the discussion has
ceased to be generative: we do not approach the doctrine
with reasons; it is explained to us by authority: we are told
what we ought to think. Another doctor would tender us
something different.
2:22
George Santayana’s Marginalia
17 p 77
||The Thomists follow the words of St. Thomas Aquinas:|| “Every form follows an inclination”; they say that is a truth evident in itself to which the metaphysical intuition of being applies.
This is the consequence of the Socratic origin of “metaphysics”. The good explains the real.1
1
See Santayana’s comment to 11 pp 56–57, above.
18 p 78
[Santayana paraphrases a turgid paragraph of Maritain’s:]
Sympathy with existence (& motion) is natural to life,
because it excites: cf. children. But it very easily turns to
hate when it over-excites or hurts.
19 p 84
||The idea of being implies movement toward desired perfection.|| […]
wherever there will be an inclination in the entire universe of things which are not
God, and which need to perfect themselves in some fashion,—and above all in the
material world, a place metaphysically indigent,—there will be movement, change.
Myth with a vengeance.
20 p 84, underlined
||Two theories of movement were classically opposed: that of Heraclitus
and that of Parmenides.|| C’est cette distribution de l’être sur […] ces
deux plans, acte et puissance, sont eux-mêmes essentiellement analogues, c’est d’une manière analogue que les notions d’acte et de puissance se réalisent en ceci et en cela.1
Cf. Heidegger, “Je”.
1
It is this distribution of being … according to two plans, action and power, which
are in themselves essentially analogous, it is in an analogous manner that the
notions of action and power are realized in this and that.
21 p 85
[Sub-chapter: Extensive and Intensive Visualisation.]
We have here simply the accession to the order of the intelligible and the universal
in general; […].
“cows”
22 p 85
After that a second step must come: the accession to the order of universal type and
of essential intelligibility, in which the typical form is expressly unmasked and
clear.
“the cow”
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:23
23 p 93, top
Scholasticism is myth denuded of poetry and reduced to
grammar.
24 p 94
Excellent: metaphysics is pure intellectual fiction.
25 p 109
Rationalistic axiom: All being must be open to thought.
26 p 110, top
That all Being is “true” is known by definition, truth being
the description of existence. But it does not follow that all
Being is intelligible, or all truth rational: the surds are true
too and intellect must bow to them. Power is before truth.
27 p 111, underlined
[…] l’essence de Dieu est raison de son existence, on dit qu’il est a se, il
est à lui-même la propre raison de son esse, la raison de son existence,
parce que son essence est précisément d’exister.1
ou plutôt de connaître, être esprit.2
1
… the essence of God is the reason of His existence; one says that He is unto
Himself, He in Himself the pure reason of His Being, the reason of His existence,
because His essence is precisely to exist.
2
Or rather to know, to be spirit.
28 p 111, marked
||Descartes was wrong to oppose divine existence with the doctrine of
efficient cause.|| Quelle philosophie rampante! L’existence divine est
infiniment plus que cela, elle est acte d’intellection, c’est une existence de
connaissance ou d’intellection, c’est pourquoi dire que Dieu existe n’est pas
énoncer un simple fait empirique ni une simple position, même nécessaire, mais une éternelle justification intelligible, une éternelle et infinie
satisfaction d’une infinie exigence intelligible, une plénitude infinie de
repos pour l’intelligence.1
Yes: a hypostasis of the satisfaction of seeing necessity in
things. But this is sophistical, because existence is necessarily contingent and unintelligible.
1
What a crawling philosophy! Divine existence is infinitely more than that. It is
the act of intellection, it is existence in knowledge or intellection, it is why to say
that God exists is not to enunciate a simple empirical fact nor a simple position,
however necessary, but an eternal, intelligible justification, an infinite plenitude of
repose for the mind.
2:24
George Santayana’s Marginalia
29 p 112, underlined
||God’s knowledge of Himself: in knowing Himself,|| il se veut, il
s’anime,1 […].
The universal Narcissus.
1
He wills Himself, He animates Himself.
30 p 112, marked Z
It is possible to reduce the principle of the reason of Being to the principle of identity: by reduction to the absurd.
There is a reason for everything, because philosophers
look for some reason for some things!
31 p 113
If the truth be the standard of rationality, everything is
reasonable. But the truth is contingent.
32 p 114
[…] le principe de raison ne joue nulle part plus magnifiquement que
dans le cas du libre arbitre.1
“Free will” is a moral not a physical indetermination. It is
a physical determination on grounds morally insufficient.
1
The principle of reason plays no part more magnificently than in the case of free
will.
33 p 116
[Santayana’s comment on Maritain’s scholastic logic:]
A caused being must have a cause!
34 p 128
||On the distinction between action and agent:|| It is clear that if an agent
brings about a certain action, produces a certain effect, there exists a reason of
being; that is to say, it is determined before the action has produced one effect and
not another. We come to see—it is the principle of finality—that the agent has an
order, which is an appetite or a love, it has a relation to such a good or it perfects
itself or otherwise, which is its action.
Le feu parfait le bois en le brûlant?1
1
The fire perfects the wood by burning it?
35 p 128, underlined
||Hydrogen and oxygen are related in producing water,|| qui est leur
essence même,1 […].
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:25
Not their essence: because if there were no O, water
would not be produced (or desired) by H. It is part of the
truth about H & O in this world.
1
Which is their very essence.
36 p 128–29, marked Z
Poursuivons cette suite de réflexions. Peut-il y avoir une relation ou un
ordre entre deux choses qui ne sont en aucune manière, entre deux
néants, ou bien entre une chose qui est et une chose qui n’est pas? Pour
qu’existe la relation ou l’ordre entre deux termes il faut que ces termes
en rapport soient là tous les deux; il faut donc que l’effet ou l’action soit
là de quelque manière pour que l’agent s’y trouve déterminé, ordonné,
ou enclin. Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire? Il faut que l’action ou l’effet soit
là avant d’être produite ou réalisée.1
Scholasticism at its worst.
1
Let us pursue these reflections. Is it possible to have a relation or an order between
two things that do not exist in any manner, between two zeros, or even between one
thing that exists and one that does not? In order for a relation to exist between two
terms, it is necessary that both terms be in rapport; the effect or action must in some
way be such that an agent may find it determined, ordered, or so inclined. What
does that mean? It is necessary that the action or effect be present before being
achieved or realized.
37 p 130, top
We name fire; the name connotes what fire does.
Therefore fire could not have acquired its properties
unless it had been first conceived to connote them, and so
named FIRE.
38 p 130, marked Z
Mais poser cette chose que je nomme feu c’est précisément poser un
ordre, une préordination ou une détermination radicale à l’action de
brûler, action conçue par une pensée comme à produire, à accomplir par
cette chose-là.1
N.B. Cf. note above.
1
To set forth this thing which I call fire is exactly to set forth an order, a preordination or a radical determination in the action of burning, an action conceived by
a thought to bring about, to accomplich that particular thing.
39 pp 130–31, underlined
You see that we may well say that if the bird flies it is because it has wings, because
it is a bird. Mais qu’est-ce qu’être oiseau? C’est précisément être ordonné
à voler, et violà le fond du principe de finalité.1
2:26
George Santayana’s Marginalia
To be fit to do that which you are fit to do is true teleology.
1
But what is it to be a bird? It is exactly to be organized to fly, and there lies the
basis of the principle of finality.
40 p 132
||Maritain’s involved, mystical statement of the nature of God’s love.||
He loves & creates to satisfy his artistic essence.1
1
Surely irony?
41 p 133, marked
[…] Dieu veut que le monde physique soit pour l’homme et que l’animal
soit pour l’acte de voir et d’entendre […] il veut que les choses soient
pour sa bonté et pour la communication de sa bonté.1 Vult ergo hoc esse
propter hoc; sed non propter hoc vult hoc.2
Yes: he wishes things to find satisfaction: he doesn’t wish
the satisfaction first. I.e. the goods are good only for those
natures. (God, here, is a name for the truth.)
1
God wills that the physical world be for man, and He wills that animals exist to
see and to hear … He wills that things exist out of His goodness and for the communication of His goodness.
2
He wills this, therefore it is by reason of His willing; but not by reason of this does
He will it. (Summa Theologica, I, 19, 5.)
42 p 135
Things must be preordained: else there would be no reason why they are as they are? And why were they preordained in that way rather than in another? Because that is
what, in fact, comes. So that your principle of finality is
merely a façon de parler.1
1
Manner of speaking.
43 p 137
||Concerning finality (purpose) and the difficulty of accounting for fortuitous elements involved, for|| tout agent agit en vue d’une fin, pour une fin,
[…].1
Each wind has a purpose, but the resultant currents of air
have none? Or is it only air and heat that have a purpose,
& are all winds (and vapours) fortuitous?
1
… each agent acts with a purpose in view, for a purpose.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:27
44 p 137, underlined
The only unity that [fortuitous events] can have is in a thought.
Then the whole material world threatens to be fortuitous:
it would be a medley of accidents produced by moral
agents at cross purposes.
45 p 139, underlined
Le Dieu de Spinoza, ce Dieu très imparfaitement immanent et pensée et
étendue, comme serait une Géométrie subsistante; […].1
Excellent
1
Spinoza’s God, this God very imperfectly immanent and intellectual and
extended, as the shreds of a geometry might be; ….
46 p 144, underlined
[On the contingency of being:]
L’être contingent, l’être qui n’est pas par soi, […].1
Note the notion of contingency, as derivative being.
1
Contingent being, being that cannot exist by itself.
47 p 149
[…] si nous comparons ces deux notions d’être contingent et d’être causé, ou
ayant en un autre la raison de son existence, nous voyons que le sujet propre
de ce qui a en un autre la raison de son existence, c’est précisément l’être
contingent.1
Hardly, since its cause is self-evident in itself and in its
operation to produce this effect. The contingent could be
necessary!
1
… if we compare the two notions of contingency and cause, or finding in another
the reason for his existence, we see that the real subject of the reason for another’s
existence is precisely contingency.
48 p 153
[On chance:]
||Among the ancients, chance results from several factors coming
together in an unforeseeable moment. But a chance event might be foreseen if the factors involved are sufficiently simple.||
Chance is a moral category, like all categories of this
philosophy. Turning it into a physical category is superstitious.
2:28
George Santayana’s Marginalia
49 p 155
||A man killed by thieves:|| il n’y pas une nature, un agent naturel qui soit
de par sa structure préordonné à cette chose-là, préordonné à ce fait de
la rencontre de ces trois événements, […].1
2
1
… it is not nature, a natural agent which by its preordained structure, preordained by the fact of the coming together of three circumstances.
2
First falsehood (or premise).
50 p 155, underlined
||The meeting with thieves had no être because it is not a thought; it exists
but is not|| une essence.
Not a Socratic nature.
51 p 162, top
Note the radical incapacity to conceive that the thought is
a hint only because the organism is unified in its functions.
This unity is indeed requisite to a unity in the action or
product: the thought is only a dramatic transcript, and
often mythical.
Marriage Ceremonies and Priapic Rites in India and the East
By a member of the Royal Asiatic Society
n.p.: 1909. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Gerald Marsh
Prairie Grass Poems
Dallas: 1947. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 pp 26–27
I am a follower after the demagogues,
Those who pass in kaledioscopic caravans, spotlighted one
after another,
I crowd around bandwagons, shouting madly for them
---------------------------------------When you look for me, you’ll find me standing
By the rostrum of a windy politician,
Enclosed in the triumphant mob, the flurry and confusion,
A part of the shuffling, noisey [sic] pulsating
blood of Democracy.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:29
Good: but some features are not characteristic of the
“people”, except in rural America. The people are essentially the Poor. They are unhappy They are, at bottom,
the beggars, those that society has found no place for.1
1
Santayana’s comment on this parody or pastiche of Walt Whitman is his
only remark, to my knowledge, on “rural America,” of which he seemed
to know little or nothing.
John Masson
Lucretius: Epicurean and Poet
London: 1907. Georgetown. Three marginalia.
1 p xxxi
[Introduction.]
Inspiring all his merciless war with ‘Religion’ (by which he [Lucretius]
means superstition), there is a deep and true love of man. Yes, and an
essential reverence also, for he would have men ashamed to believe that
the Gods can be propitiated by casting to them one of their fellows as a
victim.
So the author not a christian after all?
William Maxwell
The Folded Leaf
New York and London: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
A. L. Maycock
An Oxford Note-book
Edinburgh and London: 1931. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Lorenzo de’ Medici
Poemetti
Edited by Emilio Cecchi
Milan: 1943. Columbia. Fourteen marginalia.
[Stanzas 78, 81, 108, 112, 113, 116, and 117 are marked. At 117:]
anti climax
1 p 25
[Santayana looking for rhymes:]
love, wave, cave
2:30
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Erich Meissner
Confusion of Faces:
The Struggle between Religion and Secularism in Europe
London: 1946. Waterloo. Seventy-five marginalia.
1 p 8, marked
||The main fact in European history for the past 400 years is the secularization of life.||
2 p 11, marked
[Meissner quotes Goethe:]
‘There is only one interesting thing about the Reformation and that is
Luther’s character. That is what people admire. All the rest is but a
muddle that is still worrying us daily.’
This is true intellectually, but not biologically.
3 p 12, underlined
The forces working for disunity, notably modern nationalism, proved
infinitely stronger than any kind of secular humanism.
4 p 15, marked
||The many undercurrents of heresy in Europe were very strong in
Germany.|| An ‘age of faith’ has never existed: […].
Nor a land of faith. Look at Ireland, & Spain.
5 p 15
||But there was|| an almost mystic fervour and desire to introduce
Christianity into everyday life, into all secular spheres so that Christian
men would behave and act differently from non-Christians.
Latent insanity in inspiration.
6 p 16
The anticlericalism of the illiterate was different in character from the
eloquent and sarcastic criticisms of the Humanists. Erasmus and his followers mocked at the monks and clerics, attacking their ignorance and
corruption, […].
The hard headed man sees that he is being deceived; yet
his heart may be religious.
7 p 20
[…] the Western reader of Dostoevsky is not unfamiliar with that peculiar and potent humility—the inarticulate philosophy of sinners—which
seems capable of shaking the foundations of human life. There is one
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:31
immediate consequence. The brotherhood of men, sought in vain by idealists, is established by sinners.
Faith the escape from guilt: or one superstition healed by
another.
8 p 22
The modern view, recommending Christianity as an appropriate political tool, is an ineffective and slightly dishonest approach to the religious
problem. The Christian religion cannot be called in as a Cinderella to
clear up some worldly mess. […] Why should a scheme of social reform
be called Christian if no principle peculiar to Christianity is involved?
[…] we must realize that the vigour of the Christian faith will not be at
our disposal just because we feel it would be a good thing if it were.
Listen to this, Boston 1880!
9 p 23
The state can be defended and the common cause conscientiously and
competently served and guarded by men who do not believe in Christ.
Cf. Stalin & the enthusiasm for industrial reform.1
1
Santayana was reading Stalin in Togliatti’s Italian translation at this time:
Questioni del Leninismo. See the entry below.
10 p 29
||The doctrine of obedience to the teachings of the Church.||
this is true of good Catholic converts: e.g. Max Jacob.
11 cp 42
||No secular philosophy has arisen in Europe to rival true religion.||
Marx, Lenin, Stalin? don’t count?
12 p 46, marked
||Prussians thought that civilians should be kept out of war.|| The idea of
a nation’s war, demanding the whole-hearted participation of every
civilian, is quite un-Prussian; the French Revolution proclaimed it,
Robespierre’s friend, Saint Just, was its apostle.
True militance is free; selected and special. Even the
Christian flock has to be shepherded.
13 p 49, top
Reason is aristocratic like militancy, but peaceful. It uses
one natural force to neutralise another where they conflict. It so generates its order.
2:32
George Santayana’s Marginalia
14 p 53, marked
The peculiar thing about the Reich was that its nationalism got interfused
with the military traditions of Prussia. ||A few, Wilhelm I perhaps too, distrusted the Reich.||
15 p 53, underlined and marked
The Reich, up to a certain point, was Prussia, […] but it was a deflected
and vulgarized Prussia, supported by mass-acclamation and allied with
commerce and the acquisitive spirit of the industrial age. […] The golden
calf had never been worshipped in Prussia […]. Now the cult of
Mammon was spreading rapidly.
I remember my surprise in 1886 at the luxury in a private
house in Göttingen. I had expected Spartan simplicity.
16 p 54, marked
||Heine was not a true representative of the bourgeois time and its misplaced self-confidence.|| He dwelt in a different zone. Goethe’s wider
influence was based on the misconceptions of his admirers.
17 p 55
The German ‘Bildungsphilister’ the educated bourgeois, welcomed the
Reich frantically; they were beside themselves with joy and self-satisfaction. There had been victory after victory and further gains were still to
come; […].
As in Russia now, 1946.
18 p 57
Since the fourteenth century Austria had borne the burden and responsibilities of the Holy Roman Empire; she is therefore built on imperial
and not on national foundations.
This should have been the international power.
19 p 58
The seat of the Roman Empire when it became Christian
became migratory. It was ideal.
20 p 58
[Meissner quotes Frederick the Great as of 1752:]
‘Prussia cannot tolerate it that France should lose Alsace or Lorraine.’
N.B.!
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:33
21 p 59
Protestantism derived its sense of unity from the strong feeling (anxiously
preserved) that whatever the common Protestant heritage may be, it was
certainly and emphatically anti-Catholic.
They felt until recently that they must help to defend
themselves against the religion & culture which they had
betrayed.
22 p 63, underlined
[From the chapter on the effect of the French Revolution on German
history.]
||The French Revolution introduced a sequence never since broken up
of|| the alliance between irreligion, utopian hope and compulsion […].
La carrière ouverte1 for all vices and crimes, if committed
in private.
1
The open career.
23 p 64, marked
[At top:]
N.B.
Political agitators working on their own or paid by others are familiar
figures in history. Their effect has always been pretty well the same: they
are the link between the genuine grievances and the revolutionary outburst. ||In the French Revolution, the agitator became a central figure,
who|| tried to establish himself in society as a permanency—a professional man, doing a useful job.
Birth of the politician.
24 p 66
[…] complete disregard of personal liberty, backed up by the pernicious
doctrine that the individual as such does not matter, gets quickly rid of
[…] encumbrances and turns the state into a smoothly running machine,
capable of any ‘total’ effort […].
Cf. the Russian revolution & reconstruction.
25 p 67, top
Militant society: the bond of crime is the most compulsive
and internal, but also the most brittle externally, when the
criminals turn against one another.
26 p 69, marked
When in 1793 the Committee of Public Safety began to revolutionize the
war, the country was weary and apathetic. It had to be driven into this
2:34
George Santayana’s Marginalia
enterprise at the sword’s point. The formidable weapon which in times
to come made Europe tremble, was forged against the will of the French
nation under the pressure of a Terrorist government. Such is the historical origin of total war.
Unanimity in war & religion is a product of tyranny, working in part by contagion and in part by terror. It is a false
and fragile unanimity.
27 p 70, top
Last meaning of “Democracy” = herd psychology or
linch [sic] law.
28 p 72, marked
[Fichte’s ideological nationalism.]
Note the insidious though perfectly logical combination of mystical
nationalism and compulsion! The ‘consuming flames of higher patriotism’ which Fichte was trying to kindle have devoured since then the
happiness of millions and devastated the ancient commonwealth of
nations. To call these ideas Prussian is misleading, nor were they German
(they were indeed opposed to all German traditions); they were revolutionary.
What is German in Fichte is the Egotism and the racial
claim to supremacy.
29 p 85, marked
||In 1815 the chance for a prudent constitutional government in Germany
was missed.|| Liberalism became a demagogic revolutionary force—and
allied itself with the mass emotion of modern nationalism, […].
30 p 91, marked
[At top:]
Vacant liberty in Art
||In Bismarck’s Reich, Art went down hill. Experimentation, and the
artist’s reluctance to engage the bourgeoisie led to his isolation.|| The
human mind, thrown back on to itself, must go to pieces through lack of
communication and support. Modern art, in its genuine representatives,
entered the purgatory of this experience. […] The sensitive observer will
be deeply moved by the sounds of sorrow that come from the waste
land. The best German example is, I think, the Austrian poet Georg
Trakl (died 1914). Rilke’s Duineser Elegien should also be mentioned here.
The deadly isolation of the autonomous individual has been poignantly
formulated by Alexei Khomiakov, the great Slavophil: ‘Modern society
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:35
in its decay releases every individual to the freedom of his own impotence.’
[At Khomiakov’s quotation:]
Solipsistic art “Success” or fame are not needed.
Contradiction?
31 p 94, marked
Education cannot lead.
It requires a fund to be transmitted: but it may rationalise
the traditional elements.
32 p 112
||Meissner quotes Arnold Toynbee that political, social and economic
developments of the nineteenth century have deprived many people of
true citizenship; they have become an internal proletariat.|| ‘The true
hall-mark of the proletarian […] is neither poverty nor humble birth but
a consciousness—and the resentment which this consciousness
inspires—of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society and
being un-wanted known in a community which is his rightful home,
^
^
[…].
I am a proletarian.
33 p 113, marked
The Hitler movement can be called a stampede of suburbia […].
34 p 118, marked
[Meissner quotes a conversation of Hitler with Rauschning:]
‘Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of
humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has
taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a
chimera called conscience and morality and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.’ Thus
spake Nietzsche’s clown!
Hitler’s creed Militancy in excelsis Spontaneity in a gang.
35 p 121, marked
[At top:]
Atlantic Charter attacked
||The hungry want bread, but the wants of the bored are less articulate.||
Boredom may well be called a disease of the mind, and a serious one. It
weakens and eventually kills the power of appreciation. Life becomes a
misery, although the two demands of the Atlantic Charter, freedom
from want and freedom from fear may be completely secured.
2:36
George Santayana’s Marginalia
36 p 124 and 124fn
If mysticism tries to explore and to conquer the dangerous realm beyond
good and evil,1 it often becomes the supporter and ally of immoral violence.
1
In actual fact, the realm does not exist. It is an illusion of the proud. On closer
examination it turns out to be a dependency of evil. or sensibility to all
^ the little, for intugood. The result for morals is contentment in
ition ideal possession of everything.
^
[Thus Santayana tames Nietzsche.]
37 p 125, underlined
[Concerning “Conservative Revolution” and Nihilism:]
At the end of the nineteenth century the educated bourgeois responded
keenly to Schopenhauer’s sombre visions; their sons followed Nietzsche;
their grandsons took to dynamite which they considered the real thing.
They were no longer interested in shattering ideas. Scepticism had
destroyed itself and produced, as its last exhalation, the fata morgana of a
new authoritative world.
It had released the natural man in an artificial world. You
don’t see that in the natural world he would be normal. It
is your superstitious nominalism that makes him seem
(and feel) devilish.
38 p 125 and 125fn, underlined
Belief in Hell and disbelief in Heaven […] is, indeed, the core of the
widespread and obnoxious affair which has been called, for want of a
better name, Nihilism.1
1
A better name would certainly be desirable. For Nihilism is not just nothing; it
is full of dynamic life, it is a forceful enterprise of deliberate transgression—
impiety sure of itself.
Anarchism? But compare my Lucifer,
Satanism? who is a sort of saint.
39 p 127, marked
The fighters of 1848 were mostly lofty idealists, not counting the professional instigators. In post-war Germany the revolutionary spirit became
decidedly cynical and acid. To make a revolution, to kill opponents, to
direct persecutions, to establish a most ruthless system of state control, to
do all that without real beliefs was indeed a new departure. Compare
Hitler with Robespierre.
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Isn’t it all a form of romanticism? But there is also an
antique element of political force or formativeness. Cf.
Stalin.
40 p 127, marked
The disillusioned interpretation of human nature has become the basic
common conviction of modern political activism though the actual programmes differ. Hence the determination to control and, if necessary, to
compel man in all his activities also in his thoughts and feelings. Hence
the peculiar love of violence and compulsion. Hence the complete disregard of individuals who are sacrificed without uneasiness.
41 p 127, marked
Love of mankind (upheld as a principle) or devotion to the proletariat or
some master race are perfectly compatible with hatred and contempt of
the neighbour. Hitler was not the bold, solitary, Nietzschean philosopher
that he would have liked to be.
Nothing commoner than the philanthropist who hates all
the best works of man, and loves only babies.
Kuno Meyer
A German Grammar for Schools
London: 1896. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Rime e lettere
Firenze: 1892. Georgetown.
[No marginalia as such, but Santayana collates other versions and corrects typographical errors to sonetto ii, iii, iv, vi, viii, ix, x; to madrigale
vii; to sonetto xvii; and to madrigale xix, xx, and xxxiv.]
John Stuart Mill
Dissertations and Discussions
New York: 1882. Georgetown. Seventy-three marginalia.
[Volume III, “Utilitarianism.” Santayana used “Utilitarianism” when he
taught Philosophy 15 at Harvard. His address, written on the title page,
“19 Hollis. Cambridge.” suggests that he read the text as an undergraduate. Many of the marginalia are a student’s or lecturer’s paraphrase].
1 p 301
But, though in science the knowledge of particular truths precede the
^
^
general theory, […].
2:38
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2 p 303, underlined
||The intuitive school’s affirmation of a science of morals.|| They either
assume the ordinary precepts of morals as of à-priori authority, or they
lay down as the common groundwork of those maxims some generality
much less obviously authoritative than the maxims themselves, and
which has never succeeded in gaining popular acceptance.
[At authoritative:]
so is utility
3 p 303
||Mill asserts that a law of morality ought to exist.||
Such a law has tacitly existed.
4 p 305
The Utilitarian principle proposed: the ultimate good can
not be proved to be such except rhetorically.
5 p 306
Utility not opposed to ornament and pleasure.
6 p 308
But consists in seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.
7 p 309
Now, such a theory of life excites in many minds, and among them in
some of the most estimable in feeling and purpose, inveterate dislike. […]
a doctrine worthy only of swine […].
Supposed bestiality of the doctrine explained.
8 p 311
People always prefer the pleasures of the higher faculties.
(This merely says that people do not choose happiness)
9 p 316
Is happiness possible?
10 p 317
Tranquility and excitement sufficient for happiness.
11 pp 318–19
||On the pleasures of the cultivated mind.|| Now, there is absolutely no
reason in the nature of things why an amount of mental culture sufficient
to give an intelligent interest in these objects of contemplation should not
be the inheritance of every one born in a civilized country.
Which can be removed by education.
(False)
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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12 p 321
Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness: it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind, even in those parts of our
present world which are least deep in barbarism; and it often has to be
done voluntarily by the hero or the martyr, for the sake of something
which he prizes more than his individual happiness.
Those who renounce happiness should do so to increase
the happiness of others. (False, as here stated.)
13 p 324
The greatest happiness principle, though the ground of
right, need not be the conscious motive of every act.
14 p 333
||Traditional beliefs|| are the rules of morality for the multitude, and for
the philosopher, until he has succeeded in finding better.
Cf. Browning’s new morality, the ethics of Mrs Way. [Mrs.
Why?]1
1
See Santayana, “The Poetry of Barbarism,” Chapter VII, Interpretations of
Poetry and Religion.
15 p 340
There is, I am aware, a disposition to believe that a person who sees in
moral obligation a transcendental fact, an objective reality belonging to
the province of “things in themselves,” is likely to be more obedient to it
than one who believes it to be entirely subjective, having its seat in
human consciousness only.
The transcendental idea of duty does not make us respect
it more.
16 p 341
If there is innate duty it is to regard others.
17 p 343
Merely acquired conscience can be analysed away. (This is
to say that not reason but sentiment is the basis of right.)
18 p 347
||Social feeling as a sanction for Utilitarianism. Despite differences in
sensibility and culture, one need feel no conflict, for|| he is not opposing himself to what they really wish for,—namely, their own good,—but
is, on the contrary, promoting it. This feeling in most individuals is
2:40
George Santayana’s Marginalia
much inferior in strength to their selfish feelings, and is often wanting
altogether.
this is a self-contradiction.
19 p 347, underlined
||For those who have social feeling,|| it possesses all the characters of a
natural feeling. It does not present itself to their minds as a superstition
of education, or a law despotically imposed by the power of society, but
as an attribute which it would not be well for them to be without.
The social creature would not be without his interest in
others, although this may make him unhappy. He wishes
happiness, but only on the basis of his own nature.
20 p 349, underlined
||How Utilitarianism is proved.|| No reason can be given why the general
happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to
be attainable, desires his own happiness.
Instinctively he does, but deliberately he does not. If we
are wise, we know happiness is not worth having.
21 p 349
But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired?
Happiness is, and yet must not consciously be, the sole aim.
22 pp 349–50, underlined and marked !
||Mill’s doctrine maintains not only that|| virtue is to be desired, but that
it is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion
of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is
made virtue; however they may believe (as they do) that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than
virtue,—yet this being granted, and it having been decided […] what is
virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which
are good as a means to the ultimate end, but they also recognize, as a psychological fact, the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in
itself, […].
(this is delightfully absurd. As when Christians say that we
must do everything for the love of God, but must not think
about him at all.)
23 pp 350–51
Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so, and, in those who
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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love it disinterestedly, it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not
as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.
(then to the vicious, vice must be also a part of happiness
& of virtue.)
24 p 352, underlined
Life would be a poor thing, very ill provided with sources of happiness,
if there were not this provision of nature, by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to, or otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of
our primitive desires, become in themselves sources of pleasure more
valuable than the primitive pleasures, […].
(Sensual pleasures are then the only real basis of happiness).
25 p 353, underlined
||Virtue may be considered a good in itself and highly desired,|| and
with this difference between it and the love of money, of power, or of
fame,—that all of these may, and often do, render the individual noxious to the other members of the society to which he belongs, whereas
there is nothing which makes him so much a blessing to them as the
cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue.
(This is not evident at all. Consider the hermits.)
26 p 353, underlined
Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the
consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being
without it is a pain, or for both reasons united: […].
(That is, most people who desire virtue do not desire it for
its own sake. True, but it ought not to be so.)
27 p 356
(Of course, Mill is far from the doctrine that virtue consists
in not desiring at all.)
28 p 365
||On how Utilitarianism is connected to justice; the question of the
existence of rank and privilege.||
(Would it not come nearer the truth to say that inequality
is considered just when it is considered natural, unjust
when it is considered artificial?)
2:42
George Santayana’s Marginalia
29 p 365, underlined
||Communists think that rewards should be shared equally by all;|| others hold that those who work harder or who produce more, […] may
justly claim a larger quota in the division of produce. And the sense of
natural justice may be plausibly appealed to in behalf of every one of
these opinions.
(Evidently if we have decided here what is natural, we
have decided what is just.)
30 p 373, underlined
It is common enough, certainly, though the reverse of commendable, to
feel resentment merely because we have suffered pain; but a person
whose resentment is really a moral feeling,—that is, who considers
whether an act is blamable before he allows himself to resent it,— […]
certainly does feel that he is asserting a rule which is for the benefit of
others as well as for his own.
(Curious. What else on utilitarian principles can resentment
be felt for? Acts are blamable only because they give pain.)
John Stuart Mill
Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism
London: 1885 (3rd edition). Georgetown. No marginalia.
John Stuart Mill
An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy
London: 1889 (6th edition). Georgetown. 162 marginalia.
[Fly-leaf:]
G. Santayana
in re Hyde
19051
1
Early in 1905 William James urged Santayana to accept the Hyde lectureship at Harvard. James would follow Santayana: “You the Baptist! I the
Messiah! (That’s the way it looks to my wife.)” Cf. McCormick, George
Santayana: A Biography, 181–82. (Santayana told Cory that one should
never refer to one’s own work, but here he forces my hand.)
1 p 22
||Concerning the “reality” of matter.||
The “reality” is a logical empty term that which has “the
essential attributes of matter or mind.” As if in knowing
the attributes of a thing I did not know it.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:43
2 p 24
[Hamilton] says, that not only all the knowledge we have of anything, but
all which we could have if we were a thousandfold better endowed than
we are, would still be only knowledge of the mode in which the thing
would affect us.
The above artificial unknowable is logical; that is why Mill
can’t see it: it is of course not incompatible with material
reality being known. The unknowable is no cause; it is
only a grammatical term, like “I.” 1
1
This has obvious reference to Santayana’s lecture “The Unknowable,”
the Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford, 1923, and frequently
reprinted.
3 p 27, marked
||Mill’s summary of Hamilton’s account of relative knowledge as distinct
from absolute knowledge.||
This is quite right—as an interpretation of Sir W.
4 p 68, underlined
||Hamilton’s argument against Victor Cousin:|| he speaks of the effect as
a condition of its cause.
i.e. of the cause being called a cause.
5 p 84
The inconceivable is no category of physics.
6 p 85, marked Z
[…] the universe of thought and that of reality […] must have been
framed in complete correspondence […].
This is of course not the language or thought of an
Identitätsphilosophie.1
1
Philosophy of identity.
7 p 94, top
st
1 meaning—unimaginable
nd
2
''
—incredible
rd
3
''
—unintelligible
}
meanings of
“inconceivable”
8 p 128, marked
||Mill says he does not mean goodness by ascribing goodness to God; but
Mr. Mansel asks what Mill means by venerating Goodness?||
Mill is a Socratic moralist, Mansel an ordinary blooming
idolater.
2:44
George Santayana’s Marginalia
9 p 129, marked
[…] I believe that [Mansel] and I have at bottom the same standard of
truth and rule of right, and that he probably understands better than I the
facts of the particular case.
Socratic ethics
10 p 178
||Mill comments on Hamilton’s and others’ interpretations of consciousness.|| Could we try the experiment of the first consciousness in any
infant—its first reception of the impressions which we call external; whatever was present in that first consciousness would be the genuine testimony of Consciousness, and would be as much entitled to credit […] as
our sensations themselves.
It is extraordinary that Mill should regard an infant’s first
feeling as an ultimate authority in metaphysics.
11 p 179, marked
||On supposedly original intuitions, their origins, and our memory of
them.||
As if it mattered which were original! Mill is a poor victim
of the malicious psychology, and of the intuitive dogmatism behind it.
12 p 181, marked Z
||Hamilton demands|| “that no fact be assumed as a fact of consciousness
but what is ultimate and simple.” But to pronounce it ultimate, the only
condition he requires is that we be not able to “reduce it to a generalisation from experience.”
m
Sir W , too, is a victim of this strange illusion. If we are
obliged to imagine a thing, this incapacity to be put right
is a proof that we are right!
13 p 181, underlined
This condition is realised by its possessing the “character of necessity.”
[…] In this Sir W. Hamilton is at one with the whole of his own section
of the philosophical world; with Reid, with Stewart, with Cousin, with
Whewell, and we may add, with Kant.
No! Kant thought the necessary was necessarily wrong.
14 p 185fn, marked
||Is the unimaginable subject to proof as true?|| […] is a creation a
nihilo, or Matter capable of thinking, unimaginable, or only incredible? Both the one and the other are habitually ranked among the most
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:45
unimaginable of all things. Yet the one is firmly believed by all
Materialists, and the other by all Christians.
Both are perfectly and easily imaginable; and the only
difficulty is a confusion with dialectic. Ex nihilo1 is a
contradictory phrase, if ex involves nihil’s having an
inside or a removable substance.
1
Out of nothing.
15 pp 202–3
Sir W. Hamilton thinks us entitled to infer a substance from attributes,
though he allows that we know nothing of the substance except its
attributes.
A substance is not inferred; it is included in any datum.
16 p 207
The notion that perceptions need a cause is the root of all
evil.
17 p 208, underlined and marked Z
All this artillery is directed against the simple supposition that by a law
of our nature, a modification of our own minds may assure us of the
existence of an unknown cause.
I should think a puff of wind would suffice to overturn this
axiom.
18 pp 214–15, marked Z
||Reid, citing Locke, on the appearance of colour equalling an idea:|| “By
the constitution of our nature, we are led to conceive this idea as a sign
of something external, and are impatient till we learn its meaning.” 1
Observe this artificiality in a “natural realist”. As if “the
meaning” of colour could be clearer than the colour itself.
1
From Locke’s Inquiry into the Human Mind, edited by Hamilton, p. 111.
19 p 216, marked
“When I move my hand along the table, the feeling is so simple that I
find it difficult to distinguish it into things of different natures, yet it
immediately suggests hardness, smoothness, extension, and motion—
things of very different natures, and all of them as distinctly understood
as the feeling which suggests them.” 1
Monstrous! A “perfectly simple” feeling suggests a multiplicity of perfectly clear qualities in unknown things.
1
Locke cited again, p. 123.
2:46
George Santayana’s Marginalia
20 p 228, top
Here Mill gives his case away: If I had only sensations I
should believe them to be sensations: if I had only a
dream, I should recognise that I was dreaming.
This is the psychologist’s fallacy in a nut-shell.
21 pp 229–30, underlined and marked X
Let us now take into consideration another of the general characters of
our experience, namely, that in addition to fixed groups, we also recognise a fixed Order in our sensations; […].
This page gives away the contention it begins with.
22 p 236, underlined
It is an admitted fact, that we are capable of all conceptions which can be
formed by generalising from the observed laws of our sensations.
But it is admitted that there are none or few. Cf. p. 230.
23 p 238, underlined
Our sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist
where we are not; but when we change our place we do not carry away
with us the Permanent Possibilities of Sensation: they remain until we
return, or arise and cease under conditions what? with which our
^
^
presence has in general nothing to do.
[At “they remain”:]
N.B. in space and time.
24 p 239, top
It must be confessed that such worthies as Mill have little
speculative capacity and missed their vocation in becoming philosophers. It is a mere scratching of the surface in
a deep soil of prejudices and verbal conventions. There is
not the least freedom or sweep of mind.
25 p 245, underlined and marked Z
Supposing me to believe that the Divine Mind is simply the series of the
Divine thoughts and feelings prolonged through eternity, that would be,
at any rate, believing God’s existence to be as real as my own.
Poor old weary God!
26 p 276, underlined
||Hamilton on the primary qualities of matter. Mill quotes:|| “The difference between six inches and eighteen inches is expressed to us by the
different degrees of contraction of some one group of muscles; those, for
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:47
example, that flex the arm, or, in walking, those that flex or extend the
lower limb.”
[ Blush here.]
27 p 328
Confusion of physics with dialectic, the implications of fact
with those of intent.
28 p 334
||Our experience does not let us conceive of two straight lines enclosing
space.||
This is really too ridiculous.
29 p 339, underlined
[…] one necessity is always proved by the other. The evidence always
given, and the only evidence which I believe can be given, that we must
think anything as necessary, is that we necessarily think it.
madmen (and philosophers) often think
something necessary which is not so, and vice versa: for
they forget their intent.
30 p 344, underlined
It is not the mental impressions that are latent, but the power of reproducing them. Everyone admits […] that we may have powers and susceptibilities of which we are not conscious.
Potentiality needs to be better defined when so very much
is made to hang upon it.
31 p 366
||Mill says that Brown|| professes to explain the phenomenon of causality.
Hurrah!
32 p 443
As if a concept were not a thing meant but a thing had.
33 p 462, underlined
Logic collects rules for thought grounded on a scientific investigation of
the requisites of valid thought.
How is this?
34 p 477, underlined and marked
If thought be anything more than a sportive exercise of the mind, its purpose is to enable us to know what can be known respecting the facts of
2:48
George Santayana’s Marginalia
the universe: its judgments and conclusions express, or are intended to
express, some of those facts: […].
N.B.
John Stuart Mill
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
London: 1904. Georgetown. 311 marginalia, and ten pencil-sketches.
[More than half the marginalia here consist of Santayana’s suggesting
his terms in place of Mill’s.]
[Title page:]
G Santayana
1905
in re Hyde1
1
See note l, p. 2:42 above.
1 p 3, marked
||Mill’s examples of truths.||
Memory is intuition? This is the “common sense” philosophy.
2 p 4, top
A feeling without an object would be one without a character—since all its characters belong to its object—it would
be an abstract intensity. An object without any intensity
would be a mere idea—not felt and not existent.
3 p 4, underlined
Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility
of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels. No science is required for the purpose of establishing such truths; no rules of art can render our knowledge
of them more certain than it is in itself. There is no logic for this portion
of our knowledge.
This confusion of knowledge with condition or state is the
root of all “idealism”.
If seeing or feeling have no object: but I may have what
I call the toothache and it may be no toothache but a
temptation of the devil. All that the feeling assures me of
is that some thing is wrong—and the optimists would
deny that!
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:49
4 p 5, marked
The province of logic must be restricted to that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; […].
With the claims which any proposition has to belief on the evidence of
consciousness, that is, without evidence in the proper sense of the word,
logic has nothing to do.
Isn’t this fearful!
As if feeling without an object—could evince anything!
5 p 13, marked
||Mill’s advice that to look to the self for truth is to discard the philosophical tradition.||
Transcendentalism
6 p 14, marked
What does any one’s personal knowledge of Things amount to, after
subtracting all which he has acquired by means of the words of other
people?
Quotable maxim.
7 p 17, marked
“A class is the indefinite multitude of individuals denoted by a general
name.”
All divisions in the flux are made by discourse—except
those in discourse itself and in its basis.
8 p 31, underlined
||Mill discusses the ambiguity among early logicians when concrete
names are given to abstractions.|| Being is, by custom, exactly synonymous with substance; except that it is free from a slight taint of a second
ambiguity; being applied impartially to matter and to mind, while substance, though originally and in strictness applicable to both, is apt to
suggest in preference the idea of matter.
To neither, as you understand them.
9 p 34, marked
||Acts of perception|| take their place among the varieties of feelings or
states of mind.
Intent is a state of mind: thus is “logic”.
10 p 34, marked
||Perception of objects such as stones are outside logic; the nature of
intuitive belief.||
2:50
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Wretched. The artifice of this is enough to throw one into
the arms even of a Scotchman.
11 p 42, marked
||On the effort of logicians to avoid the charge of resort to occult causes:||
the very absurdity which Molière so happily ridiculed when he made
one of his pedantic physicians account for the fact that opium produces
sleep by the maxim, Because it has a soporific virtue.
The true answer being: because it has a certain mechanical
structure affecting, in the end, the eyelids and the brain.
12 p 42, underlined
||On the whiteness of snow:|| If it be said that the sensation must have
some cause, I answer, its cause is the presence of the assemblage of phenomena which is termed the object.
[At “presence”:]
O sancta stupiditas!1
1
O holy stupidity!
13 p 43, marked
||Things denoted by names.||
Origins for meaning.
14 p 44, marked
Dawn and sunrise announce themselves to our consciousness by two
successive sensations. Our consciousness of the succession of these sensations is not a third sensation or feeling added to them; […].
Good psychology. No sense for transcendental functions.
15 p 45, marked
[…] it is evident that two different persons cannot be experiencing the
same feeling, in the sense in which we say that they are both sitting at the
same table.
Want of Platonism is want of common sense. As if natures
were not “realities”?
16 p 46
Identity of indiscernibles denied—for want of dialectic and
superfluity of psychology.
17 p 47, underlined and marked
Every attribute of a mind consists either in being itself affected in a
certain way, or affecting other minds in a certain way. […] A mind
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:51
does not, indeed, like a body, excite sensations, but it may excite
thoughts or emotions.
Psychologism in a nut-shell.
[At “minds”:]
not bodies
[At “like a body”:]
here bodies
Horrible muddle! Another mind excites what the idea of
another mind excites—or rather (for this is the fact) what
is predicted of it!
18 p 50
[Santayana quarrels with Mill’s Greek.]
Why not see that means character? The existent is
.
19 p 56, marked
[Concerning “Import of Propositions”:]
To determine what it is that happens in the case of assent or dissent
besides putting two ideas together, is one of the most intricate of metaphysical problems.
Intent
20 p 56, marked
In order to believe that gold is yellow, I must, indeed, have the idea of
gold, and the idea of yellow, and something having reference to those
ideas must take place in my mind; but my belief has not reference to the
ideas, it has reference to the things.
Hurrah! Is this you?
21 p 61, underlined
[…] the proposition is not true because the object is placed in the class.
Origin and essence are constantly confused. What does
Mill mean by “because”? Diamonds are combustible on
account of their mechanical structure: the consequent
transformation is called combustion because it satisfies a
practical definition of that process.
22 p 72
The essence of man, simply means the whole of the attributes connoted
by the word; […].
Essences are nominal. Yes, and names are practical.
2:52
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23 p 73, underlined
[On “Names and Propositions”:]
Individuals have no essences.
No, but they ought to have if they have ideals.
24 p 74
[Locke] distinguished two sorts of essences, Real and Nominal. His nom-
inal essences were the essences of classes […]. Nor is anything wanting to
render the third book of Locke’s Essay a nearly unexceptionable treatise
on the connotation of names, except to free its language from the
assumption of what are called Abstract Ideas, […]. But besides nominal
essences, he admitted real essences, or essences of individual objects,
which he supposed to be the causes of the sensible properties of those
objects.
Locke says the real essence of a thing is its molecular
structure.
25 p 77, marked Z
Animal, […] is a genus with respect to man, or John; […].
Very anti-Aristotelean.
26 p 94
The nature of dialectic is wholly missed here. It is supposed that it is either analytic and barren, or a part of
physics. Intent is taken out of it, and the art of comparing
a development with a premiss is left out of sight.
27 p 100fn, marked
“Few people […] have reflected how great a knowledge of Things is
required to enable a man to affirm that any given argument turns wholly
upon words.”1
1
The source of Santayana’s memorable phrase in Persons and Places ? He
remarks that the Spaniard may be outwardly vain and punctilious, “but
inwardly he knows that he is dust. This is the insight that I express by saying to myself that the only authority in existence is the authority of things.”
Critical edition (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1986), p. 284.
28 p 117
N.B. “expectation” and “possibility” are not the same
thing.
29 p 118
Things are possibilities and attributes are resemblances.
This is a tolerably Platonic or notional metaphysics.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:53
30 p 120, marked
||On possibility; the unreliability of the syllogism, Socrates is a man, etc.||
Unless the general truth be known on authority, say on
the authority of past experience.
[See the next entry.]
31 p 121
This is a confusion of dialectic (some things ideal) with
physics. That the Duke [of Wellington] will die is a physical
presumption: that if he is a man and all men are mortal,
he must die, is a dialectical truth.
32 p 123
||Experience is superior to maxims from books.||
The error here lies in supposing reason to be instrumental at all. Of course our action is governed by particular
habits in particular circumstances. Our thought supervenes to justify or record them: and the justification is a
general idea.
33 p 125, underlined
||Concerning the idea of circles as opposed to|| the particular circle […].
There is some such. Mill seems to think that we are discoursing about an image.
34 p 144, doubly marked
[…] all sciences tend to become more and more Deductive, they are not,
therefore, the less Inductive; every step in the Deduction is still an
Induction.
35 p 147
||The truth of mathematics|| is an illusion; in order to sustain which, it is
necessary to suppose that those truths relate to, and express the properties of, purely imaginary objects.
N.B. Very important: of course the necessity is ideal; the
application being based on induction.
36 p 149, marked
When, therefore, it is affirmed that the conclusions of geometry are
necessary truths, the necessity consists in reality only in this, that they
correctly follow from the suppositions from which they are deduced.
Good.
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37 p 151, marked
That things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another,
is as true of the lines and figures in nature, as it would be of the imaginary ones assumed in the definitions.
? No two “things” are equal.
38 p 153, marked
||Where conviction comes from. Infancy?||
Cf. Descartes & Locke
39 p 190
There are several processes used in mathematics which require to be
distinguished from Induction, being not unfrequently called by that
name, and being so far similar to Induction properly so called, that the
propositions they lead to are really general propositions. For example,
when we have proved with respect to the circle that a straight line cannot meet it in more than two points, and when the same thing has been
successively proved of the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola, it
may be laid down as an universal property of the sections of the cone.
The distinction drawn in the two previous examples can have no place
here, there being no difference between all known sections of the cone
and all sections, since a cone demonstrably cannot be intersected by a
plane except in one of these four lines. It would be difficult, therefore,
to refuse to the proposition arrived at the name of a generalisation,
since there is no room for any generalisation beyond it. But there is no
induction, because there is no inference: the conclusion is a mere summing up of what was asserted in the various propositions from which it
is drawn. A case somewhat, though not altogether, similar, is the proof
of a geometrical theorem by means of a diagram. Whether the diagram
be on paper or only in the imagination, the demonstration […] does not
prove directly the general theorem; […].
[Santayana drew a cone marked with the parabola and the hyperbola
and wrote:]
Where is the ellipse? Why have I forgotten my geometry?
40 p 199, underlined and marked
||Definitions once accepted cannot prevail against new knowledge.
Whewell, in his Philosophy of Discovery allows|| of no logical process in
any case of induction other than what there was in Kepler’s case,
namely, guessing until a guess is found which tallies with the facts; […].
But in my apprehension there is such a thing as proof, and inductions
differ altogether from descriptions in their relation to that element.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:55
Induction is proof; […]. When, on the contrary, we merely collate
known observations, and, in Dr. Whewell’s phraseology, connect them
by means of a new conception; if the conception does serve to connect
the observations, we have all we want. As the proposition in which it is
embodied pretends to no other truth than what it may share with many
other modes of representing the same facts, to be consistent with the
facts is all it requires: […].
This doctrine here opposed is that of Mill’s own metaphysics. A “permanent possibility” is a mere trustworthy
“view”.
41 p 221
This sort of idealism is materialism in suspense.
42 p 238, marked Z
No dialectic. What will justifies is what it desires and pictures its ideal. This is internal to it, though it may need
elaboration.
43 p 245, marked
||Mill refers to|| The Laws of Life […] simple laws of life; […].
Pre-Darwinian.
44 p 251, marked
[…] as in mental philosophy, […].
Strange notion. To apply dialectic to psychology would be
to make it a moral science.
45 p 300, marked
That social phenomena depend on the acts and mental impressions of
human beings never could have been a matter of any doubt, […].
Neither, again, after physical science had attained a certain development, could there be any real doubt where to look for the laws on which
the phenomena of life depend, since they must be the mechanical and
chemical laws of the solid and fluid substances composing the organised
body and the medium in which it subsists, together with the peculiar
vital laws of the different tissues constituting the organic structure. In
other cases really far more simple than these, it was much less obvious
in what quarter the causes were to be looked for, as in the case of the
celestial phenomena.
It is much clearer that life is mechanical than that the sky
is: only the right astronomy hasn’t got so far because the
case, though more obvious, is more complicated.
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46 p 325, marked Z
[Concerning hypotheses:]
In all these cases, verification is proof; if the supposition accords with the
phenomena, there needs no other evidence of it.
Sometimes M. speaks as if a hypothesis were true in itself,
as if verification proved not its validity as a method, but
its truth as a representation of objects potentially sensible.
47 p 436
||On the needs of philosophical language.||
clearness abundance
48 pp 482–83, marked
[On fallacies:]
Persons of timid character are the more predisposed to believe any statement, the more it is calculated to alarm them.
Cf. [Cardinal] Newman.
49 p 496, marked
||Mysticism is a word often used but rarely understood.|| Whether in the
Vedas, in the Platonists, or in the Hegelians, mysticism is neither more
nor less than ascribing objective existence to the subjective creations of
our own faculties, to ideas or feelings of the mind; and believing that by
watching and contemplating these ideas of its own making, it can read in
them what takes place in the world without.
A list of definitions of mysticism would be a curious thing.
Here it is taking concretions in discourse for concretions
in existence and dialectic for physics.
50 p 503
There is no reason why anything should not “cause” anything e.g. mind body & vice versa.
51 p 521, doubly marked
We always find that those are the greatest slaves to metaphorical language, who have but one set of metaphors.
52 p 523, marked
Since what was thought to be perfection appeared to obtain in some
phenomena, it was inferred (in opposition to the plainest evidence) to
obtain in all. “We always suppose that which is better to take place in
nature, if it be possible,” says Aristotle; […].
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:57
53 p 523, marked Z
As late as the Copernican controversy it was urged as an argument in
favour of the true theory of the solar system, that it placed the fire, the
noblest element, in the centre of the universe. This was a remnant of
the notion that the order of nature must be perfect, and that perfection
consisted in conformity to rules of precedency in dignity, either real or
conventional. Again, reverting to numbers: certain numbers were perfect, therefore those numbers must obtain in the great phenomena of
nature. Six was a perfect number, that is, equal to the sum of all its factors; an additional reason why there must be exactly six planets
[Kepler]. The Pythagoreans, on the other hand, attributed perfection to
the number ten; […].
Hegel is not above this
54 p 550, underlined
[On “Liberty and Necessity”:]
||Mill refutes the fatalists’ idea that character is determined and
unchangeable. A man’s|| character is formed by his circumstances,
(including among these his particular organisation,) but his own desire to
mould it in a particular way is one of those circumstances, and by no
means one of the least influential.
[At “desire”:]
Not an original circumstance; not one of the mechanical
factors, but only a literary name for a process involving
several of them.
55 p 551, underlined and marked Z
I shall not here inquire whether it be true that, in the commencement, all
our voluntary actions are mere means consciously employed to obtain
some pleasure or avoid some pain. It is at least certain that we gradually,
through the influence of association, come to desire the means without
thinking of the end: the action itself becomes an object of desire, and is
performed without reference to any motive beyond itself.
Strange!
False appeal to association, as if the overt part of the mind
were baseless.
56 p 555, marked
[On the “Laws of Mind”:]
All states of mind are immediately caused either by other states of mind
or by states of body. […] When a state of mind is produced directly by a
state [of] body, the law is a law of Body, and belongs to physical science.
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
Why? According to your classification they should be
psycho-physical.
57 p 557, marked
The subject, then, of Psychology is the uniformities of succession, the
laws, whether ultimate or derivative, according to which one mental state
succeeds another— […]. The third law is, that greater intensity in either
or both of the impressions is equivalent, in rendering them excitable by
one another, to a greater frequency of conjunction.
Contrary to fact. A vivid accompaniment of the sea—
sea-sickness—does not tend to be recalled when I see the
water from the land. I cannot recall it.1
1
On his numerous voyages, Santayana was always acutely sea-sick, for
which condition he ate arrowroot pudding.
58 p 560, underlined and marked
[…] the idea of some particular pleasure may excite in different persons,
even independently of habit or education, very different strengths of
desire, and this may be the effect of their different degrees or kinds of
nervous susceptibility; […].
What is that? The act called a pleasure by you, or the past
experience called a pleasure by me?
59 p 561, marked
||Mill quotes with approval an essay on Priestley by Martineau:|| “when
nature has endowed an individual with great original susceptibility, he
will probably be distinguished by fondness for natural history, a relish
for the beautiful and great, and moral enthusiasm; where there is but a
mediocrity of sensibility, a love of science, of abstract truth, with a deficiency of taste and of fervour, is likely to be the result.”
Bosh!
John Stuart Mill
Bibliography of the Published Writings
of John Stuart Mill
Edited from his manuscript by Ney MacMinn, J. R. Hainds, J. M. McCrimmon
Evanston, Illinois: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Charles Hubert Millevoye
2:59
Oeuvres de Millevoye
Paris: n.d. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Henry F. Mins
Materialism: The Scientific Bias
New York: 1934. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Various underlinings, but not by Santayana.]
Malcolm M. Moncrieff
The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception:
A New Theory of Vision
London: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
William P. Montague
Great Visions of Philosophy:
Varieties of Speculative Thought in the West from the Greeks to Bergson
La Salle, Illinois: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu
Lettres persanes
Paris: 1928. Waterloo. Nine marginalia.
1 p 31, marked
[Letter xii:]
The troglodytes worked for the benefit of the community. They displayed no qualities other than those that a sweet and tender order of friendship gave rise to. In a
remote countryside, separated from their compatriates, unworthy of their presence,
they led a happy, tranquil life. The very earth seemed to flourish by itself when
cultivated by those virtuous hands.
The ideal of America & the Revolution.
2 pp 164–65, underlined
||The emperor Theodosius caused all the inhabitants of a town, even
women and children, to be put to the sword. When the emperor wanted
to enter a church, the Bishop, named Ambrose, shut the doors to him as
a murderer and sacrilegious man:|| et en cela il fit une action héroïque.
Cet empereur, ayant ensuite fait la pénitence qu’un tel crime exigeoit,
ayant été admis dans l’église, s’alla placer parmi les prêtres; le même
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
évêque l’en fit sortir; et en cela il commit l’action d’un fanatique et d’un
fou: tant il est vrai que l’on doit se défier de son zèle.1
Note the assurance of M. in judging about right & wrong.
A phase of Protestantism in the Deists.
1
… and in that he performed a heroic action. This emperor, having later performed
the penance that such a crime deserved, and having been admitted into the church,
made as though to station himself among the priests. The bishop forced him to leave,
and in that he committed the action of a fanatic and madman, so much so must one
be on guard against his zeal.
Paul Elmer More
Platonism
Princeton: 1917. Georgetown. Eighty-two marginalia.
1 p 4, underlined
But if the existence, even the predominance, of the doubting mood in
Socrates cannot be overlooked, ||he is not to be considered a sceptic.||
2p4
Thus, when a man calls himself a sceptic, it commonly means that he
subscribes to some form of materialistic dogma, […].
Dunce!
3p7
Socrates was not contradicting himself, but was basing his conduct on
a profounder form of scepticism than Pyrrho’s, when, in one and the
same discourse, he avowed that his only wisdom was to know his own
ignorance, yet declared himself ready to face death with this downright
affirmation: “To do wrong and to disobey our superior, whether human
or divine, this I do know to be an evil and shameful thing.”
This is a very shallow interpretation. It is not a dogma that
Socrates falls back on but an institution of morals on freedom of spirit.
4 p 9, underlined
It was one of Socrates’ favorite maxims that no man errs, or sins, willingly, but only through ignorance—a saying hard to reconcile with the
actual conduct of the world, hard to reconcile with the other aspects of
the Socratic doctrine.
Because you don’t understand it. Since morals are freely
instituted, you break your own purpose only if you are
inconsiderate and inconsistent.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:61
5 p 9, underlined
||How can a teacher as a sceptic|| reject the authority of the senses, and
as a mystic avow that his morality depends on a superrational intuition?
oh!
6 p 18
It was just this principle of the innate divine that Protagoras
denied—certainly at least Plato so understood him—when he made
man the measure of truth and avowed that of the gods there was no
way of knowing whether they were or were not.
If he meant reason, it would be formally right. Prudence
wisdom or self-knowledge is the principle of integrity:
humanism & theism are the guarantees of harmony, and
beneficence in integrity.
7 p 25, marked Z
The condemnation of the sophists, as a body, is not that they turned the
current of thought in a new direction, but that they were themselves so
deeply immersed in the popular tide, and lent their weight to its onward
sweep.
N.B. the tide sets towards perdition.
8 pp 30–31, underlined
Here, then, is an issue between philosophy and apparent fact; and if you
solve this difficulty by explaining the equation of virtue and knowledge
after the manner of the utilitarians, as Socrates and Plato did, you forthwith lay yourself open to the charge of throwing away your spiritual
affirmation.
Not really: this is an other case of unintelligence.
9 p 32, underlined
None of these Dialogues is conclusive, and at the end of each the reader
is left in a mood like that of the ancient Persian, who complained that he
had heard great argument “About it and about, but evermore
Came out by the same door where in he went.”
What rot!
10 p 33, marked Z
Each [dialogue] sets out to define a particular virtue […] and ends by
rejecting as inadequate or inconsistent the various proposed definitions.
But through all their inconclusiveness, these two thoughts are continually
before the mind: that in some way which the debaters cannot understand
the diffferent virtues are distinct from one another, yet at the same time
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
merely aspects of one all-embracing virtue; and, secondly, that in some
way, equally obscure to the debaters, this one inclusive virtue is dependent on knowledge.
N.B. What a strange modern blindness to the good !
11 p 45
Callicles is decent enough to admit that some pleasures are in themselves
better than others, and having thus granted the existence of the good, or
the honourable, as a standard outside of pleasures by which we may
grade them, he has virtually given up his case.
He has expressed his character (which has a certain conventional cast) not given up his case.
12 p 53, underlined
So far Plato has come in the Quest: he has shown that the popular view
of morality has the sanction of religion, and that, if only the myth of
future retribution be true, then certainly it is better, measured by the
ordinary standard of happiness, to be just than to be unjust.
True literally, though a myth? O stupidity!
13 p 89, top
This book renders neither the atmosphere of ambiguity,
nor the accent of Socrates and Plato, nor the nerve of the
their philosophy.
14 p 90
No statement of a categorical imperative, no trust in an innate sense of
duty, no exhortation to the love of God or of man, will avail against the
temptations of the world unless the admonition bears with it the promise
of satifying what all men instinctively crave. The heart of man naturally
demands pleasure or happiness, and will not forgo its demand.
But, old fool, how could it be otherwise when the good is
concerned? Have you once mentioned the good?
15 p 99, top
A probable surplus of pleasures is a sign of living according to one’s nature—(if the environment and fortune were
very unfavourable, we could not have done so)—but the
end is this congenial career, including a happy death,
which is a part of happiness or the good.
16 p 109, top
“Moral superstitions or inverted taboos.”
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:63
17 p 115, underlined
||More compares Socrates and J. S. Mill.|| To Mill there was nothing
beyond the decision, nothing (in his philosophy taken literally, that is, for
in his character he was inconsistent) to give validity to the decision of
virtue when it might be weakened by doubts.
Stupid not to see that the question is whether this is
virtue.
18 p 122, marked
It is to be remembered, also, that even in the Phaedo the “body” is really
not so much the material flesh as a symbol for all that part of the soul
which is swayed by the baser desires.
So it is with the Christian ascetics.
19 p 141, underlined
||Plato’s dualism showed the courage of his convictions.|| He was, mainly,
I think, kept in the strait and narrow path by fidelity to his master; and
to understand the nature of that element of the soul in which he placed
human freedom and morality, […].
N.B. This writer is a poor thing.
20 p 145, underlined
||In the Apology, Plato causes Socrates to say that something in his mind
warned him against an act, but never urged him to an act.|| It was this
inhibitive aspect of the Socratic religion which Plato never forgot, and
which justifies us in connecting the daemonic admonition symbollically
[sic] with the principle of liberty and morality in the Platonic psychology.
Monstrous, to identify the love of the good with this feeble arrest!
21 p 149
||Socrates was fearless on the field of battle and unterrified of his imminent death.||
He was a philosopher.
22 p 149, underlined
Hence the vigour of his morality, and the preservation of his chastity
against such attacks of lust as are described with appalling freedom in the
last scenes of the Symposium.
More than that—love.
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23 p 163, underlined
What is the bond between the inner check, or spirit, and the concupiscent element of the soul?
Monstrous!
24 p 164, top
The “scepticism” of Socrates was no doctrine concerning
the non-existence of God, matter, or moral truth: it was
perplexity and suspension of judgment, amounting to
agnosticism in matters of cosmology: but never in ethics.
25 p 165, marked
But to hold, as it has become rather the fashion nowadays, that at a certain moment in his [Plato’s] career he repudiated one theory of Ideas and
adopted a contrary theory, or even that the change in his views was anything more than the natural shifting of interest from one aspect of the
question to another, is, I say flatly, to misconceive totally his philosophic
history.
Yes.
26 p 177
||More attempts to analyze the Platonic doctrine of Ideas.||
The Good is the idea by participation in which all other
things have ideas, or are related to ideals. Ergo, etc.
Generalities (without function & finality) are not ideas.
27 p 180, marked
You will scarcely retain any deep love for what is only a name; you may
conform to the popular rules of justice from habit or for prudential reasons, but, really, one may well be slow in trusting you very far out of
sight, or in placing much reliance on your character—indeed, one may
ask whether, properly speaking, you have such a thing as a character.
[From “one may ask”:]
There is the crux: the reason of the fixity of the good is
the existence of a nature in you.
28 p 195, underlined and marked
Those who dwelt with [Socrates] and understood his manner of speech
knew well enough that all his babble about the pursuit of beautiful bodies was a veil of irony thrown before the hunger of his soul for fulfilment
of its unearthly love.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:65
Yes: and it is so even if you indulge the passion
“Unearthly” in its object, or rather immaterial: but quite
animal in its basis.
29 pp 196–97, underlined and marked
This power of suspension [of acting on desire], which to Locke was the
substitute for the free will, and which I have termed the inner check or,
more precisely in the language of Plato, the daemonic opposition, intervenes between desire and the reaching out for fulfilment. The man has
time to calculate from experience or precept, half unwittingly it may
be, whether it will be better to grant himself this pleasure or to forgo it.
The result of this act of suspension, whether it end in permission or
negation, and whether the judgment of ultimate pleasure and pain be
right or wrong, is the virtue of temperance, and with it comes the feeling of happiness. That is the dialectical certainty, what we know by
immediate and incontrovertible evidence. But with this certainty there
rises before the man’s imagination, if he reflects on his state, the Idea
of temperance as a visible power or presence, so alluring in itself that
beside it the object of his physical desire appears mean and ephemeral.
If his judgment was led to veto that desire, it will seem to him that his
act of restraint was merely the choice in its place of this more desirable
image; the love of the Idea has driven out the baser love of the flesh. If
his judgment granted the desire as good, then it will seem to him as if
this desired object were indeed beautiful, but beautiful only as a
shadow or receptacle of the overflowing loveliness of the Idea.
Good in itself but bad exegesis.
30 p 205, top
N.B. Compare this to the school-master’s ferule: is it the
dynamic centre of education?
31 p 209, underlined
||In his discussion of Science and Cosmogony, More decides that Plato||
would be in accord with the most recent trend of scientific theory.
Pfew! Plato is not interested in the trend of 1910–20 or in
the perhaps opposite trend of 2000.
32 p 213, marked
There is nothing of the “ivory tower” in [Plato’s dialectic], no place for the
dreamer in wisdom or for the antinomian hypocrite; and Plato is as
thoroughly convinced as St. James that faith and works cannot be disjoined. How otherwise could it be in a doctrine wherein the assurance
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
of truth takes the form of happiness attending an active and unremitting
self-government?
This is you at your best: but not Plato.
33 p 213, marked Z
[…] mathematical studies were the only ones sufficiently advanced in
Greece to offer the sort of discipline obtained in our graduate schools
today in many fields of history and linguistic beyond the preparatory and
general education of the college.
Poor dear prof. !
34 p 222, marked Z
The modern conception of natural law, though expressed in the most
strictly scientific terms, will in the end be found to depend on an implicit
trust in the submission of nature to reason and rightness. The chief difference is that the modern man of science, in formulating his general
hypotheses, is likely to be less aware of his mental processes and more
subject to naïve illusions than was Plato.
What quibbles!
35 p 231, marked
||Physical necessity as a substitute for spiritual law gives no stable foundation for conduct. Finally men will want release from such servitude;||
if they cannot discover the way of freedom in the law of the spirit, they
will throw open the gate of the soul to the throng of invading desires,
and the stoical necessity of science, save for the few exceptional minds,
will remain as a theory, while in practice the mass of mankind will follow a rebellious and epicurean individualism.
[From “will remain as”:]
Hurrah for Lenin!
36 p 235, marked
||In Neo-Platonism:|| Evil is merely a contingent of subordinate existence—all of which, to the mind hungering after the truth, is nothing but
“words, words, words.”
How sharp the gentleman is: the religious idealists are
word-eaters, are they? Not altogether.
37 pp 272–73, marked Z
To the true Platonist the divine spirit, though it may be called, and is, the
hidden source of beauty and order and joy, yet always, when it speaks
directly in the human breast, makes itself heard as an inhibition; like the
guide of Socrates, it never in its own proper voice commands to do, but
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:67
only to refrain. Whereas to the pseudo-Platonist it appears as a positive
inspiration, saying yes to his desires and emotions. Goethe unwittingly
was giving expression to the everlasting formula of pseudo-Platonism
when he put into the mouth of Mephistopheles the fateful words: “I am
the spirit that ever denies.” It is God that denies, not Satan. The moment
these terms are reversed, what is reverenced as the spirit becomes a snare
instead of a monitor: liberty is turned into license, a glamour of sanctity
is thrown over the desires of the heart, the humility of doubt goes out of
the mind, the will to follow this or that impulsion is invested with divine
authority, there is an utter confusion of the higher and the lower elements
of our nature.
Samuel Eliot Morison
The Development of Harvard University
Since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929
Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1930. Waterloo. One marginale.
Samuel Eliot Morison
Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936
Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1936. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 308
It is said to have been a combination of clerical , alcoholic, and classi^
cal influence that prevented John Fiske, the brilliant
young^ convert to
Darwinism who graduated in 1863, from obtaining a Harvard tutorship.
2 p 323, marked Z
||Morison paraphrases a speech of Charles W. Eliot, just appointed
president of the university, in 1869:|| Harvard must expand with the
country, must save something for the advancement of learning out of
this scramble for wealth, or the age would pass her by, and the ghosts
of Dunster, Leverett, and Kirkland would rise to reproach her. There
were plenty of rival universities ready to carry the caduceus, if Harvard
slowed up or stumbled.
Style Style Style
Christopher Morley
The Powder of Sympathy
New York: 1927. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Pages 87ff, a chapter entitled “Santayana in the Subway,” concerns
Character and Opinion in the United States.]
2:68
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Kewal Motwani
India: A Synthesis of Cultures
Bombay: 1947. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 pp 276–77, underlined
A vapid religiosity, a meaningless sacerdotalism, an inane emphasis on
secularization of state, all these arise from ignorance and inadequate
appreciation of all that is involved in religion.
I.e. such ecclesiastics and such statesmen who have roots
in the genes [illegible] orders of that society England was an
example of this in the 19th century.
Gustav Emil Müller
Amerikanische Philosophie
Stuttgart: 1936. Waterloo. Twenty-five marginalia.
1 p 16, marked
||The mentality of the Bible-belt still obtains. The Ape-trial in Tennessee
was no exception, but a sign of the continuity of that mentality. The
witch-trials in Pennsylvania are not far in the past. Nevertheless America
remains, in terms of technical progress and in oases, a modern country.
Puritanism lives on; the ideals of Voltairean enlightenment are regarded
as the last word.||
intellectual backwardness
2 p 16, underlined
[On the American Revolution:]
Hier in der Revolution verschmilzt die puritanische Richtung zusammen mit dem liberal-bourgeoisen Aufklärungsdenken und dem
ursprünglichen demokratischen Individuismus des Grenzertums.1
[Santayana enumerates his three underlinings:]
123
1
In the Revolution, the puritanical leaning coalesced with the liberal-bourgeois
thought of the Enlightenment and with the native democratic individuality of the
frontier.
3 p 95, underlined
||Müller describes Henry James’s [senior] attraction to Swedenborg.|| Gott
offenbart sich nur im Menschen, als Mensch.1
This is an indirect confession of the vital if not “moral”
nature of the whole experience.
1
God becomes known only in mankind, as man.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:69
4 p 95
But man has only a “provisional” reality. In truth, his life is God’s life, when he
himself lives or believes he can be master of his life: thus illusion and sin.
You think you are a man, but are really God dreaming
that he has become human.
5 p 99, underlined
[About Ralph Waldo Emerson:]
Er ist der Prophet eines absoluten Moralgesetzes, das sich aber jeder
wirklichen Verpflichtung in der Endlichkeit entzieht, er verkündet ein
Sollen, das nicht Sollen bleiben, sondern zugleich endlich-wirklich sein
soll.1
Aspiration not subjection. The Ought is the potentiality of
the Is.
1
He is the prophet of an absolute moral law, which extricates him, however, from
every real subjection to limitation; he proclaims an obligation which does not remain
an obligation, but at the same time must be so in the end.
6 p 99
Concord the middle point between Rome and Chicago.
7 p 105, underlined
||No one since the Renaissance dreamt of universal man as did Ralph
Waldo Emerson.|| Und keiner hat ihn auf eine solche paradoxe Spitze
getrieben, indem er ihn ganz in das einzelne, empirische Individuum
gesetzt und gezogen hat.1
Only in representation. The play’s the thing.
1
No one has urged him to the top of such a paradox, one in which he has placed
the solitary, empirical human being.
8 p 111, marked X
||Müller describes Royce as “angelsächsischen.”1||
1
Anglo-Saxon. (Royce was Jewish.)
Lewis Mumford
Herman Melville
New York: 1929.
[Professor Richard Lyon’s listing of Santayana’s books at Villa Le Balze
includes this volume, dedicated to Santayana by Mumford, and containing “some” marginalia, on a page or two. The volume does not
appear to have been sent to Georgetown; I have not seen it.]
2:70
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Milton Karl Munitz
The Moral Philosophy of Santayana
New York: 1939. Columbia. Sixty-eight marginalia.
[Three marginalia on pages 11 and 18, are in Cory’s hand.]
1 p 3, underlined
||Santayana’s|| contributions to ontology and the theory of knowledge are
best viewed as outgrowths of an interest in exploring the environment in
which the activities of life take place […].
? Religion was my original interest, and to substitute truth
for fiction in placing human life.
2 p 4, marked
||Santayana’s|| historical affinities […] are with Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle, not with the Romans, Hebrews, or Germans, for [he] seeks to
define the conditions of happiness rather than of righteousness.
Good!
3p5
||Munitz analyses Santayana’s theory of morals.||
All this is slightly out of focus, and too “activistic”.
4 p 6, underlined
Happiness, the general name for all positive human values, as Aristotle
long ago pointed out, itself needs neither justification nor praise.
5 p 9, underlined
||In The Life of Reason, Munitz finds an attitude|| to be recognized as
post-rational […] and therefore one to be smilingly overcome by the
energetic hopefulness of the proponent of a rational ethics.
? Interest in a good society with friendship and beauty in
it. M. is studious and just, but not sympathetic. He doesn’t
know how I felt.
6 pp 10–11, underlined
He has been able, as perhaps few other contemporary philosophers have
been, to present a successful restatement of certain orthodox positions
that together combine to fill out a thoroughgoing naturalistic theory in
metaphysics, methodolgy, and ethics.
This is all I should desire to have done.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:71
7 p 13
||Concerning Santayana’s belief in common sense, Munitz writes that||
the complex total of activities, institutions, beliefs, and ideals of human
life are accessible and do not need proof.
N.B. the stars are left out, and even the cities. M. slides
into literary psychology.
8 p 15
A rationally practical life begins when, by joining impulse and imagination, enlightenment is given to the former and practical efficacy to the
latter.
Not my words.
9 p 17, underlined
||Transcendentalism assumes that|| “a spontaneous constructive intellect
cannot be a trustworthy instrument, that appearances cannot be the
properties of reality, and that things cannot be what science finds that
they are.”1
Here is a genuine difference between S the 1st
and '' '' 2nd. I still say
that some may be properties of “reality”, and all may be
signs of it. But it is only physical reality that is so remote
from intuitive sympathy. The other realms are more open
to inspection.
1
Munitz here refers to Reason in Science (Scribner’s, 1906), 310.
10 p 22, underlined
Instead of considering essences, as Santayana generally does, to be
ontologically antecedent objects that subsist prior to existence, […]
they are regarded as natural creations or poetic themes […], for they
are products of the imagination, structures embodied in the limitless
languages that the mind can construct, forms that a fertile imagination
can freely contrive.
This is an inexcusable mis-statement. A theme is neither a
creation nor a prior “subsistent”. It is a theme found. Is
the number 2 a creation or a prior subsistent?
11 p 23
||Munitz calls spirit a trope.||
Spirit is not a trope.
2:72
George Santayana’s Marginalia
12 p 26–27
Nature is dynamic, a matter of beginnings and endings, of potentialities
and actualities, of growth and decay. Nature is as much the seat of values and ideals (since man who is a part of nature may experience values
and strive for ideals) as of mechanism and blind causation. It is as thoroughly qualitative as it is quantitative, as much logical as it is physical.
The sphere of nature is the unified totality of whatever it produces and
contains. All distinctions found within this universe are discoveries of its
diversely qualified and related contents.
This passage is excellent.
13 p 27
||In Scepticism and Animal Faith Santayana sets forth a theory of knowledge that casts doubt on his naturalism.|| The procedure is that of transcendentalism, the conclusion—agnosticism. ||He takes over problems||
bequeathed to modern philosophy by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and
seeks an answer to those problems in terms of the assumptions common
to the characteristic epistemologic inquiries of these philosophers. The
result is no more satisfactory than the conclusions arrived at by Hume or
Kant or Spencer.
Descartes’ method ignored! Of course it is Descartes that
I follow in my scepticism.
14 p 33
||Munitz quotes Santayana early and late concerning science. From
Reason in Science, 319, science|| “contains the sum total of our rational convictions and gives us the only picture of reality on which we should care
to dwell.” ||And from Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy, p. 79:||
From the point of view of an agnosticism such as his later writings
develop, […] “science, when it is more than the gossip of adventure or
of experiment, yields practical assurances couched in symbolic terms,
but no ultimate insight.”
This is an excellent confrontation of texts. It shows the two
sides of knowledge or mind, sufficient as an entertainment
but inadequate as a report. In the L of R I1 was studying
the entertainment. I was younger.
1
Reason in Common Sense (Scribner’s, 1905).
15 p 35
||Santayana follows the Cartesian tradition in modern philosophy.||
Yes.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:73
16 p 35
Active reflection is a psychic process. For spirit, reflection
is only a change of perspective.
17 p 37, underlined
||Santayana is an ontologic dualist, leaning on both Locke and Plato for
his ontology.|| Santayana transforms the ideas that intervene as a screen
between the spirit and the external world into a realm of timeless universals, […].
Yes, in the sense that they become pure words and no
longer, as in Locke, intervening objects, or as in Plato,
supernatural powers. Words are vehicles and not obstacles
to knowledge.
18 p 39, underlined
For the philosopher, intent upon viewing things in the light of the eternal
and the infinite, the realm of essence provides the ultimate standard and
goal of insight.
Not a standard, since it is infinite, but a sufficient theme
when the natural goal of some psychic movement. Cf.
music.
19 p 88, underlined
||Munitz criticizes Santayana’s detachment, remarking that he construes
the spiritual life in two incompatible ways: as a life of understanding, and
as a life of escape from existence,|| as a disintoxication from all ideals, as
a reversion to the immediately given that in itself possesses no meaning
nor significance.
Loving all children equally is radically incompatible with
natural fatherhood, but it is not incompatible with the
existence of some monks in a rational society, nor with an
element of charity to all in the American family.
[At bottom:]
Spiritual life is not “engaged in inquiry”. It is a culmination concomitant with all life; but in anxious inquiry there
is an element of slavery and distraction.
20 p 92, underlined
In general, then, the spiritual life is not a release from preoccupation with
existence, if by this anything more is meant than a provisional detachment from the pursuit of those activities which characterize the practical
life.
2:74
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Munitz is not as lucid as usual. Pre-occupation is impediment, occupation may be expression & mastery.
21 p 98, underlined and marked Z
The proper function of spirit, in passing beyond good and evil, is “to see
such things as come in its way under the form of eternity, in their intrinsic character and relative value, in a word, in their truth.”1
This is not a fair account. Why not quote the text as in the
L. of R.? Because the text here w’d destroy his misrepresentations.
1
Platonism and the Spiritual Life, 33.
22 p 99, underlined
||Concerning Santayana’s phrase, the “disintoxication from values”:|| For
it would seem that if we are to take this as a serious claim to having overcome completely the necessity for distinguishing good from evil, on all
levels of vital endeavor, then we are left with an evident condition.
Does M imagine that beauty and love are excluded by me
from the spiritual life?
Is this accurate? Cf. the text. It is the illusion of exclusiveness, not the fact of excellence, that is to be banished from
things.
23 p 100, underlined
For if we grant, as Santayana asks us to do, that the proper function of
spirit “is to see such things as come in its way under the form of eternity,
in their transitiveness and necessity, in a word, in their truth,”1 […] then
evidently the good of the intellect, which consists precisely in this ability
to see things in their necessity and their truth, remains as one value from
which there can be no disintoxication, […] from values, it still remains
true that the disintoxication itself is but with respect to certain values,
while leaving others intact. It is impossible to negate all ideals and to
elude all interests except by death.
[At “disintoxication”:]
There is a trick of some sort here. Of course, “intellect” is
that which disintoxicates life, and makes it truly good. Cf.
St. Thomas on the Beatific Visions or Dante’s Saints.
[At “leaving others intact”:]
Certainly: has salvation no “value”?
1
Platonism and the Spiritual Life, 33.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:75
24 p 102
To lead the spiritual life is to understand and to act in accordance with
that which is morally relevant to life as a whole. Ideals acquire validity in
their applicability to material conduct and affairs. The spiritual man is
not apart from the world; rather by his elevated and penetrating vision
he is brought into closer contact with its essential and ultimate values.
All the saints have been Deweyites.
25 p 103
Yet this all-inclusive charity toward every possible good, besides tending
to obliterate the distinction between physics and morals, tends in the
end to serve as a justification for whatever pre-rational, barbarous ideals
may happen to exist. And when we find Santayana telling us that
“understanding relieves a truly intelligent man from fussiness about
social institutions and conventions [because] they are absurd,”1 we seem
to be confronted with an apologetic for reigning conventions and a willingness to submit to the powers that be, that cannot but appear as the
very abdication of intelligence in the face of irrationality. It leaves the
field open for all sorts of fanaticisms to arise and contest for domination
in the world.
This lets the cat out of the bag.2
1
Genteel Tradition at Bay, 71.
Munitz’s criticism and Santayana’s weak response indicate the naked
confrontation between the standard, liberal position of the 1930s, and
Santayana’s attempt to rise above thrusting, social issues after a decade of
economic depression.
2
26 p 105
[At top:]
It is the moral collapse of America rather than of Europe
that disenchants me. It was nicer in the 1890’s. In Europe
there is fresh inspiration.1
[Marked Z:]
||Munitz finds disparity between Santayana’s spiritual values and his
naturalism, and his enunciation of them early and late.|| But whereas in
the earlier writings the stimulus for adopting a contemplative attitude
was the confrontation of the world-view of science with that of religion,
in the latest writings, it is the increased confusion of the social world,
reflecting a maladjustment of political and economic forces, that gives
ground for the attempt to rise to an otherworldly contemplation of
essences and a complete disintoxication from moral values.
2:76
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Here a false ground is alleged. Never my feeling, but I was
interested in “culture”.
moral rather than spiritual, although of course morality is
a spiritual experience and presupposed in salvation.
1
This in 1939–40.
27 p 106
Like the otherworldly emphasis of Christianity, Santayana’s conception
of the spiriutal life recalls the spirit from its concern with the intelligible
structure of nature and the natural ideals of human life, to a world
beyond. It is essentially a variant of the advice to render unto Caesar
those things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s, and
of the belief that the Kingdom of God is within us.
Not bad company. Better than New York!1
1
To the seasoned reader, this translates into one more expression of
anit-semitism.
28 p 106, underlined
The realm of essence […] is a world of Platonic Ideas that has been
romantically extended in infinite directions. Happiness is now sought
in the free play of fancy […], the varied imaginative excursions into
which are to be enjoyed in their immediacy as subjective impressions,
significant as indications neither of natural conditions nor of possible
moral ideals.
Not fair.
Thomas Munro
Scientific Method in Æsthetics
New York: 1928. Georgetown. Six marginalia.
29 p 96
||Formal and psychic factors relating to judgments of value in works of
art need verification and clarity.|| The result will be no single definition
of “beauty” or standard of æsthetic value. Æsthetics inherits from
Platonism an exaggerated respect for the importance of this and similar
very broad and “fundamental” words. It is dissatisfied with any standard
which is not couched as a brief absolute definition of beauty or goodness, for all persons at all times.
Constant confusion of truth with true opinion or final
dogma.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Thomas Munro
2:77
Great Pictures of Europe
New York: 1930. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Guy Murchie
Saint Croix: The Sentinel River
New York: 1947. Waterloo. One marginale.
John Middleton Murry
God: Being an Introduction
to the Science of Metabiology
London: 1929. Waterloo. 221 marginalia.
[Santayana’s careful reading of this work by a literary charlatan may
perhaps be explained by the dedication to him, “to whom this book
owes much more than the author could plainly indicate, from John
Middleton Murry November 21 1929.”]
1 p 36, marked
||Murry writes a chapter of autobiography. After the sensation of complete isolation, he describes being bathed in warm light, feeling no
menace in the universe, and being part of it.|| […] I belonged, and
because I belonged I was no longer I, but something different, which
could never be afraid in the old ways […].
The ego transferred to the non-ego: not such a mysterious
operation, since it is all putative.
2 p 41, marked
||A description of mystical experience after reading Meister Eckhart:|| I
concluded […] that Christianity was an accidental accompaniment of
such experience.
Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans have it too.
3 p 45
I discerned, or thought I discerned, an intimate relation between Jesus
and Shakespeare. Take the primary conviction of the existence of God
away from Jesus, I thought, and you have a Shakespeare.
What fudge!
2:78
George Santayana’s Marginalia
4 p 52, marked
||To do what one likes is not easy, but for Murry, it is hard.|| For to know
what you really like means to know what you really are; and that is a
matter of painful experience and slow exploration.
Nothing is more classical than self-knowledge.
5 p 61, marked Z
||Murry decided to write a life of Jesus:|| if this is presumption, criticism
that is serious is in duty bound to presume, for there is nothing between
presumption and incomprehension.
There is discipleship.
6 pp 64–65, underlined
||Christ was not the Messiah; he was rejected.|| Yet what could he have
done, being rejected? He could not deny his experience, or recant his
teaching. The experience was real, the teaching was true. Had he refused
to go onward, his very name might have been lost for ever.
Really, the motives & “experience” ascribed to Christ are
blasphemous.
7 p 67, underlined
||On the death of Keats and the death of Jesus: Christ would not have
required him to sacrifice Keats to Jesus.|| To the Jesus who was real to me,
Keats would have been a brother, […].
N.B.
8 p 78, underlined
||Good Friday, 1929: If Christ was alive, he would be with the people in
the pubs.|| ‘The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath,’ was
probably the occasion of the traditionalists’ resolve to destroy him, would
have been found at Southend rather than St. Paul’s.
How hopelessly wrong a Protestant view of Jesus is!
9 p 79
He [Murry] thinks of a Christ looking for his own sentiments,
instead of pitying and forgiving.
10 p 80, underlined
||Of the physical resurrection of Christ:|| It would distress me greatly to
be condemned to live in a universe in which an event so stupid might
happen; […].
The intelligentsia speaks.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:79
11 p 87, top
The Bloomsbury perspective of the universe
12 p 87, underlined
By that resurrection in which [ Jesus] affirmed his belief he obviously
meant some new mode of existence wherein human relations of the kind
we know are transcended.
Protestants confuse the body with the world: but there
might be bodies in heaven, just as there are stones in a
church.
13 pp 87–88
To imagine that he, a Jew, at any time in his life claimed to be God, or
the son of God in any sense other than that in which, as he believed, all
men were sons of God, is fantastic.
Wasn’t St. Paul a Jew too?
14 p 95, underlined
What Jesus preached and taught was not anarchy; […].
No: because he had no hostility to any order. It was not
preaching in that sense: it was monition & insight.
15 p 102, underlined
||In 1929 it may be foolish to have a concept of God and to believe in it.||
It was assuredly not foolish nineteen hundred years ago in Galilee to
believe in God.
What stupidity! As if imagination were literal!
16 p 106, top
||Concerning Christ’s mystical certainty.||
Wasn’t the “mystical certainty” simply commonplace oriental insight? And wasn’t the coming of the kingdom something else, earthy, Jewish, humanitarian, revolutionary?
17 p 109
No man […] in such extremity [as Christ’s], can go forward with open eyes
to his own annihilation.
Why not?
18 p 112, marked Z
[…] to be prepared to introduce the category of the supernatural into my
thinking, would be mental and spiritual suicide. A world which at a certain point, no matter how far distant in time, ceased for a period to
belong to the natural order, is no world for me, a man of the twentieth
2:80
George Santayana’s Marginalia
century, to contemplate or live in: it would be a cheap and vulgar world,
from which it would be my duty as a man to escape immediately.
But then that would be the truly natural order. The 20th
century be damned.
19 pp 134–35
||There are two kinds of knowledge: mystical and intellectual;|| they cannot meet in combat or contradiction.
Intuition is not knowledge at all. It is feeling with a diversified image.
20 p 159, marked
An age which can take Behaviourism seriously as a psychology might be
said to be ignorant of the Soul for the simple reason that it had lost it.
21 p 169, marked Z
There is organic unity attainable by man, and there is an organic unity
in the Universe, […].
Why should “organic” be a magical word?
22 p 173
||Many of the works of man are ugly.||
Many animals are hideous
23 p 178, underlined and marked
[…] the suffering God was a tremendous creation; it came nearer to the
truth of things than any religious imagination had done before: nearer
than any of the sublime speculations of the Greeks. […] Essentially, this
amazing evolution of religion was the effort of man to find order in the
world of his experience.
Osiris? Mithra?
[At “amazing”:]
Not at all: you are not at home in ancient religion.
24 pp 182–83, marked Z
‘Value’ is creative newness in the organic process of the universe; […].
The creative newness of Jesus was inevitably death to the biological individual, but it was Life to the process as a whole. It became the focus of
centuries of conscious and unconscious effort in successive generations of
men: a new type had arisen, to which according to their metabiological
potentialities a succession of individuals responded.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:81
“Response to value” is a movement in a direction toward
which the organism is predisposed. Otherwise it woud not
be a “value”. “Meta” is therefore de trop.
25 p 185, underlined
||In the post-Christian world, life is to be obeyed willingly even to death;
it is not the life-force giving us the excuse to do as we wish, but life|| as it
came to self-awareness and act in the unity of himself, a strange new creature with a new delicacy of sensibility and a new passionate instinct to
live and to understand.
Chelsea & Bloomsbury.1
1
And the writings of D. H. Lawrence.
26 p 189
An organic response, relatively to human nature, is one in which intellect and emotion and will are equally participant and equally satisfied.
This complete Naturalism, therefore, should have the effect of precluding that extreme conflict between intellect and emotion, and the consequent paralysis of the will, upon which the mystical experience has been
shown to supervene.
[At top:]
There was no conflict of intellect with emotion except in
th
the XIX century. The conflict was between prosperity &
disaster, passion and passion.
27 p 202, marked
Anyone who wishes to understand human history must understand religion; […] the effort to understand religion is incumbent upon all who
seek self-knowledge.
Socrates?
28 p 206, marked
||Rascals are as prevalent as in the middle ages.||
By making “value” “objective” you have made it
non-moral: i.e. worthless. Brothels have maintained
themselves, therefore, etc.
29 p 208
The facts with regard to ‘highness’ and ‘lowness’ are simply that such
descriptions of variations are themselves variations.
Are you a Behaviourist! Fie!
2:82
George Santayana’s Marginalia
30 p 224, marked Z
||Christ was slain for his perfection.|| That is the central meditation of the
Christian faith. And everyone who dares to meditate it, be he Christian
or unbeliever, knows that in that evil there was good, in that pain joy,
and in that death a victory.
Misunderstanding. Good could come out of it, or could
overcome it. It was never itself good.
31 p 229, underlined
||On joining the Catholic Church:|| It asks no greater sacrifice than Little
Bethel or the Church of England; and it does not insult your intelligence
by inviting you to become a member of a contradiction in terms—the
church of England?
O dear, but it is so un-English!
32 p 249, underlined
Reality is the pure phenomenon, and there is no other.
Brute fact, he means.
33 p 252, marked Z
The function of the human being is to maintain all possible organic
responses. Organic responses are infinitely various. They may be emotional, or intellectual, or animal. What has to be done is to recognize
them clearly for what they are. They are not all compatible with one
another; many of them will certainly be in open or sullen warfare with
each other. Some of them will probably appear to the individual
damnable and horrible, and he will be doing his utmost to hide them.
His duty is to get them into consciousness.
Why talk like this?
34 p 256
[One] must learn that the most blessed gift of all the gods to men (as
Goethe said) is Patience.
You mean Impatience.
35 pp 263–64, marked
[…] I believe that [D. H. Lawrence] has been instinctively aware that the
attempt to decide about Jesus would be truly perturbing to himself.
Whereas I am in no danger of discovering that I am like the founder of
Christianity; D. H. Lawrence veritably is. He happens to be more like
him than any man who has lived for the past fifty years, unless perchance
it were that other anti-Christian, Friedrich Nietzsche.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:83
Think of a man who says this attempting to write a “Life
of Jesus”!1
1
Murry had discussed such a project earlier in his text.
36 p 289, marked Z
||On pure contemplation, the wonder in seeing that a simple object
exists.|| This is that ‘awe before the pure phenomenon,’ which Goethe
tried to describe, and which (if we are not mistaken) gives ontological
ultimacy in Mr. Santayana’s metaphysic. It is, in our description, pure
and total organic contact with the real.
Goethe meant facts, or fact as observed.
37 p 297, marked
The metabiological is just as biological as the biological itself.
Why use such jargon?
38 p 301
There is a pathetically eager welcome for the physicist or the logician
who dallies with the notion that there may be something (even very
much) in mysticism.
Eddington & Whitehead.
39 p 316, underlined
I am not a genius; but neither am I a fool. If the truth stared me in the
face for so long, and I could not see it, perhaps it must be a difficult truth.
And yet, there it is, obvious, before me; and so far as I am able to judge,
I am absolutely sane. I have indeed a feeling of sanity such as I have
never experienced in my life before.
[At “am I a fool”:] ?
[At “sanity”:]
To feel sane is to be sane: I was never sane before; when
shall I be sane again?
John Middleton Murry
Studies in Keats
London: 1930. Georgetown. Thirty-three marginalia.
1 p 36
[“The Meaning of ‘Endymion’.”]
‘What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth’ appears to mean
that what the Imagination conceives as Beauty must be actually existent,
‘whether it existed before or not’.1
2:84
George Santayana’s Marginalia
“I am sure of the right which the Heart has to assert the
excellence of that which it loves. All the passions create
true excellence, whether their objects ever exist or not.”
It is evidently the poet’s mission to feel and to praise such
perceived excellence, such a truly beautiful Beauty. Is this
what K. meant?
1
Quotation from Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bailey as he was writing the
poem.
2 pp 47–48, marked
This sensuality of the imagination consists in seeking in the creatures
of imagination a substitute for that specific physical satisfaction of
which the biological man is in need. […] The sensuousness of the creative imagination is biologically disinterested. But sensuality of the
imagination is the sign of a temporary failure in the process of transmutation. The biological desire which was being wholly transformed
into metabiological creation now asserts itself as biological desire; the
imagination becomes biologically interested. This distinction, which
though generally disregarded is of the utmost importance in any real
examination of the vexed question of pornography, […].
Did [D. H.] Lawrence transmute?
3 p 54
[Murry quotes from the prelude to Keats’s Endymion: ]
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine
Full alchemiz’d and free of space.
N.B.
4 p 61
No ultimate truth is true, except we love it. Unless it awakens love, it is
merely a fact and alien to us. Love alone will change fact into Truth. And
this, however strange it sound, is no foolish fancy. For Love is a faculty
of understanding, and unless it enters into and transmutes our knowledge
of fact, we cannot really know. […]
That is what Keats meant when he declared that ‘Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty’; and that is what he had glimpsed when he wrote
Endymion.
Unless I love the facts—or at least the essence I see in
them—I do not see their beauty: and they truly have this
beauty in relation to such a loving apprehension. But what
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:85
is the sense of saying that they have it absolutely or intrinsically? Their “Truth”, according to you, is only another
name for their Beauty; it arises when they are loved
5 p 69, marked Z
[Murry quotes Keats’s well-known letter to his brothers of 19 March
1819:]
“May there not be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though
instinctive, attitude my mind may fall into as I am entertained with the
alertness of the Stoat and the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in
the street is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. The
commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel. [Seen] by a superior
Being our reasonings may take the same tone—though erroneous they
may be fine. This is the very thing in which consists Poetry … ”
With that perfect and inevitable conclusion we have a complete
manifestation of the mood of ‘diligent indolence’. One might describe
it as the organic advance to an organic self-awareness. Poetry is the
reintegration into organic unity of the would-be autonomous Mind.
When the Mind, as it were, behaves as the pure instinct that it veritably is, when it becomes the willing instrument of the total organism,
instead of its separated lord,—then Poetry appears.
[At “One might describe”:]
Isn’t there a confusion here between love and assimilation? To love or to write poetry you must assert yourself
as master of the other.
6 p 78
||The words “beauty” and “truth” recur frequently in Keats’s letters.||
They are at the core of his famous definition: ‘The excellence of every
art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from
their being in close relationship to Beauty and Truth.’
Intuition mastering the will. Cf. Schopenhauer.
7 p 81, underlined and marked Z
The relation between [beauty and truth] is simple and inextricable. When
we love a Fact, it becomes Truth; when we attain that detachment from
our passions whereby it becomes possible for us X to love all Facts,
^ ^be loved, it is not
then we have reached our Peace. If a Truth cannot
Truth, but only Fact. But the Fact does not change, in order that it may
become Truth; it is we who change. X All Fact is beautiful; it is we who
have to regain our innocence to see^its^Beauty.
2:86
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Not as fact. That would be wickedness. Only the essence
which may (or may not) appear in the facts. For Beauty is
fiction even before it is “Truth”.
8 p 116
||Murry quotes I. A. Richards:|| “A pseudo-statement is ‘true’ if it suits and
serves some attitude or links together attitudes which on other grounds
are desirable.”
“Vital lies”
W. A. Neilson and A. H. Thorndike
The Facts about Shakespeare
New York: 1913. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Ralph Nevill
Floreat Etona: Anecdotes and Memories of Eton College
London: 1911. One marginale.
[On Richard Lyon’s list at Villa Le Balze; not at Georgetown.]
Marius Paul Nicolas
De Nietzsche à Hitler
Paris: 1936. Waterloo. Eighty-four marginalia.
1 p 10, marked
||Nietzsche’s mission: to hold nothing sacred.||
This suggests respect for truth.
2 p 17
||Benda said that all Nietzsche’s work was the work of a fanatic.||
Unbridled spontaneity = madness.
3 p 19
||Nietzsche held Christ responsible for the St. Bartholemy massacres and
the other autos da fé committed in his name.||
A protestant who has his own historical Jesus
4 p 20
||Nietzsche knew that his thought was difficult and would not be understood.|| Isn’t it odd that his companions answered: “It’s of little import to us what
you said! Let us just see what the crowd has understood.”
The point is to understand what the crowd had in it. The
misunderstood great man is content to understand himself.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:87
5 p 24, underlined
||Nietzsche quoted:|| “Nulle souffrance, disait-il, n’a pu ni ne pourra me
tenter de donner un faux témoignage sur la vie.”1
This is not at all the truth. It is rather gaia scienza.2
1
“No amount of suffering,” he said, “can nor could tempt me to bear false witness
to life.”
2
The gay science.
6 pp 26–27, marked
||Nietzsche on the social lies of our civilization:|| “To speak idiocies to children but not to tell them truths, to say polite nothings to women but not truth,
to speak to young people about their future, their pleasures, and not at all of
realities,” that is what seemed to him wrong, the eternal abdication from effort,
the eternal submission to prejudice.
“Truth” = spontaneity, poetic freedom? Subjectivity is too
deep in N. for him to be consistent.
7 p 28
Partout où l’on dit: “La vérité est là”, il répond: “On ment.”1
So that the love of truth is expressed by living merrily
without it.
1
Wherever they say to him, “The truth lies there,” he answers: “They lie.”
8 p 29, top
Truth descriptive: before all description must be existence, reality, actuality. This must also lie beyond.
9 p 43, doubly marked
A clerc1 who would stop “thinking against” [i.e. critically] would cease to be a
clerc.
N.B. Definition of “clerc” = fault-finder.
1
Scholar, intellectual.
10 p 43
||Belief in law, or right, unites Hitler and Hindenburg.||One has seen that
“belief ” does not unite Hitler and Nietzsche.
It is true that Nietzsche thought of vital force, not of
armies & police. He thought of health and the dance.
11 p 49, doubly marked
||A quotation from Nietzsche’s posthumous work:|| “Je connais la volupté
que renferme le malheur de la connaissance.”1
1
I am familiar with the pleasure attending the sickness of the understanding.
2:88
George Santayana’s Marginalia
12 p 53, underlined and marked X
||From Thus Spake Zarathustra: || “L’art est le plus fulgurant symbole de
l’oppression du peuple par les élites.”1
[At bottom:]
There is some confusion here between intellectual pride
and material domination. The super-man is bitterly realistic (intelligent) but for that very reason despises the impotent intelligentsia. This is what Benda feels, & he tries to
revenge himself by degrading Nietzsche into a brutal
Nazi. But the Nazis, too, have intellectual superiority to
prejudice. That is what these gents don’t see.
1
Art is the most blazing symbol of the oppression of the people by the elite.
13 p 56
Presque tous les génies de la pensée romantique cultivent cet étrange
^
^
sentiment dont parle Nietzsche lui-même,
ce “sentiment
de haine, de
vengeance et de révolte contre tout ce qui est déjà, contre tout ce qui ne
devient plus”.1
1
Almost all the geniuses of romantic thought cultivate the odd idea of which
Nietzsche himself speaks, this “feeling of hatred, of revenge and revolt against what
already is, against whatever cannot again be.”
14 p 62, underlined
“Quatre couples d’hommes ne se sont pas refusés à moi,” écrit Nietzsche:
“ce sont Epicure et Montaigne, Gœthe et Spinoza, Platon et Rousseau,
Pascal et Schopenhauer.”1
!
1
“Four pairings of men have not rejected me,” Nietzsche wrote: “they are ….”
15 p 69, underlined
For the Chancellor, Hitler, what makes the greatness of a man, “ce n’est pas la
richesse de ses facultés intellectuelles, mais sa propension à mettre toutes
ses capacités au service de la communauté”.1
This is not to be guided by the masses, but to guide them,
of course for the good of themselves.
1
It is not the abundance of his intellectual qualities, but his proclivity to place all
his abilities to the service of the community. [Mein Kampf ]
16 p 71
||In Zarathustra, Nietzsche was original in inventing the idea of the true
masters to legislate for the world.||
There is Plato’s Republic.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:89
17 p 75
||Concerning Nietzsche’s superman:||
If the superman governs, is his superiority that of a governor or of a pure intelligence?
18 p 78, top
Did Nietzsche want a theocracy?
19 p 82, underlined
||Benda said that Nietzsche doesn’t admit a doctrine because it is just or
good,|| “mais parce qu’elle incarne bien la morale de son temps1 ….”
This is true of Hegel.
1
Because it embodies the morality of his time.
20 p 86, top
Things are the measure of thought when thought is about
them: thought is its own measure when it is about nothing:
when it merely define [sic] its own ideas.
21 p 91
||Nietzsche recognized his ideas as Utopian. Benda defined the ideals of
the clerc as Utopian.||
Utopia, sport, earnestness without seriousness.
22 p 105
||Nietzsche on Christian dogma.||
Nietzsche is often ignorant.
23 p 109
||Nietzsche’s call to love life not only for the good and the beautiful,||
mais de 1’aimer encore dans ce qu’elle a de mal, de tragique ou d’affreux.1
Why? This is a new reversal of values.
1
… but to love it also in what it offers of evil, of tragedy or frightfulness.
24 p 142
||German anti-semitism, abundantly described, from Hitler’s Mein Kampf
to the diatribes of Rosenberg.||
[At top:]
You can’t get one Chosen People to love another.1
1
Here Santayana is not only anti-semitic but also cynical.
2:90
George Santayana’s Marginalia
25 p 154
||Nietzsche’s criticism of socialist culture, of Spencer’s industrial state, of
Barrès’ nationalism, the primacy in France of the intelligentsia:|| la France
représente à ses yeux “le refuge de la culture la plus intellectuelle” […].1
1880’s “Culture” is an intellectual brothel.
1
France represents in his eyes “the refuge of the most intellectual culture.”
26 p 155
||The League of Nations: everyone sees his neighbor as neither black nor
white, but grey, which is not the color of flags.||
N.B.
27 p 155, underlined
“Hélas! s’écrie Renan, depuis le commencement du monde, on n’a pas
encore vu une aimable nation.” L’avis de Stendhal est plus net: “Rien
n’est bête, dit-il, “comme une nation.”1
Beauties in the house opposite? 2
1
“Alas,” cries Renan, “since the beginning of the world, one has never seen a lovable nation.” Stendhal’s opinion is more precise: “Nothing is so stupid,” he says, “as
a nation.”
2
Santayana unaccountably detested Stendhal, whom he may have
regarded as a romantic, thus ignoring his neo-Classical side.
28 p 159
||Nietzsche wanted to create a new Europe and a new caste of chosen
men, superior to their culture and will,|| to put an end to the endless comedy
of petty politics.
Nietzsche a patron of Geneva, with Calvin and Wilson?
29 p 160
||Further to Nietzsche’s vision of the new Europe as a world center for the
exchange of ideas:|| he dreamed of the “fusion of nations.”
He wanted to be a Maenad of the mind.
This dates Nietzsche. He was a genius: but in politics he
was an aesthete
30 p 161, bottom
The mistake is to transfer to a nation what Nietzsche
desired for the Spontaneous Me. Yet it is true, against
this criticism, that the defiance of reality is equal in both
forms of self-agrandisment [sic ]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:91
31 p 165
||Nietzsche wrote:|| True heroism consists in not fighting at all.
The Martyr
32 p 169
La guerre aussi est une source d’énergie.1
Much more of virtue. How admirable the English were
during the [Great] war, and how contemptible they are
now! [1936]
1
War is also a source of energy.
33 p 176, marked Z
||Nietzsche saw wars of religion as forms of progress, for they were conflicts for what he saw as the idea of progress, as opposed to territorial
wars.||
Absolute reversal of the truth. Territorial wars are
inevitable, because bodies are competitors for space &
food: but wars for ideas are fanatical, mad, & needless;
and end by enslaving the spirit of the material victor.
Nine
[Literary periodical.] Nos. 1–11, Autumn 1949–April 1956
Waterloo. One marginale.
Albert Jay Nock
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
New York and London: 1943. Waterloo. Thirty-three marginalia.
[Marginalia includes several corrections of grammar and spelling.]
1 p 20, marked
[…] Ruskin’s observation that “travel becomes uninteresting in exact proportion to its rapidity” applies as well to commuters’ travel […].
2 p 28, underlined
||The first music to stay in Nock’s memory was|| a few measures from the
final chorus in the second act of la Traviata.
third?
3 p 120, underlined
||Against the state control proposed by reformers:|| The control would
again be taken over by the most sagacious among the poor mass-men,
they would become rich, […].
2:92
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Not if they were employed on a just salary as officials and
inheritance were abolished.
4 p 146, marked
As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country is where the
things he loves are most respected.
5 p 275, marked
||The idea of an educable minority is quite wrong, for it is only appropriate to a certain kind of society, which the United States had not.||
6 pp 279–80, marked
||Nock had no fits of depression.|| “Things and actions are what they
are,” said Bishop Butler, “and the consequences of them will be what
they will be.” There the State was, fixed, immovable, standing as the
great instrument of economic exploitation; there also was the philosophy of economism; there also was a system of compulsory popular
instruction, answering to the requirements of both. In its great work of
training and conditioning the ineducable masses, I thought our system
was doing, on the whole, a first-rate job, and I said so publicly. As for
the educable minority, they were merely casualties of the time and circumstances […].
? If this is sincere it redeems the faults of this ill-tempered
book.
José Ortega y Gasset
La rebelión de las masas
Buenos Aires and Mexico City: 1938 (2nd edition). Waterloo. 157 marginalia.
1 p 9, underlined
||A man|| Dice, poco más o menos, una parte de lo que pensamos […].1
Confusión de lo que pensamos con lo que debeiramos
pensar.2
1
Says, more or less, a part of what we think ….
Confusion over what we think with what we ought to think.
2
2 p 34, underlined and marked
||Such is the power of the masses that one cannot envisage an individual act in the near future.|| La cosa es horrible […].1
?
1
The prospect is horrible.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:93
3 p 35, underlined
Es […] muy difícil salvar una civilización cuando le ha llegado la hora
de caer bajo el poder de los demagogos.1
¿Porqué intentar salvar una cosa que se muere? ¡Que
nascia otra!2
1
It is very difficult to save a civilization when it has arrived at the point of falling
into the hands of demagogues.
2
Why try to save a dying thing? Let another be born!
4 p 35, underlined
The essential demagoguery of the demagogue lies within his mind and is rooted
en su irresponsabilidad […].1
Lloyd George
1
In his irresponsibility.
5 p 39, underlined
||Ortega asserts the necessity of continuity in history, which is supported by the ability to|| recordar 1 ||transmitted from one generation to
another.||
[At “recordar”:]
de tradición. La memoria sin documentos e instrumentos
no vale nada.2
1
Remember.
Of tradition. Memory without documents and records is worthless.
2
6 p 40, marked
||The extreme formality of the coronation of George VI in England was
necessary because of the uproar on the continent and the necessity to
affirm the permanent customs of national life.||
y para protestar contra el insulto de la abdicación de
Eduardo VIII.1
1
And to protest against the insult of the abdication of Edward VIII. [In order to
marry the American divorcée, Mrs. Simpson.]
7 p 66, underlined and marked
||In the past thirty years, humanity in Europe arrived at the point to
which it had to reach, a point for which it had begun to travel many
generations ago.||
filisteo yo no1
1
Philistine not I.
2:94
George Santayana’s Marginalia
8 p 67
||At times in the nineteenth century, there were those who were||
archisatisfechos.1
No eran las personas las que estaban satisfechas: estas
eran pesimistas: la satisfacción era ideologica.2
1
Completely satisfied.
It wasn’t individuals who were satisfied: they were the pessimists: the satisfaction
was ideological.
2
9 p 77
||The possibilities of enjoyment for the man of moderate means have
increased fantastically.||
y nunca se aburrió tan soberanamente!1
1
And never has he been so supremely bored!
10 p 77, top
El periódico y el cine
no valen una guitarra
Tu, pintada y pati nuda
Ya no me llega al alma.1
1
The newspaper and the films / cannot equal the guitar / You, all painted and
bare-legged / I cannot possibly love you.
11 p 78, top
||Ortega on the advances of modern physics.||
Hoy sin cielo y sin infierno el mundo se ha hecho chico1
1
Today without heaven or hell the world has become diminished.
12 p 80fn
It is not that we are decadent, but that since we are ready to admit any possibility, we do not exclude decadence.
Fichte le dijo hace 100 años.1
1
Fichte said that 100 years ago.
13 p 105, underlined
||Ortega asks why, to his knowledge, there has never been|| un ensayo
sobre la tontería?1
Erasmus
1
An essay about foolishness.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:95
14 p 111, marked
||The political complexion of the present lacks definition from the habit
of making peace with the enemy, governance through compromise, creating a homogeneous, crushing mass which eliminates all opposition.||
Liberalism would be pure intelligence if it were limited to
granting minorities the right to live, provided that the
chosen life of the majority were not thereby disturbed: the
right to live separated. But liberalism is dissolving if it
means the right of minorities to derange the life of the
majority & render its perfect operation impossible.
15 p 113
La rebelión de las masas puede, en efecto, tránsito de una nueva y sin par
organización de la humanidad, pero también puede ser una catástrofe en
el destino humano.1
Y puede ser la cosa mas ordinaria y corriente del mundo2
1
The revolt of the masses may in fact amount to a new and unparalleled organization of humanity; but it might also be a catastrophe in human destiny.
2
And it may be the most ordinary and common thing in the world.
16 p 118
||What liberalism and technology need.||
Trade!
17 p 125, marked Z
Historical knowledge is a technique of the first order for conserving and continuing an old civilization.
Los romanos conocían su larga historia. Porque no progresaron siempre?1
1
The Romans knew their long history. Why did they not continue always to
progress?
18 p 126
The politics of the nineteenth century was devised—by the eighteenth century—precisely in order to avoid the error of all the earlier politicians.
Montesquieu?
19 p 131, marked
[Chapter: “La época del ‘señorito satisfecho’.” 1 ]
Summary he was Ignorant Self-satisfied aggressive
1
The epoch of the smug young gentleman (or playboy).
2:96
George Santayana’s Marginalia
20 p 132, underlined
Es una de tantas deformaciones como el lujo produce en la materia
humana.1
N.B. Here you touch the live wire.
1
He is one of the many deformations that luxury produces in the raw material of
humanity.
21 p 133
||Ortega writes that the hereditary aristocrat is divorced from his ancient
authenticity; he cannot be any more, he can only represent what he is
presumed to be.||
No; this is pure sophistry. The heir has a lovely place of
his own in his world.
22 p 133
El resultado es esa específica bobería de las viejas noblezas, que no se
parece a nada y que, en rigor, nadie ha descrito todavía en su interno y
trágico mecanismo— […] su irremediable degeneración.1
No conoce V. Inglaterra2
1
The result is that specific stupidity of the old nobles who amount to nothing, and
whom no one has as yet truthfully described in their internal and tragic mechanism—their irremediable degeneration.
2
I do not recognize this. Vide England.
23 p 140, marked
Casi nadie presenta resistencia a los superficiales torbellinos que se forman en arte o en ideas, o en política, o en los usos sociales.1
Este libro es uno de esos torbellinos.2
1
Practically no one resists the superficial whirlwinds that form in the arts or in
ideas, or in politics, or in social habits.
2
This book is one of those whirlwinds.
24 p 162, marked
||One can only govern through janissaries with their cooperation and the
consent of the governed.||
Physical presence leaves traces & creates reflexes: otherwise it would not govern but only push. (Talleyrand to
Napoleon: “Con las bayonetas, Sire, se puede hacer todo,
menos una cosa: sentarse sobre ellos.”)1
1
“With bayonets, Sire, you can do anything save one: sit on them.”
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:97
25 p 175, underlined and marked
||On the Spanish middle class:|| But one would have to see the enormous dose
of personal demoralization, de encanallamiento que en el hombre medio de
nuestro país produce el hecho de ser España una nación que vive desde
hace siglos con una conciencia sucia en la cuestión de mando y obediencia.1
1
… the degradation in the middle class in our country produces the fact that Spain
is a nation that has lived for centuries with a dirty conscience in the question of command and obedience.
26 p 182, underlined
Se habla mal del Parlamento en todas partes; pero no se ve que en
ninguna de las que cuentan se intente su sustitución, […].1
Este protesta no acierta.2
1
Everywhere they speak badly of the Parliament; but no one sees that none of them
talk about trying an alternative.
2
This protest is off the mark.
27 p 198
||The state must grow or die.||
He reached his twentieth birthday with a sigh. When he
stopped growing, he began to die.
28 p 206
||Ortega contemplates the rise and decline of Rome.||
It is true that aggression unites a band that self-defence
might disperse.
29 p 211
||The contrast between the static state, as Spain has been, with the state
in constant process of change and growth.||
Este estado es esencialmente fascista.1
1
This [dynamic] state is essentially fascist.
30 p 214
Ahora llega para los europeos la sazón en que Europa puede convertirse
en idea nacional. […] El Estado nacional de Occidente, cuanto más fiel
permanezca a su auténtica sustancia, más derecho va a depurarse en un
gigantesco Estado continental.1
[Santayana omits accent marks here.]
¿Sin Inglaterra or con ella? ¿Sin los Estados Unidos? ¿Con
Rusia?
2:98
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Es que le gustan las naciones extranjeras y quiere ser
ingles, frances, y aleman sin dejar de ser español. Pero lo
internacional—las matematicas, la religion—no es otra
nacionalidad, sino una cosa espiritual or [sic] material
comun a todos.2
1
Now the time arrives for Europeans in which Europe might be converted to the
national idea … . The national State in the West, insofar as it remains loyal to its
authentic substance, the more directly it will purify itself into an enormous continental State.
2
Without England or with her? Without the United States? With Russia?
It is that foreign nations want to remain English, French, and German without ceasing to be Spanish. But the international idea—in mathematics, religion—does not constitute another nationality, but a spiritual or material quality
common to all.
31 p 216, underlined
Por fortuna, la idea del Estado nacional que el europeo, dándose de ello
cuenta o no, trajo al mundo, no es la idea erudita, filológica que se le ha
predicado.1
[At top:]
Mussolini & Hitler, eruditos filólogos.2
1
As luck would have it, the idea of the national State offered to the world, taking
account of it or not, is not the learned, philological idea that had been preached.
2
Mussolini and Hitler, learned philologists.
32 p 217
||The fast pace of contemporary existence.||
1926?
33 p 217, underlined
Todo, desde la manía del deporte físico (la manía, no el deporte mismo)
hasta la violencia en política; desde el «arte nuevo» hasta los baños de sol
en las ridículas playas a la moda.1
1938
Expulsion de los judios
Todo va en aumento2
1
Everything, from the mania for physical sport (the mania, not sport itself) to violence in politics; from art nouveau to sunbathing in the ridiculous, fashionable
beaches.
2
Expulsion of the Jews.
Everything increasing.
34 p 217
La libertad falsificación de la vida1
1
Liberty falsification of life.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:99
35 pp 217–18, underlined
||Nations as individual units become slack, lose moral impetus.|| Ya no
puede hacerse nada con ellos si no es trascenderlos.1
[At top:]
¡Que quieres, niño?—Mamá, “dame un nuevo principio de
vida”! Quelle erreur!2
1
Now one can expect nothing from them unless they transcend their condition.
What do you want, child? “Mama, give me a new principle of life.” What a mistake!
2
36 p 221, underlined
Con tal de servir a algo que dé un sentido a la vida y huir del propio
vacío existencial, no es difícil que el europeo se trague sus objeciones al
comunismo, y ya que no por su sustancia, se sienta arrastrado por su
gesto moral.1
Romanticismo Hay que fingir heroicamente.2
1
With such as that to make sense of life and to fill their existential vacuum, it is
not difficult for the European to swallow his objections to communism, although not
for its actual meaning, and to be carried away by its moral aspect.
2
Romanticism One must imagine heroically.
37 p 223
En cuanto a las otras Dictaduras, bien hemos visto cómo halagan al hombre-masa, pateando cuanto parecía eminencia.1
Ferrero, Croce, Einstein, eminencias.2 Marconi, Gentile,
Spengler vulgaridades.3
1
As for the other dictatorships, we have seen how they make up to mass-man, trampling them under foot when they looked to be eminent.
2
Eminences.
3
Ordinary types.
38 p 252
||The spirit and ideals of the League of Nations were out of date and mistaken from the beginning.||
Old Calvin-and-water Wilson.
39 p 272, underlined
||Recent events in the world,|| cosas de grave importancia para Inglaterra
y que le han sorprendido.1
Abyssinia, Palestine, Germany, Spain, Geneva! Wrong
every time!
1
… events of grave importance for England which have surprised that country.
2:100
George Santayana’s Marginalia
40 pp 274–75, doubly marked
A few days ago Albert Einstein took it upon himself as a “right” to pronounce his
opinion about the Spanish civil war and to take a position on it. Well, Albert
Einstein displays radical ignorance about what has occurred in Spain, now, a century ago, and always. The impulse that brings him to this insolent intervention is
the same impulse which for a long time has caused the universal loss of prestige of
the intellectuals, and which, in their turn, it seems that now they send the world
adrift for lack of spiritual power.
41 p 278, underlined
Por lo pronto, vendrá una articulación de Europa en dos formas distintas
de vida pública: la forma de un nuevo liberalismo y la forma que, con un
nombre improprio, se suele llamar «totalitaria».1
[At “liberalismo”:] ?
1
Meanwhile, an articulation of Europe in two distinct forms of life will arrive: the
form of a new liberalism, and the form with an inappropriate name which they are
accustomed to call “totalitarian.”
Emil Otto
Elementary German Grammar
Heidelberg: 1914. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
E. Allison Peers
Spanish Mysticism: A Preliminary Survey
London: 1924. [An anthology.] Waterloo. Forty-four marginalia.
1 p 6, marked
||The founders of Seville said of the Cathedral,|| “Let us build so magnificent a temple that in ages to come men shall think us to have been
mad.”1
1
The founders of Seville were Moors, and their “temple” a mosque.
2 p 183, underlined
[From Francisco de Osuna:]
Llámase también unión, porque llegándose el hombre de esta manera a
Dios se hace un espíritu con él por un trocamiento de voluntades, que ni
el hombre quiere otra cosa de lo que Dios quiere, […].1
This happens in every realised good.
1
That is also mystical union, because when a person arrives to God in such a manner, he joins with Him in an exchange of desires; he desires only that which God
desires.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:101
3 p 203
[From Juan de Avila:]
||Love of God begins crudely and imperfectly.|| Entremos en la cárcel de
su amor, pues Él entró en la del nuestro, […].1
This is artificial emotion. Stories and heroisms cannot be
the source of spiritual love. It may be their source, but
must spring from our own nature.
1
Let us enter into the prison of his love, for He entered into our prison.
4 p 222
[Santayana paraphrases St. John of the Cross. God is:]
Beyond reason & beyond self.
5 p 224, marked
[San Juan de la Cruz, “¡Oh Lámparas de Fuego!”]
[…] al alma el mismo Dios muchas lámparas, pues de cada una tiene
noticia, y le dan calor de amor […] una lámpara; la cual lámpara es todas
estas lámparas, porque luce y arde de todas maneras.1
The good is all goods, in their common attribute of goodness: and it requires their diversity in order to be all
goods.
1
God imbues the soul with many lights, all of which bring knowledge; one alone
gives the soul the warmth of love, which lamp is all the lamps, because it enlightens
and burns as do all.
6 p 225, marked
||San Juan elaborates his metaphor of the fiery lamps.||
This is exactly the dialectic of Diotima reversed: & this
movement is the least often understood
From the one to the many.
7 p 226
The Absolute is there to be an object to the relative: and
also vice versa, in so far as the Spirit in each is absolute
spirit: but it must be the spirit of a relative psyche.
8 p 236
|| Juan de los Ángeles’ sermons, he believes, perform a grand service to
God|| and it will be of no small benefit to the Christian republic, if he shall write
his book, Triunfos y Diálogos.
¡Que pillo!1
1
What a scoundrel!
2:102
George Santayana’s Marginalia
9 p 241
St. Augustine said animatedly that the love of God was a weight on his soul.
momentum not weight
10 p 245, underlined
||Diego de Estella on the function of the will in wanting to do God’s will:||
Porque en la voluntad no hay necesidad como la hay en la naturaleza, y
pluguiese a tí, mi Dios, que la hubiere y un atamiento necesario, de manera que aunque no quisiésemos no pudiésemos hacer otra cosa, […].1
[At “que aunque”:]
The will, then, would still be free and vacuous. This is the
illusion in most minds: Diego de Estella at least sees that
it is a dreadful pity that it should be so.
1
Because in the will there is no necessity, as there is in nature, and if it pleased you,
my God, that we undergo a necessary restraint of the will in a manner that we disliked and still were unable to act otherwise … .
11 p 245, marked
We are pilgrims in this world, and as such we pronounce the divine letters and
make our way to you, Lord, as to our own land and the nature of our souls, en
quien nos movemos, come dice el Apóstol, y vivimos y somos:1 X […].
^
X
Note that this is understood morally, not physically^ or
pantheistically. We live move and have our being in the
thought of what we love. It is our secret, not our locus.
1
… in whom we move, as the Apostle says, and in whom we live and have our
being.
12 p 254, marked
[Diego de Estella:]
[…] sutil y claro, asi el amor, aunque en su comienzo empiece al principio imperfecto, impuro y terreno, va subiendo a su propia esfera, que es
Dios, y perfeccionándose hasta llegar a él y mejorándose hasta llegar al
punto de su perfección.1
This is good sense, and like the Symposium
1
… subtle and clear, thus is love, although in its origins it starts from an imperfect, impure and earthly principle, rising to its own sphere, which is God, and perfecting itself until it arrives at Him and improving itself to the point of perfection.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Charles Pierre Péguy
2:103
Notre jeunesse
Paris: 1933. Waterloo. Thirteen marginalia.
1 p 168, marked
||About the Dreyfus affair. In retrospect, it may look as though the intellectuals were responsible for the Dreyfus affair. They were not.|| Reflection
shows that intellectuals are ineffectual in bringing plans into reality, and plans
that come about in history owe little to intellectual efforts.
Cf. the war of l914–18.
2 p 180, underlined
[Of the moderns:]
Ceux qui font les heureux sont aussi malheureux, plus malheureux que
les autres, plus malheureux que nous.1
America
1
Those who make the moderns happy are themselves unhappy, more unhappy than
the rest, more unhappy than we are.
3 pp 199–200
When a great war breaks out, or a great revolution—that sort of war—it is
because a great people, a great race must break out. It has had enough, particularly enough of peace.
True of the Germans in 1914.
Ralph Barton Perry
The Moral Economy
New York: 1909. Georgetown.
[Marginalia few, inconsequential, and probably not in Santayana’s
hand.]
Pestalozzi Foundation of America
Pestalozzi Foundation
New York:[?] 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie
The Revolutions of Civilisation
New York and London: 1941. Waterloo. Six marginalia.
[Fly-leaf:]
From Paul Burke 89–21 161st St. Jamaica, N.Y.
1 p 112, doubly marked
[Concerning the Arabs in Spain, and in Europe:]
2:104
George Santayana’s Marginalia
The political power was […] at its greatest extent when Abd er Rahman
reached the middle of France in 732. When we look further, we see that
by 1030 they deplore the rapid deterioration of the people; and by 1144
a democratic system began, setting up and overthrowing rulers with great
frequency by the power of the vox populi. This regular feature of a
decaying civilisation shows that it had certainly passed all its stages of
growth and glory.
Democracy is a weedy growth over among the corn. But
it is itself the harvest when there is no grain grown.
This informs to the indoctrinated genteel democracy in
America. Hence British & Protestant.
William Lyon Phelps
Robert Browning: How to Know Him
Indianapolis: n.d. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Philosophy in American Education
Edited by Brand Blanshard et al.
New York and London: 1945. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 p 16, marked
[On World War II:]
The question has arisen recurrently whether most men, even those who
have fought and won it, are sure what it has all been about. They are, in
the sense that they know in a general way what they are against; they are
against aggression, against settling things by violence, X against racial
^ ^ precisely for?
oppression and political dictation. But what are they
Democracy? Yes, certainly. But what is that? Again they know in a way.
It is what has made possible the sort of life they have been living, with
its thousand points that affection clings to, and its thousand little
grounds for gratitude.
[At top:]
X
Can any victory settle anything except by violence?
Princess Pilar of Bavaria and Desmond Chapman-Hutton
Don AIfonso XIII: A Study of Monarchy
London: 1931. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Pedro Antonio Pizá
2:105
Fermagoric Triangles
Santurce, Puerto Rico: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Plato
[Santayana of course had read the Platonic dialogues as a student at
Harvard, and he lectured on Plato and Aristotle as an instructor there.
His fullest study of the Greek texts took place during his residence in
King’s College, Cambridge, in 1896–97. His Greek texts, as well as his
edition of Jowett’s translation, are inscribed “King’s College,” and dated
1896 or 1897. From Santayana’s cross-references in Jowett, as well as
from his autobiography, we know that he worked directly from the
Greek with his tutor, Henry Jackson. He appears to have used Jowett
occasionally to correct Jowett or to crib from him. It is obvious from
certain of the marginalia in Jowett that he used it in his lectures on
Greek philosophy. He complained frequently about his “bad Greek,”
and remarked in a letter that he abandoned the idea of true scholarship
on Plato after the year at Cambridge because of his failure to master the
language. His self-deprecation must be read with scepticism.
The marginalia-count, in both the Greek and the English translation,
gives some indication to the qualities of precision and philosophical
interpretation that Santayana brought to his Platonic year with
Jackson:]1
Greek text
Jowett’s translation
Cratylus
9
12
Phaedo
37
11
Theaetetus
4
29
Sophist
100 + 4 pages of
40
notes tipped in
Politics (Statesman)
8
Timaeus
103
8
Republic
82
(Intro. 28) text, 59
In Jowett only: General introduction, 24; Phaedrus, 6; Ion, 9; Gorgias, 37; Laws,
86; Parmenides, 4; Philebus, 46. All of Santayana’s Plato are in the Georgetown
library.
1
See Persons and Places, critical edition (MIT Press, 1986), p. 439. A great
many of the marginalia are purely linguistic and of interest mainly, or only,
to students of Greek as a language. Translations are Jowett’s, unless otherwise indicated.
2:106
George Santayana’s Marginalia
[The following are Santayana’s notes tipped into the Sophist.]
References to the nature of
the Ideas
Euthy phro.
Phaedrus
Symposium
Republic
Phaedo
Parmenides
Sophist
Philebus
Timaeus
5 C–D
?
[ 237 B –248 C. ]
247 C – 250 C
especially 247 – 248.
209 E – 212 C
especially 210 A – 211, B.C.
475 E, 476 A.
508 E.
509 B.
[ 523 A ]
? 522E–594C
596 A — E.
65 D.
100 C — 103
especially 100 C D
102 B C
129 D–E
130 B—E
131 E – 132 B.
[ 228 D ]
?
245 A
246 B
12 C, D – 13 A
14 C – 15 C
51 B – 51 D.
52 A — D.
1) Society - temperate, brave, [?] wise “just” ?
Throughout.
2) 1st wave
Women like men — division of labour
must be natural.
3) 2nd wave — Community of wives.
4) 3rd wave – Kings philosophers.
Dialectic.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Plato
2:107
Cratylus
In Platonis dialogi secundum Thrasylli tetralogias dispositi
Edited by K. F. Hermann
Six volumes. Volume I. Leipzig: 1896. Georgetown.
[Thrasyllus (under Tiberius, 42
Democritus and Plato.]
B.C.–37 A.D.)
was editor of works of
1 p 185, para. 389, underlined and marked
||Socrates says that as the shuttle-maker has in mind an ideal shuttle as he
works, so the legislator strives for perfect form in syllables and words.||
’A
!" !
! ! !! !"# " !"!" $
% " & !" $ " "
% " ! & !'" #1
Most important passage
1
Socrates: Then, as to the names: ought not our legislator also know how to put the
true natural name of each thing into sounds and syllables, and to make and give all
names with a view to the ideal name, if he is to be a namer in any true sense? And
we must remember that different legislators will not use the same syllables. For neither does every smith, although he may be making the same instrument for the same
purpose, make them all of the same iron. The form must be the same, but the materials may vary, and still the instrument may be equally good of whatever iron made,
whether in Hellas or in a foreign country;—there is no difference.
2 p 200, para. 399, marked
||Socrates on how words are formed and written.|| ( [B] $
" " " % !) )"""
!)! ) !!1
What could Greek have sounded like?
1
Take the word Diî Philos; in order to convert this from a sentence into a noun, we
omit one of the iotas and sound the middle syllable grave instead of acute; as, on the
otherhand, letters are sometimes inserted in words instead of being omitted, and the
acute takes the place of the grave.
2:108
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Plato
Thaeatetus
Edited by K. F. Hermann, after Thrasyllus
Volume III. Georgetown.
1 p 339, paras. 188–89, underlined and marked
||Socrates to Thaeatetus on the difficulty of distinguishing between true
and false opinion:||
*
" + + " " #
,-*./
/ +
,-*.0
%1 ,-*.2
1 " #
,-*.1 / " )3&)3#
,-*.*"
/ )3&#
,-*.&
/" )3)3
,-*./ * "")3)31
Here is the Platonic definition of reality, by implication.
To be is to have a quality: to partake in logical being or
determination—to have an “essence”.
1
Socrates: But if [a man] sees any one thing, he sees something that exists. Do you
suppose that what is one is ever to be found among non-existing things?
Thaeatetus: I do not.
Socrates: And he who hears anything, hears some one thing,—a thing which is?
Thaeatetus: Yes.
Socrates: And he who touches anything, touches something which is one and therefore is?
[… … … …]
Socrates: So, then, does not he who holds an opinion holds an opinion of some one
thing?
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Plato
2:109
Sophist
Edited by K. F. Hermann, after Thrasyllus
Volume IV. Georgeown.
[Translation of Harold North Fowler throughout the dialogue.]
1 p 396, para. 228, marked
[Socrates to Thaeatetus:]
Is deformity anything else than the presence of the quality of disproportion, which
is always ugly?
Good
2 p 399, para. 229, marked
[The Elean Stranger defines ignorance:]
Thinking that one knows a thing when one does not know it. Through this, I
believe, all the mistakes of the mind are caused in all of us.
[Charles Eliot] Norton
3 p 402, para. 231, top
[A general comment:]
All this shows (intentionally?) that the class “sophist” is a
variable; therefore there can be no idea of sophist.
4 p 407, para. 234, marked Z
||The Stranger tells young Thaeatetus that the young may be deluded by
oratory, but experienced men find that facts do not conform to unreal
propositions.||
,-*.4 %"""&"# [D]
5-4 ," $& " & ! 6""!
!" 3 ! ) ! & + [E] '
! % )#7
Quote in Life of Reason
1
Therefore all of us elders here will try, and are now trying, to bring you as near
as possible without the sad experience. So answer this question about the sophist: Is
this now clear, that he is a kind of a juggler, an imitator of realities, or are we still
uncertain whether he may not truly possess the knowledge of all the things about
which he seems to be able to argue?
2:110
George Santayana’s Marginalia
5 p 418, para. 241
[Drawing of a young man. No reference to the text here, although
“images” were discussed earlier in the dialogue.]
6 p 430, para. 248, marked
||The Stranger discourses on the distinction between generation, acting,
and being; with reference to the myth of Cadmus’s sowing dragon’s teeth
and reaping men.|| Stranger: It is in reply to this that they say generation participates in the power of acting and of being acted upon, but that neither power is
connected with being.
Cf. Royce’s first view.
7 p 438, para. 253
5- /"!&
%!’ "
" )
,-*.8 #
5-4 " &" ,-*.1 5-8 " &"
#
,-*.4&"
5-8#
,-*.4""
5-4#)% [B] !’
& # " &"
& " )#
,-*./ 5- 1 " & & "
,-*.8’ #
[Drawing of a man in left margin; no reference to Plato’s text.]
8 p 450, para. 259, marked
||Following upon a long discourse on being and non-being, the stranger
remarks to Thaeatetus:|| And if any man has doubts about these oppositions, he
must make investigations and advance better doctrines than these of ours; or if he
finds pleasure in dragging words about and applying them to different things at
different times, with the notion that he has invented something difficult to explain,
our present argument asserts that he has taken up seriously matters which are not
worth serious attention; for this process is neither clever nor difficult, […].
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:111
This is a great conclusion of Plato’s philosophy. Cf.
Parmenides ad finem.
9 p 463, para. 267, marked
||On image-making and falsehood:|| Stranger: When anyone, by employing his
own person as his instrument, makes his own figure or voice seem similar to yours,
that kind of fantastic art is called mimetic.
Cf Plato on art.
10 p 463, para. 267, marked
Stranger: But what of the figure of justice and, in a word, of virtue in general?
Are there not many who have no knowledge of it, but only a sort of opinion, and
who try with the greatest eagerness to make this which they themselves think is
virtue seem to exist within them, by imitating it in acts and words to the best of
their ability?
Plato
Statesman
Edited by K. F. Hermann, after Thrasyllus
Volume IV. Georgetown.
[Only five pages of Santayana’s notes in this edition survive.]
[Beginning of dialogue, para. 257, underlined.]
||Socrates thanks Theodorus for having introduced him to Thaeatetus
and the Eleatic Stranger. Theodorus answers that Socrates is three times
in his debt for the definitions of the statesman, the philosopher, and the
sophist. The two discuss the meaning of “three times as much,” Socrates
maintaining that the expression is merely mathematical, not one of genuine value.||
,-/- " "! *
" ") " ! $ [ ] [ " ] [ ] ) [ " ']
&3 [ )"] [] [C]
[ ] % [ ] [ ]
)!1
Greek is very redundant & prolix. Latin would omit the
words in brackets.
1
Theodorus: By Ammon, the god of Cyrene, Socrates, that is a very fair hit; and
shows that you have not forgotten your geometry. I will retaliate on you at some other
time, but I must now ask the Stranger, who will not, I hope, tire of his goodness to
us, to proceed either with the Statesman or with the Philosopher, whichever he
prefers.
2:112
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Plato
Republic (Politeia)
Edited by K. F. Hermann, after Thrasyllus
Volume IV. Georgetown.
1 p 1, para. 327
||Socrates, as narrator of the dialogue, begins Book I with the well-known
speech I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon […].||
8/9.4-.*
[" ]
4*4/:(.*9/;/:8</8*
1<*4=;9*:128/9->*<?/
,<*:>*?/*(-.>*24/1-0*9/
*
I. 1"&!8 ;& *
) ' ! " " !! " " " &" )
" […].
The fact that the dialogue is told on the following day
excuses the wording of all the picturesque elements in the
first book. It is more natural, in reciting a past scene, to
describe the setting at the beginning, and to refer to it
only incidentally after the discourse is well under weigh.
Yet what a pity it is that the dramatic movement could
not have been carried through with sentimental or superstitious arguments against the laws about women, or the
doctrine of a future life.
Socrates is not without his interesting and not too virtuous young friend. The character of Glaucon is drawn as
one might draw that of a well known person, by a few
occasional references to his familiar traits, not as one
draws a character to be introduced for the first time and
for the sake of its dramatic value, as the characters of
Cephalus and Thrasymachus are introduced. Glaucon and
Adeimantus, being Plato’s brothers, are taken for granted,
as it were, and characterised only by sous-entendus.1
1
Inference.
2 p 2, para. 328
||Socrates’ regard for Cephalus.||
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:113
Jowett suggests that this figure symbolises the old-fashioned virtue which it is the task of the Republic to defend.
It is given here in an example before the analysis of its
essence begins.
3 p 5, para. 530, underlined
||The nouveaux riches were impossible at Athens.||
Note the open-mindedness of Cephalus, who will not be
the dupe of cynicism any more than of credulity.
4 p 6, para. 331
||Cephalus praises a passage of Pindar.|| [B] " )" " !
" " ! ! " ! &"
" &" " & &
!&!"
& &"
[C] 8" 1 " " " "! " '"
#
&" " &@"@" .1
Is this idiom or loquacity or merely conversational looseness of construction? This is a very inferior syntax to the
Latin, for all its fluency.
1
The great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that
he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension
about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men. Now to this peace of
mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I say, that setting
one thing against another, of the many advantages which wealth has to give, to a
man of sense this in my opinion the greatest.
5 p 49, para. 369
[Santayana translates literally and indicates a source for his passage in
The Life of Reason.]
. " *
" 2:114
George Santayana’s Marginalia
XI. ; " ’ "
& " " " "
’ &""3#/"[C] /
" ’ ’ &+"
"! ' ' )+ !! " #8>" " 8 .! " " ’ ) &" " "" "&
; " & " " "
We are not self-sufficing, but need many things: when we
discover this, the state arises. The state is a product of reason on the basis of need. Cf. Life of Reason.
C ad finem " " " "
& Our need, as is seems, shall guide the construction.
And the primary need is food, etc. The correctness of this
beginning cannot be too much praised.
6 p 50, para. 371
[On the division of labor in the city:]
The division of labour is here made to rest on its natural
basis, diversity of gifts and opportunities. The question for
the individual as for the state depends on the right balance between diversity of culture and quantity of wealth.
The ideal is perhaps to divide labour and to synthesize
arts; that is, to do one servile thing each, and all liberal
things together. A community loses nothing by the
absence of mines, if it can get its metals more cheaply by
exchange: but it loses by the absence of music, or of learning, or of religion, because these are not the means to its
life, but the expressions of it.
7 p 163, para. 474
[C] "
! " A A " !
!"
" "3!.!"
!" ' ' ' )""! *
" *"
" A "" " "
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:115
!" "
#
[Santayana translates:]
Dialectic
474C. The lover of anything loves it universally, not in one
example only.
So the lover of youth, finds every form of youth
cleansing, and gives each it peculiarity a favourable
^
^manifested, being always the
name, the grace, variously
same grace of youth.
So love is hypocritical, and attributes to the accidents
of the object an attraction due to its own universal and
impartial hunger.
(next page)
8 p 164, para. 475
- " A & & 4 # " A $ + " 3#11" !+"""B
&" 3 [B] !
" !" 1' 4 " ! " "$
$!" "!" #8 "/
" !"" "
"A "#*"!"4 !"
& [C] " & &" " " !" &" '
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!" ! !
" & A ' "
" # [D] ; "C 8 $ ! !&
"A !
""
2:116
George Santayana’s Marginalia
!!!
&!(
[E] !"&
"# / A Ideas cover whole classes
475. A. So the lover of wine finds all wines pleasing.
Likewise the lover of honour.
B. !". It is in the region of desire that Plato
finds his first example of the universal ().
The fastidious eater is not a lover of food [ but of his own
whims. ]
C. The philosopher the omnivorous learner.
Then, says Glaucon, we shall have a motley “School of
Athens.” Sightseers will be philosophers—the vulgar
lovers of experience for its own sake.
E. No. They are counterfeit philosophers ()
9 p 165, paras. 475–76, marked Z
??4"! "#4""!
"A !1A "!$
#/"A+ " 4 # ’-" & [476 A] 8 A #
/ " # 1 1 ! '
) " + & B
3 !’/! "4'
" A & " B
! & [B] &
! 8 " # / " A " B
! 3 & &""
"" !-&" "/"A
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:117
+!A #
Ideas are single
475 E.
Who, then, are true philosophers?
Those who love to look upon truth.
What is Truth i.e. True being?
476 A
Opposites are two.
Each is therefore one.
Each idea ( justice & goodness) is one, although it appears
to our fancy in many acts and many bodies.
So we separate sightseers from truth-lovers. [The latter pursue the Idea]
The understanding of the former is unable to seize "
.
Ability to do is so is rare.
^ the
^ others awake?
Yet consider: are
For to dream is to false the similar [ copy] for that which
it resembles.
To know both the original and the copies is to be awake.
10 p 166, para 476–77, underlined
[E] ) !! ! "
& # ( " " .! "
"!!A
! A
A"$
" # ’* "8"# [477
A] /
" !"# . & &' " "' ' #
. - " & "
) "'#>)/"
A)""))
3""[B] ""&
# 8 *A
) # 8
#8""""""#*"
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
’-AD)A"""
"""//""
# !8#
Ideas are “real”
476 E. He who knows knows something.
8" #
" !"#
477A /
The object of knowledge must be something, must
have some quality (Cf. Theaetetus [sic] the one must be,
since it is one) ∴ some essence, ∴ must be something ∴
must be.
[ Being is here identified with essence. To be in key—i.e.
to be remote from the indeterminate—is regarded as more
truly existence than to be perceived—i.e. to be for
another.]
That which has perfect essence () is perfectly knowable—the wholly indeterminate or unsubstantial (" "') is wholly unknowable. The " "' is what has no predicates.
This kind of “being”(= determination) has degrees.
Therefore to the intermediate realm between being and
not-being corresponds an intermediate perception—opinion.
[At “ #”:]
the determining actions of being.
11 p 167, para. 477D—478B, underlined
* ! " *
" & &"
3 A $
[D] A A 3 ' " ""3""
""3""
##/ "(" "A
"" ' "" George Santayana’s Marginalia
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!"# - " B
"[E] 4#) " #
/ " )3 ! " )
* " " "")8 ""B
" " & !"#
1"A""")[478 A]
" - A "
*"-""
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="" ) # " # *
" "A" )[B] """
" & )
/ )"
"# *
*A
" )3# " ) " # & )3 "
)#")3)3"#*
Knowledge or science deals with ideas.
" unknowable even by opinion
[At “ " ”:] here is a class.
Science is addressed to the real, to learn its nature or its
determinations. The function of knowledge is to deal with
the real, to learn its determinates.
It is impossible to have opinions about the absolutely
indeterminate—"—an attack on Parmenides.
In thinking you must think something.
12 p 168, para. 478C—479A
*A
)3 )3#2* "" &
"!A [C] 8>"
")" /!
"/ " )3/ /
) " / *A
" "+ " +#
/*A"A )
# 1 " [D]
-A #2>) ")
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
1' / ! "
" ) ! " ""A ! ) ""# /! 2 ) " )8 [E] XXII. - " A " & " ! ')
' ) ) $ " & # /
4 " " !
[479 A] &" "" &B
3 ! ' & ' " "
& "#
# # [B] / A
" " & "
The " cannot be any one thing, cannot have any one
quality, not even this quality of being one. The " has
no predicates.
Therefore neither the nor the " can be the
object of opinion. Opinion has more light than ignorance,
less than science.
It remains to find the object of opinion.
Particular things have their qualities temporarily relatively and accidentally.
They have and have not the attributes which are
assigned to them at each moment.
They are the objects of opinion, and of the lovers of
sights and of miscellaneous experience.
See 505 A. (p-194)
13 p 195, para. 505E—506A, marked
" ' "! ! ! 3" " )
!""3#1 "/"
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:121
&" [E] B
"&
&"! + & "
" [506 A] ! ' &#= A "/
'!
) "!B
" ! 1
" / " " " [B] " ' ) "#
The idea of the good is absolutely fundamental since it
determines even why or when pleasure and insight are
good [ why insight is good and when pleasure is so] and is
the most practical of the things that a statesman should
know. Kings should be philosophers because philosophy is
the science of practical good which is the formative principle even of truth and reality.
Go on at 508 A
E. Everyone has a premonition of what would help him,
but errs, and abandons conventional goods perhaps, in
the hope of that uncertain perfect satisfaction.
14 p 197, para. 508
The simile of the sun
The eye, unlike other senses, needs a medium of vision—
light.
This, of all the gods, the sun dispenses.
15 p 198, para. 508
[“The Sun”: most important for Plato and for Santayana.]
4""!&
""! !
A "" "! B
" "! " !"" ""
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The “Sun.”
508 E. 4 ""!&—the Sun
of ultimate utility—has, according to this passage, the following functions.
1) ""!&—it gives truth [ to objects.-]
2) "
—it furnishes the organ of perception and the
objects with their [illegible] power of inter-communication
^
^ mind and the world.
—it is the medium between
the
Hence
3) ""
4) "! " —The
principle of truth, as truth is discoverable by thinking, and
the cause of the resulting science.
5) —more beautiful and nobler than
truth or knowledge.
Cf. L. of R.1
[Because fact, apart from human uses, is
without dignity, and knowledge, apart from the same,
without excuse.]
1
Life of Reason.
16 p 199, para. 509
[B] 8# 4 " " ! & " " )" " 8 # 1 " ! ! "A
!A
"+ &
[C] XX. 1 ; *
" B
"! "A3
1"A "'"
" " " ) '
*"&>"
" ' / " A $ A >" " [D] 2" " A " A
" ) 3! $A& ""#-&
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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"&"""
" "B
+ + " [E] " 509. B.
6) " A (
!) —not only the knowability
quoad nos but the being and essence of things comes to
them from the Idea of the Good. [ i.e. a teleological principle—utility—has presided over their formation.]
Discussion on the
supremacy of the good.
The inner
nature or
instinct,
that gives
direction to
idealization
The life of
reason
has two
conditions
The outer facts
or accidents, on
which the realisation
of the ideal
depends.
These two conditions are not conceivably subordinated to
the good in the same sense as the works of reason are:
they can be said to be so only
1) in the sense that, being conditions to the life of reason,
they subserve the reason when they are favourable to its
operation—when they do not disappoint they
/ hopes they
originate.
2) in the sense that they (and the l. of r. they make actual)
are products of reason on a deeper plane.
In this case, however, does not the problem seem farther back?
17 p 200, para. 510
[A] )" * 4 !
"3 4!" " = ! "A""!"!+ " )
!!"#[B] -A
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
" " " " " '
" 8'# = "! &"
&"3"3)!A&"
" A " A EF A &"
!)!
A " ! " 4A " &! [C] *A
!"A$+
"!"
B
! &" " !A
"!"!
) [D] A&
"") " 8 " / & A " A [E] " " &3"
The question of the metaphysical supremacy of reason
seems to be reduced to a question of eventual experience
of the realisation of the ends of our own rational action.
Views on this point are
1) Plato’s & Aristotles (distinguish the two)X (consistent
^
^ of human
with experience
and with the supreme authority
ends) to the effect that there are two metaphysical forces
one like reason, one opposed to it.
2) that there is one force indifferent to reason. Spinoza &
the materialists.
3) that there is one force harmonious with reason.
X
Plato’s is simple and possible—God vs. matter.
Aristotle’s is less simple & less possible. Postpone this. ]
18 p 290, para. 597B and C, underlined
[B] >" G "A3""
""A#- "/
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$" ' "
!!" A#/
>"2 ">"3 " # - H " ! 2 [C] /" !
""""'
!""
" " "$ " !" ! " 8"# "/
" A " " "
& " ""A& /! "
597 B. The bed that has its being in the nature of things or
may say was made by a god; i.e. nothing is more original
and divine than the functional needs of life by which the
idea and use of a bed comes into existence.
This idea of the bed is one; else the two or more would be
examples of a deeper nature, corollaries of a deeper function.
Cf. for interpretation the corselet
and the bridle 601. B C .
^ ^
19 p 295, para. 601C and D, underlined
[C] # 2 >" " "!
A 9 " H " &# 2 8" &#8*A
"
& #" A " & A &"!
# *"!
*A
" &# 8# [D] 8 & &"" " ""# 2
/ " !" 3 ) " "&"
' " " # / 8" " & ! "' ! " '
&+ &"$""
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The bit and the bridle
The painter paints reins and bit.
The artisan makes them.
The horseman possesses their Idea,
for he knows their use.
[Marked.] The virtue beauty and rightness of every work of
art or animal or action is relative to the function of that
being, and to nothing else.
[ Hence it necessarily follows that the Highest Good is the
highest function, since it is surely the source of virtue
beauty and rightness in things. ]
The man of practice must become an ‘angel’ to the
‘poet’—he must tell him what is the excellence he should
celebrate.
The Phaedo of Plato
Edited by R. D. Archer-Hind
London: 1883 (2nd edition, 1894). Georgetown.
[Introduction:]
1 p xvi
How translate “antapodosis”? “Give & take” “Polarity”
“Generation from opposites” “Alternation”.
2 p xvii, marked
knows that !" is a mode of existence, "
that it is a state of intelligence.
3 p xviii
The principle of reciprocity itself is most loose and arbitrary and the whole argument weak in the extreme. It is
no argument, but rather a rhetorical plausibility, which
Socrates, as a preacher, may well have used.
4 p xxiii, marked
This demonstration, which is worked out with a completeness, clearness, and subtlety peculiarly Plato’s own, is on Platonic principles perfectly incontrovertible: given the eternal ideas as causes of existence, the
eternity of soul is an inevitable inference. But though complete in itself
it utilises some of the materials of former arguments: the principle that
the eternity of soul is inseparably bound up with the existence of the
eternal ideas has been the chief feature of " and the psycho-
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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logical argument: in this last proof it is precisely formulated, handled in
a new manner, and pushed to its logical conclusion. Secondly, the whole
argument has for its ultimate premiss the constancy of the sum total of
existence: &' ! " & ! !)And this we say to be the fundamental proposition laid down in the argument of .
Moreover " is still valid to prove the existence of the ideas
and the soul’s intelligent activity apart from the body.
N.B.
5 p xxv
||Archer-Hind refers to the “quantity of spirit in the universe,” and to the
“sum of force” as “constant.”||
What does that mean? What is spiritual “force”?
6 p xxvii
[…] a permanent mode of existence for the soul is not excluded by the
Platonic theory.
Why do you say that? Simply because you like it better so.
7 p xxviii, underlined
[…] the particular soul retains the knowledge of truths which are the possession of soul at large, not necessarily of this soul in a former personal
existence. A similar examination of the remaining arguments of the
Phaedo will show that individual immortality is not fairly deducible from
any of them. The same applies to the brief but pregnant demonstration
in Phaedrus 245 C foll. There the case for the eternity of soul is stated with
unequalled force and clearness; but it applies to the universal soul alone,
and nothing can be deduced from it regarding the permanence of particular souls. The strikingly subtle argument beginning Republic 608 E
contains a remarkable expression (611 A), sc. &. This seems at first sight like an assertion of the
continued existence of the same personalities. A closer examination
however shows that this is not the case. Plato simply means that if the
whole vital force of the universe is distributed into a certain number of
souls, no addition to this number is possible, else the sum total of vitality
would be increased, which is inadmissible.
The whole force of the argument lies in the assumption
that without individual experience no preformation of
mind is possible; that the categories are memories, ∴ the
individual soul existed.
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
[At “sum total of vitality”:]
What?
8 p xxxi
||Even if personal immortality is ruled out of the Timaeus, it does not follow that it is true for the Phaedo.||
Consistency by any other name stinks as sweet.
9 p xxxv
The essential nature of soul is simple, as much in the Phaedrus, Republic,
and Timaeus as in the Phaedo. Hence it is beside the point to ask which of
the three parts is immortal: Plato is seeking to prove that soul herself is
eternal, not that certain relations and functions of soul are perpetual.
Does then the soul live at all? The “principle” of life is not
a life; “
&"” is not &" . 1
1
Soul.
10 p xli, marked
The standard of 1 then lies in the nature of :2 and
in operating 3 is working out its own being.
This is perhaps true and herein lies the explanation of the
originally so pure perception of the good in Plato.
1
The absolute best.
Mind or purpose.
3
Toward the absolute best.
2
11 p 2, para. 58
||Phaedo and Echecrates discuss Socrates’ trial and preparations for
death.||
Note how the interest & pathos of the subject is relieved
by these familiar, legal and beautiful images.
12 p 8, para. 61, underlined and marked
||Phaedo has asked Socrates, in their final conversation, why Socrates is
turning Aesop’s fables into poetry and composing a hymn to Apollo, for
Socrates has never before composed poetry. Socrates replies that he is
satisfying the bidding of a dream, in which he was urged to continue
what he was already doing; that he wished to honor the god, and being
without invention, he resorted to Aesop for material for his verse.||
" " " " $ ’ " " " " !
"!')&"
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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"""""
" !" "
! " " ! [B] " !
" " " !$ ! "
""""!
" ! "
&&
!""*
"
&
Quote. Plato’s Th.[eory] of art.
13 p 9, note 1, marked
||Plato did not in all cases disapprove of suicide.||
14 p 10, para. 64, underlined
[Archer-Hind’s notes 9 and 16 do full justice to the text.]
" +
!!! ! ! "'$ "
!’ & 1" IX. 1 & ! "! " " !' ! "!
[…] 9. ] At this point the main business of the dialogue begins: all that precedes has been merely preparatory to this thesis, and all that follows is logically evolved in its defence.
65 A—67 B, cc. ix-xi. The philosopher’s whole life is nothing else
than the study and practice of death; how then shall he be dismayed
when that comes for which he has always been striving? This paradox is
explained as follows. First we define death as the state of separation of
soul and body. Now the philosopher’s aim is the attainment of knowledge and wisdom. But the body is for ever thwarting his endeavours: (1)
by its pleasures and appetites, (2) by the intrusion of sensual perceptions,
(3) by its weaknesses and maladies. All these hinder the free action of
the soul and prevent her from gazing calmly on the truth. Accordingly
so long as the soul is in union with the body, she can never attain to perfect wisdom; only death, by setting her free, enables her, if ever, to reach
the truth. But the true philosopher will do all he can during life to anticipate this condition: he will withdraw his soul, so far as may be, from all
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
communion with the body; its pleasures and pains he will scorn, its perceptions he will ignore; and so when the hour of release arrives the soul
will be pure and unsullied by material taint; she will be fit to enjoy the
free life of intelligence that is now before her.
16. !' !] ‘dying and being dead.’
!' represents the philosophic training, the gradual emancipation of the soul from bodily passions; […].
Would Plato think of this separation as absolute—
nirvana—or as passage into direct perceptions of another
kind? Are the Ideas visible?
15 pp 58–59, paras. 83–84, marked
||Socrates tells Cebes that the soul of a philosopher after death will be free
of pain and pleasure; the soul will calm passion and be loyal to reason.||
3" "!' " "!' "
!"'! "!" " " " ! [C]
& & 3 4 # " 1" /
&" ! 3 "!" " "!" "! &' "!&&$ IJ$
" #8/ !
&" # 8 "# [D] /
" "" "
"&" " B
+ " )3 "!" ' ) & 3 ! " *
!
! )&
" !
"!!
[E] *"! "1"
Quote in “Poetry of Barbarism”
16 p 120, para. 106, marked
LVI. /
! " " "
3"!B
"!""!8"( "
! ! /
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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" ! &" " ! [E] & !"#
(1) particulars partake successively, or even simultaneously, of contrary
ideas, but the idea itself can never admit its opposite, but at the
approach thereof either withdraws or perishes; and this applies both to
ideas as existing in nature and as immanent in particulars: (2) there is a
second set of ideas, not being themselves opposites, but containing
opposite ideas; no such idea can admit the opposite of the idea it contains, but either withdraws or perishes; e.g. the triad contains the idea of
odd and cannot admit that of even: (3) particulars which one of this second class of ideas informs can never admit the opposite of the contained
idea; e.g. three things can never be even: (4) if in any such instance
refusal to admit the opposite necessarily involved indestructibility, we
could predicate immortality of that which refused to admit it; e.g. if
refusal to admit evenness involved indestructibility, three would be
imperishable; but since this is not so, three may perish at the approach
of evenness: (5) but in the case of soul refusal to admit the opposite of
its contained idea does involve indestructibility, since the contained idea
is life, whose opposite is death; and that which will not admit death is
imperishable: soul therefore on the approach of death has not the option
of perishing, but must adopt the other alternative, &Else, if
the principle of life perished, nothing could be found to resist destruction.
106 D—107 B, c. lvi. Thus from the general principle that all things
which refuse to admit death are indestructible we infer that soul can
never perish: when death comes upon a man, his mortal part perishes,
but his soul withdraws, making way for death, while she herself is saved
alive. It must be then that our souls live in Hades. Kebes is now fully convinced: Simmias cannot controvert the reasoning of Sokrates but still
feels misgivings; whereupon Sokrates encourages him to sift the matter
until he is thoroughly satisfied.
[At “(4) if in any such … since this is not so,”:]
This is like the ontological argument.
[At “and that which will not admit death is imperishable”:]
X
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
The Timaeus of Plato
Edited and with an Introduction by R. D. Archer-Hind.
London: 1888. Georgetown.
[Greek-English parallel text, translated by Archer-Hind and so quoted
unless otherwise attributed.]
1 p 33
[Introduction.]
||Unity is eternal and present to the senses.|| Each idea is the idea of the
good specialised in some particular mode or form—blueness is the mode
in which the good reveals itself to the faculty which perceives blue.
This unity is perhaps one of relation: the faculty of perceiving blueness its possible perfection, analogous to the
perfection of every other function. This relation constitutes the good, which is thus similar sorry bliss [?] without
being one in any obscure sense.
2 p 84
The question for Plato is what ideas the universe suggests,
not what origin it has.
3 p 87, para. 28
[Santayana lucidly paraphrases:]
Why should the object of reason be changeless? Because it
is an expression for the logical need of identity and permanence in objects of thought. A flux, however, could as
easily be asserted here as in the natural world, when permanence is also assumed in common thinking.
4 p 89, para. 29
If now this universe is fair and its Artificer good, it is plain that he looked to the
eternal; but if—nay it may not even be uttered without impiety,—then it was to
that which has come into being. Now it is manifest to every one that he looked to
the eternal: for the universe is fairest of all things that have come to be, and he is
the most excellent of causes.
If the cosmos did not suggest any idea, we might say it was
made by chance—by a drifting of accidents. As it is we
must attribute what it suggests to a cause.
5 p 92, para. 30
||In creation, the creator saw that reason is essential to perception of the
fair and good|| and that without soul reason cannot dwell in anything. Because
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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then he argued thus, in forming the universe he created reason in soul and soul in
body, that he might be the maker of a work that was by nature most fair and perfect.
There is here the mixture of intelligibility & intelligence
which is formed in all Platonism.
6 p 92, para. 30
||In note 1, Archer-Hind asserts the impossibility of perfection in the universe, because of the inherent nature of evil.||
To make Plato in this way the first absolute idealist is like
making St. Peter the first pope. You say he was so because
in your opinion he ought to have been so. But in fact he
spoke in figures because he thought in them and didn’t
believe in dogmas.
7 p 96, para. 32
[Santayana translates and comments:]
(N.B. the senses exist (in thought?) before the universe.)
[line] 10 The world is sensible therefore material. (We may
note here the obscurity of taking a non-psychological view
of these things. God must have made the world of matter,
because that is what we make of it.) (i.e. of the sensations
we construct it of.)
8 pp 97–98, para. 32
If the body of the universe were to have been made a plane surface having no thickness, one mean would have sufficed to unify itself and the extremes; but now since
it behoved it to be solid, and since solids can never be united by one mean, but
require two—God accordingly set air and water betwixt fire and earth, […].
This absurd passage is praised by Hegel as still valid for
philosophy.
9 p 113, para. 36
[Note 6.]
||Plato’s numerology as determining the positions of the planets.||
There is a possibility of distinguishing the principle here
from its actual application. The principle is that nature is
to be understood upon as a sort of aesthetic co-religious
^ ^ is to the universe of spheres
symbolism. The application
of Plato’s time.
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
10 p 138, para. 41, marked Z
||Timaeus’s long speech to Socrates on creation: Oceanus and Tethys,
who engendered Phorcys and Cronus and Rhea, who gave birth to Zeus
and Hera.|| " " "!. "!
"!&!. "!! " !"! )! !
" " " 3 B
&’ !)!
!1
Cf. Act V Scene I. of Temptation of Lucifer. (original
draught.)
1
When all of them, both those who visibly appear in their revolutions as well as
those other gods who are of a more retiring nature, had come into being, the creator
of the universe addressed them: Gods, children of gods, who are my works and of
whom I am the artificer and father, my creations are indissoluble, if so I will. All
that is bound may be undone, but only an evil being would wish to undo that which
is harmonious and happy. Wherefore, since ye are but creatures, ye are not altogether
immortal and indissoluble, but ye shall certainly now be dissolved, nor be liable to
the fate of death, having in my will a greater and mightier bond than those with
which ye were bound at the time of your birth. [ Jowett]
11 p 145, para. 42
||Men, descendants of gods, possess souls assigned to a star; if they live
well, their souls at death ascend to their star. If not, they will live again as
a woman; if still evil, return as a beast.||
It is necessary to insist on the human basis of this and
revive in men the sense of the possibility and value of
their purification. The beast is not depraved, but the man
who is bestial.
12 p 162, para. 46
This asserts that rational causes are first—ultimate—to the
seeker of reason. Plato does not tell us why, but we may
infer a reason—the rational interests of that man, which
are ultimate in him.
13 p 164, para. 47, marked
||The blessings of vision.|| The vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of number and has given us not only the notion of
Time but also means of research into the nature of the Universe. From these we
have procured Philosophy in all its range, than which no greater boon ever has
come or will come, by divine bestowal, unto the race of mortals. [R. G. Bury]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:135
Say in order that our reason should meet in this life with
something of a kindred nature—something intelligible and
not confused. Else reason would have lived in the isolation
of a Lucifer. Cf. “The children of Pythagoras” etc.
14 p 243, para. 64, marked
Now a process which takes place with perfect facility is perceptible in a high
degree, but it is accompanied neither by pleasure nor by pain.
Cf. Schopenhauer. Pain = strain. Pleasure = [illegible]
15 p 252, paras. 68E–69A, underlined and marked
"&""3!
! ! 3" " ! " " & [69 A] & 3 3 ’ &1
N.B. Could anything be wiser and clearer than this?
Quote in R L. of R.
1
Wherefore we must distinguish two kinds of causes, one of necessity and one of
God: and the divine we must seek in all things for the sake of winning a happy life,
so far as our nature admits of it; and the necessary for the sake of the divine, reflecting that without these we cannot apprehend by themselves the other truths, which
are the object of our serious study, nor grasp them nor in any other way attain to
them.
16 p 266, para. 71, underlined
" '!!'$1
1
God gave unto man’s foolishness the gift of divination ….
Good motto.
17 p 324, para. 86, underlined
||Distortions in the body create a diseased soul, sexual incontinence and
other forms of strange behaviour.|| & " " ! 3$ ") 1
This is a bad blunder for Plato. Why should we not
reprove the pernicious and ignorant man? Why should we
not reproach the man who “unwittingly” wills to be bad?
Free will is quite irrelevant to responsibility.
1
And indeed almost all those affections which are called by way of reproach intemperate pleasure, as though the wicked acted voluntarily, are wrongly reproached; for
no one is voluntarily wicked ….
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
The Dialogues of Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Five volumes. Oxford: 1892. Volume I. Georgetown.
[Euthydemus, Introduction.]
1 p 193, underlined
||The study of dead sciences|| is apt to blind the judgment and to render
men incapable of seeing the value of evidence, and even of appreciating
the nature of truth.
What is this nature?
[Cratylus, Introduction.]
2 p 285, underlined
||It is writing and speaking that changes the meanings of words,|| and particularly great writers, or works which pass into the hearts of nations,
Homer, Shakespear, [sic] Dante, the German or English Bible, Kant and
Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages.
Fancy, and not Aristotle.
3 p 287, marked
||Socrates holds that|| words have an independent existence; thus anticipating the solution of the mediaeval controversy of Nominalism and
Realism.
O sapience!
4 p 304, underlined and marked
Metaphysics are even more troublesome than the figments of grammar,
because they wear the appearance of philosophy and there is no test to
which they can be subjected. They are useful in so far as they give us
an insight into the history of the human mind and the modes of thought
which have existed in former ages; or in so far as they furnish wider
conceptions of the different branches of knowledge and of their relation
to one another. But they are worse than useless when they outrun experience and abstract the mind from the observation of facts, only to
envelope it in a mist of words.
This is very good, if we understand “history” as natural
history.
5 p 316, underlined
|| Jowett compares ancient and modern languages; the modern in many
ways are superior to the ancient:|| the thought is generally clearer, the
connection closer, the sentence and paragraph are better distributed.
?
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6 p 316
||There is no reason why English and French should die out, like ancient
languages.|| […] whenever a great writer appears in the future he will find
the English language as perfect and as ready for use as in the days of
Shakspere [sic ] and Milton.
? Of course no language will disappear until circumstances lead people not to speak it or to speak it differently. English is suffering a sad transformation in America
already.
7 p 316
[On English:]
A language of bricks. Greek is marble. Latin is granite,
English brick.
8 p 318, underlined
[On tautology:]
||Only Plato and perhaps Bacon, while indulging in tautology,|| has
attained to any high degree of literary excellence.
Not the highest, of course, but a high degree might be
claimed for many: including the only man who has ever
written good German. There is Cicero (perhaps hardly
philosopher enough), and Seneca and St. Augustine (a
great writer in his own style) there is Descartes, Berkeley,
Hobbes, Pascal. But none except Plato and, as Jowett says,
perhaps Bacon (if he is regarded as a philosopher) has a
such a style that it is of poetic value, of value apart from
the importance of the thought.
9 p 320, marked
[…] there is also a higher ideal of language in which all is relative—
sounds to sounds, words to words, the parts to the whole—in which
besides the lesser context of the book or speech, there is also the larger
context of history and circumstances.
Oh, yes. Every word is bathed in the light of all nature,
and has the pathetic accent of Man.
[Cratylus.]
10 p 330
[Socrates to Hermogenes:]
[…] when a man has discovered the instrument which is naturally
adapted to each work, he must express this natural form, and not others
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which he fancies, […] he ought to know how to put into iron the forms
of awls adapted by nature to their several uses?
Practical or moral determination of ideas here. Cf. Sense
of Beauty.
11 p 364, marked
||Socrates sophistically shows how returning to ancient roots of words
alters meaning.||
All this satire might be imitated against Hegel.
12 p 388, underlined and marked
[Socrates to Cratylus:]
Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what
Heracleitus [sic] and his followers and many others say, is a question hard
to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names
or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he
will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world
is a man who has a running at the nose. This may be true, Cratylus, but
is also very likely to be untrue; […].
Perfect model of the way to criticise the extravagances of
metaphysics.
[Phaedrus.]
13 pp 449–51, marked
||Socrates on the forms of divine madness: love, prophecy, poetry.||
14 p 451, doubly marked
But he who, having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes
to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art
—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and
is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.
[Ion.]
15 pp 501–3, underlined and marked
||Socrates’ long explanation to Ion of the nature of poetry as possession,
inspiration, rather than art. Lyric poets are|| like Bacchic maidens who
draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence
of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. […] For the poet
is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him
until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no
longer in him: […] for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine.
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Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not
of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of
poets, and uses them as his ministers […] in order that we who hear them
may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the
speaker, […]. Was not this the lesson which the God intended to teach
when by the mouth of the worst of poets he sang the best of songs?
[Symposium.]
16 p 557
Merits of the Symposium. 1) A real dialogue 2) Picture of
scene & manners 3) Genial, varied, naturalistic sense for
existence—no censoriousness 4) Wit & humour 5) Wealth
of colour, movement, incident. 6) Physical philosophy as
well as moral. 7) The highest flights of wisdom.
17 p 573, marked
For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and
converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on.
Cf. Aristotle’s God.
The Dialogues of Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Volume II.
[Phaedo.]
1 p 227, marked
||Socrates explains to Cebes how pleasures and pains falsify the interpretation of objects.|| And the soul of the true philosopher […] abstains
from pleasures and desires and pains and fears, as far as she is able;
reflecting that when a man has great joys or sorrows or fears or desires,
he suffers from them, not merely the sort of evil which might be anticipated—as for example, the loss of his health or property which he has
sacrificed to his lusts—but an evil greater far, which is the greatest and
worst of all evils, and one of which he never thinks. […] The evil is that
when the feeling of pleasure or pain is most intense, every soul of man
imagines the objects of this intense feeling to be then plainest and truest:
but this is not so, they are really the things of sight.
Quote in the “poetry of barbarism” The translation here
is weak. Cf. Text.1
1
Santayana does not actually quote the passage, but its meaning informs
much of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.
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2 p 244, marked Z
||Socrates recounts his disappointment in the mechanical explanations of
Anaxagoras for events. The accusations against Socrates and his remaining to undergo his sentence were not subject to Anaxagoras’s reasoning.||
Here the argument trips; because the ideal justification is
made the efficient cause.
3 pp 311–12, marked
[ Introduction, Gorgias. ]
We may further observe that the art of government, while in some
respects tending to improve, has in others a tendency to degenerate, as
institutions become more popular. Governing for the people cannot easily be combined with governing by the people: the interests of classes are
too strong for the ideas of the statesman who takes a comprehensive view
of the whole.
Cf the U.S.
4 p 314, underlined
||The office of the poet is to choose a higher pleasure over a lower one.||
Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of poetic and artistic influences.
This is a false note. Plato had another beauty to portray,
which estranged him from the vulgar one.
5 p 314, underlined
||The modern poet|| is not the master of his words, but his words—perhaps borrowed from another—the faded reflection of some French or
German or Italian writer, have the better of him.
Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Rosetti [sic].
6 p 341
||Socrates finds that Gorgias’s words about rhetoric are awry, for the
rhetoric of justice must be just, but|| when you added, shortly afterwards,
that the rhetorician might make a bad use of rhetoric I noted with surprise the inconsistency […].
i.e. the art that treats of what ought to be done is morals.
7 p 350, marked
||Socrates on good as the end of action.|| When we walk we walk for the
sake of the good, and under the idea that it is better to walk, and when
we stand we stand equally for the good?
Cf St Paul.
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8 p 365
||Socrates elicits from Polus the argument that the unjust man, uncorrected by punishment, lives the worst and commits the greatest crimes.
Socrates:|| May not their way of proceeding, my friend, be compared to
the conduct of a person who is afflicted with the worst of diseases and yet
contrives not to pay the penalty to the physician for his sins against his
constitution, and will not be cured, because, like a child, he is afraid of
the pain of being burned or cut:—Is not that a parallel case?
This argument for all its beauty and truth, is marred by a
too great reliance on analogy. Medicine and punishment
have not the same function precisely: for medicine regards
only the individual, whereas punishment may sacrifice
him to save others. This could be called a benefit only if
the sufferer were not unjust, which is contrary to the
hypothesis.
9 p 366, underlined and marked
||The case of Archelaus. Socrates:|| […] You deemed Archelaus happy,
because he was a very great criminal and unpunished: I, on the other
hand, maintained that he or any other who like him has done wrong and
has not been punished, is, and ought to be, the most miserable of all men;
and that the doer of injustice is more miserable than the sufferer; and he
who escapes punishment, more miserable than he who suffers.
Why not “corrected” and “correction”?
10 p 378
||Callicles:|| How you go on, always talking in the same way, Socrates!
||Socrates:|| Yes, Callicles, and also about the same things. ||Callicles:||
Yes, by the Gods, you are literally always talking of cobblers and fullers
and cooks and doctors, as if this had to do with our argument.
The better individual may be the under man by force of a
hostile majority; he is better because, man for man, he
could enslave the others.
11 p 379
||Socrates on the subject of self-rule before one can rule others.||
Will he be free himself, or able to command others, unless
he is chastened inwardly first?
[Thus Santayana re-phrases the question.]
12 p 382, marked
||Callicles maintains that pleasure consists in abandonment of control and
the resulting superabundance of energy. Socrates:|| Capital, excellent; go
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on as you have begun, and have no shame; I, too, must disencumber
myself of shame: and first, will you tell me whether you include itching
and scratching, provided you have enough of them to pass your life in
scratching, in your notion of happiness?
A life without a centre, or an order, or a defined aim.
[ Callicles does not know that all achievement is in reflection only & therefore in the eternal.]
13 p 387
||Callicles objects to Socrates’ dialectic concerning equivalence between
pleasure and pain, and good and evil, but loses the argument.||
Here Callicles is caught napping by the dialectic of
Socrates, whose victory is cheap. Callicles should have
said that folly and cowardice were only definable in reference to eventual pleasure. Cf. Plato’s own doctrine in
Rep Protagoras.
14 p 390
[Santayana paraphrases:]
Pleasure and the good differ as perception and reality:
each the momentary realisation of the other, which is its
permanent possibility.
15 p 399, underlined
||Socrates on the nature of the good.|| […] I further affirm that he who
desires to be happy must pursue and practise temperance and run away
from intemperance as fast as his legs will carry him: […].
The “good” present in the good man is the true direction
towards happiness of his acts pleasures and desires.
16 p 411, marked
||Socrates:|| I use the same images as before intentionally, in order that
you may understand me the better.
In several places there are in this dialogue signs of the
senile manner. Cf. Laws.
17 p 421, doubly marked
||Socrates tells Callicles of belief in stories handed down about judgment
after death in another world.|| Perhaps this may appear to you to be only
an old wife’s tale, which you will contemn. And there might be reason in
your contemning such tales, if by searching we could find out anything
better or truer: […].
Quote in L of R.
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The Dialogues of Plato
2:143
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Volume III.
[Introduction, Republic.]
1 p xi, underlined
The pompous and empty Sophist is utterly helpless in the hands of the
great master of dialectic, […].
[At “empty”:] ?
2 pp xiii–xiv, marked
Thus in a succession of characters Plato represents the successive stages
of morality, beginning with the Athenian gentleman of the olden time,
who is followed by the practical man of that day regulating his life by
proverbs and saws; to him succeeds the wild generalization of the
Sophists, and lastly come the young disciples of the great teacher, who
know the sophistical arguments but will not be convinced by them, and
desire to go deeper into the nature of things. These too, like Cephalus,
Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, are clearly distinguished from one another.
Neither in the Republic, nor in any other Dialogue of Plato, is a single
character repeated.
3 p xxiii, underlined
Thus the sophistical fabric has been demolished, chiefly by appealing to
the analogy of the arts. ‘Justice is like the arts (1) in having no external
interest, and (2) in not aiming at excess, in having a finite stan^
dard. […].’
^
4 p xxvii
In speaking of education Plato rather startles us by affirming that a child
must be trained in falsehood first and in truth afterwards.
? He says no such thing.
5 p xlix, underlined
The connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is not
unfrequently a tangled thread which in an age before logic the poet was
unable to draw out.
What nonsense!
6 p lxxxix, marked
The [modern] philosopher is no longer living in the unseen, nor is he sent
by an oracle to convince mankind of ignorance; nor does he regard
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knowledge as a system of ideas leading upwards by regular stages to the
idea of good.
No?
7 p lxxxix
The eagerness of the pursuit has abated; there is more division of labour
and less of comprehensive reflection upon nature and human life as a
whole; […].
i.e. less philosophy.
8 p lxxxix
The philosopher in modern times is one who fixes his mind on the laws
of nature in their sequence and connexion, and also on their origin
^
and justification. not on fragments or pictures
of nature i.e. not on
^
particular sciences or fragments of history. ; on history,^not on con^
troversy; […].
9 p xcviii
||It is remarkable that good as the first principle of truth and being is mentioned no other place, but briefly in Book VI.||
Perhaps not by that name: but in the Phaedrus and the
Timaeus, as well as Laws and elsewhere it is the subject of
discourse.
10 p clix
||On Plato as the enemy of poets:|| Had Plato been asked whether the
Zeus or Athene of Pheidias was the imitation of an imitation only, would
he not have been compelled to admit that something more was to be
found in them than in the form of any mortal; […].
Does Plato for a moment deny this? Is the Athene a goddess, or an imitation of a goddess? Art does deal with
images, and not to admit it frankly is to demurr to the
wrong point—if there is a wrong point.
11 p clix, marked
Again, Plato objects to the imitative arts that they express the emotional
rather than the rational part of human nature. He does not admit
Aristotle’s theory, that tragedy or other serious imitations are a purgation
of the passions by pity and fear; to him they appear only to afford the
opportunity of indulging them.
Cf. Bernanys. [? scarcely legible] If he is right, Aristotle’s theory is the same as Plato’s as to the psychology, differing
only in the ethics of it.
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12 p clix, underlined
Every one would acknowledge that there have been times when they
were consoled and elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of
architecture or by the peacefulness of nature.
for how long?
[“To be bewitched is not to be saved, ….” Reason in Art, p. 328, Volume
IV, Triton Edition.]
13 p clxi, marked Z
But Plato, who is deeply impressed with the real importance of universals as instruments of thought, attributes to them an essential truth which
is imaginary and unreal; for universals may be often false and particulars
true. Had he attained to any clear conception of the individual, which is
the synthesis of the universal and the particular; or had he been able to
distinguish between opinion and sensation, which the ambiguity of the
words ) ! 1 and the like, tended to confuse, he
would not have denied truth to the particulars of sense.
Oh, Jowett Jowett, how easy it is to be wise.
1
Opinion, notion; explanation, clarification; reasonable, probable.
14 p clxiii
The modern English novel which is the most popular of all forms of reading is not more than a century or two old: will the tale of love a hundred
years hence, after so many thousand variations of the same theme, be still
received with unabated interest?
Let us hope not.
15 p clxv, underlined
[ Jowett pursues his question, “Why was Plato the enemy of poets?”]
||There might be a form of poetry given over to divine perfection, goodness, truth.|| Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or prose,
two in one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the service of God and
man; and feelings of love might still be the incentive to great thoughts
and heroic deeds as in the days of Dante or Petrarch;
What heroic deeds did Dante & Petrarch indulge in?
and many types of manly and womanly beauty might appear among us,
rising above the ordinary level of humanity, and many lives which were
like poems (Laws vii. 817 B), be not only written, but lived by us. A few
such strains have been heard among men in the tragedies of Æschylus
and Sophocles, whom Plato quotes, not, as Homer is quoted by him, in
irony, but with deep and serious approval,—in the poetry of Milton and
Wordsworth, and in passages of other English poets,—first and above all
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in the Hebrew prophets and psalmists. Shakespeare has taught us how
great men should ? speak and act; […].
^ ^ have detested the Protestant unseizableHow Plato would
ness of these ungeometrical persons, people whose brains
are full of clouds—thunderclouds with Milton, lake-mists
and pietistic fogs with the other.
[And how Santayana detests the romantics.]
16 p clxv
Possibly, like Mephistopheles in Faust, [the poet] may retaliate on his
adversaries. But the philosopher will still be justified in asking, ‘How may
the heavenly gift of poesy be devoted to the good of mankind?’
Ba! You have said nothing.
17 p ccxx
[Dante] speaks in a very interesting manner of the beauty and utility of
nature and of the human frame, which he conceives to afford a foretaste
of the heavenly state and of the resurrection of the body. The book is not
really what to most persons the title of it [The Divine Comedy ] would imply,
and belongs to an age which has passed away. But it contains many fine
passages and thoughts which are for all time.
This is a strange monument to the critic’s limitations.
Compare Jowett’s comments on the Philebus.
[Republic, Book I.]
18 p 18
||Thrasymachus explains to Socrates his idea of justice in government.||
Justice then is the advantage of the art—what makes for
perfection. Thrasymachus has the same doctrine as
Socrates, but a different tone and reading. That is right
conduct which tends to make conduct infallible.
Otherwise, Thrasymachus would hold that infallible art is
useful to satisfy desires which are not elements in any
art—but are there any such?
19 p 25
||Socrates sums up: both art and government serve their own interests;
they provide for the weak, not the strong; no one wishes to govern,
which is to reform evils without payment.||
This is not consistent with Socrates’ position: what need of
a selfish motive, if art is unselfish? But it is quite true in
itself because all arts must be based upon some impulse or
motive, so that a man may be prompted to exercise them.
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20 p 25
||The good take office from necessity, and because they do not want others less qualified to rule.||
This is really the reason of one’s eagerness to undertake
any thing—the conscious ability to perform it better than
others: an artistic impulse mixed with vanity.
21 p 25, underlined
For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good
men, X then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention
^ ^ office is at present; […].
as to obtain
X In what, O Socrates, would goodness consist if not in
finding pleasure and profit in the performance of liberal
arts, among them that of governing?
22 p 29
||Thrasymachus loses the argument.||
The finiteness and objectivity of the standard makes this
wisdom and goodness. Thrasymachus is caught by being
forced to rationalise his principle, which is avowedly irrational. He might have said above that the unjust man did
not wish to go beyond his own model, the “perfectly
unjust” man.
23 p 30
The fact is that perfect injustice is justice in a given field:
it has the rationality of justice on the basis of inhuman or
imperfectly human impulses and arts.
[Republic, Book II.]
24 pp 58–59.
[Concerning education: at Socrates’ discourse with Adeimantus on the
ideal education, Santayana marks the exchange on the second half of
58 and most of 59, 60 and all of 61, with the remark at mid 58, presumably for a lecture or for Reason in Art.]
Quote with omissions from here on.
[Republic, Book III.]
25 p 89, marked
||The lover will not tolerate lack of harmony in the soul of the beloved,
but he will be patient with bodily defects and continue his affection.||
This shows the error of Pastor Schleiermacher in saying
all Platonic love is sensuous.
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26 p 90
||The discourse on gymnastics.||
This the true beginning of the next book or division, on
the physical and practical discipline of citizens.
[Republic, Book V.]
27 pp 173–74, marked
475 C. Quote in “Function of Art.”
28 p 175, underlined
||Discourse on being and not being.|| […] for how can that which is not
ever be known?
Why is this not as cogent as Descartes’ axiom?
[Republic, Book VI.]
29 p 208
||Socrates and Glaucon discuss sensuous perception.||
If the good is a medium for perceiving (& even determining) the intelligible, the ideas are conceived not as they lie
in the life of reason, not as they lie in the realm of essence.
30 p 209, underlined
[The discourse continues:]
And the power which the eye possesses is a sort of effluence which is
dispensed from the sun?
Exactly.
Then the sun is not sight, but the author of sight who is recognised by
sight?
[In left margin:]
If the sun were sight we should have phenomenalism, if
the author of sight, rationalism.
[In right margin:]
Exoteric and esoteric meanings. The sun is the great creator of seeing (since eyes are developed because the sun
is there to give us light) and the reality is the great creator
of the appearance, whose function is to reproduce that
reality to us.
31 p 210, top
This philosophy of the good is a metaphysical rendering
of the utilitarianism of Socrates, as the philosophy of ideas
is a metaphysical rendering of his general terms.
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32 p 210
||The idea of the good is more honorable, higher, than mere perception
for demonstrable truth.||
The principle of the formation both of things and of senses
and categories, is utility.
33 p 210, marked
[…] the good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge to all
things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is not
essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.
Cf. Life of Reason: the “good” is the principle of individuation and fixation in things and ideas. Yet utility far
exceeds determinations, and transmutes them as it itself
varies its directions.
34 p 212
||Through hypothesis, dialectic rises above hypothesis.||
i.e. a world of hypostasis.
[Republic, Book IX.]
35 p 294
||Socrates and Glaucon conclude that the philosopher, having judgment
and experience, approves of the love of wisdom, of honor, but least, the
love of gain.||
A hint in all this of my principle of the subjective judgment criterion of all values. Cf. Life of Reason Chapter
^
^
X.
The Dialogues of Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Volume IV.
1 p 49
||Parmenides: Would Socrates make ideals of all things? Not of mud, dirt,
and the like, Socrates replies.||
Their ideal is their reality: rubbish is the only thing that
fulfils its idea.
2 p 52, underlined
And can there be individual thoughts which are thoughts of nothing?
Impossible, he said.
The thought must be of something?
Yes.
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Of something which is or which is not?
i.e. has or has not an essence?
[Theaetetus.]
3 p 199
[Santayana paraphrases:]
To know that clay is the substance used by all these artisans is to know it by its function, i.e. ideally & morally. It
is of course not to know it physically or in itself.
4 p 213
||On dreams, waking, and sleep.||
Waking consists in finding the given unreal; i.e. in controlling it. Perhaps the difference in these levels of experience
and thought consists not in that one contains the real, and
so is true, but that one contained the sense of the unreal,
and so is free. Waking has more perspective. That is all.
5 p 224, doubly marked
||Socrates:|| And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man
have no existence; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils
which appear and are to a man, into goods which are and appear to him.
[…] Remember what has been already said,—that to the sick man his
food appears to be and is bitter, and to the man in health the opposite
of bitter. Now I cannot conceive that one of these men can be or ought
to be made wiser than the other: nor can you assert that the sick man
because he has one impression is foolish, and the healthy man because
he has another is wise; but the one state requires to be changed into the
other, the worse into the better.
[From “Remember”:]
“Pragmatism”
6 p 224, doubly marked
[…] so I conceive that a good mind causes men to have good thoughts;
and these which the inexperienced call true, I maintain to be only better,
and not truer than others.
7 p 236, doubly marked
||On confusion between what the state defines as good and the ideal of
the good.|| […] he who said so [that they were identical] would be playing
with the name ‘good,’ and would not touch the real question—it would
be a mockery, would it not?
Cf. pragmatism
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8 p 252
Error = Institution.
9 p 257
Error = false apperception.
[Sophist, Introduction.]
10 p 314, underlined
The Platonic unity of differences or opposites is the beginning of the
modern view that all knowledge is of relations; it also anticipates the doctrine of Spinoza that all determination is negation. Plato takes or gives so
much of either of these theories as was necessary or possible in the age
in which he lived.
Jowett is not a very learned man, and this defence of
Hegelianism is less to be trusted than if it came from a less
glib and superficial pen.
11 p 315
In several of the later dialogues Plato is occupied with the connexion of
the sciences, which in the Philebus he divides into two classes of pure and
applied, adding to them there as elsewhere (Phaedr., Crat., Rep., States.)
a superintending science of dialectic. This is the origin of Aristotle’s
Architectonic, which seems, however, to have passed into an imaginary
science of essence, and no longer to retain any relation to other branches
of knowledge. […] But even now the time has not arrived when the anticipation of Plato can be realized. Though many a thinker has framed a
‘hierarchy of the sciences,’ no one has as yet found the higher science
which arrays them in harmonious order, […].
Does this man know anything? This sounds like a newspaper.
12 p 321, marked Z
We may ponder over the thought of number, reminding ourselves that
every unit both implies and denies the existence of every other, and that
the one is the many—a sum of fractions, and the many one—a sum of
units. We may be reminded that in nature there is a centripetal as well as
a centrifugal force, a regulator as well as a spring, a law of attraction as
well as of repulsion. The way to the West is the way also to the East; the
north pole of the magnet cannot be divided from the south pole; […].
Female philosophy.
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13 p 325, marked Z
Formerly when philosophers arrived at the infinite and absolute, they
seemed to be lost in a region beyond human comprehension.
Fancy that! But now we have changed all that.
14 p 326, marked Z
The system of Hegel frees the mind from the dominion of abstract ideas.
[…] For Hegel has found admirers in England and Scotland when his
popularity in Germany has departed, and he, like the philosophers
whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other thinker has ever dissected the
human mind with equal patience and minuteness.
And the Scholastics? It would have been dangerous to
know about them when Balliol must be kept liberal and
broad.
[ Jowett, of course, was Master of Balliol.]
15 p 330, marked Z
The true meaning of Aristotle has been disguised from us by his own
appeal to fact and the opinions of mankind in his more popular works,
and by the use made of his writings in the Middle Ages. No book, except
the Scriptures, has been so much read, and so little understood.
What an ignoramus good fat Jowett really is. Does he
think he understands Aristotle better than did Saint
Thomas?
[Sophist.]
16 p 360, top
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
To know the grounds of things is mastership.
[Santayana’s eloquent translation.]
17 p 372, marked
||The stranger maintains to Theaetetus that Parmenides and the Eleatics
held to a philosophy of being and non-being that was a mythology.||
Then there are Ionian, and in more recent times Sicilian muses, who
have arrived at the conclusion that to unite the two principles is safer,
and to say that being is one and many, and that these are held together
by enmity and friendship, […] peace and unity sometimes prevailing
under the sway of Aphrodite, and then again plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife.
[From “peace and unity”:]
Cf. Lucretius who evidently imitated Empedocles here.
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18 p 375, marked
||Stranger:|| […] if being be not a whole, through having the attribute of
unity, and there be such a thing as an absolute whole, being lacks something of its own nature? ||Theaetetus:|| Certainly. ||Stranger:|| Upon this
view, again, being, having a defect of being, will become not-being?
Hegel’s joy!
19 p 377, top
Nature
The Moral = actual = or
the physical or existent
Matter
Life or Mood
moral
logical
or the causal
or the
truth
or potent
Immediate
or the standard, the typical
or actual
the ideal.
The ideal = potential = possible
20 p 379
||Stranger:|| […] and I hold that the definition of being is simply power.
Cf. Schopenhauer.
21 p 380, underlined
[… the idealists] will allow that if to know is active, then, of course, to be
known is passive. And on this view being, in so far as it is known, is acted
upon by knowledge, and is therefore in motion; for that which is in a
state of rest cannot be acted upon, as we affirm.
Sophism. Cf. Aristotle.
22 p 391
[Santayana paraphrases:]
“Being is not the things that are.
not-being is only not merely being. It is, but is not—
“Being”.
23 p 393, top
A little System of Philosophy
I {Evolution. Genesis
II {Discourse. Types Logic
III {Art. Valuation Estimation
IV. {Criticism. Skepsis.
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24 pp 403–4, underlined
||Theaetetus and the Stranger discuss the nature of images. Stranger:||
And what shall we say of human art? Do we not make one house by the
art of building, and another by the art of drawing, which is a sort of
dream created by man for those who are awake?
[At top of 404:]
Definition of fine art
[Philebus, Introduction.]
25 pp 531–32, underlined
In the language of ancient philosophy, the relative character of pleasure
is described as becoming or generation. This is relative to Being or
Essence, and from one point of view may be regarded as the Heraclitean
flux in contrast with the Eleatic Being; from another, as the transient
enjoyment of eating and drinking compared with the supposed permanence of intellectual pleasures.
This is bad. The point missed by Jowett, is rather that pleasure cannot be the object of ultimate desire, because,
being a process, it is not an object at all. But the good is
the object of desire. Ergo pleasure is not the good. But
pleasure & pain are the sanctions of reason and life, the
signs of right activity and of wrong, and the source of values as distinguished from their objective seat or embodiment. Cf. Aristotle, also Green.
26 p 534
The most sensual pleasure […] is inseparable from the consciousness of
pleasure; no man can be happy who, to borrow Plato’s illustration, is
leading the life of an oyster.
Wretched criticism.
[Philebus.]
27 p 577
||Socrates and Protarchus debate whether pleasure or wisdom is the
good.||
[Santayana comments:]
Pleasure is what Hegel would call an abstraction—it has
all sorts of contexts, and involves none of them in particular.
Query: Is the presence of a common element the same
logically and physically? E.g. old age common to the pyramids & Teiresias: gold, common to coins & crowns. Which
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is pleasure like? In other words, is it a separable element?
Hedonists say yes: Plato, no.
28 p 578
[Santayana interprets and comments:]
If knowledge were the good, any kind of knowledge
would do: but much of knowledge is useless or (by its
^ ^as much of pleasure is: ergo,
predominance) hurtful,
^
neither knowledge nor pleasure, of^ every
sort and in general, can be the good. Human life is assumed. Plato’s
ethics is politics.
29 p 586
||The life of pleasure vs. the life of wisdom.||
Nature perhaps contains both these species—mechanisms
accompanied by images within feelings, and mechanisms
unaccompanied by feelings without images. Who shall say
that they ought or ought not to exist? We may say two
other things, however: that the first could assign no value
to itself (since it has no appreciative consciousness) and
that both are repulsive to man, whose necessities and
ideals involve both sorts of experience.
30 p 596, doubly marked
||Socrates asks to which class mind and knowledge belong, and answers
his own question,|| […] since all philosophers assert with one voice that
mind is the king of heaven and earth—in reality they are magnifying
themselves. And perhaps they are right.
N.B.
31 p 598, marked
||Our souls and minds must come from the soul or mind of the universe.
Is there another source? Socrates asks and Protarchus agrees that it is the
only source. Socrates:|| Why, yes, Protarchus; for surely we cannot
imagine that of the four classes, the finite, the infinite, the composition
of the two, and the cause, the fourth, which enters into all things, giving
to our bodies souls, and the art of self-management, and of healing disease, and operating in other ways to heal and organize, having too all
the attributes of wisdom;—we cannot, I say, imagine that whereas the
self-same elements exist, both in the entire heaven and in great
provinces of the heaven, only fairer and purer, this last should not also
in that higher sphere have designed the noblest and fairest things?
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Soul, i.e. a principle of life order and reason is drawn by
us from the world. Cf. L of R. Chapt 1. Book I.
32 p 599
Pleasure is the material principle and intelligence the formal principle of the life of reason.
33 p 600, underlined
||Socrates:|| […] would not the general proposition seem to you to hold,
that the destroying of the natural union of the finite and infinite, which,
as I was observing before, make up the class of living beings, is pain, and
that the process of return of all things to their own nature is pleasure?
This involves the highest good as the principle of pleasure
itself.
34 pp 604–5
||Socrates develops the idea that desire is the wish to replenish pleasure,
that one cannot want a pleasure of which one has no experience, and that
it is through memory that desire occurs, through the mind and not the
body.||
This artificial rationalistic psychology is one of the worst
things in Plato and Aristotle. As if desire were of what we
remembered, not of what we have never experienced, but
throw together at the instigation of blind instinct and
dwell on with near delight as upon a great and delicious
discovery!
35 p 614
False opinion about pleasure confused with false pleasure.
36 p 638
||Concerning the possibility of mixing pleasure and wisdom. Socrates:||
One pleasure was supposed by us to be truer than another, and one art
to be more exact than another. […] There was also supposed to be a difference in sciences; some of them regarding only the transient and perishing, and others the permanent and imperishable and everlasting and
immutable; and when judged by the standard of truth, the latter, as we
thought, were truer than the former.
This appeal to “truth” (the value of which has not been
investigated) would be a gross ineptitude if by “truth”
were not meant “genuineness”, true goodness.
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37 p 641, underlined
||Socrates and Protarchus agree that knowledge and wisdom are constituents of the good. Socrates:|| Unless truth enter into the composition,
nothing can truly be created or subsist.
= a definite nature. This mixture must be a single essence.
38 p 641, underlined
||Socrates:|| And may we not say with reason that we are now at the
vestibule of the habitation of the good?
Distinctly the common political good, since both the
applied or empiric arts and the necessary pure pleasures
are admitted on human grounds—on which also vague
^
^
& infinite pleasures are also excluded.
39 p 642, doubly marked
||Measure and symmetry are also essential to the good. Socrates:|| And
now the power of the good has retired into the region of the beautiful;
for measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue all the world over.
40 p 643
[Santayana summarizes his own language:]
God. The principle of order. (principle of selection)
Heaven. Essences (intrinsic goods)
religion, Dialectic (system of goods)
morality. Physics. (opinions about goods.)
feeling. experience (sense of good)
41 p 644, underlined
||Socrates:|| […] convinced of what I have just been saying, and feeling
indignant at the doctrine, which is maintained, not by Philebus only, but
by thousands of others, I affirmed that mind was far better and far more
excellent, as an element of human life, than pleasure.
N.B.
The Dialogues of Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Volume V.
[Laws, Book II.]
1 p 45, marked
||The Athenian stranger suggests that boys shall not have wine until age
eighteen. Then,|| they may taste wine in moderation up to the age of
thirty, but while a man is young he should abstain altogether from
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intoxication and from excess of wine; when, at length, he has reached
forty years, after dinner at a public mess, he may invite not only the
other Gods, but Dionysus above all, to the mystery and festivity of the
elder men, making use of the wine which he has given men to lighten
the sourness of old age; that in age we may renew our youth, and forget our sorrows; and also in order that the nature of the soul, like iron
melted in the fire, may become softer and so more impressible.
Charming passage on the value of Combination Rooms.1
1
“Combination Rooms” at Cambridge are common rooms in other British
universities.
2 p 46, marked
||From a discussion of music and dancing, which produce pleasure and
charm, the argument moves to eating and drinking, and on to learning.||
[Santayana paraphrases:]
It could not be said that learning was good only for the
accompanying charm: yet it is good for its utility
3 p 47, marked Z
||Music is imitative, the Athenian says. If it gives only pleasure it cannot
really be excellent,|| but only that other kind of music which is an imitation of the good.
The polemic here is against the immediate or irrational
pleasure. True utility is not touched.
4 p 47, marked
||Athenian:|| And those who seek for the best kind of song and music
ought not to seek for that which is pleasant, but for that which is true; and
the truth of imitation consists, as we were saying, in rendering the thing
imitated according to quantity and quality.
This is quite true: art must be squared with the purpose of
life in general, not allowed to go about loose.
Music to be judged by its appropriateness alone. Plato little thought such a maxim would lead to what he would
most abhor—a Wagner.
[Laws, Book III.]
5 p 69
||The discussion now concerns the origin of government. The Athenian
speaks of the dissolution of the Dorian confederacy.|| […] not cowardice
was the cause of the ruin of the Dorian kings and of their whole design,
nor ignorance of military matters, either on the part of the rulers or of
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their subjects; but their misfortunes were due to their general degeneracy, and especially to their ignorance of the most important human
affairs.
,
Cf. Other countries in this respect. The American for instance, and what it may come to.
6 p 70, underlined and marked
||Athenian:|| […] the greatest ignorance is when a man hates that which
he nevertheless thinks to be good and noble, and loves and embraces
that which he knows to be unrighteous and evil. This disagreement
between the sense of pleasure and the judgment of reason in the soul is,
in my opinion, the worst ignorance; and also the greatest, because affecting the great mass of the human soul; […].
[From “This disagreement”:] N.B.
7 pp 82–83, marked
||Of ancient music, and of the disorder introduced by poets:|| They were
men of genius, but they had no perception of what is just and lawful in
music; raging like Bacchanals and possessed with inordinate delights—
mingling lamentations with hymns, and paeans with dithyrambs; imitating the sounds of the flute on the lyre, and making one general
confusion; ignorantly affirming that music has no truth, and, whether
good or bad, can only be judged of rightly by the pleasure of the hearer.
N.B. Quote in Function of Art.
[Laws, Book IV.]
8 p 87, marked Z
||What will the ideal city be? Description of its site; it would be eighty
stadia distant from the sea. Athenian:|| But there is comfort in the eighty
stadia; although the sea is too near, especially if, as you say, the harbours
are so good. Still we may be content. The sea is pleasant enough as a
daily companion, but has indeed also a bitter and brackish quality; filling the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begetting in the
souls of men uncertain and unfaithful ways—making the state unfriendly
and unfaithful both to her own citizens, and also to other nations.
Plato would not, in this age, have regretted being a
Spaniard. Castile is a naturally noble country and would
be great if it had a noble training.
9 p 89, marked
||Athenian:|| And in estimating the goodness of a state, we regard both
the situation of the country and the order of the laws, considering that the
mere preservation and continuance of life is not the most honourable
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thing for men, as the vulgar think, but the continuance of the best life,
while we live; […].
10 p 91, marked
||Athenian:|| I was going to say that man never legislates, but accidents of
all sorts, which legislate for us in all sorts of ways. The violence of war
and the hard necessity of poverty are constantly overturning governments and changing laws.
Canovas on the inner constitution of Spain.
11 p 104
||The Athenian outlines and applies the double method of persuasion and
command. If a man did not marry between ages thirty and thirty-five, he
would be fined.|| This would be the simple law about marriage. The double law would run thus:—A man shall marry between the ages of thirty
and thirty-five, considering that in a manner the human race naturally
partakes of immortality, which every man is by nature inclined to desire
to the utmost; for the desire of every man that he may become famous,
and not lie in the grave without a name, is only the love of continuance.
Cf. Life of Reason.
12 p 105. marked Z
||The Athenian pursues his idea.|| And for a man voluntarily to deprive
himself of this gift [of immortality through his posterity], as he deliberately
does who will not have a wife or children, is impiety.
What is the postulate here? That the natural desire for life
is the basis of virtue. Cf. a man who, believing in personal
immortality, should neglect to save his soul.
[Laws, Book V.]
13 p 125, marked Z
||From the Athenian’s long discourse about the state and its governance:||
The intention, as we affirm, of a reasonable statesman, is not what the
many declare to be the object of a good legislator, namely, that the state
for the true interests of which he is advising should be as great and as rich
as possible, and should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest
empire by sea and land;—this they imagine to be the real object of legislation, at the same time adding, inconsistently, that the true legislator
desires to have the city the best and happiest possible.
Alas! When will this be understood! Cf. note in my text.
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[Laws, Book VI.]
14 p 137, marked
||The Athenian to Cleinias:|| The old saying, that ‘equality makes friendship,’ is happy and also true; but there is obscurity and confusion as to
what sort of equality is meant. For there are two equalities which are
called by
Equality.
15 p 138, marked
[The Athenian’s speech continues:]
the same name, but are in reality in many ways almost the opposite of
one another; one of them may be introduced without difficulty, by any
state or any legislator in the distribution of honours: this is the rule of
measure, weight, and number, which regulates and apportions them. But
there is another equality, of a better and higher kind, which is not so easily recognized. This is the judgment of Zeus; among men it avails but little; that little, however, is the source of the greatest good to individuals
and states. For it gives to the greater more, and to the inferior less and in
proportion to the nature of each; and, above all, greater honour always
to the greater virtue, and to the less less; and to either in proportion to
their respective measure of virtue and education. And this is justice, and
is ever the true principle of states, at which we ought to aim, and according to this rule order the new city which is now being founded, and any
other city which may be hereafter founded. To this the legislator should
look,—not to the interests of tyrants one or more, or to the power of the
people, but to justice always; which, as I was saying, is the distribution of
natural equality among unequals in each case. But there are times at
which every state is compelled to use the words, ‘just,’ ‘equal,’ in a secondary sense, in the hope of escaping in some degree from factions. For
equity and indulgence are infractions of the perfect and strict rule of justice. And this is the reason why we are obliged to use the equality of the
lot, in order to avoid the discontent of the people; and so we invoke God
and fortune in our prayers, and beg that they themselves will direct the
lot with a view to supreme justice. And therefore, although we are compelled to use both equalities, we should use that into which the element
of chance enters as seldom as possible.
Good on “equality.”
16 p 155, marked
||The Athenian on marriage:|| Let this then be our exhortation concerning marriage, and let us remember what was said before—that a man
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should cling to immortality, and leave behind him children’s children to
be the servants of God in his place for ever.
This is Biblical yet literal enough. Cf. Text. But the sort of
piety is different from the Hebrew.
[Laws, Book VII.]
17 p 179, marked
||Children who change the rules of traditional games will as adults want
to change institutions and laws.||
Important idea. If we could bring up people under the
same influences we should not have this instability in
affairs.
18 p 199, marked
||The Athenian on rules for comedy:|| For serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites, if
a man is really to have intelligence of either; but he cannot carry out both
in action, if he is to have any degree of virtue.
Cf. Text & note. This is doubtful, although not so bad as if
action too had been made experimental. Perhaps only he
who has not laughed can know what it is to be serious: the
other can always laugh at his own zeal, as above.
19 p 199, underlined
And for this very reason he should learn them both, in order that he may
not in ignorance do or say anything which is ridiculous and out of
place— […].
The only thing one should be forewarned against is what
one is probably predisposed to: then the [illegible] is not
really suggested, but the natural suggestion met by a foretaste of the consequences and perhaps inhibited. But
when there is no predisposition the suggestion is gratuitous and dangerous.
20 p 200, marked
||Objections to imitation in the arts are again posed: “Serious” poets,
tragedians, from other cities are not to be permitted to make their arguments in the Athenian’s model city until their scripts have been approved
by the magistrates.||
Here begins the great explanation.
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[Laws, Book VIII.]
21 p 212, marked
||Military drill and athletic exercises are to occur regularly and to be as
realistic as possible. Should a man be killed in the process,|| the homicide is involuntary, and we will make the slayer, when he has been
purified according to law, to be pure of blood, considering that if a few
men should die, others as good as they will be born; but that if fear is
dead, then the citizens will never find a test of superior and inferior
natures, which is a far greater evil to the state than the loss of a few.
Cf. our athletics
22 p 220
||On the forbidding of sexual intercourse between brother and sister.||
||The Athenian:|| Nor does the thought of such a thing ever enter at all
into the minds of most of them.
||Megillus:|| Very true.
||The Athenian:|| Does not a little word extinguish all pleasures of that
sort?
||Megillus:|| What word?
||The Athenian:|| The declaration that they are unholy, hated of God, and
most infamous; and is not the reason of this that no one has ever said the
opposite, but every one from his earliest childhood has heard men speaking in the same manner about them always and everywhere, whether in
comedy or in the graver language of tragedy?
The reason is familiarity and the presence of other opportunities. We do not warn boys against falling in love with
their sisters. Is it possible to fall in love with a person one
knows well? Hardly. Lust is possible, the love of fancy is
not.
[Laws, Book IX.]
23 p 236
||The Athenian on sacrilege. To the guilty he would say:|| When any
such thought comes into your mind, go and perform expiations, go as a
suppliant to the temples of the Gods who avert evils, go to the society of
those who are called good men among you; hear them tell and yourself
try to repeat after them, that every man should honour the noble and
the just.
How Greek is this tragic sense of crime and of destiny.
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24 p 260, underlined and marked
||Human selfishness creates the necessity for laws.|| For if a man were
born so divinely gifted that he could naturally apprehend the truth, he
would have no need of laws to rule over him; for there is no law or order
which is above knowledge, nor can mind, without impiety, be deemed
the subject or slave of any man, but rather the lord of all. I speak of mind,
true and free, and in harmony with nature.
Strange persistence of this Socratic hobby. In what relation could Plato & Aristotle & St Thomas think the
instincts passive and character lay to the intellect? There
must be some explanation of so unreal a doctrine held by
such men.
[Laws, Book X.]
25 p 282, marked
||The Athenian insists that there are two souls, one of good and one of
evil.||
This proves the moral rectitude of Plato, in spite of the
tendency to monism in the Timaeus.
26 p 283, marked
||The world moves regularly, thus it is guided by the good soul. But if it
moves wildly, the evil soul is guide.||
But, alas, here is the confusion of moral with logical and
aesthetic order once more.
[Laws, Book XI.]
27 p 299, marked
||The Athenian quotes an old saw:|| ‘Move not the immovables.’
How superstitious Plato becomes. After being in the last
book, sophistical and fanatical.
[Laws, Book XII.]
28 p 359, marked
||On the regularity of motion of bodies.||
Strange, many would rather say the regularity was proof
of mechanism and an irregularity would be proof of life.
This is really the thought underlying the definition of life
as spontaneous motion: for regular motion has no origination, no spontaneity in it.
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[Timaeus, Introduction.]
29 p 429
But the Timaeus still remains the greatest effort of the human mind to
conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has
bequeathed to us.
And Lucretius?
[Timaeus.]
30 p 449, marked
||Timaeus to Socrates:|| Now it is all-important that the beginning of
everything should be according to nature.
i.e. that our foundations correspond to the real structure
of things.
31 p 450, top
The myth of creation. God (being the good) is not jealous
but self-diffusing. He finds a chaos: he shapes it into an
image of himself.—But good = intelligence. Therefore the
form of the world is to be as intelligent and intelligible as
possible. As the total of ideas is one, the total of phenomena is one also.
32 p 450
[Santayana’s paraphrase:]
The ideal realm is limited to the types of nature. The
whole realm of essence is manifested in the realm of
nature.
33 p 451, top
Deduction of the four elements:
Since the “created” is sensible & visible, it
must be earth & fire. But to combine these, their numbers
must be brought into a proportional series with two other
terms (two, because cubes have two powers) hence water
and air.
34 p 451, marked Z
For whenever in any three numbers, whether cube or square, there is a
mean, which is to the last term what the first term as the last term is to
the mean,—then the mean becoming the first and last, and the first and
last both becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be
the same, and having become the same with one another will be all one.
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[From “then the mean becoming”:]
The same law will unite them. Nuts to Hegel.1
1
Who said that Santayana did not command the American vernacular?
35 p 509, marked
||Timaeus says that mental disease originates in the body.|| And in general, all that which is termed incontinence of pleasure and is deemed a
reproach under the idea that the wicked voluntarily do wrong is not justly
a matter for reproach. For no man is voluntarily bad; but the bad become
bad by reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education, things
which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will.
Why has mankind such a superstitious zeal in hating itself
for its misfortunes?
Ezra Loomis Pound
Quia pauper amavi
London: n.d. [1919?]. Waterloo. Twelve marginalia.
[Early versions of Pound’s first three Cantos.]
1 p 19
I
Hang it all, there can be but the one “Sordello,” […]
Fert animus to imitate Browning.1
[…] I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping […]
Good image of catch what comes.
I stand before the booth (the speech), but the truth
Is inside this discourse: this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom.
Give up the intaglio method?
Vomit, don’t write.
1
“Fert animus” should probably be “Fort animus”: brave spirit.
2 p 7, underlined
Langue d’Oc
When the nightingale to his mate
Sings day-long and night late
My love and I keep state
In bower,
In flower,
’Till the watchman on the tower
Cry:
“Up! Thou rascal, Rise, […]”
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This is intentional? Otherwise guitar-like.
3 p 21, underlined and marked X
True, it was Venice,
And at Florian’s, under the North arcade
4 p 27
Back once again in middle Indiana,
Acting as usher in the theatre,
Painting the local drug-shop and soda bars,
The local doctor’s fancy for a mantle-piece:
Sheep! jabbing the wool upon their flea-bit backs,
1890: Americans gone to seed.
Llewelyn Powys
Rats in the Sacristy
London: 1937. Waterloo. Sixteen marginalia.
1 pp 59–60, marked
“The multitude,” Heraclitus once said, “are like people heavy with wine
led by children knowing not whither they go.”
2 p 101, underlined
||Lucian, on a place|| of monotony where there is neither strength nor
beauty, where one is no better than another, “all under the same gloom.”
Democracy.
3 p 140
||On Machiavelli: Each person has a modicum of freedom, within
bounds. It is folly for an individual to struggle against the mass.||
This is not free-will but harmony with nature and necessity.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
Il cattolicismo rosso
Napoli: 1908. Georgetown. Forty-three marginalia.
1 p xiii, marked
[Prezzolini’s Introduction.]
||Hundreds among the aristocracy of the Roman Church have preferred
to see it go down rather than to go along with the machine-like version
of religion, automatism of faith, that had dominated the clergy and the
Vatican.||
2:168
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2 p xvii, doubly marked
[Introduction.]
||Luther believed that he was being a good Catholic by attempting to
reform the Church. Now certain people who call themselves Catholic are
not such; others, supposed rebels, are more Catholic than the Pope; still
others who think they are treating of religious matters|| sono fuori non
solo del Cattolicismo ma della stessa religione.1
1
… are not only outside Catholicism but beyond religion itself.
3 p 11
||Theologians have diminished piety, condemned mysticism to the convent alone, suppressed aesthetic, linguistic, and artistic expressions of
religious sentiment, and virtually denied individual will.||
The early Church—say in the 4th century—had most of
these characteristics. Cf. Gibbon.
4 p 23
[Santayana’s paraphrase:]
Practical madness is not now so often founded on theoretical madness.
5 p 25
[Santayana concludes from the analysis:]
i.e. true Christianity is impossible for a society.
6 p 27
||Concerning automatic responses to religion, without doctrine or formal
instruction.||
This unconsciousness of religion is a proof, of course, that
this is the really proper and representative religion of the
age. A sentimental desire to be very religious, like other
ages, is a sign, not of religion, but of coxcombry.
7 p 44
Strange inconsistency in the revolutionists and democrats
not to welcome the popular and modern religious fiction.
8 p 58, marked
||The Socialists rely on economic determinism, reject the idea of Christian
charity, and are anti-clerical: all the result of exterior philosophies.||
How socialism has become anti religious. [sic]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:169
9 p 95
||Cardinal Newman’s reliance not on the Council of Trent but on divine
grace and personal illumination.||
In this we forget that he was bred an Anglican—a hot
house even more artificial.
10 p 146, marked
Per i protestanti la vita religiosa è in uno sguardo al passato, in un ravvicinamento al Cristo che è stato, in un ritorno ai suoi tempi. Il
Protestantismo, che si dà per una religione di progresso, è una religione
di regresso; è stato una rivoluzione reazionaria.1
1
For Protestants the religious life is a glance at the past, in a state of reconciliation
with Christ, in a return to His times. Set forth as a religion of progress,
Protestantism is a religion of regress; it is a reactionary revolution.
11 p 190, marked
||Prezzolini quotes and criticizes Le Roy for recommending anti-intellectual states of consciousness, suitable, Prezzolini says, for Buddhists, but
hardly appropriate to the effort to renew study of Catholicism.||
Nostalgie de la boue . . psychique!
The worship of psychic slime.
Protoplasm worship.
12 p 240, marked
||Prezzolini approvingly cites Loisy: it might have been better had
Christian revelation occurred in the nineteenth-century rather than when
it did; Catholicism would then be rid of a great deal of historical freight
and open to genuine faith and piety.||
Quite excellent!
13 p 318
||A disquisition on the nature of charity.||
Might not the higher spiritual life consist in charity: then
every expression of charity would be christian.
Joseph Frederic Privitera
The Latin American Front
Milwaukee: 1945. Waterloo. Seventeen marginalia,
and a draft of a poem in the end-pages.
1 p 40
If the Indians were converted by Protestant propaganda it
would be to Protestant thrift and conceit, not to Protestant
2:170
George Santayana’s Marginalia
religion. If they have religious instincts of their own, not
appealed to by the Catholic system, those instincts would
surely be appealed to much less by Protestantism. But by
that time Protestant missions may have ceased to be religious even in name.
2 p 54, underlined
Do we desire only the trade of Latin America?
This desire, made reciprocal, is enough for organising
trade relations all the world over. Desire for cultural
union should remain “uncovenanted”.
3 p 58
||Privitera foresees the day when the United States will send south Latin
American engineers, geologists, and the like to starve to death.||
Isn’t the better way this: that S. Americans should learn
engineering in the U.S. and then teach it at home? Didn’t
the Japs do this?
4 p 135, underlined
Surrounded as we are in the United States by the most modern comforts,
the best food, […].
?
5 pp 148–49, marked
“If heroes exist in this country, they are not to be found among writers”; these words of Gálvez have a familiar ring. It is a striking fact that
spiritually Argentina resembles the United States more than it does the
rest of Latin America. While Argentinians themselves have never been
willing to put it quite that way, those who have given any thought to
the matter have at least seen evidence of those traits which one generally associates with the cultural pattern of the United States. […] The
profession of writer, [Gálvez] says, is scorned. A poet is considered a
useless creature, a muerto de hambre,1 a pariah, if not a beggarly alcoholic. When he was a boy, he tells us … “parents took care not to
encourage literary study in their children. In fact, they did everything
in their power to place obstacles in the path of a boy as soon as they
suspected in him an affection for poetry.”
1
One dead of hunger.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:171
6 p 151, marked
The Latin finds in conversation a communion of the spirit with his fellow man that is both delightful and satisfying to the soul. This is an art
which we in the United States no longer possess.
[End-paper:]
While on earth [illegible] thrift and earthly
^
^
Though loving circumstance
must needs on earth control
Our rights freedom lives wakes within the soul,
^
^
Smooth Wise custom
^
^
The soul, the seed of all things
Smiling she signs the temporary bond
knows no bond
the matrimonial bond
And Smiling submits to every civic bond,
Fashions
Builds as she it may, but yet ever looks beyond control
^ ^thrift & circumstance
^ ^
While on earth
Wise custom, freedom wakes within the soul
Smiling submits to every civic bond
Builds as it may, but ever looks beyond
Frederic Prokosch
Chosen Poems
New York: 1948. Waterloo. Five trivial marginalia.
Marcel Proust
A la recherche du temps perdu
Paris: 1919. Georgetown. Fifteen marginalia.
[The pagination of Santayana’s copies of the Gallimard 1919 edition do
not correspond to the pagination in the other 1919 printings I have been
able to locate.]
[A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, tome I.]
1 p 18, underlined
||Marcel the narrator reflects on his vacillating, childhood love for
Gilberte, as opposed to love for another person, love in the abstract,
detached from individuals.|| […] quand on aime, on sent que cet amour
ne porte pas leur nom, pourra dans l’avenir renaître, aurait pu, même
dans le passé, naître pour une autre et non pour celle-là. Et dans le temps
2:172
George Santayana’s Marginalia
où l’on n’aime pas, si l’on prend philosophiquement son parti de ce qu’il
y a de contradictoire dans l’amour, c’est que cet amour dont on parle à
son aise on ne l’éprouve pas alors, donc on ne le connaît pas, la connaissance en ces matières étant intermittente […].1
[At “dont on parle”:] knowledge
[At “la connaissance”:] intuition
1
… when one is in love, one feels that this love is not attached to a name, that in
the future it may be re-born, or that it might, in the past, have come into being for
another than the beloved. And during the time in which one is not in love, if one
philosophically faces up to the contradictory side of love, one finds that such love of
which one speaks at one’s ease had not in the past been tested, thus one does not
really recognize it, recognition in these matters being intermittent ….
2 p 45
[…] chez ceux qui aiment et sont abandonnés, le sentiment d’attente—même d’attente inavouée—dans lequel ils vivent se transforme de
lui-même, et bien qu’en apparence identique, fait succéder à un premier
état, un second extrêmement identique, fait succéder à un premier état,
un second exactement contraire.1
1
Santayana corrects either a typographical error or an extremely obscure
sentence.
… among those who are in love and are abandoned, the sensation of waiting—even
of unavowed waiting—in which they live becomes transformed, and while identical
in appearance, causes a second state to succeed the first, a second absolutely identical, causes a second exactly the contrary of the first to come about.
3 pp 59–60, marked
||More concerning Marcel’s love for Gilberte.|| Souvent (notre vie étant
si peu chronologique, interférant tant d’anachronismes dans la suite des
jours), je vivais dans ceux, plus anciens que la veille ou l’avant-veille, où
j’aimais Gilberte.1
1
Often (our lives being so slightly chronological, so many anachronisms breaking
into the sequence of our days), I re-lived those days, before the times of wakefulness
or semi-sleep, when I loved Gilberte.
[A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, tome II.]
4 pp 84–85, marked
||At the new year, walking with Françoise, the young Marcel sees a poster
on a column advertising a performance that Berma had given on New
Year’s day.|| A gentle and moist wind was blowing. Having lost Gilberte, Marcel
thinks of a new world in parallel to the former in which a new friendship may
occur, as in the first days of the creation of the world. J’avais beau dédier
celle-ci à Gilberte, et comme on superpose une religion aux lois aveugles
de la nature, essayer d’imprimer au jour de l’an l’idée particulière que je
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:173
m’étais faite de lui, c’était en vain; je sentais qu’il ne savait pas qu’on l’appelât le jour de l’an, qu’il finissait dans le crépuscule d’une façon qui ne
m’était pas nouvelle: dans le vent doux qui soufflait autour de la colonne
d’affiches, j’avais reconnu, j’avais senti reparaître la matière éternelle et
commune, l’humidité familière, l’ignorante fluidité des anciens jours.1
1
However much I would consecrate this to Gilberte, and as one superimposes religion on the blind laws of nature, to try to imprint on a day of the year the particular idea that I had of it was in vain. I felt that it did not know what we called
the New Year, that it ended in the twilight in a way that was not new to me: in
the gentle wind blowing about the column of posters, I had again known, I had
sensed to re-appear that eternal and common substance, the familiar dampness, the
unknowing flow of former times.
5 p 114, underlined
||Marcel has written a letter to Swann to which Swann had not bothered
to reply.|| J’admirais l’impuissance de l’esprit, du raisonnement et du
cœur à opérer la moindre conversion, à résoudre une seule de ces difficultés, qu’ensuite la vie, […].1
Bergson revised & materialised.
1
I wondered at the impotence of the mind, of rationality and of the heart to bring
about the slightest change, to resolve any one of the difficulties that life entails, ….
6 p 145, marked
Ce qu’on appelle la posterité, c’est la postérite de l’œuvre.1
[Vinteuil’s music.]
Your only posterity is the offspring of your work.
1
That which we call posterity is the posterity of the work.
7 p 146
||Marcel meditates upon our illusion of the orderliness of past tradition in
the arts, and of the changes, necessarily surprising and disorderly, which
must come about in the art of the future.|| Songeons seulement aux
choquants disparates que nous présenterait, si nous ne tenions pas
compte du temps à venir et des changements qu’il amène, tel horoscope
de notre propre âge mûr tiré devant nous durant notre adolescence.
Seulement tous les horoscopes ne sont pas vrais et être obligé par une
œuvre d’art de faire entrer dans le total de sa beauté le facteur du temps,
mêle, à notre jugement, quelque chose d’aussi hasardeux et par là aussi
dénué d’intérêt véritable que toute prophétie dont la non réalisation
n’impliquera nullement la médiocrité d’esprit du prophète, car Depth
of mind deepens the view of essence, not of events. ce qui^appelle
^
2:174
George Santayana’s Marginalia
à l’existence les possibles ou les en exclut n’est pas forcément de la compétence de génie; […].1
1
Just imagine the shocking disparities we should confront if we did not take into
account the future and the changes it would lead to, in a horoscope of our maturity
taken in adolescence. But horoscopes are not necessarily true, and the necessity in
judging works of art to include time in the totality of its beauty introduces into our
judgment something as hazardous and as barren of interest, as any prophecy, the lack
of fulfillment of which does not imply mediocrity on the prophet’s part, for it is not
within the compass of genius to call possibilities into existence or to exclude them ….
8 p 166–67
||Mention of the writer Bergotte startles Marcel and brings to mind
Bergotte’s beard, his general appearance. His earlier mental portrait of
Bergotte had now to include|| the snail-shell nose and to incorporate the black
goatee: just as one discards as worthless the solution to a problem, the terms of
which one has not read fully and so failed to note that a specified figure was to be
reached.
[At the description, Santayana translates Proust’s words into a drawing.]
9 p 172, marked
||On the excellence of Bergotte’s diction, his subtlety, and the deceptive
flow of his thought, all of which came over into his conversation, which
gave it an air of falsity,|| de faire du paradoxe, et qu’ainsi ses idées semblaient le plus souvent confuses, chacun appelant idées claires celles qui
sont au même degré de confusion que les siennes propres.1
1
… an air of paradox, so that his ideas seemed, more often than not, to be confused;
each of us calls those ideas clear which display the same degree of confusion as his
own.
[A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, tome III.]
10 p 73, marked
||Marcel thinks that exterior impressions of Balbec, of the young girls, his
relatives, pleasures, or his work were only|| un flocon d’écume dans un
grand vent qui ne la laisse pas se poser, n’existait plus que relativement
à cette puissance intérieure: l’ivresse réalisé pour quelques heures l’idéalisme subjectif, le phénoménisme pur: tout n’est plus qu’apparences et
n’existe plus qu’en fonction de notre sublime nous-même.1
1
… a fleck of foam in a high wind which will not let it settle; they existed only relatively to this interior power: the ecstasy realized in a few hours of subjective idealism, pure phenomenality: then everything is no more than appearance and has no
existence other than its function of pertaining to our sublime selves.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:175
11 p 171
[Santayana makes a paragraph symbol in the midst of one of Proust’s
very long paragraphs: like trying to fence in a portion of the sea.]
12 p 198, marked
Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par
l’habitutde, définitifs.1
1
Our facial characteristics become hardly more than gestures, by habit, definitive.
Marcel Proust
A la recherche du temps perdu: Le Temps retrouvé
Paris: 1927. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 p 60
||Gossiping indiscretions of Mme Verdurin’s circle during the Great
War.|| Mais beaucoup de grands hôtels étaient à cette époque peuplés
d’espions qui notaient les nouvelles téléphonés par Bontemps avec une
indiscrétion que corrigeait seulement par bonheur le manque de sûreté
de ses informations toujours démenties par l’événement.1
Reeves [sic]2
1
But at that time many of the grand hotels were inhabited by spies who marked the
news that Bontemps telephoned with a degree of indiscretion that corrected only by
good luck the lack of security of his information, always refuted by the event.
2
A reference to Emery Reves, The Anatomy of Peace (1945). This would date
Santayana’s reading of Le Temps retrouvé. See Reves marginalia below.
2 pp 198–99, marked
||Marcel in his age reflects on his amours: Gilberte, Mme de
Guermantes.|| Du reste déjà, à cause justement de cet individuel
auquel on s’acharne, les amours pour les personnes sont déjà un peu
des aberrations. Et les maladies du corps elles-mêmes, du moins celles
qui tiennent d’un peu près au système nerveux ne sont-elles pas des
espèces de goûts particuliers ou d’effrois particuliers contractés par
nos organes, nos articulations, […]?1
1
And for the rest, precisely owing to that individual whose victim one is, the love of
persons is really on the order of aberration. And even the illnesses of the body, or at
least those that we associate with the nervous system, are they not an order of particular tastes or of particular terrors contracted by our organs, our joints, …?
2:176
George Santayana’s Marginalia
David B. Quinn
Raleigh and the British Empire
London: 1947. Waterloo. One marginale.
1 p 24, marked
It was in Ireland in the decade after 1565 that Englishmen became
accustomed to the conception of a real colony settlement, involving the
transplantation of a section of English society overseas, where it must
find a livelihood with the aid of cheap land and native labour.
A[rthur] L[yon] R[aile] [pseud., Edward Perry Warren]
A Tale of Pausanian Love
London: 1927. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
1 p 122
Besides, I could not help but thinking that, by forwarding this engage^ misery beyond my power to help, and
ment, I might be sealing ^Fred’s
/
that my desire to help was, after all, more or less, if not by any means
altogether selfish. yielding to a selfish desire of my own.
^
^
Carveth Read
The Metaphysics of Nature
London: 1905. Georgetown. Twenty-seven marginalia.
Readings in Ethical Theory
Thomas Reid
Edited by Wilfrid Sellars and John Hospers
New York: 1952. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
Abridged, with notes and illustrations from Sir William Hamilton and others
Philadelphia: [1861], 1864 (10th edition). Georgetown.
Thirty-three marginalia, two drawings. Several marginalia illegible.
1 p 103
Hence it is that philosophers speak of the perceptions of memory and the
perceptions of imagination.
A vital criticism of the un-technicality of the English
writers,—one of their great merits.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:177
2 p 103, marked
However improbable it may appear that philosophers, who have taken
pains to study the operations of their own minds, should express them
less properly and less distinctly than the vulgar, it seems really to be the
case; […] the vulgar seek no theory to account for the operations of their
minds; they know that they see, and hear, and remember, and imagine;
and those who think distinctly will express these operations distinctly,
[…].
Admirable passage. Yet the theory of the origin of distinctions is worth studying.1
1
A comment suggesting that Santayana may have read this as a student.
He perhaps read the book with William James.
3 p 119, underlined
||Perhaps Bishop Berkeley saw that|| if we perceive only the ideas of spirits, we shall find the same difficulty in inferring their real existence from
the existence of their ideas, as we find in inferring the existence of matter from the idea of it; […].
Not fair to B., who denies the idea.
4 p 120–21, underlined
[…] two philosophers of the eighteenth century, of very distinguished
rank, were led by a philosophical hypothesis, the one to disbelieve the
existence of matter, and the other to disbelieve the existence both of matter and of mind.
Is this quite ingenuous? Mind is not consciousness, matter
is not the world of sense.
5 p 128, marked
||Philosophers say that immediate objects of perception exist in the mind
itself;|| that, for instance, we do not see the sun immediately, but an idea,
or, as Mr. Hume calls it, an impression, in our own minds.
Hume doesn’t mean that the act is one thing the impression another.
Is it proper to say a perception is perceived? What cannot
be doubted is the belief, its object may not exist.
6 p 244, marked
[…] it is not my remembering any action of mine that makes me to be the
person who did it. This remembrance makes me to know assuredly that
I did it; but I might have done it, though I did not remember it. That relation
2:178
George Santayana’s Marginalia
to me, which is expressed by saying that I did it, would be the same,
though I had not the least remembrance of it.
Alas! Common sense has its pitfalls. What is this self, that
memory testifies to, but does not constitute?
7 p 245, underlined
[Concerning personal identity:]
We probably at first derive our notion of identity from that natural conviction which every man has from the dawn of reason of his own identity
and continued existence. The operations of our minds are all successive,
and have no continued existence. But the thinking being has a continued
existence, and we have an invincible belief, that it remains the same
when all its thoughts and operations change. ?
^ ^
[At “we have”:] Have we?
Emery Reves
The Anatomy of Peace
New York and London: 1945. Waterloo. Fifty marginalia.
1 p 2, underlined
[…] in 1917, the United States was forced to go to war in defense of
American rights.
2 p 3, underlined
[…] no one could fail to see that the European and Asiatic military
powers, known as the Axis, were planning the conquest of North and
South America.
3 p 82, marked
It is of utmost importance for the future of mankind to realize the apostasy and failure of all three of the monotheistic world religions and their
domination by disruptive and destructive nationalism, as without the
deep influence of the monotheistic outlook of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, human freedom in society—democracy—could never have been
instituted and cannot survive.
“Democracy”, then is contrary to moral freedom since one
spirit dominates the universe.
4 p 83, underlined
For Aristotle a democratic state was not conceivable with more than ten
thousand inhabitants.
citizens
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:179
5 p 83
||Fifteen centuries of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic teaching was needed|| to
forge the ideology of modern political democracy.
The promise of Judaism was always one of domination not
of “democracy”.
6 p 87, marked X
||Only universalism can save human society. Christian churches must
make it central or vanish.||
7 p 116, underlined
[Reves’s axioms:]
1. Individual freedom and individual security in modern society are the
product of democratically created and democratically executed law.
2. All individuals must be directly related ? to the institutions express^^
ing the sovereignty of the community.
3. Any intermediary organizations with attributes of sovereignty standing
between individuals and the institutions of the sovereignty of the community (cities, provinces, churches, nations or any other units) destroy
the rights of the individual, the sovereignty of the community and, consequently, destroy democracy itself.
All psychologically impossible.
8 p 121, top
The love of man based on the fear of God.
9 p 177, top
Dull abstract poor monotonous jargon.
10 p 177
The moment organized socialist workers in the various countries had to
choose between loyalty to their comrades in the internationally organized class warfare within class in all classes nations, and loyalty to
^
all of their compatriots ^in the nationally organized
warfare between
^
^
nations, they invariably chose the latter.
11 p 177
[Marked from “Through” to “international war.”]
Through a fundamental contradiction in its program, modern socialism
is particularly to blame for strengthening nationalism and for the
inevitable consequence: international war. The contradiction lies in the
discrepancy between the socialist political ideal of internationalism and
2:180
George Santayana’s Marginalia
the socialist economic ideal of nationalization . of the means of pro^^
duction.
12 p 178, top
Interests, in so far as they are physical, ought to be comiliatory & brotherly; in so far as they they are ideal, they
ought to be uncompromising and diverse.
13 p 178, marked
The greater the extent of nationalization, the more power is vested in the
nation-state, the more impregnable becomes nationalism.
14 p 178, marked
The socialist and Communist parties must realize that through their program of “nationalization” they have done more to strengthen and buttress the modern totalitarian nation-states than have the aristocracy or
any feudal or capitalist ruling class.
15 p 178
This tragedy is the result of acting emotionally on first impulses, without
thinking the problem through. The workers of the world must realize that
through their misconception and through their self-deluding ideal of
internationalism, they are preventing the realization of their ideals of
peace and betterment of economic and social conditions. well-being.
^
^
16 p 179, top
National interests are private interests, selfish and pugnacious.
17 p 179, underlined
By advocating nationalization, the socialists originally had in mind, of
course, collectivization, the transfer of certain property rights from individuals to the community.
18 p 179, marked
But at the present stage of industrial development, in the middle of the
twentieth century, nothing is more remote from the ideal of the community than the nations. They have shrunk into tightly sealed compartments
obstructing any community expression.
19 p 179, underlined
“Nationalization” today no longer means collectivism but its opposite.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:181
20 p 179, marked
Confusing the nation-state with the community people is a most dan^
^
gerous error, as today nation-states are the mortal enemies of the ideal of
human community, far more than any landowner, industrialist or private
corporation.
21 p 195, top
It takes two to make peace, but one to make war.
22 p 199
||The Winston Churchill who in 1930 said that national sovereignty could
not last, in 1940 declared that nationalism and self-determination must
be the foundation of society.||
W. C. is a histrionic opportunist.
23 p 203, marked
||The central idea of the Atlantic Charter is that all peoples have the right
to choose their own forms of government, and that sovereign right and
self-government must be restored to those who have been deprived of
them.||
This is the liberal ideal, falsely applied to physical & biological life. But intervention is intolerable in spiritual
things.
24 p 206, marked X
We fail to recognize that what made the Bill of Rights and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man possible were the Ten Commandments
of trade .
^
^
25 p 214, underlined
Just as a council of delegates and representatives of fifty sovereign cities,
defending the interests of their respective municipalities, could never create a united nation ||so fifty nations cannot.||
? The American colonies were independent in theory
before the Union. But they possessed one army. Hence … .
26 p 230, underlined
Within the span of a single generation, two world wars into which the
United States has been dragged against the will of its people […].
Japan would not have acted against the U.S. if the latter
had been home-keeping.
2:182
George Santayana’s Marginalia
27 p 251, marked
Or must we become resigned and admit that Plato was right in saying
that “human beings never make laws; it is the accidents and catastrophes
of all kinds, happening in every conceivable way, that make the laws for
us”?
A ray of truth.
I[vor] A[rmstrong] Richards
Mencius on the Mind
London: 1932. Columbia. Five marginalia.
1 p 78
||Interpreting Mencius, Richards writes of|| the social origin of human
consciousness.
Society among human animals must be an implication of
their nature & cannot produce that nature. It may be a
condition of consciousness, or of specific kinds of feelings:
but to confuse consciousness with nature in man is so
appalling a blunder that one feels like closing this book.
The author has good points but is essentially a journalist.
2 p 80
We have seen reason to suppose that Mencius’ pronouncements ought
probably to be read more as injunctions than as statements.
this is the style of an American professor. Is Richards an
American?1
1
On the title page of Santayana’s copy of the book, Richards is identified
as Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
I. A. Richards
The Philosophy of Rhetoric
New York and London: 1936. Columbia. Marginalia not counted.
1 p 35, underlined
[…] what a word means is the missing parts of the contexts from which
it draws its delegated efficacy.
A word “means” what it does not indicate?
2 p 40
||Ambiguity discussed.||
Water “means” (among other things not water) the Desert
of Sahara, because there is no water there. Cf. McTaggart.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:183
3 p 95
||Richards quotes Kant, “practical” and refers to its “practical” use.||
Kant used “practical” in the sense of relating to conduct
i.e. morals, or preceptive. Not the American “practical”.
4 p 103
||Richards quotes Lord Kames:|| I have taken this instance of vain
pedantry chiefly to fill up my lecture-hour and to accustom you to
^
^
my use of technical terms, […].
5 p 131, underlined
[Although Santayana still believes Richards to be an American, he
agrees with him about metaphor.]
[…] to present language as working only through the sensations it reinstates, is to turn the whole process upside down. It overlooks what is
important in Mallarmé’s dictum that the poet does not write with thoughts
(or with ideas or sensations or beliefs or desires or feelings, we may add)
but with words. “Are not words,” so Coleridge asked, “parts and germinations of the plant? And what is the law of their growth? In something
of this sort,” he wrote, “I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis
of Words and Things: elevating, as it were, Words into Things and living
things too.” We must do so if we are to study metaphor profitably. Hulme
and the school teachers are forgetting everything that matters most about
language in treating it as just a stimulus to visualization. They think the
image fills in the meaning of the word; it is rather the other way about
and it is the word which brings in the meaning which the image and its
original perception lack.
Because the word is more easily transferred to a different
context and marks the dispersed instances of the identical.
6 p 134, underlined
||Richards writes of the difficulty of belief in poetry, particularly that in
which metaphor is the mode. If The Divine Comedy is a metaphor in its
entirety,|| what is it that we might believe in it? Is it […] ‘that tenor and
vehicle are thus and thus related there’? Or is the belief required no more
than […] in accordance with the resultant meaning in so far as we apprehend that meaning—or rather in so far as that meaning apprehends,
grasps, takes control of, us?1
Rather the moral? Is moralising perhaps behind this
whole mess.?
1
Quotation from T. S. Eliot.
2:184
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Heinrich Rickert
Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis.
Einführung in die Transzendentalphilosophie
Tübingen and Leipzig: 1904. Georgetown. Two marginalia.
Emile Rideau
Le Dieu de Bergson
Paris: 1932. Waterloo. Sixty-five marginalia.
1 p 24, marked X, top
It is perhaps true that by his mythical expressions B. is
only expressing subjectively a sense of the unknown
depths of matter. As he confuses “matter” with the idea of
matter, so he confuses it with the idea (= consciousness) of
force of will. But it is not an idea at all.
2 p 24, underlined, marked X
Or, il y a infiniment plus dans la réalité matérielle, dans la vie surtout,
que dans leur expression, si exacte, si approchée, si progressive soit-elle,
en termes de pensée: […].1
Yes, in the realism of matter; but in B’s intuition or élan
there is infinitely less.
1
Now, there is infinitely more in material reality, in life above all, than in their
expression, however exact, however approximate, however progressive it may be in
terms of thought: ….
3 p 32, marked
The sentiment of Spirit has been for Bergson a progressive conquest from the Essay
as far as Deux sources: […].
Yes he has become more spiritual and more Catholic.
4 p 33, marked X and underlined
[…] the dominating law of life lies in its uneasiness and suffering, for if it is
always created anew in the world, life is toujours1 discontented with the results.
“Spirit”, for B. is a self-creation out of nothing. German
Will. But in reality the German Will is a transmutation of
sausages and beer.
1
Always.
5 p 39, underlined
||Rideau discusses God’s works of creation.|| Dieu, immanent à ses œuvres
par une présence éminemment active et amoureuse, ne les abandonne
pas à leur sort, mais s’intéresse à leur développement et le poursuit.1
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:185
What is this force or fate with which God has to fight?
1
God, immanent in his works by a presence eminently active and loving, does not
abandon them to their fate, but is interested in and pursues the course of their development.
6 pp 67–68, marked Z
||Because certain Catholics lead a life of prayer and adoration, the
Catholic Church insists that proof and demonstration of God’s works are
possible.||
[At top:]
How little the critics brought up in the Church understand
the religion of others!
7 p 71, marked Z
||Mysticism must somehow explain the existence and nature of God.
Bergson says,|| […] «l’accord profond (des mystiques chrétiens) est signe
d’une identité d’intuition qui s’expliquerait le plus simplement par l’existence réelle de l’Être avec lequel ils se croient en communication».1
N.B. B’s feeble notions of the order of nature. His genesis
is specious.
1
… “the profound agreement (about the Christian mysteries) is a mark of an identity of intuition, which is explained in the most simple manner by the actual existence of the Being with which they believe themselves to be in communication.”
8 pp 82–83, underlined
||According to Bergson, human labor has a sacred quality under
Christianity, which thus leads to the conclusion that it is|| […] l’élan créateur de la civilisation occidentale et «l’industrialisme lui-même». Alors
que des mysticismes incomplets, comme le bouddhisme, ignorent «le don
total et mystérieux de soi-même», le christianisme croit «à l’efficacité de
l’action humaine»: «seule cette confiance peut devenir puissance et
soulever les montagnes».1 avec de la dynamite.
^
^
[At top:]
Quote
N.B.
1
… the creating force of Western civilization and the industrialization of the same.
Whereas the incomplete mysticisms, like Buddhism, ignore the total and mysterious
gift of itself, Christianity believes in the efficacy of human action: only such confidence can become power and raise mountains.
9 pp 98–99, marked
La durée résorbe dans son progrès l’extension apparente du passé: tout
l’univers est la croissance organique d’une mémoire unique et simple, qui
2:186
George Santayana’s Marginalia
se développe sans à-coups, ni hiatus, par explicitation immanente de sa
confusion.1
N.B. The past is not past: it is a confused part of the present. This, being true of the idea of the past, is transferred
idealistically to the past itself
1
In its progress, duration reabsorbs the apparent extension of the past: the whole
universe is the organic development of a unique and simple memory, which is developed without jolts or hiatus, by the immanent explicitness of its confusion.
10 pp 104–5, top
B. becomes at the end a more intelligible, a more appealing, and a nobler figure than he seemed at first. We feel
his earnestness, his sincerity; a sort of Pauline enthusiasm
& missionary sense: yet there is no real inspiration, a great
narrowness, a great monotony. The passions (apart from
hatred of certain philosophies) are absent; so is birth,
death, and love—erotic love—everything in fact that the
sense of [illegible] life w’d reveal to a complete man. We
have here the zeal of a scribe, not the free flight of a
genius.
11 p 105fn, underlined
||With reference to Bergson’s phrase, “création de soi par soi,”1 Rideau
cites|| E. S., 25.2
Énergie spirituelle.
What energy would a man have if he didn’t eat?
1
“Creation of the self by the self.”
Bergson, L’Énergie spirituelle; essais et conferences (Paris, 1919).
2
12 p 109, top
Disinterestedness
super-rational & pessimistic
[Marked:]
In order to “prolong social solidarity and human brotherhood,” it is not necessary
to count on “an expansion of the self”: “we do not reach humanity by steps, in
passing from the family to the nation.”
Confusion of objects with principles. We might like all
babies, even black ones; but we might hate all frogs.
Buddha would not. So absolute love of the good is love of
all goods.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:187
13 p 118fn, underlined
||Rideau vaguely paraphrases Bergson on the mystery of life and its connection to death. He then quotes Bergson in a footnote:|| «Cet amour, où
quelques-uns ont vu le grand mystère de la vie, nous en livrerait peut-être
le secret. […] Il nous laisse entrevoir que l’être vivant est surtout un lieu
de passage, et que l’essentiel de la vie tient dans le mouvement qui la transmet».1
[Santayana here manages a black pun:]
F_____ g [sic] is the essence of life. Quel bel effort! 2
1
This love, in which some have located the great mystery of life, perhaps delivers the
secret to us. … It allows us to glimpse that life is above all a passage-way, and that
the essential thing about life lies in the movement that transmits it.
2
What a lovely effort!
14 p 126, top
This reading of the depths of life, as felt, is arbitrary & narrow. Hunger, love, death, repletion.
15 p 127, top
[Rideau’s conclusion:]
Does The dawn arises/ by an effort? Is propagation is
^
^
^
an effort?
etc. Literary composition—^except
in inspired
passages, which are poetry—is indeed an effort, very hard
work, because so many things have to be collected & combined which are not [illegible] spontaneously in intuition.
But etc. above?
Arthur Rimbaud
Oeuvres de Arthur Rimbaud: vers et proses
Préface de Paul Claudel
Paris: 1937. Waterloo. Eight marginalia and a translation of the poem “Bonheur.”
1 p 85
[In “Bateau ivre,” one of Rimbaud’s lines contains a difficult reading:
“Plus douce qu’aux enfants la chair des pommes sures,” usually translated, Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children. Sur does not mean
“sour” in standard French.]
“mûres”?1
1
Ripe.
2 p 144
“Chanson de la plus haute tour.”
Oisive jeunesse
2:188
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Cf. Oliver
^
^
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s’éprennent!1
1
Lazy youth / Enslaved by everything / Out of delicacy / I have lost my life. / Ah,
may the time come / When hearts are lost in love!
3 p 151–52
[Santayana’s translation of “Bonheur”:]
BONHEUR
O saisons, ô châteaux,
Quelle âme est sans défauts?
O saisons, ô châteaux,
J’ai fait la magique étude
Du bonheur, que nul n’élude.
O vive lui, chaque fois
Que chante le coq gaulois.
Mais je n’aurai plus d’envie,
Il s’est chargé de ma vie.
Ce charme! il prit âme et corps,
Et dispersa tous efforts.
Que comprendre à ma parole?
Il fait qu’elle fuit et vole!
O saisons, ô châteaux!
Joy.
O springtide, O castles wide
What soul is without shame or pride?
O springtide, O castles wide
^ ^
I have learned the lore of
Magic Book joy for a every boy.
^ ^
^
^
Let joy [illegible ] live, and ever fl[illegible ]
^ Gallic^ cock doth crow.
While the
Not one [illegible ] need I avow
I am in joy’s keeping now.
All my troubles [illegible ] at this spell
^
^
Vanished. All ceased to trouble. All is well
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:189
And But what mean these airy things?
Nothing! Joy has lent them wings.
O Springtide, O castles wide.
4 p 180, marked
[From Les Illuminations, “Á une Raison.” Final line:]
Arrivée de toujours, tu t’en iras partout.1
1
You, arrival from forever, you will leave for everywhere.
5 p 227
[The first lines of “Les Ponts,” no. xiv of Les Illuminations.]
Des ciels gris de cristal. Un bizarre dessin de ponts, ceux-ci droits, ceux-là
bouclés, d’autres descendant en obliquant angles sur les premiers; […].1
Paysage Cubiste2 1873!
1
Skies grey crystal. An odd design of bridges, some straight, others curved, still others coming down in angles oblique to the first, ….
2
Cubist landscape.
6 p 229, underlined
[First lines of Les Illuminations, xv, “Ville.”]
Je suis un éphémère et point trop mécontent citoyen d’une métropole
crue moderne, parce que tout goût connu a été éludé dans les ameublements et l’extérieur des maisons aussi bien que dans le plan de la ville.1
Cf. the judgment of Descartes. All forms should be demolished and rebuilt on a single plan.
1
I am an ephemeral and not at all very discontented a citizen of a metropolis
believed to be modern, because all good taste has been omitted in the furnishings and
facades of the houses, as well as in the city-plan.
7 p 236
[Les Illuminations, vii, “Vies.”]
Un envol de pigeons écarlates tonne autour de ma pensée.1
Chinese
1
A flight of scarlet pigeons thunders about my thought.
8 p 295, marked
||From Une saison en enfer, just before “O saisons, ô châteaux!” the lines in
prose:|| Le Bonheur était ma fatalité, mon remords, mon ver: ma vie
serait toujours trop immense pour être dévouée à la force et à la beauté.1
1
Joy was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too vast to
be given over to strength and beauty.
2:190
George Santayana’s Marginalia
9 p 295, marked
O saisons, ô châteaux!
Quelle âme est sans défauts!
J’ai fait la magique étude
Du bonheur, qu’aucun n’élude.1
1
O seasons, o castles! / What soul is without fault! / I have studied the magic / of
happiness, which no one escapes.
Abraham A. Roback
Psychorama: A Mental Outlook and Analysis
Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1942. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Abraham A. Roback
Personality in Theory and Practice
Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Romain Rolland
Jean-Christophe: L’Adolescent
Paris: 1904 (1908). Location unknown. Eight marginalia.
[See McCormick, George Santayana, Appendix B, for an account of these
marginalia.]
Romain Rolland
L’Aube
Paris: 1903 (16th edition, n.d.). Location unknown. No marginalia.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Complete Poetical Works
Boston: 1891. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Du contrat social [and] Les Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire
London: 1912. Georgetown. Twelve marginalia; none in Les Rêveries.
1 p 10, underlined and marked X
L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.1
1
Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:191
2 p 10, underlined and marked
Si je ne considerais que la force, et l’effet qui en dérive, je dirais: Tant
qu’un peuple est contraint d’obéir et qu’il obéit, il fait bien; sitôt qu’il peut
secouer le joug et qu’il le secoue, il fait encore mieux: car, recouvrant sa
liberté par le même droit qui la lui a ravie, ou il est fondé à la reprendre,
ou l’on ne l’était point à la lui ôter. Mais l’ordre social est un droit sacré
qui sert de base à tous les autres.1
The weak can prove collectively[?] stronger.
satirical
1
If I considered only strength and the effect that derives from it, I should say: insofar as a people are constrained to obey and they do obey, well enough; insofar as they
can shake off the yoke and they do so, so much the better, for it is a case of recovering liberty under the same right that took it away, of taking back the right on which
it was based, a right that no one whatsoever should have removed. But the social
order is a sacred right which serves as a base for all other rights.
3 pp 10–11, underlined and marked X
||The social order is not based in nature but in certain conventions,
such as that of the family. Members of a family voluntarily give up individual, total liberty for the common good.|| Cette liberté commune est
une conséquence de la nature de l’homme. Sa première loi est de
veiller à sa propre conservation, ses premiers soins sont ceux qu’il se
doit à lui-même; et, sitôt qu’il est en âge de raison, lui seul étant juge
des moyens propres à le conserver, devient par là son propre maître.1
[At “conservation”:]
Not if you mean enlightened judge: fine if you mean seat
of the judgment.
1
That common liberty results from man’s nature. His first law is to see to his own
survival; his first cares are those that he owes to himself. As soon as he attains the
age of reason, being the only judge of the methods of self-preservation, he thus
becomes his own master.
4 p 13, underlined and marked X
Or, qu’est-ce qu’un droit qui périt quand la force cesse?1
False notions altogether.
1
Now, what is a right that perishes when power fails?
5 p 13, underlined and marked X
Convenons donc que force ne fait pas droit, et qu’on n’est obligé d’obéir
qu’aux puissances légitimes.1
1
Let us then agree that power does not make right, and that one is not obliged to
obey excepting to legitimate powers.
2:192
George Santayana’s Marginalia
6 p 14, underlined and marked X
Quand chacun pourrait s’aliéner lui-même, il ne peut aliéner ses enfants;
[…] leur liberté leur appartient, nul n’a droit d’en disposer qu’eux.1
1
While each person may give up his own rights, he may not enslave his children;
… their liberty is theirs alone, and no one has the right to dispose of it but they
themselves.
7 p 14, underlined and marked X
||Before children come of age, a father may set conditions to their liberty
for their own good, but not irrevocable ones,|| car un tel don est contraire
aux fins de la nature, et passe les droits de la paternité.1
False Protestant or moralistic notion of right, freedom, or
duty; and an unnatural notion of nature.
1
For such a condition is contrary to the ends of nature and exceeds the rights of
paternity.
8 p 19, top
[On the “Social Contract”:]
You can’t get up if you are sitting down, or sit down if you
are standing up. You can’t open your mouth or shut it,
without some sacrifice: but you must make the one or the
other.
Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom
Essays by Divers Hands
3rd series, volume 1, London: 1921. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Josiah Royce
The World and the Individual
Two volumes. New York and London: 1899. Harvard.
[See Peter Fuss, “Santayana’s Marginalia on Royce’s The World and the
Individual.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, viii, no. 3, July 1970,
318–74.]
Dagobert D. Runes
Letters to My Son
New York: c. 1949. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Dagobert D. Runes
2:193
Of God, the Devil and the Jews
New York: c. 1952. Waterloo.
[Some inconsequential marks, probably not Santayana’s.]
Benjamin Rush
The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush
Edited by Dagobert D. Runes
New York: 1947. Waterloo. Four marginalia.
1 p 99, marked
[On education:]
The same systems of grammar, oratory and philosophy, will be taught in
every part of the state, and the literary features of Pennsylvania will thus
designate one great, and equally enlightened family.
Pre-industrial America.
Bertrand Russell
“Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”
Reprinted from Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
1911. Texas. Eighteen marginalia.
1 p 111, marked
Awareness of universals is called conceiving and a universal of which we
are aware is called a concept. Not only are we aware of particular yellows,
but if we have seen a sufficient number of yellows and have sufficient
intelligence, we are aware of the universal yellow […].
The “universal” here is not the essence of any yellow but
a name for a range of yellows, having “yellowness” in
common. “Yellowness” is also an essence but not one
given in sense. Sense, therefore, never presents Russell’s
universals. But it presents my essences; it presents something; the universal is not all of that something: the present character therefore has more character than its
universal. Aesthetical essences are richer than logical.
2 p 111, marked
And the universal yellow is the predicate in such judgments as “this is
yellow”, where “this” is a particular sense-datum.
always?
2:194
George Santayana’s Marginalia
3 p 113, underlined and marked
We know that the man with the iron mask existed, and many propositions are known about him, but we do not know who he was.
In literature, or in rerum natura?
4 p 116, underlined and marked
I suspect that even the Universe, as considered in metaphysics, involves
such a connection with particulars. In logic, on the contrary, where we
are concerned not merely with what does exist, but with whatever might
or could exist, or be, no reference to actual particulars is involved.
Are there non-actual particulars? Then R. would admit
essences that were concrete.
5 p 118
[Concerning judgments:]
I judge that A loves B […] the constituents are myself and A and love and
B and judging.
Judgment = assertion; supposition = conception.
6 p 122, marked
[On denotation:]
[…] propositions concerning “the so-and-so” are possible even when the
“so-and-so” has no denotation. Take, e.g., “the golden mountain does not
exist” or “the round square is self-contradictory.” If we are to preserve
the duality of meaning and denotation, we have to say, with Meinong,
that there are such objects as the golden mountain and the round square,
although these objects do not have being. We even have to admit that the
existent round square is existent, but does not exist.
Lovely!
7 p l22, underlined
Meinong does not regard this as a contradiction, but I fail to see that it is
not one. Indeed, it seems to me evident that the judgment “there is no
such object as a round square” does not presuppose that there is such an
object.1
There are two essences, and a vain attempt to identify
them.
1
Russell’s footnote: [Alexis] Meinong, Über Annahmen, 2nd edition, Leipzig,
1910, p. 141.
8 pp 123–24, underlined
A Miss Jones argues “that Scott is the author of Waverley” asserts the
identity of denotation between Scott and the author of Waverley. […] it
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:195
would be nearer the truth to say that the meaning of “Scott” is the denotation of “the author of Waverley.” The relation of “Scott” to Scott is that
“Scott” means Scott, […].
Heigh, diddle diddle.
Bertrand Russell
“On the Relations of Universals and Particulars.”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, volume xii (1911–1912), 1–24
Texas. Twenty-four marginalia.
1 p 4, marked Z
[…] universals are generally conceived as common properties of particulars, in fact, as predicates. For our purpose it is barely worth while to
invent a technical term ad hoc; I shall therefore speak of entities which are
not relations simply as non-relations.
essences cover both.
2 p 7, underlined
[On tactile perception:]
Hence if the thing is to be impartial as between sight and touch, it must
cease to have the actual qualities of which we are sensible, and become
their common cause or origin or whatever vaguer word can be found.
Thus the road is opened to the metaphysical theories of science and to
the metaphysical theories of philosophy: the thing may be a number of
electric charges in rapid motion, or an idea in the mind of God, but it is
certainly not as essence, tho’ it is as substance what the senses per^
^
ceive.
3 p 7, marked Z
Realists who reject particulars are apt to regard a thing as reducible to
a number of qualities co-existing in one place. But apart from other
objections to this view, it is doubtful whether the different qualities in
question ever do co-exist in one place. If the qualities are sensible, the
place must be in a sensible space; but this makes it necessary that the
qualities should belong to only one sense, and it is not clear that genuinely different qualities belonging to one sense ever co-exist in a single place in a perceptual space.
Why make the senses a criterion of possible existences?
Your apprehension may be made to fit any essence.
4 p 9, underlined and marked
Likeness at least, therefore, must be admitted as a universal, and, having
admitted one universal, we have no longer any reason to reject others.
2:196
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Thus the whole complicated theory, which had no motive except to
avoid universals, falls to the ground. Whether or not there are particulars, there must be relations which are universals in the sense that (a )
they are the objects of concepts, not percepts; (b ) they do not exist
in time; (c^) they are the^objects of verbs, not substantives.
^ an essence which is explicIs this the same^ as a variable—
itly a range of essences? Cf. blue or Plato’s “infinite”.
5 p 11, top
[Apropos nothing in Russell’s paper:]
[ Note on Bergson: The Hebrew preference for time is
partly, superficially, traceable to immediation of the
critical sort; it is arbitrary when immediation becomes
metaphysical or analytic, for their exterior is as characteristic of reality as duration. ]
6 p 12
[…] we must suppose that an indivisible object of visual perception may
occupy a finite extent of visual space.
Splendid instance of the fallacy of treating mental views
as if they were things.
7 p 17, marked
||It is self-evident that two patches of white are numerically diverse.|| It
follows from this that the terms of spatial relations cannot be universals
or collections of universals, but must be particulars capable of being
exactly alike and yet numerically diverse.
Places are not essences, but elements of matter.
8 p 19, top
Characteristics of consciousness:
1. Immaterial, without base, extension of place.
2. Undiscoverable from outside—imperceptible
3. Synthetic, & in one sense instantaneous—
aesthetic essence perceived
4. Cognitive
5. Actual
6. Moral
7. Appreciative or impassioned
9 p 19, underlined
||On the differing forms of belief: Men of quite differing characteristics
will agree that two plus two equal four.|| A particlar belief is a complex
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:197
of which something which we may call a subject is a constituent: in our
case, it is the diversity of the subjects that produces the diversity of the
beliefs. objects But these subjects cannot be mere bundles of general
^ Suppose
^ one of our men is characterised by benevolence,
qualities.
stupidity, and love of puns. It would not be correct to say:
“Benevolence, stupidity, and love of puns believe that two and two are
four.”
10 p 20
Persons, like places are material elements.1
1
The origin of Santayana’s title, Persons and Places?
11 pp 22–23, underlined
It will be seen that, according to the theory which assumes particulars,
there is a specific relation of subject to predicate, unless we adopt the
view—considered above in connection with Berkeley and Hume—that
common sensible qualities are really derivative from specific kinds of
likeness. Assuming this view to be false, ordinary sensible qualities will
be predicates of the particulars which are instances of them. The sensible qualities themselves do not exist in time in the same sense in which
the instances do. Predication is a relation involving a fundamental logical difference between its two terms. Predicates may themselves have
predicates, but the predicates of predicates will be radically different
from the predicates of substances. The predicate, on this view, is never
part of the subject, and thus no true subject-predicate proposition is
analytic. Propositions of the form “All A is B” are not really
subject-predicate propositions, but express relations of predicates; such
propositions may be analytic, but the traditional confusion of them
with true subject-predicate propositions has been a disgrace to formal
logic.
Aesthetic essences will be predicates of matter.
[Doubly marked from “Predication is a relation” to “Propositions of the
form”:]
N.B.
Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy
London: n.d. [1912]. Texas. Eleven marginalia, plus notes on an end-paper.
1 p 135, marked
||On Kant and knowledge a priori: arithmetical knowledge is always
constant, but, Russell says, such knowledge according to Kant is a result
2:198
George Santayana’s Marginalia
of our nature.|| It might happen, if Kant is right, that tomorrow our
nature would so change as to make two and two become five. This possibility seems never to have occurred to him, yet it is one which utterly
destroys the certainty and universality which he is anxious to vindicate
for arithmetical propositions.
2 p 196, marked
[On truth and falsehood:]
When Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio, he must not have
before his mind a single object, “Desdemona’s love for Cassio,” or “that
Desdemona loves Cassio,” for that would require that there should be
objective falsehoods, which subsist independently of any minds; and this,
though not logically refutable, is a theory to be avoided if possible.
In a sense all disembodied essences are “objective falsehoods”—they are such to the idolater of existence.
3 p 235, underlined
||Descartes’ kind of scepticism is the criticism|| which constitutes philosophy. Some knowledge, such as knowledge of the existence of our sensedata, appears quite indubitable, however calmly and thoroughly we
reflect upon it.
It is certain that the essence occurs or appears: it is not
certain that it “exists” or persists substantially. What
appears need not work until we distinguish, in that
“what”, the substance that works from the essence that
appears.1
1
Of obvious pertinence to Scepticism and Animal Faith.
[End-paper:]
5
Babe’s
4
“from which it follows—”
6
“How understand, etc
6 “That is what happens
beautiful!!
6
“over and above what we are aware of.”
ambiguous”
[No such pagination in Russell. “The Babe” was the familiar name of
Willie Haines Smith, consort of Howard Overing Sturgis. For details, cf.
McCormick, George Santayana, p. 130.]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Bertrand Russell
2:199
The Analysis of Matter
London and New York: 1927. Texas. 258 marginalia.
1 p 16
[On “Pre-Relativity Physics”:]
It is impossible to lay down a hard-and-fast rule that we can never validly
infer something radically different from what we observe—unless,
indeed, we take up the position that nothing unobserved can ever be
validly inferred. This view, which is advocated by Wittgenstein in his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, has much in its favour, from the standpoint
of a strict logic; but it puts an end to physics, and therefore to the problem with which this work is concerned. I shall accordingly assume that
scientific inference, conducted with due care, may be valid, provided it
is recognized as giving only probability, not certainty. Given this
assumption, I see no possible ground for rejecting an inference to
absolute space and time, if the facts seem to call for it.
[From “I shall accordingly”:]
Poor stuff.
2 p 17, marked
Everything that we perceive directly is subject to certain conditions,
more especially physiological conditions; it would seem a priori probable
that where these conditions are absent things would be different from
anything that we can experience.
Yes.
3 p 17, marked
If we suppose—as we well may—that what we experience has certain
characteristics connected with our experiencing, there can be no a priori
objection to the hypothesis that some of the things we do not experience
are lacking in some characteristics which are universal in our experience.
4 p 18
||On objections to Newtonian physics: force and cause derived from
notions of pushing and pulling.|| […] secondly, that people falsely supposed themselves in contact with things when they pushed and pulled
them, or were pushed and pulled by them. I do not mean that such crude
notions would have been explicitly defended, but that they dominated
the imaginative picture of the physical world, and made Newtonian
dynamics seem what is absurdly called “intelligible.”
Berty in his innocent intellectualism: Why not define
“things” so that “we” may be in “contact”?
2:200
George Santayana’s Marginalia
5 p 24, underlined and marked
Any statement runs a risk of being out of date before it is printed.
6 p 27, marked
[…] no empirical evidence can decide between two theories of the atom
which yield the same result as regards the interchanges of energy
between the atom and the surrounding medium.
7 p 27, marked
It may be that the whole Rutherford-Bohr theory is too concrete and pictorial; the analogy with the solar system may be much less close than it
is represented as being. A theory which accounts for all the known facts
is not thereby shown to be true: this would require a proof that no other
theory would do the same.
Doors always open.
8 p 27, marked
It is proper and right to use a pictorial theory as a help in investigation;
but what can count as definite knowledge is something much more
abstract. And it is quite possible that the truth does not lend itself to pictorial statement, but only to expression in mathematical formulæ.
Good little Berty, sometimes I love you.
9 p 81, underlined
||Electrons or protons are assumed to be unchangeable throughout time,
but our continuum is one of events.|| Any two such events can be connected by a geodesic in which any two points have a time-like separation;
therefore, so far as the laws of dynamics are concerned, they might both
belong to the same material unit. Yet sometimes we think they do, and
sometimes we think they do not. […] The decision must depend […]
upon the existence of some series of intermediate events (or sets of
events) following each other according to some law. If there exists any
law which is in fact obeyed by strings of events, such a law can be used
to define what we mean by one material unit.
How are events strung together? Isn’t there here a psychological prejudice?
10 p 102
||On “The Principle of Differential Laws”: What creates change in a particular case may not be known.|| But we are not likely to find science
returning to the crude form of causality believed in by Fijians and
philosophers, of which the type is “lightning causes thunder.”
Empiricism is superstition? This from Berty!
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:201
11 p 126
||The suggestion that light is carried by photons:|| when light radiates,
what happens is that a photon travels; […].
[At top:]
Light
The electric spark may only mark
The friendship of two atoms in the dark.
12 p 128, underlined
[…] light […].
Ambiguity here: it would not be light but it would be
power, i.e. the sun would be as ready to light & warm
objects in one direction (where there was nothing) as in
another. The fact of possible directions would be implied
in its substance.
13 p 132, marked
The view of Locke, that the secondary qualities are subjective but not the
primary qualities, was more or less compatible with physics until very
recent times. There are spaces and times in our immediate experience,
and there seemed no insuperable obstacle to identifying them with the
spaces and times of the physical world.
But it was a foolish presumption, even to ignorant philosophers like the Indians.
14 p 133, underlined
We may therefore concentrate upon light as a source of our knowledge
concerning the external world.
Not our bodies? But it is bodily sense that give [sic] us the
type of all material existence.
15 p 135, marked Z
[On “The Abstractness of Physics”:]
||A drop in water loses its identity, and fire presents difficulties to common sense.|| The elaboration immediately suggested leads on naturally
to elementary physics and chemistry, where it is still assumed, at least
tacitly, that the objects concerned are of the same sort as sensible objects,
but rather smaller.
Yes & no: Berty is here beginning to suffer from not admitting substance and forgetting that it is always assumed.
2:202
George Santayana’s Marginalia
16 pp 137–38, marked Z
||Physics as an empirical study leads to trouble when, if it invalidates
perception it yet depends on perception.|| I do not say that physics in
fact has this defect, but I do say that a considerable labour of interpretation is necessary in order to show that it can be absolved in this
respect. And it is because of the abstractness of physics, as developed
by mathematicians, that this labour is required.
No: it is because of the pictorial physics from which it
starts and which Berty wants to restore.
17 p 138, marked
||Russell expresses admiration for Whitehead; however,|| I think there
are points—and not unimportant points—where his methods break down
for want of due attention to psychology and physiology. Moreover, there
seem to be premisses in his construction which are derived rather from
a metaphysic [sic] than from the actual needs of the problem.
18 p 143, underlined
||An infant has only enough primitive instincts to keep it alive with the
aid of its mother.|| In this primitive condition, the infant obviously has no
conception of an “object.”
Not of his own body? Cf. “Narcissus.”1
1
How old was Narcissus?
19 p 144, underlined and marked Z
The space containing my visual objects has no point in common with the
space containing yours, since no visual object in my world is precisely
identical with one in yours.
Not object but essence is here meant. The objects, not the
essences, are discovered to be one, but each essence, from
the beginning meant an object, since it aroused a reaction.
20 p 149, marked Z
||Experience accounts for reactions to familiar stimuli.|| If an adult
were to hear a donkey’s bray for the first time, without having previously known that there was an animal which made that noise, his
experience would be amazingly unlike that of a normal adult in the
same circumstances. but would carry just as great an assurance
^ the strange noise—say, a devil.
of something causing
^
21 p 151
[At top:]
Psychologism with a vengeance.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:203
At a primitive stage, X there is no distinction between “substance” and
^ first
^ in language and then in thought, the emotion
“thing”; both express,
of recognition.
X at which my mind is arrested
22 p 156, marked Z
||In the seventeenth century, the scientific outlook superseded the
approach of common sense in physics.|| The historical aspects of this
change have been set forth by Dr [sic] Whitehead in his Science and the
Modern World, particularly in the chapter on “The Century of Genius,” so
admirably that it would be foolish to attempt to cover the ground again.
What rot
23 p 176, underlined and marked X
In a science, there are two kinds of empirical propositions. There are
those concerned with particular matters of fact, and those concerned with
laws induced from matters of fact. The appearances presented by the sun
and moon and planets exist on certain occasions when they have been
seen are particular matters of fact. The inference that the sun and moon
and planets exist even when no one is observing them—in particular, that
the sun exists at night and the planets by day—is an empirical induction.
The occurrence of the appearance is confused with the
existence of what appears—an object of literary psychology with an object of physics.
24 p 179, underlined and marked X
When I say, “I know that I have just heard a clap of thunder,” I am saying something not so indubitable as when I say, “There has just been a
clap of thunder.”
? It is earlier: but it is more dubitable. Physics is all
dubitable: autobiography is less so in parts.
25 p 181
||The recollection of experience and expectation of an experience to
come.|| Everyone knows the story of the Orangeman who fell off a scaffolding and murmured as he fell: “To Hell with the Pope, and now for
the—bump.”
Empirical fallacy: why expect a bump? Because he had
always bumped before when falling, or because he was
then deprived of support?
2:204
George Santayana’s Marginalia
26 p 184, marked Z
The feeling of surprise marks error, and the absence of this feeling marks
correctness.
Strange that Berty, so late, should sink so low in Millism.
27 p 192
[On inference:]
||The light goes out at a dinner party. When it is turned on again,|| if there
are fewer spoons than before, we do not infer that they have ceased to
exist, [ but that someone present is a thief. ]
^ ^ lecture-habit here spoils the nicety
^ ^ of wit. If he had
The
lived in the XVIII th century he would have left the last
clause unexpressed.
28 p 195, marked
And a result deduced from a hitherto successful theory is more likely
to be right than the theory is: the theory is only right if all its consequences are true (at least, so far as they can be tested), but a verifiable
consequence of the theory is likely to be true if most of the verifiable
consequences are true. That is why the practical value of scientific theories is so much greater than their philosophic value as contributions to
ultimate truth.
[From “That is why”:]
Quote
29 p 201, underlined and marked
||The causal theory of perception. We cannot see our own faces, but can
imagine what an invisible part of our bodies ought to look like.|| When
we see another person frowning, we can imitate him; and I do not think
the habit of seeing ourselves in the glass is indispensable for this.
Silly: how new Berty is to psychological observation.
30 p 253, underlined
||Knowledge in physics is mathematical since no|| non-mathematical
properties of the physical world can be inferred from perception. ||The
exception is time.|| I shall assume […] that, when we are speaking of
physical space, all our percepts are in our head. Consequently psychological time is the same as time measured by our watches, […].
i.e. physical time in so far as intuitions are dated in it.
31 p 258, marked
I hold that the world is very full of events, that often a group of these
events, or some characteristic which the members of the group possess in
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:205
varying degrees, is such as to suggest arrangement in an order, generally
a symmetrical order about a centre— […] e.g. if we move so as to make
the big drum look larger, we also move so as to make it sound louder. In
this way we construct a space containing both percipients and physical
objects; but percepts have a twofold location in this space, namely that
of the percipient and that of the physical object.
N.B.
32 pp 265–66, underlined
[On “Non-Mental Analogues to Perception”:]
||Russell proposes the example of a dictaphone and a camera recording
the process of dictation;|| […] now we will assume the four-dimensional
manifold of physics and the justification (in principle) of the inference
from perceived to unperceived events. Assuming this, what can we infer
as to the relation between (a) the sounds heard by the listener, (b) the
events just outside his ear when he hears, (c) the events at the dictaphone
at the same time, (d ) the dictaphone record, (e ) the sounds heard by the
man when he listens to the dictaphone?
The similarity between (a) and (e ) is fundamental, and is known by a
comparison of a percept with a memory.
Simplistic & verbal psychology is at the bottom of this
whole construction.
33 p 269, marked
||On the perception of color: it does not appear to be analogous to perception of a light-wave, which is a periodic process.|| […] we do not really
know that our percept of a colour does not have the rhythmic character
of the stimulus. We know something about percepts, but not all about
them.
N.B. they are not, then, given in sources, but posited tests
suggested to the mind or will by the given essence—or
rather, objects posited by the impulse to act and described
in terms of the given essences.
34 p 269, underlined and marked
We all know that if an object is made to rotate rapidly, for instance on a
top, we can see it rotating if it does not go too fast, but when it passes a
certain speed we see only a continuous band. This is to be expected in
view of the existence of akoluthic sensations. But it by no means follows
that there is not a flicker in the percept, although we cannot perceive a
flicker.
N.B.
2:206
George Santayana’s Marginalia
35 p 269, underlined
Exactly the same thing applies to light and sound generally, and to the
apparent continuity of motion in the cinema. We cannot know, unless in
virtue of some elaborate argument, whether our percepts are static or
rhythmical, nor yet whether their physical stimuli are continuous or discrete. Such knowledge is rendered impossible by the fact that we can
only assume semi-similarity, not full similarity, between percept and
stimulus. Oh Berty, where is your logic?
^
^ because something
We cannot
perceive what we perceive
else may be anything.
36 p 270, marked
But we have found it necessary to emphasize the extremely abstract
character of physical knowledge, and the fact that physics leaves open
all kinds of possibilities as to the intrinsic character of the world to
which its equations apply.
Cf. Strong1
1
See the entry below under “Strong.”
37 p 275, underlined
[“Particulars and Events.”]
We do not want the percept to appear mysteriously at the end of a causal
chain composed of events of a totally different nature; if we can construct
a theory of the physical world which makes its events continuous with
percpetion, we have improved the metaphysical status of physics, even if
we cannot prove more than that our theory is possible.
which is only mathematical. Cf. p. 291.
38 p 277, underlined
I shall give the name “particulars” to the ultimate terms of the physical
structure—ultimate, I mean, in relation to the whole of our present
knowledge.
intrinsic essences of substances.
39 p 281, underlined
||On distinguishing among colors: when are percepts not percepts?||
Now, instead of different static shades of colour, let us suppose what we
are watching a chameleon gradually changing. We may be quite unable
to “see” a process of change, and yet able to know that, after a time, a
change has taken place.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:207
Very good: but that does not make the identical percepts
different. Berty gives a false permanence & substantiality
to data.
40 p 284
It is a mere linguistic convenience to regard a group of events as states
of a “thing,” or “substance,” or “piece of matter.” This inference was
originally made on the ground of the logic which philosophers inherited from common sense. But the logic was faulty, and the inference is
unnecessary. By defining a “thing” as the group of what would formerly
have been its “states,” we alter nothing in the detail of physics, and
avoid an inference as precarious as it is useless.
Is honesty as useless as it is precarious? The matter is not
an inference but an assumption of action.
41 pp 286–87, marked
||The traditional assumption of one cosmic time and one cosmic space
made possible the notions of things in various states. Four-dimensional
space-time dismisses all that.|| I shall therefore assume henceforth that
the physical world is to be constructed out of “events,” by which I mean
practically, […] entities or structures occupying a region of space-time
which is small in all four dimensions. “Events” may have a structure, but
it is convenient to use the word “event,” in the strict sense, to mean something which, if it has a structure, has no space-time structure, i.e. it does
not have parts which are external to each other in space-time. I do not
assume that an event can ever occupy only a point of space-time; […].
N.B.
42 p 286–87
[…] the construction of “points” out of finitely extended events will form
the subject of the next chapter. Nor do I assign a maximum to the duration of an event, though I hold that any event, in the broad sense, which
lasts for more than about a second can, if it is a percept, be analyzed into
a structure of events. But this is a merely empirical fact.
Quote on the restoration of Scholastic quibble & trifling.
43 p 328, marked
It is clear that whenever we perceive light we absorb it, that is to say,
the energy in the waves of light (or light quanta?) that hit the eye is
transformed into a different kind of energy, though I should not venture to say what kind.
Ah! Percepts here are parts of the body, like the undiscoverable insides of electrons.
2:208
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44 p 328
Therefore all visual percepts involve this process of absorbing light. And
if perception can ever be a source of knowledge as to things outside the
percipient’s body, there must be causal laws connecting what happens to
the percipient with what goes on outside. It is, of course, obvious that
there are such laws; we “ cannot ” = “don’t like to”; all science
^ Leibniz’s
^
^ windowless
^^
here is partisan. revive
monads.
^
45 p 331, underlined
If we had sufficiently powerful microscopes, we could see a glowing gas
dissolving into a comparatively small number of spots of light, while
the atoms in steady motion would be invisible. Thus we seem to reach
the conclusion that the causal laws which genuinely connect one piece
of matter with another are quantum laws, in which there are various
stages: first, a periodic process having no outside effect; secondly, a
sudden disruption of the energy of this process into two parts, one
being a new periodic process in the original body, the other a periodic
process travelling in empty space; […].
What is this beast?
46 p 331, marked
[…] thirdly, the arrival of the travelling process at another body; fourthly,
a quantum change in this other body, involving absorption of the radiant
energy in the production of a new steady state in the absorbing body. All
genuine causal relations between different bodies, we may suppose,
involve this process of sudden loss of energy by one body and its sudden
acquisition, later, by another body.
This is intelligible.
47 p 340, doubly marked
There is […] no inconsistency in the view that the physical event differs
from the percept in the way suggested by physics, since the difference
consists in attributing more structure to the physical event, not in denying to it those elements of structure which are possessed by the percept.
Good and important
48 p 340, underlined
[…] although percepts may have an unperceived structure, this does not
diminish the significance of the fact that the structure we perceive in percepts has only a one-many relation to that of their stimuli.
[At “structure”:] = ground
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:209
49 p 345, underlined
[Definition of the quality of an event.]
Physics traditionally ignores quality, and reduces the physical world to
matter in motion. This view is no longer adequate. Energy turns out to
be more important than matter, and light possesses many properties—e.g.
gravitation—which were formerly regarded as characteristic of matter.
The substitution of space-time for space and time has made it natural to
regard events, rather than persistent substances, as the raw material of
physics.
N.B. Berty seems to be clearly aware that his events are
substances and his gravitating light & energy are matter.
50 p 350
[“Periodicity and Qualitative Series.”]
This is just what I had understood from Weyl1 about the
junction of 2 times which in each of them instants are not
comparable in date with the instants of the other time.
1
Hermann Weyl, the noted mathematician.
51 p 352, top
Quote
52 p 352, marked
If we could imagine a homunculus floating on the crest of a light-wave,
he would have no means of discovering that anything periodic was
occurring, since he could not “see” the other parts of the wave. The different parts of a light-wave cannot, in a word, interact causally in any
way, because no causal action can travel faster than light.
Fatal consequence of relativity.
53 p 356, marked Z
A “steady event,” as I use the term, is anything which is devoid of physical structure and is compresent with events which are not compresent
with each other, but are one earlier and the other later; in other words,
the steady event is a member of at least two points which have a
time-like interval.
What determines the sense of earlier & later? Intuition?
54 pp 359–60, marked
[…] a rhythm can never consist merely in periodic changes of spatial
relation between two or more bodies, but must consist of qualitative
cycles of events. We have experience of such cycles when we watch a
large-scale periodic event, such as the swing of a pendulum. All that
2:210
George Santayana’s Marginalia
happens to us during the cycle happens in us, not in a number of different places; and any effect upon us depends upon what happens to
us. I am suggesting that this is a proper analogy when we wish to understand how a periodic motion affects an electron.
[At “I am suggesting”:]
Leibnitz always knocking at the door.
55 p 362, underlined
From our point of view, it is a difficulty in the quantum principle that it
is stated in a form involving energy, which, from a relativity standpoint,
requires reinterpretation.
N.B. This is a euphemism: it disappears, and every datum
is an absolute universe.
56 p 363, marked Z
The relation of a steady event to a rhythm I conceive according to a
musical analogy: that of a long note on the violin while a series of chords
occurs repeatedly on the piano. All our life is lived to the accompaniment of a rhythm of breathing and heart-beating, which provides us with
a physiological clock by which we can roughly estimate times.
Yes: but the synthetic unity of apperception!
57 p 373
[On “Causality and Interval”:]
An interval is the number of absolute steps between two
crisis [sic]. [ Really only the units are extended: and they
have no intervals ] .
58 p 377
[“The Genesis of Space-Time.”]
A group of more than five events is called “co-punctual” when every
quintet chosen out of it is co-punctual. A “point” is defined as a co-punctual group of events which cannot be added to without ceasing to be
co-punctual. “Events” are defined as the field of the relation of compresence.
“Events” are “concretions in existence” i.e. things.
59 p 389
[…] physics might, ideally, be able to predict that at such a time my eye
would receive a stimulus of a certain sort; it might be able to trace the
physical properties of the resulting events in the eye and the brain, one
of which is, in fact, a visual percept; but it could not itself give us the
knowledge that one of them is a visual percept.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:211
Intuition needs to be distinguished from “knowledge”.
60 p 393, underlined
||The likelihood that physical determinism is limited.|| This, of course, is
merely a speculative possibility; but it interposes a veto upon materialistic dogmatism.
How inveterate is the desire of the British mind to end
with a hushed Amen.
61 p 398, underlined
In Part II., we approached a different type of question: the question of
the evidence for the truth of physics, i.e. of the relation of physics to perception.
This is a partisan identification. Intuition, faith, and reason
have different kinds of evidence or force: perception is a
confused notion.1
1
A central aspect of Santayana’s objection to empiricism and pragmatism
is lodged in this marginale.
62 p 402, underlined
[Final sentence of the final page:]
But from the standpoint of philosophy the distinction between physical
and mental is superficial accidental and unreal. transitory
^
^
Russell has always^ been indifferent
to existence.
It ^is his
secret: it makes his keeness [sic] & thinness.
Bertrand Russell
New Hopes for a Changing World
London: 1951. Waterloo. Twenty marginalia and a quatrain.
1 p 98, marked
[On the notion of a world government:]
For my part I believe that, if it is constituted, it will be on a basis of consent in some regions and conquest in others.
2 p 165, underlined
||That the mistakes of exterminating Jews by Nazis, or Russians killing
the rich would not have been made|| by men who understood that when
different groups have different interests it is because of unwise passions
and not because of any physical fact.
Is it unwise to exist?
2:212
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3 p 165, marked X
If we are to live happily with a modern technique—and it is possible for
modern technique to bring a far higher level of happiness than was formerly possible— […].
[At bottom:]
It has been their false modern idea of human interests that
has rendered both Russell brothers tragically unhappy.
4 p 182
||Unfortunate loves, and the possibility of new loves.||
Divorce is the comfort of cuckolds.
5 p 183
Love, if it is to be satisfactory, must not be obsessed by the fear of loss. It
should rejoice in what the gods give, not destroy the gift by the corroding fear of jealousy.
Secret Happiness
I’ll love you when you love me
I’ll kiss you when you smile
And when you kiss another
I’ll take a walk the while.
The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell
Edited by Paul A. Schilpp
Evanston, Illinois: 1946. Waterloo. Seven marginalia.
David Russell
Sing with Me Now
Dallas: 1945. Waterloo. Five marginalia.
1 p 49
[Verse about V-E Day, May 8, 1945. “Rejoice, O Men.”]
The pulsing drum
Of war is muffled, and the air
At last devoid of death is fair.
Cf. Phèdre, her last words.
John Francis Stanley Russell
My Life and Adventures
London and New York: 1923. Georgetown. 149 marginalia.
[More than half of these marginalia are extensive, sharp in tone, and
even bitter, indicating the strength and perhaps the confusion of
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:213
Santayana’s sentiments for and against Frank Russell, his women, his
habits, and his character.]
1 p 14, marked
||Russell’s fondness for dogs as a child.|| I had, however, from time to
time cats & women! of my own, […].
^
^
2 p 14, marked
||Even now, his dogs and cats (belled, to prevent cruelty to birds) love
him and come running at the sound of his motor-horn.||
Vera1 too was oddly unfortunate and made you cruelly
suffer. No wonder we all love you—Every thing loves you.
Strange, there are some exceptions.
1
Vera was the writer “Elizabeth,” best known for Elizabeth and Her German
Garden (1898). She was born Mary Annette Beauchamp, and married
Count Henning August von Arnim. She later married Frank Russell and
published a memoir-novel of that unfortunate marriage entitled Vera.
3 p 23, marked
||Russell does not recall having indulged in small-boy wickedness.||
R. has a very bad memory about moral facts.
4 p 26, underlined and marked
||As a youth in the grounds of the Palazzo Barberini, Rome,|| a terrible
adventure befell me […].
This was an indecent assault by a strange man.
5 p 35, marked
||His schoolroom books showed|| slushy innocence.
This is conscious hypocrisy. He means: “You see, I was
provoked to be a rebel”.
6 p 39
||At Cheam school, Russell met Burke, who was to marry three times.||
Poor dear Burke!
7 p 40, marked
||The cricket ball that passed before Russell saw it.||
Symbol
8 p 41, marked
||For failing to write to his grandmother, young Russell was punished at
school by having to eat standing up, and deprived of pudding, still his
favorite food.||
2:214
George Santayana’s Marginalia
N.B. It is the surviving small-boy sensuality that runs
through R.
9 p 42
||At the death of his grandfather,|| I was no longer Viscount Amberley, I
was Earl Russell—wretched child of twelve!
This is a mixture of liberal cant and psychic inversion: he
wants to excuse himself, and remembers that it is a
calamity to be an Earl.
10 p 54, marked
||At age forty, Russell had been to a music-hall only three times; twice
with his aunt, and once as an official of the London County Council.||
This suggestion of strictness in morals is a strange illusion.
R. was never chaste, but he was secretive in his pleasures.
11 p 58, marked Z
||The failings of his aunt Rosalind.|| It was a sad development, for she was
a fine character, full of energy directed to noble objects, but it shows how
the best qualities may suffer from unchecked domination, and from the
arrogance that claims the judgment of God without His infinite mercy or
pity.
This recurring cant is almost unintelligible to me. R. is not
quite sane, or he would feel the falsity of this pose. He
does not assume it for an ulterior purpose, but for his own
satisfaction in feeling virtuous.
12 p 59, underlined
||After Winchester school,|| my grandmother even went so far as to offer
me a permanent room in Dover Street, and the use of the address for my
visiting cards.
Fool not to accept. But he vacillated, loving the low world
better than the great world. In part this was high unworldliness and democratic pique: in part it was love of bossing
low companions.
He once introduced me to Lady S.1 at Dover Street. It
was all very grand and imposing, and left an impression
of true distinction and kindness in that circle, with no cant.
Why does R. wallow in cant, when he knew and liked true
wit?
1
Lady S. = Lady Stanley, wife of the first Lord Russell.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:215
13 p 71, underlined and doubly marked
||At Winchester, as a Prefect, Russell officially spanked one of his
cousins.|| I remember the incident because next morning in spite of his
protests we examined the locus in quo, and to my horror the marks of five
fingers were still clearly discernible. From that day to this I have never
raised my hand to a fellow creature in anger for fear of hurting him.
Not true. But R has a terribly bad memory for his own acts
and feelings. He is often perfectly furious and merciless.
Once—when I dragged him into the water (it being
entirely his fault)—he was so to me.1
1
See Persons and Places, critical edition (Cambridge, MA, and London:
MIT Press, 1986), p. 297, for a description of the incident.
14 p 81
||Russell deplores that the Queen’s yacht costs £1,000 per annum to
maintain.||
R. can’t resist radical tags of this sort. In some respects he
is an idiot.
15 p 90, underlined and marked X
||Acquaintance with Lionel Johnson at Winchester; his appearance:|| an
oval face and rather dark hair. It was an arresting picture; he looked like
some young saint in a stained glass window.
Lionel Johnson’s hair was of the exact colour of khaki,
sleek and parted very much on one side, so that it looked
like a silk cap. The shadows in it might have looked dark;
but it was pale hair.
16 p 90, underlined and marked Z
||Friendship with Johnson was not easy;|| he was always aloof and
detached and apt to suggest an Epicurean god rather than a human
being.
False note. He was rapt in ideas, but he was a perfectly
tractable child. R. has no notion of a spiritual life & takes
it for the lack of something. He was Ariel to R’s Achilles.
17 pp 90–91, marked Z
Above all [ Johnson] taught me to read and to love Browning, but he
taught me more than that, a lesson I have never forgotten, and that is
that all the supposedly real things of life, that is to say the external
things, the physical things, the humours, the happenings, disgraces, successes, failures are in themselves the merest phantoms and illusions, and
that the only realities are within one’s own mind and spirit.
2:216
George Santayana’s Marginalia
[From “successes”:]
Bosh: these are Lionel’s words, but R. has no notion of
what they mean. By his own mind & spirit he means his
barbaric ego, his “will”, not a sacrificial intelligence or
love.
18 p 91, underlined
||The spirit of Winchester as Johnson felt it compared to Dante’s ideal of
service to Beatrice, to Galahad’s feeling for the Holy Grail,|| as of an
Englishman for his fair England, […].
R. thinks he is making a speech. He loves England only as
his launch or his motor car or his big chair.
19 p 94, marked Z
||Russell has been expelled from Winchester for an unspecified offence.
To prepare for Oxford, he attends a private tutor.|| A worse exchange for
the healthy communal life at Winchester could not well be imagined.
The man himself was vulgar and mean in spirit, and his wife, though
kind, shared the same detestable middle-class gentility.
Something essential is left out here. What had given P. L.
[the headmaster?] the notion of corruption?
20 p 94, marked Z
||Russell’s distaste for his fellow crammers.|| Then there was one at least
of the type of boy who had been requested to leave his public school.
This touch is impayable.1
1
Priceless.
21 p 103
||At Balliol, Oxford, Russell’s diary over the Christmas holiday:|| We all
went in the morning to hear Boyd Carpenter preach which he did splendidly.
Boyd Carpenter was a Broad Churchman who thought, on
the whole, Christianity had done more good than harm,
and so we ought to be Christians in name. Pragmatism
before Wm James. The good Christianity had done was of
course not to introduce Christianity, but to make people
wash and read the newspapers. It seemed to me, as I
heard him preach to this effect at Saint Mary’s, that it was
a long way round, by Calvary, to the London Times and
to Pear’s Soap.
I don’t think Boyd Carpenter pleased Oxonians in
general.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:217
22 p 107, marked X
Jowett, who was, it will be remembered, both the Master of Balliol and
the Vice-Chancellor, sent for me and told me he had been informed that
I had been guilty of disgusting conduct in writing some scandalous letter,
but that he thought that it was probably only a piece of thoughtlessness,
and he suggested that I should go down for a month as a punishment,
and come back in June to take my examination in Honour Mods which
was approaching. I was startled beyond belief by such an accusation, and
I was also infuriated by his calm way of talking to me as if it could possibly be true. So remote was it from the truth that I was entirely possessed
by that white virginal flame of innocence which I think is even stronger
in adolescent boys than in girls, and I was horrified that it should be possible for anyone in close relation with me to think otherwise. ||Russell
then demanded to see the letter; Jowett refused; Russell demanded an
inquiry before the Vice-Chancellor’s court, which Jowett refused.|| I then
completely lost my temper, told him that he was no gentleman, that he
was behaving in an autocratic way, indefensible even in the head of an
Oxford college, and that I refused to have anything more to do with him.
Jowett’s reply was to tell me that I should be sent down for a year, and
that at the end of that time he would graciously consider the question of
re-admitting me. I told him that nothing of the sort would happen and
that I should not be sent down for a year because I should then and there
take my name off the college books, and shake the dust of Oxford from
my feet.
[At “virginal flame of innocence”:]
This is true as regards Lionel Johnson & Russell, but it is
a lie if applied to R. in his general habits—a cheeky lie,
when so many of his readers know the facts.
[Concerning the entire episode:]
This is a complete falsification of the events as told me by
R. himself. The chief point was that Lionel Johnson had
spent a night in R’s rooms.
23 pp 107–8, underlined
And I did. Thus the autocratic injustice of an old man and the passionate indignation of a young one combined to wreck my life at Oxford,
and to place my whole life under a cloud which any number of public
vindications have never entirely dissipated. I left Oxford in May, 1885,
accompanied to the railway station and seen off by scores of enthusiastic friends and defiantly wearing in my buttonhole the white flower of
a blameless life.
2:218
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Good God! No doubt he wore a white buttonhole. It was
aestheticism à la Bunthorne, then prevalent in Oxford,
where Oscar Wilde’s influence was recent.
24 p 115, underlined
||Life at Teddington; the Williams, [Billings?] his old nurse, lives there,
and|| her daughters act as my servants.
Not merely. Of course silence is justified here, the
Williams’s or their children may still be living. But why
assume a puritan tone? When he took Mary Williams out
in the launch he compelled her to wear her hair hanging
loose. On one occasion, when her sister & I were also of
the party, she seemed most unhappy. He did not seem to
notice it.
25 p 119, marked
||In November, 1885, Russell paid a visit to Walt Whitman, in Camden,
New Jersey.|| He was most pleasant to talk to, though I didn’t venture to
say much.
N.B.
26 p 127
||Polygamy in Utah and the Christian conscience. If an elder had five
wives, a new law decreed that he select one, but he might keep the other
four as mistresses, provided that he treated them with respect.||
R. is curiously “moral”. If you legalize a thing it becomes
beautifully right.
27 p 153, underlined and marked
||Russell successfully navigates his yacht through a stormy night in the
Mediterranean.|| It was with devout thankfulness and a great peace in my
heart that I handed over the command to Bowles at 4 a.m., […].
N.B. This is a key passage to R’s religion. It is old phraseology covering an intensive animal will to live.
28 p 157
||Intrigue having to do with Russell’s marriage to Mabel Edith Scott and
his subsequent suit against the Scotts for criminal libel, i.e. for buggery.||
It is hopeless to straighten out a tale so radically misleading. R. is putting up a smoke-screen of lies, composed of
atoms of truth.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:219
29 p 160, underlined and marked
[Of Lady Scott:]
Her mother again was a weak, kind-hearted woman, but she was by
instinct a blackmailer and a preyer upon men, and I doubt if she ever
fully realized what she was doing. I cannot, however, acquit my wife of
perhaps the most serious blame of all, for she did know the truth, and
therefore knew that her allegations were false, […].
True.
Yes, I am inclined to think she did: but not what the
reader here is expected to conceive as the truth. He was
then proud of his free morals and ready to boast of his
actions.
30 p 161
||Of Mabel Edith Scott and her mother, Russell quotes a friend:|| “They
have the morality of the Choctaw Indian.”
R. I suspect is thinking of himself. This was his case
exactly.
31 p 163, marked
[Mabel’s charges:]
Another was that I tried to revive her by sprinkling water over her when
she had fainted. ||Also swearing and flourishing a revolver, which was in
storage.||
This covers a terrible unmentionable accusation, involving all R’s past.
32 p 166, underlined
I forgot to mention that with the same malignity as in the X case they had
thrown to the public the name of a young woman who belonged to the
period before the marriage, and who was in no way connected with the
case. On that incident the Judge remarked in his summing-up: “I cannot
help thinking that those who instructed the learned Counsel to put those
facts were actuated by nothing but malice.” ?
^^
Kate Williams. There was the same unmentionable background to this as to the fainting of Mabel Edith. The Scotts
regarded such things as normal, but their lawyers (and the
nurse) refused to mention them, and so left the whole case
vague & incoherent.1
1
Santayana was a witness on Russell’s behalf in the trial.
2:220
George Santayana’s Marginalia
33 p 169
||Russell accused of visiting one Roberts in his bedroom on four occasions.||
I think Mabel Edith was really jealous: and she invented
the cause. Roberts was a perfectly nice simple man; but it
is true that R. was fond of him and preferred his company
to other people’s in a way which might wound anyone
inclined to jealousy or other wise offended already.
34 p 170
||Would such a man as Jowett, counsel asks, attend the wedding of the
blackguard Russell has been accused of being?||
Jowett was a man of the world. He was thinking of the
future, not of the past; he was kind; the Russells were a
distinguished family; and R. had not done anything, as a
matter of fact, that an open-minded person would make a
fuss about, if appearances could be preserved or restored.
35 p 176
||Russell succeeds in negating the charge against a young girl of having
murdered her bastard child.||
I was at this hearing. R. had an obvious feeling of sympathy with the poor Gretchen, victim of social tyranny, but
he put it on the business ground that “no jury would convict”.
36 p 180, underlined
||Leaving a possibly unfortunate liaison in 1894,|| I decided to run away
before my feelings were too deeply involved. And naturally I ran to
America, which I had not seen for ten years, and where I had always
wanted to return.
If this is Agnes Tobin, he went to America to see her people! He had her photo & that of Mary Morris always in his
pocket. Laying them one day before me, he asked which
I should incline to: and I very truthfully said: Neither!
37 p 185, top
[Chapter XXII, “Restitution Suit.”]
R. had begun by defying public opinion, and feeling himself a hero. Then, under direct accusation, he quailed, and
fought desperately, not for his opinions, but for public success. He half-succeeded; forgot or over-laid his old opin-
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:221
ions with cant; and ran into the arms of disgrace in
another direction—the arms of Vera.
38 p 207
||Lady (Lena) Scott had libelled Russell, he believes, by suborning members of the crew of his yacht to swear to unpleasant sexual activity
aboard; he determines to sue her.||
I was at Amberley Cottage when the libel arrived. R.
came to me with the papers in his hand, flush, saying:
“This time it’s a prosecution for criminal libel, and Lena
goes to prison!”
39 p 208, underlined and marked
Some of the witnesses on my side were also examined.
Including myself.
40 p 210
Lady Scott when sentenced, cried: It is all true!
41 p 212, marked
||Russell quotes from a contemporary newspaper account of the trial:||
“But the case was one of those in which—so far as regards the principal
person concerned—prudence and self-regard seem to have been entirely
sacrificed at the shrine of vengeance.”
No: because the Scotts or their lawyers knew that the
“raking up” had been done by bribes. Cockerton may
have had some grudges: but William Aylott was attached
to R. and would have said nothing (even if true) unless
prodded. I never saw Kast, but heard about him from R. I
doubt that he could have stood cross-examination.1
1
Santayana had been a guest in Russell’s yacht on a trip from the South of
France up the Rhone to Paris.
42 p 220
[On the “Vestry” of the National Liberal Club, London:]
It was a queer mixture of all sorts of people with all sorts of interests […].
Odious people, odious place.
43 p 236
||Russell visits the Grand Canyon.||
Hell
2:222
George Santayana’s Marginalia
44 p 257, underlined
[…] I have always maintained that the real inhabitants of the West are
delightful.
If you don’t mind their being common. It is a peasant temperament with middle-class resources. R himself is a common man enlarged.
45 p 262, underlined
||Russell adds 200 acres to his residence at Beacon Hill.|| Here was a new
joy, and I fell upon it tooth and nail. I surrounded it with a wire fence to
show that it was really mine, […].
A piece of folly, except for this passion of domination
made evident in symbols & ceremonies, which it assuaged.
The same passion governed him with people: “Kiss the
rod!” he would say, lifting a finger to Mary Morris, and
she would literally do it.
46 p 345
||Russell remains free, like Cyrano, to|| “rever, chanter, pleurer.”1
How can you say anything so very much out of character?
1
To dream, to sing, and to weep.
William MacKintire Salter
Nietzsche the Thinker: A Study
London: [c. 1917]. Georgetown. Forty-one marginalia.
1 p 69, underlined
||Salter defines Nietzsche’s idea of the saint in terms of a quotation from
Schopenhauer:|| “A happy life is impossible; the highest thing which man
can reach, is an heroic course of life. Such he leads who, in any manner
and situation, fights against enormous odds for what is in some way of
universal benefit and in the end conquers, though he is ill or not at all
rewarded.”
How? Salvation?
2 p 160, underlined
||A quotation from Nietzsche’s Will to Power.|| Let us be on our guard
against making death the antithesis of life—the living is only a species of
the dead, and a rare species.
[Outlined by a pencilled rectangle:]
Motto for Essence
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:223
3 p 172, underlined and doubly marked
[…] Zarathustra stretches out his hands, so to speak, in blessing on all
existence. “Pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun.
… Say also to woe: go, but come again … joy wills […].”
a wicked & selfish joy.
4 p 327, underlined
Utilitarians, æstheticians, friends of knowledge, and idealists may make
the same demands which morality makes, so that its self-destruction need
not practically change matters.
Utilitarians not moralists!
5 p 332, doubly marked
In passing to Nietzsche’s construction in morality I may say at the outset
that it is a mistake to suppose that he was by temperament and instinct a
radical—traces of a certain natural conservatism are plainly visible in his
writings. He mentions with pride that he came of a line of Protestant pastors, and it is evident that it was intellectual necessity more than anything
else that led to his departure from the ancient ways, and that even in his
mental revolutions he kept something of the old spirit.
What this book tries to prove
6 p 361, marked X
But Nietzsche is not bête,1 and so far as he speaks of power as a desirable
end for man he means just a power that does not necessarily effectuate
itself, that has to be striven for and may or may not be attained—it is
emphatically a power that requires a will to power.
This would have to be intelligence.
1
Foolish.
7 p 362
||Whether in packs, herds, or communities, Nietzsche favors the strong
over the weak.|| Of course, no independence is absolute and Nietzsche is
well aware of it; still beings are graded in his eyes according as they are
more or less capable of it.
Then the secret of dominance is adaptation!
8 p 388, underlined
||A description of Nietzsche’s view of great men:|| […] we must give particular attention, encouraging them, giving them room, not measuring
them by ordinary standards, and willing rather to be hurt by them than
to prevent their arising, knowing that, whatever immediate harm they
2:224
George Santayana’s Marginalia
do, humanity’s possibilities of “ further development ” are bound up
^ ^
^ ^
with them.
Snob. Snob. Snob.
9 p 389, underlined
||According to Nietzsche, not the individual but the mass is now dominant.|| The most human aim is not to provide for the comfort and happiness of the mass, but to raise the type— […].
Snob!
10 p 435, underlined and doubly marked
[Will to Power quoted:]
“There is absolutely nothing better than the good! and that means having some kind of proficiency and creating from it virtù in the Italian
Renaissance sense.”
Then it is not for the sake of the Uebermensch that others
exist. Yet he seems to mean that they [shoemakers or schoolmasters] are good only to supply a soil for the
Uebermensch to glow in.
11 p 439
Zarathustra’s instinct is to love “all that lives” (whatever danger may lie
in doing so), and tears come to his eyes as he watches the setting sun
pouring its golden light on the sea, so that even the poorest fisherman
rows with golden oars.
Bosh!
12 p 441
At present [Nietzsche] finds men in civilized lands much the same in one
respect: they work for the sake of the reward.
Cf. Fichte
Sankaracarya
Self-Knowledge
New York: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana
[Many of the volumes contain no marginalia. The notes that Santayana
did write, e.g. in his revisions of The Life of Reason in his copies of the
Triton Edition (now in the Beinecke Library, Yale University), will be
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:225
or are being incorporated in the critical edition. What follows, therefore, is a list of those volumes together with the usual indication of their
location.]
Sonnets and Other Verses, Georgetown. A second copy is in the Butler
Library, Columbia.
The Sense of Beauty, Georgetown
The Life of Reason, Georgetown
Reason in Common Sense
Reason in Art
Reason in Religion
Reason in Science
Winds of Doctrine, Georgetown
Egotism in German Philosophy, Columbia
Character and Opinion in the United States, Georgetown
Poems, Georgetown
Scepticism and Animal Faith, Georgetown
The Unknowable, Waterloo
Lucifer, or the Heavenly Truce, Waterloo
A Brief History of My Opinions, Waterloo
The Genteel Tradition at Bay, Waterloo
The Last Puritan, Waterloo
Der letzte Puritaner, Waterloo. A second copy is in the Butler Library,
Columbia.
Le Dernier puritain, Waterloo
Persons and Places, Waterloo
The Middle Span, Waterloo
Die Spanne meines Lebens, Waterloo
The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, Waterloo [two copies]
La idea de Cristo en los evangelios, Waterloo
L’Idea di Christo nei vangeli, Waterloo
Die Christusidee inden Evangelien, Waterloo
Atoms of Thought (edited by Ira D. Cardiff), Waterloo
Dominations and Powers, Waterloo
George Santayana
Lotze’s System of Philosophy
Edited by Paul Grimley Kuntz
Bloomington, Indiana: 1971.
[Santayana’s doctoral dissertation, unpublished until 1971. This volume
contains Santayana’s marginalia to his volumes of Lotze’s work, now in
the Loewenberg Library, Wells College, Aurora, New York.]
2:226
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Charles Sarolea
The Anglo-German Problem
London and New York: 1912
Personal library of Adelaida Sastre, Avila. Five marginalia.
1 p 159
But Bernhardi’s chief authorities are the historian of the super-race, the
Anglophile obe Treitschke, and the philosopher of the super-man,
^
^
Nietzsche.
Max Scheler
Die transzendentele und die psychologische Methode
Leipzig: 1900. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress
Boston: 1939. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Herbert W. Schneider
The Puritan Mind
New York: 1930. Waterloo. Thirty-two marginalia.
1 p 98, marked
Beliefs seldom become doubts; they become ritual.
2 p 101, underlined
||About the response to the Puritans’ preaching.|| You turn, […] for your
own best good and enjoyment to the glory of God and in him you dwell
at home.
This part seems to have been vague. What was it to enjoy
God?—the reversion to the world was satisfying because
religion had been made a blank.
3 p 136, marked
To a Puritan the most natural science was the science of mind. […] What
may surprise us, however, is the overwhelming power which Locke’s
Essay had on this college sophomore [ Jonathan Edwards], fourteen years
of age.
It doesn’t surprise me.
4 p 154, underlined
Such is the general purport of the story, robbed of its metaphors. It is
Puritanism purged of its local and mythological aspects and become an
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:227
example of that catholic idealism which portrays in poetic language the
nature of moral ideas, and which in all ages has found expression in one
form or another.
i.e. nakedness or self-abnegation in intrepid allegiance to
the facts.
5 p 160
||Reference to an Encyclopaedia, dated|| Anno a Christo pro nobis incarnato
1714 et a mundo per numen creato 5663.1
5663
1714
3949 BC.
1
In the year of Christ made flesh for us, 1714, and sent into the created world by
the divine will, 5663.
6 p 214, marked
[A paraphrase and quotation from Samuel Hopkins, The Knowledge of
God’s Law Necessary in Order to the Knowledge of Sin.]
The most hardened sinner is he who imagines that he can oblige God to
save him on account of his natural virtue. God will not be obliged! Man
must surrender unconditionally; and no man is further from surrender
than he who is still confident of the value of his own strivings. “The plain
reason for this is, his sin and guilt are infinite and his virtue finite.
Therefore the latter … is of not more avail … than nothing at all.” It follows that “the secure, unawakened sinner does not sin so directly and
immediately against God as the awakened, convinced sinner.”
7 p 235, marked
[…] Unitarians were not required to build their own churches, they
inherited the meeting houses of the Puritans, together with their social
traditions and intellectual habits.
In some sense the [sic] were still puritans. What is this sense?
8 pp 246–47, underlined
[On the simplicity of Benjamin Franklin’s prose:]
Though more recent instrumentalists have succeeded in putting this doctrine in language which appeals more to “university men, […]”.
not to me!
9 p 254, underlined
If the Franklin morality substitutes for anything, it is for the traditional
Christian virtues, for they, too, constitute a philosophy of the discipline
of life. The Christian life is traditionally portrayed as one of humility,
2:228
George Santayana’s Marginalia
charity, penitence, poverty, self-denial, a forgiving spirit. These are
obviously instrumental virtues and not ideal perfections, for they disappear in heaven.
Not at all. Even poverty and self-denial, in one sense,
remain in Piccarda.
10 p 254, doubly marked
Franklin’s diagnosis of his own case corresponds fairly well to the historians’ diagnosis of Puritans in general. They pretended to live saintly
lives, but their actual ideals were pagan. They pursued “health, wealth
and wisdom” while they professed election into the Covenant of Grace.
11 p 261, doubly marked
[Schneider quotes Lloyd Morris, The Rebellious Puritan, who quotes
Nathaniel Hawthorne:]
“We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go all right.”
Oliver1
1
In his inscription, Schneider wrote, “To George Santayana (and for
‘Oliver’, if he wants it) with a sense of deep obligation.”
12 p 262–63, marked
Needless to say, Hawthorne used the theological terminology metaphorically. He did not need to believe in Puritanism, for he understood it. He
saw the empirical truth behind the Calvinist symbols. He recovered what
Puritans professed but seldom practiced—the spirit of piety, humility and
tragedy in the face of the inscrutable ways of God.
There is also self-dedication in Oliver.
13 p 264, marked
And now that Emerson is dead or dying, [in terms of readership, c. 1930]
the solitary Puritan who “said so little,” has an opportunity of “showing
his purer power.” Whenever self-reliance fails, as it sooner or later must,
and sinners see themselves as God sees them, piety becomes reincarnate,
though the language in which it finds expression may bear little resemblance to that of the Puritans. But whenever sinners become convinced
that they are instruments in the hand of God, elected to carry out his holy
will, they lose their piety and begin doing good to others.
Mere self-surrender or conformity is not puritan: there is
the uncompromising hatred of mummeries & vanities as
well.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Robert E. Schneider
2:229
Positivism in the United States:
The Apostleship of Henry Edger
Rosario, Argentina: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
William H. Schofield
English Literature,
from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer
London and New York: 1906. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Parerga und Paralipomena
Two volumes. Leipzig: 1891. Le Balze. One marginale.
Fannie B. Sebastian
Poetry for Today
Washington, D.C.: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Roderick Seidenberg
Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry
Chapel Hill, NC: 1950. Waterloo. Twelve marginalia.
1 p 174, marked
In the shifting panorama of history, the doubts, problems, and antinomies of one age are not so much resolved as supplanted by those of
another age.
2 p 186
[Santayana’s paraphrase:]
Spirit not abolished but generated by perfection of life.
3 p 189
[…] the person as the source and citadel of spiritual realities, as the ultimate center of being and the nucleus of creative thought and activity, will
ultimately come to seem to whom? to God? a remote myth, a vague
^
^
historic concept […].
But spirit has to be incarnate.
2:230
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Richard Semon
Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip
in Wechsel des organischen Geschehens
Leipzig: 1911 (3rd edition). Georgetown. No marginalia.
George Bernard Shaw
The Adventures of a Black Girl
in Her Search for God
London: 1932. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Osbert Sitwell
The Scarlet Tree
Boston: 1946. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 p 349
[Sitwell on himself at Eton:]
I possessed a liking for things of the intellect, a passion for the arts, which
already I placed above everything.
I don’t as yet see great signs of “intellect” in you: a taste
for gossip, for novels, & the Russian ballet is not intellectual. It shows sprightliness. Strange silence about the classics and about history & politics.
Harry Slochower
Three Ways of Modern Man
New York: 1937. Waterloo. One marginale.
1 p 72, underlined
[A quotation from Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain:]
[…] “une aventure dans la mal” […].1
!
1
An adventure in evil.
Harry Slochower
Richard Dehmel
Dresden: 1928. Georgetown. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Charles Allen Smart
2:231
Wild Geese and How to Chase Them
New York: 1941. Waterloo. Six marginalia.
1 p 54
||The United States keeps out of the war from second-hand prudence.
Are we|| afraid to say that we want to go into this war to the hilt […]
simply because we hate all bullies’ guts, and are willing to take any consequences?
Isn’t this a call of “insanity”? A bully seems to be speaking.
2 p 57, underlined
[…] people who have been places, […].
New idiom?
Logan Pearsall Smith
Afterthoughts
London: 1931. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Robinson Smith
The Solution of the Synoptic Problem:
Sources, Sequences and Dates of the Gospels and Epistles,
and the Consequent Life of Christ
London: 1922. Waterloo. No marginalia; three-quarters un-cut.
Thomas V. Smith
The Philosophic Way of Life in America
New York: 1943. Waterloo. Twenty-nine marginalia.
1 p 121, underlined
[Chapter V: “The Aesthetic Way: Santayana.”]
Ideas, while not the very things of nature, are held to be the essence of
the things for which they stand.
not by me
2 p 210
[Chapter VIII: “The Legislative Way: Congress.”]
People are not able to represent one another (This is an
objection to autocracy, and also to representative government).
2:232
George Santayana’s Marginalia
3 p 216
[Smith urges variety and tolerance in taste.]
Ideal to like everything.
4 p 217
[An appeal for everyone to learn touch-typing.]
Democratic joy in touch typing.
5 p 217
A man of the world learns how to meet men halfway; […].
Insidious cordiality
6 p 218
Accomodation liberates (what remains of) the self.
7 p 219, marked
||The roots of amiability and animosity are in all of us.|| But under proper
conditions they do grow and flower into the friendliness of a self-respect
so staunch that it respects others as part of the very same with itself.
Do parliaments foster kindness in all nations? In the U.S.
are Congressmen kinder than commercial travellers?
Fairness & patience are really characteristic of government by agreement and compromise.
8 p 223, underlined
Congress would break up again if all other representatives were to turn
on those who speak for one cause with the united conviction that they
were rogues not worthy to be heard.
As you do upon fascists.
9 p 227
The beginning of collective wisdom is for each man to discover that he
is not God.
2 points:
1. Moralism is here taken as typical selfishness.
2. The “legislative life” = the life of reason.
10 p 233
||Better a majority have its way than a minority.||
Quantity only considered rather than faculty.
11 p 234
||One is not a good man if he compromises his very self.|| The good
man and the good citizen meet and merge in a society so peaceful that
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:233
freedom of conviction is habitually allowed. This is the end-goal of the
legislative way of life: […].
But the private loyalties may be to another society or
church. Your democracy therefore should be multiple and
in material things, federated.
Sophocles
Antigone
Translated by Lauro de Bosis
Rome: 1927. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Sophocles
Oedipus Rex
Translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald
New York: 1949. Waterloo. No marginalia.
William Soutar
Conflict
London: 1931. Waterloo. One marginale.
Edward G. Spaulding
A World of Chance, or, Whence, Whither, and Why?
New York: 1936. Waterloo. 101 marginalia.
1 p xvii, marked
No property, e.g., perfection, “generates” or necessitates its own instances.
No essence generates its instances.
2 p xviii
||Concerning properties which are|| instances of Impossibility.
The essence of contradiction cannot be exemplified
(except in thought or language).
3 p xxv, footnote
A proposition is not the words of a sentence, nor an “awareness” of any
kind; rather it is an objective “state of affairs,” a meaning, that is “made”
true or false by something external to itself.
A proposition is an essence.
2:234
George Santayana’s Marginalia
4 p xxvi, marked
[…] the proposition is a specific objective state of affairs through or by means
of which we judge. It is a possibility, but a specific one, namely, that of
being open to realization by something external to itself. If the proposition is
realized, it is true, if it is not, it is false.
Definition of truth.
5 p xxvii, marked
[…] in asserting any position to be true, we are presupposing, (1), that
a certain set of propositions is disclosed, and, (2), that through the
propositions which constitute this set, we are getting at facts which are
independent of both the propositions and the judgments. This is
Realism.
Definition of realism. But what is a “fact”?
6 p xxxi
[Santayana’s gloss:]
Realism is open to conviction about reality, whereas idealism has its reality at home.
7 p xxxii, underlined
||Spaulding’s list of words that he regards|| to be neither mere words, nor
“constructs,” nor “fictions,” nor “ideas,” but facts, realities: Functionality
(“Propertiness”) Possibility, Necessity, Contingency, […].
He won’t say “essence” and sweats!
8p5
[Santayana interprets:]
Odd to call essences “facts”.
9 p 6, marked Z
[On propositions about propositions that might be true or false:]
Essences are not “true” about themselves. Judgments may
be true or false about them when they are specified. But
this involves selection & intent.
10 p 9, underlined
||The relation between the non-physical and fact contradicts|| the explicit
tenet of Behaviorism, that everything is physical; […].
including relations. Does Watson deny relations?
11 p 21
[Chapter II, “Propositions about Propositions.”]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:235
Even if one said, after investigation, as does, e.g., the nominalist, “There
are no propositions,” one would be aware of, or would be discovering, at
least one proposition.
1st meaning of “is”.1
1
See Santayana’s “Some Meanings of the Word ‘Is’” in Obiter Scripta
(Scribner’s, 1936), pp. 189–212.
12 p 22, underlined
It will be found that these realities [nature, existence] are of different kinds,
and that these kinds have definite relations to one another.
All kinds & all relations. If you limit the realm of essence
you contradict yourself, since you refer to what you
exclude, indicating it in denying it.
13 p 34, marked Z
[…] if “round-squareness” is an impossibility, then, on the one hand, it
itself is an instance of this property, but, on the other hand, it is an instance
which is of such a character (impossibility) not only that it is not, but also
that it cannot be, exemplified,—i.e., there are no possible instances of it.
There are, then, some properties (if, by courtesy, they may be called this),
some pseudo-properties, that, as themselves instances of Impossibility,
cannot be possibilities-of-instances, of classes.
No: there are no such essences in that genus (no round
square in space or geometry) but there are many instances
(like round squares) of contradiction in speech and
attempted thought.
14 p 36, footnote
||Can logical consistency be established, as by mathematicians, through
an appeal|| to an external factor, to a “concrete representation.” This is,
of course, an appeal to truth, […].
Isn’t intuition meant? To see contradiction you must distinguish the compared terms definitely. i.e. in intuition, in
actual vision.
15 p 37, footnote, underlined
Whether […] maintaining that propositions as propositions, meanings as
meanings, are such as to reveal their consistency or inconsistency, there is
a concealed reference to an external factor, and therefore to a “concrete
representation” and so to an external test, is an open question.
No, no, no. Intuition does not rest on an external object
but on an essence, which has no locus and no existence.
2:236
George Santayana’s Marginalia
16 p 38
Silly ass. All essences are “one” no matter how many parts
(not to speak of instances) they may synthesize.
17 p 52
In brief, and to summarize: There is either an infinite series (regress) of
properties or there is not. If there is, then, ipso facto, there is no ultimate
property. If there is not, then either there is one ultimate property or there
are many ultimate properties.
“Number” e.g. cannot be an instance of number, i.e. a particular number. Does it follow that there is a higher
essence than Being, of which all essences are “instances”?
18 p 77, marked Z
[…] we discover what may be called the Antinomy or Paradox or
Dilemma of Functionality (or Propertiness) and Ultimacy. Each presupposes the other. Functionality, if, or as, an Ultimate, presupposes, or is an
instance of, Ultimacy, and Ultimacy, as a function, presupposes, or is an
instance of, Functionality.
Scholastic trifling & monkish quibbles.
19 p 96, underlined
What, then are some of the more important classes or types of relations?
Note the fishing of this professor, so as to be able to go on
with his lecture.
20 p 104
i.e. you are rambling among the ideas that happen to
occur to you.
21 p 114
Truth may be found in mere ideas if these ideas are made
objects, and referred to in other terms at other moments.
By “idea” I mean not psychological moments—intuitions—
but specific essences. Science may therefore be mathematical or logical: & within limits propriety & consistency
in developing them may be called “truth” i.e. formal or
grammatical truth. The limits are set by the prevalence &
clearness of the ideas discussed.
22 p 117, marked
The propositions, identical with meanings, are symbolized; they are
“understood,” or not, by other minds than that of the investigator; and
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:237
they are made true or false by facts. But the facts themselves care not
whether or not there is truth or falsity, understanding, symbolization,
rational examination, science, or philosophy; only, if there are these, then
the realm of fact is by so much the richer.
Good sense.
23 p 130
||Truth is always contingent.||
There are no necessary truths.
Herbert Spencer
The Study of Sociology
London: 1897 (19th edition). Georgetown. Thirty-four marginalia.
1 p 34, marked Z
True, if you please to ignore all that common observation, verified by
physiology, teaches—if you assume that two European parents may produce a Negro child, or that from woolly-haired prognathous Papuans
may come a fair, straight-haired infant of Caucasian type—you may
assume that the advent of the great man can occur anywhere and under
any conditions.
What is the standard of greatness?
2 p 52, marked
It needs but to ask what would happen if men avoided one another, as
various inferior creatures do, to see that the very possibility of a society
depends on a certain emotional property in the individual.
If men were not social they would not live in society. Do
you know the social structure in the individual, or only the
social action of individuals in the mass?
3 p 195, top
[Santayana summarizes two pages.]
1.
2.
2.
3.
ideals of society or life.
Well-fed ideal.
[sic] Reproduction ideal
Hunting ideal
4. ideals of War.
^
^
5. Industry. [Spencer]
6. State.
7. Fame.
Business is the background of labour.
Love is the background of art.
4 p 199, underlined and marked Z
Those educated in the religion of enmity—those who during boyhood,
when the instincts of the savage are dominant, have revelled in the
2:238
George Santayana’s Marginalia
congenial ideas and sentiments which classic poems and histories yield
so abundantly, […].
N.B.
5 p 200
||It is a perverted idea of society presented by Gibbon when he writes
that Rome declined because of public happiness creating corruption, as
opposed to the vitality and health of the empire at war.||
The author doesn’t see that in fighting a scarcely conceived and repellent enemy we bind closely to us all the
friends and allies of our own soul.
6 p 209, underlined
[On “The Bias of Patriotism”:]
We can see nothing save crime in the endeavour of the Hindus to throw
off our yoke; and we recognize no excuse for the efforts of the Irish to
establish their independent nationality. We entirely ignore the fact that
the motives are in all such cases [of patriotic rebellion] the same, and are to
be judged apart from results.
This from you?
7 p 371, marked
||The selfish, thoughtless young men and women become responsible
and unselfish when they become parents.||
Good passage on the representative value of the family.
Rationality within is so firmly established that it over balances irrationality without.
8 p 377, underlined and marked
That the emotion of awe aroused by contemplating whatever suggests
transcendent force or capacity, which constitutes religious feeling, is
strongest in women, is proved in many ways. We read that among the
Greeks the women were more religiously excitable than the men.
N.B.
9 p 380, top
Some little organs nature moulds in vain
Like a man’s nipple or a woman’s brain.
10 p 413, top
If population doubled every 25 years, in 300 years the
whole land-surface of the world would be covered with a
population as thick as that of London.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:239
[End-paper:]
Plato’s Republic
Aristotle’s Politics.
St Augustine’s City of God.
Dante’s De monarchia.
Montesquieu. L’esprit des lois.
Rousseau. Contrat Social.
Hobbes. Leviathan.
Machiavelli: De principe.
Spinoza: Politico-Theological tractate.
Hegel: Philosophy of history— history of philosophy. Phil
^
^
of religion
Sidgwick: Politics.
Maine’s Ancient Law.
Spencer’s Sociology.
Kidd: Social evolution.
Comte: Philosophie positive, vol. I.
Bossuet. Discours de l’histoire universelle.
Hume: Natural history of religion.
[ Caird: Evolution of religion.]
[ Mill’s Liberty. ]
Arnold. Culture and Anarchy.
Stephen Spender
The Destructive Element:
A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs
London: 1935. Texas. Fourteen marginalia.
1 p 50, underlined
What distinguishes James from the æsthetes is his extraordinary sense of
life, as distinct from reported experience. Writers like Wilde and Lionel
Johnson, and even Whistler, were so deeply embroiled in various sensations and memorable experiences, that it was natural for them to think of
Art as something cut off from life.
I.e. in buggery and drunkenness.
2 p 133, marked
[On T. S. Eliot and his poetry:]
One notices further that there is a tendency in the work of all these artists
[ Joyce, Proust, Baudelaire, Rilke] to regard life as an illness, and themselves
(although they, too, are very seriously ill) as doctors or nurses or spiritual
fathers, or mere affectionate holders of fading hands.
2:240
George Santayana’s Marginalia
3 p 161, underlined
[On T. S. Eliot’s criticism:]
In Eliot’s essay [“Tradition and the Individual Talent”] there seems to be little feeling that a sense of tradition can be derived from the conditions of
life round the poet; that his audience, or his potential audience, is, as it
were, the carrier of tradition, and that he is the one infected. Nor is there,
as yet, any feeling that tradition may be found in the Church, or, as we
find it in Henry James, amongst an aristocracy. It is to be found in books.
This fallacy infects American minds. It stinks at Harvard.
4 pp 166–67
||With regard to After Strange Gods, although Eliot is not a fascist, his
statement concerning Jews, and “excessive tolerance is to be deprecated” would be approved by such fascists as Mussolini, Mosley, and
Hitler.|| The doctrine is not Catholic or Protestant. It has no echo in
Renaissance Italy or in the teachings of the Church which claimed to
stand above all cultures and local characteristics, and to unite all peoples. Nor does it apply to our own history since the Reformation. It is
in fact an Old Testament doctrine suited to the intense nationalism and
racial self-sufficiency of the Chosen People. There is nothing in the
New Testament to correspond to it.
You forgot Plato and the Greek legislators, e.g. Lycurgus.
5 pp 172–73, marked
To call Joyce a traditionalist means a lot, but to call Lawrence a heretic
means nothing. For if the tradition is all that matters, it finally disposes
of Lawrence as a serious writer. On the other hand, if Lawrence does
matter, then we have got to revise our use of the word tradition, and
the machine that Eliot has constructed falls to pieces. We remember his
curious remark that Blake was only traditional ‘up to the age of twenty.’
After that he became not a classic—like Dante—but ‘only a poet of
genius.’ Perhaps a part of the English tradition is to produce artists who
are only poets of genius.
[From “Perhaps a part”:]
Perhaps poets of genius who are not artists. Robert
Bridges says Shakespeare was not an artist.
6 pp 177–78, underlined
[On D. H. Lawrence:]
Lawrence was only an individualist in the sense that he wished the individual to be free in order that he might transcend his own separation
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:241
from his fellow-beings, and fulfil his deep and unconscious being through
sex, and through non-individual, primary sensations.
Animality doesn’t fulfill: it subtends. If this were all in
Lawrence and Spender they would be beasts.
7 p 186
[From a letter of D. H. Lawrence:]
‘[…] You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character.
There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs
a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are
states of the same single radically unchanged element.’
The psyche is not the spirit. Excellent if you are interested
in the conduct and ineraction of people for its physical
drama.
Oswald Spengler
Reden und Aufsätze
Munich: 1938. Waterloo. Eighty-four marginalia.
1 p 4, marked
||Democritus and the ancient materialists differed from the moderns.||
And the ancients were more profound.
2 p 19, underlined
(Nietzsche macht auf das Treffende des Ausdrucks “Wirklichkeit”
aufmerksam.)1
Schopenhauer said it first: Die Wirklichkeit ist das
Wirken.2
1
Nietzsche notes the pertinence of the expression “Reality.”
Reality is activity.
2
3 p 29
[On Heraclitus, Santayana’s gloss and translation:]
Contrariety exists only by comparison: but the contrary
essences lie uncompared in the movement of things. A
terrible fallacy is skirted here, viz., that the turn of
thought creates the alternation of forms. This is another
point. Things identical with themselves have contrary
relations to other things, large and small etc.
2:242
George Santayana’s Marginalia
4 p 65, underlined
||A powerful current in modern German thought derives from Leibniz by
way of Goethe and Hegel.|| Leibniz became Goethe’s influential teacher,
although Goethe himself was not aware of this connection and instead pronounced
the name of the quite alien wesensfremden Spinoza […].
Jew!!!
5 p 65, underlined
||If one deletes Leibniz’s writings on politics, efforts at reunification of the
country; his observations on mining, on mathematics and the organization of knowledge,|| so bleibt wenig übrig.1
Only the monadology.
1
Very little else remains.
6 p 65, underlined
Der gewaltige Hegel war der letzte, dessen Denken, von politischen
Wirklichkeiten ausgehend, noch nicht ganz durch Abstraktionen erstickt
wurde.1
Very true. He was a politician like you.
1
The overpowering Hegel was the last one whose thought, diverging from political
realities, was not completely suffocated in abstractions.
7 p 66
[Santayana paraphrases:]
History a collection of parables to enforce a policy.
8 p 66, marked
The blaze of emotional and experienced deeds once extinguished, one reflects
analytically. Fate is a word the contents of which one feels. Time, longing, life
are closely related words. No one may believe that he has understood the kernel
of my manner of thought if the ultimate meaning of such words, as I intend
them, remains closed to him.
Bergson in more virile form, and more honest because not
pretending to be true, only inspiring.
9 p 67
[…] den Gang der Welt instinktiv zu durchschauen, […].
[Santayana glosses:]
“Intuition” in the sense of divination.
Certainly there is divination in the Napoleons: but there
is also study; and when the insight is not based on study
it leads to ruin.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:243
10 p 78, marked
In the land of Till Eulenspiegel, I miss great comic style of world-historical heights
and depths, exalted, tragic, light and fine; it is almost the only form in which,
without becoming unauthentic, both the philosopher and the poet can use.
11 p 116, marked
||In “Nietzsche and his Century,” Spengler compares Goethe’s times and
education with Nietzsche’s.||
N. was more literary than G. more drunk with words.
Aristocracy & Democracy are ideas. The real people in
both cases are beastly and helpless.
12 p 117, marked
||Nietzsche was incapable of living a communal life, but lived a lonely
and isolated existence, unlike Goethe.||
It is the beauty of friendship not to be “society” but a conjunction of solitudes: like religion.
13 p 118, underlined and marked X
||The Birth of Tragedy displayed classical knowledge quite different from
conventional teachings; he saw Greek culture|| ins Innere1 […].
1
In essence.
14 p 122, underlined
Niemand […] No one wrote more histories [than in the neo-classical period]
without a conception of a single culture and a unified set of mores.
Except Croce & Co.
15 p 131, underlined
Der Charakter eines Volkes ist das Ergebnis seiner Schicksale. Nicht
das Land, das Klima, Himmel und Meer, auch nicht die Rasse, das Blut
bringen ihn letzten Endes hervor. Das ist nur der Stoff, aus dem die
Schläge der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit eine Form schmieden.1
There is a curious shift from realities at work in history, to
history at work on men. The realities all material.
1
The character of a people is the result of its fate. Neither the land, climate, the skies
and sea, neither race nor blood ultimately determines it. Those elements are only the
material out of which the blows of historical reality forge a form.
16 p 150, underlined
Vor 50 Jahren kannte man den Streitwagen nur aus Homer.1
And the Bible.
1
Fifty years ago we knew about war chariots only from Homer.
2:244
George Santayana’s Marginalia
17 p 182, marked
||Man preyed upon nature like an animal|| before he linked himself to a
culture of his own, in which each expression of life became a new shackle.
Liberty, death, & dirt go together for the proud savage.
18 p 236fn, underlined
Spanish bullfighting, concerning the origins of which little has been known, was
still in the Baroque period the special privilege of noblemen. The individual man
approached the animal with sword in hand in order to display his skill. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century bullfighting turned into a show for the rabble,
in which professional troops practised nur noch scheinbar gefährliches
Gewerbe ausüben.1 Each animal was “disposed of ” in about twenty minutes.2
!
1
Only an apparently dangerous occupation .
Santayana went often to corridas in Madrid, understood them, and was
properly astonished at Spengler’s ridiculous account.
2
19 p 256, marked
[Santayana satirically paraphrases Spengler’s history of civilization.]
True culture stopped short in the semi nigger court of the
Empress Josephine.
20 p 269
[On the military heroes of the Old Testament:]
The Jews were the Foreign Legion. So things came round.
Oswald Spengler
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
Two volumes. Munich: 1922–23. Georgetown. 195 marginalia.
[Volume I.]
1 p 20, marked
[Introduction.]
||The conception “world history” may prove in the end to be not a culture or a particular human type, but|| eine Form, ein Inhalt des kosmischen Bewußtseins ist.1
naturalism is therefore the author’s real conviction: this
book is merely the expression of an arbitrary orthodoxy
confessed to be an illusion.
1
A form, a content of the cosmic consciousness.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:245
2 p 21
||The conventional divisions of history into a classical period, middle
ages, and modern are senseless and unjust to the actual cultural past.||
Here begins the controversy of orthodoxy against
heresy—all within the sphere of illusion.
3 p 55, underlined
Hat man diese Höhe der Betrachtung erreicht, so fallen einem alle
Früchte von selbst zu. An den einen Gedanken schließen sich, mit ihm
lösen sich zwanglos alle Einzelprobleme, welche auf den Gebieten der
Religionsforschung, der Kunstgeschichte, der Erkenntniskritik, der Ethik,
der Politik, der Nationalökonomie den modernen Geist seit Jahrzehnten
und leidenschaftlich, aber ohne den letzten Erfolg beschäftigt haben.
Dieser Gedanke gehört zu den Wahrheiten, die nicht mehr bestritten
werden, sobald sie einmal in voller Deutlichkeit ausgesprochen sind.1
The Key to the Mystery!
1
If one had attained these heights of contemplation, all the fruits would have fallen
by themselves to him as one. Within that one way of thought, all individual problems are easily solved, those problems approached by way of research into religion,
art-history, theory of knowledge, of ethics, politics, or national economies, which
have absorbed the modern mind for decades without the slightest success.
These ideas pertained to the truth that is no longer engaged, whereas once they were
fully discussed.
4 p 56
||The models for Germany are not to be found in Periclean Athens, but
in Rome.||
This is all an apology for Prussian monstruosity [sic],
likened to Roman grandeur.
What rot! As if in all ages something beautiful could not
be made.
5 p 57, marked
Wenn unter dem Eindruck dieses Buches sich Menschen der neuen
Generation der Technik statt der Lyrik, der Marine statt der Malerei, der
Politik statt der Erkenntniskritik zuwenden, so tun sie, was ich wünsche,
und man kann ihnen nichts Besseres wünschen.1
Why must people do the fashionable thing? Worldliness is
absolutely ineradicable in the Jew-German mind.
1
When, under the influence of this book, men of the new generation turn to technology rather than to lyric poetry, to the sea rather than to painting, to politics not
to theory of knowledge, they will act as I should wish them to, and one cannot wish
them anything better.
2:246
George Santayana’s Marginalia
6 p 61
||Praise again for Roman architecture, and denegration for other forms of
ornament.||
Oh rot! as if the ornaments were less expressive than the
structure.
7 p 81, marked
[Chapter: “Vom Sinn der Zahlen” (On the meaning of numbers).]
Geschichte verstehen heißt Menschenkenner im höchsten Sinne sein.1
Literary psychology.
1
To understand history means to understand mankind in the highest sense.
8 p 82, underlined and marked Z
Jede Philosophie ist bisher in der Verbundenheit mit einer zugehörigen
Mathematik erwachsen. Die Zahl ist die bildgewordene Idee der
kausalen Notwendigkeit, wie die Vorstellung von Gott, die jede Kultur
aus ihrer tiefsten Tiefe neu gestaltet, die bildgewordene Idee der
Notwendigkeit des Schicksals ist.1
Note that every Kultur creates the world: yet the Kulturen
seem to arise in an order dependent on astronomy. Where
are we?
1
Previously each philosophy developed in connection with a parallel mathematics.
Number is the shaping idea of causal necessity, like the introduction of God, which
each culture set forth anew out of its profoundest depths, and which is the shaping
idea of the necessity of fate.
9 p 87, top
Turbid and profuse repetitions, jumble of assumptions,
and cocksure interpretations of remote lore in China
Greece and Egypt.
10 p 87, doubly marked
||Kant assumes identity of mental activity in all mankind.||
Quite so. But this is not the reason. The reason is that Kant
thinks transcendentally. The natural occasions for thinking
exist only for thought.
11 p 92, underlined
||The creations of higher mathematics compared to the interior of a
Cathedral,|| ( wie die Verse der Engel im Faustprolog ) 1
^^
^^
Not this: this is sentimental convention. You mean the contemplation of essence.
1
Like the angel’s verse in the prologue to Faust.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:247
12 p 93
Substance is not essence.
13 p 101
||Spengler cites the deeply religious intuition of mathematical artists.||
What does he mean by religious? Mystical? pious?
14 p 110
[On mathematical functions:]
Relations and types rather than shapes & sizes. But
Platonic Ideas were types.
15 p 112, marked
In the totality of the history of mankind, one finds nothing innately strange. And
even so, because opposites disturb, because in their depths they refer to a possible
commonality, we discover in the western Faust-like soul every longing search for
the Apollonian ideal, which they alone among all others grasp and are envied for
the strength of their devotion to the pure-intellectual future.
This is like Goethe, not like you. You pretend to like being
a German.
16 p 113
[“On the meaning of numbers,” i.e., mathematical thought:]
All this comes to the simple conclusion that there is some
analogy between the way mathematicians of a particular
nation think, and the other arts of that nation. It is not
mathematics or the arts that change their total constitution.
17 pp 113–14
||In early civilations, Egypt or Greece, architecture, sculpture, and mensuration were in accord. Modern men experience an intense longing for
what is irrecoverable. Spengler writes of|| das Urgefühl der Sehnsucht1
||of the modern.||
False history.
1
The primitive feeling of longing.
18 p 114, underlined
Wie alles Werden sich auf ein Gewordensein richtet, mit dem es endet,
so rührt das Urgefühl des Werdens, die Sehnsucht, schon an das andre
des Gewordenseins, die Angst.1
Hardly that: sorrow, a Sehnsucht that is hopeless.
1
Just as all becoming is directed to fulfillment, its proper end, so the primitive feeling of becoming, longing, arises, [with] that other aspect of fulfillment, anxiety.
2:248
George Santayana’s Marginalia
19 p 114, underlined
Es ist etwas Fremdes, das Zukunft in Vergangenheit verwandelt,1 […].
Yes, to spirit, but not to the childish psyche, that loves
change.
1
It is rather strange that the future changes into the past ….
20 p 115, top
“Sentimental Time”
21 p 115, marked
Only the inwardly dying men of the great late cities, of Ptolemaic Alexandria or
of contemporary Paris and Berlin, only the purely intellectual sophist, sensualist
and Darwinist loses sight of or denies an unmysterious “scholarly
Weltanschauung” between himself and the strangeness of being.
This animus is against the radicals who omit spirit from
their philosophy. But Empedocles felt the strangeness of
existence.
22 p 116
[A random observation:]
Essences are a harness thrown over substance—the
intended object of knowledge.
23 p 125
The infinite is a provocation to motion, not an actual
thing.
24 p 127
[On the mathematical absolute:]
Absolute space must be a notion, because if it existed
there would be no difference in individuality in its parts:
how then could it exist? Existence also implies change:
how could absolute space move or endure inward motion?
25 p 129
||Only a few understand the sphere of mathematical thought that
Spengler sets forth.||
Aren’t you in danger of being a coxcomb with your profundity?
26 p 130
||For us, the days of the great mathematicians are over.||
No Einstein yet?
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:249
27 p 136
Egotism unconscious of itself: But you—fussy, vain prejudiced person—how are you going to do that?
28 p 137, marked
[Chapter: “Das Problem der Weltgeschichte” (The problem of worldhistory).]
“The World” is for each individual his own, singular, necessary and completely
willess experience. Schopenhauer called it the world as representation and its identity for all mankind as obvious.
And you assume a lot of barbarians artists & children
besides yourself. Why?
29 p 390, marked
[Chapter: “Musik und Plastik.”]
||The elevated greens of Grünewald, Lorrain, and Giorgione are Catholic
colors; Rembrandt’s browns represent the Protestant world-feelings.||
N.B. Can nonsense further go?
30 p 427
This is another notion—picturesqueness, idiosyncrasy: but
the same in that it treats a man as a stimulus for me.
31 p 428, underlined
Man bemerkt […] daß jede einzelne Kultur als eineheitliches Wesen
höherer Ordnung im historischen Gesamtbilde ihre eigne moralische
Fassung besitzt. Es gibt so viele Moralen, als es Kulturen gibt.1
N.B. Kultur = tradition.
1
One observes … that each single culture uniformly possesses, in historical perspective, a higher order of moral perception. There are as many orders of morality as
there are individual cultures.
32 p 429
He confuses harmony with passivity. I am not passive if I
live according to nature, nature living in me. But I am
quiet and settled.
33 p 434, marked
||Spengler contrasts the fable of the ancients with the short story, or
novellas, the masters of which are Cervantes, Kleist, Hoffmann, and
Storm.||
!
2:250
George Santayana’s Marginalia
34 p 465, marked
||The analysis of an order of morality cannot itself be a form of morality.||
N.B. Yet he has an evident preference for the Faustish.
35 p 466, marked
Himself the passionate opposer of all “Herd-morality,” Nietzsche is hardly able,
in the ancient sense, to confine his zeal to himself.
Of course not. Nietzsche is a raving barbarian.
36 p 471, marked
Each culture has its own ethical standards, the validity of which begins and ends
with it. There is no ethics common to all.
Not complete: but there are some human goods recognized every where. E.g. health. If St. Francis prefers illness, it is as a means to “true” health.
37 p 472
||The many varieties of morality.||
Why such unanimity? Are there not always all sorts of people at bottom? Perhaps it is only the snobs & their fashions
that change.
38 p 479, marked
Nietzsche’s Master-morality is a reality as a type of energetic, imperial, highly
intellectual civilization. Here we find the politics of reality, the moneyed magnate,
the great engineer and organizer.
Nietzsche was a poet, not a Prussian or an American.
39 p 484
This is a confession that Kant (unintentionally) meant to
express a chaotic freedom.
40 p 486, marked Z
The inner certainty of a free will is intrinsic in the whole of portrait painting since
Leonardo.
Typical twaddle.
41 p 486, underlined
Der freie Wille als „Form der inneren Anschauung“, mit Kant zu reden,
steht in einer tiefen Beziehung zur Einsamkeit des faustischen Ich, zum
Monologischen seines Daseins und seiner gesamten künstlerischen
Äußerungen, wovon die apollinische Seele nichts besitzt.1
Freedom is wanted only as an illusion.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:251
1
Free will as a “form of inner reflection,” to speak in Kant’s terms, is profoundly
connected to the islolation of the Faustian I, to the monologue of its existence and all
its artistic utterances, of which the Apollonian mind possesses no part.
42 p 487, underlined and doubly marked
||The ethical socialism of the ancient and contemporary Bhuddists.||
Rousseau ist der Ahnherr dieses Sozialismus. Rousseau steht neben
Sokrates und Buddha, den anderen ethischen Wortführern großer
Zivilisationen. Seine Ablehnung aller großen Kulturformen, aller bedeutungsvollen Konventionen, seine berühmte „Rückkehr zur Natur“, sein
praktischer Rationalismus gestatten keinen Zweifel. Jeder von ihnen hat
eine tausendjährige Innerlichkeit zu Grabe getragen.1
Rousseau and the liberals are really enemies of tradition
and “undertakers” of Kultur.
1
Rousseau is the ancestor of that socialism. Rousseau stands alongside Socrates and
Buddha, the other ethical spokesmen of great civilizations. His denial of all great
forms of culture, all meaningful conventions, his famous return to nature, his practical rationalism permit no doubts. Each of these qualities has buried a thousand
years of inwardness.
43 p 489, marked
The scholarly worlds are superficial worlds, practical, spiritless, clean, extensive
worlds. They eliminate the outlook of Buddhism, stoicism, and socialism.
I.e. to see things as they are kills the Faust-like nature. But
it is admitted that they are so.
44 p 490, marked
||In Faust II, Goethe symbolized the centuries to come as practical,
far-seeing, and directed outwardly, in opposition to the tragic aspect of
Faust I. In part II,|| Goethe predicted psychologically the entire future of Western
Europe.
Yes.
45 p 499, marked
||The many ways in which modern man has gone astray.|| There is no
greater opposition than that between civilized and a Kulturmenschen.1
Primitive man himself is not so foreign to doric and gothic times.
Thank you.
1
Humanity at one, in ancient fashion, with its conditions.
46 p 532, marked
||Spengler contrasts “Nature” and “a physical world-picture.”||
What then is the historical cosmos in which Kulturen
arise?
2:252
George Santayana’s Marginalia
47 p 554, marked Z
Since the late Renaissance, the representation of God in the minds of all serious
people as pure space is more and more common.
What rot!
48 p 556, marked Z
||On the tragic, doomed aspect of Apollonian apprehension of nature.||
So that this is your mighty Wille?
49 p 612
N.B. Romantic “life” is the source of science, but in what
sort of a world is Romantic Life extant? In a novel?
Oswald Spengler
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
[Volume II.]
1 p 9, marked Z
[Chapter: “Ursprung und Landschaft” (Primal cause and landscape).]
||A lyrical description of the development of a plant.|| The appearance of the
first green tips in the ground of winter, the swelling of the buds, the great power
of the blooms, the scent, shining, ripening: it is all a desire to fulfill its fate and a
continuous longing question to the harvesting.
myth
2 p 10, marked Z
Anxiety before the invisible indicates the individuality of human religiosity. […]
The “invisible God” is the highest expression of human transcendence.
But this may be because he is a substance.
3 p 14, doubly marked
||Why do we think as we do? Spengler asks, and answers:|| Das Blut
aber herrscht wirklich, indem es schweigend die Tätigkeit des Denkens
beginnen oder enden läßt. Auch ist ein Unterschied zwischen Sprechen
und Leben. Das Dasein kann des Wachseins, das Leben des Verstehens
entbehren, nicht umgekehrt. Das Denken herrscht, trotz allem, nur im
„Reich der Gedanken“.1
If you stick to this you are all right.
1
Blood [race] really dominates, while it quietly allows the activity of thought to
begin or to end. Further, there is a distinction between speaking and living.
Existence can do without the growth and life of the understanding, not the reverse.
Thought dominates, in spite of all, in the “country of thought.”
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:253
4 p 16, underlined
||Reason and understanding compared to ancestor and fulfillment in the
plant world.|| Vernunft1 calls ideas into life; the understanding discovers truth;
truths are lifeless and allow themselves to be uttered, but ideas belong to the living self of their discoverer and may be shared.
[For Vernunft, Santayana wants:]
Imagination. “Reason” is a principle of harmony, not of
invention. Criticism has no first principle.
1
Reason.
5 p 18, marked Z
[Santayana criticizes as he summarizes:]
The time it takes for a cause to work is a part of the discovery. It is not a formula, but an event.
6 p 21
||The life of contemplation and the life of action contrasted.||
I think the contemplative man is also natural; but he is
less involved in means to ends.
7 p 23, marked Z
||Bird-song and warfare: all part of one great cosmic tactic, irrespective of
mankind’s desires.||
A great respect for bang, bang. Stonehenge is impressive
because one wonders what the builders felt and imagined,
not because they moved stones about.
8 p 29, underlined
Es gibt keine Geschichte an sich.1
N.B. He is talking only of views.
1
There is no history as such.
9 p 30, marked
It is obvious that each man belonging to the Faust-like culture has his own idea of
history, and not only one, but numberless notions from adolescence on, views which
the experiences of days and years continuously weaken and change.
N.B.
10 p 37
Of course there is no reason why types should be adapted
more than is barely requisite for survival: and any accident may set them up or kill them off. Only you must not
suppose a “destiny” that presides miraculously over
events. It is only a perspective a posteriori.
2:254
George Santayana’s Marginalia
11 p 55, marked
||With reference to Ranke’s idea of what constitutes history:|| Ohne
Zweifel ist hier das, was geschehen ist, mit dem verwechselt, was innerhalb des Blickfeldes der jeweiligen Geschichtsforschung geschehen ist.
Daß Mardonios bei Platää geschlagen wurde—hat das aufgehört
Geschichte zu sein, wenn 2000 Jahre später ein Gelehrter davon nichts
mehr weiß? Ist das Leben nur dann eine Tatsache, wenn in Büchern
davon geredet wird?1
N.B. Quote.
1
No doubt that here we have what happened, confusing what happened within the
field of vision of momentary historical research. That Mardonius was conquered at
Plataea—has that history ceased to be if 2000 years later a scholar no longer knows
about it? Is life only then an event if it is spoken about in books?
12 p 56, underlined
||The historian’s certainty about the past occurs|| in einem Augenblick
der Erleuchtung […].1
Bad, bad, bad.
1
In a moment of enlightenment ….
13 p 58, underlined
||People are without history when their destiny is fulfilled, the development of their civilization comes to an end,|| die letzten Möglichkeiten
eines sinnvollen Daseins erschöpft hat.1
Romantic drama: if not, you are a worm. I think the sweetness of life remains to the worms—say, to the Spaniard.
The U.S. are an anthill.
1
The final possibilities of a meaningful existence have been exhausted.
14 p 60
The natural is not romantic
15 p 61
Try Romantic — Conventional
for Kultur — Civilization
Query: Does he admit that the historical is a part of the
biological, apperceived romantically? Or is there a
romantic force occasionally at work? Why & when?
16 p 133, marked Z
[Chapter: “Städte und Völker” (Cities and peoples).]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:255
Race is cosmic and spiritual. Somehow it is periodic and in its essence conditioned
by the great astronomical conditions. Languages are causal images; they function
through the polarity of their means.
N.B.
17 p 243
[Chapter: “Probleme de Arabischen Kultur” (Problems of Arabian
culture).]
||Emphasis on the element of magic in the cult of Mithra. The catacombs,
the early cult of Jesus.||
Sacraments & doctrines of redemption take the place of
propitiatory rites.
18 p 265, marked
||Spengler’s interpretation of “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is that
one suffers, obeys, and does not ask if it is just.||
Very good
19 p 289, underlined
||If one had a vague suspicion of how strange the inner life of Jesus|| uns
allen ist1 […].
you all: because you are egotists & worldlings.
1
Is to us all ….
20 p 292, marked
||The distinction in piety between Islam, and the piety of such as Santa
Teresa, Luther, or Pascal.|| The Faustian Ur-sacrament of repentance implies a
strong and free will that overcomes itself. But “Islam” means exactly the impossibility of an individual as a free power opposed to God’s will.
There is really not much difference, since the surrender of
the will is only the surrender of folly and illusion.
21 p 293, marked
In reality, Augustine is the last great thinker of early Arabian scholasticism, with
no less than a Western outlook.
He is a Catholic not a Lutheran nor a Calvinist.
22 p 295fn
||Spengler takes pains to write that he uses the word “good” only as a
declared value, [Wertschätzung] not a substance.||
Good is not an arbitrary taste: it is a harmony in the realm
of truth.
2:256
George Santayana’s Marginalia
23 p 326, underlined and marked
Einen kausalen Zusammenhang innerhalb der Welt als Natur, von dem
wir überzeugt sind, daß er durch weiteres Nachdenken unmöglich
verändert werden könne, nennen wir Wahrheit. Wahrheiten „stehen
fest“ and zwar zeitlos— […].1
N.B. Confusion of objects. The idea is not the connection
nor the truth: and it is only the idea that reflexion could
modify.
1
To a causal connection within the world of Nature of which we are convinced that
further rejection cannot possibly change, we give the name truth. Truths “stand fast”
and are in fact timeless— ….
24 p 334, marked
||Praise for Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux.||
You are very good for a barbarian.
25 p 337, marked Z
One can only love something of lasting purpose in which one believes. Love
assumes belief in an established world-order.
Why this fancy? What does he mean by “love”?
Possession? Love in a cottage?
26 p 355, underlined
Marienmythus und Teufelsmythus haben sich zusammen ausgebildet
und keiner ist ohne den andern möglich.1
Not true. Cf. Spain at present.
1
The myth of the virgin birth and the myth of the devil have been imagined simultaneously, and neither is possible without the other.
27 p 356, marked
Together with the hymns glowing with love to Mary, the dense smoke of innumerable funeral fires arises. Close to the Cathedrals stand the wheel and the gallows.
In those times everyone lived in the awareness of terrible danger, not from the
hangman, but of hell itself. Thousands of witches were convinced of its reality.
They themselves attested through their confessions, out of purest love of truth, to
their nightly travels and pacts with the devil. In tears, the Inquisitors out of sympathy hanged them in order to save their souls.
Overdrawn but well-grounded.
28 p 378, marked Z
||Buddha, Confucius, and Rousseau were philistines; impossible to ignore
the pedantry of the Socratic way of life.||
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:257
Not Philister [philistines] but tame animals. Only you don’t
see the humour and the poetry of it.
29 p 385, underlined
The Buddhist teachings about experience, in theory and practise aus
Weltmüdigkeit und intellektuellem Ekel hervorgegangen […].1
No greater than any honest man feels in any age—say
Homer or Shakespeare.
1
Resulted from world-weariness and intellectual disgust ….
30 p 396
||On the persistence of ancient “wisdom” and dubious beliefs.||
Why shouldn’t human nature remain faithful to the truths
it has once discovered.
31 p 408, marked
||On the importance of breeding.|| Women out of the depths delude themselves
that a few years in the respectable world are possible, but they sink back down all
the faster. Mankind changes itself with difficulty, because men are weak. The proletariat wants to become aristocratic; the aristocrat completely proletarian.
How German!
32 p 409
[Santayana’s summary:]
Kultur is intentional breeding.
33 p 448, marked Z
Plant life exists only in relation to animal life; the two elements condition each
other in opposition. Similarly, a people exists only in relation to another people,
and this reality occurs naturally and inevitably, in attack and defence, enmity and
warfare.
This is a good example of twaddle inspired by wickedness.
34 p 451
Right & law not distinguished. Right would be what was
for the natural advantage of all concerned, if this harmony
could be established. The circumstances will determine
the best type of harmony to establish: i.e. that which
involves the least mutilation all ’round.
35 p 455
||The nobility will operate the State for its own benefit.|| Quite different is
the disparity between the theory of the State and the idea of the residual positions,
2:258
George Santayana’s Marginalia
which collectively stand apart from the State as such, ||and consider that the
efforts of the state should be directed to social benefit.||
This is why liberals are essentially traitors.
36 p 456, marked
N.B. ideals are sometimes prophetic of what facts are
pregnant with.
37 p 525, marked
||The failure of the innumerable current revolutions.||
Yes: everything is destruction except the mechanical complication of life.
38 p 526
||Since the time of the Napoleonic wars, entire populations, through conscription, are subject to active warfare.||
This will be a suicidal policy, because no one will know if
his army will fight or go home.
39 p 540
||On the historical necessity for the traditions of the monarchy and the
aristocracy to lead society.||
But it seems to be the Fascisti, not the Junkers!
40 p 550, underlined
||Means, not measures are essential, men who represent the inmost possibility of their race, and who possess the ambition to lead|| an die Spitze
der Ereignisse1 […].
This comparative and invidious ambition is unworthy of a
free being.
1
To the heights of events.
41 p 552
In the U.S. there is only self-trust, no consecutive loyalty.
There is team-work, but no policy.
42 p 552, underlined
||The man of action is in no danger of setting in motion the politics of
feelings and programs.|| Er glaubt nicht an die großen Worte. Er hat die
Frage des Pilatus beständig auf den Lippen. Wahrheiten—der geborne
Staatsmann steht jenseits von wahr und falsch.1
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:259
? “Theories”. [for “Wahrheiten”] They are not needed for
action, but the implicit assumptions of action, if it is to be
successful, must be true.
1
He does not believe in big words. He has Pilate’s question continually on his lips.
Truth—the born statesman stands beyond true and false.
43 p 553
Gladstone was “conscientious” in the bad sense—guided
by emotional formulas.
44 p 556, underlined and marked
||Without a Caesar, or in Germany a leader on the order of Moltke,
events are subject to the idiosyncrasies of|| eine Sammlung von Köpfen,1
[…].
And heads full of hobbies & notions. Consider the rot that
German ambassadors and ministers talked during the
war—and since.
1
A collection of heads.
45 p 557, marked
||The outbreak of revolution indicates the lack of political insight on the
part of the ruling party and the opposition.||
Consider Lloyd George and Ireland.
46 p 561, top
Important passage on parties.
[Marked.]
||On the power of factions, on changes in politcal forms:|| A party is not a
natural growth, but a collection of heads opposed to a tradition contrary to their
instinct. The parties are the deadly enemies of those who oppose their opportunistic positions. The conception of the party is always joined to an absolute denying,
unravelling, social levelling, bound up with the idea of equality. It is not worthy
ideals that are recognized, but professional interests.
N.B. It is a pity that the better sort in England are divided
into parties. They ought to be one force.
47 p 565
||The end of democracies and their usurpation by Caesarism.||
Political parties yield to leaders with a personal following.
48 p 570
||In a democracy lacking as champion a true “Herrennatur,”1 demagogy
must result.||
2:260
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Yes: but you forget natural democracies, like that of
America, where there are certainly no Herrennaturen.
1
One fitted by nature and breeding to lead.
49 p 571, underlined
||Measures for governance that are merely rationalized and|| nicht auf
Grund einer tiefen Kenntnis der Menschen und Dinge, sondern abstrakter Vorstellungen von Recht und Gerechtigkeit1 ||depart from realities
and from the necessities of the particular people.2||
Cf. such a silly and nugatory measures as votes for women.
1
Not established on the basis of a profound understanding of mankind and its conditions, but on abstract legalistic ideas of justice.
2
Volk.
50 p 580
In preparation for the World War, the press of entire countries was placed under
the financial command of London and Paris; thus the subject peoples entered into
a form of intellectual slavery.
Not in Spain.
51 p 589
||Madness tends to rule in history.||
The story of anything (say of an illness) can’t be reduced
to mechanisms unless we know the elements and in large
human affairs the elements can’t be counted.
52 p 591
[Santayana’s paraphrase:]
There is art and jollity in healthy labour.1
1
Consult the Nazis’ “Arbeit macht frei.”
53 p 615
||Early German capital was responsible for the discovery of the two
Americas.||
Columbus is a German.
54 p 633fn, underlined
||The dictatorship of money in modern industrialism, owing to|| Dies
gewaltige Ringen einer sehr kleinen Zahl stahlharter Rassemenschen von
ungeheurem Verstand, […].1
Bosh: I know Jack Morgan & old Rockefeller: they are
ridiculous.
1
These powerful circles of a very small number of iron-hard [Rassemenschen]
men of quality [or racially pure leaders ] of powerful intelligence ….
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Benedict Spinoza
2:261
Benedicti de Spinoza opera, quotquot reperta sunt
Ethica: Ordine geometrico demonstrato
Edited by J. van Vloten and J. P. N. Land
Volume I. The Hague: 1882. Waterloo. Twenty-six marginalia.
[Translation based on that of R. H. M. Elwes, The Chief Works of Benedict
de Spinoza. London: 1919.]
1 p 42
[Part I, “Of God,” Proposition VII.]
That thing is called free, which exists by the nature of its own nature alone.
Axiom: If a thing can be conceived as non-existing, its essence does not involve
existence.
This is a physical, not a logical proof. The radical facts
must be the ground of the universe.
2 p 77
[Ethics, Part II, “On the Origin of the Mind,” Axiom III.]
Modes of thinking, such as love, desire, or any other of the passions, do not take
place, unless there be in the same individual an idea of the thing loved, desired,
and the like. But the idea can exist without the presence of any other mode of
thinking.
Idea here is a particular sort of pensée having an external
object.
3 p 78
[Proposition I, Note.]
This proposition is also evident from the fact that we are able to conceive an
infinite thinking being. For, in proportion as a thinking being is conceived as
thinking more thoughts, so is it conceived as containing more reality or perfection. Therefore a being which can think an infinite number of things in an infinite number of ways is, necessarily, in respect of thinking, infinite. As from the
consideration of thought alone we conceive an infinite being, is necessarily one
of the infinite attributes of God, as we wished to demonstrate.
The “hideous hypothesis”.
4 p 81, marked Z
[Proposition VII, Note.]
A circle existing in nature, and the idea of a circle existing, which is also in God,
are one and the same thing displayed through different attributes.
This seems to place the identical substance in diverse
places & times, since God does not think the circle where
the material circle is. If the circle thinks it surely does not
2:262
George Santayana’s Marginalia
think of a circle. [ No: but it feels what it is to be a circle,
which is the true knowledge of the circle, in S.’s sense.]
[In Santayana’s early, minute hand, as are most of these marginalia.]
5 p 99
[Proposition XXIV, Proof.]
The parts composing the human body do not belong to the essence of that body,
except in so far as they communicate their motions to one another in a certain fixed
relation.
The psyche or organism (not the parts of the latter) is the
organ of mind: i.e. the essence of the body is functional.
6 p 101, underlined and marked
[Proposition XXVI, Proof.]
Cum Mens humana per ideas affectionum sui Corporis corpora externa
contemplatur, eandem tum imaginari dicimus; […].1
This requires development.
1
If the human body in no way is affected by a given external body, then neither is
the idea of the human body ….
7 p 101
But in so far as the human body is affected in any way by a given external body,
thus far it perceives that external body.
Our The knowledge (i.e. imagination & belief) of things is
utterly other than the mental phase of those things.
8 p 105
[Proposition XXXV, Note.]
This seems to assume that when ideas are adequate (or normal) they present the essences of their objects as well as of
their ideates. Ideates and objects then become identical.
Benedict Spinoza
Benedicti de Spinoza opera, quotquot reperta sunt
Tractatus Politici
Fifty-two marginalia.
1 p 282, top
Politics science, not preaching
and the more useful for that reason.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:263
2 p 282
[Chapter I, para. III.]
Et sane mihi plane persuadeo, experientiam omnia Civitatum genera,
quæ concipi possunt, ut homines concorditer vivant, […].
[Santayana translates and summarizes:]
Everything has been tried. [ N.B. Concord & control the
objects]
3 p 282, underlined and marked
[Chapter I, para. IV.]
Cum igitur animum ad Politicam applicuerim, nihil quod novum vel
inauditum est, sed tantum ea, quæ cum praxi optime conveniunt, certa
et indubitata ratione demonstrare, […].1
1
When therefore I apply my mind to politics, I have resolved to indicate by a certain and indubitable process, or to deduce from human nature, not what is new and
unheard of, but only such as concord with human nature.
4 p 283, top
Somewhat petty view of human nature.
Dutch-Jewish.
Reason utopian. (rather logic)
[Santayana’s paraphrase:]
It is human to pity suffering & to envy[? almost illegible] prosperity. More inclined to vengeance than to mercy.
Intolerant of differences and satisfaction in victory rather
than in profit. Golden rule futile. [ S. himself moralizes
here. Would it work if people pleaded other people’s
suits.] Contracts vain. [ Does S. mean that governments
aim only to remain in office?]
5 p 284, underlined
||Because in all communities men form some manner of civic government,|| ideo imperii causas, et fundamenta naturalia, non ex Rationis
documentis petenda, sed ex hominum communi natura seu conditione
deducenda sunt, quod in sequenti capite facere constitui.1
Human nature & circumstances determine everything.
1
… we must not look to proofs of reason for the causes and natural bases of government, but derive them from the general nature or position of mankind, as will be
seen in the sequel.
6 p 284, marked
[Chapter II, para. II.]
2:264
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Res quæcunque naturalis potest adæquate concipi, sive existat sive non
existat; ut igitur rerum naturalium existendi principium, sic earum in
existendo perseverantia ex earum definitione non potest concludi.1
Essence
1
Any natural thing can be just as well conceived, whether it exists or does not exist.
As the beginning of existence of natural things cannot be inferred from their definition, so neither can their continuing to exist.
7 p 284
[Santayana’s summary of the remainder of para. II and para. III.]
All things are natural.
Might [ ie. capacity to exist] is right. [ Note equivocal use
of “right”.]
8 p 285, top
Carrière ouverte aux
{
possibilités,
pouvoirs,
puissances.1
1
Career open to (possibilities, powers, might).
9 p 286, marked
[Chapter II, para. VI.]
||On the power of man to sin or not to sin, to stand or to fall.|| At dicunt,
eum a Diabolo deceptum fuisse. Verum quis ille fuit, qui ipsum
Diabolum decepit? quis, inquam, ipsum omnium creaturarum intelligentium præstantissimum adeo amentem reddidit, ut Deo major esse
voluerit?1
Egotism, madness or S. Pre-romantic.
1
But they say that he was deceived by the devil. Who then was it that deceived the
devil himself? Who was so maddened a being that excelled all other created intelligences that he wanted to be greater than God?
10 p 287
[Santayana’s glosses from here to p. 291:]
Nature forbids nothing but the impossible.
11 p 288
Harmony of interest establishes a common light.
12 p 289
The best man is the worst enemy.
Natural rights verbal only.
Convention establishes private rights, and has the right
against rebels that go beyond the rights allowed them.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:265
13 p 290
Natural right = anarchy.
14 p 291
Justice conventional
If society is rational, irrationality becomes wrong. It is not
“wrong” in the jungle.
15 p 291, marked
[Chapter II, para XXIII.]
Ut itaque peccatum et obsequium stricte sumptum, sic etiam justitia et
injustitia non nisi in Imperio possunt concipi.1
1
As, then, wrong-doing and obedience, in their strict sense, so also justice and
injustice cannot be conceived of except under government.
16 p 293
[Santayana’s gloss:]
Liberty is the abdication of the state in favour of the individual. This cannot happen except as the state disappears.
17 p 294
[Chapter III, para. VI.]
||Reason teaches nothing contrary to nature.|| Adde, quod Ratio omnino
docet pacem quærere, quæ quidem obtineri nequit, nisi communia
Civitatis jura inviolata serventur; […].1
The “free” man perfectly obedient. Cf. Hobbes.
1
In addition, reason altogether teaches us to seek peace, and peace cannot be maintained, unless the general laws remain unbroken ….
18 p 294–95
[Chapter III, Para. VII.]
Nam Civitatis Jus potentia multitudinis, quæ una veluti mente ducitur,
determinatur. At hæc animorum unio concipi nulla ratione posset, nisi
Civitas id ipsum maxime intendat, quod sana Ratio omnibus hominibus
utile esse docet.1
Does this mean that irrational government is not authoritative?
1
The right of the state is determined by the power of the multitude, which is led
as though by one mind. But this unity of mind cannot be conceived unless the state
pursues the end that sound reason teaches is in all men’s interest.
19 p 295, underlined
||The state cannot force one to repugnant, unnatural acts.|| Atque huc
etiam illa referenda sunt, a quibus humana natura ita abhorret, ut ipsa
2:266
George Santayana’s Marginalia
omni malo pejora habeat; ut quod homo testem contra se agat, ut se cruciet, ut parentes interficiat suos, ut mortem vitare non conetur, […].1
filios: because a man may often wish to kill his parents,
but there are few Medeas.
Solution: There is war, both sides being right, between a
rebel & a government.
1
And to this category must also be referred such things as are so abhorrent to human
nature that it sees them as actually worse than any evil, such as that a man should
be witness against himself, or torture himself, or kill his parents, or not try to avoid
death, ….
20 p 296
[Gloss and comment:]
Peace and concord the chief end of (commercial) government. Cultus is indifferent (also art, speech, sport, manners)
21 p 302, marked Z
[Chapter V, para. II.]
||That state is best in which laws are kept unbroken.||
Dutch-Jewish shopkeeper! But see §V.1
1
V: That dominion is best where men live in unity. I understand a life to be defined
not by the circulation of the blood and other animal qualities, but by reason above
all, the true excellence of the life of the mind.
22 p 303, top
Double error: all men are alike
all diversity in Sittlichkeit1 is due to
government.
1
Morals.
23 p 304, top
The notion that a “libera multitudo” has obvious interests,
which it will pursue in unison, implies a special public
(like an army) demanding plain objects (such as loot or
pay). It does not apply to a democracy divided into
classes, sects, & parties.
24 p 304
[Chapter V, para. VII.]
||Approval of Machiavelli’s The Prince, for Spinoza believes that
Machiavelli believed in liberty and advised how best to attain it.||
Machiavelli exonerated.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:267
25 p 304
[Chapter VI, para. I.]
||Since men are led more commonly by passion than reason, the multitude is unified in wishing to be led by a common hope or fear.||
Cf. Hobbes
26 p 305, marked
Reason should be imposed or contrived when not spontaneous. So government should be controlled, not loose or
absolute.
27 p 306
[Chapter VI, para. VII.]
||Kings educate their sons so that they may have no reason to fear them.||
Jewish republican calumny.
Benedict Spinoza
Benedicti de Spinoza opera, quotquot reperta sunt
Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione
Thirty-six marginalia.
[There is considerable repetition of the marginalia to the Ethics.]
1p5
||On the folly of worldly possessions.||
The wisdom of Buddha.
2 p 13
[Santayana glosses:]
The mind is a natural product, and the first requirement
of right reason is a fund of noble ideas and normal habits.
You should start from the R. of E. [Realm of Essence] in
understanding existence.
3 p 19
Curious confidence in the existential force of essence.
4 p 22, marked
Nam quoad primam, de qua prius locuti sumus, ubi scilicet res clare
concipitur, vidimus, quod si ea res, quae clare concipitur, et etiam
ipsius existentia, sit per se aeterna veritas, nihil circa talem rem poterimus fingere; sed si existentia rei conceptae non sit aeterna veritas, tantum est curandum, ut existentia rei cum ejus essentia conferatur, et
simul ad ordinem Naturae attendatur.1
2:268
George Santayana’s Marginalia
All essence is true!
1
As for the first manner of fiction already discussed, when a thing is clearly conceived, one saw that if the existence of that thing is in itself an eternal truth, fiction
can have no bearing upon it. But if it is not an eternal truth, we need only compare
that thing to its essence, and to attend to the order of nature.
5 p 23, top
Truth = justified assertion. The Hegelian notion of truth =
coherence is implicit here, in spite of Spinoza’s naturalism: because nature for him is too intelligible.
6 p 23
Truth is internal to evidence. It is the definition of
essences.
7 p 24, bottom
Truth of essence is the infinite nature of essence.
8 p 27
Porro si quis recte procedat investigando, quae prius sunt investiganda,
nulla interrupta concatenatione rerum, […].1
The perfect prig
Was never wrong.
Twig, twig
Twig, twig
Was all his song.
1
Thus if one proceeds with investigation in proper order, inquiring first into those
things which should first be inquired into, never passing over a link in the chain of
association, ….
9 p 28
S. sees in the character of ideas the reason for their
occurence [sic].
Benedict Spinoza
Benedicti de Spinoza opera, quotquot reperta sunt
Edited by J. van Vloten and J. P. N. Land
Volume II. The Hague: 1883. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Benedict Spinoza
2:269
Benedict von Spinoza’s Ethik
Translated by J. H. von Kirchmann
Heidelberg: 1886. Harvard. Twenty-seven marginalia and one drawing.
[There is much repetition of the notes to Santayana’s Latin edition.]
1 p 16, marked
||The idea of a triangle must be based in the fact, as well as in its essence.||
N.B. What need there was of a Hume!
2 p 43
||The gods and men together are bound by the same principles.||
This is the essence of religion, as far as it is a creed and
not an emotion.
3 p 51
Das Denken ist ein Attribut Gottes, oder Gott ist ein denkendes Wesen.1
The fallacy that the conceivable is actual is with S. raised
to an axiom.
1
Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking substance [or essence].
4 p 59, underlined
Das Wesen des Menschen wird durch gewisse Zustände der Attribute
Gottes gebildet, nämlich durch die Zustände des Denkens, von denen die
Vorstellung, der Natur nach, der erste von allen Zuständen des Denkens
ist.1
What sort of philosophising is this? Not unlike that spoken
of in the note on final causation.
1
The essence of mankind will in certain circumstances be conceived as an attribute
of God, namely through the circumstances of thoughts of which the representation,
following nature, is the first of all the circumstances of thought.
5 p 69, underlined
[…] um die gewohnten Ausdrücke beizubehalten, die Erregungen des
menschlichen Körpers, deren Vorstellungen uns die äusseren Körper als
gegenwärtig darstellen, die Bilder der Dinge nennen, obgleich sie die
Gastalten der Dinge nicht wiedergeben; […].1
N.B. Cf. James.
1
… to keep to the usual phraseology, the modifications of the human body, of which
the ideas represent external bodies as present to us, we will call the images of things,
although they do not recall the figure of things ….
6 p 83, marked
Often the crude expression of a theory is the best.
2:270
George Santayana’s Marginalia
7 p 93
In the mind there is no willing; i.e. affirming or denial, except that which an idea,
inasmuch as it is a representation of an idea, contains.
This is a profound truth not yet comprehended by psychologists.
8 p 102, marked
Unter Affekte verstehe ich die Erregungen des Körpers, durch welche
des Körpers Vermögen zu handeln vermehrt oder vermindert, gesteigert
oder gehemmt wird, und zugleich die Vorstellungen dieser Erregungen.1
James
1
By emotion I understand the modifications of the body in which the active power
of the body is increased or diminished, aided or prevented, and at the same time the
ideas of such modifications.
9 p 110
Individual things are modes in which the attributes of God are expressed in a given
manner […] no thing contains in itself anything by which it can be destroyed or
which can take away its existence. To the contrary, it is opposed to anything that
could take away its existence. […] It persists in its own being.
There is something of Schopenhaur’s [sic] poetry in this.
10 p 127, marked
[…] Jeder von Natur verlangt, die Andern sollen nach seinem Sinne
leben. Wenn dies Alle in gleicher Weise verlangen, so sind sie Alle sich
gleich hinderlich; und wenn Alle von Allen gelobt oder geliebt sein
wollen, so werden sie einander hassen.1
That is why there is more hatred among the poor than
among the rich and independent.
1
… by his nature, each wants others to live according to his particular understanding. If all desire the same order of things, all are then communally let down
when disappointed, and if all are praised or loved, they will hate one another.
11 p 127, bottom
In bleeding earth and infinite calm, heaven
Alike in beauties to my charmed eyes.
12 p 138
A thing which we conceive as free must be perceived through itself without anything else. If we therefore conceive it as the cause of pleasure or pain, we shall love
or hate it, with the utmost love or hatred that can arise from either emotion. But
if that which causes the emotion can be thought of as acting from necessity, we then
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:271
conceive it not as the only cause, but as one of the causes of the emotion, and our
love or hatred will be less intense.
This is the sole foundation of the contention that determinism removes responsibility.
Benedict Spinoza
Epistolario
Translated by Oscar Cohan
Buenos Aires: 1950. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 164, marked
I believe that the idea of spectres is completely in accord with the ideas that I find
in my imagination concerning harpies, griffins, hydras, etc.; I cannot consider
them other than as dreams, which differ as much from God as Being from
non-Being.
N.B. God, matter, existence. Yet if all essence exists, why
not centaurs?
Septimana Spinozana: Acta conventus oecumenici in memoriam
Benedicti de Spinoza diei natalis trecentesimi Hagae comitis habiti
Edited by the Spinoza Society
The Hague: 1933. Waterloo. 103 marginalia.
1 p 25, marked
[Gebhardt, “Spinoza in unserer Zeit.”]
||The enemy of new, open thought was|| the middle ages and its monarchic-feudal order.
More frankly: the enemy was Christendom, Christian society.
2 p 30
[Ravà, “Il pensiero di Spinoza e i problemi dell’ora.”]
||Spinoza is studied and respected by churchmen in Catholic institutions.||
?
3 p 47, underlined
[Brunschvicg, “Physique et Métaphysique.”]
||On the return to an old metaphysics,|| that which was practised before science et avant la civilisation.
Aristotle was a savage.
4 p 56, marked
[Clay, “Physik und Metaphysik.”]
2:272
George Santayana’s Marginalia
In those times one still made his [Spinoza’s] well-known difference between
thought and ideas about reality and reality itself.
Yet this is what idealists repeat.
5 p 63, marked
||Clay quotes Max Planck to the effect that positivism is too confined and
confining to be able to elicit the purpose of physical research, which
approximates metaphysics ultimately.||
6 p 77, marked
[G. Bachelard, “Physique et Métaphysique.”]
The euphony of mathematical expression uncovers a singular euphoria in the
mathematician’s soul, a euphoria which takes effective part in the genuinely real
rationalism of human thought.
Yes: but this confirms the playfulness of mathematics.
7 p 81, marked
An electron is only a functionary dependent on the technique of thought. It has no
individuality.
N.B.
8 p 81, marked
Organic chemistry is really form in quest of matter, it is the renewed formal cause,
supplanting the efficient cause, it is the conquering geometric form.
N.B.
9 p 112
[In Santayana’s own contribution, “Ultimate Religion,” he corrects
“chose” to “choose”.]
10 p 127–28
[S. Alexander, “Spinoza and the Philosophy of Religion.”]
It is clear that pantheism is the only philosophy whose God can be the
object of such a passion. Only a pantheistic God can replace for the
philosopher the prescribed beings which theistic religions adore.
You forget Platonism.
11 p 216, underlined
[Rivaud, “Quelques remarques sur la notion d’essence.”]
Or, déjà pour Descartes, un mode n’a son essence que dans la substance
dont il est le mode […].1
[At “essence”:] cause
1
Now for Descartes, a mode possesses essence only in the substance of which it is the
mode ….
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:273
12 p 217, marked
[…] les possibles eux-mêmes, ou les essences, n’ont leur être que par l’entremise de la puissance divine qui crée, à la fois, ex nihilo, les possibles et
les existences […].1
God couldn’t have existed without thinking: he wouldn’t
think without thinking something, without essences. He no
more created these than he created himself.
1
… possibilities themselves, or essences, have their being only through the mediation
of the divine power which creates, at the same time out of nothing, the possibilities
of existences ….
13 p 221, underlined
L’essence d’un esprit est susceptible de comporter un conscience, […].1
!
1
The essence of a spirit is susceptible to comprising a consciousness, ….
14 pp 221–22
It is of slight importance that consciousness, to Descartes, is no more than an
essential determination of the thinking being.
Really! How can thinking not be essential to thinking?
15 p 235, marked
[Töennies, “Hobbes und Spinoza.”]
||On the perception of bodies when the bodily object is no longer there:||
such bodies are only perceived as though in no particular moment they seem to have
been perceived.
Certainly: this shows the intervention of tropes and the
non-instantaneous nature of physical time and of psychic
existence. The transcendental unity of spirit is not in time:
it is dateless: though you might date its initiation, the
point in physical change where the existence of a perceiving spirit is first involved. But the spirit need not
occupy that point.
16 p 248, marked
[Ebbinghaus, “Spinozas Attributenlehre.”]
||On the difficulties involved in God’s conception of specific objects and
of extension as well. It is necessary to confront the problem, because||
according to Spinoza a final intelligence is no other than an Idea (in divine understanding); but such an Idea as cognition in its unity may be determined absolutely
through anything other than through the unity of its objects, insofar as it thus has
reference.
2:274
George Santayana’s Marginalia
I. e. God thinks everything once, and each thought can be
the thought of only one object—yet why shouldn’t this
object be more complex? It is also complex: but we happen to be the thought of what we happen to think. Some
one must have been just me.
17 pp 288–89, marked
[Polak, “Spinoza und Kant.”]
Der höchste, letzte Massstab von Wahr und Falsch kann nicht trügen, ist
grundsätzlich und notwendig (nicht etwas bloss tatsächlich für bezweifelbaren Glauben) unfehlbar, weil Fehlen nur vor einem höheren Massstab
bestände, somit der letzte nicht der letzte wäre.1
This is Spinoza but not Kant: it is the very essence of
non-relativity. Turn it, and it becomes pragmatism or the
denial of the very idea of truth.
1
The highest and final measure of truth and falsehood cannot deceive, if fundamental and necessary (not something only real for undoubted beliefs), unfailing,
because failures exist only according to a higher standard, hence the ultimate would
not be the ultimate.
18 p 293, marked
||On Spinoza’s distinctions between lust and joy, between the common
and the noble, the slavish lustling and the wise.||
Yes: but this is the Jewish-Dutch prejudice of Spinoza, not
his philosophic insight. The prejudice not only makes him
safely good, but also spiritually blind—say to Platonism.
Henry Powell Spring
Challenge to Think
Winter Park, Florida: 1943. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Henry Powell Spring
Essays on Human Science
Winter Park, Florida: 1943. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Joseph Stalin
Questioni del Leninismo
Translated by Palmiro Togliatti
Two volumes. Rome: 1945. Waterloo. 174 marginalia.
[These volumes had obvious influence on several of Santayana’s ideas
as he prepared Dominations and Powers for publication.]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:275
[Volume I.]
1 p 22, marked
||Lenin’s idea that instead of waiting for the proletariat to be educated to
the necessity for taking power, better to take power, then carry on
through cadres the necessary education.||
Compare the feebleness of Labour leaders & “cultured”
American officials with the efficacy of the rough
Americans and of the Russians.
2 p 47, marked
Soviet power resides in the unification and integration of the various states in a
single organization, in a proletarian state organization as the avant-guard of the
exploited and oppressed masses and as the dominant classes, and their unification
in the Soviet Republic.
A soviet republic is ruled by the leaders of the militant
poor. It is an anti-biological order. The Catholic Church is
a Soviet Republic! Only it is not concerned with the material interests of the poor, but with their “opium”: parasitical & idealistic.
3 p 63
This shows how only the material interests of mankind,
food, health and small comforts, are valued by communists: as if nationality did not determine a special “culture”.
4 p 64, underlined
Così si presenta la questione dei movimenti nazionali singoli e dell’eventuale carattere reazionario di questi movimenti se, naturalmente,
non si considerano questi movimenti da un punto di vista formale, dal
punto di vista dei diritti astratti, ma concretamente, dal punto di vista
degl’interessi del movimento rivoluzionario.1
“Reactionary” in this system means ideal. In practice,
however communism may be itself an ideal of the
Franciscan sort.
1
Thus the question of national movements, individual and reactionary in character
if, naturally, these movements are not considered from the point of view of abstract
rights, but concretely, from the point of view of the interests of the revolutionary
movement.
2:276
George Santayana’s Marginalia
5 p 67
Does not foresee the murderous rivalry of races for the
earth. It was primitive and will come if other structures do
not enlist the masses.
6 p 68
Are these “republics” [of the Soviet Union] really free nations?
7 p 68
||Stalin quotes Nicholas II’s idea of the fusion of small states into the
greater entity of the empire.||
Fusion, moral fusion, is precisely what is to be avoided.
8 p 81
You change your tactics never your aim. Not the liberal
(aimless) practice of compromising in respect to the aim.
9 p 85, marked
The revolutionary party can be the dominant power after the proletarian revolution. The ruling class, without a revolutionary party, is an army without a leader.
The party is the leader of the state delegated by the proletariat.
This may be the root of a real ruling class for the whole
world, like the Roman army. (or Curia)
10 p 86
The army must have a people to feed it, the curia a flock.
The universal government shall be backed by the whole
commercial class of the world, i.e. by all material interests
coordinated. It must not rely on any non-material interest
not recognisable by everybody.
11 p 92
||With the disappearance of social classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat would also disappear.||
Then there would be no government?
12 p 93, marked
||The end of divisions in the party is indispensable; the necessity of discipline.||
This allegiance to a decision once arrived at legally makes
the force of Anglo-American governments. But the aim
here is only temporary and the authority relative.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:277
13 p 95
La via dello sviluppo e del consolidamento dei partiti proletari passa
attraverso la loro epurazione dagli opportunisti e dai riformisti, dai
social-imperialisti e dai social-sciovinisti, dai social-patrioti e dai
social-pacifisti. Il partito si rafforza epurandosi dagli elementi opportunisti.1
Distinction from Fascists Nazis and pacifist socialists.
1
The route to development and consolidation of proletarian parties necessitates their
purifying themselves of opportunists and reformers, of social imperialists and social
chauvinists, of social patriots and social pacifists. The party strengthens itself by
purification of opportunistic elements.
14 p 97, bottom
||On the practical American spirit, and revolutionary maneuverings.||
It would be easy to unify these two virtues if the Russians
became true materialists and the Americans true “pragmatists”, giving up their apostolic conceit.
15 p 109, marked
||Lenin on the future of revolutions elsewhere than in Russia.||
Universal conquest anticipated.
16 p 121, top
[ Elimination of peasants ] & its consequences. All working
people become militant.
Soviets are militant bodies representing the industrial &
professional order of production.
17 p 124
||Stalin lists all the reasons why a constituent assembly must fail.||
Query: Will not the UNO have this fate? An empire of
Soviet (industrial) republics to be substituted?
18 p 137
Reform is generative
revolution militant.
19 p 145, marked
||The party and the working class in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The avant-guard of the party form the leadership of the party.||
The leaders are not an Executive but a determining force,
choosing the direction to be taken. [ How are the leaders
selected?]
2:278
George Santayana’s Marginalia
These are now dictated by politicians but need they be so
in a settled community?
20 p 151
||Further details about the dictatorship of the proletariat.||
This is nothing more than to say that government requires
a substance, a people to work upon. It does not share the
government with them, but shares the political life.
21 p 153, marked
Governs by consent of the proletariat. Violence belongs to
the latter in respect to the upper classes. [ N.B. the exact
analogy to the government of the church.]
22 p 156
[Santayana summarizes his reflections on Stalin’s chapter concerning
the workings of “proletarian” government.]
st
All government requires 1 acquiescence of the people,
nd
rd
2 possibility of success in its policy [ 3 vitality in its own
personel [sic] and spirit] [These are insecure essentially, so
that all government is more or less unsuccessful.] Add
fidelity in its agents.
23 p 160, top
Criterion for distinguishing free from organized areas:
The physical possibility of compulsion succeeding
You may impose methods, language, customs.
''
'' not ''
impulses, tastes, beliefs, affections.
24 p 161
Propaganda first, persecution afterwards.
25 p 165
||Lenin’s ideals for government:|| alle masse senza partito: non osate contraddire, non osate discutere, perchè il partito può tutto, perchè nel nostro paese esiste la dittatura del partito; […].1
Something like this existed in the young Fascists.
1
… to the masses without [not belonging] to the party: do not dare to contradict,
do not dare to discuss, because the party is capable of all that, because in our country the dictatorship of the party exists.
26 p 181
N.B. the advantage of forming real common interests
instead of common opinions.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:279
27 p 212, marked
[Chapter on “The International Character of the October Revolution”:]
According to the first stage in the history of humanity, the salaried classes, the
persecuted classes, the classes of the oppressed and of the exploited might rise into
the dominant classes, earning by its example the loyalty of the proletariat in all
countries.
The Roman legions used to appoint Emperors. It is true
that they didn’t alter the administration or the army. Did
the Soviets do so?
28 p 215
||Oppressed peoples were never benefited by bourgeois revolutions.
Only the October revolution put an end to that, liberating the oppressed
and offering fraternal union to all.||
Why then do you persecute the vast majority of Poles, etc.?
29 p 249
Remarkable passage. Communism depends on impersonal
anonymous powers controlling the individual workmen. It
is a form of slavery.
30 p 251, top
Contrast the small scale militancy of the trader with the
large scale militancy of the law-giver.
31 p 284, top
The “Four Freedoms” literary privileges or material support. The real liberties are of trade, of property, of education, of movement, (person & residence); to which the Left
is opposed.
32 p 288
[Santayana paraphrases and reflects:]
Agriculture must be rendered serviceable to industry by
the destruction of peasant life. Instead of being its own
reward, labour must be the means of carrying on all other
labours. For what? For numbers of drudges.
33 p 319, doubly marked
||Problems posed by the necessity for investment in heavy industry cannot be solved by cadres.||
The Soviets aim to breed their own elite. They seem to
have done so. 1946.
2:280
George Santayana’s Marginalia
34 p 320
This eludes the question of the benefits to the peasants by
referring only to the advantage to the harvests to be gathered for the state. The Kulaks perish, the poor peasants
become machinists, and the crops go to the engineers, soldiers, and politicians in the cities. It is a town domination.
35 p 335
[At top:]
N.B. Militancy is “reason armed”: it is dangerous &
unstable.
[Text marked:]
N.B. Property is evil. Ascetic sentiment in materialism.
36 p 345, marked
||On the lot of the peasants unattached to the collective farms.||
Defence of the poor against the rich farmers has become
^ the government.
^
attack—by
37 p 346, underlined and marked
||A quotation from Lenin on the transformation of small holdings and
the mentality associated with them.|| Risolvere questo problema rispetto
al piccolo agricoltore, risanare, per così dire, tutta la sua mentalità, è
cosa che può esser fatta solo da una base materiale, da una tecnica,
dall’impiego su vasta scala di trattrici e di macchine nell’agricoltura,
dall’elettrificazione su vasta scala.1
Propaganda by material progress. Cf. U.S.A.
1
To resolve the problem posed by small farmers, to cure, so to speak, their entire
mentality, can only be accomplished on a material basis, by means of a technique
employing on a vast scale the treatment in agriculture by machinery and electrification on that vast extent of country.
38 p 347, top
Militancy sometimes enforces a system without legislating,
and sometimes legislates without enforcing. To do both, it
needs to enforce first, and legislate afterwards—as nature
does in morals, e.g. in regard to marriage. Militancy works
best when it initiates growth by creating habits and prejudices.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Stalin
2:281
Questioni del Leninismo
Volume II.
1 p 7, marked
[…] il colcos offre al contadino, al contadino povero e medio, la via per
liberarsi dall’indigenze e dalla miseria.1
The point touched at last.
1
… the collective offers to the average poor peasant a way to liberate himself from
poverty and misery.
2 p 18, marked
||More on the importance of the collectives.||
N.B. Fixity & purity of the cause, and indifference to the
existence of other systems. True militancy.
3 p 29, underlined
Esiste da noi questo partito? Sì, esiste. È giusta la sua politica? Sì, è giusta,
perchè riscuote seri successi.1
It is “just”, i.e. fit, because it works.
1
Does our party exist? Yes, it exists. Is its politics just? Yes, it is just, because it
achieves success.
4 p 33, marked
We are behind advanced countries by 150 years. We have to cover that distance in
ten years. Either we shall do it, or we shall be crushed.
Tragic cry that inspires sympathy.
5 p 33, marked
||Lenin’s impassioned expression of why the Soviets deserve the support
of the working class world-wide: because the Soviets were the first to liberate the working class in actual battle against oppression. They will gain
that wide support, not dishonor.||
Great passage.
6 p 39
Communism admits diverse salaries for skilled and
unskilled labour.
7 p 40
||High salaries should not motivate workers, but knowledge of participation in the common good.||
Love of the subject & desire to do good not sufficient
motives: there must be money in it. This is the failure of
2:282
George Santayana’s Marginalia
communism in the world. It can subsist only in the cloister or in the fine arts.
8 p 224, top
Does life impose inevitable crimes?
9 p 224, marked
||On the necessity of the Stakhanovite system in Soviet industry.||
“Ruthless” ambition, dangerous, cruel, but efficacious and
rational in principle, tho’ hardly to be justified in practice
since it may miss the victory that might cover its crimes.
10 p 230, top
N.B. Motto for vacant liberty
11 p 230, marked
Se il pane non basta, se la carne e i grassi non bastano, se non bastano i
manufatti, se le abitazioni sono cattive, con la sola libertà non si fa molta
strada. È molto difficile, compagni, vivere di sola libertà.1
1
If there’s not enough bread or meat or oil, not enough manufactured goods, if your
houses are wretched, liberty alone is not worth much. It is very hard, brothers, to live
only on empty liberty.
12 p 271, marked
||The dialectic of Marx and Engels is not identical with Hegel’s.|| Marx
and Engels took from Hegel only his nucleus of rationality, ridding themselves of
Hegelian courtesy and developing a dialectic consistent with modern scientific
thought.
Not dialectic
13 p 272, marked Z
||The dialectical method follows the method of nature in which phenomena are constantly in motion and transformation; the development in
nature and the development in method are natural, and display contradictions as does nature.||
Variation in things is not dialectical: it may be sometimes
expressed dialectically, by playing with opposite terms
applied to real mutations.
14 pp 272–73
Contrary to metaphysics, dialectic does not consider nature as a casual mass of
objects, static phenomena, isolated and independent from one another, but as a
completely concrete unit, in which objects, phenomena, are organically related,
each dependent upon the conditions of the others.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:283
? By material deviation or by dialectical play of qualities?
Historical connections unite these two bonds: events [one or
two words illegible] one another materially; they are reviewed
and dramatised by their moral relevance to some chosen
interest. Hence the Hegelian sophistry or myth.
15 p 274
||Engels quoted to the repeated fact that nature is dialectical, not metaphysical.||
[At “dialettico”:]
verbal, not natural
[ Engels is refuting Aristotle: but confusing Hegel with
Darwin.]
16 p 277
||Current methods in historiography are an accumulation of absurd
errors.||
Moral errors: misreadings of moral progress. The choice
of a goal is presupposed in this sort of partisan history.
Join the winners. This is the soul of “dialectic”.
17 p 278, underlined
Così si presenta il metodo dialettico marxista, nella sua applicazione alla
vita sociale, alla storia della società.1
Pure sophistry.
1
Thus is the Marxist dialectical method in its application to social life, and to
social history.
18 p 282, top
Le fer aurait déjà tranché ma destinée,
Mais je laissais gémir la vertu soupçonnée.
J’ai voulu, devant vous exposant mes remords
Par un chemin plus lent descendre chez les morts …1
1
The sword will already have severed the thread of my destiny / But I allowed my
suspected virtue to groan. / Exposing before you my remorse, I wanted / To descend
to the grave by a slower route. [Phèdre’s death speech from Racine’s Phèdre.]
19 p 282
||Socialism, become a science, will offer a finer future to humanity at
large.||
Science the guide,—If you know where you want to go. It
might guide you to kill yourself.
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
But the decisive physical growths for society are in the
psyche not in the outer world. e.g. sex, involving social
cohesion of the generative order.
20 p 320
||Stalin boasts the superiority of the Soviet industrial system.||
The Russian people are still poor. And it is not intended
to keep them simple. They are to be flooded with bourgeois trash.
21 p 335
||The threat posed by capitalist espionage.||
What can spies discover that would pain you?
22 p 354
[Santayana’s gloss:]
Intensify the sectarian spirit of the party.
Carleton W. Stanley
Roots of the Tree
London: 1936. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 p 42
It is not […] an accident nor even an original thing, in Aristotle to conceive of Nature as having an ascending scale, and of creatures adapting
themselves to their environment […]. In biology he seems to have come
pretty close to Lamarck’s Theory of Use and Disuse.
Do you mean that Aristotle accepted the evolution of
species?
Harold Stearns
Liberalism in America
New York: 1919. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Laurence Sterne
The Novels of Laurence Sterne
London: 1926[?]. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette
London: 1894. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Trumbull Stickney
2:285
Les Sentences dans la poésie grecque:
d’Homère à Euripide
Paris: 1903. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Christopher Stone
Eton
London: 1909. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Giles Lytton Strachey
Portraits in Miniature, and Other Essays
London: 1931. Waterloo. Four marginalia.
1 pp 174–75
||Macaulay’s optimism; his description of Torquay:|| “The inhabitants are
about ten thousand in number. The newly-built churches and chapels,
the baths and libraries, the hotels and public gardens, the infirmary and
the museum, the white streets, rising terrace above terrace, […] present
a spectacle widely different from any that in the seventeenth century
England could show.”
Ah, why wasn’t Mac an American?
2 p 189, marked
Frederick was in reality a knave of genius, a sceptical, eighteenth-century
gambler with a strong will and a turn for organization; and this was the
creature whom Carlyle converted into an Ideal Man, a God-like Hero,
[…].
Charles Augustus Strong
“L’Être et le devenir:
Thèse de philosophie naturelle.”
in Recherches philosophiques
Paris: 1934[?]. Waterloo. Seventeen marginalia.
1 p 37
All duration contains more than one present; it must consist of at least two presents which are not real at the same time.
Here the dogmatism becomes subjective: all presents are
real always.
2:286
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2 p 37
The whole universe is contained in, or exists at, each instant. The instant is not
empty, far from there, and it may very well contain the universe, for it must do so
since the universe exists in time, which consists in presents.
Potentiality introduced. Is it a name for fertility or for
pregnancy?
3 p 42, marked Z
[Santayana’s criticism:]
Distance between occupied points belongs to their history
& relations: it is not an absolute distance in a prior void.
4 p 49, marked
||Strong quotes Bergson in defining sensation as a contraction of an
inconceivably large number of small beings.|| Let us say then that what
occupies a point in an instant is a miniscule sensation-force. Or rather this is the
nature of ultimate beings, or their nature is unknowable. Or the word being [être]
in this sense, to which I do not know how to attach a positive meaning. For, as
we have seen, I can conceive of force only through its effects.
This is well put: but it regards physical knowledge as still
gained by intuition, and not by action positing the object
and describing it in dynamic terms.
Charles Augustus Strong
Essays on the Natural Origin of the Mind
London: n.d. Texas. 358 marginalia, one drawing.
[The drawing is reproduced on p. 300 of McCormick, George Santayana.]
1 p 4, underlined
[Introduction.]
A being who had no faculty but sense-perception could never suspect the
existence of such things as feelings.
Except that feeling which sense perception is.
^
^
2p5
The structure of the nervous system must supply the ground-plan of the
mind, its functions must furnish the key to the mind’s activities. It is
impossible to understand the mind aright by contemplating it from
within.
Platonism again barred: but not explicitly. S. never thinks
of that possibility.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:287
3 p 7, marked Z
Knowledge of the external or of the past will depend on the assumption
that things appear to some extent as they really are.
Knowledge not defined.
4 p 13
||Awareness is not a possible datum of observation.||
This is not exactly the case in regard to spirit. This, too,
can’t be the dynamic object of my perception but may be
its intended ontological object or “eject”.
5 p 14, underlined
If feelings, in themselves considered, are “blind, windowless, ignorant”,
that is to say, non-cognitive, then a feeling is not known to us, or an
object before the self, at the moment of its existence; it is a mere component in the self.
non sequitur. A thing is not unknown simply because it
does not know.
6 p 15, underlined
Though James denied consciousness or awareness to be a datum of experience, he did not of course deny that we have experience of anything
psychical, for feelings are obvious data.
[Santayana draws a line between his underlining on the previous page
and on this one, writing:]
contradiction
7 p 15, underlined
[ James] fails to recognise that in perception we are aware only of physi-
cal things, yet that sensations then exist without our being aware of them
[…].
Intolerable paradox. The sensory excitement is that of
which, in feeling, we are aware though not by intuiting its
essence, but by intuiting an emotional essence which is
the sign of it^for us. The ^
sensory excitement is the object
causing the feeling revealed by it, though the feeling does
not resemble it.
8 p 17, underlined
The apparent thing is the real thing as the senses assert it to be.
Good Aristotelean phrase.
2:288
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9 p 26
“‘A motion became a feeling,’” says William James: “no phrase that our
lips can frame is so devoid of apprehensible meaning.” But if a motion,
in itself considered, is a feeling?
Do you mean this, or rather that that which moves is a
feeling, or a multitude of feelings?
A motion may produce a feeling: and as the motion
is a trope, with no unity save in the realm of truth, the
feeling which hypostatises it in the realm of spirit might
be said to be the integrated reality of that motion. Some
sense might then be given to the phrase “a motion is a
feeling”. But it is nonsense as you mean it.
10 p 31
[“The Genesis of Sense-Data.”]
Holt has argued that the simplicity of sensible qualities is in a certain
sense illusory, and due to the suppression of a multitude of minute
parts—to “condensation” or “fusion”. Contraction and fusion are clearly
the same process; perhaps the most generally applicable and readily
intelligible name for it will be simplification.
This presupposes a sort of new realism or objective idealism which regards the material many and the specious
one as on the same plane of phenomena. But only the
result is phenomenal. Projection & simplification are
therefore both impossible & uncalled for.
11 p 38
In aesthetic enjoyment what enthralls us is the character of our states of
sentience—quite literally, we enjoy ourselves.
Does excitement excite, or does not rather the music excite
until the enthusiasm overwhelms it in consciousness?
12 pp 46–47, underlined
[On distance and magnitude:]
[…] an object near at hand, such as a house, may appear many times the
size of the body, and therefore many times the size of the sensations by
means of which it is seen.
Monstrous this use of words. The only thing that can have
size is a body, i.e. an existing figure.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:289
13 pp 48–49, underlined
When I notice that the landscape is framed in by the window, and the
window in turn by the rim of my glasses, I am observing that the window-sensation given essence regarded as existing is larger than
^
^ than either.
the landscape-sensation
and that the rim-sensation is larger
[At top:]
Two English axioms unconsciously accepted by S.
1. The given exists, and nothing else can exist.
2. The mind is the given inside the body.
14 p 53, underlined and marked
Only by assuming states of sentience, with characters which may account
for the nervous processes as well as for the introspective data, can psychology become explanatory.
Isn’t this the method of myth-making?
15 p 61, underlined
If it costs us an effort to believe that characters so unquestionably
experienced and to the senses so real as distance and magnitude can
be fictitious, we should remember that vision is a function that has
existed since before there were vertebrates, and that an illusion so necessary to its success in conveying knowledge and guiding action must
needs be very deeply ingrained.
What a wicked thought! This from you, Oh S.?
16 pp 66–67, underlined and marked X
[“The Genesis of Sense-Data: Sensible Qualities.”]
Assuming it to be undeniable, then, that intuition of wholes without parts
is a fact, let us inquire as to the whereabouts of the missing parts, and as
to the means by which they have been suppressed or excluded from our
awareness. For, though excluded or suppressed, they are evidently in
some sense present, ready to be perceived whenever we turn our attention to them.
A little Aristotle would have saved S. from many blunders.
The parts are potential; they have never been actual.
17 p 67
Our thoughts will be more definite if we consider a concrete example.
And, since most objects—a printed word, for instance, or a face—have
meanings, which it is desirable to exclude because they would complicate
the problem, let the object be an aesthetic one, which, holds our attention by its mere sensible quality and form: say, a rose.
[Santayana encircles the text, then writes:]
2:290
George Santayana’s Marginalia
This is an author’s note which should have been “suppressed”.
18 p 76
If we were as quick in our movements as swallows or humming-birds, we
might be correspondingly quick in our acts of apprehension, […].
I would you were a humming bird
And darted like the swallow,
And I should find your winged word
Much easier to follow.
19 pp 88–89, underlined
[…] when I hear a melody, my self must have passed be passing
^
^
through a sequence of different states.
Intuition cannot be based on passed intuitions, but on
their persistent and co-existent causes.
20 p 90, underlined
[“On the Relation of the Apparent to the Real.”]
The essential principle of neo-realism is the identity of the real thing with
the apparent thing. This identity is necessary to the possibility of knowledge: for, unless in perception the real thing appears, no inference from
what appears can justify our belief in a real thing; from what other source
indeed than perception could our knowledge of it be derived?
The real thing must be the object, and the given essence
must symbolise it: i.e. must express at least, by its practical signification, some of the facts about the object: though
not at all its internal essence.
21 p 92
2. The Three Ingredients of Perception.—Perception, even in the chick,
involves three things: intuition, intent, and animal faith.
[Footnote 1:]
I make use of the excellent terms chosen by Mr. Santayana, with whose
doctrine of perception mine agrees in most respects. I think it important,
however, to insist more strongly than he does that intuition is not a separate act, but only an ingredient of the one act of perception; and that the
sense-datum, accordingly, while in its nature an “essence”, is in perception always predicated of a real thing, and therefore, in use, a particular.
Only thus, it seems to me, is it possible to avoid representationism and
vindicate the claim of perception to be direct acquaintance (false or true)
with the external thing itself.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:291
I agree: but perhaps an essence is not “in use” even in
perception: and the particular is not the datum but the
perception itself with all its material implications.
22 p 96, underlined and marked
The apparent thing as distinct from the real thing is an object which
exists only for the critic of knowledge, and which has been brought into
existence as a separate entity by his doubt. or hypothetical false
^
belief. It has been brought into existence by cancellation
or suspension
^
of the animal faith normally characterising perception. No: because
^
that would reveal the pure datum.
^
It is therefore neither the datum nor the object, but a psychological fiction.
23 p 104, underlined
Nor, again, is the sense-datum that with which we are acquainted, but the
object of acquaintance is the real thing given to intent, and with which
we become acquainted by predicating the sense-datum of it.
I think this is what “acquaintance” is understood to mean:
although James may have meant “coming up against a
fact”. Experience.
24 p 106, marked
The sense-datum presented, for instance, when I look at a flower is confused with the impression on the self by means of which I see the flower,
and the real existence belonging only to the sensation or the object
^ an existent at
^
is attributed to the sense-datum; which thus hardens into
once physical and mental.
Very good
25 p 116, marked
[…] introspection, instead of appearing to reveal an existent that cannot
be in space, will confirm the testimony of perception that the real is spatial. For that the self is in time we are not likely to doubt.
Yes.
26 p 118, top
This is a particularly bad page: Strong here is the
old-fashioned professor drooling second-hand philosophy
in a country college.
2:292
George Santayana’s Marginalia
27 p 125, marked Z
||Since we are natural, composed of natural materials,|| we have reason
to regard our confidence in knowing as justified.
Sobald er reflectiert, ist er ein Kind.1
1
The moment he reflects, he is a child.
28 p 145, underlined
[“The Continuity of Space and Time.”]
||If progress is continual in time why|| has it not strictly no limit?
Because—in the case of time—there could then be no single present.
Time would consist exclusively of durations, that is, of parts every one of
which contains a before and an after, without ever a part which is not
thus composite, a part which is real at once.
Nothing existent is “real at once”, it is unreal, transitional;
and only in the realms of truth & essence can you find that
which it is.
29 p 146, top
My nose, my toes, my finger-tips
and t’ other ends of me,
Must really be just where they end
and end just where they be.
30 p 161, underlined
[“The Soul and Its Bodily Presentment.”]
||Strong refers to|| an idea rightly condemned— […]
Professor Strong knows right from wrong.
31 p 181
The objects, then, that appear to us in the form of introspective data such
as fear, pain, desire, are groups of sensations—not “modes of awareness”.
A hint of the view James may have meant to deny: consciousness a substance waiting to be qualified by its
objects.
32 p 183, underlined
Introspection, no less than perception, exists primarily for practical
purposes. We need to become aware of our states only when they are
specially intense, painful, or pleasant, for the purpose of taking the requisite action.
Action then happens or ought to happen, in order to
avoid pain (not injury to the body), etc.
Strong is deep in mythological psychologism.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:293
33 pp 190–91, underlined
||Strong concludes his chapter with the identity between body and soul.||
The principle of the conservation of energy, so often appealed to as contradicting interaction, is found to ensure it. The assertion, apparently
required by the facts, that mind depends on matter gives place to the
harmless statement that matter is such only for awareness, and that
awareness is a function of the active soul.
The animus of the Rochester Seminary. But this conclusion
is excellent in itself, not because it turns the tables “pleasantly” on materialism but because it assumes the materiality of the psyche.
34 p 196, marked Z
[“On Images and Thinking.”]
That we should see light when external light acts on the retina and brain
is intelligible enough; that, after we have once seen it, the brain should
have acquired the power of recreating within itself this special process, is
by no means so easy to understand, and ought not to be admitted except
upon cogent proofs.
? Strong the innocent.
35 p 212, underlined and marked X
Suppose we hear a musical phrase consisting of four or five successive
tones. How can we, when the phrase is completed, have that sense of surveying it as a whole, […] the earlier tones are past and no longer heard,
and all that we actually hear is the present tone.
S. says he hears what he believes to be the object, which
in music is absolutely irrelevant. Only the essences matter, and these are exactly as intuition conveys them.
36 p 213
Hopeless attempt to discover psychological mechanisms.
37 p 216
||On vision as anticipatory:|| The tiger (I confess that I have no tech^ an antelope in the distance cannical knowledge of tigers) who sees
^
not yet seize and crunch it, but must hold these reactions in readiness
until the moment of fruition arrives.
38 p 229, marked
Plato was led to his doctrine of ideas largely by Pythagorean considerations; among the entities most prominently in his mind were the geometrical and arithmetical essences, […].
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
These were intermediate: it was Socrates who invented
Ideas: and these were moral perfections.
39 p 234
[“The One and the Many in Psychology.”]
||On the nature of awareness.||
Awareness, if it is only a relation, cannot change the character of actual feeling: it can only bestow on this feeling
(for the third person) a certain value as a sign. Intent
within feeling remains undescribed. “Awareness” is cognitive validity: intent is cognitive claim. The first is a question of truth, the second a fact.
40 p 236
[…] James’s recognition that consciousness is not observable and that
only the kinaesthetic sensations are so is a most important advance,
entailing consequences in psychology and in philosophy the full extent
of which will only appear with time.
James is innocent of this. Strong is the Messiah.
41 p 237, marked Z
||A newly-hatched chick’s behavior with a grain of corn.||
Strong knows the chick’s consciousness perfectly, as he
does James’s.
42 p 244, marked
We could not think of many things at once if our souls were not many—
if they did not consist of many simultaneous sensations, or, in other
words, consist of as many parts as do the wholes of which we think. What
is necessary to our being aware of many things at once is not the absence
of parts in us, but co-operation of the parts.
Excellent
43 p 257, marked Z
When we hear a bell, its sound is an external quality, and it is not from
this that the conception of sentience can be obtained; in simply listening
to a bell we are not aware of anything that can be called sentience.
? Not only pure sentience: certainly also some essence: but
the impression of that essence, & the void or echo it
leaves, are a sort of self-consciousness forming a background for special intuitions. Pure essence is reached by
contemplation: it is not given in pure animal sensitivity.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:295
The latter is self-conscious, tho’ the self is not clearly distinguished from the world.
44 p 264
If […] the peripheral processes should chance to be the sole basis of sensations, the “messages” sent inward to the centres would, from the very
outset, be motor messages (in a broad sense)—that is, messages tending
to secure the right response; […].
But of course you & Bergson are proposing as a great revolution the simplest ontological axiom: motion is motion,
light is light, etc. Consciousness has no seat at all; it has
merely a local cause.
45 p 267, marked Z
Whatever be the basis of the sensible qualities—of red, sweet,
warm—they are in any case produced by a simplification of elements
which do not possess the quality in question. In any case these qualities
have no existence in the real world. They exist only as data of awareness,
and in the ultimate units there is no awareness. To ask whether these
units have a quality seems, therefore, a little like asking what is the colour
of an atom or an electron.
Strong here slips towards denying his psychologism: but
never quite does so. He has asserted that all sentience has
the quality common to all sensations.
46 p 268
All the differences of things are due to number; what is not number is all
alike. Our philosophy is thus a Pythagoreanism, justifying what is sound
in the ideas of Plato.
Good God!
47 p 271
“Cats do not lie awake at night and whine over their sins”, as Whitman
irreverently says.
O yes: if love be a sin.
48 p 285, underlined
||Strong cites William James on the material base of all life, including
mental life.|| James winds up with the proposition, “If evolution is to
work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at
the very origin of things.”
Strong!
[Because of Strong’s use of the phrase “winds up with.”]
2:296
George Santayana’s Marginalia
49 p 295, underlined
[“A Defence of Mind-Stuff.”]
For, if feelings are distinct from the acts of awareness which, when combined with a suitable reaction, they make possible—if they are existents
(and their nature the nature of the existent), whereas the acts in question
are only functions—there is no longer any reason why feelings may not
exist outside a consciousness or mind.
This is nonsense: an act is an event, the temporal and particular exercise of the function.
50 pp 302–3, marked Z
No feeling, at the moment when it exists, is ever aware of itself. Its
unawareness of itself does not prevent it from being a feeling—that is,
from being what introspection finds, and from having the nature which
introspection finds, in the rare cases in which introspective attention is
turned upon it. This is realism applied to introspection.
That is the essence given in feeling is never the essence of
feeling (i.e. of spirit) but the essence of this sort of pain,
colour, etc. Where such a given essence is inarticulate it is
called “feeling”—so that feeling in this sense is a datum of
feeling. But when not a datum it cannot exist: and when
it is a datum what really exists is the act of feeling that
bears the same name as the datum.
Charles Augustus Strong
The Origin of Consciousness
London: 1918. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Henry Cecil Sturt
The Idea of a Free Church
London and New York: 1909. Georgetown. Sixty marginalia.
1 p 12, marked
There is not a word in the New Testament to recognize the value of art
or literature or philosophy or the sympathetic study of the past or science
or education or political enterprise or soldierly valour and honour. To
what a mean, spiritless monotony, destitute of every enthusiasm that distinguishes civilised society from a herd of inoffensive human cattle, to
what a level of sainted noodledom would Christian exhortation drag us
down.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:297
2 p 13, marked
Worst of all is the Christian attitude to family life. In its original authentic form Christianity was an anti-domestic institution. The Christian
family, of which so much is said in edifying books, is, to speak strictly,
a contradiction in terms. The Christian community from the first was
against the family. Jesus and his apostles were religious mendicants, calling urgently upon men to renounce domestic ties in view of the speedy
coming of the Messianic Kingdom. We know how consistently St. Paul
held by the anti-domestic tradition. The great saints of Christian history
have not been family men and women, but ascetics to whom love and
the breeding of children were abomination.
3 p 14, marked Z
||We need charity, but not Christian charity.|| The right sort of charity for
ordinary use is that whose nursery is the family and whose main field of
exercise is the modern commonwealth.
No: the good Samaritan & the Sister of Charity are pitiful
for the love of God, which is something good & remedial.
4 p 21, marked Z
||Sturt will argue that|| the welfare of civilized man lies in the principle of
freedom, that is, in the proper development of every essential part of
human nature under the guidance of the individual judgment. The right ideal
of manhood is an ideal that is governed by this principle; right religion
is a religion that harmonizes with this principle; a good church is a
church that is animated by a free religion and has for its subsidiary aims
the promotion of all that appertains to the life of freedom.
Individualism, not as a source of sincerity, but as an ideal
of diversity. This is not my idea. I would breed men whose
ideal would be social, whose spontaneity would be art.
5 p 27, marked
There is no better moral tonic than working shoulder to shoulder with
men who insist on your obedience if they are better than you, but are
willing to obey if you are better than they.
Principle of snobbery & servility!
6 p 27
A nation penetrated by this spirit (however imperfect its form of government) is capable of such enthusiasm as makes it unconquerable.
U.S. idealised?
2:298
George Santayana’s Marginalia
7 p 43
||The good father is attentive to his wife, industrious, and proud of a fine
family of children.||
The author, I hear, is a bachelor.
8 p 48, marked
No one who knows the British workman well and has listened to his
familiar talk and swearing can doubt that his ideal is one of strength and
efficiency. He does not aspire to be gallant and an object of feminine
admiration, or to be thought well-off with a house and land of his own,
or to have savoir-faire and use a pocket-handkerchief: he likes to be
thought a man who can do and be depended on.
9 p 50, marked Z
||Sturt attacks the unnaturalness of academia, and the notion that the
isolated scholar is anything other than an antiquarian. The futility of the
third-rate norm.||
Philistia potens1
1
All-powerful philistines.
10 p 57, marked Z
A scheme of life like Goethe’s, all intellectual curiosity and adventure
with no enduring affections, always breaks down in the end.
How?
11 p 57
What is it that Nietzsche’s Superman is striving for? What will he do with
the beautiful blonde strength that he is so proud of? If it is only to behave
like a wild beast, the first rational man whom he meets will shoot him.
If he cares for nothing, true: but is there nothing but
home, sweet home?
12 p 60
||On the moral danger of monarchy and aristocracy.||
The other side of all this is that without a great advantage
no one can be truly great: Helen had to suffer for her
beauty: but, for that very reason, she was the more beautiful. So with hereditary advantage.
13 p 75, underlined and marked Z
Without religion there is so little meaning in our life in relation to the
universe.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:299
This is a silly cry. Why should we be much “in relation to
the universe”? How would that help us?—This feeling is a
survival of the time when the universe was an egg-shell
for the human chick.
14 p 76, underlined and marked X
We must frame our scheme of life not for the thoughtless but the
thoughtful. […] We cannot seriously believe that the resources of science will ever keep us from dying, or from growing old, or make us
cease to feel that we are creatures of trifling size compared with the vast
spaces around us.
What of that, you idiot?
15 pp 82–83, underlined
Oh! the horrible mendicant whine of certain forms of Christianity!
Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous: 1 any one who has been importuned by the
miserable wasters who haunt the streets of Paris knows what are the
moral affinites of that.
In London they do not beg so humbly: they grab you. That
is what Sturt’s beggars would do.
1
Lord, have mercy on us.
16 p 83
It is the business of human authority to frame and enforce the necessary
rules of abstention: religion has a much more important and noble function, to stimulate us to enterprise and aspiration. and make Roosevelts
^
of us.
^
17 p 90, marked
The politician must believe in his party, or he cannot be an efficient and
self-respecting politician.
Sophism. It is one thing to join the party in which you
believe: another to believe in a party to which at birth
you have been joined.
18 p 93, underlined and marked
In periods of decay and despondency, as in the decline of the Roman
Empire, we always find right religion declining—the pure radiance of
right faith sinking into the smoky flare of superstition.
“Right” religion is no religion.
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19 p 109, underlined
We cannot imagine a God who has purpose, but no power to execute the
purpose.
Why not?
20 p 113, underlined
[…] it is most desirable that we should think of God as having the faculties of intelligent purpose, moral preference and appreciation of beauty.
Once he walked in his garden in the cool of the evening.
Now, he walks through the National Gallery, with the
trans-Atlantic tourist.
21 p 115, underlined
Above all, man must be a source of satisfaction to God.
Why?
22 p 121, marked Z
Why did God let the Brahmin think he was singing the hymn, when he
was really singing it himself?
God is a word, my dear sir: have you not discovered this
yet?
23 p 183, marked Z
||The scribes of Jerusalem went to Nazareth to urge the holy family to
restrain Jesus.|| The family party, then, came with this object from
Nazareth to the lake shore. An eldest son so gifted and sweet-natured as
Jesus must have been greatly beloved, almost worshipped, in his home:
[…].
Is this a cheap novel?
24 p 184, marked Z
As Mary moved away weary and broken-hearted, she must have felt that
all hopes of saving her noble and beloved first-born were at an end.
Bosh
25 p 285, marked
The Church of England is saturated through and through with the virus
of gentility. That a clergyman should be a gentleman is to the average
Anglican a fortieth article of religion; and to many minds it is an article
that quite outweighs the other thirty-nine. Jesus was the least genteel of
prophets, and the Church of England is the most ladylike of churches.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Luigi Sturzo
2:301
I discorsi politici
Rome: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Leon Z. Surmelian
I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen
New York: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books
London: 1933. Waterloo. Twenty marginalia.
[All marginalia are to “A Tale of a Tub.”]
1 p 482
[…] all [the Æolists’] belches were received for sacred, the sourer the better, and swallowed with infinite consolation by their meagre devotees.
And, to render these yet more complete, because the breath of man’s
life is in his nostrils, therefore the choicest, most edifying, and most
enlivening belches, were very wisely conveyed through that vehicle, to
give them a tincture as they passed.
Origin of the American accent.
2 p 484, marked Z
||The oracles of the Æolists are inspired by|| certain subterraneous effluviums of wind, […] these were frequently managed and directed by
female officers, whose organs were understood to be better disposed
for the admission of those oracular gusts, as entering and passing up
through a receptacle of greater capacity, and causing also a pruriency
by the way, such as, with due management, hath been refined from carnal into a spiritual ecstasy.
Oh, oh!
3 p 495, marked
[“A Digression concerning Madness.”]
For cant and vision are to the ear and the eye, the same that tickling is to
the touch. Those entertainments and pleasures we most value in life, are
such as dupe and play the wag with the senses. For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect
either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties
and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual
possession of being well deceived. And, first, with relation to the mind or
2:302
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understanding, ’tis manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over
truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build
nobler scenes, and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or
nature will be at expense to furnish.
This is capital; and why didn’t S. apply it to what he
retained of religion, say, the Bible?
4 p 496, marked
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much
it altered her person for the worse.
5 p 532
[“A Digression on the Nature, Usefulness, and Necessity of Wars and
Quarrels.”]
This is the best bit in the book. Does the author feel that
in spite of his biting irony, he is showing up the true
nature of life? It would be lovely if this double irony could
be exhibited plainly.
6 pp 532–33
[…] those that cannot or dare not make war in person employ others to
do it for them. This maintains bullies, bravoes, cut-throats, lawyers, soldiers, &c. Most professions would be useless, if all were peaceable.
Hence brutes want neither smiths nor lawyers, magistrates nor joiners,
soldiers nor surgeons.
Hint of Rousseau & Walt Whitman.
7 p 535
||The project of a description of Australia the Unknown, of great use for
all families,|| because it contains exact accounts of all the provinces,
colonies, and mansions of that spacious country, where, by a general
doom, all transgressors of the law are to be transported; […].
In hell there are many mansions.
August Thalheimer
Introduction to Dialectical Materialism
New York: 1936. Waterloo. 155 marginalia.
1 p 42, marked Z
The Jewish national god expanded into a world god. This Jewish
national god was highly suited to be the starting point for an international world god of ancient times since he was the god of an oppressed
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:303
national people, and the oppressed classes and peoples of the Roman
empire naturally became the first bearers of this new world religion.
2 p 55
[Santayana summarizes the argument to this point and comments:]
Historical economic forces, not arguments, create &
destroy religion. [ and everything else, including Marxism. ]
3 p 55, marked
||Dialectical materialism opposes religion and will destroy it because it
hinders social development.||
N.B. Is the socialist motive desire to destroy religion?
[ Protestantism wished to destroy the church for the sake
of lay freedom and wealth. ]
4 p 57
||If one is religious, one cannot be a member of the communist party.||
Communism a religious sect.
5 p 58, marked
Only complete material freedom, not merely legal freedom such as
already exists in many bourgeois states, can give the full intellectual freedom which renders them competent to free themselves from religious
ideas.
Vital liberty of thought does not exist under liberalism.
Social pressure forbids. So that society has to be liberated
before it can become free. Circumstances have to do it. Is
this “dialectical” or “historical” materialism?
6 p 59
||Historical dialectics defined as|| a phenomenon which is necessary
under certain conditions and signifies progress, under changed historical
conditions straightway changes to its opposite and becomes a hindrance
to further development.
Circumstances produce views which change those circumstances and thereby undermine themselves. What views,
contrary to socialism, will socialism produce?
[Santayana repeats this comment several times.]
7 p 60
||Dialectical materialism is the final and highest step resulting from
struggles that took place since the beginning of history.||
[Generalized comment at top:]
2:304
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Circular movements, or tropes, overlooked in Hegelian
dialectic. It is based on Protestant theology, not on logic.
Protestant theology was essentially self-contradictory.
8 p 66, marked
||The ancient Tyrants|| were supported by the people against the city
nobility. With the help of the people they raised themselves above the
city nobility ||who were merchants||.
Like the Fascist leaders in our time vs. the liberal politicians & bankers.
9 p 83, underlined
||In Platonism, material phenomena are subordinate to spiritual prototypes.|| Thus the true locus of things is posited in the mind. The highest
idea is the idea of the Good.
Leaving out Socrates spoils this summary. The Good comes
in to moralise the universe & make a new mythology.
10 p 92
[On “Ancient Logic and Dialectics”:]
[…] if I generalize and propound without qualifications I fall into grave
errors. Then this law of formal logic does not hold good. I must turn to
a higher system, to dialectics; that is, I say that difference is bound up
with all identity. Thus in no object can I absolutely separate identity and
difference. The object remains the same, and at the same time it changes.
The logic of essence does not control existence: so that
your “dialectic” is not logic at all, but physics & history.
11 p 92, marked
A modern bourgeois philosopher, the Frenchman, Bergson, fell into the
error of overlooking identity in universal change, […]. If I extend the
change between two states of a thing so far that no identity at all remains
between them, then I cannot establish any change. I am utterly unable
to say that they represent two states of one thing.
[From “If I extend”:]
Excellent.
12 p 93, underlined
We have already said that a thing which changes is identical with itself
and is different from itself. It is identical and different; identical and not
identical. Within the same thing there exists a contradiction.
“Contradiction” is here a sophistical name given to instability. Logic confused with physics.
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2:305
13 p 98, top
Dialectic admitted to be superficial.
14 pp 97–98, doubly marked
||On the idealistic character of dialectics in Plato and Aristotle:|| both
assume that contradictions have their origin in the mind and that the
contradictions in actual things derive from the mind. We materialistic
dialecticians say that the contradictions in concepts are only a reflection
of the motion of things.
[At “from the mind”:]
From appearance? Plato = actual things: i.e. treacherous
exemplifications of ideas.
15 p 119
[Chapter on Hegel and Feurbach.]
||Bacon and Descartes as|| fathers of modern bourgeois philosophy […].
“Bourgeois philosophy” (a good term, if not abused).
16 p 121, underlined
[Voltaire and Rousseau:]
What they wanted was a bourgeois Christianity.
i.e., without religion.
17 pp 122–23, marked Z
Dialectics halts for nothing. Nothing is sacred to it, nothing is inviolable.
This destructive power of dialectics is, in the Hegelian view, the strongest
force of historical progress, or as Goethe, who lived in the time of Hegel,
said, “All that exists has this much value, that it perishes.”
! Mephisto says, “Alles was entsteht ist wert, dass es zu
Grunde geht.” i.e. Everything crumbles because it’s rotten;
or everything that arises deserves to perish.
18 p 125, underlined and marked
With Hegel there is as yet no sharp contradiction between religion and
philosophy. Hegelian philosophy undermines religion from within.
19 p 133, underlined
||The Chartist movement|| was the most obvious place to study the materialistic explanation of historical events.
i.e. the material incentives to party movements. But incentives work through psycho-physical processes. History is
not dialectical in itself, after Hegel’s fashion.
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20 p 134, marked
||Feuerbach discovered the materialistic explanation of nature. Marx and
Engels based their materialistic explanation of history on modes of production: basic agriculture.||
[In his note, Santayana appears to instruct himself on how to proceed
in writing Dominations and Powers.]
Trace the method of supporting life to agriculture, fishing,
& cattle-breeding. All else is parasitic trade, parasitic work.
21 p 136, marked Z
Marx conceived of dialectics as the sum of the universal laws of motion
of the real, material world and the laws of thought in the minds of men
corresponding to these universal laws. In other words, the real, material
world is dialectical; it follows the laws of dialectics; and dialectics also
operates in the human mind since the human mind is also a part of the
material world.
Absurdity useful in defining the term “dialectical” as here
mis-used.
22 p 140
||An A,B,C of sense impressions and their difficulties.||
Knowledge is a mode of faith: faith is a presupposition of
intelligence. And by trusting faith you may understand the
source of both faith and knowledge, that they are normally true, since animals live surrounded by other things
to which it would be fatal to them not to pay attention.
This attention has a spiritual side called faith, perception,
or knowledge.
23 p 142, marked
Hegel […] says that things exist outside of human consciousness, but
also that things are not of a material, corporeal nature, but spiritual. This
is objective idealism. Materialism maintains that the external world is of
a corporeal nature. This has been adequately proved by natural science.
[From “Materialism maintains”:]
What rot: curious that a person so well informed in one
place should be so foolish in another.
24 p 159
||Bergson reverts to Heraclitean theory of flux.||
Bergson denies this. He preserves the past.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:307
25 p 161, underlined and marked Z
||Dialectics are not incomprehensible;|| anyone can grasp them because
everyone has the proof of dialectics in his daily experience as well as in
his own mind. In this respect human thought is exactly the same in all
minds.
The most general and the most inclusive fundamental law of dialectics
from which all others are deduced is the law of the permeation of opposites.
N.B. The levelling intolerance of the moderns. Cf. Watson:
“there is no fatigue”.
1. Permeation of opposites. i.e. existence changes. You can
make opposites of the terms of any variation. Cf. the
dichotomies of the Politicus & Sophist.
26 p 164
“Dialectics” = facility in admitting changes in society, in
politics & morals.
27 p 169, underlined and marked X
[…] this law of the permeation of opposites may be deduced from the
examination of thought itself. It is the law of thought as well as of nature.
Not a “law”, but a result of the incidence of essences in the
flux of existence. Flux = variation in essence with continuity of substance.
28 p 170, underlined
[…] the law of the negation of the negation, or the law of development
through opposites.
Law is a superstitious term Do you materialise it? Is there
no “dialectic” amongst “laws”?
29 p 174
With Bergson development becomes an incomprehensible, mystical
process in which the relations between the old and the new are conceived of only as oppositions and not […] as identities.
Quite false since the past, according to B. is that which
acts in the present and is retained entire.
30 pp 174–75
Dialectics concerns itself with definite, concrete negation. The first distortion of dialectics, the distortion which disregards negation, may be
called the opportunistic distortion. The second in which the retention of
the old in the new is disregarded may be called the anarchistic distortion.
2:308
George Santayana’s Marginalia
These two opposed distortions […] are alike in that both put an end to
development—the first because it puts an end to negation as the moving
force in development, and the second because it puts an end to the connection between opposites.
i.e, you must destroy society and inherit its possessions.
31 p 176, underlined
The mystical or falsified dialectics of the Bergsonian type rejects historical regularity and replaces it by miracle […].
i.e. evolution, which in fact is natural & materially controlled.
32 p 183, marked
The most general characteristic of dialectical thought is the study of
things in their inter-relations, in both one-beside-the-other relations and
one-after-the-other relations,—that is, in their changes.
It is physical instead of nominal knowledge.
33 p 184, marked
Like dialectics, the theory of historical materialism is not a means of
mere contemplation, but it is an instrument for action.
It is not true but partisan.
34 p 185, marked
Divorced from revolutionary practice the materialistic theory of history
would be lifeless.
might be true?
35 p 195, underlined
A division of society into classes appeared only after a relatively long
development in consequence of the division of labor which was introduced into the primitive classless society.
There were always old & young, leaders and followers,
men and women.
36 p 196
We also distinguish a class which is still pre-capitalist, but which exists
under capitalistic conditions; the class which owns its means of production and itself works, the small farmers, the handicraftsmen, or simple
commodity producers.
e.g. poets.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:309
37 p 197, underlined
||Classes emerge when|| a surplus product ||is regularly produced and one
social group takes|| the surplus product of another group.
Commerce, production for sale, is the beginning of trouble.
38 p 204
Envy of some other class.
[ Can the interests of a “class” be to abolish that class, e.g.
slavery? Evidently the “class” is always harmonious with
the world in which it exists. Only the individuals have or
may think they have contrary interests.]
39 pp 204–5, underlined
This consciousness that all workers have common interests, or all small
farmers have common interests, this consciousness of the oppressed and
exploited classes, is not present from the outset. It emerges only through
the struggle.
This is a strange notion. Only when they don’t eat one
another’s oats.
“Class-consciousness” is a political phenomenon.
40 p 207, marked
All ruling classes have used and use certain means to set false ideologies
in motion, to deceive oppressed classes in regard to their interests.
41 p 209
If “class” = material means of living, it is true that “class”
underlies all other social forms.
42 p 234–35
Another very profound conception of Lao-tse which reminds one of
Hegel is that the impulse in things comes from non-being. In Hegel’s
view the moving force of things is ascribed to negation.
Rather call or need for something else: the self-transcendence of essence taken to be the ground rather than the
condition of the flux.
43 p 238, marked Z
[…] the revolution now in process in China demands not individual but
collective behavior from the masses of the people, not passivity and contemplation, but the greatest activity.
Hell.
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44 p 240, marked
||Thalheimer will discuss pragmatism|| because it is the best known of
the foreign world-views or philosophies and because it has a particularly
progressive, democratic, and unprejudiced quality. ||It is not easy for the
uninitiated to see that pragmatism|| is reactionary and idealistic.
45 p 245, marked
[On pragmatism:]
This school or trend originated in America. It then spread to England
and Italy and, in lesser degree, to France and Germany. It reflects the
characteristic spirit of the American bourgeoisie. Hence the democratic
and pseudo-radical touch, as well as the distortion of cause and effect,
and the tendency towards commerce.
46 p 247, marked
Naturally, if the existence of a material world independent of human
consciousness is reasoned away, there can no longer be a problem of the
relationship of such a world to human thought. This utterly simple and
staggering “solution” is merely a sleight-of-hand by which the problem
itself is made to disappear. In its fundamental conception pragmatism is
therefore idealism.
47 p 248, marked
[Concerning a pluralistic universe:]
To be sure, it is not self-contradictory to postulate a world which is at
the same time a unity and a plurality, but to affirm a world, a universe,
which is a plurality without unity is plainly a meaningless contradiction. If one asks oneself how a school of philosophy can achieve such
palpable nonsense, one does not have to seek far for the answer: the
prototype of the world which consists of parts having nothing to do
with each other is the world of the high priests of all schools, a world
composed of the earthly vale of tears and the heavenly hereafter which
are utterly and absolutely separate and different from each other. The
“pluralistic universe” is merely a new “higher” label for this ancient and
insipid clerical nonsense.
Knock out for old Wm.
[ James, of course.]
48 p 249, marked
||In pragmatism, truth is what works, is useful.|| The measure is thus
subjective. The undefined subject who is the measure of truth is not
man in general but the bourgeois in particular and his particular ends.
The bourgeois mind governed by bourgeois interests is made the
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:311
supreme judge of truth. That this is very convenient for the bourgeoisie
certainly cannot be disputed.
Truer of Dewey than of James, who was romantic.
49 p 253, marked
[Final sentences of the book:]
Karl Marx once said: “The task of philosophy [and by philosophy he
meant materialism] is not to explain the world anew, but to change it.”
No one who lives in a great revolutionary period can remain merely a
theorist.
Pure Pragmatism!
Lowell Jackson Thomas
Out of This World:
Across the Himalayas to Forbidden Tibet
New York: c. 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica
Three volumes, n.p.: 1894 (Marietti edition). Georgetown. No marginalia.
Anna Boynton Thompson
The Unity of Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge
Introduction by Josiah Royce.
Radcliffe College Monographs, no. 7.
Boston: 1895. Georgetown. 134 marginalia.
[A special bite in many of Santayana’s comments indicates his intolerance of those whom he called “lady philosophers.”]
1 p 6, marked
||One defect of determinism is that it has no place for reflective ideas.||
Even if by means of the assumption of the existence of the mind and of
matter, and of the validity of the laws of cause and effect, they can
account for our successive states, yet they can give no reason why at
any point in the succession the mind should abstract itself from the
immediate sensation, mount above itself to reflect upon itself receiving
the sensation […].
Ignorance of Spinoza.
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2 p 9, marked Z
||Of determinations via will:|| We name it Freedom, signifying […] complete absence of all the determinations of actual existence, but complete
liberty at any moment to assume them, just as it is freedom not to
assume them.
Pure myth, since the undetermined is nothing.
3 p 10, marked
That […] there is a real, potential Free Will apart from the consciousness
that conceives it, and a real free-will act that precedes consciousness and
creates it, Fichte never for a moment asserts.
Fichte admits that he is mythologising.
4 p 11, underlined
The conclusion reached in the “Grundlage” that the ego appears as an
Absolute, and therefore as unrelated to an extra-mentem creator, awaked,
as is well known, great philosophic scandal. People misunderstood
Fichte’s form of expression, paused here, and asserted that Fichte taught
that the ego creates itself.
This is a false category: but it would be fair to say that
Fichte teaches that the ego is not created at all. And the
scandal would be no less at that.
5 p 15, top
Vitality, inwardness} the chief characteristics of the life
Ignorance, tentativeness} described by the idealists.
6 p 17, underlined
||On the ego and free will:|| This world is Freedom appearing as the
world of consciousness with its laws.
This freedom on the part of nothing to become anything
is an empty myth. True freedom is ability on the part of
an [illegible] and definite nature to realise itself in the midst
of the world.
7 p 17, underlined
[…] in the world of consciousness is no freedom except in so far as this
world is that which has freely willed not to be free: […].
Cf. Schopenhauer. This is simply a mythical way of saying
that the world is arbitrary.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:313
8 p 21, marked
The proposition “existence is identical with God” is self-contradictory,
for existence means “standing forth from God as the image of his reality:
eternally separate from God as image must be from reality.” When the
image is absolutely identical with the imaged there is no image; if existence were absolutely identical with God, there would be no existence,
no standing forth as separate.
Reality is an intellectual idea not to be realised in any mind
that still conceives reality as different from perception.
9 p 22, marked Z
||The author paraphrases the Wissenschaftslehre: || Freedom, as Freedom, is
undetermined; if now Freedom choose to renounce itself and become
Law, Law must, for us, be its end, as we can conceive no other end:
Freedom obeys law for the sake of law. But that will which chooses law
for the sake of law we call Holy Will, and describe it as “doing what it
ought because it ought.” The motive power of will is desire: a free will
that chooses must choose from preference, otherwise there is no will and
no choice, but blind chance. Hence Holy Will chooses law because it
loves law, and we have a God of whose nature the ultimate fact is Love.
What an abuse of significant language! This logic is worthy
of a Sunday-School.
10 p 25, underlined
[…] from the empirical facts of freedom and necessity, Holy Will is
deduced […].
!
11 p 30
[Santayana’s general reflection:]
The mythical choice of law qua law becomes a real virtue
in the will where it is a loyalty to the nature already latent
(or chosen) in oneself. It is then loyalty to the ideal, and
to this an ideal grounded in real organization and real
^ ^ of growth.
possibilities
12 p 30, marked
But we must always hold in mind that there are two stages of being, one
the actual, the other the logical, that is, the sphere of conditions and
pre-suppositions which the rationalizing of facts demands.
Cf. Münsterberg.
2:314
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13 p 35
||The objective world is real to man only because of the perfect faith of
the ego that it is so.||
Is verification nothing This is the first sphere[?] of the
“categorical imperative”.
14 p 36
[…] the withered arm is stretched forth […].
This has the sound of “Christian Science”.
15 p 36
Faith is action, and action is Faith.
Philosophy is rhapsody, and rhapsody is philosophy.
16 p 45
||Of God, truth, and thought.||
i.e. the stable object. (But God is the most unstable of all
objects of thought.)
17 p 51, underlined
Of himself man is nothing: personal merit and blame are the
short-sighted judgments of ignorance: persons as independent integers
have no power and no existence, for power and existence are attributes
of the One and Only Reality which we conceive beyond the appearance.
Candid but commonplace and superficial determinism.
18 p 57
||Concerning Will willing that Law conquer, right prevail.||
the absolute bluff.
The self-abuse of the absolute Fakir.
19 p 60, underlined and doubly marked
Fichte’s doctrine is an Egoism which faith turns into a Pantheism.
20 p 64, underlined
But consciousness exists only in finite individuals, and finiteness cannot
receive the command [of the moral law] in its wholeness: hence the law
cannot appear as the revelation of a definite ideal which is to be realized
by men upon earth, for no human mind can contain it; […].
Here is obscurantism and moral superstition with a
vengeance.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:315
21 p 64, underlined
A problem that presents difficulties in other ethical systems is the ground
of moral obligation. Why should I do right? If I do right for the result
thereby gained, I am not doing right, I am making a commercial venture.
Topsy-turvy down. The ethics of a wistful child or thunder
struck savage.
22 p 72, underlined
To discover his own view [of truth] in its purity is pre-eminently the task of
[man’s] life, since he exists for no other purpose than to set forth this view.
This pose is intolerable to me.
23 p 102
||At birth we are not directed to the Truth, but we exist in a shadowy,
foggy world.||
And thus the recognition of the natural fictions emboldens
us to substitute unnatural fictions for them.
24 p 119, top
[Appendix. Quotations from Fichte’s writings, many of which Santayana
translates or paraphrases without comment or criticism, but here:]
A net-work of pedantry over a core of barbarism.
25 p 120
||On the reflective freedom of the will.||
The world of thought changes, and the German thinks he
has changed his mind and regenerated the world.
26 p 126, underlined and marked Z
||Fichte uses the term “God” loosely.|| Gott stellt sich dar, wie Gott sich
darstellen kann.1
Cf. Schopenhauer’s Unhappy deity!
1
God exhibits himself as he is able to.
27 p 131
God as Immediacy.
Here the divine is the rational form which reflection
meets in experience.
28 p 135, underlined
Gott ist zu denken als eine Ordnung von Begebenheiten, keineswegs
aber als eine Forme der Ausdehnung.1
Does the shoe pinch?
1
God is to be thought of as an event, but by no means as a form of extension.
2:316
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29 p 152, underlined
[On the “Unity of Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge”:]
But is it impossible to get beyond the products of thinking which are
only images? Can we reach no reality? Yes, we can find and we possess
reality. This reality is the immediate activity of thinking, which, indeed,
cannot be grasped, and is inconceivable, yet in its inconceivable activity is reality.
mysticism
30 p 153, marked Z
On the other hand, we cannot maintain that being, or an Ansich, is the
cause of image, or the realistic theory, for not only does realism fail to
explain the connection between being and image, but it accepts as ultimate the results of the laws of thought, knowing no ground for these
laws: the realist thinks out his Ansich, using the methods of thought
without questioning them, accepting the validity of results obtained by
obedience to the laws of thought without seeking the ground of such
validity; hence consciousness, in its activity and laws, is really his ultimate, and he is an idealist: in effect he says, “Consciousness is the only
reality, and whatever it asserts must be so.”
The realist’s weak point is his confidence in reason: his
strong point is his expression of reason. We should express
reason without too much confidence in the result.
31 p 157, marked
If the question is asked, “Why is Wissen an absolute Von instead of
something else?” we reply that Wissen in its qualitative and material
determinations is, of necessity, incomprehensible (this incomprehensibility is the necessary condition of comprehension as its inseparable
opposite).
If we understand something we cannot understand understanding.
32 p 178, underlined and marked
The term Leben is sometimes used interchangeably with God, hence it
sometimes denotes:—(1) the Inconceivable which appears as the world
of consciousness; (2) the notion which we form of the Inconceivable.
!!
33 p 180, bottom
“Life” is a term, merely an improper word applied to an
empty idea in order to conceal its emptiness.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:317
34 p 183, underlined
The important results of this analysis by consciousness of itself are that:
(1) In obedience to the laws of consciousness the First Cause takes the
form in consciousness of a Power, a Life, a Free-Will; […].
Is it the first cause or are the laws of consciousness such?
35 p 191
[Santayana summarizes:]
Intelligence is a mythical antecedent to the world, like all
its antecedents.
36 p 195, top
L. of R. “Nature or experience” a good phrase to use, like
Spinoza’s “Deus sive natura”,1 to show that experience is
the presence of nature and nature the content of experience. Nature has its locus in experience, and experience
its object and meaning in nature.
1
God or nature.
37 p 203, marked Z
The conclusions of the Wissenschaftslehre are not actualities: Kein
einziger ihrer Gedanken, Sätze, Aussprüche, ist einer des wirklichen
Lebens, noch passend in das wirkliche Leben. Es sind eigentlich nur
Gedanken von Gedanken, die man hat, oder haben sollte, Sätze von
Sätzen, die man sich zu eigen machen, Aussprüche von Aussprüchen, die
man selbst aussprechen soll.1
The essence of transcendentalism.
1
Not one of your thoughts, sentences, expressions, is one of actual life, nor suited to
actual life. One really has and should have and utter only thoughts about thought,
sentences about sentences, expressions about expressions.
38 p 210, top
Contrast romantic
ignorant childish
revolutionary
with
transcendental philosophy.
reflective, profound,
sterile but productive
Francis Thompson
Shelley
New York: 1909. Georgetown. Twenty-eight marginalia.
1 p 27, marked
Indeed, nothing is so artificial as our simplicity.
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2 p 27, marked
An age that is ceasing to produce child-like children cannot produce a
Shelley. For both as poet and man he was essentially a child.
3 p 30, underlined and marked
To the last [Shelley] was the enchanted child.
This was, as is well known, patent in his life. It is really, though perhaps less obviously, manifest in his poetry, the sincere effluence of his
life.
4 pp 45–46, marked
The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He
is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief
with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases
into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery
chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered
with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases
the rolling world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He
stands in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after
a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.
Right idea—over-expressed.1
1
In Santayana’s astonishing approval of this sort of thing may lie the cause
for the failure, from one point of view (mine), for much of his own verse.
5 pp 47–48, marked
||Shelley a poet of nature, but not in the sense that Wordsworth was.||
To such following of Nature, Shelley felt no call. He saw in her not a
picture set for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared for his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might
quarry stones for his own palaces. Even in his descriptive passages the
dream-character of his scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognizable scenery of Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the
heat and haze arising from his crackling fantasies. The materials for
such visionary Edens have evidently been accumulated from direct
experience, but they are recomposed by him into such scenes as never
mortal eye beheld.
6 p 48, underlined and marked X
The one justification for classing Shelley with the Lake poet is that he
loved Nature with a love even more passionate, though perhaps less
profound.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:319
Physically, intellectually, perhaps, but not morally,
humanly. The good is the first category of mind.
Wordsworth was a “slave”—a nature-worshipper.
7 p 52, marked
[Concerning metaphysical poetry:]
So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then
you might as well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures,
and then you may write a Sensitive Plant.
8 p 63, marked Z
[Of Shelley’s “Adonais”:]
What utter desolation can it be that discerns comfort in this hope, whose
wan countenance is as the countenance of a despair? Nay, was not
indeed wanhope the Saxon for despair? What deepest depth of agony is
it that finds consolation in this immortality: an immortality which thrusts
you into death, the maw of Nature, that your dissolved elements may
circulate through her veins?
Bosh
9 p 65, marked Z
After all, to finish where we began, perhaps the poems on which the
lover of Shelley leans most lovingly, which he has oftenest in his mind,
which best represent Shelley to him, and which he instinctively reverts to
when Shelley’s name is mentioned, are some of the shorter poems and
detached lyrics. Here Shelley forgets for a while all that ever makes his
verse turbid; forgets that he is anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that
he is anything but a child; lies back in his skiff, and looks at the clouds.
He plays truant from earth, slips through the wicket of fancy into
heaven’s meadow, and goes gathering stars.
Bad, bad, bad.
[Final page, unnumbered. Santayana sums up his own reactions:]
Pessimism & idealism complementary.
A person like Browning is incapable of being a pessimist
because he is incapable of loving the good. A pig is truly
in no need of a bath-tub, soap, and disinfectants; but a
human child is who has fallen into the stie. Shelley is
The Catholic has not a word for the sublime self-less-ness
[sic] of the poet.
2:320
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Francis Thompson
The Hound of Heaven
London: c. 1912. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Samuel Martin Thompson
“A Study of Locke’s Theory of Ideas”
A dissertation.
N.p., n.d. Texas. Nineteen marginalia, and various remarks by Daniel Cory.
1 p 8, underlined
Instead of taking some limited aspect of experience as a clue to the
nature of his system and attempting to fit the whole into this scheme, he
makes the examination of experience and its objects primary […].
What is experience?
2 p 21
Intuition of terms a prerequisite to perception or belief.
[ This is true only of explicit propositions: it is not true of
animal faith, which is an acquiescence in action and in the
assumptions of action, before the terms of perception are
clearly given. We must turn & attend first.]
3 p 31, doubly marked
[Note 39:]
For Hume an “impression” is nothing but “a particular instance of the
mind’s awareness of a universal,” while for Locke ideas of sensation
possess characteristics which “determine them to this or that particular
existent” (Whitehead: Process and Reality, p. 221).
Essence in Hume according to Whitehead.
4 p 39, underlined
In fact, if we attempt to determine precisely what it means to be a representation of something we find such a relation possible only on the
basis of a nature in some respect common to the representation and
that which is represented.
If representation is graphic: but it may be symbolic. And
it is not “ideas” that are true of nature but propositions.
5 p 46
[…] where Locke speaks of ideas as in things he cannot intend his
statement to be taken literally. The only way to make such a statement
intelligible, when his general position is taken into account, is to interpret it in terms of the distinction between the existence and content of
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:321
ideas, and to assume that where Locke speaks of “ideas” in this way he
is referring to the content of ideas. So far as their existence is concerned ideas are in the mind, not in things.
But this is the classic meaning of “idea”, the Platonic
meaning.
6 p 91, underlined
If […] the real world is one which exists in some fashion within our
experience, if experience can be regarded as the medium through
which certain important qualities of the objective order come into existence, then our knowledge will have reference to the real world.
Bosh. Does your great grandfather exist within your
experience?
Henry David Thoreau
Paragraphs
N.p., n.d. Texas. Eighteen marginalia.
1 p 4, underlined
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the
track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us
rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let
company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children
cry,—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and
go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible
rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows.
Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill.
With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses.
Grim resolve to ignore facts while not denying them. Dine
looking another way.
2p4
If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun
glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet
edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel
cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
Here the opposite—true. Face “reality”
2:322
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3 p 5, underlined
Talk of Fate! How little one can know what is fated to another! What he
can do and what he cannot do. I doubt whether one can give or receive
any very pertinent advice. In all important crises, one can only consult
his genius. Though he were the most shiftless and craziest of mortals, if
he still recognizes that he has any genius to consult, none may presume
to go between him and her.
Shiftlessness curiously characteristic of early Americans.
Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, & even Emerson. It goes with
individualism.
4 p 5, marked
We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the
true savor of our food. We consult our will and our understanding and
the expectation of men, not our genius. I can impose upon myself tasks
which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this I am but
too inclined to do.
Oliver.
5p6
||A description of weather after a storm.|| Late in the year, at the
eleventh hour, we have visions of the life we might have lived. In each
case, every recess was filled and lit up by the pure white light. The
maples were Potter’s, far down stream, but I dreamed I walked like a
liberated spirit in the maze; the withered meadow grass was as soft and
glorious as paradise. And then it was remarkable that the light-giver
should have revealed to me for all life the heaving white breasts of
those two ducks within this glade of light. It was extinguished and relit
as it traveled. Tell me precisely the value and significance of these transient gleams which come sometimes at the end of the day before the
final dispersion of the clouds at the close of a storm; […].
Desperate need of finding a meaning in trifles. A sort of
high-brow superstition.
6 p 7, underlined and marked
||A fine day in spring.|| I lean over a rail to hear what is in the air liquid
with the bluebirds’ warble. My life partakes of infinity. The air is as deep
as our nature. Is the drawing in of this vital air attended with no more
glorious results than I witness? The air is a velvet cushion against
which I press my ear. I go forth to make new demands on life. I wish
to begin this summer well, to do something in it worthy of it and of
me, to transcend my daily routine and that of my townsmen, to have
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:323
my immortality now, in the quality of my daily life, to pay the greatest
price, the greatest tax, of any man in Concord, and enjoy the most!! I
will give all I am for my nobility. I will pay all my days for my success.
Desperate egotism.
7 p 7, marked
May I gird myself to be a hunter of the beautiful, that naught escape me.
May I attain to a youth never attained. I am eager to report the glory of
the universe. May I be worthy to do it, to have got through with regarding human values so as not to be distracted from regarding divine values.
Transcendental bluff
8 p 8, marked
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many
influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness
reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness
gather around us, “and lo! creation widens to our view.” We are often
reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Crœsus, our
aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same.
Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot
buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the
most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with
the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch.
Minor key
Satisfaction with simplicity & poverty—most un-American
but balanced by complacency—most American.
9 p 10, underlined
I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None
of his institutions control or pervade her. Here a different kind of right
prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world
were all man, I could not stretch myself. I should lose all hope. He is constraint; she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world; she
makes me content with this. None of the joys she supplies is subject to his
rules and definitions. What he touches he taints. In thought he moralizes.
Cf. Whitman. But W. thinks it is only civilised man that is
bad—Rousseau in both.
10 p 10
There is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. I
have a room all to myself. It is nature. It is a place beyond the jurisdiction of human governments. Pile up your books, the records of sadness,
2:324
George Santayana’s Marginalia
your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her many worms
within will erelong topple them down.
Pantheism passing into Schadenfreude.1
1
Gloating, or malicious pleasure.
11 p 10
Our appetite should always be so related to our taste, and our board be
an epitome of the primeval table which Nature sets by hill and wood and
stream for her dumb pensioners.
Rot. There are harmonies at each moment anywhere.
12 p 17
Nothing is so attractive and unceasingly curious as character. […] I am
not concerned to know what eighth planet is wandering in space up
there, or when Venus or Orion rises, but if in any cot east or west, and
set behind the woods, there is any planetary character illuminating the
earth.
Moralism gone to seed.
13 p 18, underlined
To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there
is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch. […] I
awoke into a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank
for it? The luxury of wisdom! the luxury of virtue! Are there any intemperate in these things? I feel my Maker blessing me.
Old Protestant madness.
14 p 21
Men may talk about political? measures till all is blue and smells of
^ home and
^ sit down and expect their measures to
brimstone, and then go
do their duty for them. The only measure is integrity and manhood.
15 p 26, marked Z
In proportion as I have celestial thoughts is the necessity for me to be out
and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days. That is the
symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer.
What is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity and transparency and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind; for whatever
we see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest
off is the symbol of what is deepest within.
“Within” = the realm of truth?
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Crawford Howell Toy
Judaism and Christianity:
A Sketch of the Progress of Thought from Old Testament to New Testament
Boston: 1892. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
A Study of History
Six Volumes. London, New York, and Toronto: 1934–45.
Volume I. Waterloo. Forty-six marginalia.
1 p 4, underlined and marked
[Introduction: “The Relativity of Historical Thought.”]
||Mommsen’s work fragmentary, in which he was|| representative of the
Western historians of his generation—a generation in which the prestige
of the Industrial System imposed itself upon the ‘intellectual workers’ of
the Western World.
Dispersed information was the boast of natural science
rather than of industry which was unified by the aim of
comfort & wealth.
2 p 15
||Historians do not abstract their study from their national environment.||
It seems to consist, in Russia & the U.S.A. in assigning a
larger field to the home practice. Be like me or die!
3 p 49
||On the processes of synthesis and interpretation in history.||
Very well: but do you suggest that each synthesis covers
all that was synthesized before. That is folly. The arts are
lost: also the histories.
4 p 55, underlined
||Lucretius was a poet in time of difficulties who|| knew at first hand the
distracted Roman masters of a devastated Hellenic world: […].
Like those that at this moment control Europe. 1945.
5 p 92, marked
||On extinct societies: the Minoan.|| If we now examine, in their turn, the
backgrounds of these extinct societies, and if, in these older backgrounds,
we discern the same tokens again, we may hope in this way to identify
other extinct societies of an older generation […].
Ha this staging should be pulled down.
2:326
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6 p 158, marked
||The sense of triumph expressed in now-extinct societies.||
Fatuity universal.
7 p 159
||Is there hope that any of the seven civilizations still about may continue?|| While there is life there is hope; […].
If this is T’s conclusion he misses the moral nature of
success.
8 p 162
||If Germany had begun World War II with Russia as an ally, she would
have won it.||
Moreover had Germany & Russia no part in civilization?
9 p 177, bottom
T. has an absolute standard in petto at least for mankind.
Angels & gods would then be required to restore reason.
10 p 192
||Primitive men imitate the older generation. Custom rules, society is static.|| On the other hand, in societies in process of civilization, mimesis is
directed towards creative personalities which command a following
because they are pioneers on the road towards the common goal of
human endeavours.
N.B. Questionable theory that progress depends on militancy or enterprise. Genesis too is original.
11 p 195, underlined and marked Z
[…] dominant minorities are static by definition; […]. Against this static
condition, the secession of a proletariat is a dynamic reaction; […].
Pericles, Augustus, Louis XIV, Queen Victoria were primitive on this view.
All life is dynamic & somewhat varying in mood But it
need not be militant or proletarian
12 p 246
In the classic account of the Covenant in the Book of Genesis, Yaweh is
made to declare: ‘I will establish my Covenant between me and thee and
thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting Covenant.’
Not exclusive or original with the Jews.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:327
13 p 250fn, underlined
[Note 2:]
In the first age of Hellenic history Hellenic minds had passed through
the stage of being under the dominion of the concept of Race, as is
shown by the two facts that the earliest Hellenic institutions were based
on kinship and that the earliest Hellenic efforts at historiography took
a genealogical form.
Here is a fallacy that runs thru’ this book. It is not the
concept of race but the fact of descent, it might be quite
fresh, as from Zeus in the case of Alexander or from
Apollo in that of Plato. Not a question of colours.
14 p 253, underlined
The Race-theory finds its differentiating natural cause in the diversity of
the human physique […].
The skin is not the psyche: the psyche is not “consciousness”. This is the shallow in which the otherwise excellent
Toynbee floundered.
A. J. Toynbee
A Study of History
Volume II. Waterloo. Twenty-one marginalia.
1 p 11, underlined
Such were the achievements of the Syriac Civilization under the stimulus
of the desert.
The incentive was love of money. The desert simply was a
field that could be exploited, not a divine challenge as this
book makes it.
2 p 13, underlined
||The statues show that the art of sculpture|| must have been kept alive on
Easter Island by continual transmarine intercourse.
? Why not a development & decline in the island?
3 p 16
||The abandonment of a village in early Connecticut|| explained the
miracle of those great cities in Ohio and Illinois and Colorado and
California which had sprung into existence overnight. In this hard environment of New England, an apprenticeship had been served for the
hard task of building the United States.
The village no longer paid! Marvellous moral lesson.
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4 p 31
We have now perhaps established decisively the truth that ease is inimical to civilization. & civilisation is barbarous without ease.
^
^
5 p 96
||The hardships of migration are responsible for the great epics. The
non-migrating peoples produce drama.||
Where are the American epics? There was drama in
Castile but epics in Italy & Portugal.
6 p 97, top
Origin of “town meetings”
[Text marked:]
Discussion & forensics go with trade: authority with
licence.
7 p 97, marked
In the city-state thus founded, the ‘cells’ of the new political organization
would be, not kindreds held together by the tie of common descent, but
‘tribes’ representing ship’s companies; […]. Having co-operated at sea as
men do co-operate when they are ‘all in the same boat’ in the midst of
the perils of the deep, they would continue to feel and act in the same
way ashore when they had to hold a strip of hardly-won coast against the
menace of a hostile hinterland.
Important.
8 p 213
||On slavery and “The Stimulus of Penalizations.”||
Does it not occur to you that all this “stimulus” weeds out
the weak and leaves only the strong?
9 p 359, marked
||Stimulated by Charlemagne, the Scandinavians broke out and by
way of the Vikings,|| they had made a supreme effort to overwhelm
the civilizations of the South which they encountered on their
warpath, and to establish in their stead a new Scandinavian
Civilization erected on barbarian foundations and unencumbered by
reminiscences of a traditional style or by traces of a traditional
ground-plan.
Cf. America
George Santayana’s Marginalia
A. J. Toynbee
2:329
A Study of History
Volume III. Waterloo. Fifty-three marginalia.
1 p 14
Nomadism, according to this, is militant.
2 p 23
||The interdependence of the Nomad and his flocks. Without human
herding, neither the flocks nor the people could not have been so
numerous.||
What advantage is it to a free band to be enslaved in
order to become more numerous? This profits only the
foreign masters now lording it over them.
3 p 94, marked
Aristotle rejects Plato’s prescriptions of an intellectual governing caste,
which is to be segregated from the military caste ab initio and to exercise authority over it at all times (an idea which Plato rightly believed
to be the most important contribution in the Republic to Hellenic social
philosophy). Aristotle is content to recruit his senate from time-expired
soldiers.
Toynbee believes in Christus Rex.
4 p 95, underlined
[Concerning Plato’s Republic: ]
The ‘human watch-dog’ cannot and will not be happy; but his personal
happiness is of no account; for the individual human being exists, not for
his own sake, but in order to promote the welfare of the commonwealth
of which he is a member.
Theocracy in Plato a mask for “nationalism”.
5 p 97, underlined
The Utopian programme of the fourth-century Athenian philosophers
was a forlorn hope, for the ‘Lycurgean’ system, in which they put their
trust, was visibly crumbling at the very time when they were seeking to
arrest the incipient decline of the Hellenic Civilization by ‘pegging’ it to
the Spartan rock.
Only Plato was deceived. Aristotle only reviewed constitutions. He did not imagine that Alexander might cane[?]
the world.
2:330
George Santayana’s Marginalia
6 p 134, underlined
||The rule seems to be that geographical expansion may|| effect ‘actual
regression’, arrest.
English belles lettres in America.
7 pp 136–37, marked
And Don Quixote might also have noted that the wave of the Italian
Renaissance, which had swept over Spain in the generation of Cervantes
and over Germany in the generation of Goethe, only irrigated New
England in the generation in which Texas was conquered from its
Spanish-descended occupants by Sam Houston and his fellow-filibusters.
Moreover, the intellectual renaissance of Houston’s respectable
fellow-citizens and contemporaries in New England—an Emerson and a
Longfellow and a Thoreau and a Hawthorne—passed over as swiftly and
as abruptly as an Indian Summer.
The “Indian Summer” of New England
8 p 154, marked
On this interpretation, a declining society is apt to hasten the day of
its dissolution by squandering its diminishing store of vital energy in
material performances on an excessive scale, not so much out of
wanton megalomania as in a vain effort to give the lie to its own
unacknowledged but agonizing consciousness of incompetence and
failure and doom.
How about a study of history in 13 volumes?
9 p 167, marked
Perhaps we may infer from the foregoing survey that an improvement in
military technique is usually, if not invariably, the symptom of a decline
in civilization.
Anyhow now.
10 p 202
And in this tug-of-war which we are witnessing in Russia between the
ideals of Lenin and the methods of Ford we may look forward to seeing
the modern ascendancy of the Western over the Russian Civilization
paradoxically confirmed.
This needs revision. 1947, Totalitarian discipline has intervened.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:331
11 p 203
And thus we see Ghandi to-day promoting a political movement with
a Western programme—the transformation of India into a sovereign
independent parliamentary state—and with a Western procedure […].
? This will not last.
12 p 203
In this spiritual travail of a Gandhi and a Lenin in our generation, we can
watch the impact of the Western Civilization upon Hinduism and upon
Russian Orthodox Christendom in the act of transformation from an
external encounter between the Western Society and its neighbours into
an inner experience of a Westernized World.
This adoption of “Western” spirit is not really spiritual but
instrumental and external. “Spirit” for Toynbee = steam,
it is a source of motion, not of form.
13 p 212, doubly marked
Or are we going to turn our new power to our own destruction by putting
its unprecedently powerful ‘drive’ into a number of ancient anti-social
institutions—into War and Tribalism and Slavery and Property— […].
Perhaps it will be War issuing in industrial & commercial
imperialism.
14 p 217
We know it because already, on the peaks of the mountains, the grim
chthonic glow is turning miraculously into the ethereal flush of dawn;
and because, down here in the shadow, unhurried but unhindered, there
floats or dances through Space and Time a living chain of Goddesses,
hand linked in hand: the endless procession of the Hours.
Drop it!
15 p 230, marked
A field of action—and, a fortiori, an intersection of a number of fields of
action—cannot be a source of action. The source of action is other than
the field of action ex hypothesi.
A ray in the fog!
16 p 231, marked
It is human individuals and not human societies that ‘make’ human
history.
2:332
George Santayana’s Marginalia
17 p 237
||Concerning an award for the invention of the tank|| by His Brittanic
Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom.
Why this waste of words? Toynbee is sometimes cheap.
18 p 242, underlined and marked
||The stagnation of the Indian masses|| while the few were making their
tremendous moral and intellectual advance.
What rot
19 p 242
The very fact that the growths of civilizations are the work of creative
individuals or creative minorities carries the implication that the uncreative majority will be left behind unless the pioneers can contrive some
means of carrying this sluggish rear-guard along with them in their
eager advance.
You don’t realise that militant revolutions are erratic. The
great flux remains generative and automatic.
20 p 246fn, underlined
[Note 3:]
||Toynbee quotes Bergson:|| ‘This is the principal mode in which the
greatest minds of an age produce their effect. They set the tone which
others take, and the fashion which others use.’
A thousand Toynbees quote the unique Bergson.
21 p 263, underlined and marked
||The persistence of the myth of the eternal return; the return of the
Messiah in Judaism.|| In the concept of the Second Coming, the motif of
Withdrawal-and-Return attains its deepest spiritual meaning.
It is its unspiritual Jewish side that appears here. All is
to be mundane in nature though supernatural instead of
being natural but spiritual in its “return” or consummation
22 p 263, marked
In the last chapter of his career, Paul employed his gifts of propaganda
in responding to the challenge of Hellenism in a totally different way. He
sought to solve the problem of Helleno-Syriac relations by peace instead
of war.
Very good. It was Hellenism not Jesus, that he turned to.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:333
23 p 264, underlined
After his vision on the road to Damascus, in which he was suddenly
enlightened, Paul withdrew into the wilderness, as Jesus himself had
withdrawn after his sudden enlightenment at the moment of his baptism
by John.
Not a good Anglican then, but a wild Protestant or fancy
Christian (like St. Paul!)
24 p 264, marked
Benedict of Nursia […] was born just after the first barbarian ‘successor-state’ of the Roman Empire was set up by Odovacer in Italy, and he
died in the throes of the long-drawn-out and devastating war between the
Ostrogothic ‘successor-state’ and the Imperial Government of
Constantinople—a war which was the worst that Italy had undergone
since the War of Hannibal, and which completed the destruction of the
ancient order of society in the peninsula.
Like that of 1940–5
Cf. German & Anglo-Saxon
25 p 372, marked
||Toynbee quotes H. W. C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe: Civilizations flourish||
when institutions are stable and adapted to the needs of those who live
under them; when the minds of men are filled with ideas which they find
completely satisfying; when the statesman, the artist, and the poet feel
that they are best fulfilling their several missions if they express in deed
and work and language the aspirations common to the whole society.
Then for a while Man appears to be the master of his fate; and then the
prevailing temper is one of reasoned optimism, of noble exaltation, of
content allied with hope. […] Now by a period of history we mean the
tract of years in which this balance of harmonious activities, this reconciliation of the real with the ideal, is in course of preparing, is actually
subsisting, and is vanishing away.
Moral definition of a period or a progress.
26 p 372, underlined and marked Z
The particular moment of equilibrium that was in the historian’s mind
when he wrote this eloquent and imaginative passage was the moment in
the second period of our Western history at which the two institutions of
the Papal Church and Feudalism were found satisfying by men and
women in Western Christendom. We may perhaps equate this moment
with those five years in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era when
2:334
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Saint Dominic and Saint Francis of Assisi and the Emperor Frederick II
and Saint Louis King of France were all in the World together.
Not every body liked it then, and Catholics like it now.
[At “five years”:]
cats & dogs
27 p 373, underlined
This social expedient of mimesis is a ‘short cut’; and the resort to it is
proof in itself that the goal of human endeavours has not yet been
attained. The climber has not yet reached the ledge above him where he
may hope to find rest.
So that stasis is the good after all. This is feeble in a progressist.
28 p 383
||On Spengler, Decline of the West.||
This notion of Kultur is itself local & temporal. Toynbee &
Spengler both confuse ideal eternity with cosmic universality: the latter is a false generalisation or hyperbole. The
former is an intrinsic determinative.
A. J. Toynbee
A Study of History
Volume IV. Waterloo. 122 marginalia.
1 p 17, marked
||The Risorgimento was|| at least as notable a feat of rejuvenation as the
Italian Renaissance; […].
Nonsense It was mere envy of the northern wealth &
“progress”.
2 p 34
||Toynbee writes at length about yin and yang.||
The springs of life are everywhere diffused: each tends to
repeat its trope, but they collide & even inter-marry, so
that the trope in each generation is of a different individual character. The total is a result not a purpose.
3 p 41
||Roads built by the British in Greek Macedonia, 1916–18 were abandoned.||
Cf. Italian roads in Abyssinia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:335
4 p 44, underlined
[…] the social disease of Assyrian militarism […].
A scourge to Babylon but perhaps a sign of health in
Ninevah.
5 p 45
Politics the curse of industry.
6 p 81, underlined
This Syriac assimilation of the Egyptian society— […].
Jewish?
7 p 94
||The Japanese wiped out Ainu society.||
Tragic effects of militancy in a naturally generated society.
8 p 128
||Creative souls break the seal of custom, or mimesis.|| This baring of a
blade means the removal of a safeguard; and the necessity of using the
tool of mimesis without the protection of a customary régime— […] condemns a growing civilization to live dangerously.
Timid natures (like B. [Bergson, whom Toynbee has just quoted]
& this woolly Toynbee) love the idea of adventure. They
have no notion of rational courage or heroism.
9 p 135, marked Z
The element of retardation is likewise of the essence of revolutions; and
it is this that accounts for the violence prominent to them.
Revolution may be desired before it occurs, because it is
a [sic ]
10 p 141, marked
||That the North won the American Civil War.||
Industrialism & democracy become militant with a
vengeance.
11 p 156
||Toynbee again quotes Bergson:|| For Democracy ‘breathes the spirit of
the Gospels … and its motive-force is Love’./ , Hate & Envy.
^
^
12 p 162, underlined
In origin and essence, Democracy is not parochial but universal, not
militant but humanitarian.
2:336
George Santayana’s Marginalia
It is the herd instinct, & animal. It fights any other herd or
individual moving within sight. It is militant and tyrannical.
13 p 172
In Germany a customs union—the German Zollverein—actually anticipated, and prepared the ground for, the establishment of a political
union, the German Reich.
The economic union was rational, the political artificial &
demagogic.
14 p 173, underlined
It will be seen that the British Free Trade movement of the
‘eighteen-forties’ was in accordance with the general spirit of the times.
It was in the generative order, but unintentionally,
because the motive bias local and militant.
15 p 174, underlined
[…] the disruption of the eighteenth-century British Empire to which the
establishment of the United States was the sequel.
prologue?
16 p 175, marked
For Economic Nationalism did not make its first appearance in our
Western World after the War of 1914–18 in post-war Poland or
Czechoslovakia; it was born in the United States during the Civil War of
1861–5 and in Germany after the foundation of the Reich in 1871.
17 p 176
||The United States set itself up as|| ‘Workshop of the World’.
“Arsenal of Democracy!”
18 p 181, marked
||The nineteenth-century economic world order, British in origin,|| has
grown up without any corresponding political framework and indeed
without any design at all.
That was its virtue. It was lovely for everybody.
19 p 181
||Bankers and industrialists who built up industry in formerly agricultural
nations did not reflect that their new order could not live on unless it was
matched by a political framework.||
If the old moralities, or Napoleon, had still been in power,
they would have managed it. Intelligence with a fundamental disinterestedness are needed.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:337
20 p 182
The British are empirical. They think their ideas create
the world.
21 p 185, underlined
In less than fourteen centuries the narrow-verged Western Christendom
of Gregory’s generation has grown into the ubiquitous Great Society of
our day. If a religious basis was required for Gregory’s unpretentious economic building, and if it is this basis that has enabled our civilization to
grow on the material plane […], it seems unlikely […] that the vaster
structure of a world order, which it is our task to build in our day, can
ever be securely based upon the rubble foundation of sordid economic
interests.
It had been changed at the Reformation into a Jewish millenium. Hence these tears. But a Catholic world would not
have been militant in industry.
22 p 188
||The eighteenth-century Spanish-American republic of Panama||
seceded from Colombia in 1903.
bribed by the U.S. & mutilated
23 p 200
Alone among the leading peoples of the Western World, the Germans
retained an element of Autocracy in their government after A.D. 1871;
and, although there was a large infusion of Parliamentarism in the constitution of the Bismarckian Reich, the survival into the twentieth century of even a remnant of a sixteenth-century autocratic régime in the
government of one of the Great Powers of the Western World was sufficient to involve not only Germany herself, but all the other countries
that were members of the Great Society of the day, in the catastrophe of
A.D. 1914.
Did commercial & colonial rivalry have no lodgement in
England? Or the defence of the Mediterranean to this day?
24 p 206, marked
||It is possible that|| the militarism and imperialism of the Romans were
the expression of their native abilities, while their domestic political
institutions were an imitation—and a belated imitation—of Hellenic
models which were hardly calculated to work smoothly except in the
hands that had originally fashioned them.
2:338
George Santayana’s Marginalia
N.B. “Politics” in the Greek sense, is a disease. It signifies
a perpetual conflict of parties where there ought to be as
in a family or an army a perpetual cooperation of
^
^
functions.
25 p 208
[…] in the international field the Solonian economic revolution confronted the Hellenic Society with death through the necessity for
^
establishing a political world-order. ^
26 p 211, top
A government must have a local seat and personal rulers,
but it need not represent or defend or express any single
city, nation, or man.
27 p 211, underlined
||The Hellenic city-states preserved their autonomy, but they were
unequal, subject to the power of|| a forcible and selfish domination of
some single city-state over all the rest.
If Rome had remained a political city with everything
determined by shouts in the forum, this evil unity w’d
have abolished itself. But Rome became a government
and an army, two rational instruments. Polity yielded to
law and authority.
28 p 218
||The breakdown of the Papacy in the late middle ages.||
The radical loyalty of the Papacy to its religious office is
ignored. When most “corrupt” officially the Church was
full of saints vitally. There were its true interests rather
than political successes. The parallel with British compromises is a proof of blindness.
29 p 225
||Fanaticism in Judaism; it was anti-Hellenic, and satirized by Junius
Iuvenalis,|| in an apparently genuine ignorance of the moral and intellectual sublimity of the religion which had betrayed its Jewish champions
into their notorious militancy. In the history of Christianity
likewise—both in its internal schisms and in its encounters with alien
faiths—we observe the same evil spirit of fanaticism breaking out again
and again.
Because this is a monarchical theism, & not pantheistic as
you are.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:339
30 p 254, marked X
||Toynbee quotes verses from the Tao-te King as translated by Arthur
Waley.||
A fatuous poet pleased with vulgar rhymes.
31 p 259fn
[Note 5:]
||The paradoxical but right and natural victory of the “dark horse” motif
in the Beatitudes, in folklore, in some fiction.||
This is only because the era was coming to an end. You
assume that all things are radically changing all the time.
Conditions are constant in essentials, else we could not
exist
32 p 262, underlined
||On the history of the Jews. They raised themselves above the Syriac
peoples in|| a mighty feat of spiritual intuition to perceive in the lineaments of a primitive volcano-demon of the Arabian Wilderness the
epiphany of a God who was omnipresent and omnipotent. […] And
then, after having divined a truth which was absolute and eternal, they
allowed themselves to be captivated by a temporary and relative
half-truth. They persuaded themselves that Israel’s discovery of the
One True God had revealed Israel itself to be God’s Chosen People;
and this half-truth inveigled them into the fatal error of looking upon a
momentary spiritual eminence, which they had attained by labour and
travail, as a privilege conferred upon them by God in a covenant which
was everlasting.
This is the first Blunder that I have detected in this interpretation.
33 p 271
He doesn’t like Oxford and quotes Cambridge books only.
34 p 275
||After the eighteenth century, the contributions of Italy|| to the general
life of the age were inferior.
except in opera
35 p 295
[…] Jugoslav nationalism in South-Eastern Europe has only been satisfied at the cost of a world war […].
Not settled yet: 1947.
2:340
George Santayana’s Marginalia
36 p 295
The inferiority of the Old World to the New World in psychological
plasticity can also be illustrated from the histories of certain modern
international frontiers.
The New World has less structure, but is even more stubborn in sticking to what it has, as the only right thing.
37 p 298, underlined
The gift of creativity, which is in origin the reward of a successful
response to a challenge, becomes in its turn, in the act of being conferred,
a new and uniquely formidable challenge for its devoted recipient.
N.B. the verbal derivation of events in this writer. If you
succeed in doing something your reward is the gift of
doing it. Your punishment is the temptation to do it again.
Moralists have no physics. Their philosophy is all words.
38 p 307, underlined
||Dual citizenship in the Greek city-states.|| This creative compromise was
psychologically possible only in those communities in which the idolatrous worship of City-State Sovereignty had not acquired a stranglehold
over the citizens’ hearts and minds; and the importance of this psychological condition becomes apparent as soon as we remind ourselves of
the actual circumstances in which this political invention was gradually
evolved in a long historical process which the Roman political genius
eventually carried to completion.
The demonology of T. appears here in its nakedness. By
admitting other cities to Roman citizenship, Rome had
eluded the “stranglehold” of a demon that was lying in
ambush for it, to punish it for being a city-state!
39 p 307
||Toynbee cites a book published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford.||
First Oxford book quoted, as far as I remember.
40 p 315
||The departed glories of a former age in the view of the eighteenthcentury traveller.||
You may now see Dresden or Monte Cassino destroyed by
the sin of not being saved by the League of Nations.
41 p 317
Where a survival of the town government exists, all is
more living & beautiful than when the tyrant great power
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:341
(even in England) has flattened the towns into provincial
centres.
42 p 318
||In modern times we|| replace the medieval Sovereign City-State, on the
pattern of Florence or Nürnberg, by the modern Sovereign National
State, on the pattern of France or Great Britain, as the standard sovereign
unit in our political system; […].
You telescope the centuries there and lengthen them here.
Wait a bit!
43 p 393, marked
This contrast between the respective experiences of the East Roman
Empire and Bulgaria, in and after their Hundred Years’ War, […]. In such
a conflict the less civilized combatant is apt to suffer egregious defeats
and to show an extraordinary capacity for surviving them, while his
more civilized opponent is apt to have the inverse experience of winning
brilliant victories and then emerging exhausted from a struggle […].
Cf. England & Germany, the U.S. and Russia in 1947.
44 p 394
||On losers and winners in World War I.||
Repeated with modifications in 1939–45. Germany
recovered and was wholly destroyed: Russia recovered
& undertook to become a universal power. England
withdrew exhausted: the U.S. advanced with a prophetic
mission. In a duel with Russia, who w’d prevail?
45 p 407, marked
But can we count upon Time to prolong our reprieve to Eternity? And
is it really a reprieve that Time has been granting us? Has not Time
perhaps been fattening our Western body social, like a sacrificial victim, for a mighter holocaust than Orthodox Christendom was ever
able to afford?
Two or three years after you wrote this the atomic bomb
was split.1
1
A rare example of Santayana’s idiom failing him.
46 p 551, marked Z
In Hildebrand’s generation the Western Christendom was passing out of
the first into the second chapter of its history—out of a defensive state of
mind in which the height of ambition was to keep alive, as the Abbé
Siéyès boasted in a later age that he had lived through the French
2:342
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Revolution, into an adventurous state of mind in which this vegetative
life for life’s sake began to seem hardly worth living unless it could now
be transcended, on the Aristotelian scheme of social growth, in an effort
to make life a stepping-stone towards attaining the true end of Man.
Complete travesty of the text below. [Quotation from the
Politics, I, chap. 2, para. 8.] Aristotle says: We build cities for
defence: we dwell in them for virtue.
47 p 553, underlined
||The purpose of the church:|| the regeneration of Mankind?
Salvation of souls, not political reform, is the object of
Christian preaching. You are a corrupt Christian yourself.
48 p 572
||Reiteration of a point already made repeatedly concerning the
top-heaviness of the Papacy.||
Redundant repetitous. T. is a cheap preacher when he is
not a diligent “student” of history.
49 p 577
||The failures of the territorial politics of numerous popes.||
These defeats touch the man not the Pope. A Protestant
always misses where the Catholic heart lies.
50 p 646, marked
If we have really lost the power or the will to practise the virtues of
Gethsemane, then it is certainly better to practise those of Sparta or
Valhalla than to practise none at all.
Moralism at a loss to justify itself, turns to superstition
rather than to reason & nature.
51 p 647
What is true of the dross in which the diamond has lain buried is likewise
true of the ephemeral institution of War in which an eternal principle of
goodness has glimmered darkly for a season, in the guise of ‘the military
virtues’, in order that it may shine out brightly hereafter in the perfect
physical peace of the City of God.
This is utter rot. The beauty of sacrifice comes from the
liberation of the will from every obsession. Not at all from
the baby’s pap to be.
52 p 648
||Ways of waging war, and attitudes toward war vary in history.||
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:343
The methods of war vary: the physical interference of one
life with another remains.
53 p 649
Granting that this gruesome institution has provided a field for the exercise of ‘the military virtues’ yesterday, we may be sure that to-morrow the
‘chivalrous’ kind of War will either rankle into a ‘Militarism’ without a
vestige of virtue or beauty or else will be transfigured into a militia Christi
in which the physical warfare of one man against another will have been
translated into a spirtual warfare of all men united in the service of God
against the powers of evil.
I.e. they are to have a common aim apart from the existence of any one of them. Very well. But one or another
will survive to inherit that aim: and “war” of some kind
must decide which. Perhaps the good children will chloroform the bad boys, as at Nürnberg.
A. J. Toynbee
A Study of History
Volume V. Waterloo. Sixty-eight marginalia.
1 p 13, top
Ridiculous fallacy.
[Text underlined:]
[…] in the disintegrations of civilizations, the perpetual variety which
gives light and life to their growth is replaced by a merciless uniformity;
and intensification, instead of diversification, is the form of change which
now relieves the monotony of the series of performances.
The absence of interest for the historian is here projected
into the world, as if each generation, in falling in love like
its predecessors felt bored by the monotony of the feeling!
2 p 17
Not control over things but moral unanimity is the test of
political health.
3 p 19, underlined
||On decline in Hellenic society:|| A ‘creative minority’ which had once
evoked a voluntary allegiance from the uncreative mass, in virtue of the
gift of charm which is the privilege of creativity, had now given place to
a ‘dominant minority’ which found itself unable to exert the charm
because it was destitute of the creative power.
2:344
George Santayana’s Marginalia
fashion is “creative”. It depends on novelty & is probably
worthless. The test of true progress in the growth of viable
faculties that support the radical order of the psyche
4 pp 28–29, underlined
[…] the ‘union sacrée’ between internal proletariat and dominant
minority took the form of an amalgamation of the living worship of
Osiris with the dead worship of the official Egyptiac Pantheon; and this
artificial act of syncretism killed the religion of the internal proletariat
without availing to bring the religion of the dominant minority back to
life. for more than 2000 years.
^ “living worship of Osiris”:] ^
[At
Might be said of Judaism in Christianity in Protestant
times, & reversed in Catholic times.
5 p 31, marked
[…] creativity is subject to its own peculiar nemesis; and that a minority
which has demonstrated its creative power by responding to one challenge victoriously is likely to inhibit itself from repeating its
exploit—that is to say, from responding, later on, to a different challenge
with equal success— […].
This is a British generalization of the occasional awakening of a dull comfortable society to different unnecessary
projects of special circles. In most nations the “problems”
are always the same, and the “response” a religious or
philosophical resignation, always the same too.[?] This if
the people are intelligent and have good traditions.
6 p 54
||The hatred of the Chinese for the Manchus.||
Can they [the Chinese] love the Americans?
7 p 61
||Toynbee quotes lines 365–75 of Gilbert Murray’s translation of
Antigone: ||
High-citied he: citiless the other
Who striveth, grasping at things of naught, […].
Shocking translation: why don’ t you give the original?
8 p 79
||Toynbee quotes Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion:||
The first form of religion had been infra-intellectual […], the second was
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:345
supra-intellectual. We may best understand religion in the incomplete opposition
between the two.
Had B. read vol. 5 of the L. of R.?
9 p 93
The plebs has no memory. Remove the old demagogues,
introduce new ones and you can convert it to anything.
10 p 155, marked
We can also observe another fact in the life of an intelligentsia which is
written large upon its countenance for all to read: an intelligentsia is born
to be unhappy.
11 p 178, marked
The distinctively Jewish (or perhaps originally Zoroastrian) element in
the traditional religious inspiration of Marxism is the apocalyptic vision
of a violent revolution which is inevitable because it is the decree, and
irresistible because it is the work, of God himself, and which is to invert
the present roles of Proletariat and Dominant Minority in a tremendous
peripeteia—a reversal of roles which is to carry the Chosen People, at one
bound, from the lowest to the highest place in the Kingdom of This
World.
Apocalyptic Marx.
12 p 179, marked
[…] it is of the essence of the Marxian apocalyptic doctrine that the
Messianic Kingdom is not only to be a material kingdom in This World
but is also to be won by a victorious stroke of violence. If this archaic
Futurism is the distinctive Jewish element in the Marxian faith, the distinctively Christian element is an Oecumenicalism which is positively
antipathetic, and not merely foreign, to the Jewish tradition.
Militant prophet & Jewish, but œcumenical like
Christianity.
13 p 320, doubly marked
It will be seen that, in the record of our Western Christendom’s relations,
[664–1171 A.D.] with the primitive societies round about, there are more
entries on the debit and fewer on the credit side than in the corresponding chapter of the Hellenic Society’s account.
This black & white list of events is the curse of this whole
book. Is history a confessional? And by whose catechism
guided?
2:346
George Santayana’s Marginalia
14 p 338, top
Quote in possible Review.
[Text marked:]
Our present muster of other examples will perhaps have confirmed us
in the belief that these are, in fact, the three camps into which any disintegrating civilization tends to divide against itself; [ and in the light
of our survey we shall perhaps also have come ^to^ the conclusion
that ] the characteristic works of dominant minorities are schools of
^^
philosophy
and universal states, and that internal proletariats display
their creative power in [ the creation of ] ‘higher religions’ and
^ ^ while external ^proletariats
^
[ of ] universal churches,
express them^
^
^
^
selves in barbarian or dissenting religions and in ‘heroic’ poetry.
Scheme of this whole “Study”.
15 p 338, bottom
A trope suggesting a teleological miracle = a civilisation.
16 p 339
False Platonism. Potentiality is determined to a particular
development by circumstances: the a priori element is
only the inheritness of the psyche concerned. [ Cf. last
page of this vol.]
[End-page, opposite p. 712:]
Suppose that at some exceptional crisis the organisation
of matter were ground so fine that no particular heritage
remained, but only abstract or indeterminate potentiality
for any growth whatever. It would be the distribution of
these disinherited atoms,—this rising proletariat—that
could alone induce a particular form of reorganisation;
and then, as the heritage of each organised centre was
enriched, it would at once narrow and predetermine the
character of the future development possible for it, without destroying afresh its acquired heritage.
17 p 341
The Russians may do for us what Napoleon ought to have
done, if they become Europeans.
18 p 359, marked Z
Alone among barbarian heresies, the Arab prophet Muhammad’s
amalgam of Christianity and Judaism escaped the scrap-heap which is
the usual destination of such crude barbarian black-smith’s work.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:347
Exceptional prejudice for A. J. T.
19 p 370
Judaism native to Babylon and not to Judaea? And does
Egypt not count in this matter?
20 p 371
The philosophic & spiritual side of Hinduism not noticed?
21 p 389
Between them, the two archaizing Heracleidae and the two archaizing
Gracchi let loose a spate of Violence which did not subside until it had
swept away the whole fabric of the commonwealth which the would-be
reformers had sought to save.
Everything lapses in time. You are preaching.
22 p 390, underlined
[…] the men who worked their will upon a distracted world during the
last two centuries B.C. begot […] a breed of public servants with the conscience and the ability to organize and maintain a universal state; […].
It was a confused violence that accomplished nothing.
Alexander and Caesar were violent too but wise.
23 p 390, underlined
In the souls of the Roman fraction of the Hellenic dominant minority the
ideal of Archaism had been supplanted by that of Detachment; in the
souls of the Jewish fraction of the Hellenic internal proletariat the ideal
of Futurism had been replaced by that of Transfiguration. ?
^ ^ vertiOnly futurism postponed? The Jews never took the
cal direction except sadly, like Ecclesiastes.
24 p 393
||Peter, a “futurist,” drawing his sword in the garden of Gethsemane.||
Even at the climax of his Master’s earthly career—when all that the
Master himself had foretold was patently coming true— […].
Is this way of taking the Gospels as if historical a mere
façon de parler or is it an idée fixe that no learning can
cure?
25 p 393, underlined
||Paul’s evangelism compared with Peter’s confession to Cornelius’s
messengers.|| What are these two ways of life which produced these
2:348
George Santayana’s Marginalia
vast spiritual effects when they were respectively adopted in place of
Archaism by Cato and in place of Futurism by Peter?
The suicide of the republican die-hards was not a spiritual
nor a vast effect. It expressed the pride of a sect, a sort of
political fashion & irrational.
26 p 396fn, marked
||On the varying linguistic roots of “behold, the Kingdom of God is
within you.”||
It is a moral allegiance or “spiritual home” that persons
may develop or dwell in either singly or in company. You
might be more intensely conscious of this state of grace in
heaven than on earth but the time, place, or duration of
the thing is accidental.
27 p 399, underlined
||In primitive society, one can distinguish alternation between the
orgiastic and the ascetic,|| according to the season, in the tribe’s ceremonial corporate expression of its members’ emotions.
The emotions that accompany orgies are supplied here to
cause them. First you love music (although never heard)
and then you play it to satisfy your musical emotions.
Inverted psychology.
28 p 411, underlined and marked
||On “la trahison des clercs”:1|| Their treason did not begin with the pair
of treasonable acts—a cynical loss of faith in the recently established
principles, and a nerveless surrender of the recently won gains, of
Liberalism—that have been perpetrated by our ‘intellectuals’ within living memory. The truancy that has given this latest exhibition of itself
was set on foot, centuries earlier, when the ‘clerks’ repudiated their
clerical origin—and in the same act cut our Western culture off from the
possibility of drawing nourishment any longer from the sap of the Tree
of Spiritual Life—by trying to shift the rising edifice of our Western
Christian Civilization from a religious to a secular basis.
[At “rising edifice”:] !
Liberalism = Protestantism = a bastard X’ity; so that to be
a Fascist is to desert the Church. Yes, Hegel was a
“Fascist”. He liquidated X’ity into Pantheism.
1
Betrayal of the Intellectuals, the title of Julien Benda’s well-known book of
1927.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:349
29 p 456, marked
[…] when the Christian Church eventually succeeded—whether in
spite of persecution or because of it—in overcoming the proletarian
opposition and establishing its own ascendancy over the internal proletariat’s life, the dominant minority signified its unenthusiastic
acceptance of the proletariat’s revised verdict by a wry-faced
announcement of its own conversion to a religion which had now
decisively proved its title by its sensational victory in the proletarian
arena.
Plausible fiction.
This was not the motive of Julian the Apostate or of
Constantine. Philosophy and superstition also counted in
both directions.
30 p 458, marked
The proletarianization of a dominant minority could be watched in the
London metropolitan area in the year 1938 by any one who entered
the doors of either a cinema or a club; for in the cinema he would see
people of all classes taking an equal pleasure in films that had been artfully designed to cater for the taste of the proletarian majority of the
audience, while in the club he would find that the black ball did not
exclude the yellow press.
Farewell to England.
31 p 617
||On the doctrine of predestination; we may conclude|| that his belief in
the coincidence of his own will with the inevitable course of Destiny is
hollow in the exact measure of the believer’s display of ‘dynamism’.
As if the joy of doing what God has made us to do were
not both spontaneous and pious. These insular prejudices
& blind spots spoil T.’s book.
32 p 670
||Religious scepticism in seventeenth-century France.||
Was there no cynicism about religion before there were
any Protestants? E.g. Machiavelli.
A. J. Toynbee
A Study of History
Volume VI. Waterloo. Sixty-three marginalia.
1 p l0, top
Last word
2:350
George Santayana’s Marginalia
[Text marked:]
The only society that is capable of embracing the whole of Mankind is a
superhuman Civitas Dei; and the conception of a society that embraces
all Mankind and yet nothing but Mankind is an academic chimaera.
Yes. All mankind does not or need not have a unanimous
vocation. The dogma that they ought to be unanimous
under one law is a Hebraic instance of egotism. Cf. The
Marriage of Venus, Jupiter’s last speech.
2 p 13
The whole of Mankind can never dwell together in a brotherly unity
until men have learnt to exchange their intrinsically conflicting as well as
parochial tribal loyalties for one common allegiance to a heavenly king.
This is the Jewish claim to Domination, contrary to reason
& liberty.
3 p 174
That is ‘palingenesia’ in which the work of creation is resumed, but not
as a ‘vain repetition’.
Neuen Lebenslauf
Beginne
Mit hellem Sinne,
innd neue Lieder
Tönen darauf.1
What blasphemy to quote Goethe on eternal life when he
means only to keep the ball rolling.
1
New life / Begins / With a clear mind / And new songs / Resound to it. (Goethe,
Faust, II,11.1622–26.)
4 p 217
||The idea of a superior Nordic race was first the work of de Gobineau
before the French Revolution; it passed out of his hands|| into those of a
Nietzsche and a Houston Stewart Chamberlain whose caricatures of de
Gobineau’s theme helped to inspire the masters of the Second German
Reich […].
Don’t you know that this was in Fichte far more serious
than in Nietzsche?
5 p 241, marked
The outlook and ideals and standards and examples with which the
saviour-outcasts’ advent irradiates the Internal Proletariat’s murky
native ‘ideology’ are the only elements of the futurist Weltanschauung
that survive the inevitable failure of the futurists’ forlorn hope.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:351
Aristocratic virtue survives in revolutionary leaders of the
nobility: Alcibiades, Byron, etc.
6 p 256, underlined
||Machiavelli quoted on the necessity to force belief in people if they will
not believe willingly.|| In these wholesomely brutal words Machiavelli
brings out a sinister feature in the strategy of the philosopher-king which
Plato almost disingenuously slurs over.
N.B. Plato is always and essentially a dissembler, an idealist who forces his cards into the politician’s hand. Cf.
Catholic teaching.
7 p 274, marked Z
||The difficult question of the adoption of Jesus as the son of God, versus
his conception by the Holy Ghost. The two words “adoption” and “conception”|| have in our Christian version acquired a new connotation
which is neither legal in the one case nor physical in the other, but is in
both cases metaphorical. The essence of the Christian mystery lies in a
belief that God has made himself, by means that have been spiritual and
not corporeal, the father of a son who has lived and died on Earth as a
man in the flesh.
A. J. T. in deep water.
8 p 314
||Toynbee self-approvingly suggests that western disintegration has been
explained by his review of disintegration in other civilizations.||
“I should leave this out, too.” B. Jowett’s words to his
pupils.
9 p 315
||World War I was not the climax of a movement to ever more wars.|| If
the series continues, the progression will indubitably be carried to ever
higher terms, until this process of intensifying the horrors of war is one
day brought to an end by the self-annihilation of the war-making society.
faute de combattants! 1
^ Quite so In 2 years
^ it was on us harder than ever and
now 1948 threatens to come a third time
1
For lack of combatants.
10 p 362
It was an utter violation of the Jewish mind to conceive of God in the
shape of a living creature.
Cf. the golden calf.
2:352
George Santayana’s Marginalia
11 p 439
||Concerning the authorship and reliability of early documents.||
People normally half invent what they say they have
heard or read, prouder of seeming to report than of
actually “creating” i.e. lying.
12 p 448, marked
[…] the Gospels can be properly described as the epic cycle of the
Hellenic internal proletariat; and epic poetry is a kind of Zwischenreich 1
between the two mental realms of ‘folk-lore’ and history.
Cf. my “Idea of Christ in the Gospels”
1
Middle-ground.
13 p 457, marked Z
From the foregoing survey it would appear that the Gospels contain,
embedded in them, a considerable number and variety of elements
which have been conveyed to them by the stream of ‘folk-memory’, and
which have originated partly in these waters but partly also on stretches
of once dry ground which the shifting subterranean currents of a perennially flowing primitive psychic life have subsequently undermined and
swept away.
[ Damnable rhetoric] Bits of old philosophy or poetry were
current, without any conception of their original sense.
14 pp 502–3
||On the source of the saying, “He that is not with me is against me,”
attributed to Caesar by Cicero.||
The militant feel that neutrals are against them: traditionalists that neutrals are for them. And both parties are
right. But was not Caesar the revolutionary who conspired
against the Republic? Not at bottom, but only in forms:
because he represented the force of evolution, and Brutus
the conceit and peripheral dogma of private sentiment.
^
^
15 p 507
Style too verbose & would-be edifying.
16 p 508
||The slave-intelligentsia as heroic leaders.||
Aristocratic ethos does not fit a plebian hero, even in
myth. Christ has the prophetic Jewish sublimity which is
not aristocratic but mystical.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:353
17 p 527, marked
||The pagan roots of certain scenes in the Gospels. Why are they there?||
These scenes which [an author] has failed to knit up into the main fabric
of his work may have been virtually impossible for him to leave out for
the reason that his public may have expected to find them in any
Volksbuch in which the hero was presented in the role of a saviour.
The evangelists are not professional men of letters: they
are docile to tradition and report; they look only for
explanation in the fulfilment of old prophecies. If the
faithful adopted a pagan picture, they copied it.
18 p 529
||A Jewish caption supplied to a Hellenic tableau? This with reference to
scenes from Christ’s passion.||
Then not even S. John never felt that anything was
Hellenic: they thought it was original in Jesus: & their one
assurance was that Jesus had been the Messiah.
19 p 538, marked
[…] if, […] the Parables have been recognized by the Church as being
revelation without being history, are we debarred from accepting other
elements in the Gospels on the same footing because, unlike the
Parables, they do not proclaim themselves to be fiction, but are cast, like
epic poetry or ‘folk-tales’, in the form of statements of fact?
Inspiration understood critically, but attributed mythically
to a divine intention.
Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom
Volumes XIV, XVI, XVII, XXV. 1935–50
London: 1921. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Mark Twain
The Prince and the Pauper
New York: 1909. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
New York: 1912. Waterloo. No marginalia.
2:354
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s Autobiography
New York: 1924. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer Abroad and Other Stories
New York: 1924. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Umfazi [Clara Urquhart]
Amadodana Ami (My Sons)
N.p. 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Hans Vaihinger
Die Philosophie des als ob
Leipzig: 1922. Georgetown. 352 marginalia.
[Usually I have followed C. K. Ogden’s translation, The Philosophy of ‘As
If,’ London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner (1924), 1952.]
[General Introduction.]
1 p 4, marked Z
It is the purpose of the organic function of thought to change and elaborate the
perceptual material into those ideas, associations of ideas, and conceptual constructs which, while consistent and coherent among themselves are, as the phrase
goes and as we can also say provisionally, “clothed in objectivity.”
What rot! All this is a matter of words.
2p5
||We cannot know, but can only infer, objective reality. Therefore,||
thought has fulfilled its purpose when it has elaborated the given sensationcomplexes into valid concepts, general judgments, and cogent conclusions, and
has produced such a world that objective happenings can be calculated and our
behaviour successfully carried out in relation to phenomena.
Is the man mad? Does he suppose animals & children, or
even professors, don’t jump until they have formed universal ideas and passed universal judgements?
3 p 6, underlined
||According to Schopenhauer, the will|| is the only metaphysical principle,
and a will that is blind and illogical, so the brain with all its ideas is in his
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:355
opinion essentially nichts als ein Werkzeuge des willens, das ihm zu
dienen und das Leben des Individuums zu erhalten hat.1
How can an instrument serve a will that has not yet the
idea of what it wants? Has the Will an articulation of its
own to begin with? Are its phases prearranged in the
order of space, time, species, and individual, before the
idea has arisen, to express that order in consciousness? If
so Will is but a romantic name for the realm of matter.
1
… nothing but a tool, whose function it is to serve the will and preserve the life of
the individual.
4p7
Durch diese Reduktion der Begriffe: Denken, Handeln, Beobachten
u. s. w. auf schliesslich physiologische Elemente, auf Empfindungen,
gewinnen wir allein den richtigen Massstab für die Abschätzung der
logischen Arbeit, […].1
Utter confusion of terms.
1
Only through the reduction of the concepts thought, action, observation, etc. to
elements ultimately psychological, to sensations, may we obtain a correct standard
for the evaluation of work in logic ….
5 p 8, underlined
||One might define the purpose of thought as|| the elaboration and adjustment of the material of sensation for the attainment eines reicheren und
volleren Empfindungslebens.1
Who wants this, and what is the use of it? Doesn’t the fool
see that it is the complicated vegetation of material
organs, like flowers, that introduces & perpetuates all this
sensitivity? Cf. sex.
1
… of a richer and fuller life of sensation.
6 p 9, underlined
||The fact that|| die organische Funktion des Denkens meistenteils
unbewusst verläuft.1
Indeed!
1
… for the most part, the organic function of thought takes place unconsciously.
7 pp 9–10, marked
Should the product of thought finally enter consciousness, or should consciousness
momentarily accompany the processes of logical thought, this light only penetrates
to the shallows, and the actual fundamental processes are carried on in the darkness of the unconscious.
This is honest, but fatal.
2:356
George Santayana’s Marginalia
8 p 10
Es handelt sich für die Logik nun gerade darum, die dunkel und unbewusst arbeitende Tätigkeit des Denkens zu beleuchten und die kunstvollen Methoden, die sinnreichen Wege kennen zu lernen, welche jene
unbewusst wirkende Tätigkeit einschlägt, um ihr Ziel zu erreichen.1
Freudian logic, i.e. myth.
1
Logic is specifically concerned to light up the dark and unconsciously working
activity of thought, and to study the ingenious methods and devices which that
unconscious activity employs in order to attain its object.
9 p 22, underlined
[Part I: “Basic Principles.”]
Logical processes are a part of the cosmic process and have as their immediate
purpose [Zweck] the preservation and enrichment of the life of organisms; […].
Which? What is a Zweck?
10 p 23
Utility [of fictional constructs] is then a myth, and whatever
conception you arrive at you call the reality, adaptation to
which was useful to produce this very conception. Oh
sapience!
11 p 25
[“Artificial Classification.”]
Confusion. One question is: Is nature articulate? Another
question is: can or does the human mind discover that
articulation, and express it in its existential terms? To the
first question I answer Yes, to the second, No. The articulations of sense & thought are aesthetic, not material. They
are literary descriptions of [word cropped]
12 p 27, marked Z
||Fiction treated as hypotheses unrealized are false hypotheses.|| They
derive real value only if one realizes that they have been deliberately set up as
provisional representations, which in the future are to make space for better and
more natural systems.
In another sphere, perhaps: i.e. in psychology or knowledge of discourse.
13 p 42
[Of “indispensable fictions”:]
Substance, above all, is such a fiction, as Fichte indicates its nature naïvely when
he says, “The ceaseless change in the stream of time must be given something of a
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:357
permanent and unchangeable nature to support it.” (Wesen d. Gelehrten 6.
Vorlesung.)
Permanence is important to substance because active
(which posits a substantial medium) is prospective and
preservative: it posits the continued efficacy of the
changes it initiates. No absolutely changeless material
state need be contained in this lasting substance.
14 p 42
[Apropos nothing in paticular:]
Thought is talk.
15 pp 42–43, doubly marked
||By a different method, Vaihinger reaches the conclusion of Kant: categories do not assist in grasping reality, and as analogical fiction, they
cannot produce true knowledge.||
Yes. Not for literal knowledge, which is impossible of anything but essence.
16 p 51, marked
||Discussion of “élan vital,” vital force. Du Bois-Reymond quoted:||
“Force is simply a disguised outlet for the irresistible tendency to personification;
a rhetorical device, as it were, of our brain which seizes upon a figurative expression because the idea is not clear enough to be directly formulated.”
A hard blow and a soft blow are identical approaches and
contacts of visible objects? There are inner reactions of the
body that supply the notion of strain or force. Of course,
used as a symbol in physics it is allegorical—like all perception and discourse.
17 p 67, underlined
||Ideals are fictions, but useful in history.|| The ideal is a Begriffsbildung1
? contradictory in itself and with reality, but it has irresistible power. The ideal
^
is a^ practical fiction.
The pretty image is one thing: the state of the world which
would be best if and when it arose is another thing. The
latter is “The ideal”.
1
Conceptual image.
18 p 68, underlined Z
The logical optimist will be depressed by this formula [of practical fictions] compressed into a few sentences. Die Wissenschaft geht unbarmherzig vorwärts.1
2:358
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Heaven won’t fall on your account, my boy.
1
Science moves forward mercilessly.
19 p 69
||In Kantian ethics, morality always rests on a fictional basis, yet we
must act as if God imposed duties on us and as if we will be judged and
punished for immorality.|| As soon as this as if is transformed into a because,
its ethical character vanishes and it becomes a matter of our lower interests, mere
egoism.
This violent pose is a remnant of superstition, as in Kant.
20 p 98
It is not possible without the help of discursive thought to make ourselves intelligible to others or even to think or to calculate.
Other people? What fiction is that?
21 p 98
The importance of the logical function does not prevent it from recognizing its own
nothingness. Man’s most fallacious conclusion has always been that because a
thing is important it is also right.
What a fiction!
22 p 101, underlined and marked
Das diskursive Denken schafft sich selbst immer feinere Mittel, um mit
diesen die Wirklichkeit zu bearbeiten, zu umspannen, zu umfassen: es ist
ein logischer Fehler, das Mittel, das Instrument mit dem Gegenstande
selbst zu werwechseln, zu dessen Bearbeitung allein es berufen ist.1
Yes
Why is contradiction impossible in “reality” but harmless
in thought?
1
Discursive thought creates more and more delicate means of encompassing and
dealing with reality, and it is a logical error to confuse the means, the instrument,
with what the instrument was created to deal with.
23 p 112, marked
||Kant’s Ding an sich, the thing in itself: only sensations are real.||
Confusion of origin and meaning of sensations. To ask for
their origin is to have accepted their meaning: it is to have
posited the natural world. Otherwise no origin could be
found or demanded. But this acceptance of the meaning
of sensation is necessary if you are to think or believe anything, or to write any stupid book like this.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:359
24 p 113, top
It is one last instance of hypostatizing given essences, to
hypostatize our sense of ignorance into the Unknowable.
The object meant is the one common intended object of
all these descriptions—The world found about us in action.
There is an unknowable residue in the best known things,
and in the most charming people.
25 p 113
||For Kant, the Ding an sich was an absolutely necessary fiction, without
which we cannot think or speak; the presented world is ungraspable.||
i.e. The Unknowable is required to keep up the false sense
of subjectivity in regard to natural things, which it is the
ghost of.
26 p 135, marked
[Separation of scientific from aesthetic fictions.]
Just as the aesthetician firmly decides between good and bad pictures, so the
logician decides between good and bad fictions.
Very good: now let us see how you manage it.
27 p 136, underlined Z and doubly marked
Die logische Wahrheit X eines Begriffes folgt demselben psychologis^ ^ die ästhetische Schönheit—nämlich dem
chen Grundgesetze, wie
Grundgesetz, das in der Seele das Zweckmässigste beharrt.1
Science is human, but truth is not.
1
The logical truth of a concept follows the same psychological ground rule as that
of aesthetic beauty—the rule that in the mind the most purposeful perseveres.
28 p 144
[The difference between fiction and reality.]
A hypothesis is directed toward reality, i.e. the ideational construct contained in
its claims, or hopes, to coincide with some perception in the future.
If this means “reduced to intuition” it is impossible. But a
fiction may be reduced to its initial instance, as matter to
perception of a stone. The stone is not a hypothesis, but it
is a “fiction” in so far as it is an existence described by a
given essence.
29 p 159
The impulse to unify, and to substitute some single essence
for any manifold is doubtless a physiological necessity: the
2:360
George Santayana’s Marginalia
equilibrium or organization of movements is a new system
of movement, expressed in a fresh intuition.
30 p 166
[“Linguistic Forms of the Fiction.”]
The form of the atomic fiction is that matter must be treated as it would be, if there
were atoms of which it was imagined to be composed. The form of the hypothesis
connected with this assumption is: only of the presupposition that atoms exist and
only if they do exist, can the empirical appearance of material phenomena be
explained.
This is still a hypothesis in the air: a positive hypothesis
would say: “Such and such facts will be observed” and the
intervening machinery would be fictitious. A hypothesis is
a prophecy modified by a fiction.
31 p 178, doubly marked
[Outline of a “General Theory of Fictional Constructs.”]
[…] the psyche is a machine which is continually improving itself, and whose
purpose is to perform as safely, expeditiously, and with the minimum expenditure of energy, the movements necessary for the preservation of the organism; […].
Not bad
32 p 179
To regard ideas as ends in themsleves is an error; and finally the theoretical is only
a means to the practical. As soon as we treat the problem seriously from this standpoint, as first adopted by Kant and Fichte, several difficulties and obscurities
become clear.
The complication in the psyche which renders it intelligent is confused with the intuition involved.
33 p 184
||The formation of a Gleichheitszentrum, or similarity-center, in the
psyche.||
What rot is this?
34 p 190, marked
Aenesidem correctly reduced Kant’s philosophy to the following: the necessity of
being thought is by no means the same as existence [Sein].
This is true even if Sein is sensation elsewhere.
35 p 191, marked
||Thought needs mental aids in order to attain its purpose.|| It is true that
Locke, Berkeley and Hume had partially recognized this better and more clearly
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:361
than Kant. In Kant one looks in vain for the modern point of view which regards
thought as a means to an end.
This is the point to attack.
36 p 193
[End of page and chapter:]
Specious necessity & specious inconceivability are not
authoritive over things. The obvious & the inconceivable
are proper to animal faculty—they are subjective. But how
does “utility” help them to become true? It does not: but
a prosperous mode of imagination expresses a habit at
least not fatal to the animal, and so has some slight value
as a symptom for the order of nature.
37 p 217, underlined
[“Antithetic Error.”]
Gehen ist ein reguliertes Fallen: […].1
Cribbed from Schopenhauer, if it is not older.
1
Walking is a regulated falling.
38 p 220
[“The Law of Ideational Shifts.”]
The psychical elements can be divided into fixed and well-established ideas or
groups of ideas. […] On the one side are groups of ideas which are without hesitation regarded as the expression of reality; on the other side ideas whose objective
reality may be doubted. The former are dogmas, the latter hypotheses.
the elaborate history of the mind is postulated in silence.
39 p 220, underlined
Die Seele hat die Tendenz,1 to bring all ideational contents into equilibrium
and to establish an unbroken connection between them.
N.B.
1
The mind has a tendency ….
40 p 228, doubly marked
To maintain a fiction as a fiction implies a highly developed logical mind, one
that does not surrender too quick to the impulse to equilibrium, but distinguishes
with care means from end. To maintain a purely critical standpoint as represented by Hume and Kant, great mental energy is needed. All attempts after Kant
are nothing but attempts, and premature, to resolve the condition of tension,
which is uncomfortable and prevents mental laziness.
N.B. Quote
2:362
George Santayana’s Marginalia
41 p 279, underlined and marked Z
||The origin of the idea of sensation itself as a fiction is a metaphysical
joke.|| Durch die „zufällige Ansicht“ der Philosophen kann nicht die
Entstehung der Empfindungen aus einer Abweisung einer fingierten
Störung erklärt werden.1
Not if you believe nothing: but V. is a credulous man. It is
true that to hypostatize the Life of Reason would yield an
absurd metaphysics. What you must hypostatize is physical
substance.
1
One cannot explain through the “accidental opinion” of philosophers the origin of
sensations from a refusal of an imaginary disturbance.
42 p 290, marked Z
How can it be that although in thinking we make use of a falsified reality, the
practical result proves it to be correct? The solution must lie in the thought-process.
The course of nature is unchangeable and proceeds according to hard and unalterable laws. Nature’s will is iron, but thought is an adaptable, pliant and
adjustable organic function.
What is “nature” here?
43 p 291, underlined
||Vaihinger writes of|| Denkinstruments1 […].
language!
1
Thought-instruments.
44 p 297, top
The art of remaining an idiot when you are a learned
man.
45 p 301
[“Categories as Fictions.”]
Who authorized the use of “white” as a thing, or of “sweet” as an attribute?
Who indeed?
46 p 307
A contradiction exists between the thing and its attributes thought of in isolation.
For what can “thing” be without “attribute,” or vice-versa? The tension is here
released in the judgment, “Sugar is sweet”, and we believe that this constitutes
understanding, knowledge. […] Thought has now corrected its error.
Strange that these mistaken people get on so well! The
egotistical blunder is yours, my man.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:363
47 p 313, underlined
[“Categories as Analogical Fictions.”]
Die Kategorien sind also keineswegs ein angeborener Besitz der Seele,
sondern sie sind im Lauf der Zeit angewandte und ausgewählte
Analogien, nach denen die Geschehnisse erfasst werden.1
What on earth is the good on this system?
1
The categories are in no sense innate possessions of the mind, but analogies selected
and applied in the course of time, according to which events have been explained.
48 p 317, marked Z
Criticism allows us to prove that analogies themselves cannot be understood, and
further that they have been taken from fields of knowledge of too intricate a nature.
? Even the most useful of analogies, that of causality, the only one that in mod^ ^science has survived the general ruin, had its origin in a field of knowledge far
ern
too complicated to allow it to serve for explanation. It arose in inner experience
and action, which is the product of a highly complicated form of being. These
expressions are used today only symbolically, to designate an unalterable relation
of sequence.
True of metaphorical moral “causes”—not of the order of
genesis in nature; not in sensation. What a muddle to
regard the reckoning of material events as a means of
bringing order into sensations where there is no order.
49 p 318
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas?1
1
Happy the man who can know the cause of things?
50 p 320, underlined and marked Z
[“The Practical Utility of the Fiction of Categories.”]
Nach rein „psychomechanischen“ Grundgesetzen categories? der
^
^ is
Verbindung1 fusion, interpenetration, association, etc. a knot,
so to speak,
formed in the conceptual stream; […].
Very doubtful literary psychology.
1
According to the purely “psycho-mechanical” principles of combination, ….
51 p 323
“Action” is a desire for sensations to come? Where is the
sugar when I have sucked the sweet? Vain hypothesis!
Sweet fiction!
52 p 324, top
“Why should thy avid dreaming logic speak of honey?
^
^
Sweetness is all!”
2:364
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Plato might say this, as well as Aristippus.
53 p 324, bottom
The lying thought itself the only truth.
That you’re a liar is all the truth of you.
54 pp 326–27, marked
Allein dieser Schluss von der Ergiebigkeit einer Vorstellung in der Praxis
auf ihre theoretische Wahrheit ist sehr unlogisch und beruht auf falschen
Beobachtungen.1
Very true: & this is the fallacy of pragmatism.
1
This conclusion as the result of a conception on its theoretical truth in practice is
very illogical and depends on false observations.
55 p 366
If a fiction is “useful” it must exhibit some analogy in the
order of the facts. This element in it will be literally true
and dogmatic. So the element of prophecy in a hypothesis. In both cases there is simply a truth conveyed in a
medium which has also a figurative linguistic or fictitious
side. Vaihinger is therefore either announcing with trumpets that 1 + 1 = 2, that expression and knowledge are not
identical with their themes; or else a perfect falsehood,
that these have no analogy or relevance whatever to those
themes.
56 p 367, underlined and marked
[“Lotze’s ‘Hypothetical Animal.’”]
||That fictional animal is useful for the theory of knowledge, according to
Laas, because by|| developing the consequences of an impossible assumption, a
false Kantian doctrine can be disproved: that an intelligence automatically provided with categories was necessary in order to arrive at objective knowledge; „das
Lotzesche Tier, mit unserem Verstande ausgerüstet, wird an der Hand
des unmittelbar Gegebenen sich wohl über objektive Ruhe und
Bewegung ein Urteil verschaffen können“, ohne jene von Kant als
notwendig erachteten kategorialen Funktionen.1
[In left margin between “Verstande …” and “kategorialen …”:] ?
Did Kant conceive the categories as existing before they
are employed? Aren’t they mere names for the actual
intellect?
1
“Lotze’s animal, endowed with our understanding, would be in a position by
means of the actual data to arrive at some idea of objective rest and motion” without those categorical functions which Kant regarded as necessary.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:365
57 p 381
Between fictions & hypothesis, & before either of them,
comes description. As an indication of an object & its
locus, description is a hypothesis; as a search for aspects
and epithets, it is a fiction: but in itself, in its logical & cognitive force, it is a poetic use of the fictions to paint the
hypothetical fact. This “painting” is genial caricature in
human terms; but its subject-matter is not human: hence
the charm and audacity of the picture.
58 p 387, marked Z
[“Abstractions as Fictions.”]
Die Realisation blosser Möglichkeitsabstraktionen hat zu den törichsten
Fragen geführt, wie immer dies bei der Hypostase solcher Fiktionen der
Fall ist; […].1
Poor dear essences! But these old ladies move in good
society: Aristotle & Co frequent them, although Vaihinger
refuses to know them.
1
The realization of bare abstract possibilities leads to the most insane questions, as
is always the case in the hypostasis of such fictions; ….
59 p 472
[“The Fiction of Pure, Absolute Space.”]
Since the primary characteristic of a useful hypothesis is its freedom from contradiction, such a contradictory concept as an absolute, unoccupied, mathematical
space cannot be a hypothesis.
Why not? Every thing imaginable, thinkable, or mentionable is, in its essence, an immediate datum.
60 p 606
The “utility” of the Als Ob is perhaps reducible to a verbal
utility or convenience: there are terms in which reckoning
can go on, (like x’s & y’s) which are avowedly not the forms
of things. So that no illusion or concrete fiction is
demanded at all.
61 p 630
||Kant’s use of fictions in his Critiques: || Reason easily perceives the idealistic
and purely imaginary elements in an idea of God. It cannot be persuaded by
imaginary elements alone to accept at once as a real entity a product of its own
creation. Reason thinks it has dogmatic proofs of such an entity and of its right
to assert the reality of a mere idea. While the procedure is false, it is also useful.
2:366
George Santayana’s Marginalia
e.g. The interior of the earth is a hypothetical object: the
parallels & meridians on its surface are ideas. God, the
good, etc. are like the parallels & meridians.
62 p 652
Every thing may be only ideal, but in that case the glory
of pursuing an ideal is a question of disposition. You may,
if you think the game worth playing. There is nothing sublime in this.
63 p 664
The element of compulsion (inconsistent with autonomy)
which lies in the categorical imperative is a survival in
Kant of what his own philosophy makes out to be superstition—obligation imposed by authority and threats.
64 p 668
||A useful fiction is the idea of Zweckmässigkeit,1 the central idea of the
Critique of Judgment. Kant quoted:|| The particular, empirical laws of Nature
must be in accord with such unity as the understanding provides.
Instance of existence in an irrelevant medium. If laws
were facts they would lie in the medium of their terms,
whereas they lie (if they are facts at all) only in the mind
that thinks them, and which they do not reveal.
1
Fitness, suitability.
65 p 683, marked Z
||Kant quoted, from “Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Traktats
zum ewigen Frieden in der Philosophie.”|| A postulate is an a priori given
without the possibility of explaining itself as a more ready, more practical imperative. [The German defies translation, and Ogden makes no attempt.] We do not
postulate things, nor above all the design of any manner of object, but only a rule
for the action [Handlung] of a subject.
N.B. This is the radical back-handedness of Kant. You
know when there is nothing to know knowledge and
^
believe^ in belief without believing in anything.
The age is full of people who believe in the Church without believing her doctrines, and are shocked at atheism,
although God is entirely absent from their own belief.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:367
66 p 684
||The Als Ob functions in Kant like the notion that one believes in God
as though there really were a God, and in the good as though the good
were decisive in the world.||
This is not implied in pursuing the good at hand. On the
contrary, if there was a Providence in everything, all
pursuit of goods would be illusory if not impious. The
contrary assumption is a mere local prejudice, not “critical philosophy”.
67 p 685, top
Kant is a dear old burrowing buzz-brain, but no guide.
68 p 707, marked
Finally the fiction of the idea of God reaches its climax in the idea of God as a
judge who punishes the world. As Kant says in his “final note,” the idea of a
divine penal justice is here personified: “it is not a special being who administers
it, for in that case conflicts would arise between it and legal principles. It is justice regarded as substance […] which passes judgment.”
Excellent, far better than I had supposed was forthcoming
in Kant. Why, then, all that other stuff?
Only the atheist, if he is a moral fanatic, believes in God.
Ordinary believers, qui pretendent se sauver,1 are atheists.
Moses the prince of atheists.
1
Who pretend to save themselves.
69 pp 722–23, underlined and doubly marked
||Reflections on the ‘Ding an sich’ in Kant’s posthumous papers.|| „Der
Gegenstand an sich = x ist das Sinnenobjekt an sich selbst, aber nicht als
ein anderes Objekt, sondern eine andere Vorstellungsart.“ In diesem
Sinne nennt Kant das Wahrnehmungsding „ein Ganzes der Anschauung,
welches objektiv bloss Erscheinung ist, dem der Gegenstand als Ding an
sich lediglich in der Idee korrespondierend gedacht wird.“ „Das Ding an
sich ist nicht ein anderes Objekt, sondern eine andere Art, sich selbst
zum Objekt zu machen, nicht objectum noumenon, sondern der Akt des
Verstandes, der das Objekt der Sinnenanschauung zum blossen
Phänomen macht, ist das intelligible Objekt.“1
This is very important, if Kant’s constant doctrine. Isn’t it
rather one more inconsistency?
1
“The object-in-itself = x is the sense-object in itself, not however as another object
but rather as another mode of conception.” In this sense Kant calls the entity of perception “a unit of perception, which objectively is a mere appearance, to which the
2:368
George Santayana’s Marginalia
object as Thing-in-itself is thought of as corresponding purely in idea.” “The
Thing-in-itself is not another object but another manner of becoming the object. It
is not an objectum noumenon. The act of reason which makes of the object of senseperception “a mere phenomenon, is the intelligible object.”
70 p 743, underlined and marked
||Forberg’s Kant: Whether the striving for heavenly virtue is in itself
virtue, or whether virtue exists in itself. If so, is the aspiration pointless?||
Der Gegner, der Vertreter der gemeinen Menschennatur, wird daraufhin,
wie Forberg ausführt, sagen: „Das nicht. Aber es ist seitdem unvernünftig
geworden.“1
Yes: unless the pursuit is a new object of desire for its own
sake, as in a paper-chase. This is what Kant (a frivolous
old fraud) really meant.
1
The opposer, the representative of common human nature will respond to that, as
Forberg says, “Not like that. It has long since become absurd.”
71 p 745, marked
||In the religion of Als Ob, the aspiration to God creates the rules or laws,
the success of which no one can judge, but the aspiration is its own end.||
? This is Als Ob pure.
Here again he relapses into the idea that it is in the hope
and belief that it can come that you try to bring it.
72 p 751
||Vaihinger writes that Forbergian religion is at once positive and pessimistic.||
Heroic pessimism or romantic virtue. “All is madness, but
what a fine madman am I ! ”
73 p 752
||On the interpretation in Forberg of Kant’s|| true sceptical atheism.
All Catholic readers of Kant have always understood this.
But few Catholics have read him.
74 p 761
||On the mythical aspect of Christ’s life, his suffering and death, according to F. A. Lange.||
Just what I have always thought and said.
75 p 761, marked
The weakness of American pragmatism is that it does not look into the double
aspect of belief, but resolves scientific concepts of truth completely into the relativity of religious concepts of truth […].
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:369
Very good. James couldn’t understand how, in the Life of
Reason, I treated science otherwise than religion.
76 p 766, top
The whole polemic against materialism rests in the wilful
confusion of the idea of matter with the object meant, of
the term with the fact. Every idea projected upon the
energetic object or dynamic thing is an idea of matter.
These ideas must change with every sense and with every
theory: but they all have the same object.
77 p 773, underlined
||On Nietzsche and the will to appearance.|| Zur Kunst wie zum Leben ist
der Schein, die Illusion die notwendigste Voraussetzung: […].1
No: this is characteristic of German wrong-headedness, to
call a concomitant effect a presupposition because it may
be a ground for giving a certain name (“art”) to the operation.
1
In art as in life, appearance, illusion is the most necessary presupposition.
78 p 781
This notion of refuting a thing is grotesque: you may find
ideal difficulties in the idea.
79 p 783, marked Z
||The persistence, the use, and honoring of fictions.||
“What a hero I am to live on lies, which I know to be lies!”
This is the spirit of the arrogant villain of melodrama, so
prevalent in contemporary Germany. If they only knew
how ugly it is!
80 p 790
[Final page, still on Nietzsche.]
If he had lived to see The truth, he would have been like
ME.1
1
The best summary of Santayana’s reading of Vaihinger is contained in an
as yet (2010) unpublished essay, “Vaihinger,” a thirteen-page autograph
manuscript on deposit in Special Collections, Columbia University Library.
In the essay he calls the philosophy of Als Ob the “philosophy of bluff.”
2:370
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Paul Valéry
Charmes
Paris: 1926. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 p 118
[Santayana translates the final verse of eight of the poem, “Le Rameur.”]
Leur nuit passe longtemps. L’âme baisse sous eux
Ses sensibles soleils et ses promptes paupières,
Quand, par le mouvement qui me revêt de pierres,
Je m’enfonce au mépris de tant d’azur oiseux.
Threading their length of night, and passing through,
Th’eyelids laid low their suns and fain were furl’d.
The deep cool garment of that stony world
Wrapped me in scorn of so much flaunting blue.
Threading their length of night, my soul pass’d through,
Her eyelids sudden furl’d: her two suns set:
And, as a garment down’d, that stony net
Wrapp’d her in scorn of so much flaunting blue.
Paul Valéry
Monsieur Teste
Paris: 1927. Waterloo. Four marginalia.
1 p 41, underlined
L’incohérence d’un discours dépend de celui qui l’écoute. L’esprit me
paraît ainsi fait qu’il ne peut être incohérent pour soi-même.1
i.e. for the complete psychic process, which is not a spirit.
“For me” = for my reflective self. In my autobiography,
however complete, there would be much incoherence,
which an omniscient psychist w’d find coherent enough.
1
The incoherence of a speech depends on who is listening to it. In spirit, it seemed to
me that his discourse could not be incoherent to him.
2 p 60, marked
What would be more tiresome than to conceive of a multitude of minds?
Paul Valéry
Variété II
Paris: 1930. Waterloo. Twelve marginalia.
1 p 85, marked
[On “Stendhal”:]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:371
Se connaître n’est que se prévoir; se prévoir aboutit à jouer un rôle.1
1
To know oneself is only to predict; to predict future action ends in playing a role.
2 p 104
The cult of specific place and of ancestors has not been restored, for railways and
the disorderly effects of modern economies have still not caused many to feel the
need, more or less profound, for roots more or less real, or the nostalgia for a
practically vegetable state which those who have undergone it have not always
much cared for.
Cf. my fondness and dislike for Avila.
3 p 117, marked
Comédie et convention consistent dans une certaine substitution de ce que
l’on sait à ce que l’on est,—et l’on ne sait pas ce que l’on est.1
1
Comedy and convention consist in a certain substitution of what one knows for
what one is,—and one does not know what one is.
4 p 120
||Stendhal witnessed the establishment of political parties and of parliamentary government on the ruins of régimes.||
Last phase of the Reformation.
5 p 134, marked Z
||Stendhal’s characters look for the evils in human nature.|| Un «psychologue» à la Stendhal, tout sensualiste qu’il est, a besoin de la mauvaiseté
de notre nature.1
Why evils? Why not simply facts? To think facts evil is a
remnant of dogma.
1
One of Stendhal’s “psychologues,” complete sensualist though he is, requires the
nastiness in our nature.
Paul Valéry
L’Idée fixe
Paris: 1934. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
Paul Valéry
Variété IV
Paris: 1938. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 29, marked
||On the uniqueness of French atmosphere for the cultivation of letters.||
The world generously admits that we represent, in a time that is lacking in grace,
2:372
George Santayana’s Marginalia
a particular cult of exquisite things, and that we make favorites both artists and
amateurs happy in their fate, their skies clear, their countryside filled with beauty,
[…].
La France bordel del’esprit.1
1
Brothel of the spirit.
Paul Valéry
Introduction à la poétique
Paris: 1938. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 37, marked
Perhaps if great men knew they were great, they would not find themselves great.
Paul Valéry
Lèttres à quelques-uns
Paris: 1952. Columbia. Twenty-five marginalia.
1 p 10, underlined
[Final three lines of Valéry’s sonnet, “Élévation de la lune.”]
Alors, Elle apparut! Hostie immense et blonde
Puis elle étincela, se détachant du monde
Car d’invisibles doigts l’élevaient vers les cieux!1
Cf. my first verses.
1
“Moon-rise.” Then she appeared! Huge and blonde sacrificial victim / Then she
sparkled, detaching herself from the world / For invisible fingers raised her toward
the skies!
2 p 61, marked
[Valéry to F. Vielé-Griffin, 1898:]
In these journalistic times people do not know how to think. They call republican
a little tyrant who speaks of liberty. They call the most obvious weakness power.
They often call it Nature to want easy work, or the desire to sell themselves and to
be considered men of genius of the day.
The curse of France, etc. etc.
3 p 99, marked
[Valéry to Albert Thibaudet, 1912:]
Mais une certaine heure sonna. Il y en eut qui parurent se réveiller en
sursaut. Quoi! j’ai 35, j’ai 40 ans! je ne suis ni riche ni célèbre. Je péris, si
je reste. Et toujours dominé, toujours conscient d’être moindre! Quelque
chose d’instinctif les précipita—au journal, au théâtre, aux centres
académiques, aux ministres, aux éditeurs, au public: à toutes les latrines
du troupeau….1
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:373
The fear of not being of one’s own time.
1
A certain time arrives. They seem to awaken with a start. What! I am 35, I am 40
years old. I am neither rich nor famous. I’ll die if I do nothing. And always oppressed,
always aware of being nobody. Some instinct hurries them on—to journalism, to the
theater, to the universities, to the ministries, to the publishing houses, to the public: to
all the latrines of the troop.
4 p 168
[To André Fontainas, c. 1927:]
||Valéry dislikes memories, either good or bad. The bad are painful, the
better memories are the worst. Reading pages that he wrote as a young
man produces his mood.||
There is something perverse in this perpetual unrest. An
initial error intolerance of human nature?
5 p 201
[To Jean Guéhenno, 5 March 1932:]
||On the idea that war and human progress tend to go together in the
minds of such as Maistre and Nietzsche.|| War is born from politics; politics,
such as it is, needs for its purposes credibility, excitability, emotion; it has to have
indignation, hatred, confidence, mirages.
A lion, an Ajax or a singer may be perfect without reaching nirvana.
6 p 202, marked
Je ne veux point être cru, pas plus que je ne veux croire.1
1
I do not at all want to be believed, any more than I want to believe.
7 p 208, underlined and doubly marked
[To Jean de la Tour, 28 July 1933:]
||Valéry writes that he has never published philosophical matter that did
not move his spirit.|| Le philosophe ne veut pas avouer qu’il fait et ne
peut faire qu’œuvre d’art et se refuse à centrer cette œuvre sur soi-même,
tel qu’il est. Je crois que prétendre à quelque chose de plus est une absurdité: Je préfère l’art avoué.1
1
The philosopher does not wish to aver that he makes, and can make only a work of
art, and refuses to center that work in himself, such as he is. I believe that to pretend
to anything more is an absurdity. I prefer avowed art.
8 p 243, marked
[To R. P. Rideau, 1943:]
||The index of Rideau’s book on Valéry causes him surprise, self-opposition, and sets forth contradictions.|| Je me permets de penser qu’il y a de
la pauvreté d’esprit à être toujours d’accord avec soi-même.1
2:374
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Cf. the opening of my “Change of Heart”. Absolute spirit
rejects all truth because it admits no objective reality.
1
I permit myself to think that it is one poor in spirit who is always consistent in
himself.
9 p 244, marked
La logique n’est pas un des moindres pièges que nous trouvions sur les
voies du verbe.1
1
Logic is not one of the lesser traps on the paths of the word.
Georges Valois
Le Père
Paris: 1913. Georgetown. Eight marginalia.
1 p 39
une seule religion? une seule science?
All this is weak: you merely say what it had to be.
Roger Vercel
Bertrand of Brittany: A Biography of Messire du Guesclin
London: 1934. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]
Carmina omnia
Paris: 1858. Waterloo. One marginale.
[End-paper:]
From Joe Stickney Paris September 1902
Vergil
The Georgics of Vergil
Translated by R. D. Blackmore.
London: 1931. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Gore Vidal
The Season of Comfort
New York: 1949. Waterloo. One marginale.
1 p 211, marked
||In Vidal’s novel, the owner of a “modern though not, chronologically
speaking, contemporary” art gallery remarks:|| “I don’t see any great
sense of decay or birth in the Americans; one must be aware of one or
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:375
the other or both. Since our period is one of decay the European artists
paint the disintegration of Western civilization but here, where in many
ways the decay is more rapid, the artists, for the most part, pretend to
ignore it. In America there is such a youth and beauty fetish. It’s like an
old man, now impotent, who surrounds himself with beautiful young
girls whose faces are only clumsy facsimiles of his desire. Your country is
in love with beautiful boys who wear unstarched collars. I see so much
exciting decay here, the accelerated rot of the New World and I think it
a pity that so few of your painters seem aware of it. Your writer Faulkner
is the only one aware of this destruction and he isn’t particularly liked in
this country. Your country should be producing Joyces and Picassos but
it hasn’t. Well, perhaps in time. You are still infatuated with youth; you
still think you’re young and new: as though you could escape your
degenerate ancestry; you brought decay with you from Europe: you’re
not new at all and certainly not young. This is still the fin de siècle, the
transition, and there’s no sign of a new messiah yet (God help us if it’s
the Russians). Christianity is almost dead; it has one final fight in it and
then dissolution. No, I show the pictures of the French and the Spanish
because they are decaying with considerable ingenuity and faultless
taste.”
Peter Viereck
Terror and Decorum: Poems 1940–1948
New York: 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Peter Viereck
Strike through the Mask!
New York: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Peter Viereck
The First Morning: New Poems
New York: 1952. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Leone Vivante
Note sopra la originalità del pensiero
Rome: 1925. Georgetown. Thirty-three marginalia.
[Perhaps one-half the marginalia are translations of Italian words.]
2:376
George Santayana’s Marginalia
1 p 25
||Vivante discusses the idea of “scelta” (selection) in consciousness, and
asks whether it is possible for there to be|| «selezione incosciente» (espressione inintelligibile!).1
Is conscious selection intelligible? The attention that wanders over given elements may be an incandescence playing over a field not given.
1
Unconscious selection (an unintelligible expression).
2 p 43
||On the relationship between perception, logic, thought, and the character of the thinker; the “spiritual reality” at work.||
Yes: This instance of thought can’t borrow its logic from
the logic of other instances or from an absolute logic other
than its own.
3 p 47, marked
||The spiritual principle,|| infinitamente originale, essenziale, che ha una
intrinseca necessità o carattere […] e non strumentale.1
Its essence, by which it is known & distinguished in eternity.
1
Infinitely original, essential, having an intrinsic necessity or character … is not
instrumental.
4 p 48
[Santayana paraphrases, sympathetically, into his own philosophical
language, words he has used and will use repeatedly in others’ studies
of thought-processes.]
Every given essence is an original & eternally itself.
5 p 64, marked X
Soltanto una necessità-finalità di valori, intrinseca, infinitamente originaria, soltanto questa profonda necessità, questa eternità nell’atto, questa
soltanto fa l’uomo integro, non monco, non goffo, nei suoi movimenti
non arbitrario e inconsulto….1
These two sections are mystical in the bad sense—intuition
becomes Schwärmerei.2
1
Only an ultimate necessity of values, intrinsic, infinitely original, only this the
integral man, not incomplete, not clumsy, undertakes in movements un-arbitrary
and well-considered.
2
Gush.
6 p 83, marked Z
[On muddy thinking. Santayana sums up:]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:377
An Italian is a kind of man, a man a kind of animal, an
animal a kind of creature endowed with sensibility: Q.E.D.
7 p 84, marked Z
||Eyes are not only to see with, but we have them|| as instruments of life,
instruments to accomplish an end.
Confusion: You see because an animal so endowed has a
Spiritual life, which his eyes are instruments of: but the
demand for eyes is nonsense.
8 pp 173–74
A truth reveals itself immediately, but not without some sense of victory. But its
name assuredly is liberty, liberation coming to oneself power is asserted,
^
^
a value, implied force or vocation;
grace or merit.
9 p 250
[Santayana’s paraphrase of a long paragraph:]
That is: choice is not between given alternatives, but is
instinctive—expressive of a physical affinity.
10 p 251, underlined
[…] valore come causa; […].1
Affinity: I think as my physical nature prompts, in its service.
1
Values as cause.
11 p 275, marked
[Santayana’s concise reduction of 200 words of Vivante:]
Faith is imposed by a vital requirement or instinct,
because I am acting out my faith before I express it dogmatically.
Leone Vivante
Studi sulle precognizioni
Florence: 1937. Waterloo. Twenty-five marginalia.
1 p 45, underlined
The ineluctable fact does not prove determinism. […] Fact implies some thing as
an obscure will which opposes our own, indicating an obscure willed reality final,
spirituale; […].
Rather, superstitious because the separate absolute predicted event has impressed the speaker or is hugged by
one of his passions.
2:378
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2 p 110, marked
Ammesso che la figura del sogno non abbia voluto imbastire una commedia, le sue parole sembrano supporre:
1) voluntà minori (quella del defunto) che interferiscono, in modo
sopranormale, modificando parzialmente l’avvenimentto;
2) uni più forte precisa volontà, o altrimenti un’anticipazione totale, o
di più largo giro, e di più oscura natura;1
Vivante is mad.
1
Suppose that the figure in a dream had not wanted to sketch a comedy, his words
might seem thus:
1) the lesser will (that of the dead) which would interfere, in a super-normal
manner, partially modifying the introduction;
2) a rather more exact will, or otherwise a total anticipation, or given another
twist and a darker nature; [All in the service of how to interpret psychic
material.]
3 p 179
||Thought is not art, but artifice.||
Aesthete not craftsman—true of Vivante.
4 p 184
[Santayana translates concisely:]
Matter is the “will” to take a form.
5 p 187
||How a work of art comes into being.||
Imagination is first hand, not second hand experience or
creation.
6 p 188, marked Z
Half-right. Images are confused with essences. Nature pursues chosen essences: images are only glimpses of those
(or other) essences, & caricatures of them.
7 p 194, underlined
||It is the function of the mind to be open to receiving images as though
they were orders, to retain them in memory, and|| a custodirli in istrati di
coscienza meno facilmente accessibili, […].1
An order, my friend, is not an image but a threatened compulsion. It scares the psyche, and canalises it—deprives it
of fabulating with a good conscience.
1
To care for them in the strata of the mind least easy of access ….
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:379
8 p 196, marked Z
Tropes are not adaptations: they are experiments.
9 p 200
||Memory and forgetfulness.||
Why does old age make me forget at once what I set about
doing?
Leone Vivante
Indétermination et création
Translated by Lorenzo Ercole Lanza
Paris: 1939. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Leone Vivante
La poesia inglese
ed il suo contributo alla conoscenza dello spirito
Florence: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Leone Vivante
Notes on the Originality of Thought:
The Concept of Internal Necessity, Poetic Thought and Constructive Thought
Translated by Arthur Brodrick Bullock
London: 1927. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
The Aztec and Maya Papermakers
New York: 1944. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
Sudamérica los llamaba
Mexico City: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
Frederick Catherwood, Archt.
New York: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
2:380
George Santayana’s Marginalia
W. Bayard Cutting, Jr. 1878–1910
New York: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Selma Walden
Do You Ask for My Death?
Chicago: 1945. Self-published. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Edward Perry Warren
[See Raile, Arthur Lyon]
Charles Waterman
The Three Spheres of Society
London: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
John Broadus Watson
Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist
Philadelphia and London: 1919. Texas. Forty-six marginalia.
1 p 8, marked
Because an occasional business leader has known how to pick out and
keep good men, we are offered no reason why we should not seek to
understand and control the processes involved in picking and keeping
good men. The same may be said of the factors in keeping men out of
crime, keeping them honest and sane, and their ethical and social life
upon a high and well-regulated plane.
Tyranny. Isn’t this rather a Jesuitical art of controlling
men’s souls? Trapping them into little habits, and small
enticements, until they can only run in that harvest.
2 p 11, underlined
Life presents stimuli in confusing combinations. As you write you are
stimulated by a complex system—perspiration pours from your brow,
the pen has a tendency to slip from your grasp; the words you write are
focussed upon your retinæ; the chair offers stimulation, […].
twirls! Oh, wretched American professor!
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:381
3 p 11
The world of stimulation is thus seen to be exceedingly ugly and
^
^
complex.
4 p 12, underlined
||Watson’s theory of “reaction possibilities”:|| It lies well within the
bounds of probability that if we were able to obtain a new-born baby
belonging to the dynasty of the Pharaohs, and were to bring him up
along with other lads in Boston, he would develop into the same kind of
college youth that we find among the other Harvard students. His
chances for success in life would probably not be at all different from
those of his classmates.
Without being a Pharaoh I think I know some differences.
5 p 44, underlined and marked
Owing to the remarkable but widespread notion that language behavior
has some peculiarly great significance, the development of performance
tests has been seriously handicapped.
People are supposed to think when they talk; it is a prejudice; it might lead to the conclusion that women think
more than men.
6 p 79, underlined
The various reactions to noise stimuli have not received any great
amount of study. Any tonal stimulus interrupted before two complete
vibrations have been transmitted to the fluids of the ear is reacted to as
a noise. Popular language contains many words characterizing noise
stimuli such as hiss, murmur, sigh, boom, bang, rumble, crash, etc.
grumble, crish-crash
7 p 89, underlined and marked
||On reaction to light:|| The subject reacts to it as to a non-homogeneous
or white light.
N.B. the way of avoiding saying seen.
8 p 202
||A child in a rage goes into a “death feint.”||
[At top:]
Je demeure immobile, et mon âme abbatue
cède au coup que me tue.1
1
I remain motionless, and my battered soul / surrenders to the blow that kills me.
2:382
George Santayana’s Marginalia
9 p 226
||Certain people can type only so many words a minute, trapped,
apparently, in stereotyped responses.||
What is the test of health? To work longer hours and to
be able to type-write more words a minute?
10 p 227, top
[Apropos of nothing in Watson:]
Thinking is muttering.
11 p 229
||Watson concludes from his study of emotional reactions that emotionally unstable people need medical attention.||
Tyranny. Nothing unusual is to be allowed.
12 p 231, marked
Probably every stimulus which leads to a definite instinctive act leads
at the same time to some change in emotional tension. It seems easier
to believe that emotion can occur without overt instinctive response
than that instinctive action can occur without at the same time arousing
emotional activity.
This disproof of mere behaviourism—because it is contrary to fact.
13 p 267, marked
||Modern education frustrates a boy’s natural mechanical talents, putting
in their place chance, vague aspiration to business or the like.||
In socialism the boy would be put to the trade (sailor,
carpenter, hunter, etc.) which he affected, and not taught
the higher snobbery. The family must be abolished.
14 p 269, underlined and marked
Not until the child begins to handle and generally manipulate objects, to
build with blocks or clay, to crawl or walk from spot to spot and to put
on language habits is it a going human concern.
Style
15 p 274, underlined
The implicit-habit systems which we cannot observe except with the aid
of instruments are probably equally as numerous if not more so and
oftentimes more complex than the explicit.
Style
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:383
16 p 319, underlined and marked
||Concerning a child’s early habits of language:|| Abbreviated and
short-circuited actions become a necessity if it is to hold its own in that
environment and make progress.
What is the teleology here?
17 p 332
||Of the man who would like to go to the races, but decides he must write
letters.||
DUTY!
Alfred Weber
Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte
Berne: 1946. Waterloo. Seventy marginalia.
[The book was written, Weber says, toward the end of World War II.]
1 p 8, marked
Das Schicksal der Welt liegt heute in sehr wenigen Händen, so wenigen
wie noch nie in der Geschichte.1
1
Today the fate of the world lies in very few hands, fewer than ever before in history.
2 p 33, marked
There is a spiritual history of Europe in terms of dogmatism. But what her great
men saw in absolute values that were not dogmatic, which values they honored,
and how they understood or modified them, that is the genuine spiritual history of
Europe.
Borrowed and native elements in the life of spirit.
3 p 33
||Despite its material wealth, nineteenth-century Europe sank into
nihilism.||
Embarras de richesses1 bring on despair.
1
Overwhelming riches.
4 p 41, marked
||Michaelangelo’s slave-figures. A transcendental animation marks them.||
Self-transcendence of matter.
5 p 43, marked
One must be blind not to feel in Michaelangelo’s figures his obsession with transcendence, undogmatic, the basis of which is present in all his symbolic figures,
whether Christian, Judaic, or derived from ancient mythology. They appear to
2:384
George Santayana’s Marginalia
detach themselves from their origins, from their mythological burden to become
purely and directly human.
Of course, since the myth is itself a rendering of nature.
6 p 45, marked
||When Shakespeare’s major figures use the pronoun I, they are not
merely individuals, but as Gundolf says,|| their destinies, in all their
unmistakable characterization, “powers become Man, the incarnation of various
elemental forces, tensions, colours, masses.”
The spectrum of chaos.
7 p 51
||A discussion of Othello.||
[Santayana’s generalized speculation:]
Othello is jealous of his young wife: but the Christian
world is jealous of Othello, as the gods were jealous of
good fortune in Greece.
8 p 65
||Approving quotation of Hobbes concerning the “beast-world” of lust for
money and power; efforts to elevate such motives through transcendental visions.||
Hobbes & Darwin
Sophistry & hypocrisy
right fundamentally about the modern world.
9 p 75, marked
||The eighteenth century; its differences from the preceding period.||
The regulation of the wolf-hunger of the state under William of Orange, and in
which people could see a new and perhaps eternal principle of life for the West,
superseding the former supra-biological sanctions, eased into life as a whole harmonious conceptions and a sense of balance.
Respectability and dignity replaced religion. This lasted in
th
the 19 century.
10 p 88, marked
||Praise of Goethe.|| The type of man that the upper classes produced at this time
was of a breadth, depth, and delicacy of feeling and fellow-feeling unexampled in
any age. His sensibility went out broadly, without allowing it to disintegrate
chaotically into himself.
Goethe at his best.
11 p 89, top
Egotism in German Philosophy.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:385
[Text marked:]
||The weakness of the latter half of the nineteenth century lay in its discounting scientific and philosophic ideas of reality of the foregoing
periods and substituting groundless structures quite separated from
existence.||
th
The real forces of nature subjectified in the 19 century.
12 p 95, underlined and marked
||Weber sums up his reading of Kant and later nineteenth-century
philosophies.|| Denn hier zum erstenmal wird, veranlaßt durch die
Atmosphäre des nach Napoleon heraufziehenden Jahrhunderts, eine
spontan ergreifbare Macht, der Schopenhauer die Chiffre Willen aufdrückt, gesehen und als das Wesen der Objektwelt, als das «An sich» des
Daseins gefaßt. Damit wird deutlich in Fluß gebracht, in anderer und
tieferer Weise als in dem scholastischen Denken Hegels, ein
Sichbewegen und Sichentfalten alles dessen, was hinter den
denkerischen Fixierungen des achtzehnten und des vorangegangenen
siebzehnten Jahrhunderts […].1
1
Here, stimulated by the atmosphere of the century dawning behind Napoleon,
Schopenhauer sees a power which he names Will, that we can apprehend spontaneously and know as the essence of the objective world, as the “in itself” [Kant] of
Being. Thus in a different and more profound manner compared to the scholastic
thought of Hegel, he brings about reanimation and unfolding of what was an
immediate datum of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
13 p 120, marked
||After broad economic prosperity in England, c. 1875, and apparent
progress for the working-class as well, the prosperous middle class forget
the misery of the 1840s and acquisition became again paramount.||
Still so in the U.S.
14 p 121
||In Germany the intellectuals withdraw into a corner after 1875.||
The Intellectuals sit admiring in a corner? Don’t they
really love the man of action?
15 p 122
||The appearance of an intelligentsia standing apart from the bourgeois
world, repudiating it.||
Rise of the detached cosmopolitan intellectual. Aesthetic
Jews and I! Nietzsche here?
16 p 144, underlined and marked
[“Nietzsche and the Catastrophe.”]
2:386
George Santayana’s Marginalia
||The superman and the Dionysian view. Nietzsche:|| «böse heiß
ich’s und menschenfeindlich: all das Lehren vom Einen und Vollen
und Unbewegten und Satten und Unvergänglichen. Alles
Unvergängliche—das ist nur ein Gleichnis. Und die Dichter lügen
zu viel. […]»1
Very clever and a back view of the truth. The likeness is
the eternal element in the transitory.
1
“I call it evil and misanthropic: all the teachings about the One and the Perfect and
the Unmoved—that is only a figure, a metaphor. And poets lie too often.”
17 p 165
[On the Will to Power: ]
It is not true that all interpretation is a matter of perspective.
No Absolute view of that state [? illegible] but only normal
madness.
18 p 166, marked
What else is the self-enlarging quantum but a mechanistic concept of measure
taken over from contemporary natural science, which Nietzsche so hated?
He should have left the physics to the physicists.
19 p 169, underlined
||From the Will to Power: a serious weakening of spontaneity results in
heaviness and weariness rather than in external alertness.|| Dazu sozial
eine «überreichliche Entwicklung der Zwischengebilde und
Zwischenpersonen», die «dem Staat einen unsinnig dicken Bauch
machen»; […].1
1
Socially, “a vast crop of the half-educated and half-persons,” who “give the state a
ludicrous fat belly.” [Santayana draws a “fat belly” in the right margin.]
20 p 171, marked
||Nietzsche’s “Herdentier,” herd-animal, responds to commands and
obeys.||
Even in America people elect a Roosevelt 4 times—a sort
of Hitler!
21 p 172
||Nietzsche’s hope for a “great cure.”||
Can the Russians do it? Or the Americans?
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:387
22 p 179, underlined
||Nietzsche’s ultimate vision of the highest, greatest man, who will
demand of the world a vast task.|| «Denn unsere Kraft ist es, welche über
uns verfügt.»1
Kraft = artificial strength, militancy. It play [sic] in the psyche, as well as in society.
1
For it is our power that rules us.
23 p 204, marked
|| Just before 1914,|| the forces of imperialism, nationalism, and militarism were
coming together in feverish cooperation behind the scenes.
Auch capitalismus.
24 p 204
||With the outbreak of the Great War, the entire spiritual and intellectual
world|| collapsed. It fell apart not only in Germany but the entire earth was
smashed as if with a powerful hammer-blow.
Not in my case!
25 p 206
[At the end of the long chapter on Nietzsche:]
Why nothing about Weimar and Hindenburg? Or the
Russian revolution, friendly to Hitler?
26 p 215
||Weber asks whether it is not possible for the world to be linked to the
transcendental and metaphysical level of earlier times, before the onset
of nihilism?||
Superstition to the front again. This is a worse result than
the others.
27 p 239, marked
||The necessity for Germany to educate herself once more in order to
achieve spiritual renewal and transformation.|| And foreign powers must
again be clear: the spirit cannot be compelled, it bends as and where it will. They
must leave to the Germans their renewal of mind and character. Anything else
would be nothing but waiting for revenge and a wish to push into some crack or
other of the new world syndicate or something equally disastrous, which could only
be worse.
American conceit & British stupidity take note!
28 p 241, marked
[“Fragments to Direct Transcendence.”]
2:388
George Santayana’s Marginalia
Whereas our difference arises from immediate naked experience of how active,
spontaneous forces operate in nature and matter, while mind is only a special
expression of the spontaneity which pervades all existence.
Spirit is a mode of natural exuberance [ so that what W.
means would be that each centre of life has an environment to count with and every environment centre of life
active within it ] .
29 p 244
Quite true that mechanism is itself a spontaneous miracle.
The question is only how regular and pervasive any trope
is.
30 p 251, underlined and marked
When we experience the power striving for beauty of expression and active in an
extraordinary way in the world of plants, experience it as a disparate yet unifying phenomenon, as in the symphonically orchestrated carpet of flowers in an
Alpine valley, wo sie individuell und artmäßig Getrenntes in eins zusammenfaßt,1 then it seems as though it [that power] embraced the inanimate too,
and raised the whole to a melody of vibrant color and line.
? Myth gone mad.
1
Where it unites things that are separate into one category, … .
Hermann Weyl
Raum, Zeit, Materie
Berlin: 1923. Georgetown. Fourteen marginalia.
[None from p. 23 to the end on p. 332. Weyl’s mathematical treatise no
doubt strained Santayana’s admittedly weak mathematics.]
1 p 7, marked
[On measurement of time:]
Note that it is the filling that determines the extent of a
duration. You assume that you can transfer the same fact
to a different portion of time, which will then be equal to
that time filled by that event in the first instance. In itself
the smallest length of time equals the greatest.
2p8
The chosen point of vantage remains essential to any vista
in time. But not to the order of the events surveyed.
^ ^
3p9
[At the end of the introduction:]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:389
X Why assume that an object can be the same when
posited in two acts and measured on two scales? Animal
faith! According to this, relativity is only a matter of scales
& measures, and the universe is assumed to be single and
unambiguous.
John Hall Wheelock
Poems: 1911–1936
New York: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Alfred North Whitehead
Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect
Cambridge, England: 1928. Georgetown. Twenty-eight marginalia.
[In his Preface, Whitehead writes that this work is best understood by
reference to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and to
Scepticism and Animal Faith by George Santayana.]
1p4
||An artist, a colored shape, a chair, and a puppy dog are posited. The
dog is commanded to sit; the artist’s perception of a shape.||
This seems to imply a ridiculous psychologism, as if the
dog or man had to infer the existence of the chair (and
what would “chair” mean?) before he sat in it. Of course
the colour etc. are effects of his reaction, not causes of it.
2p5
[…] both men and puppies often disregard chairs when they see them.
Against behaviourism?
3 p 10
||On the “self-production” of a symbol:|| The potter, and not the pot, is
responsible for the shape of the pot. An actual occasion arises as the
bringing together into one real context diverse perceptions, […] feelings,
[…] purposes […].
Does this ever happen? Not to me.
4 p 11
||No symbols are without meaning; there are no symbols alone or in
compartments of experience.|| This statement is the foundation of a
thorough-going realism. phenomenalism?
^
^
2:390
George Santayana’s Marginalia
5 p 13, underlined
[…] why do we say that the word ‘tree’—spoken or written—is a symbol
to us for trees? Both the word itself and trees themselves enter into our
experience on equal terms; […].
visual images? A tree never entered into my experience:
I am not a park.
6 p 14, marked
The poet’s readers are people for whom his words refer symbolically to
the visual sights and sounds and emotions he wants to evoke.
This is not very good. What would Valéry say?
7 p 41, underlined and marked
||We know time as succession.|| But this succession is not pure succession: it is the derivation of state from state, with the later state exhibiting conformity to the antecedent. Time in the concrete is the
conformation of state to state, the later to the earlier; and the pure succession is an abstraction from the irreversible relationship of settled
past to derivative present.
N.B.
8 p 42, marked
The past consists of the community of settled acts which, through their
objectifications in the present act, establish the conditions to which that
act must conform.
This is very good. “Acts” are moments in the flux of substance. Each is occasioned by the combined influence of
its predecessors, in spatial as well as temporal recession.
9 p 43, marked
Thus the immediate present has to conform to what the past is for it,
and the mere lapse of time is an abstraction from the more concrete
relatedness of ‘conformation.’
Quite so.
10 p 43, marked
The ‘substantial’ character of actual things is not primarily concerned
with the predication of qualities. It expresses the stubborn fact that whatever is settled and actual must in due measure be conformed to by the
self-creative activity.
This is good, except for the “self-creative activity” which
is simply a sham name for flux. The need of going on is
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:391
just as fatal as the necessity of going on from here with
this.
11 p 93, marked Z
The world is a community of organisms; these organisms in the mass
determine the environmental influence on any one of them; there can
only be a persistent community of persistent organisms when the environmental influence in the shape of instinct is favourable to the survival
of the individuals.
What is the instrument of instinct and on what does it
work to prove its aptitude?
12 p 99
||The vagueness of symbolic words in literature.||
Eloquence would then always be deception: but there is
the art of showing the eloquence of things.
13 p 100
Our only interest in the hoot [of a motor car] is to determine ( a definite
locality as the seat of causal efficacy determining the future.^)^
^ ^ “to
Is this meant to be humorous? If so, he might have said
determine the whereabouts of the enemy.”
14 p 104, underlined
The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic
code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code
serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason.
What is your test?
Alfred North Whitehead
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology
New York and Cambridge, England: 1929. Texas. 371 marginalia.
[A great many of the marginalia are verbal or incidental markings, and
several are Daniel Cory’s.]
1 p vi
Science and opinion, not nature, is to be the theme.
2 p 9, underlined
In monistic philosophies, Spinoza’s or absolute idealism, this ultimate is
God, who is also equivalently termed ‘The Absolute’. In such monistic
schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality,
beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the
philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of
2:392
George Santayana’s Marginalia
? Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European,
^ ^
thought.
I agree that the ultimate has no pre-eminent reality. But
Brahma surely is said to have it.
3 p 14, marked Z
The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas
which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to
them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. A new idea introduces a
new alternative; and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt
the alternative which he discarded. Philosophy never reverts to its old
position after the shock of a great philosopher.
Too evolutionary and “historical”. The impossibility of
reversion is accidental.
4 p 14, underlined and marked
||The appeal to facts is difficult, because it must be phrased in the instrument of language.|| This appeal is not solely to the expression of the facts
in current verbal statements. The adequacy of such sentences is the main
question at issue. It is true that the general agreement of mankind as to
experienced facts is best expressed in language.
He feels a qualm but reverts to his sin. Experience is
expression. If science seeks to express generalities of
experience, it is merely thin literature.
5 p 17, underlined
[…] actual entity […].
Truth must think itself?
6 p 23, underlined
[…] the social expression ||of experience.||
This is the Hegelian side of Whitehead: all is the history
of theory.
7 p 26
The electrons long for the nucleus. And what does the
nucleus long for?
8 p 27, marked
It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built
up out of universals. The answer is, ‘In no way’. The true philosophic
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and
yet participated in by its own nature?
Very good: Essences cannot produce matter: how does
matter acquire essence?
9 p 32, underlined
[…] whatever is a datum for a feeling has a unity as felt.
Remember that this [datum] means cause.
10 p 33, underlined
[…] every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any
particular instance, has its reason either in the character of some actual
entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the
subject which is in process of concrescence. This category of explanation is termed the ‘ontological principle’. It could also be termed the
‘principle of efficient, and final, causation’.
Facts are primitive. They may be regarded as their own
origin and as their own purpose.
11 p 34, underlined and marked Z
The ‘subjective aim’, which controls the becoming of a subject, is that
subject feeling a proposition with the subjective form of purpose to realize it in that process of self-creation.
Horrible way of saying: “turning up”.
12 p 36, underlined and marked
The Category of Conceptual Valuation. From each physical feeling move^
ment of the psyche there is the derivation of a purely conceptual
^
feeling whose datum is the eternal object determinant of the definiteness of the actual entity, or of the nexus, physically felt.
Yes, if I understand.
13 p 39, underlined
It is fundamental to the metaphysical doctrine of the philosophy of
organism, that the notion of an actual entity as the unchanging subject of
change is completely abandoned.
N.B.
Substance is not unchanging, or it would be
non-existent. He is thinking of the Ego!
14 p 40, marked
In the philosophy of organism it is not ‘substance’ which is permanent,
but ‘form’.
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
In mine also: yet substance may be constant in some
respects.
15 p 42
The primordial created fact is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of
the entire multiplicity of eternal objects. This is the ‘primordial nature’ of
God.
God primordially contemplates the Realm of Essence.
Does “valuation” imply choice, in view of order? Then
God would be contingent.
16 p 42, marked
‘Creativity’ is another rendering of the Aristotelian ‘matter’, and of the
modern ‘neutral stuff’.
17 p 42, marked
But it is divested of the notion of passive receptivity, either of ‘form’ or
of external relations; it is the pure notion of the activity conditioned by
the objective immortality of the actual world—a world which is never the
same twice, though always with the stable element of divine ordering.
Very good
18 p 53, underlined
||Whitehead claims authority for his main positions|| of one, or the other,
of some supreme master of thought—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke,
Hume, Kant.
!!!
19 p 54
Apart from such orderings, there would be a complete disjunction of
eternal objects unrealized in the temporal world. at any time?
^
Novelty would be meaningless, and inconceivable. We^are here extending and rigidly applying Hume’s principle, that ideas of reflection are
derived from actual facts. Which is not true.
^
^
20 p 57
||Whitehead’s theory of “concrescence.”||
Tea-table mythology.1
1
So wrote Santayana, in the right margin. On the left, Cory wrote: “idealistic bull-shit.”
21 p 57, underlined
||Despite imperfections, metaphysics enables belief in the rationality of
things. We may|| lose hope at the exact point where we find ourselves.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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The preservation of such faith must depend on an ultimate moral intuition into the nature of intellectual action—that it should embody the
adventure of hope.
Jewish notion that religion is hope—especially unreasonable hope. Might it not be the surrender of hope?
22 p 59
||Whitehead uses the figure of a|| Wolf-eating-Lamb.
There is wolfness eating lambness
In the perfectness of damness
Of the whole
23 p 61, top
Whitehead’s “Satisfaction”:
“I love the people I don’t know,
And feel supremely happy so.”
24 p 62
Your animus is against the deniers of infinite essence.
Good boy!
25 p 63
[…] the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere; since it
retains its proximate relevance to actual entities for which it is unrealized.
This ‘proximate relevance’ reappears in subsequent concrescence as final
causation regulative of the emergence of novelty. This ‘somewhere’ is the
non-temporal actual entity. Thus ‘proximate relevance’ means ‘relevance
as in the primordial mind of God’.
But at once you wander into the opposite, making essence
self-conscious and so all actual. How does your God
decide which order to adopt for the world?
26 p 64, marked
The Leibnizian theory of the ‘best of possible worlds’ is an audacious
fudge produced in order to save the face of a Creator constructed by contemporary, and antecedent, theologians.
Naughty, naughty!
27 p 65, underlined
The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the
sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence—its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its
purposes, its phases of subjective aim—beyond the determination of
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
these components there always remains the final reaction of the
self-creative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the
self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis
upon the determinations of efficient cause.
Cf. James & Bergson on free will.
28 p 68
We find ourselves in a buzzing world,1 amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can
only introduce us to solitary substances, […].
This is the world of faith, from which “enlightenment”
came to deliver us. Are you a reactionary?
1
Whitehead credits William James for the phrase.
29 p 69, marked Z
The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum,
‘(A substance) is not present in a subject’. On the contrary, according to
this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if
we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must
say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.
[At “we must say”:]
This is a buzzing universe indeed. Yet its author, Bergson,
is a poor shy thing, afraid of draughts.
30 p 70
[Concerning Locke:]
He was English, like you.
31 p 71, underlined and marked
||In pre-Kantian terminology, an entity’s experience|| is being described
in respect to those forms of its constitution whereby it is that individual
entity with its own measure of absolute self-realization. Its ‘ideas of
things’ are what other things are for it. In the phraseology of these lectures, they are its ‘feelings’. The actual entity is composite and
analysable; and its ‘ideas’ express how, and in what sense, other things
are components in its own constitution.
Oh: that can’t be all you mean: that its being is partly conception of other things.
32 p 75, underlined and marked
[Concerning Locke’s “Of our Complex Ideas of Substances,” II,
XXIII, 1:]
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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In this section, Locke’s first statement […] is exactly the primary
assumption of the philosophy of organism: “The mind, being furnished
with a great number of the simple ideas conveyed in by the senses, as
they are found in exterior things, …”. Here the last phrase, ‘as they are
found in exterior things’, asserted what later I shall call the vector character of the primary feelings. The universals involved obtain that status
by reason of the fact that ‘they are found in exterior things’.
The identity in the “concrescence” is then one of essence
only. You absorb the forms of things.
33 p 85, marked
||The contemporary world is perceived by the senses as entities divided
one from another.|| This limitation of the way in which the contemporary actual entities are relevant to the ‘formal’ existence of the subject
in question is the first example of the general principle, that objectification relegates into irrelevance, or into a subordinate relevance, the
full constitution of the objectified entity.
Strong’s summation.
Perception is symbolic, its terms are not the qualities
native to the object.
34 p 96
The spontaneity of existence is here attributed to its satisfaction in being what it is. Quousque, Domine!1
1
How long, O Lord!
35 p 108, marked Z
The notion of the undifferentiated endurance of substances with
essential attributes and with accidental adventure was still applied [in
molecular theory]. This is the root doctrine of materialism: the substance, thus conceived, is the ultimate actual entity.
Not of mine. It is perhaps Epicurean, being sensualistic.
But materialism is practical & intellectual.
36 p 111, underlined
According to the philosophy of organism, the extensive space-time continuum is the fundamental aspect of the limitation laid upon abstract
potentiality by the actual world.
Substantial heredity. To call it an “aspect” is Hegelian, &
ruins your realism. Cave Hegel, Cave Bergson!
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
37 p 114
[End of Chapter II:]
This seems an exact reversal of things. Bergson calls “reality” that which Plato says “never really is”.
38 p 115
CHAPTER III.
THE MORAL ORDER OF NATURE.
^
^
39 p 117, marked
This satisfaction is the attainment of something individual to the entity in
question. It cannot be construed as a component contributing to its own
concrescence; it is the ultimate fact, individual to the entity.
The good is fruition, not force.
40 p 117, underlined and marked
The ‘formal’ reality of the actuality in question belongs to its process of
concrescence and not to its ‘satisfaction’. This is the sense in which the
philosophy of organism interprets Plato’s phrase ‘and never really is’;
for the superject can only be interpreted in terms of its ‘objective
immortality.’ truth.
^
^
N.B.
41 p 121, marked Z
The ‘objectifications’ of the actual entities in the actual world, relative
to a definite actual entity, constitute the efficient causes out of which
that actual entity arises; the ‘subjective aim’ at ‘satisfaction’ constitutes
the final cause, or lure, whereby there is determinate concrescence;
[…]. There is, in this way, transcendence of the creativity; and this
transcendence effects determinate objectifications for the renewal of
the process in the conscrescence of actualities beyond that satisfied
superject.
[From “There is, in this way”:]
Gott im Himmel!
42 p 145, marked Z
What has to be explained is originality of response to stimulus. This
amounts to the doctrine that an organism is ‘alive’ when in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical
inheritance.
It is a prejudice to suppose that novelty has anything to do
with vitality. The last lover is as vital as the first.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
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43 p 155, marked Z
This betrays the spirit in which this book is written. It is
not scientific but romantic.
44 p 160
[…] each sensum is complex; for it cannot be dissociated from its
potentiality for ingression into any actual entity, and from its potentiality of contrasts and of patterned relationships with other eternal objects.
“Internal” relations do not render simple essences complex: they merely show them to be elements in other
more complex essences.
45 p 163, marked
||To substitute the word “energy” for “emotional intensity,” and “form of
energy” for “specific form of feeling” shows us that|| this metaphysical
description of the simplest elements in the constitution of actual entities
agrees absolutely with the general principles according to which the
notions of modern physics are framed.
Yes: it is a translation of physics into deceptive psychological terms.
46 p 163, underlined
It has been a defect in the modern philosophies that they throw no light
whatever on any scientific principles.
Would it be better to throw darkness?
47 p 167, marked Z
The crude aboriginal character of direct perception is inheritance.
What is inherited is feeling-tone with evidence of its origin: in other
words, vector feeling-tone. In the higher grades of perception vague
feeling-tone differentiates itself into various types of sensa—those of
touch, sight, smell, etc.— […].
N.B. Myth at bottom, as in psychoanalysis. This is earlyStrong rather than late-Strong, since the “feeling” is mental. A mental substance in a physical frame.
48 p 180
The term ‘duration’ will be used for a locus of ‘unison of becoming’, and
the terms ‘presented locus’ and ‘strain locus’ for the systematic locus
involved in presentational immediacy.
Not intelligible to me
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
49 p 189, underlined
||Hume on simple impressions and repetition. The argument in the
beginning of the Treatise is circular.|| We cannot even be wrong in thinking that we think of ‘necessary connection’, unless we are thinking of
‘necessary connection’. Of course, we may be very wrong in believing
that the notion is important.
Why not say “true”? You can hardly mean by “important”
anything but applicable to dynamic facts.
50 p 195, marked
||Whitehead quotes and criticizes Locke.|| “Our abstract ideas are to us
the measures of species”. And again: “Nor let any one say, that the power
of propagation in animals by the mixture of male and female, and in
plants by seeds, keeps the supposed real species distinct and entire”. In
technical language, Locke had no use for genetic evolution.
This is an attack on Aristotle. It does not deny evolution,
but real species. A good deal of your criticism is captious
& egotistical.
51 p 198, marked Z
The approximation of the philosophy of organism to Santayana’s doctrine of ‘animal faith’ is effected by this doctrine of objectification by the
mediation of ‘feeling’.
Santayana would deny that ‘animal faith’ has in it any element of
givenness. This denial is presumably made in deference to the sensationalist doctrine, that all knowledge of the external world arises by the
mediation of private sensations.
No: no part of the object is given: but intent is given; it is
a feeling carrying the whole panorama.
52 pp 198–99, underlined
The divergence from, and the analogy to, Santayana’s doctrine can be
understood by quoting two sentences [from Scepticism and Animal Faith]:
“I propose therefore to use the word existence … to designate not
data of intuition but facts or events believed to occur in nature. These
facts or events will include, first, intuitions themselves, or instances of
consciousness, like pains and pleasures and all remembered experiences and mental discourse; and second, physical things and events,
having a transcendent relation to the data of intuition which, in belief,
may be used as signs for them; …”
It may be remarked in passing that this quotation illustrates
Santayana’s admirable clarity of thought, a characteristic which he
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:401
shares with the men of genius of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now the exact point where Santayana differs from the organic
philosophy is his implicit assumption that ‘intuitions themselves’ cannot be among the ‘data of intuition’, that is to say, the data of other
intuitions. This possibility is what Santayana denies and the organic
philosophy asserts. Quite so. In this respect Santayana is voicing the
^
^
position which, implicitly
or explicitly,
pervades modern philosophy. He
is only distinguished by his clarity of thought. If Santayana’s position be
granted, there is a phenomenal veil, a primitive credulity associated with
action and valuation, and a mysterious symbolism from the veil to the
realities behind the veil. The only difference between such philosophers
lies in their reading of the symbolism, some read more and some less.
There can be no decision between them, since there are no rational
principles which penetrate from the veil to the dark background of reality.
[At “phenomenal veil”:]
Rather, an internal sensibility. Language is not a veil, but
a tentacle: so is sensation. Yet the tentacle is no part of the
thing touched.
53 p 199, underlined and marked X and Z
The organic philosophy denies this doctrine because, first, it is contrary
to naïve experience; secondly, ‘memory’ is a very special instance of an
antecedent act of experience becoming a datum of intuition for another
act of experience; thirdly, the rejected doctrine is derived from the misconception of Locke, […] that logical simplicity can be identified with
priority in the concrescent process.
54 p 199
Locke, in his first two Books, attempts to build up experience from the
basic elements of simple ‘ideas’ of sensation. These simple ideas are
practically Santayana’s ‘intuitions of essences’. Santayana explicitly
repudiates the misconception, but in so doing he knocks away one of
the supports of his doctrine. A fourth reason for the rejection of the
doctrine is that the way is thereby opened for a rational scheme of cosmology in which a final reality is identified with acts of experience.
55 p 200
Whitehead interprets philosophy like a foreigner to it.
2:402
George Santayana’s Marginalia
56 p 215
[Santayana’s general observation:]
“Objectification” seems to `mean “efficacious element” in
the stimulus-side of things on which the organism reacts.
57 p 217, underlined
We have now come to Kant, the great philosopher who first, fully and
explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning, transforming subjectivity into
objectivity, or objectivity into subjectivity; […].
i.e. made the error of imagining mental machinery.
58 p 219, underlined
[…] datum […] can be […] universals.
Certainly it cannot, if the datum means the stimulus. But
where did you get your knowledge of the stimulus? If you
mean by the intent in alarmed feeling, this certainly gives
a ‘datum’ which lies outside—i.e. is not given but posited.
59 p 225, marked Z
Each phase in the genetic process presupposes the entire quantum, and
so does each feeling in each phase.
Bergson: this “physical time” seems to be specious.
60 p 233, underlined and marked
||More on relativity in the philosophy of organism.|| The subjectivist
principle is that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the
analysis of the experiences of subjects. Process is the becoming of experience. It follows that the philosophy of organism entirely accepts the
subjectivist bias of modern philosophy. It also accepts Hume’s doctrine
that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is
not discoverable as an element in subjective experience.
N.B. If subjects are unconscious, there is relativity, not
subjectivity.
61 p 233, underlined and marked Z
Thus Hume’s demand that causation be describable as an element in
experience is, on these principles, entirely justifiable. The point of the
criticisms of Hume’s procedure is that we have direct intuition of inheritance and memory: thus the only problem is, so to describe the general
character of experience that these intuitions may be included.
There is an equivocation here. We can’t have intuition that
our intuition is true.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:403
62 p 234
||Modern philosophies are in trouble for accepting the subjectivist principle while continuing to use categories derived from other points of
view. Language has been formed to express the concept of “vacuous
actuality” and the concept “of quality inherent in substance.”|| […] language, in its ordinary usages, penetrates but a short distance into the
principles of metaphysics. Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle
must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is
nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.
Apart from tea and toast there can be nothing nothing
nothing for breakfast. Apart from Christianity, there is no
religion. Apart from myself, there is bare nothingness.
63 p 299
An instance of concrescence is termed an ‘actual entity’—or, equivalently,
an ‘actual occasion’. There is not one completed set of things which are
actual occasions. For the […] fact is the creativity in virtue of which there
can be no ‘many things’ which are not subordinated in a concrete unity.
Thus a set of all actual occasions is by the nature of things a standpoint for
another concrescence which elicits a concrete unity from those many
actual occasions. Thus we can never survey the actual world except from
the standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the presupposed completion.
Synthesis adds a new item: but before the synthesis, were
there not the facts there were?
64 pp 299–300
The creativity in virtue of which any relative complete actual world is,
by the nature of things, the datum for a new concrescence, is termed
‘transition’. Thus, by reason of transition, ‘the actual world’ is always a
relative term, and refers to that basis of presupposed actual occasions
which is a datum for the novel concrescence.
There seems to be a fallacy here. Because a universe
becomes a relative term to me, when I arise in it, it was
not essentially relative to me before.
65 p 301, marked Z
||The process of attainment of the private ideal|| which is the final
cause of the concrescence. But the process itself lies in the two former
phases. The first phase is the phase of pure reception of the actual
world in its guise of objective datum for aesthetic synthesis. ||Such synthesis involves the private centers of feeling.|| The feelings are felt as
2:404
George Santayana’s Marginalia
belonging to the external centres, and are not absorbed into the private immediacy.
Not intelligible. The feelings may belong to the scattered
centres: they cannot be felt as belonging there, for that
would be a new single feeling, and not those feelings
themselves. “Feelings” must here mean objects or even
essences. Then the assertion would be clear.
66 p 315, underlined
Each task of creation is a social effort, employing the whole universe.
Each novel actuality is a new partner adding a new condition. Every new
condition can be absorbed into additional fullness of attainment. […] A
new actuality may appear in the wrong society, amid which its claims to
efficacy act mainly as inhibitions. Then a weary task is set for creative
function, by an epoch of new creations to remove the inhibition.
Your brother is a bishop. And here you’re talking his shop.
67 p 320, underlined and doubly marked Z
The process through which a feeling passes in constituting itself, also
records itself in the subjective form of the integral feeling. The negative
prehensions have their own subjective forms which they contribute to
the process. A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; it recollects as
a subjective emotion its struggle for existence; it retains the impress of
what it might have been, but is not.
The mythological character of the system is evident here.
This is true of the psyche. It is not true either of matter or
feeling.
68 p 320, underlined
In the first phase of this conceptual prehension, there is this eternal object
to be felt as a mere abstract capacity for giving definiteness to a physical
feeling.
as if the feeling could have been other than it was—other
than definite before. The essence acquired is simply
another essence, another definiteness.
69 p 323, underlined
Bradley’s discussions of relations are confused by his failure to distinguish between relations and contrasts. A relation is a genus of contrasts.
He is then distressed—or would have been distressed if he had not been
consoled by the notion of ‘mereness’ as in ‘mere appearance’—to find
that a relation will not do the work of a contrast. It fails to contrast.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:405
i.e. will not indicate two separate essences. But of course
it does.
70 pp 324–25, underlined and marked Z
Our perceptual feelings feel particular existents; that is to say, a physical
feeling, belonging to the percipient, feels the nexus between two other
actualities, A and B. It feels feelings of A which feel B, and feels feelings
of B which feel A. It integrates these feelings, so as to unify their identity
of elements.
This is true if “feeling” includes intent: the objects of
intent are substances. But “physical feeling” may mean
also “physical reaction”—the ground of intent.
71 p 328, underlined
The way in which the feeling feels expresses how the feeling came into
being. It expresses the purpose which urged it forward […].
Is this mythical language meant to deceive?
72 p 335, underlined and marked
Thus a simple physical feeling is one unconscious feeling which feels
^ from the subject
another feeling. But the feeling felt has^ a subject diverse
of the feeling which feels it.
Fancy that ! The cause or object is a different fact from the
effect or passion.
73 p 343, marked Z
||Whitehead discusses|| the deep-seated alliance of consciousness with
recollection both for Plato and for Hume.
Surprising assertion. Hume’s “impressions” were of course
conscious.
74 p 344, underlined
[…] the fourth category of explanation, that no entity can be abstracted
from its capacity to function as an object in the process of the actual
world. ‘To function as an object’ is ‘to be a determinant of the definiteness of an actual occurrence’. According to the philosophy of organism,
a pure concept does not involve consciousness, at least in our human
experience.
i.e. to be material. Hume did forget this.
75 p 344, marked
Also affirmation involves its contrast with negation, and negation
involves its contrast with affirmation. Further, affirmation and negation
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
are alike meaningless apart from reference to the definiteness of particular actualities.
Truth is about existence, faith is about nature.
76 p 344
Consciousness requires that the objective datum should involve (as one side
of a contrast) a qualified negative determined to some definite situation.
Originally consciousness is cognitive: that is, it is intuition
carried by intent. But the intent (as you say above) may be
suspended. Then we have imagination without illusion.
77 p 363, underlined
This difference between propositions and eternal objects arises from the
fact that truth and falsehood are always grounded upon a reason. But
according to the ontological principle […], a reason is always a reference
to determinate actual entities. Now an eternal object, in itself, abstracts
from all determinate actual entities, including even God. It is merely referent to any such entities, in the absolutely general sense of any.
This is a point of difference between your eternal objects
and my essences. Mine are prior to all existences.
78 p 395, underlined
Thus in the successive occasions of an enduring object in which the
inheritance is governed by this complex physical purpose, the reverted
conceptual feeling is transmitted into the next occasion as physical feeling, and the pattern of the original physical feeling now reappears as the
datum in the reverted conceptual feeling.
Matter borrows its form from the previous form of matter:
i.e. it keeps vibrating in the same way.
79 p 407, underlined
An actual entity, in its character of being a physical occasion, is an act of
blind perceptivity of the other physical occasions of the actual world.
“a response to” the “actual world” is limited (by definition) to the substances active in that production. The rest
of nature is not relevant.
80 p 446, underlined
In their most primitive form of functioning, a sensum is felt physically
with emotional enjoyment of its sheer individual essence. For example,
red is felt with emotional enjoyment of its sheer redness. In this primitive
prehension we have aboriginal physical feeling in which the subject feels
itself as enjoying redness. This is Hume’s ‘impression of sensation’ […].
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:407
Unconsciously, remember! For Hume they were given
essences in intuition.
81 p 447, marked
[…] the perception of a red cloak may often be associated with a feeling
of red irritation.
Cf. Strong. “red irritation” is what is going on in the
retina. In other words, your eyes may ache when you see
red. Is the ache the true red?
82 p 448, underlined
The philosophy of organism provides for this relevance by means of two
doctrines, (i) the doctrine of God embodying a basic completeness of
appetition, […].
Destiny would be a better word.
83 p 461, marked Z
The Cartesian doctrine of the ‘realitas objectiva’ 1 attaching to presentational immediacy is entirely denied by the modern doctrine of private
psychological fields.
Not at all. The “objective” for Descartes means the imagined or intuited—the given essence.
1
Objective reality.
84 p 462, underlined and marked Z
The whole doctrine of mentality—from the case of God downwards—is
that it is a modifying agency. But Descartes and Locke abandon the ‘realitas objectiva’ so far as sensa are concerned (but for Descartes, cf.
Meditation I, “It is certain all the same that the colours of which this is
composed are necessarily real”), and hope to save it so far as extensive
relations are concerned.
Of course: they are obvious. Whitehead is ignorant of the
Scholastic language still familiar to Descartes.
85 p 489
The perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness
of his primordial nature, issues into the character of his consequent
nature. In it there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison
of immediacy. The property of combining creative advance with the
retention of mutual immediacy is what in the previous section is meant
by the term ‘everlasting’.
The stored up memory of Bergson.
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
86 p 490
The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves
the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved.
Truth sentimentalised.
87 p 490, underlined
[…] we conceive of the patience of God, tenderly saving the turmoil of
the intermediate world by the completion of his own nature.
He doesn’t seem to have a tender stomach if he digests all
that mess. [ This God is like Lord Parmoor, bleating in the
House of Lords. ]
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Philadelphia: 1891–92. Georgetown. Twelve marginalia.
[Inscribed by an anonymous donor, “To G. Santayana Cambridge,
Mass. in memory of a pleasant week of heat & philosophy San
Francisco. 14 Aug. 1894.” The prose of A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d
Roads is included.]
1 p 48, underlined
[“Song of Myself,” section 24:]
I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, […].
Two different things
2 p 54, marked
[“Song of Myself,” section 32.]
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
[At top:]
That each is perfect is here compared with the perfection
of all things for each.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:409
3 p 108, underlined
[“A Promise to California.”]
Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain,
to teach robust American love.
!
4 p 429, marked
[A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads .]
Think of the absence and ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the multitudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of to-day and
here. It almost seems as if poetry with cosmic and dynamic features of
magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul, were never
possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality
for the use of the democratic masses never was.
Curious illusion that America was more stimulating [than
Europe].
5 p 430, underlined
||The themes of aestheticism, the mind, the soul, and|| just as inherent
and important, of their point of view, the time had come to reflect all
themes and things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the
advent of America and democracy— […].
Anarchy & equality: did he think these had triumphed?
6 pp 434–35, marked
The educated world seems to have been growing more and more
ennuyed for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all. Fortunately
there is the original inexhaustible fund of buoyancy, normally resident in
the race, forever eligible to be appeal’d to and relied on.
7 p 435, underlined
Democracy has been so retarded and jeopardized by powerful personalities, that its first instincts are fain to clip, conform, bring in stragglers,
and reduce everything to a dead level.While the ambitious thought of
my song is to help the forming of a great aggregate Nation, it is, perhaps,
altogether through the forming of myriads of fully develop’d and enclosing individuals.
Inconsistent with the contrast with the past which is so
strong in your self-consciousness. The really new man is
drearily empty.
2:410
George Santayana’s Marginalia
8 p 435, underlined
Welcome as are equality’s and fraternity’s doctrines and popular education, a certain liability accompanies them all, as we see. That primal and
interior something in man, in his soul’s abysms, coloring all, […]
The inner man lost.
9 p 435–36
The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets
endow’d their god-like or lordly born characters—indeed prouder and
better based and with fuller ranges than those—I was to endow the
democratic averages of America. You didn’t
^
^
10 p 436
||Of sex and “amativeness” in Leaves of Grass: || I am not going to argue
the question by itself; it does not stand by itself. The vitality of it is
altogether in its relations, bearings, significance—like the clef of a symphony. At last analogy the line I allude to, and the spirit in which they
are spoken, permeate all “Leaves of Grass,” and the work must stand
or fall with them, as the human body and soul must remain as an
entirety.
Yes: except perhaps this form which is neither simple nor
delicate.
11 p 437, underlined and marked
||The purpose of Whitman’s work is to emphasize that the United States’
growth is to be spiritual, heroic.|| To help start and favor that growth—or
even to call attention to it, or the need of it—is the beginning, middle
and final purpose of the poems. (In fact, when really cipher’d out and
summ’d to the last, plowing up in earnest the interminable average fallows of humanity—not “good government” merely, in the common
sense—is the justification and main purpose of these United States.
i.e. giving average men more to live for.
William Carlos Williams
Paterson (Book One)
New York: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
William Carlos Williams
Paterson (Book Two)
New York: 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:411
Winchester College: Its History, Buildings and Customs
Winchester: 1926. Georgetown. Six marginalia.
1 p 77, underlined
The oldest piece of plate possessed by the College is Election Cup, a
large silver-gilt covered cup jewelled and elaborately worked: […].
chalice?
2 pp 86–87
Secondly, as Matthew says, ‘our head is not covered by hat or heavy
cap’. Uncovering in Chamber Court, by the analogy of All Souls and
Christ Church is an act of respect rather to the Warden and Fellows than,
as is commonly supposed, to our Lady, whose statues are above Middle
Gate. The custom lapsed for a while, some time after 1778, till the
Warden had it revived in 1848. Let our account close with this word of
comfort to the foes of superstition.
Is this ironical or serious? Everything is possible with an
Englishman.
Frederick J. E. Woodbridge
The Realm of Mind:
An Essay in Metaphysics
New York: 1926. Texas. Thirty-six marginalia.
1 p vi, underlined Z and marked X
[Preface:]
||Woodbridge would not put thinking outside nature or make thinking a
product of nature. Thinking is rather a natural event.|| And the major
consequences seem to me to be, first, that mind as a logical structure of
existence is antecedent to thinking, and secondly, that our thinking as
individuals is a bodily activity congruent with that structure.
The essence of the cosmos, in so far as persisting[?] in the
laws of nature?
2 p vi, underlined
Or again, as our digesting involves a chemical world, so our thinking
involves a logical world.
Habits of readjustment in animals are relevant to habits
^
^
of existence at large?
3 p viii, underlined and marked X
[…] language is ever matter […].
2:412
George Santayana’s Marginalia
4 p viii, marked
We describe matter in figures of speech because the figure of speech is
what matter indestructibly is.
Does this mean anything? Or is it just matter arranged in
a certain way?
5 p 26
At best the greater duration of the world […] proves only that we are not
thinking from everlasting to everlasting.
Is the future “cut off” from the man who bets? Or is it contemporary with his betting?
6 p 38, marked
||Thinking discovers logical connection.|| That fact defines as a logical
world the world in which thinking is an event. If such a world is properly
the mind’s world, then the mind is not properly a being, but a realm of
being.
N.B. Mind or is an order in nature. How about
dreams?
7 p 39, underlined and marked
It is the world as experienced with which we have to do, and the world
as experienced is the concrete, vivid world of every day.
How timid American philosophy is. This dear world of
cars and mothers is the real one.
8 pp 40–41, marked
[…] we use the term mind to denote the fact that while experience is a
matter of space and time, of objects, qualities and relations, it is also a matter of implications and inferences.
N.B. i.e. what is the idea of mind.
9 p 42
[Chapter II:]
OBJECTIVE M IND
[Santayana alters this to:]
The Applicability of Language to Facts or Objective Mind
10 p 44, underlined
||Confusion could be avoided if writers|| who insist that mind is no more
than a name for a being that thinks, would abide by this restriction of the
term.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:413
Is this the act of thinking or man thinking? (the absence of
the category of substance is fatal to clearness).
11 p 45, top
A “being” if this means an essence cannot think; the agent
is a substance, the operation is an event.
12 p 45, underlined
[…] our bodily selves.
at last!
13 p 46, underlined
If […] our thinking is to be wise and sane and correct, it is not the body
which makes it so, […].
?
14 p 46, underlined and marked
It is a coherence between us, our bodies, and those things. These may be
a chaos when we think of chaos, by engaging disparate impulses in one
sweep.
all of it?
15 p 51, underlined
||Although most of us profess intellectual emancipation from foibles,
hidden away is|| the solid conviction that in the nature of things ||is
something whether found out or not,|| which, if found, would render
intelligible to us this sorry scheme of things entire.
It has to be ordered as it is ordered, and so as to make our
language and thought possible.
16 p 87
Knowledge finds in [mind] its objective ground and the possibility of its
verification.
The realm of truth.
17 p 89
Objective mind may be august, but it is not a human mind.
Logic it hath, but it reasoneth not, mind it hath, but it mindeth not.
18 p 116, marked
||The author would deal with the relation of mind to body|| not as a
problem to be solved, but as a fact to be stated.
Good
2:414
George Santayana’s Marginalia
19 p 139
||The metaphysicians’s work is a moral event. He may be a
Prometheus, working with stolen fire and doomed, but|| like him boasting that the great gift he gave himself and others was “to make them
that die cease to look forward to their doom.”—!" " !
and mortals | in this light | forget their doom.
| at my word |
James Haughton Woods
The Value of Religious Facts
New York: 1899. Georgetown. Thirty-nine marginalia.
[Santayana’s four-page “Analysis” in the end-pages fully summarizes his
marginalia:]
Analysis
p. 1–18. The historical materials, interpreted sympathetically, leave us in doubt whether religion has a universal
essence, and whether it is something specific [ the effect of
a special cause, God’s grace ] or a natural complication of
other more primitive activities of the human mind.
p. 19–85. The characteristic which all religions however
diverse have in common is the idea of “superhuman realities to which reverence is due” p. 23. This idea is not
the product of hope. “Religion is what it is, not because
it satisfies logical postulates, but because of its own peculiar value (and its close connection with all the ideal significance of reality, with the higher emotions, and with
the sense of an infinite reality higher ? than what is
human.) p. 27. All the geniuses of religious history have
troubled themselves precious little about unity. and sufficient reason” etc Religion, then, is not science or philosophy. No more is it poetic inspiration or personification.
Quote p. 31. [Page 31 reads: Heaven, Creation, Light, Lord are poetical terms, but to a developed religious nature symbols of inner facts
independent of any æsthetic insight.]
Religion although ideal as contrasted with material reality, is personal and immediate, as contrasted with logical
or aesthetical ideals. It has “entered into men by some
kind of sorcery” (Religion is superstitious i.e. it is a belief
in the actuality and efficacy of what is at the same time,
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:415
and in its essence, ideal. It is like the resolution of congress that people “are and of right ought to be” free and
independent. That which ought to be, although it is not,
must be asserted to be, and to be about to appear.)
p. 42. If the ideal be actual, we have a religious object,—
^ ^
God. We have a sense of dependence upon a Power which
is the source of every benefit. Religion God cannot be
^
^
identified with the ideal “except in the highest levels of
the great religions”.
p. 44. Lower religions are not ideal. [ ? ] If the ideal exists
in name only religion is an illusion.
p. 50. “Something more” comes into play at all times. “A
will which is not the result of judgments i.e. of aspira^
tions but the cause of them.”
^
p. 53. Quote p. 53. [Page 53 reads: If, however, these needs are necessary demands of human nature, then they are rather the way to truth
than the way to illusion, unless we conclude that, on the whole, the
world seems to us hopelessly rudimentary and without real meaning.]
[ This assumes that an ideal is false if it is not realised.]
And that another actual world, a paradise of some sort
would give the actual world a meaning. Is it not obvious
that another fact can never be the meaning of a fact
given? [ Quote the absurdity on p. 53 to show the hopeless
entanglement of the author in dogma.] [Page 53 reads: This
theory of postulates from the sense of need is not without weaknesses.
Thereby we should be forced out of the deepest impulses of our nature
to form the idea of a normal Being bearing all in himself, who has all
the attributes which can be revealed directly or indirectly to the finite
being, and yet who deems it better to allow himself to be postulated,
[…]. Santayana underlines “who deems … postulated,” and writes:]
Oh!
p. 55. God is an object because of the need of him.
p 67. The experience of God is the occasional intuition of
the Absolute in a kind of ecstasy. As this disintegration of
the categories is necessarily unstable there is need of “repetition of the religious experience.” This ecstasy must start
from something: hence the need of positive religion as a
background.
2:416
George Santayana’s Marginalia
p. 70. “The contemplation of God never occurs by itself.”
Its forms are the symbols of it. “Religious life without
imagination is unknown.” Religion is thereby made relevant to life. It contains and feeds all the emotions aroused
by our positive interests. This realisation being conceived
as dependent upon God. [On page 70 Santayana’s marginalia
reads:] The author does not see that this “religious experience” is negative: that it arises by the disintegration of the
mind.
[Page 98 reads: A half-conscious state arouses the will and keeps before
it obscure but deeply felt aims. Impulses play their part in the unconscious depths of the soul. Here the connection of the inner life with the
surrounding world produces impulses and directions of aim which
drive men to conscious questions about the objects they seek and compel them to a clear knowledge of their own purposes.]
Could confusion be worse confounded?
p. 86–113. The historical cases must be viewed as
approaches to the realisation of this ideal. We must presuppose the reality of religion in studying its forms [ as we
used to presuppose the inspiration of the Bible ] .
Phenomenalism and monistic substantialism are both
inadequate ideas of this revelation. History is the adjustment of man to the divine will, which is gradually
revealed by intuitions. Unless religious history is guided
by Providence it is a history of illusions. Religion is not science nor theology: theology is the effort to combine or
adjust the two: it is essentially a compromise.
p. 114–65. A norm for religion cannot be found by abstraction or comparison. Nor can we begin with the most primitive form as the measure, for the higher forms present
incom-measurable [sic ] values. We must therefore take on
our highest ideal. Those who have a different ideal can
nevertheless transpose one literally into their own key:
the classification will not be useless even to them.
Claud Alley Worth
Yacht Navigation and Voyaging
London: 1928. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
William Wycherley
2:417
The Country Wife: A Comedy
London: 1934. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Malcolm Young
Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
London: 1949. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 96, marked
[…] the Universities broke the fall of the aristocracy by civilizing the
plutocracy.
Eduard Zeller
Die Philosophie der Griechen
Six volumes. Leipzig: 1892. Georgetown. Eighty-nine marginalia.
[One marginale in Volume I; none in Volume II; nine in Volume III;
twenty-three in Volume IV; none in Volume V; fifty-six in Volume VI.]
[Volume III.]
1 p 467, underlined
||Aristotle wrote about Plato’s work not as a historian of literature,|| der
ein vollständiges Verzeichniss derselben aufzustellen und alles, was er
über sie weiss, mitzutheilen verpflichtet ist; […]1
What an ideal.
1
… who records his subject in detail and is duty-bound to report all that he knows
of that subject ….
2 p 469
||Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s dualism with respect to object and idea.||
Aristotle’s reason is perfectly clear to me. See below.
This criticism is perfectly good. The minor gods of the
Timaeus notwithstanding. For if you begin with the aspiring nature, and get the goal out of that, you have a relation between them: but if you begin with the goal, you
never can get away from it to the thing that is to approach
it, or see why it chooses that end.
3 p 703
||On the basis of the idea in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: ||
The basis of this difficulty would appear as well as the
solution, if the human genesis of the doctrine were
considered. An idea is a concretion in time: only the
2:418
George Santayana’s Marginalia
relatively permanent, of which a general idea can be
formed by assimilation of particulars that recur, can
therefore have an idea. Yet everything of which there
is knowledge is incipiently such a general permanent
object. Hence incipiently there is an idea of everything thinkable.1
1
Obviously of great import as an early, possibly the first, full statement of
Santayana’s philosophy of essence, although the term is not yet used.
4 p 704, underlined
||Ideas, based in nature, display an orderly succession from one to
another, in which there are various crossings from one to another, or
independence,|| oder an einander theilhaben.1
Nothing real could be participated in without being
divided: the ideas should therefore never be hypostatised.
1
… or take part in one another.
[Volume IV.]
1 p 176, marked Z
||Aristotle’s method forbade the dualism which he found in Plato.||
This is an important criticism. The solution of the difficulty
would seem to lie in abandoning the attempt to regard
form as more than an ideal; an ideal which the living reality engenders and which exists merely as the direction of
its effort, eventually defined in reflection.
Definition of Idea: a goal which reflection eventually
assigns to the movement of reality. Or better: a standard
to by which reflection eventually measures reality exis^
^ ^, either as the goal of its movement or as the notion
tence
^
of its being.
2 p 293, underlined and marked Z
||The meaning of the real|| Wirkliches ||to Plato, as opposed to Aristotle’s
interpretation in his philosophy.||
The meaning of “reality” is at the bottom of this quarrel.
X
For Plato it is a eulogistic, for Aristotle a scientific term.
The eulogistically real is only an aspect or function of the
scientific reality, while the latter is a mixture of reality
X
and unreality, in the eulogistic sense of these words.
Experience is a mixture of the intelligible and the surd;
the expressible is only an element in the actual. But the
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:419
expressible alone is known; the actual must be enacted.
The expressible, the thinkable is, however, the only good
for the rational part of our nature.
3 p 310, marked
||Knowledge as possibility:|| Wissenschaft als Vermögen […].
Knowledge in potentia is theory: knowledge in act is ideal
realisation in detail, and knowledge of the absolutely individual. Actual knowledge is therefore impossible to an
imperfect and transitive being: it could be possessed only
by a static and comprehensive intelligence, the mirror of
all particulars in all their relations.
4 p 311
||The fundament of Aristotle’s system is that in specifics forming general
principles lies reality, truth, and the notion of the Godhead.||
Because there theory becomes representation of the
whole detail of truth, and is knowledge of all individuals.
The true, so conceived, is however entirely opposed to the
good and the beautiful, which have affinity only to the
entelechies of things, not to their embodiments.
5 pp 312–13, underlined
Aristotle put aside the Platonic hypostatizing of general concepts, but two contradictory principles remain: dass nur das Allgemeine Gegenstand that there be
only the universal object of knowledge, and the truth of knowledge of the reality of
its objects prevents any progress toward universals. How then is it possible to unite
both despite their opposition?
This sentence has the same equivocal meaning as that of
knowledge being only of psychological ideas: it is through
ideas, but not of them. So knowledge is of the individual
through the theory that reconstructs it, and if successful
vanishes into the vision of the concrete individuality. The
universals are in the things: in knowing them we know
aspects of the thing (or our thought would not be true or
representative of reality) and if our knowledge were complete we should have all the aspects of the thing: the totality of applicable universals would make one nature—one
individual.
6 p 330, marked Z
||Aristotle failed always to make distinct and to unify the formal, the
efficient, and the final cause.||
2:420
George Santayana’s Marginalia
This is an exaggeration of a certain affinity and occasional
coincidence of these principles. The willingness to identify
them in such haste is a reason for Zeller’s difficulties in
interpreting Aristotle.
7 p 349, marked Z
||Zeller introduces the idea of possibility of the realization of Form not as
entirely subject to formal logic; the notion of the Verlangen, longing, for
Form.||
Ah! here the matter begins to appear in its proper light.
8 p 350, marked Z
||Zeller’s note insists on a psychological reading of various passages in
Metaphysics, V.||
Bosh. The whole point is that the psychological desire is
a phenomenal phase of the metaphysical tendency and
universal direction towards the possible & predeterminate good.
9 p 362
||The idea of Bewegung, attraction, in Aristotle.||
Cf the “attraction” of Aristotle with that of Newton, as an
eternal unmoved first mover of the world.
10 p 427, underlined
1) Phys. II, 8. 199, b, 26: " ! !" "
&"$ ")"""
$'&'
7
Quote in L of R chapter on the utility of thought.
1
It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the
agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood,
it would produce the same results by nature. If, therefore, purpose is present in art,
it is present also in nature. (The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan
Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995 [Volume I, page
341].)
11 p 577
||On the separation of reason, as abstracted from the body, from bodily
thought.||
May we not regard the two as aspects of one faculty? The
passive reason is Reason made phenomenal, conditioned
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:421
reason: active reason is reason as an eternal power, manifesting itself in the other. Without conditions the power
does not manifest itself, and nobody thinks. Without the
power no conditions could produce thinking.
The active reason is the active reason abstracted from
its temporal embodiments and regarded as completely
realised in act.
[Volume VI.]
1 p 487, marked
||Of Plotinus.||
The good is not the concept “good” but the unthinkable
exciting good—so called for no reason.
2 p 489
||The negative connotations of the Godhead.|| Auch das Sein =
^
Essence nicht, denn alles Sein ist Totalität, […]1
^
1
Nor is it being, for being is totality ….
3 p 493, marked
||The idea of the good in Plotinus.||
We pursue it: its essence would be to be the good if it had
an essence and were merely ideal: being real it cannot be
good.
4 p 496
[…] die Ursächlichkeit Gottes […].1
Oh, how excellent! If you had only worked that out! God
is not the ground of things, since he exludes their articulation; he is only the aim of things in which that articulation would be perfect. And then he is not One, but
infinitely various, and not real, but only ideal. The unity
is only harmony of each ideal with itself.
1
God as a fundamental cause.
5 p 497, marked
||Plotinus on number.||
Cf. the relation of number to the numerality of things.
Number overflows into things, without changing its
essence or being an efficient power. It is rather a condition which existence finds if it is to have being.
2:422
George Santayana’s Marginalia
6 p 502, top
Thus all things souls gather whence they went
^
^
And their one content is content.
7 p 502, marked
||Zeller interprets Plotinus as saying that all strive toward participation in
the first cause, and that constitutes the Good.|| Eigentlich ist das
Verhältniss freilich das umgekehrte: der Drang des Menschen nach dem
unendlichen ist das Erste, und erst aus diesem subjektiven Bedürfniss ist
die Weltanschauung hervorgegangen, welche alles endliche Sein nur als
Wirkung eines überweltlichen Urwesens erscheinen lässt.1
Zeller is not in it! The Drang nach dem Unendlichen ! It
is the effort toward proper perfection !
7
In fact the situation is quite the reverse: the striving of men toward eternity is foremost, and from this first subjective necessity arises a world-view in which all eternal
Being permits an over-worldly primordial being to appear.
8 p 502
[Santayana translates the pertinent passage quoted in Zeller’s footnote 1.]
Each thing, in striving to be perfect, strives to be harmonious, self-equilibrated, a pure and entelechy: it
thus has its own unity as its goal.
But now its own unity is like the proper unity of anything else—in character and value, and so in all relevant
content: possibly even in material content, which would
be mere pleasure or “content.”
9 p 514, underlined
"
" "
Isn’t there a confusion here between essence and existence? Or is it to be taken instransitively, so that the
phrase is a tautology?
10 p 527
||Zeller suggests that inhuman things, animals, plants, stones cannot have
the same origins, hence not the same order of idea, as human beings.||
Why? Z. is stupid at times.
11 p 529, underlined
""#
" & " "
"
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:423
" """ !" IV, 8, 3.471,
A.
i.e. potentiality if we do not distinguish the thoughts from
the thinkings. Or vice versa, the whole is potential, the
particular ideas actual, (of which the “idea of the whole”
would of course be one; for it is a special idea).
12 p 549, marked Z
||According to Zeller, Plotinus offered “positive conditions” in his system
for metaphysical evil.||
How perverse. Metaphysical evil can be deduced from the
surplus good of imitating the highest—i.e. from the good
of the creature: but physical or moral evil (the latter is
part of the former) cannot be deduced at all.
13 p 553
||Dualism with respect to the world of appearance as illustration of the
intelligible world.||
Not so much of a dualism, my dear Hegelian. “The ghost
of good that haunts the earth is sadder than all evil”.1
1
Lucifer to Hermes in Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy, Act IV, page 111
(Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone, 1899).
14 p 558, marked
This is the error of essentialism in physics: as if ideal relations could be dynamic bonds.
15 p 563
||Zeller questions what happens to the pursuit of the good in time of war,
before the prospect of death?||
Sycophancy & Fanaticism—these are the usual ingredients
of Theodicies and optimisms.
16 p 575
This is a very unsatisfactory commentary.—The soul,
being impassable, ought not herself to descend or suffer.
But the body, soliciting and deserving such a soul, might
breed a likeness of her in itself—a consciousness. This
might, at best, identify itself with its own eternal
idea—and be saved.—The notion of a “fallen soul” needs
2:424
George Santayana’s Marginalia
to be analysed into two: 1st the heavenly {idea soul =
2nd the aspiring consciousness or life.
17 p 582
[Santayana translates Plotinus:]
Is an idea of suffering possible to one who has never suffered?
[Then he comments:]
Only in material terms of pursuit, struggle, etc.
18 p 584, underlined
||Zeller explains the|| Sorge ||of the soul for the fate of the body.||
[Santayana translates “Sorge” as:]
concern—fellow-feeling—dramatic imitation. Of course,
this is not the soul, but the consciousness that has that soul
for its eventual heaven.
19 p 587
No one seems to consider that freedom (the worst of
things) belongs to ungoverned matter. Sin, chance, etc.
and rises from below to disturb order and reason.
20 p 593, underlined
||The persistence of Persönlichkeit1 in the eternal.||
What is this to Plotinus?
1
Personality.
21 p 594, marked
||The distinction in Plato between recurring memory and thinking,||
etwas anderes sei, als das Gedächtniss, und weil es dieses nur mit dem
zeitlichen und veränderlichen zu thun habe, in Beziehung auf das ewige
dagegen wohl eine Erneuerung der Denkthätigkeit, aber keine
Erinnerung statthabe.1
Use this in interpreting the Phaedo.
1
… might be rather different from reflection, and because it is confined only to the
temporal and changeable. On the other hand, with reference to the eternal, a renewal
of mental activity, but no memory occurs.
22 p 597, marked
||To the happy man, misfortune is an irrelevance.|| […] wird seine
Vaterstadt zerstört, so wird er Holz und Steine für nichts grosses achten;
kommen seine Mitbürger um, so bedenkt er, dass Sterben besser ist, als
George Santayana’s Marginalia
2:425
Leben; stirbt er eines grausenhaften Todes, so wird seine Ansicht über
den Tod dadurch nicht geändert werden; […].1
Couldn’t this be used in the Philosopher at Court? Try.
1
… should his native city be destroyed, he will not consider wood and stone of
great account; if a fellow-citizen falls in battle, he reflects that dying is better than
living; should he himself die a frightful death, his attitude to death still would not
change; ….
George Santayana’s Library
Books and journals owned by George Santayana were deposited at or
collected by various institutions or individuals. The editors of The Works
of George Santayana are aware of approximately 525 titles at nine different locations. The major repositories include:
Columbia
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library,
Columbia University, New York City
Georgetown
Special Collections, Lauinger Library,
Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Harvard
Houghton Library,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Le Balze
Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Italy
(Charles Augustus Strong’s Villa, now owned by Georgetown University)
Texas
Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas, Austin
Waterloo
Rare Book and Manuscript Room,
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Two appendixes have been included on the following pages. The first
(appendix A) is a listing (alphabetically by author) of all of the books
known to have been in Santayana’s possession at one time. The list
includes a record number, which corresponds to the “George
Santayana’s Library” database number, the author’s name, the title of the
work, publication information, and repository. Any particular comments
about the book are also included. Most of the books contain Santayana’s
marginal notes, comments, or markings, and the majority of the titles are
included in this volume, George Santayana’s Marginalia. An asterisk following the record number indicates those titles.
2:428
George Santayana’s Library
The second is a listing, alphabetically by title (appendix T), of the
books known to have been in Santayana’s possession at one time. Initial
record numbers in this list refer to the more complete alpha by author
list in appendix A.
The Santayana Edition obtained photocopies of bibliographic records
from the major repositories. From these records and John McCormick’s
notes, a library database has been compiled that contains the following
fields:
Record number
Inclusion or not in McCormick’s volume
Type of publication
Author’s name
Title
Publisher and place of publication
Year of publication
Number of pages
Name of repository
Library catalog number
Reference comments
Not all fields are included in the following appendixes. However, it is
the intention of the Santayana Edition to post and maintain the complete
database of “George Santayana’s Library” on the Santayana Edition Web
site. The database will be updated as more information is received.
George Santayana’s Library
A:1
1 * Abell, Walter. Representation and Form: A Study of Aesthetic Values in
Representational Art. New York: Scribner’s, 1936, 172p. Waterloo.
Introduction by Arthur Pope. No marginalia.
2 * Acton, Harold. Memoirs of an Aesthete. London: Methuen, 1948,
415p. Waterloo.
3 * Adam, Antoine. Le Vrai Verlaine: essai psychanalytique. Paris: E. Droz,
1936, 139p. Waterloo.
4 * Adam, James. The Religious Teachers of Greece. Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 1908. Georgetown. Being Gifford Lectures on natural religion
delivered at Aberdeen. Edited by Adela Marion Adam. No marginalia.
5 * Aiken, Conrad. The Divine Pilgrim. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1949, 288p. Waterloo.
6 * Aiken, Conrad. The Kid. London: John Lehmann, 1947, 46p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
7 * Ainger, Arthur Campbell. Memories of Eton Sixty Years Ago. London:
J. Murray, 1917, 353p. Waterloo. Marked by Santayana. McCormick
notes no marginalia.
8 * Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier]. Histoire de mes pensées. Paris:
Gallimard, 1936, 310p. Waterloo. Eighth edition.
9 * Alain [E. A. Chartier]. Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs. Paris: Editions
du Sagittaire, S. Kra, 1926, 235p. Waterloo. Marked by Santayana.
McCormick notes no marginalia.
10 * Alain [E. A. Chartier]. Les Dieux. Paris: Gallimard, 1934, 400p.
Waterloo.
11 * Alain [E. A. Chartier]. Les Idées et les âges. Paris: Gallimard, 1927.
Waterloo. Volume II.
12 * Alain [E. A. Chartier]. Propos de littérature. Paris: P. Hartmann,
1934, 324p. Waterloo.
13 * Alain [E. A. Chartier]. Propos de politique. Paris: Rieder, 1934,
346p. Waterloo. Seventh edition.
14 * Alain [E. A. Chartier]. Propos sur le Christianisme. Paris: Rieder,
1924, 174p. Waterloo.
15 * Albert, Thomas. Manufacture of Christianity. Philadelphia:
Dorrance, 1946, 177p. Waterloo. Holograph address written by
Santayana on inside front cover. No marginalia.
A:2
George Santayana’s Library
16 - Alexander, Samuel. Space, Time, and Deity. London: Macmillan
and Co., 1920. Le Balze. The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1916–1918.
Volume One of two. Inscription identifies book as having belonged to
Daniel Cory “Rome, 1929.”
17 * Alonso, Dámaso. Poesía Española: ensayo de metodos y limites estilisticos. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1950, 671p. Waterloo.
18 * Amery, L[eopold] S[tennett]. Thoughts on the Constitution. London
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1947, 166p. Waterloo. Four
Chichele Lectures delivered at All Souls College, Oxford.
19 * Ames, Van Meter. Proust and Santayana: The Aesthetic Way of Life.
Chicago and New York: Willet, Clark, and Co., 1937, 176p. Waterloo.
20 * Aristotle. Aristoteles Metaphysik. Berlin: Reimer, 1890. Georgetown.
Translated into German by Hermann Bonitz and edited by Eduard
Wellmann.
21 - Aristotle. Aristotelis Metaphysica recognovit et enarravit Hermannus
Bonitz. Bonnae: A. Marcus, 1848–1849. Georgetown. Two volumes in
one.
22 * Aristotle. Aristotle’s Psychology: A Treatise on the Principle of Life (De
Anima and Parva Naturalia). London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd.;
New York: Macmillan Co., 1902. Georgetown. Translated and edited
by William Alexander Hammond. Inscribed by Santayana, “G.
Santayana 1903.”
23 - Aristotle. Metaphysica. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908.
Georgetown. The Works of Aristotle, Volume VIII. Translated into
English under the editorship of J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross.
24 * Aristotle. The Nichomachaean Ethics of Aristotle. London and New
York: Macmillan, 1892. Le Balze. Translated by J. E. C. Welldon.
Inscribed by Santayana, “G. Santayana Avila 1895.” McCormick notes
few and unimportant markings.
25 * Aristotle. Psychologie d’Aristote: Traité de l’âme. Paris: Librairie
Philosophique de Ladrange, 1846. Le Balze. Translated into French by
J. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire. McCormick notes few and unimportant
markings.
26 * Asín Palacios, Miguel. El Islam cristianizado. Madrid: Editorial
Plutarco, 1931, 543p. Waterloo.
George Santayana’s Library
A:3
27 * Atkinson, Brooks. Once Around the Sun. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1951, 376p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
28 * Babbitt, Irving. Democracy and Leadership. London: Constable &
Co., 1924. Georgetown. No marginalia.
29 * Bacon, Francis. The Essays or Counsels: Civil and Moral. London:
David Scott, 1891. Columbia. Inscription indicates this volume
belonged to Daniel Cory.
30 * Bailey, Cyril. The Greek Atomists and Epicurus. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1928. Georgetown.
31 * Bailly, Auguste. Byzance. Paris: A. Fayard, 1948, 442p. Waterloo.
Holograph note on back flyleaf reads: “From Mattie Dana” and lists
address.
32 * Bainville, Jacques. L’Allemagne. Paris: Plon, 1939. Waterloo. Two
volumes of articles previously published in L’Action française. Volume
One has no marginalia.
33 * Bainville, Jacques. L’Angleterre et l’empire Britannique. Paris: Plon,
1938, 243p. Waterloo. Collection of articles, most of them previously
published in L’Action française and La Liberté.
34 * Bainville, Jacques. La Fortune de la France. Paris: Plon, 1937, 364p.
Waterloo. Consists of articles reprinted from various periodicals.
35 * Bainville, Jacques. La Russie et la barriere de l’est. Paris: Plon, 1937,
294p. Waterloo. Consists of articles reprinted from L’Action française
and La Liberté.
36 * Balfour, Arthur James. The Foundations of Belief. London and New
York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901. Georgetown. Eighth edition,
revised.
37 * Barbusse, Henri. Jésus. Paris: E. Flammarion, 1927, 249p.
Waterloo.
38 * Baring, Maurice. Have You Anything to Declare? London: W.
Heinemann, 1936, 323p. Waterloo. Holograph inscription on flyleaf.
No marginalia.
39 * Barnes, William. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1883, 467p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
A:4
George Santayana’s Library
40 * Bartlett, Alice Hunt. Six Historic and Romantic Leaders Who Visioned
World Peace: Poetic Dramas. New York: Distributed by Brentano’s, 1946,
275p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
41 * Bates, Ernest Sutherland. Biography of the Bible. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1937, 183p. Waterloo.
42 * Bede, Cuthbert. The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green. London: J.
Blackwood, n.d. Le Balze. No marginalia.
43 * Belgion, Montgomery. Our Present Philosophy of Life. London:
Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1929. Georgetown.
44 * Benda, Julien. Essai d’un discours cohérent sur les rapports de Dieu et
du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1931, 221p. Waterloo. Extensive notes on
back flyleaf.
45 * Benda, Julien. La Fin de l’éternel. Paris: Gallimard, 1929, 260p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
46 * Benda, Julien. Mon premier testament. Paris: Gallimard, 1928, 141p.
Waterloo.
47 * Benn, Gottfried. Der Ptolemäer. Wiesbaden: Limes, 1949, 139p.
Waterloo. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
48 * Berenson, Bernard. Sketch for a Self-Portrait. London: Constable,
1949, 144p. Waterloo. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no
marginalia.
49 * Bergson, Henri. La Pensée et le mouvant. Paris: F. Alcan, 1934.
Columbia. Third edition.
50 * Bergson, Henri. Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Paris:
F. Alcan, 1932. Columbia.
51 * Bergson, Henri. L’Intuition philosophique. Paris: Helleu et Sergent,
1927. Georgetown.
52 * Berkeley, George. Selections from Berkeley. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1884. Georgetown. Third edition, revised.
53 * Beruete, Aureliano de. Velazquez. London: Methuen and Co.,
1906. Waterloo. Translated by Hugh E. Poynter. Marked by
Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
54 * Bevan, Edwyn Robert. Jerusalem under the High-Priests. London: E.
Arnold, 1918. Georgetown.
George Santayana’s Library
A:5
55 * Bewick, Thomas. A Selection of Engravings on Wood by Thomas
Bewick. London: Penguin Books, 1947, 56p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
56 * Birnbaum, Martin. Jacovleff and Other Artists. New York: P. A.
Struck, 1946, 235p. Waterloo. Author’s signed presentation copy to
Santayana (200 copies of this edition are signed by the author). No
marginalia.
57 * Birnbaum, Martin. John Singer Sargent. New York: W. E. Rudge’s,
1941, 80p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana signed by the
author. No marginalia.
58 * Bishop, Elizabeth. North & South. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1946, 54p. Waterloo. Winner of the tenth anniversary HoughtonMifflin fellowship award for a volume of poetry.
59 * Blanshard, Brand [Editor]. Philosophy in American Education. New
York and London: Harper, 1945, 306p. Waterloo.
60 * Bolaffio, Carlo. Colui che si chiama “lo sono.” Modena: Guanda,
1936, 721p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author
(number 252/500).
61 * Bolton, Isabel. Do I Wake or Sleep? New York: C. Scribner’s Sons,
1946. Waterloo. Pseudonym of Mary Britton Miller. No marginalia.
62 - Bonitz, Hermann. Platonische Studien. Berlin: F. Vahlen, 1886.
Georgetown.
63 * Bradley, Francis Herbert. Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical
Essay. London: S. Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1893. Texas.
“1894” inscribed by Santayana, and signed by Santayana on half-title
page.
64 * Bradley, Francis Herbert. Ethical Studies. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1927. Georgetown. Second edition, revised.
65 * Breasted, James Henry. The Dawn of Conscience. New York and
London: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1933, 431p. Waterloo. Presentation copy
to Santayana from the author.
66 - Brooks, Van Wyck. Emerson and Others. New York: E. P. Dutton &
Co., 1927. Le Balze.
67 * Buchheim, Karl Adolf [Editor]. Deutsche Lyric. London: Macmillan
& Co., 1883. Georgetown. Fourth edition.
A:6
George Santayana’s Library
68 * Buchler, Justus. Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1951, 176p. Waterloo. Presentation
copy to Santayana from the author.
69 * Bullett, Gerald William. Dreaming. London: Jarrolds, 1928, 85p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
70 * Bullett, Gerald William. Poems in Pencil. London: J. M. Dent, 1937.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
71 * Bülow, Bernhard von. Imperial Germany. London, New York, and
Toronto: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1914. Adelaida Sastre, Avila.
72 * Bultmann, Rudolf Karl. Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1931, 408p. Waterloo.
73 * Burgard, Raymond. L’Expédition d’Alexandre et la conquête de l’Asie.
Paris: Gallimard, 1937, 187p. Waterloo. University of Waterloo’s copy
imperfect, lacks pages 189–252.
74 * Burnett, Whit and Charles E. Slatkin [Editors]. American Authors
Today. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1947, 559p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
75 * Butcher, Samuel Henry. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts:
With a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics. London and New York:
Macmillan, 1898. Georgetown. Second edition. No marginalia.
76 * Butler, Joseph. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the
Constitution and Course of Nature. London: George Bell & Sons, 1902.
Georgetown.
77 * Butler, Richard. “The Notion of Essence in the Philosophy of
George Santayana.” Rome, 1952. Columbia. Published as The Mind of
Santayana. Chicago: Regnery, 1955.
78 * Caird, Edward. The Evolution of Religion. New York: Macmillan &
Co., 1893. Georgetown. The Gifford Lectures delivered before the
University of St. Andrews in sessions 1890–91 and 1891–92. Two volumes.
79 * Callimachus. Poems of Callimachus: Four Hymns and the Epigrams.
London: J. Cape, 1931, 123p. Waterloo. Number 107/500. No marginalia.
80 * Calverton, Victor Francis. The Liberation of American Literature.
New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1932. Georgetown.
George Santayana’s Library
A:7
81 - Calverton, Victor Francis. The Passing of the Gods. New York: C.
Scribner’s Sons, 1934. Georgetown.
82 * Campbell, Lewis. Religion in Greek Literature. London and New
York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1898. Georgetown. Inscribed by
Santayana, “G. Santayana Harvard College 1899.” No marginalia.
83 * Campion, George C. Elements in Thought and Emotion: An Essay on
Education, Epistomology, & the Psycho-neural Problem. London: University
of London Press, 1923. Georgetown. No marginalia.
84 * Camus, Albert. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard, 1942, 189p.
Waterloo. New edition with appendix on Kafka.
85 * Camus, Albert. La Peste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947, 337p. Waterloo.
Margins heavily marked by Santayana, but no comments.
86 * Carco, Francis. Images cachées. Paris: A. Michel, 1929, 253p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
87 * Carco, Francis. La Lumière noire: Roman. Paris: A. Michel, 1934,
254p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
88 * Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan. Law and Literature, and Other Essays
and Addresses. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934, 190p. Waterloo. No
marginalia.
89 * Carus, Paul. The Canon of Reason and Virtue: Being Lao-tze’s Tao Teh
King. London and Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1927. 209p.
Waterloo.
90 * Castelli, Enrico. Idealismo e solipsismo: e saggi critici. Rome: A.
Signorelli, 1933, 108p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from
the author.
91 * Castelnau, Jacques Thomas de. Le Paris de Charles V, 1364–1380.
Paris: Hachette, 1930, 158p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
92 * Cavalcanti, Guido. Rime. Genova: Edizioni Marsano, 1931.
Waterloo. One volume. No marginalia.
93 * Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. L’École des cadavres. Paris: Denoël, 1938,
305p. Waterloo.
94 * Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Mea culpa: suivi de la vie et l’oeuvre de
Semmelweis. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1937, 124p. Waterloo.
A:8
George Santayana’s Library
95 * Chapman, John Jay. Notes on Religion. New York: Laurence J.
Gromme, 1915. Georgetown.
96 * Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer.
London: The Medici Society, 1929, 637p. Waterloo. Passages marked
by Santayana, but no comments.
97 * Chénier, André Marie. Bucoliques. Paris: La Sirene, 1923, 155p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
98 * Churchill, Winston. The Dawn of Liberation: War Speeches by the
Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1945,
417p. Waterloo. Compiled by Charles Eade. No marginalia.
99 * Clemens, Cyril. The Man from Limehouse: Clement Richard Attlee.
Webster Groves, MO: International Mark Twain Society, 1946, 159p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
100 * Clemens, Cyril. The Man from Missouri: A Biography of Harry S.
Truman. Webster Groves, MO: International Mark Twain Society,
1945, 184p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
No marginalia.
101 * Clemens, Cyril. My Chat with Thomas Hardy. Webster Groves,
MO: International Mark Twain Society, 1944, 31p. Waterloo.
Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. Marked by
Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
102 * Clifford, William Kingdon. Lectures and Essays by the late William
Kingdon Clifford. London and New York: Macmillan, 1901.
Georgetown. Edited by Leslie Stephen and Sir Frederick Pollock.
Inscribed by Santayana, “G.S. in re Hyde 1905.”
103 * Coates, Adrian. A Sceptical Examination of Contemporary British
Philosophy. London and New York: Brentano’s Ltd., 1929. Georgetown.
No marginalia.
104 * Cole, George Douglas Howard. The World of Labour: A Discussion
of the Present and the Future of Trade Unionism. London: George Bell &
Sons, 1920, 443p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
105 * Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Friend. London: George Bell &
Sons, 1899. Georgetown.
George Santayana’s Library
A:9
106 * Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. London: George Bell & Sons, 1890. Georgetown. Edited by
T. Ashe. Volume Two only (of two). No marginalia.
107 * Collingwood, Robin George. The Idea of Nature. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1945. Texas.
108 * Collingwood, Robin George. The New Leviathan, or Man, Society,
Civilization and Barbarism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944, 387p.
Waterloo.
109 * Collis, John Stewart. While Following the Plough. London: J. Cape,
1946, 232p. Waterloo. Notes on endpaper listing Santayana’s places of
residence 1939–1941.
110 * Colony, Horatio. Bacchus and Krishna. Privately printed, 1952,
43p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
111 * Confucius. The Unwobbling Pivot & the Great Digest. Norfolk, CT:
Pharos, 1947, 52p. Waterloo. Translated by Ezra Pound. No marginalia.
112 * Corneille, Pierre. Oeuvres de Pierre Corneille: Théatre complet. Paris:
A. Laplace, 1869, 777p. Waterloo.
113 * Corwin, Norman Lewis. On a Note of Triumph. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1945, 71p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
114 * Cramb, J[ohn] A[dam]. Germany and England. London: J. Murray,
1914. Adelaida Sastre, Avila.
115 * Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado. San Juan de la Cruz, su obra
científica y su obra literaria. Madrid: Mensajero de Santa Teresa y de San
Juan de la Cruz, 1929. Waterloo. Two volumes.
116 * Croce, Benedetto. Ce qui est vivant et ce qui est mort de la philosophie
de Hegel. Paris: V. Giard and E. Brière, 1910, 249p. Waterloo.
Translated by Henri Buriot.
117 * Crosfield, Thomas. The Diary of Thomas Crosfield. London:
Oxford University Press, 1935, 169p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
118 * Cuneo, Niccolò. Spagna cattolica e rivoluzionaria. Milano: Gilardi e
Noto, 1934, 352p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
119 * Cutting, W. Bayard. W. Bayard Cutting, Jr. 1878–1910. New York:
Marchbanks Press, 1947, 56p. Waterloo. Privately printed. No marginalia.
A : 10
George Santayana’s Library
120 * Dante Alighieri. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by birth
but not in conduct. New York: Harbor Press, 1934. Waterloo. Translated
by Louis How. Two volumes. Presentation copy to Santayana from
How. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
121 * Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, Purgatorio, and
Paradiso. New York: Pantheon Books, 1948, 187p. Waterloo. Translated
by Lawrence G. White. Presentation copy from George Rauh to
Santayana. No marginalia.
122 * Dante Alighieri. La Divina commedia. Firenze: Casa Editrice
Nemi, 1931, 527p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
123 * Dante Alighieri. La Divina commedia di Dante Alighieri. Parigi:
Torchi de Dondey-Dupré, 1818–1819. Georgetown. Comment by G.
Biagioli. No marginalia.
124 * Dasgupta, Surendranath. A History of Indian Philosophy.
Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1922. Georgetown.
125 * Datta, Dhirendra Mohan. The Chief Currents of Contemporary
Philosophy. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1950, 541p. Waterloo.
Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
126 * Davenport, Russell Wheeler. My Country. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1944, 62p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
127 * Delphic Club. Quinquennial Catalogue of the Delphic Club of
Harvard University. Cambridge, MA.: Graduates’ Association, 1936,
1946, 1950. Waterloo. Three volumes [1936, 1946, 1950]. No marginalia.
128 * Denifle, Henri. Luther et le Luthéranisme. Paris: Picard, 1911.
Georgetown. Translated by J. Paquier. Volume Two only (of three). No
marginalia.
129 * Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. Chicago and London: Open
Court Publishing Co., 1925. Georgetown.
130 * Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty. London: George Allen &
Unwin Ltd., 1930. Columbia. Gifford Lectures, 1929.
131 * Dewey, John. Reconstruction and Philosophy. London: University of
London Press, 1921. Georgetown.
George Santayana’s Library
A : 11
132 * Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes. Appearances: Being Notes of Travel.
London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1914. Sastre Family,
Madrid.
133 * Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes. Is Immortality Desirable? Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909. Georgetown.
134 - Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes. The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue.
Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1901. Georgetown.
135 * Dillaway, Newton. Prophet of America: Emerson and the Problems of
Today. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1936, 423p. Waterloo.
136 * Douglas, Norman. South Wind. New York: Macmillan, 1929,
421p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to James W. Oliver from Lawrence
James Wathen. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
137 - Drake, Durant. Problems of Religion: An Introductory Survey. Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916. Georgetown.
138 * Ducasse, Curt John. Nature, Mind, and Death. La Salle, IL: Open
Court Publishing Company, 1951, 514p. Waterloo. Presentation copy
to Santayana from the author. Holographic note on flyleaf by
Santayana. No marginalia.
139 * Ducasse, Curt John. “On the Attributes of Material Things.” The
Journal of Philosophy [reprint], 31 (1 Feb 1934): 57–72. Texas.
140 * Dudley, Owen Francis. Will Men Be Like Gods?: Humanitarianism
or Human Happiness? London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1924. Georgetown. Introduction by G. K. Chesterton.
141 * Du Maurier, Daphne. Hungry Hill. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
Doran, 1943, 402p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
142 - Dunn, Robert. And Least Love. Katonah, NY: SouthworthAnthoensen Press, 1945, 92p. Waterloo. Page references to text on
back flyleaf.
143 * Dunn, Robert. Horizon Fever. New York: Albert and Charles
Boni, 1932. Georgetown.
144 * Dunning, Ralph Cheever. Rococo: a poem. Paris: E. W. Titus,
1926, 22p. Waterloo. Signed by the author and the illustrator.
Presentation copy number 35/500 to Santayana from the author. No
marginalia.
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George Santayana’s Library
145 * Durant, William James. The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and
Opinions of the Greater Philosophers. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1926, 586p. Waterloo.
146 * Durant, William James. The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and
Opinions of the Greater Philosophers. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1926, 586p. Waterloo. Second copy.
147 * Duron, Jacques. La Pensée de George Santayana: Santayana en
Amérique. Paris: Nizet, 1950, 556p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to
Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
148 * Dyer, Louis. Studies of the Gods in Greece at Certain Sanctuaries
Recently Excavated. London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1891.
Georgetown. Eight lectures given in 1890 at the Lowell Institute.
Inscribed, “George Santayana Cambridge 1891.” No marginalia.
149 * Eastman, Max [Forrester]. The Enjoyment of Poetry: with Anthology
for Enjoyment of Poetry. New York: C. Scribner’s, 1951, 317p. Waterloo.
Author’s autograph presentation copy to Santayana. No marginalia.
150 * Eaton, Charles Edward. The Shadow of the Swimmer. New York:
Fine Editions Press, 1951, 33p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to
Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
151 * Eddington, Arthur Stanley. The Nature of the Physical World.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1928. Georgetown.
152 * Edman, Irwin. Philosopher’s Quest. New York: Viking Press, 1947,
255p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Daniel Cory from the author. No
marginalia.
153 * Edwards, Jonathan. Representative Selections. New York,
Cincinnati, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta: American Book Co., 1935, 434p.
Waterloo. American Writers Series.
154 * Einstein, Albert [Editor]. Living Philosophies. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1937, 334p. Waterloo.
155 * Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns]. After Strange Gods. London: Faber and
Faber Ltd., 1935. Texas.
156 * Eliot, T. S. The Cocktail Party: A Comedy. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1950, 190p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from T. W.
157 * Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1948,
44p. Waterloo.
George Santayana’s Library
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158 * English Institute. Essays, 1948. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1949. Waterloo. Edited by D. A. Robertson Jr. No marginalia.
159 * Ewing, Alfred Cyril. Idealism: A Critical Survey. London:
Methuen, 1934. Texas. Marginal annotations in Santayana’s hand in
pencil, Daniel Cory’s hand in ink.
160 - Fadiman, Clifton. Reading I’ve Liked. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1941, 908p. Waterloo.
161 - Fairbanks, Arthur. The First Philosophers of Greece. New York: C.
Scribner’s Sons, 1898. Le Balze. Inscribed by Santayana, “G.
Santayana 52 Brattle Street Cambridge 1898.”
162 * Falconi, Carlo. Jean Paul Sartre. Modena: Guanda, 1949, 293p.
Waterloo.
163 * Fargue, Léon-Paul. Portraits de famille: souvenirs. Paris: J. B. Janin,
1947, 29p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
164 * Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Science of Knowledge. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott & Co., 1868. Georgetown. Translated by A. E. Kroeger.
165 * Ficke, Arthur Davison. Tumultuous Shore, and Other Poems. New
York: A. A. Knopf (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press), 1942, 110p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
166 * Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. London:
Hutchinson, 1934. Waterloo. Two volumes.
167 * Fisch, Max H. [Editor]. Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James,
Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1951, 493p. Waterloo. Presentation copy from the editor to
Santayana.
168 * Fletcher, Phineas. Venus & Anchises (Brittain’s Ida) and Other
Poems. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926, 125p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
169 - Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de. L’Esprit de Fontenelle. La Haye:
Chez Pierre Gosse, 1753. Waterloo. Eight volumes.
170 * Foote, Henry Wilder. Thomas Jefferson: Champion of Religious
Freedom: Advocate of Christian Morals. Boston: Beacon Press, 1947, 70p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from Cyril Clemens. No
marginalia.
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George Santayana’s Library
171 * Frank, Philipp. Einstein: His Life and Times. New York: A. A.
Knopf, 1947. Waterloo. Translated from a German manuscript by
George Rosen.
172 * Frazer, James George. Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History:
Selected from his Commentary on Pausanias’ Description of Greece. London:
Macmillan, 1919, 419p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
173 * Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London and
Vienna: The International Psycho-analytic Press, 1922. Georgetown.
Translated by C. J. M. Hubback.
174 * Freud, Sigmund. Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams).
Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1914. Georgetown. Fourth edition.
175 * Freud, Sigmund. L’Avenir d’une illusion. Paris: Denoël et Steele,
1932, 196p. Waterloo. Translated by Marie Bonaparte. No marginalia.
176 * Frost, Robert. A Masque of Reason. New York: H. Holt, 1945, 23p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from Omar E. Mueller. No
marginalia.
177 * Fuller, Benjamin Apthorp Gould. A History of Philosophy. New
York: H. Holt, 1938, 417p. Waterloo. Originally published in two volumes. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
178 * Fülöp-Miller, René. The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An
Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia. London and New York: G.
P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927. Georgetown. Translated by F. S. Flint and D.
F. Tait. McCormick notes no significant marginalia.
179 * Furon, Raymond. La Perse. Paris: Payot, 1938, 238p. Waterloo.
180 * Garbe, Richard von. Die Sâmkhya-Philosophie: eine Darstellung des
indischen Rationalismus. Leipzig: H. Haessel, 1894. Georgetown.
Inscribed by Santayana, “G. Santayana 5 Grove St.” No marginalia.
181 * García Marruz, Fina. Las miradas perdidas, 1944–1950. Havana,
Cuba: [Ucar García], 1951, 205p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to
Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
182 * Gavin, Frank Stanton Burns. Some Aspects of Contemporary Greek
Orthodox Thought. London: Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge; Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing Co., 1936, 430p.
Waterloo.
George Santayana’s Library
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183 * Gibson, James. Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and Its Historical
Relations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1917.
Columbia.
184 * Gide, André Paul Guillaume. Amyntas. Paris: Gallimard, Editions
de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1927, 220p. Waterloo.
185 * Gide, André Paul Guillaume. Journal des faux-monnayeurs. Paris:
Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1929, 144p.
Waterloo.
186 * Gide, André Paul Guillaume. Le Voyage d’Urien. Paris: Gallimard,
Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1929, 165p. Waterloo. Sixth
edition. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
187 * Gide, André Paul Guillaume. Si le grain ne meurt. Paris: Nouvelle
Revue Française, 1924. Waterloo. Two volumes. Marked by
Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
188 * Gioberti, Vincenzo. Cours de philosophie, 1841–1842. Milano:
Fratelli Bocca, 1947, 278p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
189 * Giraudoux, Jean. Les Cinq tentations de La Fontaine. Paris: B.
Grasset, 1938, 292p. Waterloo.
190 * Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, comte de. La Renaissance: scénes historiques. Paris: Plon, 1929. Waterloo. Two volumes. No marginalia.
191 * Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe’s Gedichte. Berlin: S.
Fischer, 1905. Waterloo. Edited by Otto Pniower.
192 * Gollancz, Victor. Our Threatened Values. London: V. Gollancz,
1946, 157p. Waterloo.
193 * Goodman, Jack Rawlin. A Self Portrait. New York: Exposition
Press, 1949, 110p. Waterloo. Presentation copy signed by the author.
194 * Gordon, Hirsch Loeb. The Maggid of Caro: The Mystic Life of the
Eminent Codifier Joseph Caro as Revealed in His Secret Diary. New York:
Pardes Publishing House, Shoulson Press, 1949, 396p. Waterloo.
Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
195 * Gorer, Geoffrey. The Americans: A Study in National Character.
London: Cresset Press, 1948, 211p. Waterloo.
196 * Gray, Thomas. Poems. London: Printed for J. Murray, 1786.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
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George Santayana’s Library
197 * Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1890. Georgetown. Third edition. Edited by A. C. Bradley.
198 * Gregory, Alyse. Wheels on Gravel. London: J. Lane, The Bodley
Head, 1938, 208p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the
author.
199 * Groethuysen, Bernhard. Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France.
Paris: Gallimard, 1927. Waterloo. Second edition.
200 * Guénon, René. Les États multiples de l’être. Paris: Les Editions
Véga, 1932, 140p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
201 * Guénon, René. L’Homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta. Paris:
Bossard, 1925, 271p. Waterloo. Second edition.
202 * Guénon, René. Introduction générale á l’étude des doctrines Hindoues.
Paris: M. Riviére, 1921, 346p. Waterloo.
203 * Gumpert, Martin. The Anatomy of Happiness. New York, London,
and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1951, 310p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to
Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
204 * Guzzo, Augusto et alii. Concetto e programma della filosofia d’oggi.
Milano: Fratelli Bocca, 1941, 286p. Waterloo. Istituto de Studi
Filosofici.
205 * Guzzo, Augusto. Il pensiero di B. Spinoza. Firenze: Vallecchi
Editore, 1924, 536p. Waterloo. Presentation copy from the author.
206 * Guzzo, Augusto. La filosofia domani. Milano: Fratelli Bocca,
1943, 128p. Waterloo. Presentation copy signed by the author. No
marginalia.
207 * Guzzo, Augusto. La filosofia e l’esperienza. Roma: Editrice
Perrella, 1942, 218p. Waterloo. Presentation copy from the author.
208 * Guzzo, Augusto. L’io et la ragione. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1947,
381p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. No
marginalia.
209 * Hadfield, James Arthur. Psychology and Morals: An Analysis of
Character. London: Methuen, 1923. Georgetown.
210 * Hamilton, William. Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton. New York:
D. Appleton & Co., 1858. Georgetown. Fifth edition. Edited by O. W.
Wight.
George Santayana’s Library
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211 * Harcourt, Robert d’. Goethe et l’art de vivre. Paris: Payot, 1935,
200p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
212 * Harnack, Adolf von. Dogmengeschichte. Freiburg: Mohr, 1898.
Georgetown.
213 * Heard, Gerald. Is God in History?: An Inquiry into Human and
Prehuman History. London: Faber and Faber, 1951, 256p. Waterloo.
214 - Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie. Leipzig:
F. Meiner, 1914[?]. Le Balze. Edited by Georg Lasson.
215 * Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Logic of Hegel. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1874. Georgetown. Translated from the Encyclopaedia
of the Philosophical Sciences; with Prolegomena by William Wallace.
216 - Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes.
Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1841. Le Balze. Edited by Johannes
Schulze. Inscribed by Santayana, “G. Santayana Oct. 1889 29 Thayer
Cambridge.”
217 * Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Halle: Niemeyer, 1931.
Columbia.
218 * Hemingway, Ernest. Hemingway. New York: Viking Press, 1944,
642p. Waterloo. The Viking Portable Library. Edited by Malcolm
Cowley. No marginalia.
219 * Henrich, Edith. The Quiet Center. New York: W. Sloane
Associates, 1946, 73p. Waterloo. Typescript letter to Santayana from
Byron Dickson tipped in.
220 * Herodotus. Le Move muse. Milano: Sonzogno, 19–[?], 375p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
221 * Hersch, Jeanne. L’Illusion philosophique. Paris: F. Alcan, 1936,
204p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
222 * Hertzberg, Gustav Friedrich. Alkibiades: der Staatsmann und
Feldherr. Halle: C. E. M. Pfeffer, 1853, 360p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
223 * Hilliard, Albert Leroy. The Forms of Value: The Extension of a
Hedonistic Axiology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1950, 343p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
224 * Hirn, Yrjö. The Origins of Art: A Psychological & Sociological Inquiry.
London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1900. Georgetown.
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George Santayana’s Library
225 * Hispanic Society of America. Handbook: Museum and Library
Collections. New York: Printed by order of the trustees, 1938, 442p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
226 * Hogg, James. The Suicide’s Grave: Being the Private Memoirs &
Confessions of a Justified Sinner. London: J. Shiells, 1895, 226p. Waterloo.
No marginalia.
227 * Holmes, Pauline. A Tercentenary History of the Boston Public Latin
School, 1635–1935. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935,
541p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
228 * Holt, Edwin Bissell. The Concept of Consciousness. London: George
Allen & Co., 1914. Texas.
229 * Homer. Aphrodite: The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the
Pervigilium Veneris. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
1948, 53p. Waterloo. Translated by F. L. Lucas. No marginalia.
230 * Homer. The Original Iliad. n.p., 1937, 108p. Waterloo. Translated
by Robinson Smith. No marginalia.
231 * Hone, William, Jeremiah Jones, and William Wake. The
Apocryphal New Testament. Philadelphia: Gebbie & Co., 1880[?].
Georgetown. No marginalia.
232 * Hook, Sidney. The Metaphysics of Pragmatism: With an Introductory
Word by John Dewey. Chicago and London: The Open Court Publishing
Company, 1927. Georgetown.
233 * Hook, Sidney. “What is Materialism?” The Journal of Philosophy,
1934. Waterloo. Volume XXXI, number 9. No marginalia.
234 * Housman, A[lfred] E[dward]. More Poems. London: J. Cape,
1936, 71p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
235 * Hovelaque, Emile. Les États-unis et la guerre. Paris: Librairie Felix
Alcan, 1919. Georgetown. No marginalia.
236 * Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Philosophie. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1922. Waterloo.
237 - Huysmans, J.-K. A vau l’eau. Bruxelles: Kistemaekers, 1882.
Columbia. Contains a sonnet at the back in Santayana’s hand.
238 * Inge, William Ralph. The Philosophy of Plotinus. London and New
York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918. Georgetown. The Gifford
Lectures at St. Andrews, 1917–1918. Two volumes.
George Santayana’s Library
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239 * Irazusta, Julio. Actores y espectadores. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1937,
183p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
240 * Irazusta, Julio. Tito Livio, O, Del imperialismo en relación con las formas de gobierno y la evolución historica. Mendoza: Ediciones del Instituto
de Estudios Politicos, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 1951, 296p.
Waterloo.
241 * Irazusta, Julio. Tito Livio, O, Del imperialismo en relación con las formas de gobierno y la evolución historica. Mendoza: Ediciones del Instituto
de Estudios Politicos, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 1951, 296p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. This second copy contains no marginalia.
242 * Jackson, Henry. Plato’s Later Theory of Ideas. London[?]: s.n.,
1881–1896. Georgetown. Articles excerpted from The Journal of
Philology. No marginalia.
243 * James, Alice. Alice James: Her Brothers—Her Journal. New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1934, 252p. Waterloo. Edited by Anna Robeson Burr.
Contains note on flyleaf: “Nancy Toy, May 1934 From K. L.”
Overwritten with “Please do not return.”
244 * James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York and
London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912. Georgetown.
245 * James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of
Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907. Georgetown.
246 * Jeans, James Hopwood. The Universe around Us. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1929. Georgetown. No marginalia.
247 * Jeffers, Robinson. The Double Axe, and Other Poems. New York:
Random House, 1948, 149p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana
from Carleton Smith.
248 * Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York:
Random House, 1938, 622p. Waterloo. No marginlia.
249 * Jerrold, Douglas. An Introduction to the History of England, from the
Earliest Times to 1204. London: Collins, 1949, 614p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
250 * Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Fifty Spanish Poems. Oxford: Dolphin
Book Co., 1950, 97p. Waterloo. English translations by J. B. Trend. No
marginalia except a quip by Santayana opposite the title page.
A : 20
George Santayana’s Library
251 * Johnson, Lionel Pigot. Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson.
London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1919.
Georgetown. Edited by Frank Russell.
252 * Juan de la Cruz. Aphorismes de Saint Jean de la Croix. Bordeaux:
Feret, 1924, 78p. Waterloo. Edited by Jean Baruzi.
253 * Kallen, Horace Meyer. Art and Freedom. New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, 1942–1943. Waterloo. Two volumes. No marginalia in
Volume One.
254 * Kallen, Horace Meyer. The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy. New
York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1918. Georgetown. No marginalia.
255 * Kallen, Horace Meyer. Culture and Democracy in the United States.
New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924. Georgetown. No marginalia.
256 * Kallen, Horace Meyer. The Education of Free Men. New York:
Farrar, Straus, 1949, 332p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
257 * Kallen, Horace Meyer. Patterns of Progress. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1950, 87p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana
from the author.
258 * Kallen, Horace Meyer. William James and Henri Bergson: A Study
in Contrasting Theories of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
[1914]. Georgetown.
259 * Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. London: G. Bell &
Sons, 1884. Harvard. Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn.
260 * Kant, Immanuel. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. New
York: Macmillan, 1900. Georgetown. Second edition, revised.
Translated by F. Max Müller. Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana
1901.”
261 * Kant, Immanuel. Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1878. Harvard. Edited by Karl Kehrbach.
262 - Kant, Immanuel. Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
Hamburg and Leipzig: L. Voss, 1889. Georgetown. Edited by Benno
Erdmann. Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana 5 Grove St.”
263 * Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other
Works on the Theory of Ethics. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1883.
Georgetown. Third edition. Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott.
George Santayana’s Library
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264 * Keith, Arthur Berriedale. The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda
and Upanishads. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London:
Oxford University Press, 1925. Georgetown. McCormick notes two
volumes, with no marginalia in Volume One.
265 * Kettner, Frederick. Life and Spirit: Biosophical Poems. New York
and Chicago: Biosophy Press, 1948, 139p. Waterloo. Presentation copy
to Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
266 * Keynes, John Maynard. A Revision of the Treaty. London:
Macmillan, 1922, 223p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
267 * Keyserling, Hermann Alexander. Menschen als Sinnbilder.
Darmstadt: O. Reichl, 1926. Georgetown.
268 * Kinney, Mary Cyril Edwin. A Critique of the Philosophy of George
Santayana in the Light of Thomistic Principles. Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1942, 131p. Waterloo.
269 * Knowles, David. The Benedictines. London: Sheed and Ward,
1929, 112p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
270 * Knox, Howard Vicenté. The Evolution of Truth, and Other Essays.
London: Constable, 1930, 180p. Waterloo. Author’s autograph presentation copy to L. P. Jacks. No marginalia.
271 * Korean American Cultural Association. The Culture of Korea.
Honolulu: s. n., 1946, 334p. Waterloo. Edited by Changsoon Kim and
signed by editor. No marginalia.
272 * La Batut, Guy de. Henri III: Les Amours des rois de France. Paris:
Éditions Montaigne, 1931, 222p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
273 * La Fontaine, Jean de. Fables, contes et nouvelles. Paris: Gallimard,
1948, 751p. Waterloo. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no
marginalia.
274 * Lamont, Corliss. Humanism as a Philosophy. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1949, 368p. Waterloo. Second edition.
Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
275 * Lamont, Corliss. The Illusion of Immortality. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1950, 316p. Waterloo. Second edition.
Presentation copy to Santayana, signed by the author. No marginalia.
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276 * Langstaff, John Brett. Man and Christmas Verse. New York: H.
Emmerson, 1947, 160p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana
from the author. No marginalia.
277 * Le Dantec, Félix Alexandre. L’Athéisme. Paris: Ernest
Flammarion, 1906. Georgetown.
278 * Le Roy, Edouard Louis. Dogme et critique. Paris: Librairie Bloud,
1907. Georgetown.
279 * Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. A Victorian Historian: Private
Letters of W. E. H. Lecky, 1859–1878. London: Home and Van Thal,
1947, 90p. Waterloo. Edited with an introduction by H. Montgomery
Hyde. No marginalia.
280 * Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Philosophical Works of Leibniz.
New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1890. Georgetown.
Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana 7 Stoughton Cambridge.”
281 * Levy, Hermann. England and Germany: Affinity and Contrast.
Leigh-on-Sea, Essex: Thames Bank Publishing Co., 1949, 167p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
282 * Lietzmann, Hans. Geschichte der alten Kirche. Berlin and Leipzig:
W. de Gruyter, 1932. Waterloo.
283 * Lindsay, A[lexander] D[unlop]. The Philosophy of Bergson.
London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911. Georgetown.
284 * Lippmann, Walter. A Preface to Morals. London: Allen & Unwin,
1929. Georgetown.
285 * Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New
York: Samuel Marks, 1825. Georgetown. Two volumes.
286 * Loisy, Alfred Firmin. George Tyrrell et Henri Brémond. Paris: E.
Nourry, 1936, 205p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
287 * Loisy, Alfred Firmin. La Naissance du christianisme. Paris: E.
Nourry, 1933, 452p. Waterloo.
288 * Loisy, Alfred Firmin. Les Origines du nouveau testament. Paris: E.
Nourry, 1936, 375p. Waterloo. Copy imperfect, lacks all before page
17.
289 * Loisy, Alfred Firmin. Simples réflexions sur le décret du Saint-office.
Haute-Marne: Chez l’Auteur, 1908. Georgetown. Second edition.
George Santayana’s Library
A : 23
290 * Loisy, Alfred Firmin. Y a-t-il deux sources de la religion et de la
morale? Paris: E. Nourry, 1933, 204p. Waterloo.
291 * Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Prose Works of Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. London: G. Routledge, 1852, 267p. Waterloo.
No marginalia.
292 * Lotze, Hermann. System der Philosophie: Erster Theil, Drei Bücher
der Logik. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1887–1888. Wells College.
293 * Lotze, Hermann. System der Philosophie: Metaphysik Drei Bücher der
Ontologie, Kosmologie, Psychologie. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1884. Wells College.
294 * Lowell, Robert. The Mills of the Kavanaughs. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1951, 55p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the
author.
295 * Lucian [Lucianus Samosatensis]. Lucian’s True History. London:
A. H. Bullen, 1902, 117p. Waterloo. Translated by Frances Hickes.
Copy number 44/500. No marginalia.
296 * Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus]. De rerum natura libri sex.
London: G. Bell and Sons, 1886. Georgetown. Fourth edition.
Translated and with notes by H. A. J. Munro.
297 - Lutoslawski, Wincenty. The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic.
London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1897. Le Balze. Inscribed by
Santayana, “G. Santayana 60 Brattle St. Cambridge.” Also has inscription in what may be Daniel Cory’s hand giving Cory’s name and a
Foubourg St. Honore address.
298 * Machiavelli, Niccolo. Erotica. Milano: Studio Editoriale
Corbaccio, 1924, 222p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
299 * Macran, Frederick Walter. English Apologetic Theology. London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1905. Georgetown.
300 * Mallon, James Joseph and E. C. T. Lascelles. Poverty: Yesterday
and Today. London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930, 100p.
Waterloo.
301 * Manacorda, Guido. Benedetto Croce, ovvero, Dell’improntitudine.
Firenze: R. Bemporad, 1933, 125p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
302 * Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg. Berlin: Fischer, 1930.
Georgetown. Volume One of two.
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303 * Manning, Hugo. The Crown and the Fable: A Poetic Sequence.
London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1950, 31p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
304 - Manrique, Jorge. Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique. Boston: Allen and
Ticknor, 1833. Columbia. Translated by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. Contains Santayana’s corrections of Longfellow’s translations.
305 * Maraini, Fosco. Segreto Tibet. Bari: Edisioni “Leonardo da Vinci,”
1951. Waterloo.
306 * Marchant, James [Editor]. If I Had My Time Again: An Anthology
Contributed by Twenty Distinguished Men and Women. London: Odhams
Press, 1950, 256p. Waterloo.
307 * Maritain, Jacques. Art et scolastique. Paris: L. Rouart, 1927, 352p.
Waterloo.
308 * Maritain, Jacques. Réflexions sur l’intelligence et sur sa vie propre.
Paris: Desclée, de Brouwer, 1930, 380p. Waterloo. Third edition.
309 * Maritain, Jacques. Sept leçons sur l’être, et les premiers principes de la
raison spéculative. Paris: P. Téqui, 1934[?], 163p. Waterloo.
310 * Marsh, Gerald. Prairie Grass Poems. Dallas: Story Book Press,
1947, 76p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from H. James.
311 * Masson, John. Lucretius: Epicurean and Poet. London: John
Murray, 1907. Georgetown.
312 * Maxwell, William. The Folded Leaf. New York and London:
Harper, 1945, 310p. Waterloo. Eighth edition. No marginalia.
313 * Mayberry, George [Editor]. A Little Treasury of American Prose: The
Major Writers from Colonial Times to the Present Day. New York: C.
Scribner’s, 1949, 954p. Waterloo.
314 * Maycock, Alan Lawson. An Oxford Note-book. Edinburgh and
London: W. Blackwood, 1931, 304p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
315 - McCord, David Thompson Watson. Notes on the Harvard
Tercentenary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936, 99p.
Waterloo.
316 * McCord, David Thompson Watson. Poet always Next But One.
Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1951,
25p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. No
marginalia.
George Santayana’s Library
A : 25
317 * McCulloch, Hugh. Written in Florence: The Last Verses of Hugh
McCulloch. London: J. M. Dent, 1902, 107p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
318 * Medici, Lorenzo de’. Poemetti. Torino: G. Einaudi, 1943.
Columbia. Edited by Emilio Cecchi.
319 * Meissner, Erich. Confusion of Faces: The Struggle between Religion
and Secularism in Europe. London: Faber and Faber, 1946, 136p.
Waterloo.
320 * Meyer, Kuno. A German Grammar for Schools. London: Swan
Sonnenschein, 1896. Waterloo. No marginalia.
321 * Michelangelo Buonarroti. Rime e lettere: precedute dalla vita dell’
autore scritta da Ascanio Condivi. Firenze: G. Barbèra, 1892.
Georgetown.
322 * Mill, John Stuart. Bibliography of the Published Writings of John
Stuart Mill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1945, 101p.
Waterloo. Edited from his manuscript by Ney MacMinn, J. R. Hainds,
and J. M. McCrimmon. Presentation copy to Santayana from
MacMinn.
323 * Mill, John Stuart. Dissertations and Discussions. New York: Holt,
1882. Georgetown. Volume Three of five.
324 * Mill, John Stuart. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy. London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889.
Georgetown. Sixth edition. Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana in
re Hyde 1905.”
325 * Mill, John Stuart. Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism.
London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885. Georgetown. Third edition.
No marginalia.
326 * Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive.
London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1904. Georgetown.
Eighth edition. Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana 1905 in re
Hyde.”
327 * Millevoye, Charles Hubert. Oeuvres de Millevoye. Paris: Garnier,
19–[?], 443p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
328 * Mins, Henry Felix. Materialism: The Scientific Bias. New York:
s.n., 1934, 120p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the
author. No marginalia.
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George Santayana’s Library
329 * Moncrieff, Malcolm Matthew. The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception:
A New Theory of Vision. London: Faber and Faber, 1951, 315p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
330 * Montague, William Pepperell. Great Visions of Philosophy: Varieties
of Speculative Thought in the West from the Greeks to Bergson. La Salle, IL:
Open Court Publishing Co., 1950, 484p. Waterloo. Paul Carus
Foundation Lectures, fourth series. No marginalia.
331 * Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et
de. Lettres persanes. Paris: A. L’Enseigne du Pot Cassé, 1928. Waterloo.
332 * More, Paul Elmer. Platonism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1917. Georgetown.
333 * Morison, Samuel Eliot [Editor]. The Development of Harvard
University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1930. Waterloo.
334 * Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936, 512p. Waterloo.
Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
335 * Morley, Christopher Darlington. The Powder of Sympathy. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday Press, 1927, 304p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
336 * Motwani, Kewal. India: A Synthesis of Cultures. Bombay: Thacker,
1947, 319p. Waterloo.
337 * Müller, Gustav Emil. Amerikanische Philosophie. Stuttgart: F.
Frommann, 1936, 303p. Waterloo.
338 * Mumford, Lewis [Editor]. The Arts in Renewal. Philadelphia:
University of Philadelphia Press, 1951, 156p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
339 * Mumford, Lewis. Herman Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1929. Le Balze[?].
340 * Munitz, Milton Karl. The Moral Philosophy of Santayana. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Columbia. Inscribed, “July 6,
1939. To Prof. Santayana. Respectfully, Milton K. Munitz.”
341 * Munro, Thomas. Great Pictures of Europe. New York: Brentano’s,
1930, 289p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana inscribed by
author. No marginalia.
342 * Munro, Thomas. Scientific Method in Æsthetics. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1928. Georgetown.
George Santayana’s Library
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343 * Murchie, Guy. Saint Croix: The Sentinel River. New York: Duell,
Sloan and Pearce, 1947, 281p. Waterloo.
344 * Murry, John Middleton. God: Being an Introduction to the Science of
Metabiology. London: J. Cape, 1929, 316p. Waterloo. Presentation copy
to Santayana from the author.
345 * Murry, John Middleton. Studies in Keats. London: H. Milford,
Oxford University Press, 1930. Georgetown.
346 * Neilson, William Allan and A. H. Thorndike. The Facts about
Shakespeare. New York: Macmillan, 1913, 273p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
347 * Nevill, Ralph. Floreat Etona: Anecdotes and Memories of Eton College.
London: Macmillan, 1911. Le Balze[?].
348 * Nicolas, Marius Paul. De Nietzsche à Hitler. Paris: Fasquelle, 1936,
190p. Waterloo.
349 * Nock, Albert Jay. Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. New York and
London: Harper, 1943, 326p. Waterloo.
350 - Noli, Fan Stylian. George Castrioti Scanderbeg (1405–1468). New
York: International Universities Press, 1947, 240p. Waterloo.
351 * Ortega y Gasset, José. La rebelión de las masas. Buenos Aires:
Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1938, 279p. Waterloo.
352 * Otto, Emil. Elementary German Grammar. London: David Nutt,
1914, 216p. Waterloo.
353 - Owen, John. The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance. London: S.
Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: Macmillan & Co., 1893. Le Balze.
Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana Cambridge.”
354 * Peers, Edgar Allison. Spanish Mysticism: A Preliminary Survey.
London: Methuen, 1924, 277p. Waterloo.
355 * Péguy, Charles Pierre. Notre jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard, Editions
de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1933, 217p. Waterloo.
356 * Perry, Ralph Barton. The Moral Economy. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1909. Georgetown. McCormick notes, marginalia few,
inconsequential, and probably not in Santayana’s hand.
A : 28
George Santayana’s Library
357 * Pestalozzi Foundation of America. Pestalozzi Foundation. New
York: s.n., 1947, 171p. Waterloo. Copy imperfect, pages between flyleaf
and page 5 are lacking. No marginalia.
358 * Petrie, William Matthew Flinders. The Revolutions of Civilisation.
New York: P. Smith, 1941, 135p. Waterloo.
359 * Phelps, William Lyon. Robert Browning: How to Know Him.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, [1915?]. Georgetown. No marginalia.
360 * Pilar, Princess of Bavaria. Don Alfonso XIII: A Study of Monarchy.
London: J. Murray, 1931, 436p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
361 * Pizá, Pedro Antonio. Fermagoric Triangles. Santurce, Puerto Rico:
Imprenta Soltero, 1945, 153p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
362 - Plato. Dialogi. Leipzig: Teubner, 1887. Georgetown. Volume One
only.
363 * Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892.
Georgetown. Five volumes. Third edition, translated by Benjamin
Jowett.
364 * Plato. The Phaedo of Plato. London and New York: Macmillan,
1894. Georgetown. Edited by R. D. Archer-Hind. Inscribed by
Santayana, “G. Santayana King’s College 1897.”
365 - Plato. Platonis dialogi secundum Thrasylli tetralogias dispositi.
Lipsiae: In aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1851–1853. Georgetown. Six volumes. Edited by Karl Friedrich Hermann.
366 * Plato. Platonis dialogi secundum Thrasylli tetralogias dispositi.
Lipsiae: In aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1892–1898. Georgetown. Edited by
Martin Wohlrab after Karl Friedrich Hermann. Inscribed by
Santayana, “G. Santayana 1897.”
367 - Plato. Platons Parmenides: Griechisch und Deutsch. Leipzig: Verlag
von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1854. Georgetown. Edited by Friedrich
Wilhelm Wagner.
368 - Plato. Platons Phädon: Griechisch und Deutsch. Leipzig: Verlag von
Wilhelm Engelmann, 1852. Georgetown. Edited by Friedrich Wilhelm
Wagner.
369 - Plato. Platons Philebos: Griechisch und Deutsch. Leipzig: Verlag von
Wilhelm Engelmann, 1857. Georgetown. Edited by Friedrich Wilhelm
Wagner.
George Santayana’s Library
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370 * Plato. The Timaeus of Plato. London and New York: Macmillan,
1888. Georgetown. Edited by R. D. Archer-Hind. Inscribed by
Santayana, “G. Santayana King’s College 1896.”
371 * Pound, Ezra Loomis. Quia pauper amavi. London: The Egoist,
19–[?], 51p. Waterloo.
372 * Powys, Llewelyn. Rats in the Sacristy. London: Watts, 1937, 218p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
373 * Prezzolini, Giuseppe. Il cattolicismo rosso. Napoli: Riccardo
Ricciardi, 1908. Georgetown.
374 * Privitera, Joseph Frederic. The Latin American Front. Milwaukee:
Bruce Publishing Co., 1945, 212p. Waterloo. Manuscript poem on
back flyleaf.
375 * Prokosch, Frederic. Chosen Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1948, 81p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
376 * Proust, Marcel. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Paris: Librairie
Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1919.
Georgetown.
377 * Proust, Marcel. Le Temps retrouvé. Paris: Librairie Gallimard,
Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1927. Waterloo.
378 * Quinn, David Beers. Raleigh and the British Empire. London:
Hodder and Stoughton for the English Universities Press, 1947, 284p.
Waterloo.
379 * Read, Carveth. The Metaphysics of Nature. London: Adam and
Charles Black, 1905. Georgetown.
380 - Read, Carveth. The Origin of Man. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1925. Georgetown. Second edition.
381 * Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.
Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co, 1861. Georgetown.
382 * Reves, Emery. The Anatomy of Peace. New York and London:
Harper, 1945, 275p. Waterloo.
383 * Richards, I[vor] A[rmstrong]. Mencius on the Mind. London: K.
Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932. Columbia.
384 * Richards, I[vor] A[rmstrong]. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New
York and London: Oxford University Press, 1936. Columbia.
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George Santayana’s Library
385 * Rickert, Heinrich. Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis. Einführung in die
Transzendentalphilosophie. Tübingen and Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr, 1904.
Georgetown.
386 * Rideau, Emile. Le Dieu de Bergson: essai de critique religieuse. Paris:
F. Alcan, 1932, 138p. Waterloo.
387 * Rimbaud, Jean Nicholas Arthur. Oeuvres de Arthur Rimbaud: vers et
proses. Paris: Mercure de France, 1937, 398p. Waterloo.
388 * Roback, Abraham Aaron. Personality in Theory and Practice.
Cambridge, MA: Sci-Art, 1951, 437p. Waterloo. Author’s presentation
copy to Santayana. No marginalia.
389 * Roback, Abraham Aaron. Psychorama: A Mental Outlook and
Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Sci-Art, 1942, 365p. Waterloo. Presentation
copy to Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
390 * Rolland, Romain. Jean-Christophe: L’Adolescent. Paris: Cahiers de
la Quinzaine [?], 1904 (1908). Unlocated.
391 * Rolland, Romain. L’Aube. Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine [?],
1903. Unlocated. Sixteenth edition (n.d.). No marginalia.
392 * Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Complete Poetical Works of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891. Georgetown. Edited
by William M. Rossetti. Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana
Cambridge 1893.” No marginalia.
393 * Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du contrat social and Les Rêveries d’un
promeneur solitaire. Londres: J. M. Dent & Sons; Paris: Ed. Mignot,
1912. Georgetown. No marginalia in Les Rêveries.
394 * Royal Asiatic Society. Marriage Ceremonies and Priapic Rites in
India and the East. Printed for private circulation only, 1909, 107p.
Waterloo. No marginalia.
395 * Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom. Essays by
Divers Hands. London: Oxford University Press, 1921. Waterloo.
Volumes 14, 16, 17, and 25 from the Santayana Collection. No marginalia.
396 * Royce, Josiah. The World and the Individual. New York and
London: Macmillan, 1899. Harvard. Gifford Lectures delivered before
the University of Aberdeen.
George Santayana’s Library
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397 * Runes, Dagobert David. Letters to my Son. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1949, 92p. Waterloo. Autographed by the
author. No marginalia.
398 * Runes, Dagobert David. Of God, the Devil and the Jews. New
York: Philosophical Library, 1952, 186p. Waterloo. McCormick notes
some inconsequential marks, probably not by Santayana.
399 * Rush, Benjamin. The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. New
York: Philosophical Library, 1947, 433p. Waterloo.
400 * Russell, Bertrand. The Analysis of Matter. London: Kegan Paul,
1927. Texas. Marginal annotations in Santayana’s hand in pencil,
Daniel Cory’s hand in ink. Signed on front end page “Daniel MacGhie
Cory.”
401 - Russell, Bertrand. A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1900. Le Balze.
Inscription by Santayana, “G. Santayana May 9, 1901 King’s College
(on a visit to Dickinson).”
402 - Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. London:
Allen & Unwin, 1948. Texas.
403 * Russell, Bertrand. “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge
by Description.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society [reprint], 1911.
Texas.
404 * Russell, Bertrand. New Hopes for a Changing World. London: G.
Allen and Unwin, 1951, 218p. Waterloo.
405 * Russell, Bertrand. “On the Relations of Universals and
Particulars.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society [reprint], 1911–1912.
Texas. Volume xii, pages 1–24.
406 * Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford
University Press, 1912. Texas. Written on front end page, “G.
Santayana from the author; Trinity College February 1912.”
407 * Russell, David Riley. Sing with Me Now. Dallas: Kaleidograph
Press, 1945, 95p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the
author.
408 * Russell, John Francis Stanley. My Life and Adventures. London
and New York: Cassell, 1923. Georgetown.
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George Santayana’s Library
409 * Salter, William MacKintire. Nietzsche the Thinker: A Study.
London: C. Palmer & Hatward, 1917. Georgetown.
410 * Sankaracarya. Self-Knowledge (Atmabodha). New York:
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1946, 228p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
411 * Sarolea, Charles. The Anglo-German Problem. London and New
York: Thomas Nelson, 1912. Adelaida Sastre, Avila.
412 * Scheler, Max. Die transzendentale und die psychologische Methode.
Leipzig: Dürr, 1900. Georgetown. No marginalia.
413 * Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor]. The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell.
Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1946, 816p. Waterloo.
The Library of Living Philosophers Series, Volume Five.
414 - Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor]. The Philosophy of George Santayana.
New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951, 710p. Waterloo. The Library of
Living Philosophers Series, Volume Two.
415 * Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor]. The Philosophy of John Dewey.
Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University, 1939. Texas. The
Library of Living Philosophers Series, Volume One.
416 * Schlesinger, Arthur Meier. Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s
Progress. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939, 320p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
417 * Schneider, Herbert Wallace. Meditations in Season: On the Elements
of Christian Philosophy. New York, London, and Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1938, 82p. Waterloo. Presentation copy signed by the
author.
418 * Schneider, Herbert Wallace. The Puritan Mind. New York: H.
Holt, 1930, 301p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the
author.
419 * Schneider, Robert Edward. Positivism in the United States: The
Apostleship of Henry Edger. Rosario, República Argentina: s.n., 1946,
308p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. No
marginalia.
420 * Schofield, William Henry. English Literature, from the Norman
Conquest to Chaucer. New York and London: Macmillan, 1906.
Georgetown. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Library
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421 * Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga und Paralipomena. Leipzig:
Brockhaus[?], 1891. Le Balze. Two volumes. Inscription by Santayana,
“G. Santayana Cambridge.”
422 * Sebastian, Fannie B. Poetry for Today: Subjective in Form.
Washington, DC: American Publishing Co., 1951, 160p. Waterloo.
Autographed by the author. No marginalia.
423 * Seidenberg, Roderick. Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1950, 246p. Waterloo.
424 * Sellars, Wilfrid and John Hospers [Editors]. Readings in Ethical
Theory. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952, 707p. Waterloo. No
marginalia.
425 * Semon, Richard Wolfgang. Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im
Wechsel des organischen Geschehens. Leipzig: Verlag von Engelmann, 1911.
Georgetown. Library notes marginal annotations in Santayana’s hand.
McCormick notes no marginalia.
426 * Shaw, George Bernard. The Adventures of a Black Girl in Her
Search for God. London: Constable, 1932. Waterloo. No marginalia.
427 * Sitwell, Osbert. The Scarlet Tree. Boston: Little, Brown, 1946,
381p. Waterloo.
428 * Slochower, Harry. Richard Dehmel. Dresden: C. Reissner, 1928.
Georgetown. No marginalia.
429 * Slochower, Harry. Three Ways of Modern Man. New York:
International Publishers, 1937, 240p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to
Santayana from the author.
430 * Smart, Charles Allen. Wild Geese and How to Chase Them. New
York: Random House, 1941, 245p. Waterloo. Author’s letter of presentation tipped in by Santayana.
431 * Smith, Logan Pearsall. Afterthoughts. London: Constable & Co.,
1931. Georgetown. No marginalia.
432 * Smith, Robinson. The Solution of the Synoptic Problem. London:
Watts & Co., 1922, 298p. Waterloo. Second edition. No marginalia.
433 * Smith, Thomas Vernor. The Philosophic Way of Life in America.
New York: F. S. Crofts, 1943, 258p. Waterloo. Second edition.
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434 * Sophocles. Antigone: tragedia de Sofocle. Roma: Il Convivio, 1927,
89p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from Lauro de Bosis.
No marginalia.
435 * Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949, 109p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from Robert Fitzgerald.
Holograph note by Santayana on flyleaf. No marginalia.
436 * Soutar, William. Conflict. London: Chapman and Hall, 1931,
41p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
437 * Spaulding, Edward Gleason. A World of Chance, or, Whence, Whither
and Why. New York: Macmillan, 1936, 293p. Waterloo.
438 * Spencer, Herbert. The Study of Sociology. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trübner & Co., 1897. Georgetown.
439 * Spender, Stephen. The Destructive Element. London: Jonathan
Cape, 1935. Texas.
440 * Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer
Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. München: C. H. Beck, 1922–1923.
Georgetown. Two volumes.
441 * Spengler, Oswald. Reden und Aufsätze. München: C. H. Beck,
1938, 295p. Waterloo.
442 * Spinoza, Benedict. Benedict von Spinoza’s Ethik. Heidelberg:
Weiss, 1886. 255p. Harvard. Translated by J. H. von Kirchmann.
Signed, “G. Santayana, Avila, June, 1891–.”
443 * Spinoza, Benedict. Benedicti de Spinoza opera, quotquot reperta sunt.
The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1882–1883. Waterloo. Two volumes. Edited by
J. van Vloten and J. P. N. Land. McCormick notes no marginalia in
Volume Two.
444 * Spinoza, Benedict. Epistolario. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Hebraica
Argentina, 1950, 224p. Waterloo. Translated by Oscar Cohan.
Presentation copy from the translator to Santayana.
445 * Spinoza Society. Septimana Spinozana: acta conventus oecumenici in
memoriam Benedicti de Spinoza diei natalis trecentesimi Hagae comitis habiti.
The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1933, 321p. Waterloo.
446 * Spring, Henry Powell. Challenge to Think. Winter Park, FL:
Rollins Press, 1942, 331p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana
from the author. Holograph note by Santayana. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Library
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447 * Spring, Henry Powell. Essays on Human Science. Winter Park, FL:
Orange Press, 1943, 360p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana
from the author. No marginalia.
448 * Stalin, Joseph. Questioni del Leninismo. Roma: Società editrice
l’Unita, 1945. Waterloo. Two volumes.
449 * Stanley, Carleton Wellesley. Roots of the Tree. London: Oxford
University Press, H. Milford, 1936, 107p. Waterloo.
450 * Stearns, Harold Edmund. Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its
Temporary Collapse, Its Future. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919.
Georgetown. Library notes marginal annotations in Santayana’s hand.
McCormick notes no marginalia.
451 * Sterne, Laurence. The Novels of Laurence Sterne. London: Navarre
Society, 1926[?]. Waterloo. Four volumes. No marginalia.
452 * Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette.
London: W. Heinemann, 1894, 237p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
453 * Stickney, Trumbull. Les Sentences dans la poésie grecque: d’Homère à
Euripide. Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1903.
Georgetown. No marginalia.
454 * Stone, Christopher Reynolds. Eton. London: A. and C. Black,
1909, 174p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
455 * Strachey, Giles Lytton. Portraits in Miniature, and Other Essays.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1931, 217p. Waterloo.
456 * Strong, Charles Augustus. Essays on the Natural Origin of the Mind.
London: Macmillan, [1930]. Texas.
457 * Strong, Charles Augustus. “L’Être et le devenir: thèse de philosophie naturelle.” Paris: Boivin, [1934?], 35–57p. Waterloo. Published in
Recherches philosophiques. Presentation copy from the author.
458 * Strong, Charles Augustus. The Origin of Consciousness. New York
and London: Macmillan, 1918. Georgetown. No marginalia.
459 * Sturt, Henry Cecil. The Idea of a Free Church. London and New
York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1909. Georgetown.
460 * Sturzo, Luigi. I discorsi politici. Roma: Istituti Luigi Sturzo, 1951,
445p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
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George Santayana’s Library
461 * Surmelian, Leon Z. I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: E.
P. Dutton, 1945, 316p. Waterloo. Holograph note by Santayana inside
front cover. No marginalia.
462 * Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, Battle of the
Books. London: Oxford University Press, 1933, 599p. Waterloo.
463 * Thalheimer, August. Introduction to Dialectical Materialism: The
Marxist World View. New York: Covici-Friede, 1936, 253p. Waterloo.
464 * Thomas, Lowell Jackson. Out of This World: Across the Himalayas to
Forbidden Tibet. New York: Greystone Press, 1950, 320p. Waterloo.
Presentation copy to Santayana from Shih-hsiang Chen. No marginalia.
465 * Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Augustae Taurinorum:
Typographica Pontificia, 1894. Georgetown. Volumes One, Four, and
Five of six. No marginalia.
466 * Thompson, Anna Boynton. The Unity of Fichte’s Doctrine of
Knowledge. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1895. Georgetown. Radcliffe College
Monographs No. 7. Introduction by Josiah Royce.
467 * Thompson, Francis. The Hound of Heaven. London: Burns and
Oates, c. 1912, 17p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
468 * Thompson, Francis. Shelley. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1909. Georgetown.
469 * Thompson, Samuel Martin. “A Study of Locke’s Theory of
Ideas.” n.p., n.d. Texas.
470 * Thoreau, Henry David. Paragraphs. n.p., n.d. Texas.
471 * Toy, Crawford Howell. Judaism and Christianity: A Sketch of the
Process of Thought from Old Testament to New Testament. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1892. Georgetown. No marginalia.
472 * Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. A Study of History. London, New York,
and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1934–1945. Waterloo. Six volumes.
473 * Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York and
London: Harper, 1912, 404p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to
Santayana from Cyril Clemens. Holograph note on flyleaf by
Santayana. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Library
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474 * Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Autobiography. New York: Harper &
Bros., 1924. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from Cyril
Clemens. No marginalia.
475 * Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper. New York and London:
Harper, 1909, 280p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from
Cyril Clemens. No marginalia.
476 * Twain, Mark. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Other Stories. New York and
London: Harper, 1924, 452p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to
Santayana from Cyril Clemens. Library says marked by Santayana.
McCormick notes no marginalia.
477 * Umfazi [Clara Urquhart]. Amadodana Ami (My Sons): A Story of
Racial Conflict in South Africa. [S.l.]: Editions Franco-Suisses, 1950,
164p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
478 * Urquhart, Clara [Editor]. Last Chance: Eleven Questions on Issues
Determining our Destiny. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948, 182p. Waterloo.
479 * Vaihinger, Hans. Die Philosophie des als ob. Leipzig: F. Meiner,
1922. Georgetown.
480 * Valéry, Paul. Charmes. Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle
Revue Française, 1926, 125p. Waterloo.
481 * Valéry, Paul. L’Idée fixe. Paris: Gallimard, 1934, 206p. Waterloo.
482 * Valéry, Paul. Introduction à la poétique. Paris: Gallimard, 1938,
59p. Waterloo.
483 * Valéry, Paul. Lèttres à quelques-uns. Paris: Gallimard, 1952.
Columbia.
484 * Valéry, Paul. Monsieur Teste. Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la
Nouvelle Revue Française, 1927, 129p. Waterloo.
485 * Valéry, Paul. Variété II. Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle
Revue Française, 1930. Waterloo.
486 * Valéry, Paul. Variété IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. Waterloo.
487 * Valois, Georges. Le Père. Paris: Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1913.
Georgetown.
488 * Vercel, Roger. Bertrand of Brittany: A Biography of Messire du
Guesclin. London: G. Routledge, 1934, 256p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
A : 38
George Santayana’s Library
489 * Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]. Carmina omnia. Paris: Didot,
1858, 470p. Waterloo. Holograph note by Santayana on endpaper
reads, “From Joe Stickney, Paris, September 1902.”
490 * Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]. The Georgics of Vergil. London: G.
W. Jones at the Sign of the Dolphin, 1931, 128p. Waterloo. Translated
by R. D. Blackmore. Edition limited to 500 copies on specially made
paper. This copy is not numbered. No marginalia.
491 * Vidal, Gore. The Season of Comfort. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949,
253p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author.
492 * Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin. The First Morning: New Poems. New
York: C. Scribner’s, 1952, 120p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
493 * Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin. Strike through the Mask: New Lyrical
Poems. New York: C. Scribner’s, 1950, 70p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
494 * Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin. Terror and Decorum: Poems
1940–1948. New York and London: C. Scribner’s, 1948, 110p.
Waterloo. Marked by Santayana. McCormick notes no marginalia.
495 * Vivante, Leone. Indétermination et création. Paris: F. Sorlot, 1939,
270p. Waterloo. Translated by Lorenzo Ercole Lanza. Presentation
copy to Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
496 * Vivante, Leone. La poesia inglese ed il suo contributo alla conoscenza
dello spirito. Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, 1947, 542p. Waterloo.
Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
497 * Vivante, Leone. Note sopra la originalità del pensiero. Roma: P.
Magione & C. Strini, 1925. Georgetown.
498 * Vivante, Leone. Notes on the Originality of Thought. London: J.
Lane, 1927. Georgetown. Translated by Arthur Brodrick Bullock. No
marginalia.
499 * Vivante, Leone. Studi sulle precognizioni. Firenze: Vallecchi
Editore, 1937, 218p. Waterloo.
500 * Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang. The Aztec and Maya Papermakers.
New York: J. J. Augustin, 1944, 120p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
501 * Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang. Frederick Catherwood, Archt. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1950, 177p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
George Santayana’s Library
A : 39
502 * Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang. Sudamérica los llamaba: exploraciones
de los grandes naturalistas. Mexico: Editorial Nuevo Mundo, 1945, 478p.
Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana from the author. No marginalia.
503 * Walden, Selma. Do You Ask for My Death?: A Book of Poetry.
Chicago: s.n., 1945, 31p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Santayana
from the author. No marginalia.
504 * Warren, Edward Perry [pseud. ALR]. A Tale of Pausanian Love.
London: Cayme Press, 1927, 136p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
505 * Waterman, Charles. The Three Spheres of Society. London: Faber
and Faber, 1946, 294p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
506 * Watson, John Broadus. Psychology from the Standpoint of a
Behaviorist. Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1919. Texas.
507 * Weber, Alfred. Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte: Uberwindung
des Nihilismus? Bern: A. Francke, 1946, 262p. Waterloo.
508 * Weyl, Hermann. Raum, Zeit, Materie. Berlin: Verlag von Julius
Springer, 1923. Georgetown.
509 * Wheelock, John Hall. Poems, 1911–1936. New York and London:
C. Scribner’s, 1936, 245p. Waterloo. Presentation copy to Mrs.
Crawford H. Toy from the author. No marginalia.
510 * Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in
Cosmology. New York: The Macmillan Co.; Cambridge, England:
University Press, 1929. Texas. Gifford Lectures delivered in the
University of Edinburgh during the session 1927–28. Marginal annotations in Santayana’s hand in pencil, Daniel Cory’s hand in ink. Signed
on front endpaper, “Daniel Cory, 1930 July (Paris).”
511 * Whitehead, Alfred North. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1928. Georgetown.
512 * Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: D. McKay,
1891–1892. Georgetown.
513 * Williams, Oscar [Editor]. A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, English
and American. New York: C. Scribner’s, 1946, 672p. Waterloo.
514 * Williams, William Carlos. Paterson (Book One). New York: New
Directions, 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
A : 40
George Santayana’s Library
515 * Williams, William Carlos. Paterson (Book Two). New York: New
Directions, 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
516 * Winchester College Archaeological Society. Winchester College: Its
History, Buildings and Customs. Winchester, England: P. & G. Wells,
1926. Georgetown.
517 * Woodbridge, Frederick James Eugene. The Realm of Mind: An
Essay in Metaphysics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1926.
Texas.
518 * Woods, James Haughton. The Value of Religious Facts. New York:
E. P. Dutton & Co, 1899. Georgetown.
519 * Worth, Claud Alley. Yacht Navigation and Voyaging. London: J. D.
Potter, 1928, 260p. Waterloo. No marginalia.
520 * Wycherley, William. The Country Wife: A Comedy. London:
Hutchinson, 1934, 125p. Waterloo. Edition limited to 1000 copies. This
is number 535, signed by the illustrator. No marginalia.
521 * Young, George Malcolm. Victorian England: Portrait of an Age.
London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1949, 219p.
Waterloo. First published in 1936.
522 * Zeller, Eduard. Die Philosophie der Griechen. Leipzig: O. R.
Reisland, 1879–1892. Georgetown.
523 * Estria [Literary Periodical]. Rome: Roma Colegio Español, 1951.
Waterloo. Cuadernos de poesia que edita el colegio Español de Roma.
No. 1, April 1951. No marginalia.
524 * Fifty Best Poems of America. New York: Little Leather Library
Corporation, n.d. Columbia. No marginalia.
525 * The Golden Goose [Literary Journal]. Columbus, OH: Cronos
Editions, 1948. Waterloo. Number 2, Autumn 1948. No marginalia.
526 * Harvard College: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of ’86. Boston:
Anchor Linotype Printing Co., 1936. Waterloo. Prepared by John
McKinstry Merriam, class secretary. No marginalia.
527 * Nine [Literary Periodical]. Tunbridge Wells, P. Russell,
1949–1956. Waterloo. Numbers 1–11.
George Santayana’s Library
T:1
376 * A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Proust, Marcel.
237 - A vau l’eau. Huysmans, J.-K.
507 * Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte: Uberwindung des Nihilismus?
Weber, Alfred.
239 * Actores y espectadores. Irazusta, Julio.
426 * The Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search for God. Shaw, George
Bernard.
473 * The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain, Mark.
42 * The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green. Bede, Cuthbert.
155 * After Strange Gods. Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns].
431 * Afterthoughts. Smith, Logan Pearsall.
243 * Alice James: Her Brothers—Her Journal. James, Alice.
222 * Alkibiades: der Staatsmann und Feldherr. Hertzberg, Gustav
Friedrich.
477 * Amadodana Ami (My Sons): A Story of Racial Conflict in South Africa.
Umfazi [Clara Urquhart].
74 * American Authors Today. Burnett, Whit and Charles E. Slatkin
[Editors].
195 * The Americans: A Study in National Character. Gorer, Geoffrey.
337 * Amerikanische Philosophie. Müller, Gustav Emil.
184 * Amyntas. Gide, André Paul Guillaume.
76 * The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and
Course of Nature. Butler, Joseph.
400 * The Analysis of Matter. Russell, Bertrand.
203 * The Anatomy of Happiness. Gumpert, Martin.
382 * The Anatomy of Peace. Reves, Emery.
142 - And Least Love. Dunn, Robert.
411 * The Anglo-German Problem. Sarolea, Charles.
434 * Antigone: tragedia de Sofocle. Sophocles.
252 * Aphorismes de Saint Jean de la Croix. Juan de la Cruz.
T:2
George Santayana’s Library
229 * Aphrodite: The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Pervigilium
Veneris. Homer.
231 * The Apocryphal New Testament. Hone, William, Jeremiah Jones,
and William Wake.
63 * Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay. Bradley, Francis
Herbert.
132 * Appearances: Being Notes of Travel. Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes.
20 * Aristoteles Metaphysik. Aristotle.
21 - Aristotelis Metaphysica recognovit et enarravit Hermannus Bonitz.
Aristotle.
22 * Aristotle’s Psychology: A Treatise on the Principle of Life (De Anima and
Parva Naturalia). Aristotle.
75 * Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts: With a Critical Text and
Translation of the Poetics. Butcher, Samuel Henry.
253 * Art and Freedom. Kallen, Horace Meyer.
307 * Art et scolastique. Maritain, Jacques.
338 * The Arts in Renewal. Mumford, Lewis [Editor].
500 * The Aztec and Maya Papermakers. Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang.
110 * Bacchus and Krishna. Colony, Horatio.
301 * Benedetto Croce, ovvero, Dell’improntitudine. Manacorda, Guido.
442 * Benedict von Spinoza’s Ethik. Spinoza, Benedict.
443 * Benedicti de Spinoza opera, quotquot reperta sunt. Spinoza, Benedict.
269 * The Benedictines. Knowles, David.
488 * Bertrand of Brittany: A Biography of Messire du Guesclin. Vercel,
Roger.
173 * Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud, Sigmund.
322 * Bibliography of the Published Writings of John Stuart Mill. Mill, John
Stuart.
41 * Biography of the Bible. Bates, Ernest Sutherland.
254 * The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy. Kallen, Horace Meyer.
97 * Bucoliques. Chénier, André Marie.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
T:3
31 * Byzance. Bailly, Auguste.
89 * The Canon of Reason and Virtue: Being Lao-tze’s Tao Teh King. Carus,
Paul.
96 * The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer, Geoffrey.
489 * Carmina omnia. Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro].
116 * Ce qui est vivant et ce qui est mort de la philosophie de Hegel. Croce,
Benedetto.
446 * Challenge to Think. Spring, Henry Powell.
480 * Charmes. Valéry, Paul.
125 * The Chief Currents of Contemporary Philosophy. Datta, Dhirendra
Mohan.
375 * Chosen Poems. Prokosch, Frederic.
329 * The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception: A New Theory of Vision.
Moncrieff, Malcolm Matthew.
167 * Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey,
Whitehead. Fisch, Max H. [Editor].
156 * The Cocktail Party: A Comedy. Eliot, T. S.
60 * Colui che si chiama “lo sono.” Bolaffio, Carlo.
120 * The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by birth but not in conduct.
Dante Alighieri.
392 * The Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti,
Dante Gabriel.
228 * The Concept of Consciousness. Holt, Edwin Bissell.
204 * Concetto e programma della filosofia d’oggi. Guzzo, Augusto et alii.
436 * Conflict. Soutar, William.
319 * Confusion of Faces: The Struggle between Religion and Secularism in
Europe. Meissner, Erich.
304 - Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique. Manrique, Jorge.
520 * The Country Wife: A Comedy. Wycherley, William.
188 * Cours de philosophie, 1841–1842. Gioberti, Vincenzo.
401 - A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Russell, Bertrand.
T:4
George Santayana’s Library
259 * Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, Immanuel.
268 * A Critique of the Philosophy of George Santayana in the Light of
Thomistic Principles. Kinney, Mary Cyril Edwin.
303 * The Crown and the Fable: A Poetic Sequence. Manning, Hugo.
255 * Culture and Democracy in the United States. Kallen, Horace Meyer.
271 * The Culture of Korea. Korean American Cultural Association.
65 * The Dawn of Conscience. Breasted, James Henry.
98 * The Dawn of Liberation: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S.
Churchill. Churchill, Winston.
348 * De Nietzsche à Hitler. Nicolas, Marius Paul.
296 * De rerum natura libri sex. Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus].
28 * Democracy and Leadership. Babbitt, Irving.
385 * Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis. Einführung in die
Transzendentalphilosophie. Rickert, Heinrich.
47 * Der Ptolemäer. Benn, Gottfried.
440 * Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der
Weltgeschichte. Spengler, Oswald.
302 * Der Zauberberg. Mann, Thomas.
439 * The Destructive Element. Spender, Stephen.
67 * Deutsche Lyric. Buchheim, Karl Adolf [Editor].
333 * The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of
President Eliot. Morison, Samuel Eliot [Editor].
362 - Dialogi. Plato.
363 * The Dialogues of Plato. Plato.
117 * The Diary of Thomas Crosfield. Crosfield, Thomas.
72 * Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition. Bultmann, Rudolf Karl.
425 * Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen
Geschehens. Semon, Richard Wolfgang.
522 * Die Philosophie der Griechen. Zeller, Eduard.
479 * Die Philosophie des als ob. Vaihinger, Hans.
George Santayana’s Library
T:5
180 * Die Sâmkhya-Philosophie: eine Darstellung des indischen
Rationalismus. Garbe, Richard von.
412 * Die transzendentale und die psychologische Methode. Scheler, Max.
174 * Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). Freud, Sigmund.
323 * Dissertations and Discussions. Mill, John Stuart.
121 * The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Dante
Alighieri.
5 * The Divine Pilgrim. Aiken, Conrad.
61 * Do I Wake or Sleep? Bolton, Isabel.
503 * Do You Ask for My Death?: A Book of Poetry. Walden, Selma.
278 * Dogme et critique. Le Roy, Edouard Louis.
212 * Dogmengeschichte. Harnack, Adolf von.
360 * Don Alfonso XIII: A Study of Monarchy. Pilar, Princess of Bavaria.
247 * The Double Axe, and Other Poems. Jeffers, Robinson.
69 * Dreaming. Bullett, Gerald William.
393 * Du contrat social and Les Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire. Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques.
452 * The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette. Stevenson, Robert Louis.
256 * The Education of Free Men. Kallen, Horace Meyer.
171 * Einstein: His Life and Times. Frank, Philipp.
26 * El Islam cristianizado. Asín Palacios, Miguel.
352 * Elementary German Grammar. Otto, Emil.
83 * Elements in Thought and Emotion: An Essay on Education,
Epistomology, & the Psycho-neural Problem. Campion, George C.
66 - Emerson and Others. Brooks, Van Wyck.
281 * England and Germany: Affinity and Contrast. Levy, Hermann.
299 * English Apologetic Theology. Macran, Frederick Walter.
420 * English Literature, from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer. Schofield,
William Henry.
T:6
George Santayana’s Library
149 * The Enjoyment of Poetry: with Anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry.
Eastman, Max [Forrester].
444 * Epistolario. Spinoza, Benedict.
298 * Erotica. Machiavelli, Niccolo.
44 * Essai d’un discours cohérent sur les rapports de Dieu et du monde.
Benda, Julien.
285 * An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke, John.
395 * Essays by Divers Hands. Royal Society of Literature of the United
Kingdom.
244 * Essays in Radical Empiricism. James, William.
447 * Essays on Human Science. Spring, Henry Powell.
381 * Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Reid, Thomas.
456 * Essays on the Natural Origin of the Mind. Strong, Charles Augustus.
29 * The Essays or Counsels: Civil and Moral. Bacon, Francis.
158 * Essays, 1948. English Institute.
523 * Estria [Literary Periodical].
64 * Ethical Studies. Bradley, Francis Herbert.
454 * Eton. Stone, Christopher Reynolds.
78 * The Evolution of Religion. Caird, Edward.
270 * The Evolution of Truth, and Other Essays. Knox, Howard Vicenté.
324 * An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Mill, John
Stuart.
129 * Experience and Nature. Dewey, John.
273 * Fables, contes et nouvelles. La Fontaine, Jean de.
346 * The Facts about Shakespeare. Neilson, William Allan and A. H.
Thorndike.
361 * Fermagoric Triangles. Pizá, Pedro Antonio.
524 * Fifty Best Poems of America.
250 * Fifty Spanish Poems. Jiménez, Juan Ramón.
492 * The First Morning: New Poems. Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin.
George Santayana’s Library
T:7
161 - The First Philosophers of Greece. Fairbanks, Arthur.
347 * Floreat Etona: Anecdotes and Memories of Eton College. Nevill, Ralph.
312 * The Folded Leaf. Maxwell, William.
223 * The Forms of Value: The Extension of a Hedonistic Axiology. Hilliard,
Albert Leroy.
36 * The Foundations of Belief. Balfour, Arthur James.
157 * Four Quartets. Eliot, T. S.
501 * Frederick Catherwood, Archt. Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang.
105 * The Friend. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
350 - George Castrioti Scanderbeg (1405–1468). Noli, Fan Stylian.
286 * George Tyrrell et Henri Brémond. Loisy, Alfred Firmin.
490 * The Georgics of Vergil. Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro].
320 * A German Grammar for Schools. Meyer, Kuno.
114 * Germany and England. Cramb, J[ohn] A[dam].
282 * Geschichte der alten Kirche. Lietzmann, Hans.
344 * God: Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology. Murry, John
Middleton.
211 * Goethe et l’art de vivre. Harcourt, Robert d’.
191 * Goethe’s Gedichte. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.
525 * The Golden Goose [Literary Journal].
341 * Great Pictures of Europe. Munro, Thomas.
330 * Great Visions of Philosophy: Varieties of Speculative Thought in the
West from the Greeks to Bergson. Montague, William Pepperell.
30 * The Greek Atomists and Epicurus. Bailey, Cyril.
462 * Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books. Swift,
Jonathan.
225 * Handbook: Museum and Library Collections. Hispanic Society of
America.
526 * Harvard College: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of ’86.
38 * Have You Anything to Declare? Baring, Maurice.
T:8
George Santayana’s Library
214 - Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.
218 * Hemingway. Hemingway, Ernest.
272 * Henri III: Les Amours des rois de France. La Batut, Guy de.
339 * Herman Melville. Mumford, Lewis.
8 * Histoire de mes pensées. Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier].
124 * A History of Indian Philosophy. Dasgupta, Surendranath.
177 * A History of Philosophy. Fuller, Benjamin Apthorp Gould.
166 * The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. Fielding, Henry.
143 * Horizon Fever. Dunn, Robert.
467 * The Hound of Heaven. Thompson, Francis.
402 - Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. Russell, Bertrand.
274 * Humanism as a Philosophy. Lamont, Corliss.
141 * Hungry Hill. Du Maurier, Daphne.
461 * I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen. Surmelian, Leon Z.
460 * I discorsi politici. Sturzo, Luigi.
459 * The Idea of a Free Church. Sturt, Henry Cecil.
107 * The Idea of Nature. Collingwood, Robin George.
159 * Idealism: A Critical Survey. Ewing, Alfred Cyril.
90 * Idealismo e solipsismo: e saggi critici. Castelli, Enrico.
236 * Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. Husserl, Edmund.
306 * If I Had My Time Again: An Anthology Contributed by Twenty
Distinguished Men and Women. Marchant, James [Editor].
373 * Il cattolicismo rosso. Prezzolini, Giuseppe.
205 * Il pensiero di B. Spinoza. Guzzo, Augusto.
275 * The Illusion of Immortality. Lamont, Corliss.
86 * Images cachées. Carco, Francis.
260 * Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, Immanuel.
261 * Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kant, Immanuel.
George Santayana’s Library
T:9
262 - Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kant, Immanuel.
71 * Imperial Germany. Bülow, Bernhard von.
495 * Indétermination et création. Vivante, Leone.
336 * India: A Synthesis of Cultures. Motwani, Kewal.
482 * Introduction à la poétique. Valéry, Paul.
202 * Introduction générale á l’étude des doctrines Hindoues. Guénon, René.
463 * Introduction to Dialectical Materialism: The Marxist World View.
Thalheimer, August.
249 * An Introduction to the History of England, from the Earliest Times to
1204. Jerrold, Douglas.
213 * Is God in History?: An Inquiry into Human and Prehuman History.
Heard, Gerald.
133 * Is Immortality Desirable? Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes.
56 * Jacovleff and Other Artists. Birnbaum, Martin.
162 * Jean Paul Sartre. Falconi, Carlo.
390 * Jean-Christophe: L’Adolescent. Rolland, Romain.
54 * Jerusalem under the High-Priests. Bevan, Edwyn Robert.
37 * Jésus. Barbusse, Henri.
57 * John Singer Sargent. Birnbaum, Martin.
185 * Journal des faux-monnayeurs. Gide, André Paul Guillaume.
471 * Judaism and Christianity: A Sketch of the Process of Thought from Old
Testament to New Testament. Toy, Crawford Howell.
263 * Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of
Ethics. Kant, Immanuel.
6 * The Kid. Aiken, Conrad.
403 * “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.”
Russell, Bertrand.
32 * L’Allemagne. Bainville, Jacques.
33 * L’Angleterre et l’empire Britannique. Bainville, Jacques.
277 * L’Athéisme. Le Dantec, Félix Alexandre.
T : 10
George Santayana’s Library
391 * L’Aube. Rolland, Romain.
175 * L’Avenir d’une illusion. Freud, Sigmund.
93 * L’École des cadavres. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand.
169 - L’Esprit de Fontenelle. Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de.
457 * “L’Être et le devenir: thèse de philosophie naturelle.” Strong,
Charles Augustus.
73 * L’Expédition d’Alexandre et la conquête de l’Asie. Burgard, Raymond.
201 * L’Homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta. Guénon, René.
481 * L’Idée fixe. Valéry, Paul.
221 * L’Illusion philosophique. Hersch, Jeanne.
51 * L’Intuition philosophique. Bergson, Henri.
208 * L’io et la ragione. Guzzo, Augusto.
122 * La Divina commedia. Dante Alighieri.
123 * La Divina commedia di Dante Alighieri. Dante Alighieri.
206 * La filosofia domani. Guzzo, Augusto.
207 * La filosofia e l’esperienza. Guzzo, Augusto.
45 * La Fin de l’éternel. Benda, Julien.
34 * La Fortune de la France. Bainville, Jacques.
87 * La Lumière noire: Roman. Carco, Francis.
287 * La Naissance du christianisme. Loisy, Alfred Firmin.
147 * La Pensée de George Santayana: Santayana en Amérique. Duron,
Jacques.
49 * La Pensée et le mouvant. Bergson, Henri.
179 * La Perse. Furon, Raymond.
85 * La Peste. Camus, Albert.
496 * La poesia inglese ed il suo contributo alla conoscenza dello spirito.
Vivante, Leone.
351 * La rebelión de las masas. Ortega y Gasset, José.
190 * La Renaissance: scénes historiques. Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, comte
de.
George Santayana’s Library
T : 11
35 * La Russie et la barriere de l’est. Bainville, Jacques.
181 * Las miradas perdidas, 1944–1950. García Marruz, Fina.
478 * Last Chance: Eleven Questions on Issues Determining our Destiny.
Urquhart, Clara [Editor].
374 * The Latin American Front. Privitera, Joseph Frederic.
88 * Law and Literature, and Other Essays and Addresses. Cardozo,
Benjamin Nathan.
9 * Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs. Alain [E. A. Chartier].
386 * Le Dieu de Bergson: essai de critique religieuse. Rideau, Emile.
220 * Le Move muse. Herodotus.
84 * Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Camus, Albert.
91 * Le Paris de Charles V, 1364–1380. Castelnau, Jacques Thomas de.
487 * Le Père. Valois, Georges.
377 * Le Temps retrouvé. Proust, Marcel.
186 * Le Voyage d’Urien. Gide, André Paul Guillaume.
3 * Le Vrai Verlaine: essai psychanalytique. Adam, Antoine.
512 * Leaves of Grass. Whitman, Walt.
102 * Lectures and Essays by the late William Kingdon Clifford. Clifford,
William Kingdon.
189 * Les Cinq tentations de La Fontaine. Giraudoux, Jean.
50 * Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Bergson, Henri.
10 * Les Dieux. Alain [E. A. Chartier].
200 * Les États multiples de l’être. Guénon, René.
235 * Les États-unis et la guerre. Hovelaque, Emile.
11 * Les Idées et les âges. Alain [E. A. Chartier].
288 * Les Origines du nouveau testament. Loisy, Alfred Firmin.
453 * Les Sentences dans la poésie grecque: d’Homère à Euripide. Stickney,
Trumbull.
397 * Letters to my Son. Runes, Dagobert David.
483 * Lèttres à quelques-uns. Valéry, Paul.
T : 12
George Santayana’s Library
331 * Lettres persanes. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron
de La Brede et de.
450 * Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future.
Stearns, Harold Edmund.
80 * The Liberation of American Literature. Calverton, Victor Francis.
265 * Life and Spirit: Biosophical Poems. Kettner, Frederick.
313 * A Little Treasury of American Prose: The Major Writers from Colonial
Times to the Present Day. Mayberry, George [Editor].
513 * A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, English and American. Williams,
Oscar [Editor].
154 * Living Philosophies. Einstein, Albert [Editor].
183 * Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and Its Historical Relations. Gibson,
James.
215 * The Logic of Hegel. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.
295 * Lucian’s True History. Lucian [Lucianus Samosatensis].
311 * Lucretius: Epicurean and Poet. Masson, John.
128 * Luther et le Luthéranisme. Denifle, Henri.
194 * The Maggid of Caro: The Mystic Life of the Eminent Codifier Joseph
Caro as Revealed in His Secret Diary. Gordon, Hirsch Loeb.
276 * Man and Christmas Verse. Langstaff, John Brett.
99 * The Man from Limehouse: Clement Richard Attlee. Clemens, Cyril.
100 * The Man from Missouri: A Biography of Harry S. Truman. Clemens,
Cyril.
15 * Manufacture of Christianity. Albert, Thomas.
474 * Mark Twain’s Autobiography. Twain, Mark.
394 * Marriage Ceremonies and Priapic Rites in India and the East. Royal
Asiatic Society.
176 * A Masque of Reason. Frost, Robert.
328 * Materialism: The Scientific Bias. Mins, Henry Felix.
94 * Mea culpa: suivi de la vie et l’oeuvre de Semmelweis. Céline, LouisFerdinand.
George Santayana’s Library
T : 13
134 - The Meaning of Good: A Dialogue. Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes.
417 * Meditations in Season: On the Elements of Christian Philosophy.
Schneider, Herbert Wallace.
349 * Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. Nock, Albert Jay.
2 * Memoirs of an Aesthete. Acton, Harold.
7 * Memories of Eton Sixty Years Ago. Ainger, Arthur Campbell.
383 * Mencius on the Mind. Richards, I[vor] A[rmstrong].
267 * Menschen als Sinnbilder. Keyserling, Hermann Alexander.
23 - Metaphysica. Aristotle.
379 * The Metaphysics of Nature. Read, Carveth.
232 * The Metaphysics of Pragmatism: With an Introductory Word by John
Dewey. Hook, Sidney.
294 * The Mills of the Kavanaughs. Lowell, Robert.
178 * The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in
Soviet Russia. Fülöp-Miller, René.
46 * Mon premier testament. Benda, Julien.
484 * Monsieur Teste. Valéry, Paul.
356 * The Moral Economy. Perry, Ralph Barton.
340 * The Moral Philosophy of Santayana. Munitz, Milton Karl.
234 * More Poems. Housman, A[lfred] E[dward].
101 * My Chat with Thomas Hardy. Clemens, Cyril.
126 * My Country. Davenport, Russell Wheeler.
408 * My Life and Adventures. Russell, John Francis Stanley.
151 * The Nature of the Physical World. Eddington, Arthur Stanley.
138 * Nature, Mind, and Death. Ducasse, Curt John.
325 * Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism. Mill, John Stuart.
404 * New Hopes for a Changing World. Russell, Bertrand.
108 * The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism.
Collingwood, Robin George.
24 * The Nichomachaean Ethics of Aristotle. Aristotle.
T : 14
George Santayana’s Library
409 * Nietzsche the Thinker: A Study. Salter, Will iam MacKintire.
527 * Nine [Literary Periodical].
58 * North & South. Bishop, Elizabeth.
497 * Note sopra la originalità del pensiero. Vivante, Leone.
95 * Notes on Religion. Chapman, John Jay.
315 - Notes on the Harvard Tercentenary. McCord, David Thompson
Watson.
498 * Notes on the Originality of Thought. Vivante, Leone.
77 * “The Notion of Essence in the Philosophy of George Santayana.”
Butler, Richard.
355 * Notre jeunesse. Péguy, Charles Pierre.
451 * The Novels of Laurence Sterne. Sterne, Laurence.
435 * Oedipus Rex. Sophocles.
387 * Oeuvres de Arthur Rimbaud: vers et proses. Rimbaud, Jean Nicholas
Arthur.
327 * Oeuvres de Millevoye. Millevoye, Charles Hubert.
112 * Oeuvres de Pierre Corneille: Théatre complet. Corneille, Pierre.
398 * Of God, the Devil and the Jews. Runes, Dagobert David.
113 * On a Note of Triumph. Corwin, Norman Lewis.
139 * “On the Attributes of Material Things.” Ducasse, Curt John.
405 * “On the Relations of Universals and Particulars.” Russell,
Bertrand.
27 * Once Around the Sun. Atkinson, Brooks.
416 * Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress. Schlesinger, Arthur
Meier.
297 - The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic. Lutoslawski, Wincenty.
458 * The Origin of Consciousness. Strong, Charles Augustus.
380 - The Origin of Man. Read, Carveth.
230 * The Original Iliad. Homer.
199 * Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France. Groethuysen, Bernhard.
George Santayana’s Library
T : 15
224 * The Origins of Art: A Psychological & Sociological Inquiry. Hirn, Yrjö.
43 * Our Present Philosophy of Life. Belgion, Montgomery.
192 * Our Threatened Values. Gollancz, Victor.
464 * Out of This World: Across the Himalayas to Forbidden Tibet. Thomas,
Lowell Jackson.
314 * An Oxford Note-book. Maycock, Alan Lawson.
470 * Paragraphs. Thoreau, Henry David.
421 * Parerga und Paralipomena. Schopenhauer, Arthur.
81 - The Passing of the Gods. Calverton, Victor Francis.
514 * Paterson (Book One). Williams, William Carlos.
515 * Paterson (Book Two). Williams, William Carlos.
257 * Patterns of Progress. Kallen, Horace Meyer.
388 * Personality in Theory and Practice. Roback, Abraham Aaron.
357 * Pestalozzi Foundation. Pestalozzi Foundation of America.
364 * The Phaedo of Plato. Plato.
216 - Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.
152 * Philosopher’s Quest. Edman, Irwin.
433 * The Philosophic Way of Life in America. Smith, Thomas Vernor.
280 * The Philosophical Works of Leibniz. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm.
59 * Philosophy in American Education. Blanshard, Brand [Editor].
283 * The Philosophy of Bergson. Lindsay, A[lexander] D[unlop].
413 * The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor].
414 - The Philosophy of George Santayana. Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor].
415 * The Philosophy of John Dewey. Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor].
238 * The Philosophy of Plotinus. Inge, William Ralph.
384 * The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Richards, I[vor] A[rmstrong].
210 * Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton, William.
242 * Plato’s Later Theory of Ideas. Jackson, Henry.
365 - Platonis dialogi secundum Thrasylli tetralogias dispositi. Plato.
T : 16
George Santayana’s Library
366 * Platonis dialogi secundum Thrasylli tetralogias dispositi. Plato.
62 - Platonische Studien. Bonitz, Hermann.
332 * Platonism. More, Paul Elmer.
367 - Platons Parmenides: Griechisch und Deutsch. Plato.
368 - Platons Phädon: Griechisch und Deutsch. Plato.
369 - Platons Philebos: Griechisch und Deutsch. Plato.
318 * Poemetti. Medici, Lorenzo de’.
196 * Poems. Gray, Thomas.
70 * Poems in Pencil. Bullett, Gerald William.
79 * Poems of Callimachus: Four Hymns and the Epigrams. Callimachus.
39 * Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. Barnes, William.
509 * Poems, 1911–1936. Wheelock, John Hall.
17 * Poesía Española: ensayo de metodos y limites estilisticos. Alonso,
Dámaso.
316 * Poet always Next But One. McCord, David Thompson Watson.
106 * The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge, Samuel
Taylor.
422 * Poetry for Today: Subjective in Form. Sebastian, Fannie B.
163 * Portraits de famille: souvenirs. Fargue, Léon-Paul.
455 * Portraits in Miniature, and Other Essays. Strachey, Giles Lytton.
419 * Positivism in the United States: The Apostleship of Henry Edger.
Schneider, Robert Edward.
423 * Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry. Seidenberg, Roderick.
300 * Poverty: Yesterday and Today. Mallon, James Joseph and E. C. T.
Lascelles.
335 * The Powder of Sympathy. Morley, Christopher Darlington.
245 * Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. James,
William.
310 * Prairie Grass Poems. Marsh, Gerald.
284 * A Preface to Morals. Lippmann, Walter.
George Santayana’s Library
T : 17
475 * The Prince and the Pauper. Twain, Mark.
406 * The Problems of Philosophy. Russell, Bertrand.
510 * Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Whitehead, Alfred
North.
197 * Prolegomena to Ethics. Green, Thomas Hill.
135 * Prophet of America: Emerson and the Problems of To-day. Dillaway,
Newton.
12 * Propos de littérature. Alain [E. A. Chartier].
13 * Propos de politique. Alain [E. A. Chartier].
14 * Propos sur le Christianisme. Alain [E. A. Chartier].
291 * The Prose Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow, Henry
Wadsworth.
19 * Proust and Santayana: The Aesthetic Way of Life. Ames, Van Meter.
25 * Psychologie d’Aristote: Traité de l’âme. Aristotle.
209 * Psychology and Morals: An Analysis of Character. Hadfield, James
Arthur.
506 * Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Watson, John
Broadus.
389 * Psychorama: A Mental Outlook and Analysis. Roback, Abraham
Aaron.
418 * The Puritan Mind. Schneider, Herbert Wallace.
130 * The Quest for Certainty. Dewey, John.
448 * Questioni del Leninismo. Stalin, Joseph.
371 * Quia pauper amavi. Pound, Ezra Loomis.
219 * The Quiet Center. Henrich, Edith.
127 * Quinquennial Catalogue of the Delphic Club of Harvard University.
Delphic Club.
378 * Raleigh and the British Empire. Quinn, David Beers.
372 * Rats in the Sacristy. Powys, Llewelyn.
508 * Raum, Zeit, Materie. Weyl, Hermann.
160 - Reading I’ve Liked. Fadiman, Clifton.
T : 18
George Santayana’s Library
424 * Readings in Ethical Theory. Sellars, Wilfrid and John Hospers
[Editors].
517 * The Realm of Mind: An Essay in Metaphysics. Woodbridge, Frederick
James Eugene.
131 * Reconstruction and Philosophy. Dewey, John.
441 * Reden und Aufsätze. Spengler, Oswald.
308 * Réflexions sur l’intelligence et sur sa vie propre. Maritain, Jacques.
264 * The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads. Keith,
Arthur Berriedale.
82 * Religion in Greek Literature. Campbell, Lewis.
4 * The Religious Teachers of Greece. Adam, James.
1 * Representation and Form: A Study of Aesthetic Values in Representational
Art. Abell, Walter.
153 * Representative Selections. Edwards, Jonathan.
266 * A Revision of the Treaty. Keynes, John Maynard.
358 * The Revolutions of Civilisation. Petrie, William Matthew Flinders.
428 * Richard Dehmel. Slochower, Harry.
92 * Rime. Cavalcanti, Guido.
321 * Rime e lettere: precedute dalla vita dell’ autore scritta da Ascanio
Condivi. Michelangelo Buonarroti.
359 * Robert Browning: How to Know Him. Phelps, William Lyon.
144 * Rococo: a poem. Dunning, Ralph Cheever.
449 * Roots of the Tree. Stanley, Carleton Wellesley.
343 * Saint Croix: The Sentinel River. Murchie, Guy.
115 * San Juan de la Cruz, su obra cientifica y su obra literaria. Crisógono
de Jesús Sacramentado.
427 * The Scarlet Tree. Sitwell, Osbert.
103 * A Sceptical Examination of Contemporary British Philosophy. Coates,
Adrian.
164 * Science of Knowledge. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb.
342 * Scientific Method in Æsthetics. Munro, Thomas.
George Santayana’s Library
T : 19
491 * The Season of Comfort. Vidal, Gore.
305 * Segreto Tibet. Maraini, Fosco.
217 * Sein und Zeit. Heidegger, Martin.
248 * The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers, Robinson.
399 * The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. Rush, Benjamin.
55 * A Selection of Engravings on Wood by Thomas Bewick. Bewick,
Thomas.
52 * Selections from Berkeley. Berkeley, George.
193 * A Self Portrait. Goodman, Jack Rawlin.
410 * Self-Knowledge (Atmabodha). Sankaracarya.
309 * Sept leçons sur l’être, et les premiers principes de la raison spéculative.
Maritain, Jacques.
445 * Septimana Spinozana: acta conventus oecumenici in memoriam
Benedicti de Spinoza diei natalis trecentesimi Hagae comitis habiti. Spinoza
Society.
150 * The Shadow of the Swimmer. Eaton, Charles Edward.
468 * Shelley. Thompson, Francis.
187 * Si le grain ne meurt. Gide, André Paul Guillaume.
289 * Simples réflexions sur le décret du Saint-office. Loisy, Alfred Firmin.
407 * Sing with Me Now. Russell, David Riley.
40 * Six Historic and Romantic Leaders Who Visioned World Peace: Poetic
Dramas. Bartlett, Alice Hunt.
353 - The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance. Owen, John.
48 * Sketch for a Self-Portrait. Berenson, Bernard.
432 * The Solution of the Synoptic Problem. Smith, Robinson.
182 * Some Aspects of Contemporary Greek Orthodox Thought. Gavin, Frank
Stanton Burns.
251 * Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson. Johnson, Lionel Pigot.
136 * South Wind. Douglas, Norman.
16 - Space, Time, and Deity. Alexander, Samuel.
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George Santayana’s Library
118 * Spagna cattolica e rivoluzionaria. Cuneo, Niccolò.
354 * Spanish Mysticism: A Preliminary Survey. Peers, Edgar Allison.
145 * The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater
Philosophers. Durant, William James.
146 * The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater
Philosophers. Durant, William James.
493 * Strike through the Mask: New Lyrical Poems. Viereck, Peter Robert
Edwin.
499 * Studi sulle precognizioni. Vivante, Leone.
172 * Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History: Selected from his
Commentary on Pausanias’ Description of Greece. Frazer, James George.
345 * Studies in Keats. Murry, John Middleton.
148 * Studies of the Gods in Greece at Certain Sanctuaries Recently
Excavated. Dyer, Louis.
472 * A Study of History. Toynbee, Arnold Joseph.
469 * “A Study of Locke’s Theory of Ideas.” Thompson, Samuel
Martin.
438 * The Study of Sociology. Spencer, Herbert.
502 * Sudamérica los llamaba: exploraciones de los grandes naturalistas. Von
Hagen, Victor Wolfgang.
226 * The Suicide’s Grave: Being the Private Memoirs & Confessions of a
Justified Sinner. Hogg, James.
465 * Summa Theologica. Thomas Aquinas.
511 * Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Whitehead, Alfred North.
292 * System der Philosophie: Erster Theil, Drei Bücher der Logik. Lotze,
Hermann.
293 * System der Philosophie: Metaphysik Drei Bücher der Ontologie,
Kosmologie, Psychologie. Lotze, Hermann.
326 * A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. Mill, John Stuart.
504 * A Tale of Pausanian Love. Warren, Edward Perry [pseud. ALR].
227 * A Tercentenary History of the Boston Public Latin School, 1635–1935.
Holmes, Pauline.
George Santayana’s Library
T : 21
494 * Terror and Decorum: Poems 1940–1948. Viereck, Peter Robert
Edwin.
170 * Thomas Jefferson: Champion of Religious Freedom: Advocate of
Christian Morals. Foote, Henry Wilder.
18 * Thoughts on the Constitution. Amery, L[eopold] S[tennett].
334 * Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936. Morison, Samuel Eliot.
505 * The Three Spheres of Society. Waterman, Charles.
429 * Three Ways of Modern Man. Slochower, Harry.
370 * The Timaeus of Plato. Plato.
240 * Tito Livio, O, Del imperialismo en relación con las formas de gobierno y
la evolución historica. Irazusta, Julio.
241 * Tito Livio, O, Del imperialismo en relación con las formas de gobierno y
la evolución historica. Irazusta, Julio.
476 * Tom Sawyer Abroad and Other Stories. Twain, Mark.
68 * Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment. Buchler, Justus.
165 * Tumultuous Shore, and Other Poems. Ficke, Arthur Davison.
466 * The Unity of Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge. Thompson, Anna
Boynton.
246 * The Universe around Us. Jeans, James Hopwood.
111 * The Unwobbling Pivot & the Great Digest. Confucius.
518 * The Value of Religious Facts. Woods, James Haughton.
485 * Variété II. Valéry, Paul.
486 * Variété IV. Valéry, Paul.
53 * Velazquez. Beruete, Aureliano de.
168 * Venus & Anchises (Brittain’s Ida) and Other Poems. Fletcher,
Phineas.
521 * Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. Young, George Malcolm.
279 * A Victorian Historian: Private Letters of W. E. H. Lecky, 1859–1878.
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole.
119 * W. Bayard Cutting, Jr. 1878–1910. Cutting, W. Bayard.
233 * “What is Materialism?” Hook, Sidney.
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George Santayana’s Library
198 * Wheels on Gravel. Gregory, Alyse.
109 * While Following the Plough. Collis, John Stewart.
430 * Wild Geese and How to Chase Them. Smart, Charles Allen.
140 * Will Men Be Like Gods?: Humanitarianism or Human Happiness?
Dudley, Owen Francis.
258 * William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of
Life. Kallen, Horace Meyer.
516 * Winchester College: Its History, Buildings and Customs. Winchester
College Archaeological Society.
396 * The World and the Individual. Royce, Josiah.
437 * A World of Chance, or, Whence, Whither and Why. Spaulding,
Edward Gleason.
104 * The World of Labour: A Discussion of the Present and the Future of
Trade Unionism. Cole, George Douglas Howard.
317 * Written in Florence: The Last Verses of Hugh McCulloch. McCulloch,
Hugh.
290 * Y a-t-il deux sources de la religion et de la morale? Loisy, Alfred
Firmin.
519 * Yacht Navigation and Voyaging. Worth, Claud Alley.