Volume VI, Book One
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
A Critical Selection
Book One: Abell — Lucretius
Edited and with an Introduction by John McCormick
Kristine Walters Frost, Associate Editor
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 consti-tutes 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 intro-duction 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
Marianne S. Wokeck Director and Editor Kristine W. Frost Assistant Director and Associate Editor
Martin A. Coleman Associate Editor
Johanna E. Resler Assistant Editor
David E. Spiech Assistant Textual Editor
Elizabeth Garmen Graduate Intern
John Joachim 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.
I Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography,1986
II The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Æsthetic Theory,1988 III Interpretations of Poetry and Religion,1989
IV The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel,1994 V 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 One: Abell — Lucretius
Introduction xi
Editorial Practice xv
List of Authors xix
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 com-ments 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 imper-ceptible traces of influence, prejudice, or omission. Santayana’s com-ments 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 inter-pretation 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.
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 synoptis-chen 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 lit-erary 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 after-math, 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 unde-stroyed, to Georgetown University, and Santayana’s part of the library, inso-far as it can be identified, has now been deposited in the Special Collections section of the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University.2
the niceties of English prose as for the placing of Greek accent marks, these the marginalia indicate in abundance. Reputed to be isolated, anti-social, even a recluse, although he had no such attributes, Santayana nev-ertheless, 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 writer on a single work.3The 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 exten-sive and usable compilation. In the same vein, marginalia already pub-lished 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.
and Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University; to the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; to the librari-ans 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.
1Soliloquies in England(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 124.
2Early 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.
3E.g., George Remington Havens, Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau
The following enumeration of pages does not reflect the relative importance of a given work sub specie aeternitatis;the numeration of mar-ginalia 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 con-tained 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 other-wise indicated.
Each marginalia from a particular text is numbered consecutively, fol-lowed by the page number(s) and any other information regarding Santayana’s markings (‘marked’, ‘marked Z’, ‘underlined’, etc.) or place-ment (top, bottom).
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 ten-point 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.
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’ indi-cates a wavy horizontal line drawn under a word or words.
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
Blanshard, Brand [Editor]
Garbe, Richard von
Irazusta, Julio La Batut, Guy de [Editor]
La Fontaine, Jean de
Mann, Thomas
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat More, Paul Elmer
Neilson, W. A. and A. H. Thorndike Nevill, Ralph
Pilar, Princess of Bavaria and Desmond Chapman-Hutton Pizá, Pedro Antonio
Pound, Ezra Loomis
Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom Royce, Josiah
Sellars, Wilfrid and John Hospers [Editors] Semon, Richard
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.
Image used by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University
A Study of Aesthetic Values in Representational Art
New York: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia. [In his preface, Abell acknowledges “a debt of gratitude to Professor Santayana,” who has influenced his point of view.]
Harold Acton Memoirs of an Aesthete
London: 1948. Waterloo. One marginale. [Acton quotes Santayana on pp. 384–85.]
“Life is compelled to flow, and things must either flow with it, or like Lot’s wife, in the petrified gesture of refusal, remain to mock their own hope.”1
1Soliloquies in England(Scribner’s, 1922), 16.
Antoine Adam Le Vrai Verlaine: essai psychanalytique
Paris: 1936. Waterloo. Nine marginalia.
1 p 16, marked
||A mother’s love is necessary, but a father’s less so. The absence of a father is a catastrophe, for a son needs a father’s example. Thus lacking a father for a model, and|| brought up by a very tender mother, Baudelaire was a woman.
[A significant marking in light of Santayana’s cold relationship to his mother and his warmer regard for his father.]
2 p 16, marked
[Virtually the same comment as 1 p 16 above on Verlaine.]
3 p 36, marked
||Adam has shown how Verlaine could be obsessed by a woman’s body and at the same time homosexual or heterosexual.||
4 pp 63–64, marked
||Regarding Verlaine’s two mistresses, Philomène Boudin and Eugenie Krantz: in the Odes in honor of Philomène, she betrays him, tells him of her lapses, and they weep together.|| Verlaine has religious admiration for this dirty woman, a wounded Amazon in her flagrant indiscretions.
5 p 103, underlined and translated
||An image of the sea describes the mother,|| comme aux premiers jours du monde.
Herrlich wie am ersten Tag.1
6 p 105, marked
[Verlaine’s irony:]
It is ambiguous, it cannot be simple, spontaneous, natural. At base it is dual. One part of his being tries to live, to love, and to believe. But a quite different part refuses to follow, and objectively observes efforts it knows to be in vain.
You see the end before the beginning.
7 p 108
||A despairing letter from Verlaine to his wife tries nevertheless to reassure her. Such phrases attest to Verlaine’s obscure awareness [conscience]of being determined by exterior forces, superior to his will.||
Is there anyone who is not?
8 p 113
||It is universally accepted that the great artist is he who creates. The entirely healthy man does not have to create, because|| reality is given to him all complete. He sees it, and he lives it. He does not dream of re-ordering it.
N.B.
9 p 119
||The theory of art as healing to wounds or illness: Dostoievsky’s epilepsy and his use of it in The Idiot.||
No art would ensue if there were no positive gifts. The con-flict only renders the result more tragic.
James Adam The Religious Teachers of Greece
Edinburgh: 1908. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Conrad Aiken The Kid
[Edinburgh]: J. Lehmann, 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Conrad Aiken The Divine Pilgrim
Athens, Georgia: 1949. Waterloo. Five marginalia. [Aiken writes two explanatory prefaces to his verse.]
1 p 41
Spirit understands all but connives at nothing Witness but not accomplice—
has a specific nature, sensuous and rational, which it must respect or else go mad with pain or contradiction—which is the “divine” pilgrim.
2 p 101
[In the preface to “The House of Dust”:]
||Implicit is the theory|| that in the evolution of man’s consciousness, ever widening and deepening and subtilizing his awareness, and in his dedica-tion of himself to this supreme task, man possesses all that he could possi-bly require in the way of a religious credo: when the half-gods go, the gods arrive: he can, if he only will, become divine.
[After “divine”:] dreaming.
[In margin:] N.B. not clarifying or making truer.
Arthur Campbell Ainger Memories of Eton Sixty Years Ago
London: 1917. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Useful to Santayana for the Etonian passages in The Last Puritan.]
Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier] Propos sur le Christianisme
Paris: 1924. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
1 p 53 marked
||A quartet of Beethoven becomes clearer year by year, for the analyses of generations ensure that future glory.||
Rot
2 p 113
||The idea that the dead pray for the living derives from the notion of dead heroes as wiser and better than the living.||
This is true only virtually: it is not historical.
3 p 147
||Alain finds a kind of dualism in Pascal, no meeting of object and idea.|| This is the travers1of Alain. He doesn’t see the harmony of
mind with its ground in objects. 1Shortcoming.
4 p 162
Alain [E. A. Chartier] Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs
Paris: 1926. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Alain [E. A. Chartier] Les Idées et les âges
Paris: 1927. Volume II. Waterloo. Two marginalia. [Two surviving marginalia; others were erased.]
1 p 216 marked
||Liberty is hidden|| in the center of obedience, governing the inferior order instead of troubling it.
[Santayana agreed with that in Dominations and Powers(written over a period of forty years).]
Alain [E. A. Chartier] Propos de politique
Paris: 1934 (7th edition). Waterloo. Forty-three marginalia. [Virtually all Santayana’s comments on Alain’s politics underline his extreme conservatism of the 1930s and duplicate views found in his letters of the period.]
1 pp 12–13
||Strong government displeases; weak but sufficient government pleases the citizen.||
Bad government the only salvation.
2 p 14
||Alain’s citizen who wants few controls, but limited, weak government.|| This citizen is a ready-made unit, with ready-made interests. Are they “necessary”?
3 p 115
||Alain writes about the nature of tyranny, then turns to the Dreyfus affair:||
Those who tyrannized over Dreyfus showed an impudent scorn for the judgment of the majority.
N.B. Paradise of anarchy
4 p 128
||Alain debates Right versus Left with respect to Pilate, and to Dreyfus,1
using the phrase,|| héros de l’intelligence.
[Opposite “héros de l’intelligence”:]
You confuse disillusion with disloyalty. The truth will never give you a desire: how then should it take away your loy-alty? It would be too cynical to say that the truth discour-aged all pursuit of the good.
1The marginalia on pages 115 and 128 are two of only three references to the
Dreyfus affair known to me in all Santayana’s writings. (See also marginalia in Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 36 p 75.)
5 p 131
[On Comte’s idea of order in society:]
Sound positivism: but look out for the sensualism that will slip in.
6 p 134
[Concerning Rodin’s bronze, “The Thinker”:]
||Erase the inscription Thinker, write in Slave, and no one would be sur-prised.|| It is the slave who thinks, and the master who plays.
This is plain falsehood: but you mean that the true thinker respects matter and art, and speaks by their leave.
7 p 134
Thought awakens brighter from a hard bed.
This is eloquent: but consider the artisan philosophers Socrates, Spinoza, and then the aristocrats Plato, Buddha, Descartes. More soundness in the humble, but no more thought.
8 p 207, underlined
[Alain quotes Stendhal:]
“La nation s’enivre de gloire; adieu la liberté!”1
What couldn’t a Parisian do under Napoleon (I or III)? 1The nation is drunk on glory; farewell liberty!
9 p 252
The people is king; the general will is the law; and the general law is infallible, because it implies that what is imposed on one is imposed on all […]but the gen-eral will expresses itself in all justice in the moment of the vote.
The ideal would be a daily vote in the agora by acclamation.
10 p 254
[On the absence of radicals in Europe:]
[…]they are scorned, but they supply to politics a necessary ballast. A radical is one who is highly sceptical, he believes in nothing, and he is certain that no matter how agreeable a belief may be, it involves complete injustice and all possible evil.
Quote. Paradise of anarchy.
11 p 290
||Alain would have rustics in wooden shoes to supervise the work of gov-ernment agents.||
This idea is fantastic: a chorus of censors instead of a pack of agents and arrivistes.
12 p 339
In brief, the State is not a mystical being; its core is earth and rock.
Yes: this is half the truth. There is moral unity to be con-sidered also.
Alain [E. A. Chartier] Propos de littérature
Paris: 1934. Waterloo. Twenty marginalia.
1 p 31
||How great writers use metaphor. The purpose of comparison is to rule our thoughts, to cause them to march, in some fashion, in step with the world.||
There is relief—not comic relief, but relief in the indifference and hugeness of the background tragedy here: the march of things beyond.
2 p 167
[Of La Fontaine’s vanity:]
The master is too fond of himself.
Thought must know its vanity, in order to be just and free.
3 p 200
[About Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme:]
||Alain says that Stendhal is|| a republican of the most dangerous species. But observe the misery; he doesn’t please the republicans at all? Whom then?
Il n’aime pas la beaute, ni physique ni morale.1 He’s a cad. 1He doesn’t love beauty, neither physical nor moral.
4 p 254
Proust’s death deprived us of two or three unique volumes.
Why print this obituary error?
5 p 256
||All men are capable of monstrosity, depending on the occasion and leadership.||
there are masculine men fond of boys. Question of early fix-ture, taste, opportunity, contagion, etc.
[This is one of Santayana’s rare comments about homosexuality.]
6 p 298
||In Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina,Alain sees love depicted as romantic passion, a terrifying natural force, as in The Odyssey.||
Penetrating analysis
[Ironic underlining?]
Alain [E. A. Chartier] Histoire de mes pensées
Paris: 1936 (8th edition). Waterloo. Thirty-seven marginalia.
1 p 14
||Alain describes how his mind works.||
Self-indulgence in accepting intuitions as decisions.
2 pp 79–80, marked
[Alain on his own literary style:]
I believed thus that I was entering into the great family of writers who really owe their success to a mixture of genres, to a certain refusal to place on one side boring and difficult ideas, and on the other, easy gossip.
[The mark is significant for Santayana’s own conception of literary style.]
3 p 98
||Alain cannot prevent himself from hunting out the most varied occasions on which to say something.||
Alas!
4 p 109, marked
[About attempts to describe the world:]
[…] cette transparence du monde qui aussitôt nous fait libres et heureux. C’est pourtant un monde sans espérance, c’est un monde qu’on ne peut pas prier.1
[Although Santayana only marked this lovely passage, it precisely reflects his own despairing serenity.]
1That transparency of the world which at once makes us free and happy. Moreover it
is a world without hope, a world that one cannot pray for.
5 pp 132–33
||There is a contradiction in Kant’s account of what the mind is and how it functions.||
6 p 135, underlined
In its development, Marxism has produced neither a doctrine of liberty, nor a doc-trine of Humanity, nor a docdoc-trine of war.
“Marx is a naturalist: are you? That capital H is suspicious.”
7 p 219, marked
||Prose-poetry, and the relationship between words and art. Idea matters in a poem,|| but the art of speaking and writing is always dominated by the law of improvisation, which does not let us judge that which is already in place; thus it is we speak. The signs the body makes do not exist for us, but for those to whom we speak. One must express before one knows what one expresses […].
8 p 224
[Alain quotes Comte:]
“In reproaching love for being blind, often we forget that hatred is better and in an often disastrous degree.”
Cf. King Edward and Mrs. Simpson1
1Edward VIII, who renounced the British throne to marry the divorced
American commoner, Mrs. Simpson, in 1936.
9 p 252
||Alain translates Hegel’s term, “Geist” as “l’esprit de la terre.”|| Erdgeist1is good for Hegel’s Geist.
1“Erdgeist” or earth-spirit, occurs in Goethe’s Faust.
10 p 255
||The conclusion of his chapter on Descartes, in which Alain writes of the relationship between skepticism and belief.||
By doubting all you can entertain all.
11 p 256
[Santayana’s note at the very end of the chapter on Descartes.]
End of R. of T.1
Above belief, is thought Beyond truth is essence. Nearer than present
^passing^ events and stronger^purer^ than passions is the spirit that endures them. observes and survives perhaps survives them.
1Realm of Truth.
12 p 275, top
[In Alain’s chapter “Sentiments”:]
Alain [E. A. Chartier] Les Dieux
Paris: 1934. Waterloo. Thirty-three marginalia.
1 p l0, underlined
La vérité […] nous trompe sur nous-mêmes;1[…].
i.e. in normal thinking we do not realize the medium. 1The truth deceives us in ourselves.
2 p 45
||Memory of infancy disappears.||
re memory: i.e. the past has no interest in itself. It is used up in producing present assurance.
3 p 47, underlined
[Only one example of Santayana’s constant insistence on precision in diction.]
||Concerning “recovering” the past. One must invent a dialectic of child-hood, otherwise called the steps of forgetfulness,|| de l’oubli, qui est la sub-stance des rêves,1[…].
[At “substance”:] differentia
Why not take pains to say what you mean? 1… forgetfulness, which is the substance of dreams.
4 p 79
||Alain discusses perception.||
Has he read Scep. and An. F.?1 1Scepticism and Animal Faith.
5 p 86
[In section on “Work”:]
He who fails to bite on the world ignores the world.
Work may mean material process, derivation of one event materially from another. In that case, work = dynamic real-ity. Die Wirklichkeit = das Wirken.1
1Reality = activity.
6 p 116
The occult, that friend of religions, never makes an appearance. […] One may fully understand that children at play never have visions.
The interior disposition in mystics is the reality and visions of little moment.
7 p 124
||Motors run, men make motors; we must return to the mark of the human upon the machine.|| There is nothing of the occult in these matters. It all comes back to a circle of works, according to the law of equivalence, and again to its fuites1 always explicable according to changes in adjacent conditions.
This is a curious bit of stupidity. Due to Marx? 1Exceptions [?].
8 p 130
||[…] the “miracle” of industrial and agricultural processes, which when administered with thought,|| show that the miracle will be harbored in man and be named courage.
This is one of the fanatical delusions of the day. Why encourage it?
9 p 296
||The myths, or religion, simply are as they are.||
Correcting religion = knowing nothing of religion.
10 pp 297–98
[Alain’s chapter “Aesop”:]
||Divine power expires when there is no consent to it. Nothing makes the slave believe. The slave can think, however, and cause animals to speak.||
This is a psychologist’s fallacy. No power ignores that which it controls: but all real control is physical. The slave, like the demagogue, cannot be ignored as a physical force. Mais ce qu’il pense n’intéresse personne.1
1But what he thinks interests no one.
11 p 298
||Alain elaborates on the position of the slave.||
This is forced because the slave, like the domestic animal, may be very sympathetically considered. There is no vac-uum, unless the slave has no slave-mind and no rebellious mind. The former would organize him within society; the latter would class him as a public enemy.1
1See Dominations and Powers(New York, 1951), 73–77.
12 p 367
||The doctrine of grace. Faith in the reality of grace does not guarantee it, but it is liberating.||
13 p 373, underlined
||Concerning belief in the mythology of the Holy Ghost, of the trinity itself: this doctrine is not supinely to be accepted, but to re-make,|| sous la loi de liberté et d’amour1[…].
i.e. sincerity. The very acceptance of dictation from God, i.e. from within.
1… according to the law of liberty and love.
Thomas Albert Manufacture of Christianity
Philadelphia: c. 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Dámaso Alonso Poesía Española: ensayo de metodos y limites estilisticos
Madrid: 1950. Waterloo. Five marginalia. [Pages 424–69, the end, are uncut. Although few in number, Santayana’s notes here serve to contradict his repeated statement that his Spanish was no longer serviceable in his old age.]
1 p 344
[Gongora’s couplet from “Polifemo y Galatea”:] […] infame turba de nocturnas aves,
gimiendo tristes y volando graves. [Santayana translates:]
Black-feathered flocks of evil birds of night Mournfully croak and flop in solemn flight
[He then retranslates:]
Unholy broods of ghostly birds of night Pass sadly croaking in funereal flight.
[Thus the sequence on the page, but the second translation is literal, the first freer and surely better?]
American Authors Today Edited by Whit Burnett and Charles E. Slatkin Boston: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
L[eopold] S[tennett] Amery Thoughts on the Constitution
1 pp 10–11, underlined
||The whole life of British politics is|| action and reaction between Ministry and the Parliament. ||Amery identifies Bagehot as his source for this, and adds that one might almost say to-day|| between the Ministry and the Opposition, ||for it is the latter|| upon which has devolved most of the orig-inal critical function of Parliament.
which ought to be personal & competent, instead of partisan and ignorant.
2 p 11
||Montesquieu went astray in treating the division between the executive and legislative functions as|| natural checks ||on each other.||
But appropriated in the U.S.
3 pp 20–21, underlined and marked
Our system is one of democracy, but of democracy by consent
^ acquies-cence
^and not by delegation, of government of the people, for the people,
with, but not by, the people.
4 p 31, marked
||Amery discusses the concept of responsibility.||
Responsibility in the sense of allegiance to one’s own con-science.
5 p 31
Members of Parliament are no mere delegates of their constituents, but, as Burke pointed out, representatives of the nation, responsible, in the last resort, to their own conscience.
Honour preserved.
6 p 44
||The dangers of party organization; its power outside Parliament:|| using Parliament merely as an instrument for carrying through policies shaped without reference to it.
As now in Italy
[Alleged to approve of Mussolini’s Fascism, Santayana here strongly implies criticism.]
Van Meter Ames Proust and Santayana: The Aesthetic Way of Life
Chicago: 1937. Waterloo. Seven marginalia.
1 p 22
mistaken for villains; the society in which they move is vain. But what seemed a pit of despair became a hill of hope.
rot
2 p 23, underlined
[Proust]took the anguish of his mind and body, with the moments of bliss, and through the alchemy of art left nothing but beauty.
not again
3 p 30
Anything not art, or not redeemed by a touch of art, was death—though [Proust]called it life.
not intellectually
4 p 35
||We are indebted to Proust’s art for our comprehension of Françoise (the family’s servant).||
It is your nonsense only that supposes that “art” is the only interesting emotion.
5 p 42
||Proust, unlike Schopenhauer, devoted his art|| to preventing the tran-scendence of personality.
? Not to exhibiting it, and so to transcend it?
6 p 69, marked
Mr. Santayana is not ready, like Croce, to accept identification of form and expression implicit in Proust, but does admit that expression (association) “can give images the same hold upon our attention which might be secured by a fortunate form or splendid material.” ||Further, that Santayana had read and liked “nearly all” of A la recherche du temps perdu.|| He added: “I was interested to find toward the last that he also had the idea of essences. It is impossible that he should have got it from me, but he had hit on the same thing.”1
1See Santayana’s essay “Proust on Essences,” Obiter Scripta(New York and
London: Scribner’s, 1936), 273–79.
7 p 69, underlined and marked
If it was the same thing, then Mr. Santayana indirectly, at least, admitted relations in essences, for relations are the quintessence of essence for Proust. Yet Proust thinks of essences as somehow rising above the relativ-ity and change in which they are discovered—as shadowing forth an eter-nal reality behind all process.
identies [sic]are the essence. Do you call ideality a relation?
Aristotle Aristotle’s Psychology: A Treatise on the Principle of Life
(De Anima and Parva Naturalia) Translated and edited by William Alexander Hammond London and New York: 1902. Georgetown. Sixty-six marginalia. [The marginalia is in Santayana’s hand of c. 1902. Several of the margin-alia not included here are paraphrases of text for study, minor corrections in diction, and quibbles about Hammond’s Greek.]
1 p xx–xxi, underlined
[Hammond’s introduction:]
||Aristotle regards vegetable and animal life as virtually the same; while sensation, movement, and conceptual thought show the development of the|| vital principle found in plants. […] It is, however, a distinctly marked stage that nature makes in the development of the vital principle when sen-sation is exceeded and rational thought is reached. This new phenomenon is confined to man, and is the last stage in the evolution of . Soul is, therefore, in the opinion of Aristotle, the unity in which the principles of life, sense-perception, and thought are embraced.
Bad language: Soul is a term for
^the^principle of life and all its functions in any animal.
2 p xxxvi, underlined
[Concerning organs of perception:]
To make a further use of Aristotle’s terminology, the organ assimilates the significance or form of a thing without its matter.
But not into its substance: it assimilates the form by pro-ducing an idea of it. This is the final cause of the assimila-tion, its “unmoved mover.”
3 p xlviii, top
[Section on “Sensation”:]
[ There are but two important philosophers in these mat-ters: Aristotle and Spinoza. Aristotle must be corrected by Spinoza on the subject of the relations of mind and body: Spinoza must be supplemented by Aristotle on all moral subjects. The double aspect and the unmoved mover must be combined.]
4 p xlviii
This would suggest an interesting restatement in terms of the unmoved mover. No animal can exist without tactile reac-tions: no being having such exists without producing the consciousness of its situation. Interplay of forces is the basis of significant life. When your action is widely adjusted, your consciousness is widely intelligent.
5 p lxviii, marked
Aristotle, like Plato, developed his ethical doctrines in the closest connec-tion with his psychological theories. His concepconnec-tion of the moral will and its function is determined largely by his theory of the practical reason. In his analysis of the elements of consciousness, he finds only what we should call ideational and affective elements. There is no reference to any third conative element.
In which he is of course profoundly right. Will is an emotion with or at an idea.
6 p lxviii
Desire, as Aristotle employs it, is not a purely pathic or affective element. Feeling as such (theoretically) is completely passive,—mere enjoyment of the pleasant or mere suffering of the painful.
The painful = a feeling repelled. The pleasant = a feeling welcomed.
7 p lxxiv, marked
[On “Creative Reason”:]
In the interpretation of Averroës, although the reason is immortal, indi-viduality ceases with death; for differences in individuals are due to differ-ences in their accumulated sensible images and phantasmata—in the content of their experience. Rational activity, as such, is universally the same, and it is only this universal, non-individual principle of reason that persists after death. All individuals are alike in participating in one ratio-nal life, and they are different in so far as reason has a different mass of images to illumine. The principle of individuation is in plastic matter, not in generic form, and reason is related to sensible images as form is related to matter.
Good
[Rare praise.]
8 p lxxxi, marked
||The Reason has no bodily organ.|| Reason, then, confers on a potentially rational world its actually rational existence; and, moreover, in thinking the actually rational, it thinks itself.
9 p lxxxvi, marked
The sum of sense-data constitutes the potentiality of reason, i.e. it consti-tutes the passive reason, while their construction into actual rational sig-nificance constitutes the activity of creative reason; the real content is given in the former, the formal content in the latter. The content, therefore, of the sensus communis regarded as rational potentiality is the ;1the power which converts this potentiality into actual
ratio-nal forms or meanings is the
[From “The content, therefore,” to the end of the passage:]
N.B.
1Mind of the senses. 2Mind of action.
[Pages 37–120, those which contain Santayana’s markings, treat Aristotle’s De Anima.]
10 p 39, marked
[Book I, chapter V, “Definition of the Soul.”]
[…] it is evident that knowledge does not belong to the soul in virtue of its composition out of the elements, neither is it right or true to say that it is moved.
Conclusion of the whole book.
11 p 54
[Santayana’s enlightening summary:]
Dialectical psychology. Sensation, being pleasant or painful, produces desire.
12 p 60, marked
[Book II, chapter IV, “Principle of Nutrition.”]
[…] the growth of fire is indeterminate so long as there is material to burn; on the other hand, in all bodies developed in nature there is a limit and significance to size and growth. These attributes ([of limit and signifi-cance])1belong to soul, not to fire, to reason rather than to matter.
Good illustration of bad physics.
1The parentheses and brackets are actually in the text to denote words
inserted by the translator.
13 p 62
[Santayana summarizes and comments:]
Assimilation of food by the soul to the body, through heat. [ Soul is the instinct of self-preservation; of race preserva-tion, etc ]
14 p 66–67
||Aristotle defines three stages in the acquisition of knowledge, from poten-tiality to actuality.||
education, drawing out, like Socrates.
15 p 67
||Sense-perception in the new-born as a species of knowledge.|| Active sen-sation is used in a way similar to active thinking. There is, however, this difference, that the objects which produce sensation are external, […]. The reason for this is that active sense-perception refers to particular things, while scientific knowledge refers to the universal. These universals, how-ever, are, in a certain sense, in the mind itself. Therefore it is in one’s power to think when one wills, but to experience sense-perception is not thus in one’s power; for a sensible object must first be present.
Yet this is more definite, richer, more permanent, more unmistakable than any existence.
16 p 106
||Animals experience sensation, not reflexion.|| Neither is thought, in which right and wrong are determined, i.e.right in the sense of practical judgment, scientific knowledge and true opinion, and wrong in the sense of the opposite of these,—thought in this signification is not identical with sensation.
Perception not opinion. Cf Theaetetus. Sensation always true of the sensible.
17 p 107
[Aristotle on the psychology of imagination:]
If imagination means the power whereby what we call a phantasm is awak-ened in us, and if our use of language here is not merely metaphorical, then imagination is one of those faculties or mental forces in us by virtue of which we judge and are capable of truth and error.
Imagination not sense, usually false, not inevitably present when sense exists, sometimes present without it when sense is absent.
18 p 107, marked
Again, sensations are always true, while imaginations are for the most part false.
19 p 113, marked
[Book III, chapter IV, “Theory of Reason.”]
Pure Kant. The categories are not existences: if they were they would have to be material organs, for the existent condition of anything is material.
20 p 121, marked
A predication, as e.g. an affirmation, asserts something of something else, and is in every instance either true or false. This does not apply to the mind always, but when the mind asserts what a thing is in its essential nature and not what attaches to something as a predicate, then it is true.
Pure dialectic.
21 p 159, marked
[“On the Senses,” chapter III.]
[Of color, and diaphanous bodies such as water:]
Colour is the limit of transparency. [ These definitions, even when good, are not physical: they are definitions of “con-cretions in discourse”. Things cannot be defined, they must be decomposed or derived from their causes.[ ] ]
22 p 197
[“On Memory,” chapter I.]
[…] all memory is associated with time. Therefore, only those creatures that have perception of time, have memory, and memory attaches to that organ [the heart]whereby time is perceived.
Memory is here pregnantly and transcendentally under-stood. For an animal might profit by past experience which it did not, in this pregnant sense, remember or know to be past. Cf. the conscience.
23 p 200, marked
[On the psychology of memory and images:]
[…] the question arises whether one remembers the impression or the thing from which the impression was derived.
24 p 200, underlined
[…] the animal in a picture is both animal and a copy, and both of these are one and the same thing; but the mode of existence in the two instances is different, and it is possible to regard this picture both in the sense of animal and in the sense of image, and so it is with the image within us: we must regard it both as something in itself and as the image of something else.
25 pp 220–21fn
[“On Sleep and Waking,” chapter II.]
||Hammond’s didactic footnote (1) on Aristotle’s theory of form and matter. Matter is potentiality, which in a world of movement becomes actuality. Actuality is identical with form. In organic processes, the two can be sepa-rated only|| in abstraction. Form represents the completed condition towards which matter strives. Form is therefore the end, […] the final cause. Further, as the completed notion of a thing, or that which a thing really and finally is, it is the essential or notional cause. The definition of a thing is its notional cause. Cause () is here, of course, employed in a sense for-eign to English usage. There is no idea of agency in it, as there is in all English meanings of cause. It signifies, rather, ‘principle.’ Further, form rep-resents the inner Triebor force in matter whereby it is in constant transition towards realisation of its end.
? The final cause is immanent; the efficient is not. It is cause in our sense.
26 p 233, underlined
Even when we are in sound health and know the truth, still the sun appears to us to be only a foot in diameter.
[At “a foot”:]
! and, according to Spinoza, three hundred feet away!
27 p 251, marked
[“On Dreams,” chapter II.]
Since other animals than man have dreams, one may say, in a word, that dreams are not sent from God and do not occur for his ends.
Nobility and humanity of the divine.
28 p 251, underlined and doubly marked
||Dreams are daemonic, not divine.|| This is proven by the fact that very ordinary men have prophetic visions and true dreams, showing that God does not send them; but such men as have a loquacious and atrabilious nature see all sorts of visions.
i.e. Reason & Virtue, the Ideal. They do not come in the service of ultimate good.
29 p 260
[“On Length and Shortness of Life,” chapter III.]
[…] in whatsoever thing there is no principle of opposition, and where there is no such principle, there can be no destruction [of the Empyrean].
30 p 268
||Of identity between plants and animals:||
In man the mouth is beautiful; in plants the roots, hidden in the earth, are base and obscene. The reproductive organs, on the contrary. The fruit and flavor, are beautiful and flaunted in the air. One may say: because reproduction is the highest function of the unconscious. Cf. L. of R.1on Love.
1Life of Reason.
31 p 272, marked
[“On Youth and Old Age,” chapter I.]
||Aristotle’s distinction between the “upper” parts of plants and animals; upper signifying the direction of light and flame; lower referring to the voiding of excrement.||
Poetic.
[Ironic?]
Aristotle Aristoteles Metaphysik
Translated by Hermann Bonitz and edited by Eduard Wellmann Berlin: 1890. Georgetown. Fifty-three marginalia. [Many of the marginalia are corrections of Bonitz’s Greek, together with expressions of Santayana’s annoyance when Bonitz adds phrases to con-form to his own interpretation of the Greek, as in marginalia 1 and 2 below. From Santayana’s marginalia on p. 142, it is obvious that he was reading Bonitz’s Aristotle in preparation for The Life of Reason,c. 1900 to its publication in 1905.]
1 p 2, underlined
[Book I, chapter I.]
||Aristotle distinguishes between science and art. Bonitz translates,|| when Callias or Socrates or some other individual was suffering from this or that disease,
für welchen es ein Accidens ist,1experience urged that a physician be called in.
[Santayana cites the Greek, a mistranslation in the German, which he has underlined, and writes:]
The translation is biassed in the direction of nominalism and shocks the adept in Aristotelianism.
1… by accident.
2 p 2, underlined
[Bonitz translates as Ursache.]
3 p 3, marked
Lesser craftsmen work mechanically without knowing why they do certain things; the master works from theory and knows the causes for his actions.
Two parts of the same phenomenon. Intelligence is won-derful because it is a revelation: it is a revelation because it is relevant to practice, and relative to external fact. Instinct may be no less useful: but human wisdom consists in know-ing the good life while we live it. Its essence is contempla-tive but its locus is practical.
4 p 47, underlined
[Book III, chapter IV.]
If nothing exists but particulars, and they are infinite in number, how can we attain knowledge? We may learn of particulars only if they belong to a universal. Denn wenn weder diese sein soll noch jene, so würde überhaupt nichts sein.1
i.e. is a term of thought . . . . Otherwise thinking would be a continuum of insignificant feeling, not a mental energy connecting two terms—the material data and the ideal forms. The
^individual^locus and matter of the process and its distinguishable halting-places.
1If nothing exists other than individual units, knowledge is impossible.
5 p 117, marked
[Book V, chapter XXIX.]
||Aristotle’s comment on the Hippias:that the same man is both false and true. When he says that the man who limps willingly is better than the man who limps unwillingly, he means pretending to limp. Bonitz translates the next sentence:|| Denn wenn jemand wirklich freiwillig hinkte, so würde er wohl, wie dies auch im Sittlichen der Fall ist, noch schlechter sein.1
1If he is lame by will, he is the loser in this instance, even as he is morally.
6 p 138, marked
[Book VII, chapter I.]
||The relationship between being and substance.||
Every thing that arises is conditioned, and when the exis-tence of a nature
^form^is conditioned, that form needs mat-ter to exist. A mamat-terial = a condition.
7 p 142, marked
[Book VII, chapter VIII.]
The idea must not arise, Platonically speaking: but the category which leads the mind to that idea takes gradual possession of individuals and races, so that the existence of the Platonic idea or rather ideal is due to the acciden-tal development of the animal intellect and of animal life in general. In this sense ideas have a material and a his-tory. There is a sort of geology of the mind unknown to Aristotle who studied only its geography. Put this in the preface to the L. of R. or at the end of Part I.
8 p 146–47
[Book VII, chapter X.]
||On the relationship of parts to the whole.|| Und deshalb löst sich die irdene Bildsäule in Erde, die eherne Kogel in Erz, und Kallias in Fleisch und Knochen auf, und auf ähnliche Weise ferner der Kreis in die Kreisabschnitte, weil er etwas mit der Materie vereinigtes ist.1
L. of R.
Preface. It is an intolerable demand that because half of the world is stupid, the other half, out of consideration, should be [illegible]. Nor do I fear to sin against good man-ners by repeating the words of the one among all philoso-phers who was most a gentleman: “[ Descartes’ Discours, about his education.]”
1Accordingly the clay statue may be broken down in clay, the sphere into bronze, and
Callias into flesh and bone. So it is we use the form of the circle for the individual cir-cle, since it is somehow materially related.
9 pp 179–80, marked; doubly marked at the passage on ‘Line’
[Book IX, chapter II.]
The form of the triangle is not necessarily indicated by lines and enclosed space; the figure 2 and the form of 2 may be the same, but a line and the form of Line are surely not similar to the forms of numbers. Therefore many things have one form, as the Pythagoreans deduced. It is possible then to see one encompassing Form of all things; then clearly all things would be one.
Important for Pythagoreanism and not quoted in the text books. Cf. Neo-Platonism.
10 p 181
[Book IX, chapter III.]
This passage is worth all the transcendental intuition of Hume. It shows clearly that the trouble lies in ignoring the natural functions of the intellect.
11 p 226, underlined
[Book XI, chapter IV.]
||Philosophy, unlike mathematics, does not study things in their definite attributes, but concentrates on what is, insofar as each particular is. Physics, like Mathematics, studies the attributes and first principles of things.|| […] denn diese betrachtet die Accidenzen und die Prinzipien des Seienden, insofern es bewegt, nicht insofern es seiend ist.1
Also ist Hegel ein Physiker. Cf. L. of R. 1… deals with these things insofar as they exist but not otherwise.
12 p 252, underlined
[Book XII, chapter IV.]
||There are three elements and four causes or principles. They differ in dif-ferent cases, and the moving cause differs in differing cases: e.g. Health, disease, body; and the moving cause the art of medicine. Bonitz:|| die Heilkunst.1
i.e. the thoughts in the physician’s mind or (more classically) the physician’s art.—Rather the process of healing.
1The art of healing.
13 p 254, marked
[Book XII, chapter V.]
As to whether the principles or elements of substances, and relations or qualities, are the same or different: it is evident that when “principle” and “element” are used with more than one meaning they are the same for everything. When the meanings are distinguished one from another they are different.
Important for the variations of the ideal.
14 p 255, underlined
[Book XII, chapter VI.]
[At “würde”:]
Könnte?2 Nothing need have existed? Or is the idea that a
potentiality could initiate nothing, and all would have remained possible only?
1Here a difficulty arises. For everything that functions is possible or potential, but not
everything potential functions, so that potentiality comes first. But if that is true, there would be no reality, for it is possible that something might exist, but not yet exist.
2Might be able to.
15 p 257, underlined and marked
[Book XII, chapter VII.]
||How the prime-mover Mover moves: It is the apparent good that is wanted, and the real good that the rational will desires.|| Wir erstreben aber etwas vielmehr, weil wir es für “gut” halten, als dass wir es für gut hielten, weil wir es erstreben.1
?To make this acceptable we should have to say (referring to the previous phrases) that we desire sub forma voice because our will is directed to the real but unknown good. The latter would be relative to our nature, and particular desires would be secondary to it.
1But we struggle much more for that which we consider the good, than for that which
appears good in the course of our struggle.
16 p 258, underlined and marked
[Book XII, chapter VII.]
||Aristotle summarizes: such is the prime Mover, on which the sensible universe and all nature depend.|| Sein Leben aber ist das trefflichste, und wie es bei uns nur kurze Zeit stattfindet, da beständige Dauer uns unmöglich ist, so ist bei ihn immerwährend. Denn seine wirkliche Thätigkeit ist zugleich Freude. Und deshalb ist Wachen, Wahrnehmen, Denken das angenehmeste, und durch dieses erst Hoffnung und Erinnerung.1
N.B. here implies that imagined pleasures please on account of the present image, not on account of the even-tual experience they refer to. This is the truth.
1Its life is the best that we only temporarily enjoy. It must always be in that state which
we cannot know, since its condition is pleasure. Accordingly waking, sensation, and thought are most pleasurable, and because of them, hopes and memories too.
17 p 265
[Book XII, chapter X.]
||The Good manifests itself in the order of the universe. All is ordered, as in a household: the free have the least liberty to act randomly.||
Aristotle The Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle
Translated by J. E. C. Welldon London and New York: 1892. Le Balze. Few and inconsequential markings. [Signed “G. Santayana Avila 1895”.]
Aristotle Psychologie d’Aristote: Traité de l’âme
Translated by J. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire Paris: 1846. Le Balze. Few and unimportant markings.
The Arts in Renewal Lewis Mumford et al. Philadelphia: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Miguel Asín Palacios El Islam cristianizado
Madrid: 1931. Waterloo. Fifty-one marginalia.
1 p 23
||Concerning divine providence.||
Deus loquitur:1Bother this history and geography that oblige
me to go such a long way round to profit my providence! 1God speaks.
2 p 96
||Concerning divine love, that made Abenarabi a lover of women as well as of divinity.||
Pero este amor divino, ¿que efectas tiene?1
[Properly, “efectas” should be “efecto.”]
1But what effect has this divine love?
3 p 132
||That a mystic phenomenon occurs between two ascetics: one who engen-ders it, and one in whom it is engendered.||
This may be generalised. The ultimate may pervade the vicissitudes of life.
4 p 210
The inner reason for this is not that you respect the will of others but that you express the indifference you feel to all action.
5 p 215
||Baruzi, following St. Juan de la Cruz, taught his followers to prefer|| deso-lation to consodeso-lation and spiritual sadness to happiness.
Also in Ecclesiastes, who is no mystic.
6 p 238
||On hearing God.||
The source of “divine” messages is the psyche; no need of other vehicles.
7 p 243
||On God’s love for His creatures [la criatura].||
Now love is always something that does not exist, nothingness, the reality of which one craves. If, then, given the two single terms we have concerning love, the second of which is nothingness, there remains only to know the first, the lover.
’ Tis Love that makes the world go round, not the object of love. The object of love is passive and perhaps non-existent. Cf. The Secret of Aristotle.
8 p 243, marked
||It is a paradox that love combines two contraries, desiring at once union with and separation from the beloved.||
Cf. Spinoza.
9 p 244
God’s love is eternal as He is.
God is at home in the realm of essence.
10 p 245, marked
||Mystical love combines spiritual and physical longing.||
All this is an improper way of saying that essences become, for the spirit, the objects of love, because the psyche pursues them.
11 p 279, marked
||Penitence is the basis of attaining the mystical state.||
This might be said of clearing the heart, without false lamentations for the past.
12 p 280, marked
13 p 281, underlined
[Asín quotes El Chonaid.]
“El amor es la introducción de las cualidades del amado en el amante,1 causing the permutation of the qualities of the lover.”
The essence: which can be possessed only contemplatively. 1Love is the introduction of the qualities of the beloved to the lover.
14 p 281, “Dios” underlined
||El Chonaid further remarks that the sign of God’s love rests on cutting the root desires of this life and of the other life.||
Here God is rather Fate than the Good.
15 p 281, marked
||Asín quotes two examples of sexual love in the service of devotion to God. E.g.,|| “Tenía mi corazón diferentes amores, y se juntaron todos, cuando el alma vió que sólo Tú eras mi amor.”1
Shocking!
1I held in my heart various lovers and was joined to them, when my soul perceived
that You were my beloved.
16 p 283, marked
[“Amor de corazón”1defined.]
[…] it is the result of concupiscence and prefers worldly love to the love of God. Its objects are seven: women, children, treasures of gold and silver, horses, herds, and fields. Such love accounts for all sin.
1Corporeal love.
17 p 287
||Concerning prayer:||
N.B. Prayer is not a petition, but an elevation of the heart.
18 p 293, marked
||On the various kinds of revelation: Revelation of the understanding clar-ifies previously unintelligible ideas and possible contingencies.||
Essence.
19 p 293
||Revelation of the secrets of created beings and their providence.|| Matter
20 p 293
Revelation of the spirit indicates the gardens of paradise and the infernal regions, the elevations of the soul and the vision of the angels.
21 p 293
||With purification from all sensual nastiness, further insights occur.|| [Santayana defines those insights as:]
Truth
Telepathy & magic Majesty & Beauty
22 p 295
||On mystical union:||
1. Conscious absorbtion [sic] in God. 2. Self-unconscious absorbtion: the divine is mirrored but the image repro-duces only a part of the divine—(This is not a good simile, because there is no “reproduction” but only a partial inspection.)
23 p 298
[Santayana agrees with the text and clarifies it.]
When once the spirit is raised to pure intuition, distraction by passion is oppressive: and recovery of pure intuition then is a release or expansion.
24 p 300
[Asín quotes the Koran.]
Preach to your family, to your closest relatives […].
Horrid advice!
25 p 337
||One cannot rely on one’s effort to communicate with God.||
This oriental deity is a good symbol for the absoluteness of Nature, but not for her constancy.
26 p 455
||On the difference between “sufies” [sic]and “Malamies”:|| I have such a thick head
when saints do what is wrong I think they are wicked!
[Would-be verse.]
27 p 456
||More on mystical love.||
[From this passage to the end of the text, Asín is concerned with the nature of the Godhead, rather than with the attitude of the mystic to God, as in the preceding passages.]
28 p 457
||The disposition toward mystical love.||
Good psychology: Emotion is always essentially about noth-ing. We attribute it to an object which (except for our readi-ness to be moved, or actual motion) would produce no effect.
29 pp 464–65
[Asín quotes Fotuhat.]
El objeto del amor es algo inexistente.1
Lovely man: two truths in two pages
1st Only God is beautiful or can be loved—.2
2nd Only the non-existent can be loved—Essence 1The object of love is something nonexistent.
2That which is good and beautiful.
30 p 466
[Santayana adds to his remarks on the love of mystics.]
Neither pictorial essences nor tropes ever exist. It is not the futurity of the object of desire that makes it non-existent but the ideality of it—that is an essence and not a substance.
31 p 467
Love reconciles contraries.
Disdain is a ground of love, consent a cause of indifference. That is why God, truth, and beauty are loved.
32 p 468
He who agrees to receive God is rewarded with His love; who does not agree is punished.
Nasty thing!
33 p 473
||On God’s love of his own creation, which is himself.|| The Beautiful deployed
34 p 473
[More on the same.]
Admirable. the mystic feels the same Beauty in all Beauties: the understanding looks for a true good: and the will pur-sues its own satisfactions.
35 p 477
||More on God’s love for creation.||
36 p 478
Fué por el amor de Dios que puede amar a los hombres1
Love is the infallible sign that the Good is the reality which attracts us.
[This may be taken as Santayana’s gloss on his Spanish verse.]
1It was for the love of God / that he can love mankind.
37 p 481
Love is the life of the lover.
38 p 495
[Fotuhat quoted.]
Love is irrational.
Imagination is the lover’s substitute both for ideas and for things.
39 p 501
[Asín quotes Fotuhat on “Amorous melancholy.”]
Es una pena que el amante siente dentro de sí, pero que no es debida a 1a pérdida de algún bien o al abandono del amado; es una tristeza que no se sabe a qué atribuirla, que no tiene otra causa que el amor mismo, y que no tiene más medicina que la unión con el amado. Esta unión, mientras dura, priva al amante de sentir aquella tristeza. Si la unión con el amado no es unión personal, y el amado es un superior que impone obligaciones al amante, entonces el cumplimiento de estas obligaciones hace las veces de la unión personal, produciéndole una alegría que borra en su alma la con-sciencia de la tristeza.1
Beautiful
[“Beautiful” is an extraordinary adjective in Santayana’s vocabulary.]
1It is a pain that the lover feels within him, but one that is not caused by the loss of
some good, or by the loss of the beloved. It is sadness one cannot fathom, that has no cause other than love itself, and that knows no medicine other than union with the beloved. While this union lasts, it prevents the lover from feeling sadness. If the union with the beloved is not personal, and the beloved is a superior who imposes obligations on the lover, then the fulfilment of such obligations creates the occasions for that per-sonal union, resulting in a state of happiness that effaces from his soul his awareness of melancholy.
Brooks Atkinson Once Around the Sun
