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Title: The Letters of William James, Vol. II
Author: James, William, 1842-1910
Language: English
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THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
[Illustration: WILLIAM JAMES
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ABOUT 1895]
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
EDITED BY HIS SON
HENRY JAMES
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME II
[Illustration]
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HENRY JAMES
CONTENTS
XI. 1893-1899 1-52
_Turning to Philosophy--A Student's Impressions--Popular
Lecturing--Chautauqua._
LETTERS:--
To Dickinson S. Miller 17
To Henry Holt 19
To Henry James 20
To Henry James 20
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 20
To G. H. Howison 22
To Theodore Flournoy 23
To his Daughter 25
To E. L. Godkin 28
To F. W. H. Myers 30
To F. W. H. Myers 32
To Henry Holt 33
To his Class at Radcliffe College 33
To Henry James 34
To Henry James 36
To Benjamin P. Blood 38
To Mrs. James 40
To Miss Rosina H. Emmet 44
To Charles Renouvier 44
To Theodore Flournoy 46
To Dickinson S. Miller 48
To Henry James 51
XII. 1893-1899 (Continued) 53-91
_The Will to Believe--Talks to Teachers--Defense of Mental
Healers--Excessive Climbing in the Adirondacks._
LETTERS:--
To Theodore Flournoy 53
To Henry W. Rankin 56
To Benjamin P. Blood 58
To Henry James 60
To Miss Ellen Emmet 62
To E. L. Godkin 64
To F. C. S. Schiller 65
To James J. Putnam 66
To James J. Putnam 72
To François Pillon 73
To Mrs. James 75
To G. H. Howison 79
To Henry James 80
To his Son Alexander 81
To Miss Rosina H. Emmet 82
To Dickinson S. Miller 84
To Dickinson S. Miller 86
To Henry Rutgers Marshall 86
To Henry Rutgers Marshall 88
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 88
XIII. 1899-1902 92-170
_Two Years of Illness in Europe--Retirement from Active Duty at
Harvard--The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures._
LETTERS:--
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 95
To Mrs. E. P. Gibbens 96
To William M. Salter 99
To Miss Frances R. Morse 102
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 103
To Thomas Davidson 106
To John C. Gray 108
To Miss Frances R. Morse 109
To Mrs. Glendower Evans 112
To Dickinson S. Miller 115
To Francis Boott 117
To Hugo Münsterberg 119
To G. H. Palmer 120
To Miss Frances R. Morse 124
To his Son Alexander 129
To his Daughter 130
To Miss Frances R. Morse 133
To Miss Frances R. Morse 133
To Josiah Royce 135
To Miss Frances R. Morse 138
To James Sully 140
To Miss Frances R. Morse 142
To F. C. S. Schiller 142
To Miss Frances R. Morse 143
To Miss Frances R. Morse 146
To Henry W. Rankin 148
To Charles Eliot Norton 150
To N. S. Shaler 153
To Miss Frances R. Morse 155
To Henry James 159
To E. L. Godkin 159
To E. L. Godkin 161
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 162
To H. N. Gardiner 164
To F. C. S. Schiller 164
To Charles Eliot Norton 166
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 167
XIV. 1902-1905 171-218
_The Last Period (I)--Statements of Religious Belief--Philosophical
Writing._
LETTERS:--
To Henry L. Higginson 173
To Miss Grace Norton 173
To Miss Frances R. Morse 175
To Henry L. Higginson 176
To Henri Bergson 178
To Mrs. Louis Agassiz 180
To Henry L. Higginson 182
To Henri Bergson 183
To Theodore Flournoy 185
To Henry James 188
To his Daughter 192
To Miss Frances R. Morse 193
To Henry James 195
To Henry W. Rankin 196
To Dickinson S. Miller 197
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 198
To Miss Frances R. Morse 200
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 201
To Henry James 202
To François Pillon 203
To Henry James 204
To Charles Eliot Norton 206
To L. T. Hobhouse 207
To Edwin D. Starbuck 209
To James Henry Leuba 211
Answers to the Pratt Questionnaire on Religious Belief 212
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 215
To F. C. S. Schiller 216
To F. J. E. Woodbridge 217
To Edwin D. Starbuck 217
To F. J. E. Woodbridge 218
XV. 1905-1907 219-282
_The Last Period (II)--Italy and Greece--Philosophical Congress in
Rome--Stanford University--The Earthquake--Resignation of
Professorship._
LETTERS:--
To Mrs. James 221
To his Daughter 223
To Mrs. James 225
To George Santayana 228
To Mrs. James 229
To Mrs. James 230
To H. G. Wells 230
To Henry L. Higginson 231
To T. S. Perry 232
To Dickinson S. Miller 233
To Dickinson S. Miller 235
To Dickinson S. Miller 237
To Daniel Merriman 238
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 238
To Henry James 239
To Theodore Flournoy 241
To F. C. S. Schiller 245
To Miss Frances R. Morse 247
To Henry James and W. James, Jr. 250
To W. Lutoslawski 252
To John Jay Chapman 255
To Henry James 258
To H. G. Wells 259
To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 260
To his Daughter 262
To Henry James and W. James, Jr. 263
To Moorfield Storey 265
To Theodore Flournoy 266
To Charles A. Strong 268
To F. C. S. Schiller 270
To Clifford W. Beers 273
To William James, Jr. 275
To Henry James 277
To F. C. S. Schiller 280
XVI. 1907-1909 283-332
_The Last Period (III)--Hibbert Lectures in Oxford--The Hodgson Report._
LETTERS:--
To Charles Lewis Slattery 287
To Henry L. Higginson 288
To W. Cameron Forbes 288
To F. C. S. Schiller 290
To Henri Bergson 290
To T. S. Perry 294
To Dickinson S. Miller 295
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 296
To W. Jerusalem 297
To Henry James 298
To Theodore Flournoy 300
To Norman Kemp Smith 301
To his Daughter 301
To Henry James 302
To Henry James 303
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 303
To Charles Eliot Norton 306
To Henri Bergson 308
To John Dewey 310
To Theodore Flournoy 310
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 312
To Theodore Flournoy 313
To Henri Bergson 315
To H. G. Wells 316
To Henry James 317
To T. S. Perry 318
To Hugo Münsterberg 320
To John Jay Chapman 321
To G. H. Palmer 322
To Theodore Flournoy 322
To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 324
To F. C. S. Schiller 325
To Theodore Flournoy 326
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 328
To John Jay Chapman 329
To John Jay Chapman 330
To John Jay Chapman 330
To Dickinson S. Miller 331
XVII. 1910 333-350
_Final Months--The End._
LETTERS:--
To Henry L. Higginson 334
To Miss Frances R. Morse 335
To T. S. Perry 335
To François Pillon 336
To Theodore Flournoy 338
To his Daughter 338
To Henry P. Bowditch 341
To François Pillon 342
To Henry Adams 344
To Henry Adams 346
To Henry Adams 347
To Benjamin P. Blood 347
To Theodore Flournoy 349
APPENDIX I. 353
Three Criticisms for Students.
APPENDIX II. 357
Books by William James.
INDEX 363
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
William James in middle life _Frontispiece_
"Damn the Absolute": two snapshots of William
James and Josiah Royce 135
William James and Henry James posing for a
kodak in 1900 161
William James and Henry Clement at the "Putnam
Shanty" in the Adirondacks (1907?) 315
Facsimile of Post-card addressed to Henry Adams 347
THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
XI
1893-1899
_Turning to Philosophy--A Student's Impressions--Popular
Lecturing--Chautauqua_
When James returned from Europe, he was fifty-two years old. If he had
been another man, he might have settled down to the intensive
cultivation of the field in which he had already achieved renown and
influence. He would then have spent the rest of his life in working out
special problems in psychology, in deducing a few theories, in making
particular applications of his conclusions, in administering a growing
laboratory, in surrounding himself with assistants and disciples--in
weeding and gathering where he had tilled. But the fact was that the
publication of his two books on psychology operated for him as a welcome
release from the subject.
He had no illusion of finality about what he had written.[1] But he
would have said that whatever original contribution he was capable of
making to psychology had already been made; that he must pass on and
leave addition and revision to others. He gradually disencumbered
himself of responsibility for teaching the subject in the College. The
laboratory had already been placed under Professor Münsterberg's charge.
For one year, during which Münsterberg returned to Germany, James was
compelled to direct its conduct; but he let it be known that he would
resign his professorship rather than concern himself with it
indefinitely.
Readers of this book will have seen that the centre of his interest had
always been religious and philosophical. To be sure, the currents by
which science was being carried forward during the sixties and seventies
had supported him in his distrust of conclusions based largely on
introspection and _a priori_ reasoning. As early as 1865 he had said,
apropos of Agassiz, "No one sees farther into a generalization than his
own knowledge of details extends." In the spirit of that remark he had
spent years on brain-physiology, on the theory of the emotions, on the
feeling of effort in mental processes, in studying the measurements and
exact experiments by means of which the science of the mind was being
brought into quickening relation with the physical and biological
sciences. But all the while he had been driven on by a curiosity that
embraced ulterior problems. In half of the field of his consciousness
questions had been stirring which now held his attention completely.
Does consciousness really exist? Could a radically empirical conception
of the universe be formulated? What is knowledge? What truth? Where is
freedom? and where is there room for faith? Metaphysical problems
haunted his mind; discussions that ran in strictly psychological
channels bored him. He called psychology "a nasty little subject,"
according to Professor Palmer, and added, "all one cares to know lies
outside." He would not consider spending time on a revised edition of
his textbook (the "Briefer Course") except for a bribe that was too
great ever to be urged upon him. As time went on, he became more and
more irritated at being addressed or referred to as a "psychologist." In
June, 1903, when he became aware that Harvard was intending to confer an
honorary degree on him, he went about for days before Commencement in a
half-serious state of dread lest, at the fatal moment, he should hear
President Eliot's voice naming him "Psychologist, psychical researcher,
willer-to-believe, religious experiencer." He could not say whether the
impossible last epithets would be less to his taste than "psychologist."
Only along the borderland between normal and pathological mental states,
and particularly in the region of "religious experience," did he
continue to collect psychological data and to explore them.
The new subjects which he offered at Harvard during the nineties are
indicative of the directions in which his mind was moving. In the first
winter after his return he gave a course on Cosmology, which he had
never taught before and which he described in the department
announcement as "a study of the fundamental conceptions of natural
science with especial reference to the theories of evolution and
materialism," and for the first time announced that his graduate
"seminar" would be wholly devoted to questions in mental pathology
"embracing a review of the principal forms of abnormal or exceptional
mental life." In 1895 the second half of his psychological seminar was
announced as "a discussion of certain theoretic problems, as
Consciousness, Knowledge, Self, the relations of Mind and Body." In 1896
he offered a course on the philosophy of Kant for the first time. In
1898 the announcement of his "elective" on Metaphysics explained that
the class would consider "the unity or pluralism of the world ground,
and its knowability or unknowability; realism and idealism, freedom,
teleology and theism."[2]
But there is another aspect of the nineties which must be touched upon.
After getting back "to harness" in 1893 James took up, not only his full
college duties, but an amount of outside lecturing such as he had never
done before. In so doing he overburdened himself and postponed the
attainment of his true purpose; but the temptation to accept the
requests which now poured in on him was made irresistible by practical
considerations. He not only repeated some of his Harvard courses at
Radcliffe College, and gave instruction in the Harvard Summer School in
addition to the regular work of the term; but delivered lectures at
teachers' meetings and before other special audiences in places as far
from Cambridge as Colorado and California. A number of the papers that
are included in "The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy" (1897) and "Talks to Teachers and Students on Some of Life's
Ideals" (1897) were thus prepared as lectures. Some of them were read
many times before they were published. When he stopped for a rest in
1899, he was exhausted to the verge of a formidable break-down.
Even a glance at this period tempts one to wonder whether this record
would not have been richer if it had been different. Might-have-beens
can never be measured or verified; and yet sometimes it cannot be
doubted that possibilities never realized were actual possibilities
once. By 1893 James was inwardly eager, as has already been said, to
devote all his thought and working time to metaphysical and religious
questions. More than that--he had already conceived the important terms
of his own _Welt-anschauung_. "The Will to Believe" was written by 1896.
In the preface to the "Talks to Teachers" he said of the essay called "A
Certain Blindness in Human Beings," "it connects itself with a definite
view of the World and our Moral relations to the same.... I mean the
pluralistic or individualistic philosophy." This was no more than a
statement of a general philosophic attitude which had for some years
been familiar to his students and to readers of his occasional papers.
The lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,"
delivered at the University of California in 1898, forecast "Pragmatism"
and the "Meaning of Truth." If his time and energy had not been
otherwise consumed, the nineties might well have witnessed the
appearance of papers which were not written until the next decade. If he
had been able to apply an undistracted attention to what his spirit was
all the while straining toward, the disastrous breakdown of 1899-1902
might not have happened. But instead, these best years of his maturity
were largely sacrificed to the practical business of supporting his
family. His salary as a Harvard professor was insufficient to his needs.
On his salary alone he could not educate his four children as he wanted
to, and make provision for his old age and their future and his wife's,
except by denying himself movement and social and professional contacts
and by withdrawing into isolation that would have been utterly
paralyzing and depressing to his genius. He possessed private means, to
be sure; but, considering his family, these amounted to no more than a
partial insurance against accident and a moderate supplement to his
salary. His books had not yet begun to yield him a substantial increase
of income. It is true that he made certain lecture engagements serve as
the occasion for casting philosophical conceptions in more or less
popular form, and that he frequently paid the expenses of refreshing
travels by means of these lectures. But after he had economized in every
direction,--as for instance, by giving up horse and hired man at
Chocorua,--the bald fact remained that for six years he spent most of
the time that he could spare from regular college duties, and about all
his vacations, in carrying the fruits of the previous fifteen years of
psychological work into the popular market. His public reputation was
increased thereby. Teachers, audiences, and the "general reader" had
reason to be thankful. But science and philosophy paid for the gain. His
case was no worse than that of plenty of other men of productive genius
who were enmeshed in an inadequately supported academic system. It would
have been much more distressing under the conditions that prevail today.
So James took the limitations of the situation as a matter of course and
made no complaint. But when he died, the systematic statement of his
philosophy had not been "rounded out" and he knew that he was leaving it
"too much like an arch built only on one side."
* * * * *
James's appearance at this period is well shown by the frontispiece of
this volume. Almost anyone who was at Harvard in the nineties can recall
him as he went back and forth in Kirkland Street between the College and
his Irving Street house, and can in memory see again that erect figure
walking with a step that was somehow firm and light without being
particularly rapid, two or three thick volumes and a note-book under
one arm, and on his face a look of abstraction that used suddenly to
give way to an expression of delighted and friendly curiosity. Sometimes
it was an acquaintance who caught his eye and received a cordial word;
sometimes it was an occurrence in the street that arrested him;
sometimes the terrier dog, who had been roving along unwatched and
forgotten, embroiled himself in an adventure or a fight and brought
James out of his thoughts. One day he would have worn the Norfolk jacket
that he usually worked in at home to his lecture-room; the next, he
would have forgotten to change the black coat that he had put on for a
formal occasion. At twenty minutes before nine in the morning he could
usually be seen going to the College Chapel for the fifteen-minute
service with which the College day began. If he was returning home for
lunch, he was likely to be hurrying; for he had probably let himself be
detained after a lecture to discuss some question with a few of his
class. He was apt then to have some student with him whom he was
bringing home to lunch and to finish the discussion at the family table,
or merely for the purpose of establishing more personal relations than
were possible in the class-room. At the end of the afternoon, or in the
early evening, he would frequently be bicycling or walking again. He
would then have been working until his head was tired, and would have
laid his spectacles down on his desk and have started out again to get a
breath of air and perhaps to drop in on a Cambridge neighbor.
In his own house it seemed as if he was always at work; all the more,
perhaps, because it was obvious that he possessed no instinct for
arranging his day and protecting himself from interruptions. He managed
reasonably well to keep his mornings clear; or rather he allowed his
wife to stand guard over them with fair success. But soon after he had
taken an essential after-lunch nap, he was pretty sure to be "caught" by
callers and visitors. From six o'clock on, he usually had one or two of
the children sitting, more or less subdued, in the library, while he
himself read or dashed off letters, or (if his eyes were tired) dictated
them to Mrs. James. He always had letters and post-cards to write. At
any odd time--with his overcoat on and during a last moment before
hurrying off to an appointment or a train--he would sit down at his desk
and do one more note or card--always in the beautiful and flowing hand
that hardly changed between his eighteenth and his sixty-eighth years.
He seemed to feel no need of solitude except when he was reading
technical literature or writing philosophy. If other members of the
household were talking and laughing in the room that adjoined his study,
he used to keep the door open and occasionally pop in for a word, or to
talk for a quarter of an hour. It was with the greatest difficulty that
Mrs. James finally persuaded him to let the door be closed up. He never
struck an equilibrium between wishing to see his students and neighbors
freely and often, and wishing not to be interrupted by even the most
agreeable reminder of the existence of anyone or anything outside the
matter in which he was absorbed.
It was customary for each member of the Harvard Faculty to announce in
the college catalogue at what hour of the day he could be consulted by
students. Year after year James assigned the hour of his evening meal
for such calls. Sometimes he left the table to deal with the caller in
private; sometimes a student, who had pretty certainly eaten already and
was visibly abashed at finding himself walking in on a second dinner,
would be brought into the dining-room and made to talk about other
things than his business.
He allowed his conscience to be constantly burdened with a sense of
obligation to all sorts of people. The list of neighbors, students,
strangers visiting Cambridge, to whom he and Mrs. James felt responsible
for civilities, was never closed, and the cordiality which animated his
intentions kept him reminded of every one on it.
And yet, whenever his wife wisely prepared for a suitable time and made
engagements for some sort of hospitality otherwise than by hap-hazard,
it was perversely likely to be the case, when the appointed hour
arrived, that James was "going on his nerves" and in no mood for "being
entertaining." The most comradely of men, nothing galled him like
_having to be_ sociable. The "hollow mockery of our social conventions"
would then be described in furious and lurid speech. Luckily the guests
were not yet there to hear him. But they did not always get away without
catching a glimpse of his state of mind. On one such occasion,--an
evening reception for his graduate class had been arranged,--Mrs. James
encountered a young man in the hall whose expression was so perturbed
that she asked him what had happened to him. "I've come in again," he
replied, "to get my hat. I was trying to find my way to the dining-room
when Mr. James swooped at me and said, 'Here, Smith, you want to get out
of this _Hell_, don't you? I'll show you how. There!' And before I could
answer, he'd popped me out through a back-door. But, really, I do not
want to go!"
The dinners of a club to which allusions will occur in this volume, (in
letters to Henry L. Higginson, T. S. Perry, and John C. Gray) were
occasions apart from all others; for James could go to them at the last
moment, without any sense of responsibility and knowing that he would
find congenial company and old friends. So he continued to go to these
dinners, even after he had stopped accepting all invitations to dine.
The Club (for it never had any name) had been started in 1870. James had
been one of the original group who agreed to dine together once a month
during the winter. Among the other early members had been his brother
Henry, W. D. Howells, O. W. Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, John C. Gray, Henry
Adams, T. S. Perry, John C. Ropes, A. G. Sedgwick, and F. Parkman. The
more faithful diners, who constituted the nucleus of the Club during the
later years, included Henry L. Higginson, Sturgis Bigelow, John C.
Ropes, John T. Morse, Charles Grinnell, James Ford Rhodes, Moorfield
Storey, James W. Crafts, and H. P. Walcott.
* * * * *
Every little while James's sleep would "go to pieces," and he would go
off to Newport, the Adirondacks, or elsewhere, for a few days. This
happened both summer and winter. It was not the effect of the place or
climate in which he was living, but simply that his dangerously high
average of nervous tension had been momentarily raised to the snapping
point. Writing was almost certain to bring on this result. When he had
an essay or a lecture to prepare, he could not do it by bits. In order
to begin such a task, he tried to seize upon a free day--more often a
Sunday than any other. Then he would shut himself into his library, or
disappear into a room at the top of the house, and remain hidden all
day. If things went well, twenty or thirty sheets of much-corrected
manuscript (about twenty-five hundred words in his free hand) might
result from such a day. As many more would have gone into the
waste-basket. Two or three successive days of such writing "took it out
of him" visibly.
Short holidays, or intervals in college lecturing, were often employed
for writing in this way, the longer vacations of the latter nineties
being filled, as has been said, with traveling and lecture engagements.
In the intervals there would be a few days, or sometimes two or three
whole weeks, at Chocorua. Or, one evening, all the windows of the
deserted Irving Street house would suddenly be wide open to the night
air, and passers on the sidewalk could see James sitting in his
shirt-sleeves within the circle of the bright light that stood on his
library table. He was writing letters, making notes, and skirmishing
through the piles of journals and pamphlets that had accumulated during
an absence.
* * * * *
The impression which he made on a student who sat under him in several
classes shortly before the date at which this volume begins have been
set down in a form in which they can be given here.
"I have a vivid recollection" (writes Dr. Dickinson S. Miller) "of
James's lectures, classes, conferences, seminars, laboratory interests,
and the side that students saw of him generally. Fellow-manliness seemed
to me a good name for his quality. The one thing apparently impossible
to him was to speak _ex cathedra_ from heights of scientific erudition
and attainment. There were not a few 'if's' and 'maybe's' in his
remarks. Moreover he seldom followed for long an orderly system of
argument or unfolding of a theory, but was always apt to puncture such
systematic pretensions when in the midst of them with some entirely
unaffected doubt or question that put the matter upon a basis of common
sense at once. He had drawn from his laboratory experience in chemistry
and his study of medicine a keen sense that the imposing formulas of
science that impress laymen are not so 'exact' as they sound. He was
not, in my time at least, much of a believer in lecturing in the sense
of continuous exposition.
"I can well remember the first meeting of the course in psychology in
1890, in a ground-floor room of the old Lawrence Scientific School. He
took a considerable part of the hour by reading extracts from Henry
Sidgwick's Lecture against Lecturing, proceeding to explain that we
should use as a textbook his own 'Principles of Psychology,' appearing
for the first time that very week from the press, and should spend the
hours in conference, in which we should discuss and ask questions, on
both sides. So during the year's course we read the two volumes through,
with some amount of running commentary and controversy. There were four
or five men of previous psychological training in a class of (I think)
between twenty and thirty, two of whom were disposed to take up cudgels
for the British associational psychology and were particularly troubled
by the repeated doctrine of the 'Principles' that a state of
consciousness had no parts or elements, but was one indivisible fact. He
bore questions that really were criticisms with inexhaustible patience
and what I may call (the subject invites the word often) _human_
attention; invited written questions as well, and would often return
them with a reply penciled on the back when he thought the discussion
too special in interest to be pursued before the class. Moreover, he
bore with us with never a sign of impatience if we lingered after class,
and even walked up Kirkland Street with him on his way home. Yet he was
really not argumentative, not inclined to dialectic or pertinacious
debate of any sort. It must always have required an effort of
self-control to put up with it. He almost never, even in private
conversation, contended for his own opinion. He had a way of often
falling back on the language of perception, insight, sensibility, vision
of possibilities. I recall how on one occasion after class, as I parted
with him at the gate of the Memorial Hall triangle, his last words were
something like these: 'Well, Miller, that theory's not a warm reality to
me yet--still a cold conception'; and the charm of the comradely smile
with which he said it! The disinclination to formal logical system and
the more prolonged purely intellectual analyses was felt by some men as
a lack in his classroom work, though they recognized that these analyses
were present in the 'Psychology.' On the other hand, the very tendency
to _feel_ ideas lent a kind of emotional or æsthetic color which
deepened the interest.
"In the course of the year he asked the men each to write some word of
suggestion, if he were so inclined, for improvement in the method with
which the course was conducted; and, if I remember rightly, there were
not a few respectful suggestions that too much time was allowed to the
few wrangling disputants. In a pretty full and varied experience of
lecture-rooms at home and abroad I cannot recall another where the class
was asked to criticize the methods of the lecturer.
"Another class of twelve or fourteen, in the same year, on Descartes,
Spinoza, and Leibnitz, met in one of the 'tower rooms' of Sever Hall,
sitting around a table. Here we had to do mostly with pure metaphysics.
And more striking still was the prominence of humanity and sensibility
in his way of taking philosophic problems. I can see him now, sitting at
the head of that heavy table of light-colored oak near the bow-window
that formed the end of the room. My brother, a visitor at Cambridge,
dropping in for an hour and seeing him with his vigorous air, bronzed
and sanguine complexion, and brown tweeds, said, 'He looks more like a
sportsman than a professor.' I think that the sporting men in college
always felt a certain affinity to themselves on one side in the
freshness and manhood that distinguished him in mind, appearance, and
diction. It was, by the way, in this latter course that I first heard
some of the philosophic phrases now identified with him. There was a
great deal about the monist and pluralist views of the universe. The
world of the monist was described as a 'block-universe' and the monist
himself as 'wallowing in a sense of unbridled unity,' or something of
the sort. He always wanted the men to write one or two 'theses' in the
course of the year and to get to work early on them. He made a great
deal of bibliography. He would say, 'I am no man for editions and
references, no exact bibliographer.' But none the less he would put upon
the blackboard full lists of books, English, French, German, and
Italian, on our subject. His own reading was immense and systematic. No
one has ever done justice to it, partly because he spoke with unaffected
modesty of that side of his equipment.
"Of course this knowledge came to the foreground in his 'seminar.' In my
second year I was with him in one of these for both terms, the first
half-year studying the psychology of pleasure and pain, and the second,
mental pathology. Here each of us undertook a special topic, the reading
for which was suggested by him. The students were an interesting group,
including Professor Santayana, then an instructor, Dr. Herbert Nichols,
Messrs. Mezes (now President of the City College, New York), Pierce
(late Professor at Smith College), Angell (Professor of Psychology at
Chicago, and now President of the Carnegie Corporation), Bakewell
(Professor at Yale), and Alfred Hodder (who became instructor at Bryn
Mawr College, then abandoned academic life for literature and politics).
In this seminar I was deeply impressed by his judicious and often
judicial quality. His range of intellectual experience, his profound
cultivation in literature, in science and in art (has there been in our
generation a more cultivated man?), his absolutely unfettered and
untrammeled mind, ready to do sympathetic justice to the most
unaccredited, audacious, or despised hypotheses, yet always keeping his
own sense of proportion and the balance of evidence--merely to know
these qualities, as we sat about that council-board, was to receive, so
far as we were capable of absorbing it, in a heightened sense of the
good old adjective, 'liberal' education. Of all the services he did us
in this seminar perhaps the greatest was his running commentary on the
students' reports on such authors as Lombroso and Nordau, and all
theories of degeneracy and morbid human types. His thought was that
there is no sharp line to be drawn between 'healthy' and 'unhealthy'
minds, that all have something of both. Once when we were returning from
two insane asylums which he had arranged for the class to visit, and at
one of which we had seen a dangerous, almost naked maniac, I remember
his saying, 'President Eliot might not like to admit that there is no
sharp line between himself and the men we have just seen, but it is
true.' He would emphasize that people who had great nervous burdens to
carry, hereditary perhaps, could order their lives fruitfully and
perhaps derive some gain from their 'degenerate' sensitiveness, whatever
it might be. The doctrine is set forth with regard to religion in an
early chapter of his 'Varieties of Religious Experience,' but for us it
was applied to life at large.
"In private conversation he had a mastery of words, a voice, a vigor, a
freedom, a dignity, and therefore what one might call an authority, in
which he stood quite alone. Yet brilliant man as he was, he never quite
outgrew a perceptible shyness or diffidence in the lecture-room, which
showed sometimes in a heightened color. Going to lecture in one of the
last courses he ever gave at Harvard, he said to a colleague whom he met
on the way, 'I have lectured so and so many years, and yet here am I on
the way to my class in trepidation!'
"Professor Royce's style of exposition was continuous, even, unfailing,
composed. Professor James was more conversational, varied, broken, at
times struggling for expression--in spite of what has been mentioned as
his mastery of words. This was natural, for the one was deeply and
comfortably installed in a theory (to be sure a great theory), and the
other was peering out in quest of something greater which he did not
distinctly see. James's method gave us in the classroom more of his own
exploration and _aperçu_. We felt his mind at work.
"Royce in lecturing sat immovable. James would rise with a peculiar
suddenness and make bold and rapid strokes for a diagram on the
black-board--I can remember his abstracted air as he wrestled with some
idea, standing by his chair with one foot upon it, elbow on knee, hand
to chin. A friend has described a scene at a little class that, in a
still earlier year, met in James's own study. In the effort to
illustrate he brought out a black-board. He stood it on a chair and in
various other positions, but could not at once write upon it, hold it
steady, and keep it in the class's vision. Entirely bent on what he was
doing, his efforts resulted at last in his standing it on the floor
while he lay down at full length, holding it with one hand, drawing with
the other, and continuing the flow of his commentary. I can myself
remember how, after one of his lectures on Pragmatism in the Horace Mann
Auditorium in New York, being assailed with questions by people who came
up to the edge of the platform, he ended by sitting on that edge
himself, all in his frock-coat as he was, his feet hanging down, with
his usual complete absorption in the subject, and the look of human and
mellow consideration which distinguished him at such moments, meeting
the thoughts of the inquirers, whose attention also was entirely
riveted. If this suggests a lack of dignity, it misleads, for dignity
never forsook him, such was the inherent strength of tone and bearing.
In one respect these particular lectures (afterwards published as his
book on Pragmatism) stand alone in my recollection. An audience may
easily be large the first time, but if there is a change it usually
falls away more or less on the subsequent occasions. These lectures were
announced for one of the larger lecture-halls. This was so crowded
before the lecture began, some not being able to gain admittance, that
the audience had to be asked to move to the large 'auditorium' I have
mentioned. But in it also the numbers grew, till on the last day it
presented much the same appearance as the other hall on the first."
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Nov._ 19, 1893.
MY DEAR MILLER,--I have found the work of recommencing teaching
unexpectedly formidable after our year of gentlemanly irresponsibility.
I seem to have forgotten everything, especially psychology, and the
subjects themselves have become so paltry and insignificant-seeming that
each lecture has appeared a ghastly farce. Of late things are getting
more real; but the experience brings startlingly near to one the wild
desert of old-age which lies ahead, and makes me feel like impressing on
all chicken-professors like you the paramount urgency of providing for
the time when you'll be old fogies, by laying by from your very first
year of service a fund on which you may be enabled to "retire" before
you're sixty and incapable of any cognitive operation that wasn't ground
into you twenty years before, or of any emotion save bewilderment and
jealousy of the thinkers of the rising generation.
I am glad to hear that you have more writings on the stocks. I read your
paper on "Truth and Error" with bewilderment and jealousy. Either it is
Dr. Johnson _redivivus_ striking the earth with his stick and saying,
"Matter exists and there's an end on 't," or it is a new David Hume,
reincarnated in your form, and so subtle in his simplicity that a
decaying mind like mine fails to seize any of the deeper import of his
words. The trouble is, I can't tell which it is. But with the help of
God I will go at it again this winter, when I settle down to my final
bout with Royce's theory, which must result in my either _actively_
becoming a propagator thereof, or actively its enemy and destroyer. It
is high time that this more decisive attitude were generated in me, and
it ought to take place this winter.
I hardly see more of my colleagues this winter than I did last year.
Each of us lies in his burrow, and we meet on the street. Münsterberg is
going really _splendidly_ and the Laboratory is a bower of delight. But
I do not work there. Royce is in powerful condition.... Yours ever,
W. J.
Although, in the next letter, James poked fun at reformed spelling, he
was really in sympathy with the movement to which his correspondent was
giving an outspoken support--as Mr. Holt of course understood. "Isn't it
abominable"--Professor Palmer has quoted James as exclaiming--"that
everybody is expected to spell the same way!" He lent his name to Mr.
Carnegie's simplified spelling program, and used to wax honestly
indignant when people opposed spelling reform with purely conservative
arguments. He cared little about etymology, and saw clearly enough that
mere accident and fashion have helped to determine orthography. But in
his own writing he never put himself to great pains to reëducate his
reflexes. He let his hand write _through_ as often as _thro'_ or _thru_,
and only occasionally bethought him to write 'filosofy' and 'telefone.'
When he published, the text of his books showed very few reforms.
_To Henry Holt._
Cambridge, _March_ 27[1894].
_Autographically written, and spelt spontaneously._
DEAR HOLT,--The Introduction to filosofy is what I ment--I dont no the
other book.
I will try Nordau's Entartung this summer--as a rule however it duzn't
profit me to read Jeremiads against evil--the example of a little good
has more effect.
A propo of kitchen ranges, I wish you wood remoov your recommendation
from that Boynton Furnace Company's affair. We have struggld with it for
five years--lost 2 cooks in consequens--burnt countless tons of extra
coal, never had anything decently baikt, and now, having got rid of it
for 15 dollars, are having a happy kitchen for the 1st time in our
experience--all through your unprinsipld recommendation! You ought to
hear my wife sware when she hears your name!
I will try about a translator for Nordau--though the only man I can
think of needs munny more than fame, and coodn't do the job for pure
love of the publisher or author, or on an unsertainty.
Yours affectionately,
WILLIAM JAMES.
_To Henry James_.
PRINCETON, _Dec. 29, 1894_.
DEAR H.,--I have been here for three days at my co-psychologist
Baldwin's house, presiding over a meeting of the American Association of
Psychologists, which has proved a very solid and successful affair.[3]
Strange to say, we are getting to be veterans, and the brunt of the
discussions was borne by former students of mine. It is a very healthy
movement. Alice is with me, the weather is frosty clear and cold,
touching zero this A.M. and the country robed in snow. Princeton is a
beautiful place....
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _Apr. 26, 1895_.
...I have been reading Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" with immense
gusto. It almost makes me a Liberal-Unionist! If I mistake not, it will
have a profound effect eventually, and it is a pleasure to see old
England coming to the fore every time with some big stroke. There is
more real philosophy in such a book than in fifty German ones of which
the eminence consists in heaping up subtleties and technicalities about
the subject. The English genius makes the vitals plain by scuffing the
technicalities away. B. is a great man....
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
SPRINGFIELD CENTRE, N.Y., _June 16, 1895_.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--About the 22nd! I will come if you command it; but
reflect on my situation ere you do so. Just reviving from the addled and
corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the
portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have
sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get
there; just about to get a little health into me, a little
simplification and solidification and purification and sanification--things
which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to
satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of
so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the
spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its
waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken
forest--oh, Madam, Madam! do you know what medicinal things you ask me
to give up? Alas!
I aspire downwards, and really _am_ nothing, _not becoming_ a savage as
I would be, and failing to be the civilizee that I really ought to be
content with being! But I wish that _you_ also aspired to the
wilderness. There are some nooks and summits in that Adirondack region
where one can really "recline on one's divine composure," and, as long
as one stays up there, seem for a while to enjoy one's birth-right of
freedom and relief from every fever and falsity. Stretched out on such a
shelf,--with thee beside me singing in the wilderness,--what babblings
might go on, what judgment-day discourse!
Command me to give it up and return, if you will, by telegram addressed
"Adirondack Lodge, North Elba, N.Y." In any case I shall return before
the end of the month, and later shall be hanging about Cambridge some
time in July, giving lectures (for my sins) in the Summer School. I am
staying now with a cousin on Otsego Lake, a dear old country-place that
has been in their family for a century, and is rich and ample and
reposeful. The Kipling visit went off splendidly--he's a regular little
brick of a man; but it's strange that with so much sympathy with the
insides of every living thing, brute or human, drunk or sober, he
should have so little sympathy with those of a Yankee--who also is, in
the last analysis, one of God's creatures. I have stopped at
Williamstown, at Albany, at Amsterdam, at Utica, at Syracuse, and
finally here, each time to visit human beings with whom I had business
of some sort or other. The best was Benj. Paul Blood at Amsterdam, a son
of the soil, but a man with extraordinary power over the English tongue,
of whom I will tell you more some day. I will by the way enclose some
clippings from his latest "effort." "Yes, Paul is quite a
_correspondent_!" as a citizen remarked to me from whom I inquired the
way to his dwelling. Don't you think "correspondent" rather a good
generic term for "man of letters," from the point of view of the
country-town newspaper reader?...
Now, dear, noble, incredibly perfect Madam, you won't take ill my
reluctance about going to Beverly, even to your abode, so soon. I am a
badly mixed critter, and I experience a certain organic need for
simplification and solitude that is quite imperious, and so vital as
actually to be respectable even by others. So be indulgent to your ever
faithful and worshipful,
W. J.
_To G. H. Howison._
Cambridge, _July 17, 1895_.
MY DEAR HOWISON,--How you _have_ misunderstood the application of my
word "trivial" as being discriminatively applied to your pluralistic
idealism! Quite the reverse--if there be a philosophy that I believe in,
it's that. The word came out of one who is unfit to be a philosopher
because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a
vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking
him through with the conviction that it is better to _be_ than to define
your being. I am a victim of neurasthenia and of the sense of hollowness
and unreality that goes with it. And philosophic literature _will_ often
seem to me the hollowest thing. My word trivial was a general reflection
exhaling from this mood, vile indeed in a supposed professor. Where it
will end with me, I do not know. I wish I could give it all up. But
perhaps it is a grand climacteric and will pass away. At present I am
philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next
year, if I can do it at all. And I envy you your stalwart and steadfast
enthusiasm and faith. Always devotedly yours,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
GLENWOOD SPRINGS,
COLORADO, _Aug. 13, 1895_.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Ever since last January an envelope addressed to you
has been lying before my eyes on my library table. I mention this to
assure you that you have not been absent from my thoughts; but I will
waste no time or paper in making excuses. As the sage Emerson says, when
you visit a man do not degrade the occasion with apologies for not
having visited him before. Visit him now! Make him feel that the highest
truth has come to see him in you its lowliest organ. I don't know about
the highest truth transpiring through this letter, but I feel as if
there were plenty of affection and personal gossip to express
themselves. To begin with, your photograph and Mrs. Flournoy's were
splendid. What we need now is the photographs of those fair
_demoiselles_! I may say that one reason of my long silence has been the
hope that when I wrote I should have my wife's photograph to send you.
But alas! it has not been taken yet. She is well, very well, and is now
in our little New Hampshire country-place with the children, living very
quietly and happily. We have had a rather large _train de maison_
hitherto, and this summer we are shrunken to our bare essentials--a very
pleasant change.
I, you see, am farther away from home than I have ever been before on
this side of the Atlantic, namely, in the state of Colorado, and just
now in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. I have been giving a course of
six lectures on psychology "for teachers" at a so-called "summer-school"
in Colorado Springs. I had to remain for three nights and three days in
the train to get there, and it has made me understand the vastness of my
dear native land better than I ever did before.... The trouble with all
this new civilization is that it is based, not on saving, but on
borrowing; and when hard times come, as they did come three years ago,
everyone goes bankrupt. But the vision of the future, the dreams of the
possible, keep everyone enthusiastic, and so the work goes on. Such
conditions have never existed before on so enormous a scale. But I must
not write you a treatise on national economy!--I got through the year
very well in regard to health, and gave in the course of it, what I had
never done before, a number of lectures to teachers in Boston and New
York. I also repeated my course in Cosmology in the new woman's College
which has lately been established in connection with our University. The
consequence is that I laid by more than a thousand dollars, an
absolutely new and proportionately pleasant experience for me. To make
up for it, I haven't had an idea or written anything to speak of except
the "presidential address" which I sent you, and which really contained
nothing new....
And now is not that enough gossip about ourselves? I wish I could, by
telephone, at this moment, hear just where and how you all are, and what
you are all doing. In the mountains somewhere, of course, and I trust
all well; but it is perhaps fifteen or twenty years too soon for
transatlantic telephone. My surroundings here, so much like those of
Switzerland, bring you before me in a lively manner. I enclose a picture
of one of the streets at Colorado Springs for Madame Flournoy, and
another one of a "cowboy" for that one of the _demoiselles_ who is most
_romanesque_. Alice, Blanche--but I have actually gone and been and
forgotten the name of the magnificent third one, whose resplendent face
I so well remember notwithstanding. _Dulcissima mundi nomina_, all of
them; and I do hope that they are being educated in a thoroughly
emancipated way, just like true American girls, with no laws except
those imposed by their own sense of fitness. I am sure it produces the
best results! How did the teaching go last year? I mean your own
teaching. Have you started any new lines? And how is Chantre? and how
Ritter? And how Monsieur Gowd? Please give my best regards to all round,
especially to Ritter. Have you a copy left of your "Métaphysique et
Psychologie"? In some inscrutable way my copy has disappeared, and the
book is reported _épuisé_.
With warmest possible regards to both of you, and to all five of the
descendants, believe me ever faithfully yours,
W. JAMES.
_To his Daughter._
EL PASO, COLO., _Aug. 8, 1895_.
SWEETEST OF LIVING Pegs,--Your letter made glad my heart the day before
yesterday, and I marveled to see what an improvement had come over your
handwriting in the short space of six weeks. "Orphly" and "ofly" are
good ways to spell "awfully," too. I went up a high mountain yesterday
and saw all the kingdoms of the world spread out before me, on the
illimitable prairie which looked like a map. The sky glowed and made the
earth look like a stained-glass window. The mountains are bright red.
All the flowers and plants are different from those at home. There is an
immense mastiff in my house here. I think that even you would like him,
he is so tender and gentle and mild, although fully as big as a calf.
His ears and face are black, his eyes are yellow, his paws are
magnificent, his tail keeps wagging _all_ the time, and he makes on me
the impression of an angel hid in a cloud. He longs to do good.
I must now go and hear two other men lecture. Many kisses, also to
Tweedy, from your ever loving,
DAD.
* * * * *
On December 17, 1895, President Cleveland's Venezuela message startled
the world and created a situation with which the next three letters are
concerned. The boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana had
been dragging along for years. The public had no reason to suppose that
it was becoming acute, or that the United States was particularly
interested in it, and had, in fact, not been giving the matter so much
as a thought. All at once the President sent a message to Congress in
which he announced that it was incumbent upon the United States to "take
measures to determine ... the true" boundary line, and then to "resist
by every means in its power as a willful aggression upon its rights and
interests" any appropriation by Great Britain of territory not thus
determined to be hers. In addition he sent to Congress, and thus
published, the diplomatic despatches which had already passed between
Mr. Olney and Lord Salisbury. In these Mr. Olney had informed the
representative of the Empire which was sovereign in British Guiana "that
distance and three thousand miles of intervening ocean make any
permanent political union between a European and an American state
unnatural and inexpedient," and that "today the United States is
practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the
subjects to which it confines its interposition." Lord Salisbury had
squarely declined to concede that the United States could, of its own
initiative, assume to settle the boundary dispute. It was difficult to
see how either Great Britain or the United States could with dignity
alter the position which its minister had assumed.
James was a warm admirer of the President, but this seemingly wanton
provocation of a friendly nation horrified him. He considered that no
blunder in statesmanship could be more dangerous than a premature appeal
to a people's fighting pride, and that no perils inherent in the
Venezuela boundary dispute were as grave as was the danger that popular
explosions on one or both sides of the Atlantic would make it impossible
for the two governments to proceed moderately. He was appalled at the
outburst of Anglophobia and war-talk which followed the message. The
war-cloud hung in the heavens for several weeks. Then, suddenly, a
breeze from a strange quarter relieved the atmosphere. The Jameson raid
occurred in Africa, and the Kaiser sent his famous message to President
Kruger.[4] The English press turned its fire upon the Kaiser. The
world's attention was diverted from Venezuela, and the boundary dispute
was quietly and amicably disposed of.
_To E. L. Godkin._
Cambridge, _Christmas Eve [1895]_.
DARLING OLD GODKIN,--The only Christmas present I can send you is a word
of thanks and a _bravo bravissimo_ for your glorious fight against the
powers of darkness. I swear it brings back the days of '61 again, when
the worst enemies of our country were in our own borders. But now that
defervescence has set in, and the long, long campaign of discussion and
education is about to begin, you will have to bear the leading part in
it, and I beseech you to be as non-expletive and patiently explanatory
as you can, for thus will you be the more effective. Father, forgive
them for they know not what they do! The insincere propaganda of
jingoism as a mere weapon of attack on the President was diabolic. But
in the rally of the country to the President's message lay that instinct
of obedience to leaders which is the prime condition of all effective
greatness in a nation. And after all, when one thinks that the only
England most Americans are taught to conceive of is the bugaboo
coward-England, ready to invade the Globe wherever there is no danger,
the rally does not necessarily show savagery, but only ignorance. We are
all ready to be savage in _some_ cause. The difference between a good
man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
Two things are, however, _désormais_ certain: Three days of fighting
mob-hysteria at Washington can at any time undo peace habits of a
hundred years; and the only permanent safeguard against irrational
explosions of the fighting instinct is absence of armament and
opportunity. Since this country has absolutely nothing to fear, or any
other country anything to gain from its invasion, it seems to me that
the party of civilization ought immediately, at any cost of discredit,
to begin to agitate against any increase of either army, navy, or coast
defense. That is the one form of protection against the internal enemy
on which we can most rely. We live and learn: the labor of civilizing
ourselves is for the next thirty years going to be complicated with this
other abominable new issue of which the seed was sown last week. _You_
saw the new kind of danger, as you always do, before anyone else; but it
grew gigantic much more suddenly than even you conceived to be possible.
Olney's Jefferson Brick style makes of our Foreign Office a
laughing-stock, of course. But why, oh why, couldn't he and Cleveland
and Congress between them have left out the infernal war-threat and
simply asked for $100,000 for a judicial commission to enable us to see
exactly to what effect we ought, in justice, to exert our influence.
That commission, if its decision were adverse, would have put England
"in a hole," awakened allies for us in all countries, been a solemn step
forward in the line of national righteousness, covered us with dignity,
and all the rest. But no--_omnia ademit una dies infesta tibi tot præmia
vitæ!_--Still, the campaign of education may raise us out of it all yet.
Distrust of each other must not be suffered to go too far, for that way
lies destruction.
Dear old Godkin--I don't know whether you will have read more than the
first page--I didn't expect to write more than one and a half, but the
steam will work off. I haven't slept right for a week.
I have just given my Harry, now a freshman, your "Comments and
Reflections," and have been renewing my youth in some of its admirable
pages. But why the dickens did you leave out some of the most delectable
of the old sentences in the cottager and boarder essay?[5]
Don't curse God and die, dear old fellow. Live and be patient and fight
for us a long time yet in this new war. Best regards to Mrs. Godkin and
to Lawrence, and a merry Christmas. Yours ever affectionately,
Wm. James.
_To F. W. H. Myers._
Cambridge, _Jan. 1, 1896_.
MY DEAR MYERS,--Here is a happy New Year to you with my presidential
address for a gift.[6] _Valeat quantum._ The end could have been
expanded, but probably this is enough to set the S. P. R. against a
lofty _Kultur-historisch_ background; and where we have to do so much
champing of the jaws on minute details of cases, that seems to me a good
point in a president's address.
In the first half, it has just come over me that what I say of one line
of fact being "strengthened in the flank" by another is an "uprush" from
my subliminal memory of words of Gurney's--but that does no harm....
Well, our countries will soon be soaked in each other's gore. You will
be disemboweling me, and Hodgson cleaving Lodge's skull. It will be a
war of extermination when it comes, for neither side can tell when it is
beaten, and the last man will bury the penultimate one, and then die
himself. The French will then occupy England and the Spaniards America.
Both will unite against the Germans, and no one can foretell the end.
But seriously, all true patriots here have had a hell of a time. It has
been a most instructive thing for the dispassionate student of history
to see how near the surface in all of us the old fighting instinct lies,
and how slight an appeal will wake it up. Once _really_ waked, there is
no retreat. So the whole wisdom of governors should be to avoid the
direct appeals. This your European governments know; but we in our
bottomless innocence and ignorance over here know nothing, and Cleveland
in my opinion, by his explicit allusion to war, has committed the
biggest political crime I have ever seen here. The secession of the
southern states had more excuse. There was absolutely no need of it. A
commission solemnly appointed to pronounce justice in the Venezuela case
would, if its decision were adverse to your country, have doubtless
aroused the Liberal party in England to espouse the policy of
arbitrating, and would have covered us with dignity, if no threat of war
had been uttered. But as it is, who can see the way out?
Every one goes about now saying war is not to be. But with these
volcanic forces who can tell? I suppose that the offices of Germany or
Italy might in any case, however, save us from what would be the worst
disaster to civilization that our time could bring forth.
The astounding thing is the latent Anglophobia now revealed. It is most
of it directly traceable to the diabolic machinations of the party of
protection for the past twenty years. They have lived by every sort of
infamous sophistication, and hatred of England has been one of their
most conspicuous notes....
I hope _you'll_ read my address--unless indeed Gladstone will consent!!
Ever thine--I hate to think of "embruing" my hands in (or with?) your
blood.
W. J.
[S. P. R.] _Proceedings XXIX_ just in--hurrah for your 200-odd pages!
I have been ultra non-committal as to our evidence,--thinking it to be
good presidential policy,--but I may have overdone the impartiality
business.
_To F. W. H. Myers._
Cambridge, _Feb. 5, 1896_.
DEAR MYERS,--_Voici_ the proof! Pray _send me a revise_--Cattell wants
to print it simultaneously _in extenso_ in "Science," which I judge to
be a very good piece of luck for it. When will the next "Proceedings" be
likely to appear?
I hope your rich tones were those that rolled off its periods, and that
you didn't flinch, but rather raised your voice, when your own genius
was mentioned. I read it both in New York and Boston to full houses, but
heard no comments on the spot....
As for Venezuela, Ach! of that be silent! as Carlyle would have said. It
is a sickening business, but some good may come out of it yet. Don't
feel too badly about the Anglophobia here. It doesn't mean so much.
Remember by what words the country was roused: "Supine submission to
wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and
honor."[7] If any other country's ruler had expressed himself with equal
moral ponderosity wouldn't the population have gone twice as
fighting-mad as ours? Of course it would; the wolf would have been
aroused; and when the wolf once gets going, we know that there is no
crime of which it doesn't sincerely begin to believe its oppressor, the
lamb down-stream, to be guilty. The great proof that civilization _does_
move, however, is the magnificent conduct of the British press. Yours
everlastingly,
W. J.
_To Henry Holt, Esq._
Cambridge, _Jan. 19, 1896_.
MY DEAR HOLT,--At the risk of displeasing you, I think I won't have my
photograph taken, even at no cost to myself. I abhor this hawking about
of everybody's phiz which is growing on every hand, and don't see why
having written a book should expose one to it. I am sorry that you
should have succumbed to the supposed trade necessity. In any case, I
will stand on my rights as a free man. You may kill me, but you shan't
publish my photograph. Put a blank "thumbnail" in its place. Very very
sorry to displease a man whom I love so much. Always lovingly yours,
Wm. James.
_To his Class at Radcliffe College which had sent a potted azalea to
him at Easter._
Cambridge, _Apr. 6, 1896_.
DEAR YOUNG LADIES,--I am deeply touched by your remembrance. It is the
first time anyone ever treated me so kindly, so you may well believe
that the impression on the heart of the lonely sufferer will be even
more durable than the impression on your minds of all the teachings of
Philosophy 2A. I now perceive one immense omission in my
Psychology,--the deepest principle of Human Nature is the _craving to be
appreciated_, and I left it out altogether from the book, because I had
never had it gratified till now. I fear you have let loose a demon in
me, and that all my actions will now be for the sake of such rewards.
However, I will try to be faithful to this one unique and beautiful
azalea tree, the pride of my life and delight of my existence. Winter
and summer will I tend and water it--even with my tears. Mrs. James
shall never go near it or touch it. If it dies, I will die too; and if I
die, it shall be planted on my grave.
Don't take all this too jocosely, but believe in the extreme pleasure
you have caused me, and in the affectionate feelings with which I am and
shall always be faithfully your friend,
Wm. James.
_To Henry James._
[Cambridge] _Apr. 17, 1896_.
DEAR H.,--Too busy to live almost, lectures and laboratory, dentists and
dinner-parties, so that I am much played out, but get off today for
eight days' vacation _via_ New Haven, where I deliver an "address"
tonight, to the Yale Philosophy Club. I shall make it the title of a
small volume of collected things called "The Will to Believe, and Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy," and then I think write no more addresses,
of which the form takes it out of one unduly. If I do anything more, it
will be a book on general Philosophy. I have been having a bad
conscience about not writing to you, when your letter of the 7th came
yesterday expressing a bad conscience of your own. You certainly do your
duty best. I am glad to think of you in the country and hope it will
succeed with you and make you thrive. I look forward with much
excitement to the fruit of all this work.... Just a word of good-will
and good wish. I think I shall go to the Hot Springs of Virginia for
next week. The spring has burst upon us, hot and droughtily, after a
glorious burly winter-playing March. Yours ever,
W. J.
* * * * *
The next letter begins by acknowledging one which had alluded to the
death of a Cambridge gentleman who had been run over in the street,
almost under William James's eyes. Henry James had closed his allusion
by exclaiming, "What melancholy, what terrible duties _vous incombent_
when your neighbours are destroyed. And telling that poor man's
wife!--Life _is_ heroic--however we 'fix' it! Even as I write these
words the St. Louis horror bursts in upon me in the evening paper.
Inconceivable--I can't try; and I _won't_. Strange how practically all
one's sense of news from the U. S. here is huge Horrors and
Catastrophes. It's a terrible country _not_ to live in." He would have
exclaimed even more if he had witnessed the mescal experiment, that is
briefly mentioned in the letter that follows. He might then have gone on
to remark that the "fixing" of life seemed, in William's neighborhood,
to be quite gratuitously heroic. William James and his wife and the
youngest child were alone in the Chocorua cottage for a few days,
picnicking by themselves without any servant. They had no horse; at that
season of the year hours often went by without any one passing the
house; there was no telephone, no neighbor within a mile, no good doctor
within eighteen miles. It was quite characteristic of James that he
should think such conditions ideal for testing an unknown drug on
himself. There would be no interruptions. He had no fear. He was
impatient to satisfy his curiosity about the promised hallucinations of
color. But the effects of one dose were, for a while, much more alarming
than his letter would give one to understand.
_To Henry James._
CHOCORUA, _June 11, 1896_.
Your long letter of Whitsuntide week in London came yesterday evening,
and was read by me aloud to Alice and Harry as we sat at tea in the
window to get the last rays of the Sunday's [sun]. You have too much
feeling of duty about corresponding with us, and, I imagine, with
everyone. I think you have behaved most handsomely of late--and always,
and though your letters are the great _fête_ of our lives, I won't be
"on your mind" for worlds. Your general feeling of unfulfilled
obligations is one that runs in the family--I at least am often
afflicted by it--but it is "morbid." The horrors of _not_ living in
America, as you so well put it, are not shared by those who do live
here. All that the telegraph imparts are the shocks; the "happy homes,"
good husbands and fathers, fine weather, honest business men, neat new
houses, punctual meetings of engagements, etc., of which the country
mainly consists, are never cabled over. Of course, the Saint Louis
disaster is dreadful, but it will very likely end by "improving" the
city. The really bad thing here is the silly wave that has gone over the
public mind--protection humbug, silver, jingoism, etc. It is a case of
"mob-psychology." Any country is liable to it if circumstances conspire,
and our circumstances have conspired. It is very hard to get them out of
the rut. It _may_ take another financial crash to get them out--which,
of course, will be an expensive method. It is no more foolish and
considerably less damnable than the Russophobia of England, which would
seem to have been responsible for the Armenian massacres. That to me is
the biggest indictment "of our boasted civilization"!! It _requires_
England, I say nothing of the other powers, to maintain the Turks at
that business. We have let our little place, our tenant arrives the day
after tomorrow, and Alice and I and Tweedie have been here a week
enjoying it and cleaning house and place. She has worked like a beaver.
I had two days spoiled by a psychological experiment with _mescal_, an
intoxicant used by some of our Southwestern Indians in their religious
ceremonies, a sort of cactus bud, of which the U. S. Government had
distributed a supply to certain medical men, including Weir Mitchell,
who sent me some to try. He had himself been "in fairyland." It gives
the most glorious visions of color--every object thought of appears in a
jeweled splendor unknown to the natural world. It disturbs the stomach
somewhat, but that, according to W. M., was a cheap price, etc. I took
one bud three days ago, was violently sick for 24 hours, and had no
other symptom whatever except that and the _Katzenjammer_ the following
day. I will take the visions on trust!
We have had three days of delicious rain--it all soaks into the sandy
soil here and leaves no mud whatever. The little place is the most
curious mixture of sadness with delight. The sadness of _things_--things
every one of which was done either by our hands or by our planning, old
furniture renovated, there isn't an object in the house that isn't
associated with past life, old summers, dead people, people who will
never come again, etc., and the way it catches you round the heart when
you first come and open the house from its long winter sleep is most
extraordinary.
I have been reading Bourget's "Idylle Tragique," which he very kindly
sent me, and since then have been reading in Tolstoy's "War and Peace,"
which I never read before, strange to say. I must say that T. rather
kills B., for my mind. B.'s moral atmosphere is anyhow so foreign to me,
a lewdness so obligatory that it hardly seems as if it were part of a
moral _donnée_ at all; and then his overlabored descriptions, and
excessive explanations. But with it all an earnestness and enthusiasm
for getting it said as well as possible, a richness of epithet, and a
warmth of heart that makes you like him, in spite of the unmanliness of
all the things he writes about. I suppose there is a stratum in France
to whom it is all manly and ideal, but he and I are, as Rosina says, a
bad combination....
Tolstoy is immense!
I am glad _you_ are in a writing vein again, to go still higher up the
scale! I have abstained on principle from the "Atlantic" serial, wishing
to get it all at once. I am not going abroad; I can't afford it. I have
a chance to give $1500 worth of summer lectures here, which won't recur.
I have a heavy year of work next year, and shall very likely _need_ to
go the following summer, which will anyhow be after a more becoming
interval than this, so, _somme toute_, it is postponed. If I went I
should certainly enjoy seeing you at Rye more than in London, which I
confess tempts me little now. I love to _see_ it, but staying there
doesn't seem to agree with me, and only suggests constraint and
money-spending, apart from seeing you. I wish you could see how
comfortable our Cambridge house has got at last to be. Alice who is
upstairs sewing whilst I write below by the lamp--a great wood fire
hissing in the fireplace--sings out her thanks and love to you....
_To Benjamin Paul Blood._
CHATHAM, MASS., _June 28, 1896_.
MY DEAR BLOOD,--Your letter was an "event," as anything always is from
your pen--though of course I never expected any acknowledgment of my
booklet. Fear of life in one form or other is the great thing to
exorcise; but it isn't reason that will ever do it. Impulse without
reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. I take
it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of
suicide. Barely more than a year ago I was sitting at your table and
dallying with the thought of publishing an anthology of your works. But,
like many other projects, it has been postponed in indefinition. The
hour never came last year, and pretty surely will not come next.
Nevertheless I shall work for your fame some time! Count on W. J.[8] I
wound up my "seminary" in speculative psychology a month ago by reading
some passages from the "Flaw in Supremacy"--"game flavored as a hawk's
wing." "Ever not quite" covers a deal of truth--yet it seems a very
simple thing to have said. "There is no _Absolute_" were my last words.
Whereupon a number of students asked where they could get "that
pamphlet" and I distributed nearly all the copies I had from you. I wish
you would keep on writing, but I see you are a man of discontinuity and
insights, and not a philosophic pack-horse, or pack-mule....
I rejoice that ten hours a day of toil makes you feel so hearty. Verily
Mr. Rindge says truly. He is a Cambridge boy, who made a fortune in
California, and then gave a lot of public buildings to his native town.
Unfortunately he insisted on bedecking them with "mottoes" of his own
composition, and over the Manual Training School near my house one
reads: "_Work is one of our greatest blessings. Every man should have an
honest occupation_"--which, if not lapidary in style, is at least what
my father once said. Swedenborg's writings were, viz., "insipid with
veracity," as your case now again demonstrates. Have you read Tolstoy's
"War and Peace"? I am just about finishing it. It is undoubtedly the
greatest novel ever written--also insipid with veracity. The man is
infallible--and the anesthetic revelation[9] plays a part as in no
writer. You have very likely read it. If you haven't, sell all you have
and buy the book, for I know it will speak to your very gizzard. Pray
thank Mrs. Blood for her appreciation of my "booklet" (such things
encourage a writer!), and believe me ever sincerely yours,
Wm. James.
In July, 1896, James delivered, in Buffalo and at the Chautauqua
Assembly, the substance of the lectures that were later published as
"Talks to Teachers." His impressions of Chautauqua were so
characteristic and so lively that they must be included here, even
though they duplicate in some measure a well-known passage in the essay
called "A Certain Blindness in Human Beings."
_To Mrs. James._
CHAUTAUQUA, _July 23, 1896_.
...The audience is some 500, in an open-air auditorium where (strange to
say) everyone seems to hear well; and it is very good-looking--mostly
teachers and women, but they make the best impression of any audience of
that sort that I have seen except the Brooklyn one. So here I go
again!...
_July 24_, 9.30 P.M.
...X---- departed after breakfast--a good inarticulate man, farmer's
boy, four years soldier from private to major, business man in various
States, great reader, editor of a "Handbook of Facts," full of swelling
and bursting _Weltschmerz_ and religious melancholy, yet no more
flexibility or self-power in his mind than in a boot-jack. Altogether,
what with the teachers, him and others whom I've met, I'm put in conceit
of college training. It certainly gives glibness and flexibility, if it
doesn't give earnestness and depth. I've been meeting minds so earnest
and helpless that it takes them half an hour to get from one idea to its
immediately adjacent next neighbor, and that with infinite creaking and
groaning. And when they've got to the next idea, they lie down on it
with their whole weight and can get no farther, like a cow on a
door-mat, so that you can get neither in nor out with them. Still,
glibness is not all. Weight is something, even cow-weight. Tolstoy feels
these things so--I am still in "Anna Karenina," volume I, a book almost
incredible and supernatural for veracity. I wish we were reading it
aloud together. It has rained at intervals all day. Young Vincent, a
powerful fellow, took me over and into the whole vast college side of
the institution this A.M. I have heard 4-1/2 lectures, including the one
I gave myself at 4 o'clock, to about 1200 or more in the vast open
amphitheatre, which seats 6000 and which has very good acoustic
properties. I think my voice sufficed. I can't judge of the effect. Of
course I left out all that gossip about my medical degree, etc. But I
don't want any more sporadic lecturing--I must stick to more inward
things.
_July 26_, 12:30 P.M.
...'T is the sabbath and I am just in from the amphitheatre, where the
Rev.---- has been chanting, calling and bellowing his
hour-and-a-quarter-long sermon to 6000 people at least--a sad audition.
The music was bully, a chorus of some 700, splendidly drilled, with the
audience to help. I have myself been asked to lead, or, if not to lead,
at least to do something prominent--I declined so quick that I didn't
fully gather what it was--in the exercise which I have marked on the
program I enclose. Young Vincent, whom I take to be a splendid young
fellow, told me it was the characteristically "Chautauquan" event of the
day. I would give anything to have you here. I didn't write yesterday
because there is no mail till tomorrow. I went to four lectures, in
whole or in part. All to hundreds of human beings, a large proportion
unable to get seats, who transport themselves from one lecture-room to
another _en masse_. One was on bread-making, with practical
demonstrations. One was on _walking_, by a graceful young Delsartian,
who showed us a lot. One was on telling stories to children, the
psychology and pedagogy of it. The audiences interrupt and ask questions
occasionally in spite of their size. There is hardly a pretty woman's
face in the lot, and they seem to have little or no humor in their
composition. No _epicureanism_ of any sort!
Yesterday was a beautiful day, and I sailed an hour and a half down the
Lake again to "Celoron," "America's greatest pleasure resort,"--in other
words popcorn and peep-show place. A sort of Midway-Pleasance in the
wilderness--supported Heaven knows how, so far from any human habitation
except the odd little Jamestown from which a tramway leads to it. Good
monkeys, bears, foxes, etc. Endless peanuts, popcorn, bananas, and soft
drinks; crowds of people, a ferris wheel, a balloon ascension, with a
man dropping by a parachute, a theatre, a vast concert hall, and all
sorts of peep-shows. I feel as if I were in a foreign land; even as far
east as this the accent of everyone is terrific. The "Nation" is no more
known than the London "Times." I see no need of going to Europe when
such wonders are close by. I breakfasted with a Methodist parson with 32
false teeth, at the X's table, and discoursed of demoniacal possession.
The wife said she had my portrait in her bedroom with the words written
under it, "I want to bring a balm to human lives"!!!!! Supposed to be a
quotation from me!!! After breakfast an extremely interesting lady who
has suffered from half-possessional insanity gave me a long account of
her case. Life _is_ heroic indeed, as Harry wrote. I shall stay through
tomorrow, and get to Syracuse on Tuesday....
_July 27._
...It rained hard last night, and today a part of the time. I took a
lesson in roasting, in Delsarte, and I made with my own fair hands a
beautiful loaf of graham bread with some rolls, long, flute-like, and
delicious. I should have sent them to you by express, only it seemed
unnecessary, since I can keep the family in bread easily after my return
home. Please tell this, with amplifications, to Peggy and Tweedy....
BUFFALO, N.Y., _July 29_.
...The Chautauqua week, or rather six and a half days, has been a real
success. I have learned a lot, but I'm glad to get into something less
blameless but more admiration-worthy. The flash of a pistol, a dagger,
or a devilish eye, anything to break the unlovely level of 10,000 good
people--a crime, murder, rape, elopement, anything would do. I don't see
how the younger Vincents stand it, because they are people of such
spirit....
SYRACUSE, N.Y., _July 31_.
...Now for Utica and Lake Placid by rail, with East Hill in prospect for
tomorrow. You bet I rejoice at the outlook--I long to escape from
tepidity. Even an Armenian massacre, whether to be killer or killed,
would seem an agreeable change from the blamelessness of Chautauqua as
she lies soaking year after year in her lakeside sun and showers. Man
wants to be _stretched_ to his utmost, if not in one way then in
another!...
_To Miss Rosina H. Emmet._
BURLINGTON, VT., _Aug. 2, 1896_.
...I have seen more women and less beauty, heard more voices and less
sweetness, perceived more earnestness and less triumph than I ever
supposed possible. Most of the American nation (and probably all
nations) is white-trash,--but Tolstoy has borne me up--and I say unto
_you_: "_Smooth out your voices_ if you want to be saved"!!...
_To Charles Renouvier._
BURLINGTON, VT., _Aug. 4, 1896_.
DEAR MR. RENOUVIER,--My wife announces to me from Cambridge the
reception of two immense volumes from you on the Philosophy of History.
I thank you most heartily for the gift, and am more and more amazed at
your intellectual and moral power--physical power, too, for the nervous
energy required for your work has to be extremely great.
My own nervous energy is a small teacup-full, and is more than consumed
by my duties of teaching, so that almost none is left over for writing.
I sent you a "New World" the other day, however, with an article in it
called "The Will to Believe," in which (if you took the trouble to
glance at it) you probably recognized how completely I am still your
disciple. In this point perhaps more fully than in any other; and this
point is central!
I have to lecture on general "psychology" and "morbid psychology," "the
philosophy of nature" and the "philosophy of Kant," thirteen lectures a
week for half the year and eight for the rest. Our University moreover
inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings
and committees of every sort,[10] so that during term-time one can do no
continuous reading at all--reading of books, I mean. When vacation
comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month.
During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels,
which, strange to say, I had never attacked before. I don't like his
fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning
human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other
writers of novels and plays seem like children.
All this proves that I shall be slow in attaining to the reading of your
book. I have not yet read Pillon's last _Année_ except some of the book
notices and Danriac's article. How admirably clear P. is in style, and
what a power of reading he possesses.
I hope, dear Mr. Renouvier, that the years are not weighing heavily upon
you, and that this letter will find you well in body and in mind. Yours
gratefully and faithfully,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, _Aug. 30, 1896_.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--You see the electric current of sympathy that binds
the world together--I turn towards you, and the place I write from
repeats the name of your Lake Leman. I was informed yesterday, however,
that the lake here was named after Lake Geneva _in the State of New
York_! and _that_ Lake only has Leman for its Godmother. Still you see
how dependent, whether immediately or remotely, America is on Europe. I
was at Niagara some three weeks ago, and bought a photograph as souvenir
and addressed it to you after getting back to Cambridge. Possibly Madame
Flournoy will deign to accept it. I have thought of you a great deal
without writing, for truly, my dear Flournoy, there is hardly a human
being with whom I feel as much sympathy of aims and character, or feel
as much "at home," as I do with you. It is as if we were of the same
stock, and I often mentally turn and make a remark to you, which the
pressure of life's occupations prevents from ever finding its way to
paper.
I am hoping that you may have figured, or at any rate _been_, at the
Munich "Congress"--that apparently stupendous affair. If they keep
growing at this rate, the next Paris one will be altogether too heavy. I
have heard no details of the meeting as yet. But whether you have been
at Munich or not, I trust that you have been having a salubrious and
happy vacation so far, and that Mrs. Flournoy and the young people are
all well. I will venture to suppose that your illness of last year has
left no bad effects whatever behind. I myself have had a rather busy and
instructive, though possibly not very hygienic summer, making money (in
moderate amounts) by lecturing on psychology to teachers at different
"summer schools" in this land. There is a great fermentation in
"pædagogy" at present in the U.S., and my wares come in for their share
of patronage. But although I learn a good deal and become a better
American for having all the travel and social experience, it has ended
by being too tiresome; and when I give the lectures at Chicago, which I
begin tomorrow, I shall have them stenographed and very likely published
in a very small volume, and so remove from myself the temptation ever to
give them again.
Last year was a year of hard work, and before the end of the term came,
I was in a state of bad neurasthenic fatigue, but I got through
outwardly all right. I have definitely given up the laboratory, for
which I am more and more unfit, and shall probably devote what little
ability I may hereafter have to purely "speculative" work. My inability
to read troubles me a good deal: I am in arrears of several years with
psychological literature, which, to tell the truth, does grow now at a
pace too rapid for anyone to follow. I was engaged to review Stout's new
book (which I fancy is very good) for "Mind," and after keeping it two
months had to back out, from sheer inability to read it, and to ask
permission to hand it over to my colleague Royce. Have you seen the
colossal Renouvier's two vast volumes on the philosophy of
history?--that will be another thing worth reading no doubt, yet very
difficult to read. I give a course in Kant for the first time in my life
(!) next year, and at present and for many months to come shall have to
put most of my reading to the service of that overgrown subject....
Of course you have read Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." I
never had that exquisite felicity before this summer, and now I feel as
if I knew _perfection_ in the representation of human life. Life indeed
seems less real than his tale of it. Such infallible veracity! The
impression haunts me as nothing literary ever haunted me before.
I imagine you lounging on some steep mountainside, with those
demoiselles all grown too tall and beautiful and proud to think
otherwise than with disdain of their elderly _commensal_ who spoke such
difficult French when he took walks with them at Vers-chez-les-Blanc.
But I hope that they are happy as they were then. Cannot we all pass
some summer near each other again, and can't it next time be in Tyrol
rather than in Switzerland, for the purpose of increasing in all of us
that "knowledge of the world" which is so desirable? I think it would be
a splendid plan. At any rate, wherever you are, take my most
affectionate regards for yourself and Madame Flournoy and all of yours,
and believe me ever sincerely your friend,
Wm. James.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, _Aug. 30, 1896_.
DEAR MILLER,--Your letter from Halle of June 22nd came duly, but
treating of things eternal as it did, I thought it called for no reply
till I should have caught up with more temporal matters, of which there
has been no lack to press on my attention. To tell the truth, regarding
you as my most penetrating critic and intimate enemy, I was greatly
relieved to find that you had nothing worse to say about "The Will to
Believe." You say you are no "rationalist," and yet you speak of the
"sharp" distinction between beliefs based on "inner evidence" and
beliefs based on "craving." I can find _nothing_ sharp (or susceptible
of schoolmaster's codification) in the different degrees of "liveliness"
in hypotheses concerning the universe, or distinguish _a priori_ between
legitimate and illegitimate cravings. And when an hypothesis _is_ once a
live one, one _risks_ something in one's practical relations towards
truth and error, _whichever_ of the three positions (affirmation, doubt,
or negation) one may take up towards it. _The individual himself is the
only rightful chooser of his risk._ Hence respectful toleration, as the
only law that logic can lay down.
You don't say a word against my _logic_, which seems to me to cover your
cases entirely in its compartments. I class you as one to whom the
religious hypothesis is _von vornherein_ so dead, that the risk of error
in espousing it now far outweighs for you the chance of truth, so you
simply stake your money on the field as against it. If you _say_ this,
of course I can, as logician, have no quarrel with you, even though my
own choice of risk (determined by the irrational impressions,
suspicions, cravings, senses of direction in nature, or what not, that
make religion for me a more live hypothesis than for you) leads me to an
opposite methodical decision.
Of course if any one comes along and says that men at large don't need
to have facility of faith in their inner convictions preached to them,
[that] they have only too much readiness in that way already, and the
one thing needful to preach is that they should hesitate with their
convictions, and take their faiths out for an airing into the howling
wilderness of nature, I should also agree. But my paper wasn't addressed
to mankind at large but to a limited set of studious persons, badly
under the ban just now of certain authorities whose simple-minded faith
in "naturalism" also is sorely in need of an airing--and an airing, as
it seems to me, of the sort I tried to give.
But all this is unimportant; and I still await criticism of my
_Auseinandersetzung_ of the _logical situation_ of man's mind
_gegenüber_ the Universe, in respect to the risks it runs.
I wish I could have been with you at Munich and heard the deep-lunged
Germans roar at each other. I care not for the matters uttered, if I
only could hear the voice. I hope you met [Henry] Sidgwick there. I sent
him the American Hallucination-Census results, after considerable toil
over them, but S. never acknowledges or answers anything, so I'll have
to wait to hear from someone else whether he "got them off." I have had
a somewhat unwholesome summer. Much lecturing to teachers and sitting up
to talk with strangers. But it is instructive and makes one patriotic,
and in six days I shall have finished the Chicago lectures, which begin
tomorrow, and get straight to Keene Valley for the rest of September. My
conditions just now are materially splendid, as I am the guest of a
charming elderly lady, Mrs. Wilmarth, here at her country house, and in
town at the finest hotel of the place. The political campaign is a bully
one. Everyone outdoing himself in sweet reasonableness and persuasive
argument--hardly an undignified note anywhere. It shows the deepening
and elevating influence of a big topic of debate. It is difficult to
doubt of a people part of whose life such an experience is. But imagine
the country being saved by a McKinley! If only Reed had been the
candidate! There have been some really splendid speeches and
documents....
Ever thine,
W. J.
_To Henry James._
BURLINGTON, VT., _Sept. 28, 1896_.
DEAR HENRY,--The summer is over! alas! alas! I left Keene Valley this
A.M. where I have had three life-and-health-giving weeks in the forest
and the mountain air, crossed Lake Champlain in the steamer, not a cloud
in the sky, and sleep here tonight, meaning to take the train for Boston
in the A.M. and read Kant's Life all day, so as to be able to lecture on
it when I first meet my class. School begins on Thursday--this being
Monday night. It has been a rather cultivating summer for me, and an
active one, of which the best impression (after that of the Adirondack
woods, or even before it) was that of the greatness of Chicago. It needs
a Victor Hugo to celebrate it. But as you won't appreciate it without
demonstration, and I can't give the demonstration (at least not now and
on paper), I will say no more on that score! Alice came up for a week,
but went down and through last night. She brought me up your letter of I
don't remember now what date (after your return to London, about Wendell
Holmes, Baldwin and Royalty, etc.) which was very delightful and for
which I thank. But don't take your epistolary duties hard!
Letter-writing becomes to me more and more of an affliction, I get so
many business letters now. At Chicago, I tried a stenographer and
type-writer with an alleviation that seemed almost miraculous. I think
that I shall have to go in for one some hours a week in Cambridge. It
just goes "whiff" and six or eight long letters are _done_, so far as
you're concerned. I hear great reports of your "old things," and await
the book. My great literary impression this summer has been Tolstoy. On
the whole his atmosphere absorbs me into it as no one's else has ever
done, and even his religious and melancholy stuff, his insanity, is
probably more significant than the sanity of men who haven't been
through that phase at all.
But I am forgetting to tell you (strange to say, since it has hung over
me like a cloud ever since it happened) of dear old Professor Child's
death. We shall never see his curly head and thickset figure more. He
had aged greatly in the past three years, since being thrown out of a
carriage, and went to the hospital in July to be treated surgically. He
never recovered and died in three weeks, after much suffering, his
family not being called down from the country till the last days. He had
a moral delicacy and a richness of heart that I never saw and never
expect to see equaled.[1] The children bear it well, but I fear it will
be a bad blow for dear Mrs. Child. She and Alice, I am glad to say, are
great friends.... Good-night. _Leb' wohl!_
W. J.
XII
1893-1899 (CONTINUED)
_The Will to Believe--Talks to Teachers--Defense of Mental
Healers--Excessive Climbing in the Adirondacks_
_To Theodore Flournoy._
[Dictated]
Cambridge, _Dec. 7, 1896_.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your altogether precious and delightful letter
reached me duly, and you see I am making a not altogether too dilatory
reply. In the first place, we congratulate you upon the new-comer, and
think if she only proves as satisfactory a damsel as her charming elder
sisters, you will never have any occasion to regret that she is not a
boy. I hope that Madame Flournoy is by this time thoroughly strong and
well, and that everything is perfect with the baby. I should like to
have been at Munich with you; I have heard a good many accounts of the
jollity of the proceedings there, but on the whole I did a more
wholesome thing to stay in my own country, of which the dangers and dark
sides are singularly exaggerated in Europe.
Your lamentations on your cerebral state make me smile, knowing, as I
do, under all your subjective feelings, how great your vigor is. Of
course I sympathize with you about the laboratory, and advise you, since
it seems to me you are in a position to make conditions rather than have
them imposed on you, simply to drop it and teach what you prefer.
Whatever the latter may be, it will be as good for the students as if
they had something else from you in its place, and I see no need in this
world, when there is someone provided somewhere to do everything, for
anyone of us to do what he does least willingly and well.
_I_ have got rid of the laboratory forever, and should resign my place
immediately if they reimposed its duties upon me. The results that come
from all this laboratory work seem to me to grow more and more
disappointing and trivial. What is most needed is new ideas. For every
man who has one of them one may find a hundred who are willing to drudge
patiently at some unimportant experiment. The atmosphere of your mind is
in an extraordinary degree sane and balanced on philosophical matters.
That is where your forte lies, and where your University ought to see
that its best interests lie in having you employed. Don't consider this
advice impertinent. Your temperament is such that I think you need to be
strengthened from without in asserting your right to carry out your true
vocation.
Everything goes well with us here. The boys are developing finely; both
of them taller than I am, and Peggy healthy and well. I have just been
giving a course of public lectures of which I enclose you a ticket to
amuse you.[11] The audience, a thousand in number, kept its numbers to
the last. I was careful not to tread upon the domains of psychical
research, although many of my hearers were eager that I should do so. _I
am teaching Kant for the first time in my life_, and it gives me much
satisfaction. I am also sending a collection of old essays through the
press, of which I will send you a copy as soon as they appear; I am sure
of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I am afraid
that what you never will appreciate is their wonderful English style!
Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison!
Our political crisis is over, but the hard times still endure. Lack of
confidence is a disease from which convalescence is not quick. I doubt,
notwithstanding certain appearances, whether the country was ever
morally in as sound a state as it now is, after all this discussion. And
the very silver men, who have been treated as a party of dishonesty, are
anything but that. They very likely are victims of the economic
delusion, but their intentions are just as good as those of the other
side....
If you meet my friend Ritter, please give him my love. I shall write to
you again ere long _eigenhändig_. Meanwhile believe me, with lots of
love to you all, especially to _ces demoiselles_, and felicitations to
their mother, Always yours,
Wm. James.
My wife wishes to convey to Madame Flournoy her most loving regards and
hopes for the little one.
* * * * *
James had already been invited to deliver a course of "Gifford Lectures
on Natural Religion" at the University of Edinburgh. He had not yet
accepted for a definite date; but he had begun to collect illustrative
material for the proposed lectures. A large number of references to such
material were supplied to him by Mr. Henry W. Rankin of East
Northfield.
_To Henry W. Rankin._
NEWPORT, R.I., _Feb. 1, 1897_.
DEAR MR. RANKIN,--A pause in lecturing, consequent upon our midyear
examinations having begun, has given me a little respite, and I am
paying a three-days' visit upon an old friend here, meaning to leave for
New York tomorrow where I have a couple of lectures to give. It is an
agreeable moment of quiet and enables me to write a letter or two which
I have long postponed, and chiefly one to you, who have given me so much
without asking anything in return.
One of my lectures in New York is at the Academy of Medicine before the
Neurological Society, the subject being "Demoniacal Possession." I shall
of course duly advertise the Nevius book.[12] I am not as positive as
you are in the belief that the obsessing agency is really demonic
individuals. I am perfectly willing to adopt that theory if the facts
lend themselves best to it; for who can trace limits to the hierarchies
of personal existence in the world? But the lower stages of mere
automatism shade off so continuously into the highest supernormal
manifestations, through the intermediary ones of imitative hysteria and
"suggestibility," that I feel as if no _general theory_ as yet would
cover all the facts. So that the most I shall plead for before the
neurologists is the recognition of demon possession as a regular
"morbid-entity" whose commonest homologue today is the "spirit-control"
observed in test-mediumship, and which tends to become the more
benignant and less alarming, the less pessimistically it is regarded.
This last remark seems certainly to be true. Of course I shall not
ignore the sporadic cases of old-fashioned malignant possession which
still occur today. I am convinced that we stand with all these things
at the threshold of a long inquiry, of which the end appears as yet to
no one, least of all to myself. And I believe that the best theoretic
work yet done in the subject is the beginning made by F. W. H. Myers in
his papers in the S. P. R. Proceedings. The first thing is to start the
medical profession out of its idiotically _conceited ignorance_ of all
such matters--matters which have everywhere and at all times played a
vital part in human history.
You have written me at different times about conversion, and about
miracles, getting as usual no reply, but not because I failed to heed
your words, which come from a deep life-experience of your own
evidently, and from a deep acquaintance with the experiences of others.
In the matter of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new
truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really _asks_.
But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth
than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case
of the conflict of two _self-systems_ in a personality up to that time
heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion-crisis, the
higher loves and powers come definitively to gain the upper-hand and
expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down in the
position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and
discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases
_psychologically_, and leaves all the _religious importance_ to the
result which it has on any other theory.
As to true and false miracles, I don't know that I can follow you so
well, for in any case the notion of a miracle as a mere attestation of
superior power is one that I cannot espouse. A miracle must in any case
be an expression of personal purpose, but the demon-purpose of
antagonizing God and winning away his adherents has never yet taken
hold of my imagination. I prefer an open mind of inquiry, first _about
the facts_, in all these matters; and I believe that the S. P. R.
methods, if pertinaciously stuck to, will eventually do much to clear
things up.--You see that, although religion is the great interest of my
life, I am rather hopelessly non-evangelical, and take the whole thing
too impersonally.
But my College work is lightening in a way. Psychology is being handed
over to others more and more, and I see a chance ahead for reading and
study in other directions from those to which my very feeble powers in
that line have hitherto been confined. I am going to give all the
fragments of time I can get, after this year is over, to religious
biography and philosophy. Shield's book, Steenstra's, Gratry's, and
Harris's, I don't yet know, but can easily get at them.
I hope your health is better in this beautiful winter which we are
having. I am very well, and so is all my family. Believe me, with
affectionate regards, truly yours,
Wm. James.
_To Benjamin Paul Blood._
Cambridge, _Apr. 28, 1897_.
DEAR BLOOD,--Your letter is delectable. From your not having yet
acknowledged the book,[13] I began to wonder whether you had got it, but
this acknowledgment is almost too good. Your thought is
obscure--lightning flashes darting gleams--but that's the way truth is.
And altho' I "put pluralism in the place of philosophy," I do it only so
far as philosophy means the articulate and the scientific. Life and
mysticism exceed the articulable, and if there is a _One_ (and surely
men will never be weaned from the idea of it), it must remain only
mystically expressed.
I have been roaring over and quoting some of the passages of your
letter, in which my wife takes as much delight as I do. As for your
strictures on my English, I accept them humbly. I have a tendency
towards too great colloquiality, I know, and I trust your sense of
English better than any man's in the country. I have a fearful job on
hand just now: an address on the unveiling of a military statue. Three
thousand people, governor and troops, etc. Why they fell upon me, God
knows; but being challenged, I could not funk. The task is a mechanical
one, and the result somewhat of a school-boy composition. If I thought
it wouldn't bore you, I should send you a copy for you to go carefully
over and correct or rewrite as to the English. I should probably adopt
every one of your corrections. What do you say to this? Yours ever,
Wm. James.
_P.S._ Please don't betitle _me_!
* * * * *
The "copy" which was offered for correction with so much humility was
the "Oration" on the unveiling of St. Gaudens's monument to Colonel
Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (the first colored
regiment). James was quite accustomed to lecturing from brief notes and
to reading from a complete manuscript; but on this occasion he thought
it necessary to commit his address to memory. He had never done this
before and he never tried to do it again. He memorized with great
difficulty, found himself placed in an entirely unfamiliar relation to
his audience, and felt as much nervous trepidation as any inexperienced
speaker.[14]
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _June 5, 1897_.
DEAR H.,--Alice wrote you (I think) a brief word after the crisis of
last Monday. It took it out of me nervously a good deal, for it came at
the end of the month of May, when I am always fagged to death; and for a
week previous I had almost lost my voice with hoarseness. At nine
o'clock the night before I ran in to a laryngologist in Boston, who
sprayed and cauterized and otherwise tuned up my throat, giving me
pellets to suck all the morning. By a sort of miracle I spoke for
three-quarters of an hour without becoming perceptibly hoarse. But it is
a curious kind of physical effort to fill a hall as large as Boston
Music Hall, unless you are trained to the work. You have to shout and
bellow, and you seem to yourself wholly unnatural. The day was an
extraordinary occasion for sentiment. The streets were thronged with
people, and I was toted around for two hours in a barouche at the tail
end of the procession. There were seven such carriages in all, and I had
the great pleasure of being with St. Gaudens, who is a most charming and
modest man. The weather was cool and the skies were weeping, but not
enough to cause any serious discomfort. They simply formed a harmonious
background to the pathetic sentiment that reigned over the day. It was
very peculiar, and people have been speaking about it ever since--the
last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made
poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a
great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself,--"the
tender grace of a day that is dead,"--etc. We shall never have anything
like it again. The monument is really superb, certainly one of the
finest things of this century. Read the darkey [Booker T.] Washington's
speech, a model of elevation and brevity. The thing that struck me most
in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of whom there were
perhaps about thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey
faces, the heavy animal look entirely absent, and in its place the
wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen.
As for myself, I will never accept such a job again. It is entirely
outside of my legitimate line of business, although my speech seems to
have been a great success, if I can judge by the encomiums which are
pouring in upon me on every hand. I brought in some mugwumpery at the
end, but it was very difficult to manage it.... Always affectionately
yours,
Wm. James.
* * * * *
Letters to Ellen and Rosina Emmet, which now enter the series, will be
the better understood for a word of reminder. "Elly" Temple, one of the
Newport cousins referred to in the very first letters, had married, and
gone with her husband, Temple Emmet, to California. But in 1887, after
his death, she had returned to the East to place her daughters in a
Cambridge school. In 1895 and 1896 Ellen and Rosina had made several
visits to the house in Irving Street; and thus the comradely cousinship
of the sixties had been maintained and reëstablished with the younger
generation. At the date now reached, Ellen, or "Bay" as she was usually
called, was studying painting. She and Rosina had been in Paris during
the preceding winter. Now they and their mother were spending the summer
on the south coast of England, at Iden, quite close to Rye, where Henry
James was already becoming established.
_To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand)._
BAR HARBOR, ME., _Aug. 11, 1897_.
DEAR OLD BAY (and DEAR ROSINA),--For I have letters from both of you and
my heart inclines to both so that I can't write to either without the
other--I hope you are enjoying the English coast. A rumor reached me not
long since that my brother Henry had given up his trip to the Continent
in order to be near to you, and I hope for the sakes of all concerned
that it is true. He will find in you both that eager and vivid artistic
sense, and that direct swoop at the vital facts of human character from
which I am sure he has been weaned for fifteen years at least. And I am
sure it will rejuvenate him again. It is more Celtic than English, and
when joined with those faculties of soul, conscience, or whatever they
be that make England rule the waves, as they are joined in you, Bay,
they leave no room for any anxiety about the creature's destiny. But
Rosina, who is all senses and intelligence, alarms me by her recital of
midnight walks on the Boulevard des Italiens with bohemian artists....
You can't live by gaslight and excitement, nor can naked intelligence
run a _jeune fille's_ life. Affections, pieties, and prejudices must
play their part, and only let the intelligence get an occasional peep at
things from the midst of their smothering embrace. That again is what
makes the British nation so great. Intelligence doesn't flaunt itself
there quite naked as in France.
As for the MacMonnies Bacchante,[15] I only saw her faintly looming
through the moon-light one night when she was _sub judice_, so can frame
no opinion. The place certainly calls for a lightsome capricious figure,
but the solemn Boston mind declared that anything but a solemn figure
would be desecration. As to her immodesty, opinions got very hot. My
knowledge of MacMonnies is confined to one statue, that of Sir Henry
Vane, also in our Public Library, an impressionist sketch in bronze (I
think), sculpture treated like painting--and I must say I don't admire
the result _at all_. But you _know_; and I wish I could see other things
of his also. How I wish I could _talk_ with Rosina, or rather hear her
talk, about Paris, _talk in her French_ which I doubt not is by this
time admirable. The only book she has vouchsafed news of having read, to
me, is the d'Annunzio one, which I have ordered in most choice Italian;
but of Lemaître, France, etc., she writes never a word. Nor of V. Hugo.
She ought to read "La Légende des Siècles." For the picturesque pure and
simple, go there! laid on with a trowel so generous that you really get
your glut. But the things in French literature that I have gained most
from--the next most to Tolstoy, in the last few years--are the whole
cycle of Geo. Sand's life: her "Histoire," her letters, and now lately
these revelations of the de Musset episode. The whole thing is beautiful
and uplifting--an absolute "liver" harmoniously leading her own life and
_neither_ obedient nor defiant to what others expected or thought.
We are passing the summer very quietly at Chocorua, with our bare feet
on the ground. Children growing up bullily, a pride to the parental
heart.... Alice and I have just spent a rich week at North Conway, at a
beautiful "place," the Merrimans'. I am now here at a really grand
place, the Dorrs'--tell Rosina that I went to a domino party last night
but was so afraid that some one of the weird and sinister sisters would
speak to me that I came home at 12 o'clock, when it had hardly begun. I
am so sensitive! Tell her that a lady from Michigan was recently shown
the sights of Cambridge by one of my Radcliffe girls. She took her to
the Longfellow house, and as the visitor went into the gate, said, "I
will just wait here." To her surprise, the visitor went up to the house,
looked in to one window after the other, then rang the bell, and the
door closed upon her. She soon emerged, and said that the servant had
shown her the house. "I'm so sensitive that at first I thought I would
only peep in at the windows. But then I said to myself, 'What's the use
of being so sensitive?' So I rang the bell."
Pray be happy this summer. I see nothing more of Rosina's in the papers.
How is that sort of thing going on?... As for your mother, give her my
old-fashioned love. For some unexplained reason, I find it very hard to
write to her--probably it is the same reason that makes it hard for her
to write to me--so we can sympathize over so strange a mystery. Anyhow,
give her my best love, and with plenty for yourself, old Bay, and for
Rosina, believe me, yours ever,
Wm. James.
_To E. L. Godkin._
CHOCORUA, _Aug. 17, 1897_.
DEAR GODKIN,--Thanks for your kind note _in re_ "Will to Believe." I
suppose you expect as little a reply to it as I expected one from you to
the book; but since you ask what I _du_ mean by Religion, and add that
until I define that word my essay cannot be effective, I can't forbear
sending you a word to clear up that point. I mean by religion for a man
_anything_ that for _him_ is a live hypothesis in that line, altho' it
may be a dead one for anyone else. And what I try to show is that
whether the man believes, disbelieves, or doubts his hypothesis, the
moment he does either, on principle and methodically, he runs a risk of
one sort or the other from his own point of view. There is no escaping
the risk; why not then admit that one's human function is to run it? By
settling down on that basis, and respecting each other's choice of risk
to run, it seems to me that we should be in a clearer-headed condition
than we now are in, postulating as most all of us do a rational
certitude which doesn't exist and disowning the semi-voluntary mental
action by which we continue in our own severally characteristic
attitudes of belief. Since our willing natures are active here, why not
face squarely the fact without humbug and get the benefits of the
admission?
I passed a day lately with the [James] Bryces at Bar Harbor, and we
spoke--not altogether unkindly--of you. I hope you are enjoying, both of
you, the summer. All goes well with us. Yours always truly,
Wm. James.
_To F. C. S. Schiller_ [Corpus Christi, Oxford].
Cambridge, _Oct. 23, 1897_.
DEAR SCHILLER,--Did you ever hear of the famous international prize
fight between Tom Sayers and Heenan the Benicia Boy, or were you too
small a baby in 1857 [1860?] The "Times" devoted a couple of pages of
report and one or more eulogistic editorials to the English champion,
and the latter, brimming over with emotion, wrote a letter to the
"Times" in which he touchingly said that he would live in future as one
who had been once deemed worthy of commemoration in its leaders. After
reading your review of me in the October "Mind" (which only reached me
two days ago) I feel as the noble Sayers felt, and think I ought to
write to Stout to say I will try to live up to such a character. My
past has not deserved such words, but my future shall. Seriously, your
review has given me the keenest possible pleasure. This philosophy must
be thickened up most decidedly--your review represents it as something
to rally to, so we must fly a banner and start a school. Some of your
phrases are bully: "reckless rationalism," "pure science is pure bosh,"
"infallible _a priori_ test of truth to screen us from the consequences
of our choice," etc., etc. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
The enclosed document [a returned letter addressed to Christ Church]
explains itself. The Church and the Body of Christ are easily confused
and I haven't a scholarly memory. I wrote you a post-card recently to
the same address, patting you on the back for your article on
Immortality in the "New World." A staving good thing. I am myself to
give the "Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality" here in November--the
second lecturer on the foundation. I treat the matter very inferiorly to
you, but use your conception of the brain as a sifting agency, which
explains my question in the letter. Young [R. B.] Merriman is at Balliol
and a really good fellow in all possible respects. Pray be good to him
if he calls on you. I hope things have a peacock hue for you now that
term has begun. They are all going well here. Yours always gratefully,
W. J.
_To James J. Putnam._
Cambridge, _Mar. 2, 1898_.
DEAR JIM,--On page 7 of the "Transcript" tonight you will find a
manifestation of me at the State House, protesting against the proposed
medical license bill.
If you think I _enjoy_ that sort of thing you are mistaken. I never did
anything that required as much moral effort in my life. My vocation is
to treat of things in an all-round manner and not make _ex-parte_ pleas
to influence (or seek to) a peculiar jury. _Aussi_, why do the medical
brethren force an unoffending citizen like me into such a position?
Legislative license is sheer humbug--mere abstract paper thunder under
which every ignorance and abuse can still go on. Why this mania for more
laws? Why seek to stop the really extremely important experiences which
these peculiar creatures are rolling up?
Bah! I'm sick of the whole business, and I well know how all my
colleagues at the Medical School, who go only by the label, will view me
and my efforts. But if Zola and Col. Picquart can face the whole French
army, can't I face their disapproval?--Much more easily than that of my
own conscience!
You, I fancy, are not one of the fully disciplined demanders of more
legislation. So I write to you, as on the whole my dearest friend
hereabouts, to explain just what my state of mind is. Ever yours,
W. J.
James was not indulging in empty rhetoric when he said that his
conscience drove him to face the disapproval of his medical colleagues.
Some of them never forgave him, and to this day references to his
"appearance" at the State House in Boston are marked by partisanship
rather than understanding.
What happened cannot be understood without recalling that thirty-odd
years ago the licensing of medical practitioners was just being
inaugurated in the United States. Today it is evident that everyone must
be qualified and licensed before he can be permitted to write
prescriptions, to sign statements upon which public records, inquests,
and health statistics are to be based, and to go about the community
calling himself a doctor. On the other hand, experience has proved that
those people who do not pretend to be physicians, who do not use drugs
or the knife, and who attempt to heal only by mental or spiritual
influence, cannot be regulated by the clumsy machinery of the criminal
law. But either because the whole question of medical registration was
new, or because professional men are seldom masters of the science of
lawmaking, the sponsors of the bills proposed to the Massachusetts
Legislature in 1894 and 1898 ignored these distinctions. James did not
name them, although his argument implied them and rested upon them. The
bills included clauses which attempted to abolish the faith-curers by
requiring them to become Doctors of Medicine. The "Spiritualists" and
Christian Scientists were a numerous element in the population and
claimed a religious sanction for their beliefs. The gentlemen who mixed
an anti-spiritualist program in their effort to have doctors examined
and licensed by a State Board were either innocent of political
discretion or blind to the facts. For it was idle to argue that
faith-curers would be able to continue in their own ways as soon as they
had passed the medical examinations of the State Board, and that
accordingly the proposed law could not be said to involve their
suppression. Obviously, medical examinations were barriers which the
faith-curers could not climb over. This was the feature of the proposed
law which roused James to opposition, and led him to take sides for the
moment with all the spokesmen of all the-isms and-opathies.
"I will confine myself to a class of diseases" (he wrote to the Boston
"Transcript" in 1894) "with which my occupation has made me somewhat
conversant. I mean the diseases of the nervous system and the mind....
Of all the new agencies that our day has seen, there is but one that
tends steadily to assume a more and more commanding importance, and that
is the agency of the patient's mind itself. Whoever can produce effects
there holds the key of the situation in a number of morbid conditions of
which we do not yet know the extent; for systematic experiments in this
direction are in their merest infancy. They began in Europe fifteen
years ago, when the medical world so tardily admitted the facts of
hypnotism to be true; and in this country they have been carried on in a
much bolder and more radical fashion by all those 'mind-curers' and
'Christian Scientists' with whose results the public, and even the
profession, are growing gradually familiar.
"I assuredly hold no brief for any of these healers, and must confess
that my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories, so far
as I have heard them given. But their _facts_ are patent and startling;
and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and
with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I
believe, be a public calamity. The law now proposed will so interfere,
simply because the mind-curers will not take the examinations....
Nothing would please some of them better than such a taste of
imprisonment as might, by the public outcry it would occasion, bring the
law rattling down about the ears of the mandarins who should have
enacted it.
"And whatever one may think of the narrowness of the mind-curers, their
logical position is impregnable. They are proving by the most brilliant
new results that the therapeutic relation may be what we can at present
describe only as a relation of one person to another person; and they
are consistent in resisting to the uttermost any legislation that would
make 'examinable' information the root of medical virtue, and hamper
the free play of personal force and affinity by mechanically imposed
conditions."
James knew as well as anyone that in the ranks of the healers there were
many who could fairly be described as preying on superstition and
ignorance. "X---- personally is a rapacious humbug" was his privately
expressed opinion of one of them who had a very large following. He had
no reverence for the preposterous theories with which their minds were
befogged; but "every good thing like _science_ in medicine," as he once
said, "has to be imitated and grimaced by a rabble of people who would
be at the required height; and the folly, humbug and mendacity is
pitiful." Furthermore he saw a quackery quite as odious and much more
dangerous than that of the "healers" in the patent-medicine business,
which was allowed to advertise its lies and secret nostrums in the
newspapers and on the bill-boards, and which flourished behind the
counter of every apothecary and village store-keeper at that time. (The
Federal Pure Food and Drug Act was still many years off.)
The spokesmen of the medical profession were ignoring what he believed
to be instructive phenomena. "What the real interests of medicine
require is that mental therapeutics should _not_ be stamped out, but
studied, and its laws ascertained. For that the mind-curers must at
least be suffered to make their experiments. If they cannot interpret
their results aright, why then let the orthodox M.D.'s follow up their
facts, and study and interpret them? But to force the mind-curers to a
State examination is to kill the experiments outright." But instead of
the open-minded attitude which he thus advocated, he saw doctors who
"had no more exact science in them than a fox terrier"[16] invoking the
holy name of Science and blundering ahead with an air of moral
superiority.
"One would suppose," he exclaimed again in the 1898 hearing, "that any
set of sane persons interested in the growth of medical truth would
rejoice if other persons were found willing to push out their
experiences in the mental-healing direction, and provide a mass of
material out of which the conditions and limits of such therapeutic
methods may at last become clear. One would suppose that our orthodox
medical brethren might so rejoice; but instead of rejoicing they adopt
the fiercely partisan attitude of a powerful trades-union, demanding
legislation against the competition of the 'scabs.' ... The mind-curers
and their public return the scorn of the regular profession with an
equal scorn, and will never come up for the examination. Their movement
is a religious or quasi-religious movement; personality is one condition
of success there, and impressions and intuitions seem to accomplish more
than chemical, anatomical or physiological information.... Pray do not
fail, Mr. Chairman, to catch my point. You are not to ask yourselves
whether these mind-curers do really achieve the successes that are
claimed. It is enough for you as legislators to ascertain that a large
number of our citizens, persons as intelligent and well-educated as
yourself, or I, persons whose number seems daily to increase, are
convinced that they do achieve them, are persuaded that a valuable new
department of medical experience is by them opening up. Here is a purely
medical question, regarding which our General Court, not being a
well-spring and source of medical virtue, not having any private test of
therapeutic truth, must remain strictly neutral under penalty of making
the confusion worse.... Above all things, Mr. Chairman, let us not be
infected with the Gallic spirit of regulation and reglementation for
their own abstract sakes. Let us not grow hysterical about law-making.
Let us not fall in love with enactments and penalties because they are
so logical and sound so pretty, and look so nice on paper."[17]
_To James J. Putnam._
Cambridge, _Mar. [3?] 1898_.
DEAR JIM,--Thanks for your noble-hearted letter, which makes me feel
warm again. I am glad to learn that you feel positively _agin_ the
proposed law, and hope that you will express yourself freely towards the
professional brethren to that effect.
Dr. Russell Sturgis has written me a similar letter.
Once more, thanks!
W. J.
P.S. _March 3._ The "Transcript" report, I am sorry to say, was a good
deal cut. I send you another copy, to keep and use where it will do most
good. The rhetorical problem with me was to say things to the Committee
that might neutralize the influence of their medical advisers, who, I
supposed, had the inside track, and all the _prestige_. I being banded
with the spiritists, faith-curers, magnetic healers, etc., etc. Strange
affinities![18]
W. J.
_To François Pillon._
Cambridge, _June 15, 1898_.
MY DEAR PILLON,--I have just received your pleasant letter and the
_Année_, volume 8, and shall immediately proceed to read the latter,
having finished reading my examinations yesterday, and being now free to
enjoy the vacation, but excessively tired. I grieve to learn of poor
Mrs. Pillon's continued ill health. How much patience both of you
require. I think of you also as spending most of the summer in Paris,
when the country contains so many more elements that are good for body
and soul.
How much has happened since I last heard from you! To say nothing of the
Zola trial, we now have the Cuban War! A curious episode of history,
showing how a nation's ideals can be changed in the twinkling of an eye,
by a succession of outward events partly accidental. It is quite
possible that, without the explosion of the Maine, we should still be at
peace, though, since the _basis_ of the whole American attitude is the
persuasion on the part of the people that the cruelty and misrule of
Spain in Cuba call for her expulsion (so that in that sense our war is
just what a war of "the powers" against Turkey for the Armenian
atrocities would have been), it is hardly possible that peace could have
been maintained indefinitely longer, unless Spain had gone out--a
consummation hardly to be expected by peaceful means. The actual
declaration of war by Congress, however, was a case of _psychologie des
foules_, a genuine hysteric stampede at the last moment, which shows
how unfortunate that provision of our written constitution is which
takes the power of declaring war from the Executive and places it in
Congress. Our Executive has behaved very well. The European nations of
the Continent cannot believe that our pretense of humanity, and our
disclaiming of all ideas of conquest, is sincere. It has been
_absolutely_ sincere! The self-conscious feeling of our people has been
entirely based in a sense of philanthropic duty, without which not a
step would have been taken. And when, in its ultimatum to Spain,
Congress denied any project of conquest in Cuba, it genuinely meant
every word it said. But here comes in the psychologic factor: once the
excitement of action gets loose, the taxes levied, the victories
achieved, etc., the old human instincts will get into play with all
their old strength, and the ambition and sense of mastery which our
nation has will set up new demands. We shall never take Cuba; I imagine
that to be very certain--unless indeed after years of unsuccessful
police duty there, for that is what we have made ourselves responsible
for. But Porto Rico, and even the Philippines, are not so sure. We had
supposed ourselves (with all our crudity and barbarity in certain ways)
a better nation morally than the rest, safe at home, and without the old
savage ambition, destined to exert great international influence by
throwing in our "moral weight," etc. Dreams! Human Nature is everywhere
the same; and at the least temptation all the old military passions
rise, and sweep everything before them. It will be interesting to see
how it will end.
But enough of this!--It all shows by what short steps progress is made,
and it confirms the "criticist" views of the philosophy of history. I am
going to a great popular meeting in Boston today where a lot of my
friends are to protest against the new "Imperialism."
In August I go for two months to California to do some lecturing. As I
have never crossed the continent or seen the Pacific Ocean or those
beautiful _parages_, I am very glad of the opportunity. The year after
next (_i.e._ one year from now) begins a new year of absence from my
college duties. I _may_ spend it in Europe again. In any case I shall
hope to see you, for I am appointed to give the "Gifford Lectures" at
Edinburgh during 1899-1901--two courses of 10 each on the philosophy of
religion. A great honor.--I have also received the honor of an election
as "Correspondent" of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
Have I _your_ influence to thank for this? Believe me, with most
sympathetic regards to Mrs. Pillon and affectionate greetings to
yourself, yours most truly
Wm. James.
Before starting for California, James went to the Adirondack Lodge to
snatch a brief holiday. One episode in this holiday can best be
described by an extract from a letter to Mrs. James.
_To Mrs. James._
ST. HUBERT'S INN,
KEENE VALLEY, _July 9, 1898_.
...I have had an eventful 24 hours, and my hands are so stiff after it
that my fingers can hardly hold the pen. I left, as I informed you by
post-card, the Lodge at seven, and five hours of walking brought us to
the top of Marcy--I carrying 18 lbs. of weight in my pack. As usual, I
met two Cambridge acquaintances on the mountain top--"Appalachians" from
Beede's. At four, hearing an axe below, I went down (an hour's walk) to
Panther Lodge Camp, and there found Charles and Pauline Goldmark, Waldo
Adler and another schoolboy, and two Bryn Mawr girls--the girls all
dressed in boys' breeches, and cutaneously desecrated in the extreme
from seven of them having been camping without a male on Loon Lake to
the north of this. My guide had to serve for the party, and quite
unexpectedly to me the night turned out one of the most memorable of all
my memorable experiences. I was in a wakeful mood before starting,
having been awake since three, and I may have slept a little during this
night; but I was not aware of sleeping at all. My companions, except
Waldo Adler, were all motionless. The guide had got a magnificent
provision of firewood, the sky swept itself clear of every trace of
cloud or vapor, the wind entirely ceased, so that the fire-smoke rose
straight up to heaven. The temperature was perfect either inside or
outside the cabin, the moon rose and hung above the scene before
midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible, and I got into
a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The
influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people round me,
especially the good Pauline, the thought of you and the children, dear
Harry on the wave, the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented
within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht. I spent a good deal
of it in the woods, where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a
magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the Gods of all the
nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast
with the moral Gods of the inner life. The two kinds of Gods have
nothing in common--the Edinburgh lectures made quite a hitch ahead. The
intense significance of some sort, of the whole scene, if one could only
_tell_ the significance; the intense inhuman remoteness of its inner
life, and yet the intense _appeal_ of it; its everlasting freshness and
its immemorial antiquity and decay; its utter Americanism, and every
sort of patriotic suggestiveness, and you, and my relation to you part
and parcel of it all, and beaten up with it, so that memory and
sensation all whirled inexplicably together; it was indeed worth coming
for, and worth repeating year by year, if repetition could only procure
what in its nature I suppose must be all unplanned for and unexpected.
It was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence, and I
understand now what a poet is. He is a person who can feel the immense
complexity of influences that I felt, and make some partial tracks in
them for verbal statement. In point of fact, I can't find a single word
for all that significance, and don't know what it was significant of, so
there it remains, a mere boulder of _impression_. Doubtless in more ways
than one, though, things in the Edinburgh lectures will be traceable to
it.
In the morning at six, I shouldered my undiminished pack and went up
Marcy, ahead of the party, who arrived half an hour later, and we got in
here at eight [P.M.] after 10-1/2 hours of the solidest walking I ever
made, and I, I think, more fatigued than I have been after any walk. We
plunged down Marcy, and up Bason Mountain, led by C. Goldmark, who had,
with Mr. White, blazed a trail the year before;[19] then down again,
away down, and up the Gothics, not counting a third down-and-up over an
intermediate spur. It was the steepest sort of work, and, as one looked
from the summits, seemed sheer impossible, but the girls kept up
splendidly, and were all fresher than I. It was true that they had slept
like logs all night, whereas I was "on my nerves." I lost my Norfolk
jacket at the last third of the course--high time to say good-bye to
that possession--and staggered up to the Putnams to find Hatty Shaw[20]
taking me for a tramp. Not a soul was there, but everything spotless and
ready for the arrival today. I got a bath at Bowditch's bath-house,
slept in my old room, and slept soundly and well, and save for the
unwashable staining of my hands and a certain stiffness in my thighs, am
entirely rested and well. But I don't believe in keeping it up too long,
and at the Willey House will lead a comparatively sedentary life, and
cultivate sleep, if I can....
W. J.
The intense experience which James thus described had consequences that
were not foreseen at the time. He had gone to the Adirondacks at the
close of the college term in a much fatigued condition. He had been
sleeping badly for some weeks, and when he started up Mount Marcy he had
neuralgia in one foot; but he had characteristically determined to
ignore and "bully" this ailment. Under such conditions the prolonged
physical exertion of the two days' climb, aggravated by the fact that he
carried a pack all the second day, was too much for a man of his years
and sedentary occupations. As the summer wore on, pain or discomfort in
the region of his heart became constant. He tried to persuade himself
that it signified nothing and would pass away, and concealed it from his
wife until mid-winter. To Howison--who was himself a confessed heart
case--he wrote, "My heart has been kicking about terribly of late,
stopping, and hurrying and aching and so forth, but I do not propose to
give up to it too much." The fact was that the strain of the two days'
climb had caused a valvular lesion that was irreparable, although not
great enough seriously to curtail his activities if he had given heed
to his general condition and avoided straining himself again.
In August James went to California to give the lectures which have
already been mentioned in a letter to Pillon. Again, these lectures were
in substance the "Talks to Teachers." The next letter, written just
before he left Cambridge, answers a request to him to address the
Philosophical Club at the University of California.
_To G. H. Howison._
Cambridge, _July 24, 1898_.
DEAR HOWISON,--Your kind letter greeted me on my arrival here three days
ago--but I have waited to answer it in order to determine just what my
lecture's title should be. I wanted to make something entirely popular,
and as it were emotional, for technicality seems to me to spell
"failure" in philosophy. But the subject in the margin of my
consciousness failed to make connexion with the centre, and I have
fallen back on something less vital, but still, I think, sufficiently
popular and practical, which you can advertise under the rather
ill-chosen title of "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,"
if you wish.
I am just back from a month of practical idleness in the Adirondacks,
but such is the infirmity of my complexion that I am not yet in proper
working trim. You ask me, like an angel, in what form I like to take my
sociability. The spirit is willing to take it in any form, but the flesh
is weak, and it runs to destruction of nerve-tissue and madness in me to
go to big stand-up receptions where the people scream and breathe in
each other's faces. But I know my duties; and one such reception I will
gladly face. For the rest, I should infinitely prefer a chosen few at
dinner. But this enterprise is going, my friend, to give you and Mrs.
Howison a heap of trouble. My purpose is to arrive on the eve of the
26th. I will telegraph you the hour and train. When the lectures to the
teachers are over, I will make for the Yosemite Valley, where I want to
spend a fortnight if I can, and come home.... Yours ever truly,
Wm. James.
_To Henry James._
OCCIDENTAL HOTEL,
SAN FRANCISCO, _Aug. 11, 1898_.
DEAR OLD HENRY,--You see I have worked my way across the Continent, and,
full of the impressions of this queer place, I must overflow for a page
or two to you. I saw some really grand and ferocious scenery on the
Canadian Pacific, and wish I could go right back to see it again. But it
doesn't mean much, on the whole, for human habitation, and the British
Empire's investment in Canada is in so far forth but _scenic_. It is
grand, though, in its vastness and simplicity. In Washington and Oregon
the whole foreground consisted of desolation by fire. The magnificent
coniferous forests burnt and burning, as they have been for years and
years back. Northern California one pulverous earth-colored mass of
hills and heat, with green spots produced by irrigation hardly showing
on the background. I drove through a wheatfield at Harry's Uncle
Christopher's on a machine, drawn by 26 mules, which cut a swathe 18
feet wide through the wheat and threw it out in bags to be taken home,
as fast as the leisurely mules could walk. It is like Egypt. Down here,
splendid air, and a city so indescribably odd and unique in its
suggestions that I have been saying to myself all day that _you_ ought
to have taken it in when you were under 30 and added it to your
portraits of places. So remote and terminal, so full of the sea-port
nakedness, yet so new and American, with its queer suggestions of a
history based on the fifties and the sixties. But at my age those
impressions are curiously weak to what they once were, and the time to
travel is between one's 20th and 30th year. This hotel--an old house
cleaned into newness--is redolent of '59 or '60, when it must have been
built. Hideous vast stuccoed thing, with long undulating balustrades and
wells and lace curtains. The fare is very good, but the servants all
Irish, who seem cowed in the dining-room, and go about as if they had
corns on their feet and for that reason had given up the pick and
shovel.... Tomorrow, in spite of drouth and dust, I leave for the
Yosemite Valley, with a young Californian philosopher, named [Charles
M.] Bakewell, as companion. On the whole I prefer the works of God to
those of man, and the alternative, a trip down the coast, beauties as it
would doubtless show, would include too much humanity....
_To his Son Alexander._
BERKELEY, CAL., _Aug. 28, 1898_.
DARLING OLD CHERUBINI,--See how brave this girl and boy are in the
Yosemite Valley![21] I saw a moving sight the other morning before
breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young
man of the house had shot a little wolf called a coyote in the early
morning. The heroic little animal lay on the ground, with his big furry
ears, and his clean white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little body, but
his brave little life was gone. It made me think how brave all these
living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house
or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his
way with, and risking his life so cheerfully--and losing it--just to
see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his
coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my
man-business bravely too, or else we won't be worth as much as that
little coyote. Your mother can find a picture of him in those green
books of animals, and I want you to copy it. Your loving
DAD.
_To Miss Rosina H. Emmet._
MONTEREY, _Sept. 9, 1898_.
DEAR OLD ROSINA,--I have seen your native state and even been driven by
dear, good, sweet Hal Dibblee (who is turning into a perfectly ideal
fellow) through the charming and utterly lovable place in which you all
passed your childhood. (How your mother must sometimes long for it
again!) Of California and its greatness, the half can never be told. I
have been on a ranch in the white, bare dryness of Siskiyou County, and
reaped wheat with a swathe of 18 feet wide on a machine drawn by a
procession of 26 mules. I've been to Yosemite, and camped for five days
in the high Sierras; I've lectured at the two universities of the state,
and seen the youths and maidens lounge together at Stanford in cloisters
whose architecture is purer and more lovely than aught that Italy can
show. I've heard Mrs. Dibblee read letter after letter from Anita
concerning your life together; and even one letter to Anita from Bay,
which the former enclosed. (Dear Bay!) All this, dear old Rosina, is a
"summation of stimuli" which at last carries me over the dam that has so
long obstructed all my epistolary efforts in your direction.
Over and over again I have been on the point of writing to you, more
than once I have actually written a page or two, but something has
always checked the flow, and arrested the current of the soul. What is
it? I think it is this: I naturally tend, when "familiar" with what the
authors of the beginning of the century used to call "a refined female,"
to indulge in chaffing personalities in writing to her. There is
something in you that doubtfully enjoys the chaffing; and subtly feeling
that, I stop. But some day, when experience shall have winnowed you with
her wing; when the illusions and the hopes of youth alike are faded;
when eternal principles of order are more to you than sensations that
pass in a day, however exciting; when friends that know you and your
roots and derivations are more satisfactory, however humdrum and hoary
they be, than the handsome recent acquaintances that know nothing of you
but the hour; when, in short, your being is mellowed, dulled and
harmonized by time so as to be a grave, wise, deep, and discerning moral
and intellectual unity (as mine is already from the height of my 40
centuries!), then, Rosina, we two shall be the most perfect of
combinations, and I shall write to you every week of my life and you
will be utterly unable to resist replying. That will not be, however,
before you are forty years old. You are sure to come to it! For you see
the truth, irrespective of persons, as few people see it; and after all,
you care for that more than for anything else--and that means a rare and
unusual destiny, and ultimate salvation.--But here I am, chaffing, quite
against my intentions and altogether in spite of myself. The ruling
passion is irresistible. Let me stop!
But still I must be personal, and not write merely of the climate and
productions of California, as I have been doing to others for the past
four weeks. How I do wish I could be dropped amongst you for but 24
hours! What talk I should hear! What perceptions of truth from you and
Bay (and probably young Leslie) would pour into my receptive soul. How
I _should_ like to hear you hold forth about the French, their art,
their literature, their nature, and all else about them! How I should
like to hear you _talk_ French! How I should like to note the changes
wrought in you by all this experience, and take all sorts of excursions
in your company! Don't come home for one more year if you can help it.
Stay and let the impressions set and tie themselves in with a hard knot,
so that they will be worth something and definitive.
I am so glad to hear that Bay is doing so well, and doubly glad (as Mrs.
Dibblee tells me from Anita) that H. J. is going to sit to her for his
portrait. I am a bit sorry that the youthful Harry didn't accept your
invitation, but his time was after all so short that it has been perhaps
good for him to get the massive English impression. What times we live
in! Dreyfus, Cuba, and Khartoum!--I keep well, though fragile as a
worker. You will have heard of my Edinburgh appointment and my election
to the Institut de France as _Correspondant_. The latter is silly, but
the former a serious scrape out of which I am praying all the gods to
help me, as the time for preparation is so short. All Cambridge friends
are well. You heard of dear Child's death, last summer, I suppose.
Good-bye! Write to me, dear old Rosina. Kiss Bay and Leslie--even
_effleurez_ your own cheek, for me. Give my best love to your mother,
and believe me always your affectionate
W. J.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Dec. 3, 1898_.
ILLUSTRIOUS FRIEND AND JOY OF MY LIVER,--I am much pleased to hear from
you, for I have wished to know of your destinies, and Bakewell couldn't
give me a very precise account. I congratulate you on getting your
review of me off your hands--you must experience a relief similar to
that of Christian when he lost his bag of sin. I imagine your account of
its unsatisfactoriness is a little hyperæsthetic, and that what you have
brooded over so long will, in spite of anything in the accidents of its
production, prove solid and deep, and reveal _ex pede_ the Hercules. Of
course, if you do not unconditionally subscribe to my "Will to Believe"
essay, it shows that you still are groping in the darkness of
misunderstanding either of my meaning or of the truth; for in spite of
"the bludgeonings of fate," my head is "bloody but unbowed" as to the
rightness of my contention there, in both its parts. But we shall see;
and I hope you are now free for more distant flights.
I am extremely sorry to hear you have been not well again, even though
you say you are so much better now. You ought to be _entirely_ well and
every inch a king. Remember that, _whenever_ you need a change, your bed
is made in this house for as many weeks as you care to stay. I know
there will come feelings of disconsolateness over you occasionally, from
being so out of the academic swim. But that is nothing! And while this
time is on, you should think exclusively of its unique characteristics
of blessedness, which will be irrecoverable when you are in the harness
again.
I spent the first six weeks after term began in trying to clear my table
of encumbering tasks, in order to get at my own reading for the Gifford
lectures. In vain. Each day brought its cargo, and I never got at my own
work, until a fortnight ago the brilliant resolve was communicated to
me, by divine inspiration, of not doing anything for anybody else, not
writing a letter or looking at a MS., on any day until I should have
done at least one hour of work for _myself_. If you spend your time
preparing to be ready, you _never_ will be ready. Since that wonderful
insight into the truth, despair has given way to happiness. I do my hour
or hour and a half of free reading; and don't care what extraneous
interest suffers.... Good-night, dear old Miller. Your ever loving,
W. J.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Jan. 31, 1899_.
...Your account of Josiah Royce is adorable--we have both gloated over
it all day. The best intellectual character-painting ever limned by an
English pen! Since teaching the "Conception of God," I have come to
perceive what I didn't trust myself to believe before, that looseness of
thought is R.'s _essential_ element. He _wants_ it. There isn't a tight
joint in his system; not one. And yet I thought that a mind that could
talk me blind and black and numb on mathematics and logic, and whose
favorite recreation is works on those subjects, must necessarily conceal
closeness and exactitudes of ratiocination that I hadn't the wit to find
out. But no! he is the Rubens of philosophy. Richness, abundance,
boldness, color, but a sharp contour never, and never any _perfection_.
But isn't fertility better than perfection? Deary me! Ever thine,
W. J.
_To Henry Rutgers Marshall._
Cambridge [_Feb. 7, 1899_?].
DEAR MARSHALL,--I will hand your paper to Eliot, though I am sure that
nothing will come of it in _this_ University.
Moreover, it strikes me that no good will ever come to Art as such from
the analytic study of Æsthetics--harm rather, if the abstractions could
in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things
done on system with all the intangible personal _je ne sçais quaw_ left
out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art
absolutely seems to escape verbal definition--it is a matter of a hair,
a shade, an inward quiver of some kind--yet what miles away in point of
preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme
success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas
are all that your aesthetics will give.
Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount
of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but
don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's
my sentiments.
Thanks for the "cudgels" you are taking up for the "Will to Believe."
Miller's article seems to be based solely on my little catchpenny
_title_. Where would he have been if I had called my article "a critique
of pure faith" or words to that effect? As it is, he doesn't touch a
_single_ one of my points, and slays a mere abstraction. I shall
greedily read what you write.
I have been too lazy and hard pressed to write to you about your
"Instinct and Reason," which contains many good things in the way of
psychology and morals, but which--I tremble to say it before you--on the
whole _does_ disappoint me. The religious part especially seems to me to
rest on too narrow a phenomenal base, and the formula to be too simple
and abstract. But it is a good contribution to American scholarship all
the same, and I hope the Philippine Islanders will be forced to study
it.
Forgive my brevity and levity. Yours ever,
W. J.
_To Henry Rutgers Marshall._
Cambridge, _Feb. 8 [1899]_.
DEAR MARSHALL,--Your invitation was perhaps the finest "tribute" the
Jameses have ever received, but it is plumb impossible that either of us
should accept. Pinned down, by ten thousand jobs and duties, like two
Gullivers by the threads of the Lilliputians.
I should "admire" to see the Kiplings again, but it is no go. Now that
by his song-making power he is the mightiest force in the formation of
the "Anglo-Saxon" character, I wish he would hearken a bit more to his
deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the
Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal
less of a "burden" to carry. We're the most loathsomely canting crew
that God ever made. Kipling knows perfectly well that our camps in the
tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of
philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should
represent us to ourselves in that light. I wish he would try a bit
interpreting the savage _soul_ to us, as he _could_, instead of using
such official and conventional phrases as "half-devil and half-child,"
which leaves the whole insides out.
Heigh ho!
I have only had time to glance at the first 1/2 of your paper on Miller.
I am delighted you are thus going for him. His whole paper is an
_ignoratio elenchi_, and he doesn't touch a single one of my positions.
Believe me with great regrets and thanks, yours ever,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
CHOCORUA, _June 7, 1899_.
DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--I got your penciled letter the day before leaving.
The R.R. train seems to be a great stimulus to the acts of the higher
epistolary activity and correspondential amicality in you--a fact for
which I have (occasional) reason to be duly grateful. So here, in the
cool darkness of my road-side "sitting-room," with no pen in the house,
with the soft tap of the carpenter's hammer and the pensive scrape of
the distant wood-saw stealing through the open wire-netting door, along
with the fragrant air of the morning woods, I get stimulus responsive,
and send you penciled return. Yes, the daylight that now seems shining
through the Dreyfus case is glorious, and if the President only gets his
back up a bit, and mows down the whole gang of Satan, or as much of it
as can be touched, it will perhaps be a great day for the distracted
France. I mean it may be one of those moral crises that become starting
points and high-water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and
new forces behind them. One thing is certain, that no other alternative
form of government possible to France in this century could have stood
the strain as this democracy seems to be standing it.
Apropos of which, a word about Woodberry's book.[22] I didn't know him
to be that kind of a creature at all. The essays are grave and noble in
the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and
for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic
leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his
style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the
sudden word, the unmediated transition, the flash of perception that
makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good,
so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him
spot-wise--and therefore so ineffective. His paper on Democracy is very
fine indeed, though somewhat too abstract. I haven't yet read the first
and last essays in the book, which I shall buy and keep, and even send a
word of gratulation to the author for it.
As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all
their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work
from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the
world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water,
and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them
time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal,
the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big
organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big
successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth
which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way,
under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and
puts them on the top.--You need take no notice of these ebullitions of
spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.
Ever your
W. J.
When the College term ended in June, 1899, the sailing date of the
European steamer on which James had taken passage for his wife and
daughter and himself was still three weeks away. He turned again to the
Adirondack Lodge and there persuaded himself, to his intense
satisfaction, that if he walked slowly and alone, so that there was no
temptation to talk while walking, or to keep on when he felt like
stopping, he could still spend several hours a day on the mountain sides
without inconvenience to his heart. But one afternoon he took a wrong
path and did not discover his mistake until he had gone so far that it
seemed safer to go on than to turn back. So he kept on. But the "trail"
he was following was not the one he supposed it to be and led him
farther and farther. He fainted twice; it grew dark; but having neither
food, coat, nor matches, he stumbled along until at last he came out on
the Keene Valley road and, at nearly eleven o'clock at night, reached a
house where he could get food and a conveyance.
He ought to have avoided all exertion for weeks thereafter, but he tried
again to make light of what had occurred, and, on getting back to
Cambridge, spent a very active few days over final arrangements for his
year of absence. When his boat had sailed and the stimulus which his
last duties supplied had been withdrawn, he began to discover what
condition he was in.
XIII
1899-1902
_Two years of Illness in Europe--Retirement from Active Duty at
Harvard--The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures_
WHEN James sailed for Hamburg on July 15, he planned quite definitely to
devote the summer to rest and the treatment of his heart, then to write
out the Gifford Lectures during the winter, and to deliver them by the
following spring; and, happily, could not foresee that he was to spend
nearly two years in exile and idleness. For nearly six years he had
driven himself beyond the true limits of his strength. Now it became
evident that the strain of his second over-exertion in the Adirondacks
had precipitated a complete collapse. He had been advised during the
winter to go to Nauheim for a course of baths. But when he got there,
the eminent specialists who examined his heart ignored his nervous
prostration. He was doubtless a difficult patient to diagnose or
prescribe for. Matters went from bad to worse; little by little all his
plans had to be abandoned. A year went by, and a return to regular work
in Cambridge was unthinkable. He was no better in the summer of 1900
than when he landed in Germany in July of 1899. His daughter had been
sent to school in England. The three other children remained in America.
He and Mrs. James moved about between England, Nauheim, the south of
France, Switzerland and Rome, consulting a specialist in one place or
trying the baths or the climate in another--with how much homesickness,
and with how much courage none the less, the letters will indicate.
His only systematic reading was a persistent, though frequently
intermitted, exploration of religious biographies and the literature of
religious conversion, in preparation for the Gifford Lectures. During
the second year he managed to get one course of these lectures written
out. Not until he had delivered them in Edinburgh, in May, 1901, did he
know that he had turned the corner and feel as if he had begun to live
again.
Every letter that came to him from his family and friends at home was
comforting beyond measure, and he poured out a stream of acknowledgment
in long replies, which he dictated to Mrs. James. His own writing was
usually limited to jottings in a note-book and to post-cards. He always
had a fountain-pen and a few post-cards in his pocket, and often, when
sitting in a chair in the open air, or at a little table in one of the
outdoor restaurants that abound in Nauheim and in southern Europe, he
would compress more news and messages into one of these little missives
than most men ever get into a letter. A few of his friends at home
divined his situation, and were at pains to write him regularly and
fully. Letters that follow show how grateful he was for such devotion.
* * * * *
In this state of enforced idleness he browsed through newspapers and
journals more than he had before or than he ever did again, and so his
letters contained more comments on daily events. It will be clear that
what was happening did not always please him. He was an individualist
and a liberal, both by temperament and by reason of having grown up with
the generation which accepted the doctrines of the _laissez-faire_
school in a thoroughgoing way. The Philippine policy of the McKinley
administration seemed to him a humiliating desertion of the principles
that America had fought for in the Revolution and the War of
Emancipation. The military occupation of the Philippines, described by
the President as "benevolent assimilation," and what he once called the
"cold pot-grease of McKinley's eloquence" filled him with loathing. He
saw the Republican Party in the light in which Mr. Dooley portrayed it
when he represented its leaders as praying "that Providence might remain
under the benevolent influence of the present administration." When
McKinley and Roosevelt were nominated by the Republicans in 1900, he
called them "a combination of slime and grit, soap and sand, that ought
to scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country." He was
ready to vote for Bryan if there were no other way of turning out the
administration responsible for the history of our first years in the
Philippines, "although it would doubtless have been a premature victory
of a very mongrel kind of reform." In the same way, the cant with which
many of the supporters of England's program in South Africa extolled the
Boer War in the British press provoked his irony. The uproar over the
Dreyfus case was at its height. The "intellectuels," as they were called
in France, the "Little Englanders" as they were nicknamed in England,
and the Anti-Imperialists in his own country had his entire sympathy.
The state of mind of a member of the liberal minority, observing the
phase of history that was disclosing itself at the end of the century,
is admirably indicated in his correspondence.
* * * * *
Miss Pauline Goldmark, next addressed, and her family were in the habit
of spending their summers in Keene Valley, where they had a cottage that
was not far from the Putnam Shanty. James had often joined forces with
them for a day's climb when he was staying at the Shanty. The reader
will recall that it was their party that he had joined on Mt. Marcy the
year before.
_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _Aug. 12, 1899_.
MY DEAR PAULINE,--I am afraid we are stuck here till the latter half of
September. Once a donkey, always a donkey; at the Lodge in June, after
some slow walks which seemed to do me no harm at all, I drifted one day
up to the top of Marcy, and then (thanks to the Trail Improvement
Society!) found myself in the Johns Brook Valley instead of on the Lodge
trail back; and converted what would have been a three-hours' downward
saunter into a seven-hours' scramble, emerging in Keene Valley at 10.15
P.M. This did me no good--quite the contrary; so I have come to Nauheim
just in time. My carelessness was due to the belief that there was only
one trail in the Lodge direction, so I didn't attend particularly, and
when I found myself off the track (the trail soon stopped) I thought I
was going to South Meadow, and didn't reascend. Anyhow I was an ass, and
you ought to have been along to steer me straight. I fear we shall
ascend no more acclivities together. "Bent is the tree that should have
grown full straight!" You have no idea of the moral repulsiveness of
this _Curort_ life. Everybody fairly revelling in disease, and
abandoning themselves to it with a sort of _gusto_. "Heart," "heart,"
"heart," the sole topic of attention and conversation. As a "phase,"
however, one ought to be able to live through it, and the extraordinary
nerve-rest, crawling round as we do, is beneficial. Man is never
satisfied! Perhaps I shall be when the baths, etc., have had their
effect. We go then straight to England.--I do hope that you are all
getting what you wish in Switzerland, and that for all of you the entire
adventure is proving golden. Mrs. James sends her love, and I am, as
always, yours most affectionately,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. E. P. Gibbens._
VILLA LUISE, BAD-NAUHEIM, _Aug. 22, 1899_.
DARLING BELLE-MÈRE,--The day seems to have come for another letter to
you, though my fingers are so cold that I can hardly write. We have had
a most conveniently dry season--convenient in that it doesn't coop us up
in the house--but a deal of cloud and cold. Today is sunny but
frigid--like late October. Altogether the difference of weather is very
striking. European weather is stagnant and immovable. It is as if it got
stuck, and needed a kick to start it; and although it is doubtless
better for the nerves than ours, I find my soul thinking most kindly
from this distance of our glorious quick passionate American climate,
with its transparency and its impulsive extremes. This weather is as if
fed on solid pudding. We inhabit one richly and heavily furnished
bedroom, 21 x 14, with good beds and a balcony, and are rapidly making
up for all our estrangement, locally speaking, in the past. It is a
great "nerve-rest," though the listlessness that goes with all
nerve-rest makes itself felt. Alice seems very well.... The place has
wonderful adaptation to its purposes in the possession of a vast park
with noble trees and avenues and incessant benches for rest; restaurants
with out-of-door tables everywhere in sight; music morning, afternoon
and night; and charming points to go to out of town. Cab-fare is cheap.
But nothing else.... The Gifford lectures are in complete abeyance. I
have word from Seth that under the circumstances the Academic Senate
will be sure to grant me any delay or indulgence I may ask for; so this
relieves tension. I can make nothing out yet about my heart.... So I
_try_ to take long views and not fuss about temporary feelings, though I
dare say I keep dear Alice worried enough by the fuss I imagine myself
_not_ to make. It is a loathsome world, this medical world; and I
confess that the thought of another six weeks here next year doesn't
exhilarate me, in spite of the decency of all our physical conditions. I
still remain faithful to Irving St. (95 and 107),[23] Chocorua, Silver
Lake, and Keene Valley!
We get almost no syllable of American news, in spite of the fact that we
take the London "Chronicle." Pray send the "Nation" and the "Literary
Digest." _Don't_ send the "Sciences" as heretofore. Let them accumulate.
I think that after reception of this you had better address us care of
H. J., Rye, Sussex. We shall probably be off by the 10th or 12th of
Sept. I hope that public opinion is gathering black against the
Philippine policy--in spite of my absence! I hope that Salter will pitch
in well in the fall. The still blacker nightmare of a Dreyfus case hangs
over us; and there is little time in the day save for reading the
"Figaro's" full reports of the trial. Like all French happenings, it is
as if they were edited expressly for literary purpose. Every "witness"
so-called has a power of statement equal to that of a first-class
lawyer; and the various human types that succeed each other, exhibiting
their several peculiarities in full blossom, make the thing like a
novel. Esterhazy seems to me the _great_ hero. How Shakespeare would
have enjoyed such a fantastic scoundrel,--knowing all the secrets,
saying what he pleases, mystifying all Europe, leading the whole French
army (except apparently Picquart) by the nose,--a regular Shakespearean
type of villain, with an insane exuberance of rhetoric and fancy about
his vanities and hatreds, that literature has never given yet. It would
seem incredible that the Court-Martial should condemn. Henry was
evidently the spy, employed by Esterhazy, and afterwards Du Paty helped
their machinations, in order not to stultify his own record at the
original trial--at least this seems the plausible theory. The older
generals seem merely to have been passive connivers, stupidly and
obstinately holding to the original official mistake rather than
surrender under fire. And such is the prestige of caste-opinion, such
the solidity of the professional spirit, that, incredible as it may
seem, it is still quite probable that the officers will obey the lead of
their superiors, and condemn Dreyfus again. The President, Jouaust, who
was supposed to be impartial, is showing an apparently bad animus
against Picquart. P. is a real _hero_--a precious possession for any
country. He ought to be made Minister of War; though that would
doubtless produce a revolution. I suppose that Loubet will pardon
Dreyfus immediately if he is recondemned. Then Dreyfus, and perhaps
Loubet, will be assassinated by some Anti-Semite, and who knows what
will follow? But before you get this, you will know far more about the
trial than I can tell you.
We long for news from the boys--not a word from Billy since he left
Tacoma. I am glad their season promises to be shorter! Enough is as good
as a feast! What a scattered lot we are! I hope that Margaret will be
happy in Montreal. As for you in your desolation, I could almost weep
for you. My only advice is that you should cling to Aleck as to a
life-preserver. I trust you got the $200 I told Higginson to send you. I
am mortified beyond measure by that overdrawn bank account, and do not
understand it at all.
Oceans of love from your affectionate son,
WILLIAM.
_To William M. Salter._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 11, 1899_.
DEAR MACKINTIRE,--The incredible has happened, and Dreyfus, without one
may say a single particle of _positive_ evidence that he was guilty, has
been condemned again. The French Republic, which seemed about to turn
the most dangerous corner in her career and enter on the line of
political health, laying down the finest set of political precedents in
her history to serve as standards for future imitation and habit, has
slipped Hell-ward and all the forces of Hell in the country will proceed
to fresh excesses of insolence. But I don't believe the game is lost.
"Les intellectuels," thanks to the Republic, are now aggressively
militant as they never were before, and will grow stronger and stronger;
so we may hope. I have sent you the "Figaro" daily; but of course the
reports are too long for you to have read through. The most grotesque
thing about the whole trial is the pretension of awful holiness, of
semi-divinity in the diplomatic documents and waste-paper-basket scraps
from the embassies--a farce kept up to the very end--these same
documents being, so far as they were anything (and most of them were
nothing), mere records of treason, lying, theft, bribery, corruption,
and every crime on the part of the diplomatic agents. Either the German
and Italian governments will now publish or not publish all the details
of their transactions--give the exact documents meant by the
_bordereaux_ and the exact names of the French traitors. If they do not,
there will be only two possible explanations: either Dreyfus's guilt,
or the pride of their own sacrosanct etiquette. As it is scarcely
conceivable that Dreyfus can have been guilty, their silences will be
due to the latter cause. (Of course it can't be due to what they owe in
honor to Esterhazy and whoever their other allies and servants may have
been. E. is safe over the border, and a pension for his services will
heal all his wounds. Any other person can quickly be put in similar
conditions of happiness.) And they and Esterhazy will then be exactly on
a par morally, actively conspiring to have an innocent man bear the
burden of their own sins. By their carelessness with the documents they
got Dreyfus accused, and now they abandon him, for the sake of their own
divine etiquette.
The breath of the nostrils of all these big institutions is crime--that
is the long and short of it. We must thank God for America; and hold
fast to every advantage of our position. Talk about our corruption! It
is a mere fly-speck of superficiality compared with the rooted and
permanent forces of corruption that exist in the European states. The
only serious permanent force of corruption in America is party spirit.
All the other forces are shifting like the clouds, and have no
partnerships with any permanently organized ideal. Millionaires and
syndicates have their immediate cash to pay, but they have no intrenched
prestige to work with, like the church sentiment, the army sentiment,
the aristocracy and royalty sentiment, which here can be brought to bear
in favor of every kind of individual and collective crime--appealing not
only to the immediate pocket of the persons to be corrupted, but to the
ideals of their imagination as well.... My dear Mack, we "intellectuals"
in America must all work to keep our precious birthright of
individualism, and freedom from these institutions. _Every_ great
institution is perforce a means of corruption--whatever good it may also
do. Only in the free personal relation is full ideality to be found.--I
have vomited all this out upon you in the hope that it may wake a
responsive echo. One must do _something_ to work off the effect of the
Dreyfus sentence.
I rejoice immensely in the purchase [on our behalf] of the two pieces of
land [near Chocorua], and pine for the day when I can get back to see
them. If all the same to you, I wish that you would buy Burke's in your
name, and Mother-in-law Forrest's in her name. But let this be exactly
as each of you severally prefers.
We leave here in a couple of days, I imagine. I am better; but I can't
tell how much better for a few weeks yet. I hope that you will smite the
ungodly next winter. What a glorious gathering together of the forces
for the great fight there will be. It seems to me as if the proper
tactics were to pound McKinley--put the whole responsibility on him. It
is he who by his purely drifting "non-entanglement" policy converted a
splendid opportunity into this present necessity of a conquest of
extermination. It is he who has warped us from our continuous national
habit, which, if we repudiate him, it will not be impossible to resume.
Affectionately thine, Mary's, Aleck's, Dinah's, Augusta's,[24] and
everyone's,
W. J.
P.S. Damn it, America doesn't know the meaning of the word corruption
compared with Europe! Corruption is so permanently organized here that
it isn't thought of as such--it is so transient and shifting in America
as to make an outcry whenever it appears.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 17, 1899_.
...In two or three days more I shall be discharged (in very decent
shape, I trust) and after ten days or so of rigorously prescribed
"Nachkur" in the cold and rain of Switzerland (we have seen the sun only
in short but entrancing glimpses since Sept. 1, and you know what bad
weather is when it once begins in Europe), we shall pick up our Peggy at
Vevey, and proceed to Lamb House, Rye, _über_ Paris, with all possible
speed. God bless the American climate, with its transparent, passionate,
impulsive variety and headlong fling. There are deeper, slower tones of
earnestness and moral gravity here, no doubt, but ours is more like
youth and youth's infinite and touching promise. God bless America in
general! _Conspuez_ McKinley and the Republican party and the Philippine
war, and the Methodists, and the voices, etc., as much as you please,
but bless the innocence. Talk of corruption! We don't know what the word
corruption means at home, with our improvised and shifting agencies of
crude pecuniary bribery, compared with the solidly intrenched and
permanently organized corruptive geniuses of monarchy, nobility, church,
army, that penetrate the very bosom of the higher kind as well as the
lower kind of people in all the European states (except Switzerland) and
sophisticate their motives away from the impulse to straightforward
handling of any simple case. _Temoin_ the Dreyfus case! But no matter!
Of all the forms of mental crudity, that of growing earnest over
international comparisons is probably the most childish. Every nation
has its ideals which are a dead secret to other nations, and it has to
develop in its own way, in touch with them. It can only be judged by
itself. If each of us does as well as he can in his own sphere at home,
he will do all he _can_ do; that is why I hate to remain so long
abroad....
We have been having a visit from an extraordinary Pole named
Lutoslawski, 36 years old, author of philosophical writings in seven
different languages,--"Plato's Logic," in English (Longmans) being his
chief work,--and knower of several more, handsome, and to the last
degree genial. He has a singular philosophy--the philosophy of
friendship. He takes in dead seriousness what most people admit, but
only half-believe, viz., that we are _Souls_ (Zoolss, he pronounces it),
that souls are immortal, and agents of the world's destinies, and that
the chief concern of a soul is to get ahead by the help of other souls
with whom it can establish confidential relations. So he spends most of
his time writing letters, and will send 8 sheets of reply to a
post-card--that is the exact proportion of my correspondence with him.
Shall I rope you in, Fanny? He has a great chain of friends and
correspondents in all the countries of Europe. The worst of them is that
they think a secret imparted to one may at his or her discretion become,
_de proche en proche_, the property of all. He is a _wunderlicher
Mensch_: abstractly his scheme is divine, but there is something on
which I can't yet just lay my defining finger that makes one feel that
there is some need of the corrective and critical and arresting judgment
in his manner of carrying it out. These Slavs seem to be the great
radical livers-out of their theories. Good-bye, dearest Fanny....
Your affectionate
W. J.
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
LAMB HOUSE, RYE, _Oct. 5, 1899_.
DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--You see where at last we have arrived, at the end of
the first _étape_ of this pilgrimage--the second station of the cross,
so to speak--with the Continent over, and England about to begin. The
land is bathed in greenish-yellow light and misty drizzle of rain. The
little town, with its miniature brick walls and houses and nooks and
coves and gardens, makes a curiously vivid and quaint picture,
alternately suggesting English, Dutch, and Japanese effects that one has
seen in pictures--all exceedingly tiny (so that one wonders how
_families_ ever could have been reared in most of the houses) and neat
and _zierlich_ to the last degree. _Refinement_ in architecture
certainly consists in narrow trim and the absence of heavy mouldings.
Modern Germany is incredibly bad from that point of view--much worse,
apparently, than America. But the German people are a good safe fact for
great powers to be intrusted to--earnest and serious, and pleasant to be
with, as we found them, though it was humiliating enough to find how
awfully imperfect were one's powers of conversing in their language.
French not much better. I remember nothing of this extreme mortification
in old times, and am inclined to think that it is due less to loss of
ability to speak, than to the fact that, as you grow older, you speak
better English, and expect more of yourself in the way of
accomplishment. I am sure _you_ spoke no such English as now, in the
seventies, when you came to Cambridge! And how could I, as yet untrained
by conversation with you?
Seven mortal weeks did we spend at the _Curort_, Nauheim, for an
infirmity of the heart which I contracted, apparently, not much more
than a year ago, and which now must be borne, along with the rest of the
white man's burden, until additional visits to Nauheim have removed it
altogether for ordinary practical purposes. N. was a sweetly pretty
spot, but I longed for more activity. A glorious week in Switzerland,
solid in its sometimes awful, sometimes beefy beauty; two days in
Paris, where I could gladly have stayed the winter out, merely for the
fun of the sight of the intelligent and interesting streets; then
hither, where H. J. has a real little _bijou_ of a house and garden, and
seems absolutely adapted to his environment, and very well and contented
in the leisure to write and to read which the place affords.
In a few days we go almost certainly to the said H. J.'s apartment,
still unlet, in London, where we shall in all probability stay till
January, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, or till such later
date as shall witness the completion of the awful Gifford job, at which
I have not been able to write one line since last January. I long for
the definitive settlement and ability to get to work. I am very glad
indeed, too, to be in an English atmosphere again. Of course it will
conspire better with my writing tasks, and after all it is more
congruous with one's nature and one's inner ideals. Still, one loves
America above all things, for her youth, her greenness, her plasticity,
innocence, good intentions, friends, everything. Je veux que mes cendres
reposent sur les bords du Charles, au milieu de ce bon peuple de Harvarr
Squerre que j'ai tant aimé. That is what I say, and what Napoleon B.
would have said, had his life been enriched by your and my educational
and other experiences--poor man, he knew too little of life, had never
even heard of us, whilst we have heard of him!
Seriously speaking, though, I believe that international comparisons are
a great waste of time--at any rate, international judgments and passings
of sentence are. Every nation has ideals and difficulties and sentiments
which are an impenetrable secret to one not of the blood. Let them
alone, let each one work out its own salvation on its own lines. They
talk of the decadence of France. The hatreds, and the _coups de gueule_
of the newspapers there are awful. But I doubt if the better ideals were
ever so aggressively strong; and I fancy it is the fruit of the much
decried republican régime that they have become so. My brother
represents English popular opinion as less cock-a-whoop for war than
newspaper accounts would lead one to imagine; but I don't know that he
is in a good position for judging. I hope if they do go to war that the
Boers will give them fits, and I heartily emit an analogous prayer on
behalf of the Philippinos.
I have had pleasant news of Beverly, having had letters both from Fanny
Morse and Paulina Smith. I hope that your summer has been a good one,
that work has prospered and that Society has been less _énervante_ and
more nutritious for the higher life of the Soul than it sometimes is.
_We_ have met but one person of any accomplishments or interest all
summer. But I have managed to read a good deal about religion, and
religious people, and care less for accomplishments, except where (as in
you) they go with a sanctified heart. Abundance of accomplishments, in
an unsanctified heart, only make one a more accomplished devil.
Good bye, angelic friend! We both send love and best wishes, both to you
and Mr. Whitman, and I am as ever yours affectionately,
W. J.
_To Thomas Davidson._
34 DE VERE GARDENS,
LONDON, _Nov. 2, 1899_.
DEAR OLD T. D.,--A recent letter from Margaret Gibbens says that you
have gone to New York in order to undergo a most "radical operation." I
need not say that my thoughts have been with you, and that I have felt
anxiety mixed with my hopes for you, ever since. I do indeed hope that,
whatever the treatment was, it has gone off with perfect success, and
that by this time you are in the durable enjoyment of relief, and nerves
and everything upon the upward track. It has always seemed to me that,
were I in a similar plight, I should choose a kill-or-cure operation
rather than anything merely palliative--so poisonous to one's whole
mental and moral being is the irritation and worry of the complaint. It
would truly be a spectacle for the Gods to see you rising like a
phoenix from your ashes again, and shaking off even the memory of
disaster like dew-drops from a lion's mane, etc.--and I hope the
spectacle will be vouchsafed to us men also, and that you will be
presiding over Glenmore as if nothing had happened, different from the
first years, save a certain softening of your native ferocity of heart,
and gentleness towards the shortcomings of weaker people. Dear old East
Hill![25] I shall never forget the beauty of the morning (it had rained
the night before) when I took my bath in the brook, before driving down
to Westport one day last June.
We got your letter at Nauheim, a sweet safe little place, made for
invalids, to which it took long to reconcile me on that account. But
nous en avons vu bien d'autres depuis, and from my present retirement in
my brother's still unlet flat (he living at Rye), Nauheim seems to me
like New York for bustle and energy. My heart, in short, has gone back
upon me badly since I was there, and my doctor, Bezley Thorne, the first
specialist here, and a man who inspires me with great confidence, is
trying to tide me over the crisis, by great quiet, in addition to a
dietary of the strictest sort, and more Nauheim baths, _à domicile_.
Provided I can only get safely out of the Gifford scrape, the deluge has
leave to come.--Write, dear old T. D., and tell how you are, and let it
be good news if possible. Give much love to the Warrens, and believe me
always affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
The woman thou gavest unto me comes out strong as a nurse, and treats me
much better than I deserve.
_To John C. Gray._
[Dictated to Mrs. James]
LONDON, _Nov. 23, 1899_.
DEAR JOHN,--A week ago I learnt from the "Nation"--strange to have heard
it in no directer way!--that dear old John Ropes had turned his back on
us and all this mortal tragi-comedy. No sooner does one get abroad than
that sort of thing begins. I am deeply grieved to think of never seeing
or hearing old J. C. R. again, with his manliness, good-fellowship, and
cheeriness, and idealism of the right sort, and can't hold in any longer
from expression. You, dear John, seem the only fitting person for me to
condole with, for you will miss him most tremendously. Pray write and
tell me some details of the manner of his death. I hope he didn't suffer
much. Write also of your own personal and family fortunes and give my
love to the members of our dining club collectively and individually,
when you next meet.
I have myself been shut up in a sick room for five weeks past, seeing
hardly anyone but my wife and the doctor, a bad state of the heart being
the cause. We shall be at West Malvern in ten days, where I hope to
begin to mend.
Hurrah for Henry Higginson and his gift[26] to the University! I think
the Club cannot fail to be useful if they make it democratic enough.
I hope that Roland is enjoying Washington, but not so far
transubstantiated into a politician as to think that McKinley & Co. are
the high-water mark of human greatness up to date.
John Ropes, more than most men, seems as if he would be natural to meet
again.
Please give our love to Mrs. Gray, and believe me, affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
LAMB HOUSE, _Dec. 23, 1899_.
DEAREST FANNY,--About a week ago I found myself thinking a good deal
about you.
I may possibly have begun by wondering how it came that, after showing
such a spontaneous tendency towards that "clandestine correspondence"
early in the season, you should recently, in spite of pathetic news
about me, and direct personal appeals, be showing such great epistolary
reserve. I went on to great lengths about you; and ended by realizing
your existence, and its significance, as it were, very acutely. I
composed a letter to you in my mind, whilst lying awake, dwelling in a
feeling manner on the fact that human beings are born into this little
span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies,
and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their
friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by
the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia; they
contribute nothing empirical to the relation, treating it as something
transcendental and metaphysical altogether; whereas in truth it
deserves from hour to hour the most active care and nurture and
devotion. "There's that Fanny," thought I, "the rarest and most
precious, perhaps, of all the phenomena that enter into the circle of my
experience. I take her for granted; I seldom see her--she _has never
passed a night in our house!_[27] and yet of all things she is the one
that probably deserves the closest and most unremitting attention on my
part. This transcendental relation of persons to each other in the
absolute won't do! I must write to Fanny and tell her, in spite of her
deprecations, just how perfect and rare and priceless a fact I know her
existence in this Universe eternally to be. This very morrow I will
dictate such a letter to Alice." The morrow came, and several days
succeeded, and brought each its impediment with it, so that letter
doesn't get written till today. And now Alice, who had suddenly to take
Peggy (who is with us for ten days) out to see a neighbor's little girl,
comes in; so I will give the pen to her.
[Remainder of letter dictated to Mrs. James]
Sunday, 24th.
Brother Harry and Peggy came in with Alice last evening, so my letter
got postponed till this morning. What I was going to say was this. The
day before yesterday we received in one bunch seven letters from you,
dating from the 20th of October to the 8th of December, and showing that
you, at any rate, had been alive to the duty of actively nourishing
friendship by deeds.... Your letters were sent to Baring Brothers,
instead of Brown, Shipley and Co., and it was a mercy that we ever got
them at all. You are a great letter-writer inasmuch as your pen flows
on, giving out easily such facts and feelings and thoughts as form the
actual contents of your day, so that one gets a live impression of
concrete reality. _My_ letters, I find, tend to escape into humorisms,
abstractions and flights of fancy, which are not nutritious things to
impart to friends thousands of miles away who wish to realize the facts
of your private existence. We are now received into the shelter of H.
J.'s "Lamb House," where we have been a week, having found West Malvern
(where the doctor sent me after my course of baths) rather too bleak a
retreat for the drear-nighted December. (Heaven be praised! we have just
lived down the solstice after which the year always seems a brighter,
hopefuller thing.) Harry's place is a most exquisite collection of
quaint little stage properties, three quarters of an acre of
brick-walled English garden, little brick courts and out-houses,
old-time kitchen and offices, paneled chambers and tiled fire-places,
but all very simple and on a small scale. Its host, soon to become its
proprietor, leads a very lonely life but seems in perfect equilibrium
therewith, placing apparently his interest more and more in the
operations of his fancy. His health is good, his face calm, his spirits
equable, and he will doubtless remain here for many years to come, with
an occasional visit to London. He has spoken of you with warm affection
and is grateful for the letters which you send him in spite of the lapse
of years....
I have resigned my Gifford lectureship, but they will undoubtedly grant
me indefinite postponement. I have also asked for a second year of
absence from Harvard, which of course will be accorded. If I improve, I
may be able to give my first Gifford course next year. I can do no work
whatsoever at present, but through the summer and half through the fall
was able to do a good deal of reading in religious biography. Since
July, in fact, my only companions have been saints, most excellent,
though sometimes rather lop-sided company. In a general manner I can
see my way to a perfectly bully pair of volumes, the first an objective
study of the "Varieties of Religious Experience," the second, my own
last will and testament, setting forth the philosophy best adapted to
normal religious needs. I hope I may be spared to get the thing down on
paper. So far my progress has been rather downhill, but the last couple
of days have shown a change which possibly may be the beginning of
better things. I mean to take great care of myself from this time on. In
another week or two we hope to move to a climate (possibly near Hyères)
where I may sit more out of doors. Gathering some strength there, I
trust to make for Nauheim in May. If I am benefited there, we shall stay
over next winter; otherwise we return by midsummer. Were Alice not
holding the pen, I should celebrate her unselfish devotion, etc., and
were I not myself dictating, I should celebrate my own uncomplaining
patience and fortitude. As it is, I leave you to imagine both. Both are
simply beautiful!
...There, dear Fanny, this is all I can do today in return for your
seven glorious epistles. Take a heartful of love and gratitude from both
of us. Remember us most affectionately to your Mother and Mary. Write
again soon, I pray you, but always to _Brown, Shipley and Co._ Stir up
Jim Putnam to write when he can, and believe me, lovingly yours,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. Glendower Evans._
[Dictated to Mrs. James]
COSTEBELLE, HYÈRES, _Jan. 17, 1900_.
DEAR BESSIE,--Don't think that this is the first time that my spirit has
turned towards you since our departure. Away back in Nauheim I began
meaning to write to you, and although that meaning was "fulfilled" long
before you were born, in Royce's Absolute, yet there was a hitch about
it in the finite which gave me perplexity. I think that the real reason
why I kept finding myself able to dictate letters to other persons--not
many, 't is true--and yet postponing ever until next time my letter unto
you, was that my sense of your value was so much greater than almost
anybody else's--though I wouldn't have anything in this construed
prejudicial to Fanny Morse. Bowed as I am by the heaviest of matrimonial
chains, ever dependent for expression on Alice here, how can my spirit
move with perfect spontaneity, or "voice itself" with the careless
freedom it would wish for in the channels of its choice? I am sure you
understand, and under present conditions of communication anything more
explicit might be imprudent.
She has told you correctly all the outward facts. I feel within a week
past as if I might really be taking a turn for the better, and I know
you will be glad.
I have, in the last days, gone so far as to read Royce's book[28] from
cover to cover, a task made easy by the familiarity of the thought, as
well as the flow of the style. It is a charming production--it is odd
that the adjectives "charming" and "pretty" emerge so strongly to
characterize my impression. R. has got himself much more organically
together than he ever did before, the result being, in its _ensemble_, a
highly individual and original _Weltanschauung_, well-fitted to be the
storm-centre of much discussion, and to form a wellspring of suggestion
and education for the next generation of thought in America. But it
makes youthful anew the paradox of philosophy--so trivial and so
ponderous at once. The book leaves a total effect on you like a
picture--a summary impression of charm and grace as light as a breath;
yet to bring forth that light nothing less than Royce's enormous organic
temperament and technical equipment, and preliminary attempts, were
required. The book consolidates an impression which I have never before
got except by glimpses, that Royce's system is through and through to be
classed as a light production. It is a charming, romantic sketch; and it
is only by handling it after the manner of a sketch, keeping it within
sketch technique, that R. can make it very impressive. In the few places
where he tries to grip and reason close, the effect is rather
disastrous, to my mind. But I do think of Royce now in a more or less
settled way as primarily a sketcher in philosophy. Of course the
sketches of some masters are worth more than the finished pictures of
others. But stop! if this was the kind of letter I meant to write to
you, it is no wonder that I found myself unable to begin weeks ago. My
excuse is that I only finished the book two hours ago, and my mind was
full to overflowing.
Next Monday we are expecting to move into the neighboring Château de
Carqueiranne, which my friend Professor Richet of Paris has offered
conjointly to us and the Fred Myerses, who will soon arrive. A whole
country house in splendid grounds and a perfect Godsend under the
conditions. If I can only bear the talking to the Myerses without too
much fatigue! But that also I am sure will come. Our present situation
is enviable enough. A large bedroom with a balcony high up on the vast
hotel façade; a terrace below it graveled with white pebbles containing
beds of palms and oranges and roses; below that a downward sloping
garden full of plants and winding walks and seats; then a wide hillside
continuing southward to the plain below, with its gray-green olive
groves bordered by great salt marshes with salt works on them, shut in
from the sea by the causeways which lead to a long rocky island, perhaps
three miles away, that limits the middle of our view due south, and
beyond which to the East and West appears the boundless Mediterranean.
But delightful as this is, there is no place like home; Otis Place is
better than Languedoc and Irving Street than Provence. And I am sure,
dear Bessie, that there is no maid, wife or widow in either of these
countries that is half as good as you. But here I must absolutely stop;
so with a good-night and a happy New Year to you, I am as ever,
affectionately your friend,
Wm. James.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
[Dictated to Mrs. James]
HOTEL D' ALBION,
COSTEBELLE, HYÈRES, _Jan. 18, 1900_.
DARLING MILLER,--Last night arrived your pathetically sympathetic letter
in comment on the news you had just received of my dropping out for the
present from the active career. I want you to understand how deeply I
value your unflagging feeling of friendship, and how much we have been
touched by this new expression of it.... My strength and spirits are
coming back to me with the open-air life, and I begin to feel quite
differently towards the future. Even if this amelioration does not
develop fast, it is a check to the deterioration, and shows that
curative forces are still there. I look perfectly well at present, and
that of itself is a very favorable sign. In a couple of weeks I mean to
begin the Gifford lectures, writing, say, a page a day, and having all
next year before me empty, am very likely to get, at any rate, the first
course finished. A letter from Seth last night told me that the
Committee [on the Gifford Lectureship] had refused my resignation and
simply shoved my appointment forward by one year. So be of good cheer,
Miller; we shall yet fight the good fight, sometimes side by side,
sometimes agin one another, as merrily as if no interruption had
occurred. Show this to Harry, to whom his mother will write today.
We enjoyed Royce's visit very much, and yesterday I finished reading his
book, which I find perfectly charming as a composition, though as far as
cogent reasoning goes, it leaks at every joint. It is, nevertheless, a
big achievement in the line of philosophic fancy-work, perhaps the most
important of all except religious fancy-work. He has got himself
together far more intricately than ever before, and ought, after this,
to be recognized by the world according to the measure of his real
importance. To me, however, the book has brought about a curious
settlement in my way of classing Royce. In spite of the great technical
freight he carries, and his extraordinary mental vigor, he belongs
essentially among the lighter skirmishers of philosophy. A sketcher and
popularizer, not a pile-driver, foundation-layer, or wall-builder.
Within his class, of course, he is simply magnificent. It all goes with
his easy temperament and rare good-nature in discussion. The subject is
not really vital to him, it is just fancy-work. All the same I do hope
that this book and its successor will prove a great ferment in our
philosophic schools. Only with schools and living masters can philosophy
_bloom_ in a country, in a generation.
No more, dear Miller, but endless thanks. All you tell me of yourself
deeply interests me. I am deeply sorry about the eyes. Are you sure it
is not a matter for glasses? With much love from both of us. Your ever
affectionate,
W. J.
_To Francis Boott._
[Dictated to Mrs. James]
CHÂTEAU DE CARQUEIRANNE, _Jan. 31, 1900_.
DEAR OLD FRIEND,--Every day for a month past I have said to Alice,
"Today we must get off a letter to Mr. Boott"; but every day the
available strength was less than the call upon it. Yours of the 28th
December reached us duly at Rye and was read at the cheerful little
breakfast table. I must say that you are the only person who has caught
the proper tone for sympathizing with an invalid's feelings. Everyone
else says, "We are glad to think that you are by this time in splendid
condition, richly enjoying your rest, and having a great success at
Edinburgh"--this, where what one craves is mere pity for one's unmerited
sufferings! _You_ say, "it is a great disappointment, more I should
think than you can well bear. I wish you could give up the whole affair
and turn your prow toward home." That, dear Sir, is the proper note to
strike--la voix du coeur qui seul au coeur arrive; and I thank you for
recognizing that it is a case of agony and patience. I, for one, should
be too glad to turn my prow homewards, in spite of all our present
privileges in the way of simplified life, and glorious climate. What
wouldn't I give at this moment to be partaking of one of your recherchés
déjeuners à la fourchette, ministered to by the good Kate. From the bed
on which I lie I can "sense" it as if present--the succulent roast pork,
the apple sauce, the canned asparagus, the cranberry pie, the dates, the
"To Kalon,"[29]--above all the _rire en barbe_ of the ever-youthful
host. Will they ever come again?
Don't understand me to be disparaging our present meals which, cooked by
a broadbuilt sexagenarian Provençale, leave nothing to be desired.
Especially is the fish good and the artichokes, and the stewed lettuce.
Our _commensaux_, the Myerses, form a good combination. The house is
vast and comfortable and the air just right for one in my condition,
neither relaxing nor exciting, and floods of sunshine.
Do you care much about the war? For my part I think Jehovah has run the
thing about right, so far; though on utilitarian grounds it will be very
likely better if the English win. When we were at Rye an interminable
controversy raged about a national day of humiliation and prayer. I
wrote to the "Times" to suggest, in my character of traveling American,
that both sides to the controversy might be satisfied by a service
arranged on principles suggested by the anecdote of the Montana settler
who met a grizzly so formidable that he fell on his knees, saying, "O
Lord, I hain't never yet asked ye for help, and ain't agoin' to ask ye
for none now. But for pity's sake, O Lord, don't help the bear." The
solemn "Times" never printed my letter and thus the world lost an
admirable epigram. You, I know, will appreciate it.
Mrs. Gibbens speaks with great pleasure of your friendly visits, and I
should think you might find Mrs. Merriman good company. I hope you are
getting through the winter without any bronchial trouble, and I hope
that neither the influenza nor the bubonic plague has got to Cambridge
yet. The former is devastating Europe. If you see dear Dr. Driver, give
him our warmest regards. One ought to stay among one's own people. I
seem to be mending--though very slowly, and the least thing knocks me
down. This noon I am still in bed, a little too much talking with the
Myerses yesterday giving me a strong pectoral distress which is not yet
over. This dictation begins to hurt me, so I will stop. My spirits now
are first-rate, which is a great point gained.
Good-bye, dear old man! We both send our warmest love and are, ever
affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
_To Hugo Münsterberg._
CARQUEIANNE, _March 13, 1900_.
DEAR MÜNSTERBERG,--Your letter of the 7th "ult." was a most delightful
surprise--all but the part of it which told of your being ill again--and
of course the news of poor Solomons's death was a severe shock.... As
regards Solomons, it is pathetically tragic, and I hope that you will
send me full details. There was something so lonely and self-sustaining
about poor little S., that to be snuffed out like this before he had
fairly begun to live in the eyes of the world adds a sort of tragic
dramatic unity to his young career. Certainly the _keenest_ intellect we
ever had, and one of the loftiest characters! But there was always a
mysterious side to me about his mind: he appeared so critical and
destructive, and yet kept alluding all the while to ethical and
religious ideals of his own which he wished to live for, and of which he
never vouchsafed a glimpse to anyone else. He was the only student I
have ever had of whose criticisms I felt afraid: and that was partly
because I never quite understood the region from which they came, and
with the authority of which he spoke. His surface thoughts, however, of
a scientific order, were extraordinarily _treffend_ and clearly
expressed; in fact, the way in which he went to the heart of a subject
in a few words was masterly. Of course he must have left, apart from his
thesis, a good deal of MS. fit for publication. I have not seen our
philosophical periodicals since leaving home. Have any parts of his
thesis already appeared? If not, the whole thing should be published as
"Monograph Supplement" to the "Psychological Review," and his papers
gone over to see what else there may be. An adequate obituary of him
ought also to be written. Who knew him most intimately? I think the
obituary and a portrait ought also to be posted in the laboratory. Can
you send me the address of his mother?--I think his father is dead. I
should also like to write a word about him to Miss S----, if you can
give me her address. If we had foreseen this early end to poor little
Solomons, how much more we should have made of him, and how considerate
we should have been!
It pleases me much to think of so many other good young fellows, as you
report them, in the laboratory this year. How many candidates for Ph.D.?
How glad I am to be clear of those examinations, certainly the most
disagreeable part of the year's work....
_To George H. Palmer._
CARQUEIRANNE, _Apr. 2, 1900_.
GLORIOUS OLD PALMER,--I had come to the point of feeling that my next
letter _must_ be to you, when in comes your delightful "favor" of the
18th, with all its news, its convincing clipping, and its enclosures
from Bakewell and Sheldon. I have had many impulses to write to
Bakewell, but they have all aborted--my powers being so small and so
much _in Anspruch genommen_ by correspondence already under way. I judge
him to be well and happy. What think you of his wife? I suppose she is
no relation of yours. I shouldn't think any of your three candidates
would do for that conventional Bryn Mawr. She stoneth the prophets, and
I wish she would get X---- and get stung. He made a _deplorable_
impression on me many years ago. The only comment _I_ heard when I gave
my address there lately (the last one in my "Talks") was that A---- had
hoped for something more technical and psychological! Nevertheless, some
good girls seem to come out at Bryn Mawr. I am awfully sorry that Perry
is out of place. Unless he gets something good, it seems to me that we
ought to get him for a course in Kant. He is certainly the soundest,
most normal all-round man of our recent production. Your list for next
year interests me muchly. I am glad of Münsterberg's and Santayana's new
courses, and hope they'll be good. I'm glad you're back in Ethics and
glad that Royce has "Epistemology"--portentous name, and small result,
in my opinion, but a substantive _discipline_ which ought, _par le temps
qui court_, to be treated with due formality. I look forward with
eagerness to his new volume.[30] What a colossal feat he has performed
in these two years--all thrown in by the way, as it were.
Certainly Gifford lectures are a good institution for stimulating
production. They have stimulated me so far to produce two lectures of
wishy-washy generalities. What is that for a "showing" in six months of
absolute leisure? The second lecture used me up so that I must be off a
good while again.
No! dear Palmer, the best I can possibly hope for at Cambridge after my
return is to be able to carry one half-course. So make all calculations
accordingly. As for Windelband, how can I ascertain anything except by
writing to him? I shall see no one, nor go to any University
environment. My impression is that we must go in for budding genius, if
we seek a European. If an American, we can get a _sommité_! But who? in
either case? Verily there is room at the top. S---- seems to be the
only Britisher worth thinking of. I imagine we had better train up our
own men. A----, B----, C----, either would no doubt do, especially A----
if his health improves. D---- is our last card, from the point of view
of policy, no doubt, but from that of inner organization it seems to me
that he may have too many points of coalescence with both Münsterberg
and Royce, especially the latter.
The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's
book.[31] Although I absolutely reject the platonism of it, I have
literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with
which the position is laid down on page after page; and grunted with
delight at such a thickening up of our Harvard atmosphere. If our
students now could begin really to understand what Royce means with his
voluntaristic-pluralistic monism, what Münsterberg means with his
dualistic scientificism and platonism, what Santayana means by his
pessimistic platonism (I wonder if he and Mg. have had any close
mutually encouraging intercourse in this line?), what I mean by my crass
pluralism, what you mean by your ethereal idealism, that these are so
many religions, ways of fronting life, and worth fighting for, we should
have a genuine philosophic universe at Harvard. The best condition of it
would be an open conflict and rivalry of the diverse systems. (Alas!
that I should be out of it, just as my chance begins!) The world might
ring with the struggle, if we devoted ourselves exclusively to
belaboring each other.
I now understand Santayana, the man. I never understood him before. But
what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! I don't think I ever
knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so impudently
superior an air. It is refreshing to see a representative of moribund
Latinity rise up and administer such reproof to us barbarians in the
hour of our triumph. I imagine Santayana's _style_ to be entirely
spontaneous. But it has curious classic echoes. Whole pages of pure Hume
in style; others of pure Renan. Nevertheless, how fantastic a
philosophy!--as if the "world of values" _were_ independent of
existence. It is only as _being_, that one thing is better than another.
The idea of darkness is as good as that of light, as ideas. There is
more value in light's _being_. And the exquisite consolation, when you
have ascertained the badness of all fact, in knowing that badness is
inferior to goodness, to the end--it only rubs the pessimism in. A man
whose egg at breakfast turns out always bad says to himself, "Well, bad
and good are not the same, anyhow." That is just the trouble! Moreover,
when you come down to the facts, what do your harmonious and integral
ideal systems prove to be? in the concrete? Always things burst by the
growing content of experience. Dramatic unities; laws of versification;
ecclesiastical systems; scholastic doctrines. Bah! Give me Walt Whitman
and Browning ten times over, much as the perverse ugliness of the latter
at times irritates me, and intensely as I have enjoyed Santayana's
attack. The barbarians are in the line of mental growth, and those who
do insist that the ideal and the real are dynamically continuous are
those by whom the world is to be saved. But I'm nevertheless delighted
that the other view, always existing in the world, should at last have
found so splendidly impertinent an expression among ourselves. I have
meant to write to Santayana; but on second thoughts, and to save myself,
I will just ask you to send him this. It saves him from what might be
the nuisance of having to reply, and on my part it has the advantage of
being more free-spoken and direct. He is certainly an _extraordinarily
distingué_ writer. Thank him for existing!
As a contrast, read Jack Chapman's "Practical Agitation." The other pole
of thought, and a style all splinters--but a gospel for our rising
generation--I hope it will have its effect.
Send me your Noble lectures. I don't see how you could risk it without a
MS. If you did fail (which I doubt) you deserved to. Anyhow the printed
page makes everything good.
I can no more! Adieu! How is Mrs. Palmer this winter? I hope entirely
herself again. You are impartially silent of her and of my wife! The
"Transcript" continues to bless us. We move from this hospitable roof to
the hotel at Costebelle today. Thence after a fortnight to Geneva, and
in May to Nauheim once more, to be reëxamined and sentenced by Schott.
Affectionately yours,
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
COSTEBELLE, _Apr. 12, 1900_.
DEAREST FANNY,--Your letters continue to rain down upon us with a
fidelity which makes me sure that, however it may once have been, _now_,
on the principle of the immortal Monsieur Perrichon, we must be firmly
rooted in your affections. You can never "throw over" anybody for whom
you have made such sacrifices. All qualms which I might have in the
abstract about the injury we must be inflicting on so busy a Being by
making her, through our complaints of poverty, agony, and exile, keep us
so much "on her mind" as to tune us up every two or three days by a long
letter to which she sacrifices all her duties to the family and state,
disappear, moreover, when I consider the character of the letters
themselves. They are so easy, the facts are so much the immediate
out-bubblings of the moment, and the delicious philosophical reflexions
so much like the spontaneous breathings of the soul, that the _effort_
is manifestly at the zero-point, and into the complex state of affection
which necessarily arises in you for the objects of so much loving care,
there enter none of those curious momentary arrows of impatience and
vengefulness which might make others say, if they were doing what you do
for us, that they wished we were dead or in some way put beyond reach,
so that our eternal "appeal" might stop. No, Fanny! we have no repinings
and feel no responsibilities towards you, but accept you and your
letters as the gifts you are. The infrequency of our answering proves
this fact; to which you in turn must furnish the correlative, if the
occasion comes. On the day when you temporarily hate us, or don't "feel
like" the usual letter, don't let any thought of inconsistency with your
past acts worry you about not taking up the pen. Let us go; though it be
for weeks and months--I shall know you will come round again. "Neither
heat nor frost nor thunder shall ever do away, I ween, the marks of that
which once hath been." And to think that you should never have spent a
night, and only once taken a meal, in our house! When we get back, we
must see each other daily, and may the days of both of us be right long
in the State of Massachusetts! Bless her!
I got a letter from J. J. Chapman praising her strongly the other day.
And sooth to say the "Transcript" and the "Springfield Republican," the
reception of whose "weeklies" has become one of the solaces of my life,
do make a first-rate showing for her civilization. One can't just say
what "tone" consists in, but these papers hold their own excellently in
comparison with the English papers. There is far less alertness of mind
in the general make-up of the latter; and the "respectability" of the
English editorial columns, though it shows a correcter literary drill,
is apt to be due to a remorseless longitude of commonplace
conventionality that makes them deadly dull. (The "Spectator" appears to
be the only paper with a nervous system, in England--that of a
_carnassier_ at present!) The English people seem to have positively a
passionate hunger for this mass of prosy stupidity, never less than a
column and a quarter long. The Continental papers of course are
"nowhere." As for our yellow papers--every country has its criminal
classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism
as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr.
Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the "dark ages" being over, we
are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that
ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now
articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is
transferred from fields and castles and town walls to "organs of
publicity"; but it is the same fight, of reason and goodness against
stupidity and passions; and it must be fought through to the same kind
of success. But it means the reëducating of perhaps twenty more
generations; and by that time some altogether new kind of institutional
opportunity for the Devil will have been evolved.
_April_ 13th. I had to stop yesterday.... Six months ago, I shouldn't
have thought it possible that a life deliberately founded on pottering
about and dawdling through the day would be endurable or even possible.
I have attained such skill that I doubt if my days ever at any time
seemed to glide by so fast. But it corrodes one's soul nevertheless. I
scribble a little in bed every morning, and have reached page 48 of my
third Gifford lecture--though Lecture II, alas! must be rewritten
entirely. The conditions don't conduce to an energetic grip of the
subject, and I am afraid that what I write is pretty slack and not what
it would be if my vital tone were different. The problem I have set
myself is a hard one: _first_, to defend (against all the prejudices of
my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone
of the world's religious life--I mean prayer, guidance, and all that
sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble
general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and _second_, to
make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe,
that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been
absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole
is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I
fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is _my_ religious
act.
We got a visit the other day from [a Scottish couple here who have heard
that I am to give the Gifford lectures]; and two days ago went to
afternoon tea with them at their hotel, next door. _She_ enclosed a
tract (by herself) in the invitation, and proved to be a [mass] of holy
egotism and conceit based on professional invalidism and self-worship. I
wish my sister Alice were there to "react" on her with a description!
Her husband, apparently weak, and the slave of her. No talk but
evangelical talk. It seemed assumed that a Gifford lecturer must be one
of Moody's partners, and it gave me rather a foretaste of what the
Edinburgh atmosphere may be like. Well, I shall enjoy sticking a knife
into its gizzard--if atmospheres have gizzards? Blessed be
Boston--probably the freest place on earth, that isn't merely heathen
and sensual.
I have been supposing, as one always does, that you "ran in" to the
Putnams' every hour or so, and likewise they to No. 12. But your late
allusion to the telephone and the rarity of your seeing Jim [Putnam]
reminded me of the actual conditions--absurd as they are. (Really you
and we are nearer together now at this distance than we have ever been.)
Well, let Jim see this letter, if you care to, flattering him by saying
that it is more written for him than for you (which it certainly has not
been till this moment!), and thanking him for existing in this naughty
world. His account of the Copernican revolution (studento-centric) in
the Medical School is highly exciting, and I am glad to hear of the
excellent little Cannon becoming so prominent a reformer. Speaking of
reformers, do you see Jack Chapman's "Political Nursery"? of which the
April number has just come. (I have read it and taken my bed-breakfast
during the previous page of this letter, though you may not have
perceived the fact.) If not, _do_ subscribe to it; it is awful fun. He
just looks at things, and tells the truth about them--a strange thing
even to _try_ to do, and he doesn't always succeed. Office 141 Broadway,
$1.00 a year.
Fanny, you won't be reading as far as this in this interminable letter,
so I stop, though 100 pent-up things are seeking to be said. The weather
has still been so cold whenever the sun is withdrawn that we have
delayed our departure for Geneva to the 22nd--a week later. We make a
short visit to our friends the Flournoys (a couple of days) and then
proceed towards Nauheim _via_ Heidelberg, where I wish to consult the
great Erb about the advisability of more baths in view of my nervous
complications, before the great Schott examines me again. I do wish I
could send for Jim for a consultation. Good-bye, dearest and best of
Fannys. I hope your Mother is wholly well again. Much love to her and
to Mary Elliot. It interested me to hear of Jack E.'s great operation.
Yours ever,
W. J.
_To his Son Alexander._
[GENEVA, _circa May 3, 1900_.]
DEAR FRANÇOIS,--Here we are in Geneva, at the Flournoys'--dear people
and splendid children. I wish Harry could marry Alice, Billy marry
Marguerite, and you marry Ariane-Dorothée--the absolutely jolliest and
beautifullest 3-year old I ever saw. I am trying to get you engaged! I
enclose pictures of the dog. Ariane-Dorothée r-r-r-olls her r-r-r's like
fury. I got your picture of the elephant--very good. Draw everything you
see, no matter how badly, trying to notice how the lines run--one line
every day!--just notice it and draw it, no matter how badly, and at the
end of the year you'll be s'prised to see how well you can draw. Tell
Billy to get you a big blank book at the Coöp., and every day take one
page, just drawing down on it some _thing_, or _dog_, or _horse_, or
_man_ or _woman_, or _part_ of a man or woman, which you have looked at
that day just for the purpose, to see how the lines run. I bet the last
page of that book will be better than the first! Do this for my sake.
Kiss your dear old Grandma. P'r'aps, we shall get home this summer after
all. In two or three days I shall see a doctor and know more about
myself. Will let you know. Keep motionless and listen as much as you
can. Take in things without speaking--it'll make you a better man. Your
Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosopher like me and write books. It
is easy enuff, all but the writing. You just get it out of other books,
and write it down. Always your loving,
DAD.
At this time James's thirteen-year-old daughter was living with family
friends--the Joseph Thatcher Clarkes--in Harrow, and was going to an
English school with their children. She had been passing through such
miseries as a homesick child often suffers, and had written letters
which evoked the following response.
_To his Daughter._
VILLA LUISE,
BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 26, 1900_.
DARLING PEG,--Your letter came last night and explained sufficiently the
cause of your long silence. You have evidently been in a bad state of
spirits again, and dissatisfied with your environment; and I judge that
you have been still more dissatisfied with the inner state of trying to
consume your own smoke, and grin and bear it, so as to carry out your
mother's behests made after the time when you scared us so by your
inexplicable tragic outcries in those earlier letters. Well! I believe
you have been trying to do the manly thing under difficult
circumstances, but one learns only gradually to do the _best_ thing; and
the best thing for you would be to write at least weekly, if only a
post-card, and say just how things are going. If you are in bad spirits,
there is no harm whatever in communicating that fact, and defining the
character of it, or describing it as exactly as you like. The bad thing
is to pour out the _contents_ of one's bad spirits on others and leave
them with it, as it were, on their hands, as if it was for them to do
something about it. That was what you did in your other letter which
alarmed us so, for your shrieks of anguish were so excessive, and so
unexplained by anything you told us in the way of facts, that we didn't
know but what you had suddenly gone crazy. That is the _worst_ sort of
thing you can do. The middle sort of thing is what you do this
time--namely, keep silent for more than a fortnight, and when you do
write, still write rather mysteriously about your sorrows, not being
quite open enough.
Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life
develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a
destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there
will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and
dissatisfaction with one's self, and irritation at others, and anger at
circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together
form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an
enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it,
and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it
rightly. [_From margin._] (For instance, you learn how good a thing your
home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be
more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their
inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of
sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be
proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such
persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst
possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it
strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the
blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but
jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take
part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward
state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we
did before. And we must try to make it last as short a time as possible.
The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't _want_ to
get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it--that is a
part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make
ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set
ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the
good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease
makes you think of _yourself_ all the time; and the way out of it is to
keep as busy as we can thinking of _things_ and of _other people_--no
matter what's the matter with our self.
I have no doubt you are doing as well as you know how, darling little
Peg; but we have to learn everything, and I also have no doubt that
you'll manage it better and better if you ever have any more of it, and
soon it will fade away, simply leaving you with more experience. The
great thing for you _now_, I should suppose, would be to enter as
friendlily as possible into the interest of the Clarke children. If you
like them, or acted as if you liked them, you needn't trouble about the
question of whether they like you or not. They probably will, fast
enough; and if they don't, it will be their funeral, not yours. But this
is a great lecture, so I will stop. The great thing about it is that it
is all true.
The baths are threatening to disagree with me again, so I may stop them
soon. Will let you know as quick as anything is decided. Good news from
home: the Merrimans have taken the Irving Street house for another year,
and the Wambaughs (of the Law School) have taken Chocorua, though at a
reduced rent. The weather here is almost continuously cold and sunless.
Your mother is sleeping, and will doubtless add a word to this when she
wakes. Keep a merry heart--"time and the hour run through the roughest
day"--and believe me ever your most loving
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
[Post-card]
ALTDORF, LAKE LUZERN, _July 20, [1900]_.
Your last letter was, if anything, a more unmitigated blessing than its
predecessors; and I, with my curious inertia to overcome, sit _thinking
of letters_, and of the soul-music with which they might be filled if my
tongue could only utter the thoughts that arise in me to youward, the
beauty of the world, the conflict of life and death and youth and age
and man and woman and righteousness and evil, etc., and Europe and
America! but it stays all caked within and gets no articulation, the
power of speech being so non-natural a function of our race. We are
staying above Luzern, near a big spruce wood, at "Gutsch," and today
being hot and passivity advisable, we came down and took the boat, for a
whole day on the Lake. The works both of Nature and of Man in this
region seem too perfect to be credible almost, and were I not a bitter
Yankee, I would, without a moment's hesitation, be a Swiss, and probably
then glad of the change. The _goodliness_ of this land is one of the
things I ache to utter to you, but can't. Some day I will write, also to
Jim P. My condition baffles me. I have lately felt better, but been bad
again, and altogether can _do_ nothing without repentance afterwards. We
have just lunched in this bowery back verandah, water trickling,
beautiful old convent sleeping up the hillside. Love to you all!
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 16, 1900_.
DEAREST FANNY,-- ...Here I am having a little private picnic all by
myself, on this effulgent Sunday morning--real American September
weather, by way of a miracle. I ordered my bath-chair man to wheel me
out to the "Hochwald," where, he having been dismissed for three hours,
until two o'clock, I am lying in the said luxurious throne, writing this
on my knee, with nothing between but a number of Kuno Fischer's "Hegel's
Leben, Werke und Lehre," now in process of publication, and the
flexibility of which accounts for the poor handwriting. I am alone, save
for the inevitable restaurant which hovers on the near horizon, in a
beautiful grove of old oak trees averaging some 16 or 18 feet apart,
through whose leaves the sunshine filters and dapples the clear ground
or grass that lies between them. Alice is still in England, having
finally at my command had to give up her long-cherished plan of a run
home to see her mother, the children, you, and all the other _dulcissima
mundi nomina_ that make of life a thing worth living for. I _funked_ the
idea of being alone so long when I came to the point. It is not that I
am worse, but there will be cold weather in the next couple of months;
and, unable to sit out of doors then, as here and now, I shall probably
either have to over-walk or over-read, and both things will be bad for
me.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: "Damn the Absolute!"
Chocorua, September, 1903. One morning James and Royce strolled into the
road and sat down on a wall in earnest discussion. When James heard the
camera click, as his daughter took the upper snap-shot, he cried,
"Royce, you're being photographed! Look, out! I say _Damn the
Absolute_!"]
As things are _now_, I get on well enough, for the bath business
(especially the "bath-chair") carries one through a good deal of the
day. The great Schott has positively forbidden me to go to England as I
did last year; so, early in October, our faces will be turned towards
Italy, and by Nov. 1 we shall, I hope, be ensconced in a _pension_ close
to the Pincian Garden in Rome, to see how long _that_ resource will
last. I confess I am in the mood of it, and that there is a suggestion
of more richness about the name of Rome than about that of Rye, which,
until Schott's veto, was the plan. How the Gifford lectures will fare,
remains to be seen. I have felt strong movings towards home this
fall, but reflection says: "Stay another winter," and I confess that now
that October is approaching, it feels like the home-stretch and as if
the time were getting short and the limbs of "next summer" in America
burning through the veil which seems to hide them in the shape of the
second European winter months. Who knows? perhaps I may be spry and
active by that time! I have still one untried card up my sleeve, that
may work wonders. All I can say of this third course of baths is that so
far it seems to be doing me no harm. That it will do me any substantial
good, after the previous experiences, seems decidedly doubtful. But one
must suffer some inconvenience to please the doctors! Just as in most
women there is a wife that craves to suffer and submit and be bullied,
so in most men there is a _patient_ that needs to have a doctor and obey
his orders, whether they be believed in or not....
Don't take the Malwida book[32] too seriously. I sent it _faute de
mieux_. I don't think I ever told you how much I enjoyed hearing the
Lesley volume[33] read aloud by Alice. We were just in the exactly right
condition for enjoying that breath of old New England. Good-bye, dearest
Fanny. Give my love to your mother, Mary, J. J. P., and all your circle.
_Leb' wohl_ yourself, and believe me, your ever affectionate,
W. J.
_To Josiah Royce._
NAUHEIM, _Sept. 26, 1900_.
BELOVED ROYCE,--Great was my, was _our_ pleasure in receiving your long
and delightful letter last night. Like the lioness in Æsop's fable, you
give birth to one young one only in the year, but that one is a lion. I
give birth mainly to guinea-pigs in the shape of post-cards; but despite
such diversities of epistolary expression, the heart of each of us is in
the right place. I need not say, my dear old boy, how touched I am at
your expressions of affection, or how it pleases me to hear that you
have missed me. I too miss you profoundly. I do not find in the hotel
waiters, chambermaids and bath-attendants with whom my lot is chiefly
cast, that unique mixture of erudition, originality, profundity and
vastness, and human wit and leisureliness, by accustoming me to which
during all these years you have spoilt me for inferior kinds of
intercourse. You are still the centre of my gaze, the pole of my mental
magnet. When I write, 'tis with one eye on the page, and one on you.
When I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, 'tis with the design
exclusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace. I lead
a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious ideality
is to become your conqueror, and go down into history as such, you and I
rolled in one another's arms and silent (or rather loquacious still) in
one last death-grapple of an embrace. How then, O my dear Royce, can I
forget you, or be contented out of your close neighborhood? Different as
our minds are, yours has nourished mine, as no other social influence
ever has, and in converse with you I have always felt that my life was
being lived importantly. Our minds, too, are not different in the
_Object_ which they envisage. It is the whole paradoxical
physico-moral-spiritual Fatness, of which most people single out some
skinny fragment, which we both cover with our eye. We "aim at him
generally"--and most others don't. I don't believe that we shall dwell
apart forever, though our formulas may.
Home and Irving Street look very near when seen through these few winter
months, and tho' it is still doubtful what I may be able to do in
College, for social purposes I shall be available for probably numerous
years to come. I haven't got at work yet--only four lectures of the
first course written (strange to say)--but I am decidedly better today
than I have been for the past ten months, and the matter is all ready in
my mind; so that when, a month hence, I get settled down in Rome, I
think the rest will go off fairly quickly. The second course I shall
have to resign from, and write it out at home as a book. It must seem
strange to you that the way from the mind to the pen should be as
intraversable as it has been in this case of mine--you in whom it always
seems so easily pervious. But Miller will be able to tell you all about
my condition, both mental and physical, so I will waste no more words on
that to me decidedly musty subject.
I fully understand your great aversion to letters and other off-writing.
You have done a perfectly Herculean amount of the most difficult
productive work, and I believe you to be much more tired than you
probably yourself suppose or know. Both mentally and physically, I
imagine that a long vacation, in other scenes, with no sense of duty,
would do you a world of good. I don't say the full fifteen months--for I
imagine that one summer and one academic half-year would perhaps do the
business better--you could preserve the relaxed and desultory condition
as long as that probably, whilst later you'd begin to chafe, and _then_
you'd better be back in your own library. If _my_ continuing abroad is
hindering this, my sorrow will be extreme. Of course I must some time
come to a definite decision about my own relations to the College, but I
am reserving that till the end of 1900, when I shall write to Eliot in
full. There is still a therapeutic card to play, of which I will say
nothing just now, and I don't want to commit myself before that has been
tried.
You say nothing of the second course of Aberdeen lectures, nor do you
speak at all of the Dublin course. Strange omissions, like your not
sending me your Ingersoll lecture! I assume that the publication of
[your] Gifford Volume II will not be very long delayed. I am eager to
read them. I can read philosophy now, and have just read the first three
_Lieferungen_ of K. Fischer's "Hegel." I must say I prefer the original
text. Fischer's paraphrases always flatten and dry things out; and he
gives no rich sauce of his own to compensate. I have been sorry to hear
from Palmer that he also has been very tired. One can't keep going
forever! P. has been like an archangel in his letters to me, and I am
inexpressibly grateful. Well! everybody has been kinder than I
deserve....
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
ROME, _Dec. 25, 1900_.
...Rome is simply the most satisfying lake of picturesqueness and guilty
suggestiveness known to this child. Other places have single features
better than anything in Rome, perhaps, but for an _ensemble_ Rome seems
to beat the world. Just a FEAST for the eye from the moment you leave
your hotel door to the moment you return. Those who say that beauty is
all made up of suggestion are well disproved here. For the things the
eyes most gloat on, the inconceivably corrupted, besmeared and ulcerated
surfaces, and black and cavernous glimpses of interiors, have no
suggestions save of moral horror, and their "tactile values," as
Berenson would say, are pure gooseflesh. Nevertheless the sight of them
delights. And then there is such a geologic stratification of history! I
dote on the fine equestrian statue of Garibaldi, on the Janiculum,
quietly bending his head with a look half-meditative, half-strategical,
but wholly victorious, upon Saint Peter's and the Vatican. What luck for
a man and a party to have opposed to it an enemy that stood up for
_nothing_ that was ideal, for _everything_ that was mean in life.
Austria, Naples, and the Mother of harlots here, were enough to deify
anyone who defied them. What glorious things are some of these Italian
inscriptions--for example on Giordano Bruno's statue:--
A BRUNO
_il secolo da lui divinato
qui
dove il rogo arse_.
--"here, where the faggots burned." It makes the tears come, for the
poetic justice; though I imagine B. to have been a very pesky sort of a
crank, worthy of little sympathy had not the "rogo" done its work on
him. Of the awful corruptions and cruelties which this place suggests
there is no end.
Our neighbors in rooms and _commensaux_ at meals are the J. G.
Frazers--he of the "Golden Bough," "Pausanias," and other three-and
six-volume works of anthropological erudition, Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and a sucking babe of humility, unworldliness and
molelike sightlessness to everything except _print_.... He, after Tylor,
is the greatest authority now in England on the religious ideas and
superstitions of primitive peoples, and he knows nothing of psychical
research and thinks that the trances, etc., of savage soothsayers,
oracles and the like, are all _feigned_! Verily science is amusing! But
he is conscience incarnate, and I have been stirring him up so that I
imagine he will now proceed to put in big loads of work in the morbid
psychological direction.
Dear Fanny ... I can write no more this morning. I hope your Christmas
is "merry," and that the new year will be "happy" for you all. Pray take
our warmest love, give it to your mother and Mary, and some of it to the
brothers. I will write better soon. Your ever grateful and affectionate
W. J.
Don't let up on your own writing, so say we both! Your letters are pure
blessings.
_To James Sully._
ROME, _Mar. 3, 1901_.
DEAR SULLY,--Your letter of Feb. 8th arrived duly and gave me much
pleasure _qua_ epistolary manifestation of sympathy, but less _qua_
revelation of depression on your own part. I have been so floundering up
and down, now above and now below the line of bad nervous prostration,
that I have written no letters for three weeks past, hoping thereby the
better to accomplish certain other writing; but the other writing had to
be stopped so letters and post-cards may begin.
I see you take the war still very much to heart, and I myself think that
the blundering way in which the Colonial Office drove the Dutchmen into
it, with no conception whatever of the psychological situation, is only
outdone by our still more anti-psychological blundering in the
Philippines. Both countries have lost their moral prestige--we far more
completely than you, because for our conduct there is literally _no_
excuse to be made except _absolute_ stupidity, whilst you can make out a
very fair case, as such cases go. But we can, and undoubtedly shall,
draw back, whereas that for an Empire like yours seems politically
impossible. Empire anyhow is half crime by necessity of Nature, and to
see a country like the United States, lucky enough to be born outside of
it and its fatal traditions and inheritances, perversely rushing to
wallow in the mire of it, shows how strong these ancient race instincts
be. And that is my consolation! We are no worse than the best of men
have ever been. We are simply not superhuman; and the loud reaction
against the brutal business, in both countries, shows how the _theory_
of the matter has really advanced during the last century.
Yes! H. Sidgwick is a sad loss, with all his remaining philosophic
wisdom unwritten. I feel greatly F. W. H. Myers's loss also. He suffered
terribly with suffocation, but bore it stunningly well. He died in this
very hotel, where he had been not more than a fortnight. I don't know
_how_ tolerant (or intolerant) you are towards his pursuits and
speculations. I regard them as fragmentary and conjectural--of course;
but as most laborious and praiseworthy; and knowing how much
psychologists as a rule have counted him out from their profession, I
have thought it my duty to write a little tribute to his service to
psychology to be read on March 8th, at a memorial meeting of the S. P.
R. in his honor. It will appear, whether read or not, in the
Proceedings, and I hope may not appear to you exaggerated. I seriously
believe that the general problem of the subliminal, as Myers propounds
it, promises to be one of the _great_ problems, possibly even the
greatest problem, of psychology....
We leave Rome in three days, booked for Rye the first of April. I _must_
get into the _country!_ If I do more than just pass through London, I
will arrange for a meeting. My Edinburgh lectures begin early in
May--after that I shall have freedom. Ever truly yours,
Wm. James.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
[Post-card]
FLORENCE, _March 18, 1901_.
Thus far towards home, thank Heaven! after a week at Perugia and Assisi.
Glorious air, memorable scenes. Made acquaintance of Sabatier, author of
St. Francis's life--very jolly. Best of all, made acquaintance with
Francis's retreat in the mountain. _Navrant!_--it makes one see medieval
Christianity face to face. The lair of the individual wild animal, and
that animal the saint! I hope you saw it. Thanks for your last letter to
Alice. Lots of love.
W. J.
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
RYE, _April 13, 1901_.
DEAR SCHILLER,--You are showering benedictions on me. I return the bulky
ones, keeping the lighter weights. I think the parody on Bradley
amazingly good--if I had his book here I would probably revive my memory
of his discouraged style and scribble a marginal contribution of my own.
He is, really, an extra humble-minded man, I think, but even more
humble-minded about his reader than about himself, which gives him that
false air of arrogance. How you concocted those epigrams, _à la_ preface
of B., I don't see. In general I don't see how an epigram, being a pure
bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
On the Limericks, as you call them, I set less store, much less. If
everybody is to come in for a share of allusion, I am willing, but I
don't want my name to figure in the ghostly ballet with but few
companions. Royce wrote a _very_ funny thing in pedantic German some
years ago, purporting to be the proof by a distant-future professor that
I was an habitual drunkard, based on passages culled from my writings.
He may have it yet. If I ever get any animal spirits again, I may get
warmed up, by your example, into making jokes, and may then contribute.
But I beg you let this thing mull till you get a _lot_ of matter--and
then _sift_. It's the only way. But Oxford seems a better climate for
epigram than is the rest of the world.
I shall stay here--I find myself much more comfortable thoracically
already than when I came--until my Edinburgh lectures begin on May 16th,
though I shall have to run up to London towards the end of the month to
get some clothes made, and to meet my son who arrives from home. I much
regret that it will be quite impossible for me to go either to Oxford or
Cambridge--though, if things took an unexpectedly good turn, I might
indeed do so after June 18th, when my lecture course ends. Do you
meanwhile keep hearty and "funny"! I stopped at Gersau half a day and
found it a sweet little place. Fondly yours,
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
ROXBURGHE HOTEL,
EDINBURGH, _May 15, 1901_.
DEAREST FANNY,--You see where we are! I give _you_ the first news of
life's journey being so far advanced! It is a deadly enterprise, I'm
afraid, with the social entanglements that lie ahead, and I feel a cake
of ice in my epigastrium at the prospect, but _le vin est versé, il faut
le boire_, and from the other point of view, that it is real life
beginning once more, it is perfectly glorious, and I feel as if
yesterday in leaving London I had said good-bye to a rather dreadful
and death-bound segment of life. As regards the sociability, it is
fortunately a time of year in which only the medical part of the
University is present. The professors of the other faculties are already
in large part scattered, I think,--at least the two Seths (who are the
only ones I directly know) are away, and I have written to the Secretary
of the Academic Senate, Sir Ludovic Grant of the Law Faculty, that I am
unable to "dine out" or attend afternoon receptions, so we may be pretty
well left alone. I always hated lecturing except as regular instruction
to students, of whom there will probably be none now in the audience.
But to compensate, there begins next week a big convocation here of all
ministers in Scotland, and there will doubtless be a number of them
present, which, considering the matter to be offered, is probably
better.
We had a splendid journey yesterday in an American (almost!) train,
first-class, and had the pleasure of some talk with our Cambridge
neighbor, Mrs. Ole Bull, on her way to Norway to the unveiling of a
monument to her husband. She was accompanied by an extraordinarily fine
character and mind--odd way of expressing myself!--a young Englishwoman
named Noble, who has Hinduized herself (converted by Vivekananda to his
philosophy) and lives now for the Hindu people. These free individuals
who live their own life, no matter what domestic prejudices have to be
snapped, are on the whole a refreshing sight to me, who can do nothing
of the kind myself. And Miss Noble[34] is a most deliberate and balanced
person--no frothy enthusiast in point of character, though I believe her
philosophy to be more or less false. Perhaps no more so than anyone
else's!
We are in one of those deadly respectable hotels where you have to ring
the front-door-bell. Give me a cheerful, blackguardly place like the
Charing Cross, where we were in London. The London tailor and
shirtmaker, it being in the height of the Season, didn't fulfill their
promises; and as I sloughed my ancient cocoon at Rye, trusting to pick
up my iridescent wings the day before yesterday in passing through the
metropolis, I am here with but two _chemises_ at present (one of them
now in the wash) and fear that tomorrow, in spite of tailors' promises
to send, I may have to lecture in my pyjamas--that would give a cachet
of American originality. The weather is fine--we have just finished
breakfast.
Our son Harry ... and his mother will soon sally out to explore the
town, whilst I lie low till about noon, when I shall report my presence
and receive instructions from my boss, Grant, and prepare to meet the
storm. It is astonishing how pusillanimous two years of invalidism can
make one. Alice and Harry both send love, and so do I in heaps and
steamer-loads, dear Fanny, begging your mother to take of it as much as
she requires for her share. I will write again--doubtless--tomorrow.
_May 17._
It proved quite impossible to write to you yesterday, so I do it the
first thing this morning. I have made my plunge and the foregoing chill
has given place to the warm "reaction." The audience was more numerous
than had been expected, some 250, and exceedingly sympathetic, laughing
at everything, even whenever I used a polysyllabic word. I send you the
"Scotsman," with a skeleton report which might have been much worse
made. I am all right this morning again, so have no doubts of putting
the job through, if only I don't have too much sociability. I have got
a week free of invitations so far, and all things considered, fancy
that we shan't be persecuted.
Edinburgh is surely the noblest city ever built by man. The weather has
been splendid so far, and cold and bracing as the top of Mount
Washington in early April. Everyone here speaks of it however as "hot."
One needs fires at night and an overcoat out of the sun. The full-bodied
air, half misty and half smoky, holds the sunshine in that way which one
sees only in these islands, making the shadowy side of everything quite
black, so that all perspectives and vistas appear with objects cut
blackly against each other according to their nearness, and plane rising
behind plane of flat dark relieved against flat light in ever-receding
gradation. It is magnificent.
But I mustn't become a Ruskin!--the purpose of this letter being merely
to acquaint you with our well-being and success so far. We have found
bully lodgings, spacious to one's heart's content, upon a cheerful
square, and actually with a book-shelf fully two feet wide and two
stories high, upon the wall, the first we have seen for two years!
(There were of course book-cases enough at Lamb House, but all tight
packed already.) We now go out to take the air. I feel as if a decidedly
bad interlude in the journey of my life were closed, and the real honest
thing gradually beginning again. Love to you all! Your ever affectionate
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
EDINBURGH, _May 30, 1901_.
DEAREST FANNY,-- ...Beautiful as the spring is here, the words you so
often let drop about American weather make me homesick for that article.
It is blasphemous, however, to pine for anything when one is in
Edinburgh in May, and takes an open drive every afternoon in the
surrounding country by way of a constitutional. The green is of the
vividest, splendid trees and acres, and the air itself an _object_,
holding watery vapor, tenuous smoke, and ancient sunshine in solution,
so as to yield the most exquisite minglings and gradations of silvery
brown and blue and pearly gray. As for the city, its vistas are
magnificent.
We are _comblés_ with civilities, which Harry and Alice are to a certain
extent enjoying, though I have to hang back and spend much of the time
between my lectures in bed, to rest off the aortic distress which that
operation gives. I call it aortic because it feels like that, but I can
get no information from the Drs., so I won't swear I'm right. My heart,
under the influence of that magical juice, tincture of digitalis,--only
6 drops daily,--is performing _beautifully_ and gives no trouble at all.
The audiences grow instead of dwindling, and in spite of rain, being
about 300 and just crowding the room. They sit as still as death and
then applaud magnificently, so I am sure the lectures are a success.
Previous Gifford lectures have had audiences beginning with 60 and
dwindling to 15. In an hour and a half (I write this in bed) I shall be
beginning the fifth lecture, which will, when finished, put me half way
through the arduous job. I know you will relish these details, which
please pass on to Jim P. I would send you the reports in the "Scotsman,"
but they distort so much by their sham continuity with vast omission
(the reporters get my MS.), that the result is caricature. Edinburgh is
_spiritually_ much like Boston, only stronger and with more temperament
in the people. But we're all growing into much of a sameness everywhere.
I have dined out once--an almost fatal experiment! I was introduced to
Lord Somebody: "How often do you lecture?"--"Twice a week."--"What do
you do between?--play golf?" Another invitation: "Come at 6--the dinner
at 7.30--and we can walk or play bowls till dinner so as not to fatigue
you"--I having pleaded my delicacy of constitution.
I rejoice in the prospect of Booker W.'s[35] book, and thank your mother
heartily. My mouth had been watering for just that volume.
Autobiographies take the cake. I mean to read nothing else. Strange to
say, I am now for the first time reading Marie Bashkirtseff. It takes
hold of me tremenjus. I feel as if I had lived inside of her, and in
spite of her hatefulness, esteem and even like her for her incorruptible
way of telling the truth. I have not seen Huxley's life yet. It must be
delightful, only I can't agree to what seems to be becoming the
conventionally accepted view of him, that he possessed the exclusive
specialty of living for the truth. A good deal of humbug about that!--at
least when it becomes a professional and heroic attitude.
Your base remark about Aguinaldo is clean forgotten, if ever heard. I
know you wouldn't harm the poor man, who, unless Malay human nature is
weaker than human nature elsewhere, has pretty surely some surprises up
his sleeve for us yet. Best love to you all. Your affectionate
Wm. James.
_To Henry W. Rankin._
EDINBURGH, _June 16, 1901_.
DEAR MR. RANKIN,--I have received all your letters and missives,
inclusive of the letter which you think I must have lost, some months
back. I professor-ed you because I had read your name printed with that
title in a newspaper letter from East Northfield, and supposed that, by
courtesy at any rate, that title was conferred on you by a public
opinion to which I liked to conform.
I have given nine of my lectures and am to give the tenth tomorrow. They
have been a success, to judge by the numbers of the audience (300-odd)
and their non-diminution towards the end. No previous "Giffords" have
drawn near so many. It will please you to know that I am stronger and
tougher than when I began, too; so a great load is off my mind. You have
been so extraordinarily brotherly to me in writing of your convictions
and in furnishing me ideas, that I feel ashamed of my churlish and chary
replies. You, however, have forgiven me. Now, at the end of this first
course, I feel my "matter" taking firmer shape, and it will please you
less to hear me say that I believe myself to be (probably) permanently
incapable of believing the Christian scheme of vicarious salvation, and
wedded to a more continuously evolutionary mode of thought. The reasons
you from time to time have given me, never better expressed than in your
letter before the last, have somehow failed to convince. In these
lectures the ground I am taking is this: The mother sea and
fountain-head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the
individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All
theologies and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed;
and the experiences make such flexible combinations with the
intellectual prepossessions of their subjects, that one may almost say
that they have no proper _intellectual_ deliverance of their own, but
belong to a region deeper, and more vital and practical, than that which
the intellect inhabits. For this they are also indestructible by
intellectual arguments and criticisms. I attach the mystical or
religious consciousness to the possession of an extended subliminal
self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption. We
are thus made convincingly aware of the presence of a sphere of life
larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness, with which the
latter is nevertheless continuous. The impressions and impulsions and
emotions and excitements which we thence receive help us to live, they
found invincible assurance of a world beyond the sense, they melt our
hearts and communicate significance and value to everything and make us
happy. They do this for the individual who has them, and other
individuals follow him. Religion in this way is absolutely
indestructible. Philosophy and theology give their conceptual
interpretations of this experiential life. The farther margin of the
subliminal field being unknown, it can be treated as by Transcendental
Idealism, as an Absolute mind with a part of which we coalesce, or by
Christian theology, as a distinct deity acting on us. Something, not our
immediate self, does act on our life! So I seem doubtless to my audience
to be blowing hot and cold, explaining away Christianity, yet defending
the more general basis from which I say it proceeds. I fear that these
brief words may be misleading, but let them go! When the book comes out,
you will get a truer idea.
Believe me, with profound regards, your always truly,
Wm. James.
_To Charles Eliot Norton._
RYE, _June 26, 1901_.
DEAR CHARLES NORTON,--Your delightful letter of June 1st has added one
more item to my debt of gratitude to you; and now that the Edinburgh
strain is over, I can sit down and make you a reply a little more
adequate than heretofore has been possible. The lectures went off most
successfully, and though I got tired enough, I feel that I am
essentially tougher and stronger for the old familiar functional
activity. My _tone_ is changed immensely, and that is the main point. To
be actually earning one's salt again, after so many months of listless
waiting and wondering whether such a thing will ever again become
possible, puts a new heart into one, and I now look towards the future
with aggressive and hopeful eyes again, though perhaps not with quite
the cannibalistic ones of the youth of the new century.
Edinburgh is great. A strong broad city, and, in its spiritual essence,
almost exactly feeling to me like old Boston, _nuclear_ Boston, though
on a larger, more important scale. People were very friendly, but we had
to dodge invitations--_hoffentlich_ I may be able to accept more of them
next year. The audience was extraordinarily attentive and reactive--I
never had an audience so keen to catch every point. I flatter myself
that by blowing alternately hot and cold on their Christian prejudices I
succeeded in baffling them completely till the final quarter-hour, when
I satisfied their curiosity by showing more plainly my hand. Then, I
think, I permanently dissatisfied both extremes, and pleased a mean
numerically quite small. _Qui vivra verra_. London seemed curiously
profane and free-and-easy, not exactly _shabby_, but go-as-you-please,
in aspect, as we came down five days ago. Since then I spent a day with
poor Mrs. Myers.... I mailed you yesterday a notice I wrote in Rome of
him.[36] He "looms" upon me after death more than he did in life, and I
think that his forthcoming book about "Human Personality" will probably
rank hereafter as "epoch-making."
At London I saw Theodora [Sedgwick] and the W. Darwins. Theodora was as
good and genial as ever, and Sara [Darwin] looked, I thought,
wonderfully "distinguished" and wonderfully little changed considering
the length of intervening years and the advance of the Enemy. I was too
tired to look up Leslie Stephen, or anyone else save Mrs. John Bancroft
when in London, although I wanted much to see L. S. The first volume of
his "Utilitarians" seems to me a wonderfully spirited performance--I
haven't yet got at the other two.
I am hoping to get off to Nauheim tomorrow, leaving Alice and Harry to
follow a little later. I confess that the Continent "draws" me again. I
don't know whether it be the essential identity of soul that expresses
itself in English things, and makes them seem known by heart already and
intellectually dead and unexciting, or whether it is the singular lack
of visible _sentiment_ in England, and absence of "charm," or the
oppressive ponderosity and superfluity and prominence of the
unnecessary, or what it is, but I'm blest if I ever wish to be in
England again. Any continental country whatever stimulates and refreshes
vastly more, in spite of so much strong picturesqueness here, and so
beautiful a Nature. England is ungracious, unamiable and heavy; whilst
the Continent is everywhere light and amiably quaint, even where it is
ugly, as in many elements it is in Germany. To tell the truth, I long to
steep myself in America again and let the broken rootlets make new
adhesions to the native soil. A man coquetting with too many countries
is as bad as a bigamist, and loses his soul altogether.
I suppose you are at Ashfield and I hope surrounded, or soon to be so,
by more children than of late, and all well and happy. Don't feel too
bad about the country. We've thrown away our old privileged and
prerogative position among the nations, but it only showed we were less
sincere about it than we supposed we were. The eternal fight of
liberalism has now to be fought by us on much the same terms as in the
older countries. We have still the better chance in our freedom from all
the corrupting influences from on top from which they suffer.--Good-bye
and love from both of us, to you all. Yours ever faithfully,
Wm. James.
_To Nathaniel S. Shaler._
[1901?]
DEAR SHALER,--Being a man of methodical sequence in my reading, which in
these days is anyhow rather slower than it used to be, I have only just
got at your book.[37] Once begun, it slipped along "like a novel," and I
must confess to you that it leaves a good taste behind; in fact a sort
of _haunting_ flavor due to its individuality, which I find it hard to
explain or define.
To begin with, it doesn't seem exactly like you, but rather like some
quiet and conscientious old passive contemplator of life, not bristling
as you are with "points," and vivacity. Its light is dampened and
suffused--and all the better perhaps for that. Then it is essentially a
confession of faith and a religious attitude--which one doesn't get so
much from you upon the street, although even there 'tis clear that you
have that within which passeth show. The optimism and healthy-mindedness
are yours through and through, so is the wide imagination. But the
moderate and non-emphatic way of putting things is not; nor is the
absence of any "American humor." So I don't know just when or where or
how you wrote it. I can't place it in the Museum or University Hall.
Probably it was in Quincy Street, and in a sort of Piperio-Armadan
trance! Anyhow it is a sincere book, and tremendously impressive by the
gravity and dignity and peacefulness with which it suggests rather than
proclaims conclusions on these eternal themes. No more than you can I
believe that death is due to selection; yet I wish you had framed some
hypothesis as to the physico-chemical necessity thereof, or discussed
such hypotheses as have been made. I think you deduce a little too
easily from the facts the existence of a general guiding tendency toward
ends like those which our mind sets. We never know what ends may have
been kept from realization, for the dead tell no tales. The surviving
witness would in any case, and whatever he were, draw the conclusion
that the universe was planned to make him and the like of him succeed,
for it actually did so. But your argument that it is millions to one
that it didn't do so by chance doesn't apply. It would apply if the
witness had preëxisted in an independent form and framed his scheme, and
then the world had realized it. Such a coincidence would prove the world
to have a kindred mind to his. But there has been no such coincidence.
The world has come but once; the witness is there after the fact and
simply approves, dependently. As I understand improbability, it only
exists where independents coincide. Where only one fact is in question,
there is no relation of "probability" at all. I think, therefore, that
the excellences we have reached and now approve may be due to no general
design but merely to a succession of the short designs we actually know
of, taking advantage of opportunity, and adding themselves together from
point to point. We are all you say we are, as heirs; we are a mystery of
condensation, and yet of extrication and individuation, and we must
worship the soil we have so wonderfully sprung from. Yet I don't think
we are necessitated to worship it as the Theists do, in the shape of one
all-inclusive and all-operative designing power, but rather like
polytheists, in the shape of a collection of beings who have each
contributed and are now contributing to the realization of ideals more
or less like those for which we live ourselves. This more pluralistic
style of feeling seems to me both to allow of a warmer sort of loyalty
to our past helpers, and to tally more exactly with the mixed condition
in which we find the world as to its ideals. What if we did come where
we are by chance, or by mere fact, with no one general design? What is
gained, is gained, all the same. As to what may have been lost, who
knows of it, in any case? or whether it might not have been much better
than what came? But if it might, that need not prevent _us_ from
building on what _we_ have.
There are lots of impressive passages in the book, which certainly will
live and be an influence of a high order. Chapters 8, 10, 14, 15 have
struck me most particularly.
I gave at Edinburgh two lectures on "The Religion of
Healthy-Mindedness," contrasting it with that of "the sick soul." I
shall soon have to quote your book as a healthy-minded document of the
first importance, though I believe myself that the sick soul must have
its say, and probably carries authority too.... Ever yours,
Wm. James.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
NAUHEIM, _July 10, 1901_.
DEAREST FANNY,--Your letter of June 28th comes just as I was working
myself up to a last European farewell to you, anyhow, the which has far
more instigative spur now, with your magnificent effusion in my hands.
Dear Fanny, whatever you do, don't _die_ before our return! In these
two short years so many of my best friends have been mown down, that I
feel uncertainty everywhere, and gasp till the interval is over. John
Ropes, Henry Sidgwick, F. Myers, T. Davidson, Carroll Everett, Edward
Hooper, John Fiske, all intimate and valuable, some of them extremely
so, and the circle grows ever smaller and will grow so to the end of
one's own life. Now comes Whitman, whom I never knew very well, but whom
I always liked thoroughly, and wish I had known better.... It will be
interesting to know what new turn it will give to S. W.'s existence. I
haven't the least idea how it will affect her outward life. Doubtless
she will be freer to come abroad; but I hope and trust she will not be
taking to staying any time in London or Paris, in the brutal cynical
atmosphere of which places her little eagerness and efflorescences and
cordialities would receive no such sympathetic treatment as they do with
us, until she had stayed long enough for people to know her thoroughly
and conquered a position by living down the first impression. Nothing so
_anti-English_ as S. W.'s whole "sphere." So keep her at home--with
occasional sallies abroad; and if she must ever winter abroad, let it be
in delightful slipshod old Rome! All which, as you perceive, is somewhat
confidential. I trust that the present failure of health with her is
something altogether transient, and that she will keep swimming long
after everyone else has put into shore.
Which simile reminds me of Mrs. Holmes's panel, with its superb
inscription.[38] What a sense she has for such things! and how I thank
you for quoting it! With your and her permission, I shall make a vital
use of it in a future book. It sums up the attitude towards life of a
good philosophic pluralist, and that is what, in my capacity of author
of that book, I am to be. I thank you also for the reference to I
Corinthians, 1, 28, etc.[39] I had never expressly noticed that text;
but it will make the splendidest motto for Myers's two posthumous
volumes, and I am going to write to Mrs. Myers to suggest the same. I
thank you also for your sympathetic remarks about my paper on Myers.
Fifty or a hundred years hence, people will know better than now whether
his instinct for truth was a sound one; and perhaps will then pat me on
the back for backing him. At present they give us the cold shoulder. We
are righter, in any event, than the Münsterbergs and Jastrows are,
because we don't undertake, as a condition of our investigating
phenomena, to bargain with them that they shan't upset our
"presuppositions."
It is a beautiful summer morning, and I write under an awning on the
high-perched corner balcony of the bedroom in which we live, of a corner
house on the edge of the little town, with houses on the west of us and
the fertile country spreading towards the east and south. A lovely
region, though a climate terribly _flat_. I expect to take my last bath
today, and to get my absolution from the terrible Schott; whereupon we
shall leave tomorrow morning for Strassburg and the Vosges, for a week
of touring up in higher air, and thence, _über_ Paris, as straight as
may be for Rye. I keep in a state of subliminal excitement over our
sailing on the 31st. It seems too good to be really possible. Yet the
ratchet of time will work along its daily cogs, and doubtless bring it
safe within our grasp. Last year I felt no distinctly beneficial effect
from the baths. This year it is distinct. I have, in other words,
continued pretty steadily getting better for four months past; so it is
evident that I am in a genuinely ameliorative phase of my existence, of
which the acquired momentum may carry me beyond any living man of my
age. At any rate, I set no limits now!
When we return I shall go straight up to Chocorua to the Salters'. What
I _crave_ most is some wild American country. It is a curious
organic-feeling need. One's social relations with European landscape are
entirely different, everything being so fenced or planted that you can't
lie down and sprawl. Kipling, alluding to the "bleeding raw" appearance
of some of our outskirt settlements, says, "Americans don't mix much
with their landscape as yet." But we mix a darned sight more than
Europeans, so far as our individual organisms go, with our camping and
general wild-animal personal relations. Thank Heaven that our Nature is
so much less "redeemed"!...
You see, Fanny, that we are in good spirits on the whole, although my
poor dear Alice has long sick-headaches that consume a good many
days--she is just emerging from a bad one. Happiness, I have lately
discovered, is no positive feeling, but a negative condition of freedom
from a number of restrictive sensations of which our organism usually
seems to be the seat. When they are wiped out, the clearness and
cleanness of the contrast is happiness. This is why anesthetics make us
so happy. But don't you take to drink on that account! Love to your
mother, Mary, and all. Write to us no more. How happy _that_
responsibility gone must make you! We both send warmest love,
W. J.
_To Henry James._
[Post-card]
BAD-NAUHEIM, _July 11, [1901]_.
Your letter and paper, with the shock of John Fiske's death, came
yesterday. It is too bad, for he had lots of good work in him yet, and
is a loss to American letters as well as to his family. Singularly
simple, solid, honest creature, he will be hugely missed by many!
Everybody seems to be going! _We_ stay. Life here is absolutely
monotonous, but very sweet. The country is so innocently pretty. I sit
up here on a terrace-restaurant, looking down on park and town, with the
leaves playing in the warm breeze above me, and the little Gothic town
of Friedberg only a mile off, in the midst of the great fertile plain
all chequer-boarded with the different tinted crops and framed in a
far-off horizon of low hills and woods. Alice and Harry, kept in by the
heat, come later. He went for a distant walk yesterday P.M. and, not
returning till near eleven, we thought he might have got lost in the
woods. Yale beat the University race, _but_ Bill's four[-oared crew]
beat the Yale four. On such things is human contentment based. The baths
stir up my aortic feeling and make me depressed, but I've had 6 of them,
and the rest will pass quickly. Love.
W. J.
_To E. L. Godkin._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _July 25, 1901_.
DEAR GODKIN,--Yours of the 9th, which came duly, gave me great pleasure,
first because it showed that your love for me had not grown cold, and,
second, because it seemed to reveal in you tendencies towards
sociability at large which are incompatible with a very alarming
condition of health. Nothing can give us greater pleasure than to come
and see you before we sail. We shall stick here, probably, for a
fortnight longer, then go for a week to the Hartz mountains to brace up
a little--the baths being very debilitating and the air of Nauheim
sedative. Then straight to Rye until we sail--on August 31st. I hope
that you enjoy the "New Forest"--the "Children" thereof, by Capt. Mayne
Reid, I think, was one of my most mysteriously impressive books about
the age of ten. But I fear that there is not much primeval forest to be
seen there nowadays. Nauheim is a sweet little place. One never sees a
soldier and wouldn't know that _Militarismus_ existed. There are two
policemen, one of them an old fellow of 70 who shuffles along to keep
his weak knees from giving way. I went on business to the police office
t' other day. The building stood in a fine cabbage garden, and over the
first door one met on entering stood the word _Küche_[40] in large
letters. Quite like the old idyllic pre-Sadowan German days. My heart is
getting _well_! I made an excursion to Homburg yesterday, with J. B.
Warner of Cambridge, counsellor at law, and general disputant. For about
six hours we discussed the Philippine question, he damning the
anti-Imperialists--yet my thoracic contents remained as solid as if cast
in Portland cement. Six months ago I should have had the wildest
commotion there. Congratulate me! Kindest regards to you both, in which
my wife joins. Yours ever affectionately,
Wm. James.
It should perhaps be explained that E. L. Godkin had had a cerebral
hemorrhage the year before. It had left him clear in mind, but a
permanent invalid, with little power of locomotion. James spent several
days with him at Castle Malwood near Stony Cross before he sailed for
home; and when he was in England again the next year, he repeated the
visit.
[Illustration: William James and Henry James posing for a Kodak in
1900.]
_To E. L. Godkin._
LAMB HOUSE, _Aug. 29, 1901_.
MY DEAR GODKIN,--Just a line to bid you both farewell! We leave for
London tomorrow morning and at four on Saturday we shall be ploughing
the deep. All goes well, save that the wife has sprained her ankle, and
with the "firmness" that characterizes her lovely sex insists on
hobbling about and doing all the packing. I shan't be aisy till I see
her in her berth.
After all, in spite of you and Henry, and all Americo-phobes, I'm glad
I'm going back to my own country again. Notwithstanding its
"humble"ness, its fatigues, and its complications, there's no place like
home--though I think the New Forest might come near it as a substitute.
England in general is too padded and cushioned for my rustic taste.
The most elevating _moral_ thing I've seen during these two years
abroad, after Myers's heroic exit from this world at Rome last winter,
has been the gentleness and cheerful spirit with which you are still
able to remain in it after such a blow as you have received. Who could
suppose so much public ferocity to cover so much private sweetness?
Seriously speaking, it is more edifying to us others, dear Godkin, than
you yourself can understand it to be, and I for one have learned by the
example. I pray that your winter problems may gradually solve themselves
without perplexity, and that next spring may find you relieved of all
this helplessness. It is a very slow progress, with many steps
backwards, but if the length of the forward steps preponderates, one
may be well content. Good-bye and bless you both. Affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
James returned to America in early September, in advance of the
beginning of the College term. But from this time on he limited his
teaching to one half-course during the year. His intention was to
husband his strength for writing. The course which he offered during the
first half of the College year was accordingly announced as a course on
"The Psychological Elements of Religious Life." By the end of the
winter, the second series of Gifford lectures, constituting the last
half of the "Varieties," had been written out.
_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._
SILVER LAKE, N. H., _Sept. 14, 1901_.
DEAR PAULINE,--Your kind letter (excuse pencil--pen won't write) appears
to have reached London after our departure and has just followed us
hither. I had hoped for a word from you, first at Nauheim, then on the
steamer, then at Cambridge; but this makes everything right. How good to
think of you as the same old loveress of woods and skies and waters, and
of your Bryn-Mawr friends. May none of the lot of you ever grow
insufficient or forsake each other! The sight of you sporting in
Nature's bosom once lifted me into a sympathetic region, and made a
better boy of me in ways which it would probably amuse and surprise you
to learn of, so strangely are characters useful to each other, and so
subtly are destinies intermixed. But with you on the mountain-tops of
existence still, and me apparently destined to remain grubbing in the
cellar, we seem far enough apart at present and may have to remain so.
Alas! how brief is life's glory, at the best. I can't get to Keene
Valley this year, and [may] possibly never get there. Give a kindly
thought, my friend, to the spectre who once for a few times trudged by
your side, and who would do so again if he could. I'm a "motor," and
morally ill-adapted to the game of patience. I have reached home in
pretty poor case, but I think it's mainly "nerves" at present, and
therefore remediable; so I live on the future, but keep my expectations
modest. Two years away has been too long, and the "strangeness" which I
dreaded (from past experience of it) covers all things American as with
a veil. Pathetic and poverty-stricken is all I see! This will pass away,
but I don't want good things to pass away also, so I beseech you,
Pauline, to sit down and write me a good intimate letter telling me what
your life and interest were in New York last winter.
I am very sorry to hear of your sister Susan's illness, and pray that
the summer will set her right. Did you see much of Miller this summer? I
hate to think of his having grown so delicate! Did you see Perry again?
He was at the Putnam Camp? How is Adler after his _Cur_?--or is he not
yet back? What have you read? What have you cared for? Be indulgent to
me, and write to me here--I stay for 10 days longer--the family--all
well--remain in Cambridge. I find letters a great thing to keep one from
slipping out of life.
Love to you all! Your
W. J.
The next letter was written across the back of a circular invitation to
join the American Philosophical Association, then being formed, of which
Professor Gardiner was Secretary.
_To H. N. Gardiner._
Cambridge, _Nov. 14, 1901_.
DEAR GARDINER,--I am still pretty poorly and can't "jine" anything--but,
apart from that, I don't foresee much good from a Philosophical Society.
Philosophical discussion proper only succeeds between intimates who have
learned how to converse by months of weary trials and failure. The
philosopher is a lone beast dwelling in his individual burrow.--Count me
_out_!--I hope all goes well with you. I expect to get well, but it
needs _patience_.
Wm. James.
On April 1, 1902, James sailed for England, to deliver the second
"course" of his series of Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh.
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
HATLEY ST. GEORGE,
TORQUAY, _Apr. 20, 1902_.
MY DEAR SCHILLER,--I could shed tears that you should have been so near
me and yet been missed. I got your big envelope on Thursday at the
hotel, and your two other missives here this morning. Of the Axioms
paper I have only read a sheet and a half at the beginning and the
superb conclusion which has just arrived. I shall fairly _gloat_ upon
the whole of it, and will write you my impressions and criticisms, if
criticisms there be. It is an uplifting thought that truth is to be told
at last in a radical and attention-compelling manner. I think I know,
though, how the attention of many will find a way not to be
compelled--their will is so set on having a technically and artificially
and _professionally_ expressed system, that all talk carried on as yours
is on principles of common-sense activity is as remote and little
worthy of being listened to as the slanging each other of boys in the
street as we pass. Men disdain to notice that. It is only after our
(_i.e._ your and my) general way of thinking gets organized enough to
become a regular part of the _bureaucracy_ of philosophy that we shall
get a serious hearing. Then, I feel inwardly convinced, our day will
have come. But then, you may well say, the brains will be out and the
man will be dead. Anyhow, _vive_ the Anglo-Saxon amateur, disciple of
Locke and Hume, and _pereat_ the German professional!
We are here for a week with the Godkins--poor old G., once such a power,
and now an utter wreck after a stroke of paralysis three years ago.
Beautiful place, southeast gale, volleying rain and streaming panes and
volumes of soft sea-laden wind.
I hope you are not serious about an Oxford degree for your humble
servant. If you are, pray drop the thought! I am out of the race for all
such vanities. Write me a degree on parchment and send it yourself--in
any case it would be but your award!--and it will be cheaper and more
veracious. I _had_ to take the Edinburgh one, and accepted the Durham
one to please my wife. Thank you, no coronation either! I am a poor New
Hampshire rustic, in bad health, and long to get back, after four
summers' absence, to my own cottage and children, and never come away
again for lectures or degrees or anything else. It all depends on a
man's age; and after sixty, if ever, one feels as if one ought to come
to some sort of equilibrium with one's native environment, and by means
of a regular life get one's small message to mankind on paper. That
nowadays is my only aspiration. The Gifford lectures are all facts and
no philosophy--I trust that you may receive the volume by the middle of
June.
When, oh, when is your volume to appear? The sheet you send me leaves
off just at the point where Boyle-Gibson begins to me to be most
interesting! Ever fondly yours,
Wm. James.
Your ancient President, Schurman, was also at Edinburgh getting LL.D'd.
He is conducting a campaign in favor of Philippino independence with
masterly tactics, which reconcile me completely to him, laying his
finger on just the right and telling points.
_To Charles Eliot Norton._
LAMB HOUSE, RYE, _May 4, 1902_.
DEAR NORTON,--I hear with grief and concern that you have had a bad
fall. In a letter received this morning you are described as better, so
I hope it will have had no untoward consequences beyond the immediate
shock. We need you long to abide with us in undiminished vigor and
health. Our voyage was smooth, though cloudy, and we found Miss Ward a
very honest and lovable girl. Henry D. Lloyd, whose name you know as
that of a state-socialist writer, sat opposite to us, and proved one of
the most "winning" men it was ever my fortune to know.
We went to Stratford for the first time. The absolute extermination and
obliteration of every record of Shakespeare save a few sordid material
details, and the general suggestion of narrowness and niggardliness
which ancient Stratford makes, taken in comparison with the way in which
the spiritual quantity "Shakespeare" has mingled into the soul of the
world, was most uncanny, and I feel ready to believe in almost any
mythical story of the authorship. In fact a visit to Stratford now seems
to me the strongest appeal a Baconian can make. The country round about
was exquisite. Still more so the country round about Torquay, where we
stayed with the Godkins for eight days--he holding his own, as it seemed
to me, but hardly improving, she earning palms of glory by her strength
and virtue. A regular little trump! They have taken for the next two
months the most beautiful country place I ever saw, occupying an elbow
of the Dart, and commanding a view up and down. We are here for but a
week, my lectures beginning on the 13th. H. J. seems tranquil and happy
in his work, though he has been much pestered of late by gout.
I suppose you are rejoicing as much as I in the public interest finally
aroused in the Philippine conquest. A personal scandal, it seems, is
really the only thing that will wake the ordinary man's attention up. It
should be the first aim of every good leader of opinion to rake up one
on the opposite side. It should be introduced among our Faculty methods!
Don't think, dear Norton, that you must answer this letter, which only
your accident has made me write. We shall be home so soon that I shall
see you face to face. The wife sends love, as I do, to you all. No warm
weather whatever as yet--I am having chilblains!! Ever affectionately
yours,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
R.M.S. IVERNIA, _June 18, 1902_.
DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--We ought to be off Boston tonight. After a cold and
wet voyage, including two days of head-gale and heavy sea, and one of
unbroken fog with lugubriously moo-ing fog-horn, the sun has risen upon
American weather, a strong west wind like champagne, blowing out of a
saturated blue sky right in our teeth, the sea all effervescing and
sparkling with white caps and lace, the strong sun lording it in the
sky, and hope presiding in the heart. What more natural than to report
all this happy turn of affairs to you, buried as you probably still are
in the blankets of the London atmosphere, beautiful opalescent blankets
though they be, and (when one's vitals once are acclimated) yielding
more wonderful artistic effects than anything to be seen in America.
"C'est le pays de la couleur," as my brother is fond of saying in the
words of Alphonse Daudet! But no matter for international comparisons,
which are the least profitable of human employments. Christ died for us
all, so let us all be as we are, save where we want to reform ourselves.
(The only unpardonable crime is that of wanting to reform _one another_,
after the fashion of the U. S. in the Philippines.) ... Your sweet
letter of several dates reached us just before we left Edinburgh--excuse
the insipid adjective "sweet," which after all does express something
which less simple vocables may easily miss--and gave an impression of
harmony and inner health which it warms the heart to become sensible of.
I understand your temptation to stay over, but I also understand your
temptation to get back; and I imagine that more and more you will solve
the problem by a good deal of alternation in future years. It is curious
how utterly distinct the three countries of England, Ireland and
Scotland are, which we so summarily lump together--Scotland so
democratic and so much like New England in many respects. But it would
be a waste of time for you to go there. Keep to the South and spend one
winter in Rome, before you die, and a spring in the smaller Italian
cities!
I hope that Henry will have managed to get you and Miss Tuckerman to Rye
for a day--it is so curiously quaint and characteristic. I had a bad
conscience about leaving him, for I think he feels lonely as he grows
old, and friends pass over to the majority. He and I are so utterly
different in all our observances and springs of action, that we can't
rightly judge each other. I even feel great shrinking from urging him to
pay us a visit, fearing it might yield him little besides painful
shocks--and, after all, what besides pain and shock _is_ the right
reaction for anyone to make upon our vocalization and pronunciation? The
careful consonants and musical cadences of the Scotchwomen were such a
balm to the ear! I wish that you and poor Henry could become really
intimate. He is at bottom a very tender-hearted and generous being! No
more paper! so I cross! I wish when we once get settled again at
Chocorua that we might enclose you under our roof, even if only for one
night, on your way to or from the Merrimans. I should like to show you
true simplicity.
[_No signature_.]
The Gifford Lectures were published as "The Varieties of Religious
Experience, a Study in Human Nature," in June, 1902. The immediate
"popularity" of this psychological survey of man's religious
propensities was great; and the continued sales of the book contributed
not a little to relieve James of financial anxiety during the last years
of his life.
The cordiality with which theological journals and private
correspondents of many creeds greeted the "Varieties," as containing a
fair treatment of facts which other writers had approached with a
sectarian or anti-theological bias, was striking. James was amused at
being told that the book had "supplied the protestant pulpits with
sermons for a twelve-month." Regarding himself as "a most protestant
protestant," as he once said, he was especially pleased by the manner in
which it was received by Roman Catholic reviewers.
Certain philosophical conclusions were indicated broadly in the
"Varieties" without being elaborated. The book was a survey, an
examination, of the facts. James had originally conceived of the Gifford
appointment as giving him "an opportunity for a certain amount of
psychology and a certain amount of metaphysics," and so had thought of
making the first series of lectures descriptive of man's religious
propensities and the second series a metaphysical study of their
satisfaction through philosophy. The psychological material had grown to
unforeseen dimensions, and it ended by filling the book. The
metaphysical study remained to be elaborated; and to such work James now
turned.
XIV
1902-1905
_The Last Period (I)--Philosophical Writing--Statements of Religious
Relief_
JAMES now limited his teaching in Harvard University, as has been said,
to half a course a year and tried to devote his working energies to
formulating a statement of his philosophical conceptions. For two years
he published almost nothing; then the essays which were subsequently
collected in the volumes called "Pragmatism," "The Pluralistic
Universe," "The Meaning of Truth," and "Essays in Radical Empiricism,"
began to appear in the philosophic journals, or were delivered as
special lectures. Whenever he accepted invitations to lecture outside
the College, as he still did occasionally, it was with the purpose of
getting these conceptions expressed and of throwing them into the arena
of discussion. But demands which correspondents and callers from all
parts of the globe now made on his time and sympathy were formidable,
for he could not rid himself of the habit of treating the most trivial
of these with consideration, or acquire the habit of using a secretary.
In this way there continued to be a constant drain on his strength. "It
is probably difficult [thus he wrote wearily to Mr. Lutoslawski, who had
begged him to collaborate with him on a book in 1904] for a man whose
cerebral machine works with such facility as yours does to imagine the
kind of consciousness of men like Flournoy and myself. The background of
my consciousness, so far as my own achievements go, is composed of a
_sense of impossibility_--a sense well warranted by the facts. For
instance, two years ago, the 'Varieties' being published, I decided
that everything was cleared and that my duty was immediately to begin
writing my metaphysical system. Up to last October, when the academic
year began, I had written some 200 pages of _notes_, _i.e._ disconnected
_brouillons_. I hoped this year to write 400 or 500 pages of straight
composition, and could have done so without the interruptions. As a
matter of fact, with the best will in the world, I have written exactly
32 pages! For an academic year's work, that is not brilliant! You see
that, when I refuse your request, it is, after a fashion, in order to
save my own life. My working day is anyhow, _at best_, only three hours
long--by working I mean writing and reading philosophy." This estimate
of his "notes" was, as always, self-deprecatory; but there was no
denying a great measure of truth to the statement. Frequently his health
made it necessary for him to escape from Cambridge and his desk. These
incidents will be noted separately wherever the context requires.
Yet in spite of these difficulties and notwithstanding his complaints of
constant frustration, the spirit with which James still did his work
emerges from the essays of this time as well as from his letters. It was
as if the years that had preceded had been years of preparation for just
what he was now doing. At the age of sixty-three he turned to the
formulation of his empirical philosophy with the eagerness of a
schoolboy let out to play. Misunderstanding disturbed him only
momentarily, opposition stimulated him, he rejoiced openly in the
controversies which he provoked, and engaged in polemics with the good
humor and vigor that were the essence of his genius. His "truth" must
prevail! the Absolute should suffer its death-blow! Flournoy, Bergson,
Schiller, Papini, and others too were "on his side." He made merry at
the expense of his critics, or bewailed the perversity of their
opposition; but he always encouraged them to "lay on." The imagery of
contest and battle appeared in the letters which he threw off, and he
expressed himself as freely as only a man can who has outgrown the
reserves of his youth.
_To Henry L. Higginson._
CHOCORUA, _July 3, 1902_.
DEAR HENRY,--Thanks for your letter of the other day, etc. Alice tells
me of a queer conversation you and she had upon the cars. I am not
anxious about money, beyond wishing not to live on capital.... As I have
frequently said, I mean to support you in your old age. In fact the hope
of that is about all that I now live for, being surfeited with the glory
of academic degrees just escaped, like this last one which, in the
friendliness of its heart, your [Harvard] Corporation designed sponging
upon me at Commencement.[41] Boil it and solder it up from the microbes,
and it may do for another year, if I am not in prison! The friendliness
of such recognition is a delightful thing to a man about to graduate
from the season of his usefulness. "La renommé vient," as I have heard
John La Farge quote, "à ceux qui ont la patience d'attendre, et
s'accroit à raison de leur imbecillité." Best wishes to you all. Yours
ever,
Wm. James.
_To Miss Grace Norton._
CHOCORUA, _Aug. 29, 1902_.
MY DEAR GRACE,--Will you kindly let me know, by the method of
effacement, on the accompanying post-card, whether the box from Germany
of which I wrote you some time ago has or has not yet been left at your
house. I paid the express, over twenty dollars, on it three weeks ago,
directing it to be left with you.
The ice being thus broken, let me ramble on! How do-ist thou? And how is
the moist and cool summer suiting thee? I hope, well! It has certainly
been a boon to most people. Our house has been full of company of which
tomorrow the last boys will leave, and I confess I shall enjoy the
change to no responsibility. The scourge of life is _responsibility_--always
there with its scowling face, and when it ceases to someone else, it
begins to yourself, or to your God, if you have one. Consider the
lilies, how free they are from it, and yet how beautiful the expression
of their face. Especially should those emerging from "nervous
prostration" be suffered to be without it--they have trouble enough in
any case. I am getting on famously, but for that drawback, on which my
temper is liable to break; but I _walk_ somewhat as in old times, and
that is the main corner to have turned. The country seems as beautiful
as ever--it is good that, when age takes away the zest from so many
things, it seems to make no difference at all in one's capacity for
enjoying landscape and the aspects of Nature. We are all well, and shall
very soon be buzzing about Irving Street as of yore. Keep well yourself,
dear Grace; and believe me ever your friend,
Wm. James.
To this word about enjoying the aspects of nature may be added a few
lines from a letter to his son William, which James wrote from Europe in
1900:--
"Scenery seems to wear in one's consciousness better than any other
element in life. In this year of much solemn and idle meditation, I
have often been surprised to find what a predominant part in my own
spiritual experience it has played, and how it stands out as almost the
only thing the memory of which I should like to carry over with me
beyond the veil, unamended and unaltered. From the midst of every thing
else, almost, _surgit amari aliquid_; but from the days in the open air,
never any bitter whiff, save that they are gone forever."
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
STONEHURST,
INTERVALE, N. H., _Sept. 18, 1902_.
DEAREST FANNY,--How long it is since we have exchanged salutations and
reported progress! Happy the country which is without a history! _I_
have had no history to communicate, and I hope that you have had none
either, and that the summer has glided away as happily for you as it has
for us. Now it begins to fade towards the horizon over which so many
ancient summers have slipped, and our household is on the point of
"breaking up" just when the season invites one most imperiously to stay.
_Dang_ all schools and colleges, say I. Alice goes down tomorrow (I
being up here with the Merrimans only for one day) to start Billy for
Europe--he will spend the winter at Geneva University--and to get "the
house" ready for our general reception on the 26th. I may possibly make
out to stay up here till the Monday following, and spend the interval of
a few days by myself among the mountains, having stuck to the domestic
hearth unusually tight all summer....
We have had guests--too many of them, rather, at one time, for me--and a
little reading has been done, mostly philosophical technics, which, by
the strange curse laid upon Adam, certain of his descendants have been
doomed to invent and others, still more damned, to learn. But I've also
read Stevenson's letters, which everybody ought to read just to know how
charming a human being can be, and I've read a good part of Goethe's
_Gedichte_ once again, which are also to be read, so that one may
realize how absolutely healthy an organization may every now and then
eventuate into this world. To have such a lyrical gift and to treat it
with so little solemnity, so that most of the output consists of mere
escape of the over-tension into bits of occasional verse, irresponsible,
unchained, like smoke-wreaths!--it _du_ give one a great impression of
personal power. In general, though I'm a traitor for saying so, it seems
to me that the German race has been a more massive organ of expression
for the travail of the Almighty than the Anglo-Saxon, though we did seem
to have something more like it in Elizabethan times. Or are clearness
and dapperness the absolutely final shape of creation? Good-bye! dear
Fanny--you see how mouldy I am temporarily become. The moment I take my
pen, I can write in no other way. Write thou, and let me know that
things are greener and more vernal where you are. Alice would send much
love to you, were she here. Give mine to your mother, brother, and
sister-in-law, and all. Your loving,
W. J.
_To Henry L. Higginson._
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., _Nov. 1, 1902_.
DEAR HENRY,--I am emboldened to the step I am taking by the
consciousness that though we are both at least sixty years old and have
known each other from the cradle, I have never but once (or possibly
twice) traded on your well-known lavishness of disposition to swell any
"subscription" which I was trying to raise.
Now the doomful hour has struck. The altar is ready, and I take the
victim by the ear. I choose you for a victim because you still have some
undesiccated human feeling about you and can think in terms of pure
charity--for the love of God, without ulterior hopes of returns from the
investment.
The subject is a man of fifty who can be recommended to no other kind of
a benefactor. His story is a long one, but it amounts to this, that
Heaven made him with no other power than that of thinking and writing,
and he has proved by this time a truly pathological inability to keep
body and soul together. He is abstemious to an incredible degree, is the
most innocent and harmless of human beings, isn't propagating his kind,
has never had a dime to spend except for vital necessities, and never
has had in his life an hour of what such as _we_ call freedom from care
or of "pleasure" in the ordinary exuberant sense of the term. He is
refinement itself mentally and morally; and his writings have all been
printed in first-rate periodicals, but are too scanty to "pay." There's
no excuse for him, I admit. But God made him; and after kicking and
cuffing and prodding him for twenty years, I have now come to believe
that he ought to be treated in charity pure and simple (even though that
be a vice) and I want to guarantee him $350 a year as a pension to be
paid to the Mills Hotel in Bleecker Street, New York, for board and
lodging and a few cents weekly over and above. I will put in $150. I
have secured $100 more. Can I squeeze £50 a year out of you for such a
non-public cause? If not, don't reply and forget this letter. If "ja"
and you think you really can afford it, and it isn't wicked, let me
know, and I will dun you regularly every year for the $50. Yours as
ever,
Wm. James.
It is a great compliment that I address you. Most men say of such a
case, "Is the man deserving?" Whereas the real point is, "Does he need
us?" What is deserving nowadays?
* * * * *
The beneficiary of this appeal was that same unfulfilled promise of a
metaphysician who appeared as "X" on page 292 of the first volume--a man
upon whom, in Cicero's phrase, none but a philosopher could look without
a groan. There were more parallels to X's case than it would be
permissible to cite here. James did not often appeal to others to help
such men with money, but he did things for them himself, even after it
had become evident that they could give nothing to the world in return,
and even when they had exhausted his patience. "Damn your
half-successes, your imperfect geniuses!" he exclaimed of another who
shall be called Z. "I'm tired of making allowances for them and propping
them up.... Z has never constrained himself in his life. Selfish,
conceited, affected, a monster of desultory intellect, he has become now
a seedy, almost sordid, old man without even any intellectual residuum
from his work that can be called a finished construction; only
'suggestions' and a begging old age." But Z, too, was helped to the end.
_To Henri Bergson._
Cambridge, _Dec. 14, 1902_.
MY DEAR SIR,--I read the copy of your "Matière et Mémoire" which you so
kindly sent me, immediately on receiving it, four years ago or more. I
saw its great originality, but found your ideas so new and vast that I
could not be sure that I fully understood them, although the _style_,
Heaven knows, was lucid enough. So I laid the book aside for a second
reading, which I have just accomplished, slowly and carefully, along
with that of the "Données Immédiates," etc.
I think I understand the main lines of your system very well at
present--though of course I can't yet trace its proper relations to the
aspects of experience of which you do not treat. It needs much building
out in the direction of Ethics, Cosmology and Cosmogony, Psychogenesis,
etc., before one can apprehend it fully. That I should take it in so
much more easily than I did four years ago shows that even at the age of
sixty one's mind can grow--a pleasant thought.
It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican
revolution as much as Berkeley's "Principles" or Kant's "Critique" did,
and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of
philosophical discussion. It fills _my_ mind with all sorts of new
questions and hypotheses and brings the old into a most agreeable
liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
The _Hauptpunkt_ acquired for me is your conclusive demolition of the
dualism of object and subject in perception. I believe that the
"transcendency" of the object will not recover from your treatment, and
as I myself have been working for many years past on the same line, only
with other general conceptions than yours, I find myself most agreeably
corroborated. My health is so poor now that work goes on very slowly;
but I am going, if I live, to write a general system of metaphysics
which, in many of its fundamental ideas, agrees closely with what you
have set forth and the agreement inspires and encourages me more than
you can well imagine. It would take far too many words to attempt any
detail, but some day I hope to send you the book.[42]
How good it is sometimes simply to _break away_ from all old categories,
deny old worn-out beliefs, and restate things _ab initio_, making the
lines of division fall into entirely new places!
I send you a little popular lecture of mine on immortality,[43]--no
positive theory but merely an _argumentum ad hominem_ for the ordinary
cerebralistic objection,--in which it may amuse you to see a formulation
like your own that the brain is an organ of _filtration_ for spiritual
life.
I also send you my last book, the "Varieties of Religious Experience,"
which may some time beguile an hour. Believe, dear Professor Bergson,
the high admiration and regard with which I remain, always sincerely
yours,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. Louis Agassiz._
Cambridge, _Dec. 15, 1902_.
DEAR MRS. AGASSIZ,--I never dreamed of your replying to that note of
mine (of Dec. 5th). If you are replying to all the notes you received on
that eventful day, it seems to me a rather heavy penalty for becoming an
octogenarian.[44] But glad I am that you replied to mine, and so
beautifully. Indeed I do remember the meeting of those two canoes, and
the dance, over the river from Manaos; and many another incident and
hour of that wonderful voyage.[45] I remember your freshness of
interest, and readiness to take hold of everything, and what a blessing
to me it was to have one civilized lady in sight, to keep the memory of
cultivated conversation from growing extinct. I remember my own folly in
wishing to return home after I came out of the hospital at Rio; and my
general greenness and incapacity as a naturalist afterwards, with my
eyes gone to pieces. It was all because my destiny was to be a
"philosopher"--a fact which then I didn't know, but which only means, I
think, that, if a man is good for nothing else, he can at least teach
philosophy. But I'm going to write one book worthy of you, dear Mrs.
Agassiz, and of the Thayer expedition, if I am spared a couple of years
longer.
I hope you were not displeased at the _applause_ the other night, as you
went out. _I_ started it; if I hadn't, someone else would a moment
later, for the tension had grown intolerable.
How delightful about the Radcliffe building!
Well, once more, dear Mrs. Agassiz, we both thank you for this beautiful
and truly affectionate letter. Your affectionate,
Wm. James.
E. L. Godkin had recently died, and at the date of the next letter a
movement was on foot to raise money for a memorial in commemoration of
his public services. The money was soon subscribed and the Memorial took
shape in the endowment of the Godkin Lectureship at Harvard. James had
started discussion of the project at a meeting of the dinner Club and
Henry L. Higginson had continued it in a letter to which the following
replied.
_To Henry L. Higginson._
Cambridge, _Feb. 8, 1903_.
DEAR HENRY,--I am sorry to have given a wrong impression, and made you
take the trouble of writing--nutritious though your letters be to
receive. My motive in mentioning the Godkin testimonial was pure
curiosity, and not desire to promote it. We were ten "liberals"
together, and I wanted to learn how many of us had been alienated from
Godkin by his temper in spite of having been influenced by his writing.
I found that it was just about half and half. I never said--Heaven bear
me witness--that I had learned more from G. than from anyone. I said I
had got more _political_ education from him. You see the "Nation" took
me at the age of 22--you were already older and wickeder. If you follow
my advice now, you don't subscribe a cent to this memorial. _I_ shall
subscribe $100, for mixed reasons. Godkin's "home life" was very
different from his life against the world. When a man differed in type
from him, and consequently reacted differently on public matters; he
thought him a preposterous monster, pure and simple, and so treated him.
He couldn't imagine a different kind of creature from himself in
politics. But in private relations he was simplicity and sociability and
affectionateness incarnate, and playful as a young opossum. I never knew
his first wife well, but I admire the pluck and fidelity of the second,
and I note your chivalrous remarks about the sex, including Mrs. W. J.,
to whom report has been made of them, making her blush with pleasure.
Don't subscribe, dear Henry. I am not trying to raise subscriptions. You
left too early Friday eve. Ever affectionately yours,
W. J.
James's college class finished its work at the end of the first half of
the academic year, and in early February he turned for a few days to the
thought of a Mediterranean voyage, as a vacation and a means of escape
from Cambridge during the bad weather of March. While considering this
plan, he cabled M. Bergson to inquire as to the possibility of a meeting
in Paris or elsewhere.
_To Henri Bergson._
Cambridge, _Feb. 25, 1903_.
DEAR PROFESSOR BERGSON,--Your most obliging cablegram (with 8 words
instead of four!) arrived duly a week ago, and now I am repenting that I
ever asked you to send it, for I have been feeling so much less fatigued
than I did a month ago, that I have given up my passage to the
Mediterranean, and am seriously doubting whether it will be necessary to
leave home at all. I _ought_ not to, on many grounds, unless my health
imperatively requires it. Pardon me for having so frivolously stirred
you up, and permit me at least to pay the cost (as far as I can
ascertain it) of the despatch which you were so liberal as to send.
There is still a bare possibility (for I am so strongly tempted) that I
may, after the middle of March, take a cheaper vessel direct to England
or to France, and spend ten days or so in Paris and return almost
immediately. In that case, we could still have our interview. I think
there must be great portions of your philosophy which you have not yet
published, and I want to see how well they combine with mine. _Writing_
is too long and laborious a process, and I would not inflict on you the
task of answering my questions by letter, so I will still wait in the
hope of a personal interview some time.
I am convinced that a philosophy of _pure experience_, such as I
conceive yours to be, can be made to work, and will reconcile many of
the old inveterate oppositions of the schools. I think that your radical
denial (the manner of it at any rate) of the notion that the brain can
be in any way the _causa fiendi_ of consciousness, has introduced a very
sudden clearness, and eliminated a part of the idealistic paradox. But
your unconscious or subconscious permanence of memories is in its turn a
notion that offers difficulties, seeming in fact to be the equivalent of
the "soul" in another shape, and the manner in which these memories
"insert" themselves into the brain action, and in fact the whole
conception of the difference between the outer and inner worlds in your
philosophy, still need to me a great deal of elucidation. But behold me
challenging you to answer me _par écrit_!
I have read with great delight your article in the "Revue de
Métaphysique" for January, agree thoroughly with all its critical part,
and wish that I might see in your _intuition métaphysique_ the full
equivalent for a philosophy of concepts. _Neither_ seems to be a full
equivalent for the other, unless indeed the intuition becomes completely
mystical (and that I am willing to believe), but I don't think that that
is just what _you_ mean. The _Syllabus_[46] which I sent you the other
day is (I fear), from its great abbreviation, somewhat unintelligible,
but it will show you the sort of lines upon which I have been working. I
think that a normal philosophy, like a science, must live by
hypotheses--I think that the indispensable hypothesis in a philosophy of
pure experience is that of many kinds of other experience than ours,
{ co-consciousness }
that the question of { } (its conditions, etc.)
{ conscious synthesis }
becomes a most urgent question, as does also the question of the
relations of what is possible only to what is actual, what is past or
future to what is present. These are all urgent matters in your
philosophy also, I imagine. How exquisitely you do _write_! Believe me,
with renewed thanks for the telegram, yours most sincerely,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
Cambridge, _Apr. 30, 1903_.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--I forget whether I wrote you my applause or not, on
reading your chapter on religious psychology in the "Archives." I
thought it a splendid thing, and well adapted to set the subject in the
proper light before students. Abauzit has written to me for
authorization to translate my book, and both he and W. J., Junior, have
quoted you as assured of his competency. I myself feel confident of it,
and have given him the authorization required. Possibly you may supply
him with as much of your own translation as you have executed, so that
the time you have spent on the latter may not be absolutely lost.
"Billy" also says that you have executed a review of Myers's book,[47]
finding it a more difficult task than you had anticipated. I am highly
curious to see what you have found to say. I, also, wrote a notice of
the volumes, and found it exceeding difficult to know how to go at the
job. At last I decided just to skeletonize the points of his reasoning,
but on correcting the proof just now, what I have written seems deadly
flat and unprofitable and makes me wish that I had stuck to my original
intention of refusing to review the book at all. The fact is, such a
book need not be _criticized_ at all at present. It is obviously too
soon for it to be either refuted or established by mere criticism. It
is a hypothetical construction of genius which must be kept hanging up,
as it were, for new observations to be referred to. As the years
accumulate these in a more favorable or in a more unfavorable sense, it
will tend to stand or to fall. I confess that reading the volumes has
given me a higher opinion than ever of Myers's constructive gifts, but
on the whole a lower opinion of the objective solidity of the system. So
many of the facts which form its pillars are still dubious.[48]
Bill says that you were again convinced by Eusapia,[49] but that the
conditions were not satisfactory enough (so I understood) to make the
experiments likely to convince absent hearers. Forever baffling is all
this subject, and I confess that I begin to lose my interest. Believe
me, in whatever difficulties your review of Myers may have occasioned
you, you have my fullest sympathy!
Bill has had a perfectly splendid winter in Geneva, thanks almost
entirely to your introductions, and to the generous manner in which you
took him into your own family. I wish we could ever requite you by
similar treatment of Henri, or of _ces demoiselles_. He seems to labor
under an apprehension of not being able to make you all believe how
appreciative and grateful he is, and he urges me to "Make you understand
it" when I write. I imagine that you understand it anyhow, so far as he
is concerned, so I simply assure you that _our_ gratitude here is of the
strongest and sincerest kind. I imagine that this has been by far the
most profitable and educative winter of his life, and I rejoice
exceedingly that he has obtained in so short a time so complete a sense
of being at home in, and so lively an affection for, the Swiss people
and country. (As for _your_ family he has written more than once that
the Flournoy family seems to be "the finest family" he has ever seen in
his life.)
His experience is a good measure of the improvement in the world's
conditions. Thirty years ago _I_ spent nine months in Geneva--but in how
inferior an "Academy," and with what inferior privileges and
experiences! Never inside a private house, and only after three months
or more familiar enough with other students to be admitted to
Zofingue.[50] Ignorant of 1000 things which have come to my son and
yours in the course of education. It _is_ a more evolved world, and no
mistake.
I find myself very tired and unable to work this spring, but I think it
will depart when I get to the country, as we soon shall. I am neither
writing nor lecturing, and reading nothing heavy, only Emerson's works
again (divine things, some of them!) in order to make a fifteen-minute
address about him on his centennial birthday. What I want to get at, and
let no interruptions interfere, is (at last) my _system of tychistic and
pluralistic philosophy of pure experience_.
I wish, and even more ardently does Alice wish, that you and Mrs.
Flournoy, and all the children, or any of them, might pay us a visit. I
don't _urge_ you, for there is so little in America that pays one to
come, except sociological observation. But in the big slow steamers, the
voyage is always interesting--and once here, how happy we should be to
harbor you. In any case, perhaps Henri and one of his sisters will come
and spend a year. From the point of view of education, Cambridge is
first-rate. Love to you all from us both.
Wm. James.
Late in April came a letter from Henry James in which he spoke, as if
with many misgivings, of returning to America for a six months' visit.
"I should wish," he said, "to write a book of 'impressions' and to that
end get quite away from Boston and New York--really _see_ the country at
large. On the other hand I don't see myself prowling alone in Western
cities and hotels or finding my way about by myself, and it is all
darksome and tangled. Some light may break--but meanwhile next Wednesday
(awful fact) is my 60th birthday." He had not been in America for more
than twenty years, and had never known anything of the country outside
of New England and New York.
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _May 3, 1903_.
...Your long and _inhaltsvoll_ letter of April 10th arrived duly, and
constituted, as usual, an "event." Theodora had already given us your
message of an intended visit to these shores; and your letter made Alice
positively overflow with joyous anticipations. On my part they are less
unmixed, for I feel more keenly a good many of the _désagréments_ to
which you will inevitably be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical
loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.
It takes a long time to notice such things no longer. One thing, for
example, which would reconcile _me_ most easily to abandoning my native
country forever would be the certainty of immunity, when traveling, from
the sight of my fellow beings at hotels and dining-cars having their
boiled eggs brought to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten
with butter. How irrational this dislike is, is proved both by logic,
and by the pleasure taken in the custom by the élite of mankind over
here.... Yet of such irrational sympathies and aversions (quite
conventional for the most part) does our pleasure in a country depend,
and in your case far more than in that of most men. The _vocalization_
of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful
that the process of hardening oneself thereto is very slow, and would in
your case be impossible. It is simply incredibly loathsome. I should
hate to have you come and, as a result, feel that you had now _done_
with America forever, even in an ideal and imaginative sense, which
after a fashion you can still indulge in. As far as your copyright
interests go, couldn't they be even more effectually and just as cheaply
or more cheaply attended to by your [engaging an agent] over here. Alice
foresees Lowell [Institute] lectures; but lectures have such an awful
side (when not academic) that I myself have foresworn them--it is a sort
of prostitution of one's person. This is rather a throwing of cold
water; but it is well to realize both sides, and I think I can realize
certain things for you better than the sanguine and hospitable Alice
does.
Now for the other side, there are things in the American out-of-door
nature, as well as comforts indoors that can't be beat, and from which
_I_ get an infinite pleasure. If you avoided the _banalité_ of the
Eastern cities, and traveled far and wide, to the South, the Colorado,
over the Canadian Pacific to that coast, possibly to the Hawaiian
Islands, etc., you would get some reward, at the expense, it is true, of
a considerable amount of cash. I think you ought to come in March or
April and stay till the end of October or into November. The hot summer
months you could pass in an absolutely quiet way--if you wished to--at
Chocorua with us, where you could do as much writing as you liked,
continuous, and undisturbed, and would (I am sure) grow fond of, as you
grew more and more intimate with, the sweet rough country there. After
June, 1904, _I_ shall be free, to go and come as I like, for I have
fully decided to resign, and nothing would please me so well (if I found
then that I could afford it) as to do some of that proposed traveling
along with you. I could take you into certain places that perhaps you
wouldn't see alone. Don't come therefore, if you do come, before the
spring of 1904!
I have been doing nothing in the way of work of late, and consequently
have kept my fatigue somewhat at bay. The reading of the divine Emerson,
volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has
thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in
which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the
Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and
reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his
limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however
urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and
clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all
found to be most propitious, seems to me a moral lesson to all men who
have any genius, however small, to foster. I see now with absolute
clearness, that greatly as I have been helped and enlarged by my
University business hitherto, the time has come when the remnant of my
life must be passed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and
with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to
report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has
received from the Universe. This I mean to stick to, and am only sorry
that I am obliged to stay in the University one other year. It is giving
up the inessentials which have grown beyond one's powers, for the sake
of the duties which, after all, are most essentially imposed on one by
the nature of one's powers.
Emerson is exquisite! I think I told you that I have to hold forth in
praise of him at Concord on the 25th--in company with Senator Hoar, T.
W. Higginson, and Charles Norton--quite a _vieille garde_, to which I
now seem to belong. You too have been leading an Emersonian life--though
the environment differs to suit the needs of the different
psychophysical organism which you present.
I have but little other news to tell you. Charles Peirce is lecturing
here--queer being.... Boott is in good spirits, and as sociable as ever.
Grace Norton ditto. I breakfasted this Sunday morning, as of yore, with
Theodora [Sedgwick], who had a bad voyage in length but not in quality,
though she lay in her berth the whole time. I can hardly conceive of
being willing to travel under such conditions. Otherwise we are well
enough, except Peggy, whose poor condition I imagine to result from
influenza. Aleck has been regenerated through and through by "bird
lore," happy as the day is long, and growing acquainted with the country
all about Boston. All in consequence of a neighboring boy on the street,
14 years old and an ornithological genius, having taken him under his
protection. Yesterday, all day long in the open air, from seven to
seven, at Wayland, spying and listening to birds, counting them, and
writing down their names!
I shall go off tomorrow or next day to the country again, by myself,
joining Henry Higginson and a colleague at the end of the week, and
returning by the 14th for Ph.D. examinations which I hate profoundly. H.
H. has bought some five miles of the shore of Lake Champlain adjoining
his own place there, and thinks of handing it over to the University for
the surveying, engineering, forestry and mining school. He is as
liberal-hearted a man as the Lord ever walloped entrails into....
What a devil of a bore your forced purchase of the unnecessary
neighboring land must have been. _I_ am just buying 150 acres more at
Chocorua, to round off our second estate there. Keep well and
prolific--everyone speaks praise of your "Better Sort," which I am
keeping for the country....
_To his Daughter._
FABYANS, N. H., _May 6, 1903_.
SWEET MARY,--Although I wrote to thy mother this P.M. I can't refrain
from writing to thee ere I go up to bed. I left Intervale at 3.30 under
a cloudy sky and slight rain, passing through the gloomy Notch to
Crawford's and then here, where I am lodged in a house full of working
men, though with a good clean bedroom. I write this in the office, with
an enormous air-tight stove, a parrot and some gold-fish as my
companions. I took a slow walk of an hour and a half before supper over
this great dreary mountain plateau, pent in by hills and woods still
free from buds. Although it is only 1500 feet high, the air is real
mountain air, soft and strong at once. I wish that you could have taken
that four-hour drive with Topsy[51] and me this morning. You would
already be well--it had so healing an influence. Poverty-stricken this
New Hampshire country may be--weak in a certain sense, shabby, thin,
pathetic--say all that, yet, like "Jenny," it _kissed_ me; and it is not
_vulgar_--even H. J. can't accuse it of that--or of "stodginess,"
especially at this emaciated season. It remains pure, and clear and
distinguished--Bless it! Once more, would thou hadst been along! I have
just been reading Emerson's "Representative Men." What luminous truths
he communicates about their home-life--for instance: "Nature never
sends a Great Man into the planet without confiding the secret to
another soul"--namely your mother's! How he hits her off, and how I
recognized whom he meant immediately. Kiss the dear tender-hearted
thing.
Common men also have their advantages. I have seen all day long such a
succession of handsome, stalwart, burnt-faced, out-of-door workers as
made me glad to be, however degenerate myself, one of their tribe.
Splendid, honest, good-natured fellows.
Good-night! I'm now going to bed, to read myself to sleep with a tiptop
novel sent me by one Barry, an old pupil of mine. 'T is called "A
Daughter of Thespis." Is this the day of your mother's great and noble
lunch? If so, I pray that it may have gone off well. Kisses to her, and
all. Your loving
PAPA.
The next letter describes the Emerson Centenary at Concord. The Address
which James delivered was published in the special volume commemorative
of the proceedings, and also in "Memories and Studies."
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
Cambridge, _May 26, 1903_.
DEAREST FANNY,--On Friday I called at your house and to my sorrow found
the blinds all down. I had not supposed that you would leave so soon,
though I might well have done so if I had reflected. It has been a
sorrow to me to have seen so little of you lately, but so goes the
_train du monde_. Collapsed condition, absences, interruptions of all
sorts, have made the year end with most of the desiderata postponed to
next year. I meant to write to you on Friday evening, then on Saturday
morning. But I went to Lincoln on Saturday P.M. and stayed over the
Emerson racket, without returning home, and have been packing and
winding up affairs all day in order to get off to Chocorua tomorrow at
7.30. These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished
life winds up.
I wish that you had been at Concord. It was the most harmoniously
æsthetic or æsthetically harmonious thing! The weather, the beauty of
the village, the charming old meeting-house, the descendants of the
grand old man in such profusion, the mixture of Concord and Boston
heads, so many of them of our own circle, the allusions to great
thoughts and things, and the old-time New England rusticity and
rurality, the silver polls and ancient voices of the _vieille garde_ who
did the orating (including this 'yer child), all made a matchless
combination, took one back to one's childhood, and made that rarely
realized marriage of reality with ideality, that usually only occurs in
fiction or poetry.
It was a sweet and memorable day, and I am glad that I had an active
share in it. I thank you for your sweet words to Alice about my address.
I let R. W. E. speak for himself, and I find now, hearing so much from
others of him, that there are only a few things that _can_ be said of
him; he was so squarely and simply himself as to impress every one in
the same manner. Reading the whole of him over again continuously has
made me feel his real greatness as I never did before. He's really a
critter to be thankful for. Good-night, dear Fanny. I shall be back here
by Commencement, and somehow we must see you at Chocorua this summer.
Love to your mother as well as to yourself, from your ever affectionate
Wm. James.
The letter of May 3rd drew from Henry James a long reply which may be
found in the "Letters of Henry James," under date of May 24th; the
reply, in its turn, elicited this response:--
_To Henry James._
CHOCORUA, _June 6, 1903_.
DEAREST HENRY,--Your long and excitingly interesting type-written letter
about coming hither arrived yesterday, and I hasten to retract all my
dampening remarks, now that I understand the motives fully. The only
ones I had imagined, blindling that I am, were fraternal piety and
patriotic duty. Against those I thought I ought to proffer the thought
of "eggs" and other shocks, so that when they came I might be able to
say that you went not unwarned. But the moment it appears that what you
crave is millions of just such shocks, and that a new lease of artistic
life, with the lamp of genius fed by the oil of twentieth-century
American life, is to be the end and aim of the voyage, all my stingy
doubts wither and are replaced by enthusiasm that you are still so
young-feeling, receptive and hungry for more raw material and
experience. It cheers me immensely, and makes me feel more so myself. It
is pathetic to hear you talk so about your career and its going to seed
without the contact of new material; but feeling as you do about the new
material, I augur a great revival of energy and internal effervescence
from the execution of your project. Drop your English ideas and take
America and Americans as they take themselves, and you will certainly
experience a rejuvenation. This is all I have to say _today_--merely to
let you see how the prospect exhilarates us.
August, 1904, will be an excellent time to begin. I should like to go
South with you,--possibly to Cuba,--but as for California, I fear the
expense. I am sending you a decidedly moving book by a mulatto
ex-student of mine, Du Bois, professor of history at Atlanta (Georgia)
negro College.[52] Read Chapters VII to XI for local color, etc.
We have been up here for ten days; the physical luxury of the
simplification is something that money can't buy. Every breath is a
pleasure--this in spite of the fact that the whole country is drying up
and burning up--it makes one ashamed that one can be so happy. The smoke
here has been so thick for five days that the opposite shore [of the
Lake] is hidden. We have a first-rate hired man, a good cow, nice horse,
dog, cook, second-girl, etc. Come up and see us in August, 1904! Your
ever loving
W. J.
_To Henry W. Rankin._
CHOCORUA, _June 10, 1903_.
MY DEAR RANKIN,--Once more has my graphophobia placed me heavily in your
debt. Your two long letters, though unanswered, were and are
appreciated, in spite of the fact that, as you know, I do not (and I
fear cannot) follow the gospel scheme as you do, and that the Bible
itself, in both its testaments (omitting parts of John and the
Apocalypse) seems to me, by its intense naturalness and humanness, the
most fatal document that one can read against the orthodox theology, in
so far as the latter claims the words of the Bible to be its basis. I
myself believe that the orthodox theology contains elements that are
permanently true, and that such writers as Emerson, by reason of their
extraordinary healthy-mindedness and "once-born"-ness, are incapable of
appreciating. I believe that they will have to be expressed in any
ultimately valid religious philosophy; and I see in the temper of
friendliness of such a man as you for such writings as Emerson's and
mine (_magnus comp. parvo_) a foretaste of the day when the abstract
essentials of belief will be the basis of communion more than the
particular forms and concrete doctrines in which they articulate
themselves. Your letter about Emerson seemed to me so admirably written
that I was on the point of sending it back to you, thinking it might be
well that you should publish it somewhere. I will still do so, if you
ask me. I have myself been a little scandalized at the non-resisting
manner in which orthodox sheets have celebrated his anniversary. An
"Emerson number" of "Zion's Herald" strikes me as _tant soit peu_ of an
anomaly, and yet I am told that such a number appeared. Rereading him
_in extenso_, almost _in toto_, lately, has made him loom larger than
ever to me as a human being, but I feel the distinct lack in him of too
little understanding of the morbid side of life.
I have been in the country two weeks, delicious in spite of drought and
smoke, and still more delicious now that rain has come, and I cannot
bear to think of you still lingering in Brooklyn. Perhaps you are
already at Northfield. Indeed I hope so, and that the long Brooklyn
winter will have put you in a condition for its better enjoyment, and
for better cooperation with its work.
I shall get at Shields some day--but I'm slow in getting round! Yours
ever faithfully,
Wm. James.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Aug. 18, 1903_.
DEAR M.,-- ...I am in good condition, but in somewhat of a funk about my
lectures,[53] now that the audience draws near. I have got my mind
working on the infernal old problem of mind and brain, and how to
construct the world out of pure experiences, and feel foiled again and
inwardly sick with the fever. But I verily believe that it is only work
that makes one sick in that way that has any chance of breaking old
shells and getting a step ahead. It is a sort of madness however when it
is on you. The total result is to make me admire "Common Sense" as
having done by far the biggest stroke of genius ever made in philosophy
when it reduced the chaos of crude experience to order by its luminous
_Denkmittel_ of the stable "thing," and its dualism of thought and
matter.
I find Strong's book charming and a wonderful piece of clear and
thorough work--quite classical in fact, and surely destined to renown.
The Clifford-Prince-Strong theory has now full rights to citizenship.
Nevertheless, in spite of his so carefully blocking every avenue which
leads sideways from his conclusion, he has not convinced me yet. But I
can[not] say briefly why.... Yours in haste,
W. J.
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
HOTEL ----,
PORT HENRY, N.Y., _Aug. 22, 1903_.
DEAR FRIEND,--Obliged to "stop over" for the night at this loathsome
spot, for lack of train connexion, what is more natural than that I
should seek to escape the odious actual by turning to the distant
Ideal--by which term you will easily recognize _Yourself_. I didn't
write the conventional letter to you after leaving your house in June,
preferring to wait till the tension should accumulate, and knowing your
indulgence of my unfashionable ways. I haven't heard a word about you
since that day, but I hope that the times have treated you kindly, and
that you have not been "overdoing" in your usual naughty way. I, with
the exception of six days lately with the Merrimans, have been sitting
solidly at home, and have found myself in much better condition than I
was in last summer, and consequently better than for several years. It
is pleasant to find that one's organism has such reparative capacities
even after sixty years have been told out. But I feel as if the
remainder couldn't be very long, at least for "creative" purposes, and I
find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow
itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire
to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance
lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had
before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I
actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one
more book, which shall be _epoch-machend_ at last, and a title of honor
to my children! Childish idiot--as if formulas about the Universe could
ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were
not eternally the really real!--I am on my way from Ashfield, where I
was a guest at the annual dinner, to _feu_ Davidson's "school" at
Glenmore, where, in a sanguine hour, I agreed to give five discourses.
Apparently they are having a good season there. Mrs. Booker Washington
was the hero of the Ashfield occasion--a big hearty handsome natural
creature, quite worthy to be her husband's mate. Fred Pollock made a
tip-top speech.... Charles Norton appeared to great advantage as a
benignant patriarch, and the place was very pretty. Have you read Loti's
"Inde sans les Anglais"? If not, then begin. I seem to myself to have
been doing some pretty good reading this summer, but when I try to
recall it, nothing but philosophic works come up. Good-bye! and Heaven
keep you! Yours affectionately,
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
CHOCORUA, _Sept. 24, 1903_.
DEAREST FANNY,--It is so long since we have held communion that I think
it is time to recommence. Our summer is ending quietly enough, not only
you, but Theodora and Mary Tappan, having all together conspired to
leave us in September solitude, and some young fellows, companions of
Harry and Billy, having just gone down. The cook goes tomorrow for a
fortnight of vacation, but Alice and I, and probably both the older
boys, hope to stay up here more or less until the middle of October. My
"seminary" begins on Friday, October 2nd, and for the rest of the year
Friday is my only day with a college exercise in it--an arrangement
which leaves me extraordinarily free, and of which I intend to take
advantage by making excursions. Hitherto, during the entire 30 years of
my College service, I have had a midday exercise every day in the week.
This has always kept me tied too tight to Cambridge. I am _vastly_
better in nervous tone than I was a year ago, my work is simplified down
to the exact thing I want to do, and I ought to be happy in spite of the
lopping off of so many faculties of activity. The only thing to do, as
with the process of the suns one finds one's faculties dropping away one
by one, is to be good-natured about it, remember that the next
generation is as young as ever, and try to live and have a sympathetic
share in their activities. I spent three days lately (only three, alas!)
at the "Shanty" [in Keene Valley], and was moved to admiration at the
foundation for a consciousness that was being laid in the children by
the bare-headed and bare-legged existence "close to nature" of which the
memory was being stored up in them in these years. They lay around the
camp-fire at night at the feet of their elders, in every attitude of
soft recumbency, heads on stomachs and legs mixed up, happy and dreamy,
just like the young of some prolific carnivorous species. The coming
generation ought to reap the benefit of all this healthy animality. What
wouldn't I give to have been educated in it!...
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
Cambridge, _Oct. 29, 1903_.
MY DEAR "S. W.,"--On inquiry at your studio last Monday I was told that
you would be in the country for ten days or a fortnight more. I confess
that this pleased me much for it showed you both happy and prudent.
Surely the winter is long enough, however much we cut off of this
end--the city winter I mean; and the country this month has been little
short of divine.
We came down on the 16th, and I have to get mine (my country, I mean)
from the "Norton Woods." But they are very good indeed,--indeed, indeed!
I am better, both physically and morally, than for years past. The whole
James family thrives; and were it not for one's "duties" one could be
happy. But that things should give pain proves that something is being
_effected_, so I take that consolation. I have the duty on Monday of
reporting at a "Philosophical Conference" on the Chicago School of
Thought. Chicago University has during the past six months given birth
to the fruit of its ten years of gestation under John Dewey. The result
is wonderful--a _real school_, and _real Thought_. Important thought,
too! Did you ever hear of such a city or such a University? Here we
have thought, but no school. At Yale a school, but no thought. Chicago
has both.... But this, dear Madam, is not intended as a letter--only a
word of greeting and congratulation at your absence. I don't know why it
makes me so happy to hear of anyone being in the country. I suppose
_they_ must be happy.
Your last letter went to the right spot--but I don't expect to hear from
you now until I see you. Ever affectionately yours,
W. J.
_To Henry James._
NEWPORT, _Jan. 20, 1904_.
...I came down here the night before last, to see if a change of air
might loosen the grip of my influenza, now in its sixth week and me
still weak as a baby, almost, from its virulent effects.... Yesterday
A.M. the thermometer fell to 4 below zero. I walked as far as Tweedy's
(I am staying at a boarding-house, Mrs. Robinson's, Catherine St., close
to Touro Avenue, Daisy Waring being the only other boarder)--the snow
loudly creaking under foot and under teams however distant, the sky
luminously white and dazzling, no distance, everything equally near to
the eye, and the architecture in the town more huddled, discordant,
cheap, ugly and contemptible than I had ever seen it. It brought back
old times so vividly. So it did in the evening, when I went after sunset
down Kay Street to the termination. That low West that I've so often fed
on, with a sombre but intense crimson vestige smouldering close to the
horizon-line, economical but profound, and the western well of sky
shading upward from it through infinite shades of transparent luminosity
in darkness to the deep blue darkness overhead. It was purely American.
You never see that western sky anywhere else. Solemn and wonderful. I
should think you'd like to see it again, if only for the sake of
shuddering at it!...
_To François Pillon._
Cambridge, _June 12, 1904_.
DEAR PILLON,--Once more I get your faithful and indefatigable "Année"
and feel almost ashamed of receiving it thus from you, year after year,
when I make nothing of a return! So you are 75 years old--I had no idea
of it, but thought that you were much younger. I am only(!) 62, and wish
that I could expect another 13 years of such activity as you have shown.
I fear I cannot. My arteries are senile, and none of my ancestors, so
far as I know of them, have lived past 72, many of them dying much
earlier. This is my last day in Cambridge; tomorrow I get away into the
country, where "the family" already is, for my vacation. I shall take
your "Année" with me, and shall be greatly interested in both Danriac's
article and yours. What a mercy it is that your eyes, in spite of
cataract-operations, are still good for reading. I have had a very bad
winter for work--two attacks of influenza, one very long and bad, three
of gout, one of erysipelas, etc., etc. I expected to have written at
least 400 or 500 pages of my magnum opus,--a general treatise on
philosophy which has been slowly maturing in my mind,--but I have
written only 32 pages! That tells the whole story. I resigned from my
professorship, but they would not accept my resignation, and owing to
certain peculiarities in the financial situation of our University just
now, I felt myself obliged in honor to remain.
My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a
"tychism," which represents order as being gradually won and always in
the making. It is theistic, but not _essentially_ so. It rejects all
doctrines of the Absolute. It is finitist; but it does not attribute to
the question of the Infinite the great methodological importance which
you and Renouvier attribute to it. I fear that you may find my system
too _bottomless_ and romantic. I am sure that, be it in the end judged
true or false, it is essential to the evolution of clearness in
philosophic thought that _someone_ should defend a pluralistic
empiricism radically. And all that I fear is that, with the impairment
of my working powers from which I suffer, the Angel of Death may
overtake me before I can get my thoughts on to paper. Life here in the
University consists altogether of _interruptions_.
I thought much of you at the time of Renouvier's death, and I wanted to
write; but I let that go, with a thousand other things that had to go.
What a life! and what touching and memorable last words were those which
M. Pratt published in the "Revue de Métaphysique"--memorable, I mean
from the mere fact that the old man could dictate them at all. I have
left unread his last publications, except for some parts of the
"Monadologie" and the "Personalisme." He will remain a great figure in
philosophic history; and the sense of his absence must make a great
difference to your consciousness and to that of Madame Pillon. My own
wife and children are well.... Ever affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _June 28, 1904_.
DEAR H.,--I came down from Chocorua yesterday A.M. to go to--
Mrs. Whitman's funeral!
She had lost ground steadily during the winter. The last time I saw her
was five weeks ago, when at noon I went up to her studio thinking she
might be there.... She told me that she was to go on the following day
to the Massachusetts General Hospital, for a cure of rest and seclusion.
There she died last Friday evening, having improved in her cardiac
symptoms, but pneumonia supervening a week ago. It's a great mercy that
the end was so unexpectedly quick. What I had feared was a slow
deterioration for a year or more to come, with all the nameless
misery--peculiarly so in her case--of death by heart disease. As it was,
she may be said to have died standing, a thing she always wished to do.
She went to every dinner-party and evening party last winter, had an
extension, a sort of ball-room, built to her Mount Vernon house, etc.
The funeral was beautiful both in Trinity Church and at the grave in Mt.
Auburn. I was one of the eight pall-bearers--the others of whom you
would hardly know. The flowers and greenery had been arranged in
absolutely Whitmanian style by Mrs. Jack Gardner, Mrs. Henry Parkman,
and Sally Fairchild. The scene at the grave was _beautiful_. She had no
blood relatives, and all Boston--I mean the few whom we know--had gone
out, and seemed swayed by an overpowering emotion which abolished all
estrangement and self-consciousness. It was the sort of ending that
would please her, could she know of it. An extraordinary and indefinable
creature! I used often to feel coldly towards her on account of her way
of taking people as a great society "business" proceeding, but now that
her agitated life of tip-toe reaching in so many directions, of
genuinest amiability, is over, pure tenderness asserts its own. Against
that dark background of natural annihilation she seems to have been a
pathetic little slender worm, writhing and curving blindly through its
little day, expending such intensities of consciousness to terminate in
that small grave.
She was a most peculiar person. I wish that you had known her whole life
here more intimately, and understood its significance. You might then
write a worthy article about her. For me, it is impossible to define
her. She leaves a dreadful vacuum in Boston. I have often wondered
whether I should survive her--and here it has come in the night, without
the sound of a footstep, and the same world is here--but without her as
its witness....
_To Charles Eliot Norton._
Cambridge, _June 30, 1904_.
DEAR CHARLES,--I have just read the July "Atlantic," and am so moved by
your Ruskin letters that I can't refrain from overflowing. They seem to
me immortal documents--as the clouds clear away he will surely take his
stable place as one of the noblest of the sons of men. Mere sanity is
the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes.
The chief "cloud" is the bulk of "Modern Painters" and the other
artistic writings, which have made us take him primarily as an
art-connoisseur and critic. Regard all that as inessential, and his
inconsistencies and extravagances fall out of sight and leave the Great
Heart alone visible.
Do you suppose that there are many other correspondents of R. who will
yield up their treasures in our time to the light? I wish that your
modesty had not suppressed certain passages which evidently expressed
too much regard for yourself. The point should have been _his_
expression of that sort of thing--no matter to whom addressed! I
understand and sympathize fully with his attitude about our war. Granted
him and his date, that is the way he ought to have felt, and I revere
him perhaps the more for it....
S. W.'s sudden defection is a pathetic thing! It makes one feel like
closing the ranks.
Affectionately--to all of you--including Theodora,
W. J.
_To L. T. Hobhouse._
CHOCORUA, _Aug. 12, 1904_.
DEAR BROTHER HOBHOUSE,--Don't you think it a _tant soit peu_ scurvy
trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the
informed reader the reference is transparent--I say nothing of poor
Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104
_ff_.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to
Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title
the _Right_ to Believe) in the guise of an _alternative and substitute_
for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your
charmingly written essay, _substitute a travesty_ for which I defy any
candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged
the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions
and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of
tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible
cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals,
because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to
include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that
faith could not be absolutely _vetoed_, as certain champions of
"science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a
function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world.
You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic
point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from _my_
polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk.
Your essay, granting that emphasis and barring the injustice to me,
seems to me exquisite, and, taking it as a unit, I subscribe
unreservedly to almost every positive word.--I say "positive," for I
doubt whether you have seen enough of the extraordinarily invigorating
effect of mind-_cum_-philosophy on certain people to justify your
somewhat negative treatment of that subject; and I say "almost" because
your distinction between "spurious" and "genuine" courage (page 91)
reminds me a bit too much of "true" and "false" freedom, and other
sanctimonious come-offs.--Could you not have made an equally sympathetic
reading of _me_?
I shouldn't have cared a copper for the misrepresentation were it not a
"summation of stimuli" affair. I have just been reading Bradley on
Schiller in the July "Mind," and A. E. Taylor on the Will to Believe in
the "McGill Quarterly" of Montreal. Both are vastly worse than you; and
I cry to Heaven to tell me of what insane root my "leading
contemporaries" have eaten, that they are so smitten with blindness as
to the meaning of printed texts. Or are we others absolutely incapable
of making our meaning clear?
I imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but
that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of
consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object.
Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation; and each, for his
contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the
enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties.
In my essay the evil shape was a vision of "Science" in the form of
abstraction, priggishness and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the
sterilest scientific prig and cad you know, compare him with the
richest religious intellect you know, and you would not, any more than I
would, give the former the exclusive right of way. But up to page 104 of
your essay he will deem you altogether on his side.
Pardon the familiarity of this epistle. I like and admire your theory of
Knowledge so much, and you re-duplicate (I _don't_ mean _copy_) my views
so beautifully in this article, that I hate to let you go unchidden.
Believe me, with the highest esteem (plus some indignation, for you
ought to know better!), Yours faithfully,
Wm. James.
_To Edwin D. Starbuck._
SALISBURY, CONN. _Aug, 24, 1904_.
DEAR STARBUCK,-- ...Of the strictures you make [in your review of my
"Varieties"], the first one (undue emphasis on extreme case) is, I find,
almost universally made; so it must in some sense be correct. Yet it
would never do to study the passion of love on examples of ordinary
liking or friendly affection, or that of homicidal pugnacity on examples
of our ordinary impatiences with our kind. So here it must be that the
extreme examples let us more deeply into the secrets of the religious
life, explain why the tamer ones value their religion so much, tame
though it be, because it is so continuous with a so much acuter ideal.
But I have long been conscious that there is on this matter something to
be said which neither my critics have said, nor I can say, and which I
must therefore commit to the future.
The second stricture (in your paragraph 4 on pages 104 _ff_.) is of
course deeply important, if true. At present I can see but vaguely just
what sort of outer relations our inner organism might respond to, which
our feelings and intellect interpret by religious thought. You ought to
work your program for all it is worth in the way of growth in
definiteness. I look forward with great eagerness to your forthcoming
book, and meanwhile urge strongly that you should publish the advance
article you speak of in Hall's new Journal. I can't see any possible
risk. It will objectify a part of your material for you, and possibly,
by arousing criticism, enable you to strengthen your points.
Your third stricture, about Higher Powers, is also very important, and I
am not at all sure that you may not be right. I have frankly to confess
that my "Varieties" carried "theory" as far as I could then carry it,
and that I can carry it no farther today. I can't see clearly over that
edge. Yet I am sure that tracks have got to be made there--I think that
the fixed point with me is the conviction that our "rational"
consciousness touches but a portion of the real universe and that our
life is fed by the "mystical" region as well. I have no mystical
experience of my own, but just enough of the germ of mysticism in me to
recognize the region from which their voice comes when I hear it.
I was much disappointed in Leuba's review of my book in the
"International Journal of Ethics." ... I confess that the way in which
he stamps out all mysticism whatever, using the common pathological
arguments, seemed to me unduly crude. I wrote him an expostulatory
letter, which evidently made no impression at all, and which he possibly
might send you if you had the curiosity to apply.
I am having a happy summer, feeling quite hearty again. I congratulate
you on being settled, though I know nothing of the place. I congratulate
you and Mrs. Starbuck also on airy fairy Lilian, who makes, I believe,
the third. Long may they live and make their parents proud. With best
regards to you both, I am yours ever truly,
Wm. James.
The "expostulatory" letter to Professor Leuba began with a series of
objections to statements which he had made, and continued with the
passage which follows.
_To James Henry Leuba._
Cambridge, _Apr. 17, 1904_.
...My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce
with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a
sense would help me immensely. The Divine, for my _active_ life, is
limited to abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine
me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God
might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but
differences of intensity may make one's whole centre of energy shift.
Now, although I am so devoid of _Gottesbewustsein_ in the directer and
stronger sense, yet there is _something in me_ which _makes response_
when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the
deeper voice. Something tells me, "_thither lies truth_"--and I am
_sure_ it is not old theistic habits and prejudices of infancy. Those
are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement
therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from
and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical
_germ_. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of
believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most
cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but _interpretative_ criticism
(not of the mere "hysteria" and "nerves" order) it can energetically
combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure _non possumus_:
"Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every
particular, or nothing. Therefore they are _nothing_, for anyone else
than their owner." Why may they not be _something_, although not
everything?
Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic
atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germ in us, that, I
believe, is where we all should _unhesitatingly_ be today.
Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe
that we are in my position. Of course the "subliminal" theory is an
inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is
equally inessential.
I am letting loose a deluge on you! Don't reply at length, or at all.
_I_ hate to reply to anybody, and will sympathize with your silence. But
I had to restate my position more clearly. Yours truly,
Wm. James.
The following document is not a letter, but a series of answers to a
questionnaire upon the subject of religious belief, which was sent out
in 1904 by Professor James B. Pratt of Williams College, and to which
James filled out a reply at an unascertained date in the autumn of that
year.
QUESTIONNAIRE[55]
It is being realized as never before that religion, as one of the
most important things in the life both of the community and of the
individual, deserves close and extended study. Such study can be of
value only if based upon the personal experiences of many
individuals. If you are in sympathy with such study and are willing
to assist in it, will you kindly write out the answers to the
following questions and return them with this questionnaire, as
soon as you conveniently can, to JAMES B. PRATT, 20 Shepard Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
Please answer the questions at length and in detail. Do not give
philosophical generalizations, but your own personal experience.
1. What does religion mean to you personally? Is it
(1) A belief that something exists? _Yes._
(2) An emotional experience? _Not powerfully so, yet a_ social
_reality_.
(3) A general attitude of the will toward God or toward
righteousness! _It involves these._
(4) Or something else?
If it has several elements, which is for you the most important?
_The social appeal for corroboration, consolation, etc., when
things are going wrong with my causes (my truth denied)_, etc.
2. What do you mean by God? _A combination of Ideality and (final)
efficacity._
(1) Is He a person--if so, what do you mean by His being a person?
_He must be cognizant and responsive in some way._
(2) Or is He only a Force? _He must_ do.
(3) Or is God an attitude of the Universe toward you? _Yes, but
more conscious. "God" to me, is not the only spiritual reality to
believe in. Religion means primarily a universe of spiritual
relations surrounding the earthly practical ones, not merely
relations of "value," but agencies and their activities. I suppose
that the chief premise for my hospitality towards the religious
testimony of others is my conviction that "normal" or "sane"
consciousness is so small a part of actual experience. What e'er be
true, it is not true exclusively, as philistine scientific opinion
assumes. The other kinds of consciousness bear witness to a much
wider universe of experiences, from which our belief selects and
emphasizes such parts as best satisfy our needs._
How do you apprehend his relation to mankind }
and to you personally? }
} _Uncertain._
If your position on any of these matters is uncertain, }
please state the fact. }
3. Why do you believe in God? Is it
(1) From some argument? _Emphatically, no._
Or (2) Because you have experienced His presence? _No, but rather
because I need it so that it "must" be true._
Or (3) From authority, such as that of the Bible or of some
prophetic person? _Only the whole tradition of religious people, to
which something in me makes admiring response._
Or (4) From any other reason? _Only for the social reasons._
If from several of these reasons, please indicate carefully the order of
their importance.
4. Or do you not so much _believe_ in God as want to _use_ Him? _I can't
use him very definitely, yet I believe._ Do you accept Him not so much
as a real existent Being, but rather as an ideal to live by? _More as a
more powerful ally of my own ideals._ If you should become thoroughly
convinced that there was no God, would it make any great difference in
your life--either in happiness, morality, or in other respects? _Hard to
say. It would surely make some difference._
5. Is God very real to you, as real as an earthly friend, though
different? _Dimly [real]; not [as an earthly friend]._
Do you feel that you have experienced His presence? If so, please
describe what you mean by such an experience. _Never._
How vague or how distinct is it? How does it affect you mentally and
physically?
If you have had no such experience, do you accept the testimony of
others who claim to have felt God's presence directly? Please answer
this question with special care and in as great detail as possible.
_Yes! The whole line of testimony on this point is so strong that I am
unable to pooh-pooh it away. No doubt there is a germ in me of something
similar that makes response._
6. Do you pray, and if so, why? That is, is it purely from habit, and
social custom, or do you really believe that God hears your prayers? _I
can't possibly pray--I feel foolish and artificial._
Is prayer with you one-sided or two-sided--_i.e._, do you sometimes feel
that in prayer you receive something--such as strength or the divine
spirit--from God? Is it a real communion?
7. What do you mean by "spirituality"? _Susceptibility to ideals, but
with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain
amount of "other worldly" fancy. Otherwise you have mere morality, or
"taste."_
Describe a typical spiritual person. _Phillips Brooks._
8. Do you believe in personal immortality? _Never keenly; but more
strongly as I grow older._ If so, why? _Because I am just getting fit to
live._
9. Do you accept the Bible as _authority_ in religious matters? Are your
religious faith and your religious life based on it? If so, how would
your belief in God and your life toward Him and your fellow men be
affected by loss of faith in the _authority_ of the Bible? _No. No. No.
It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine
authorship can survive the reading of it._
10. What do you mean by a "religious experience"? _Any moment of life
that brings the reality of spiritual things more "home" to one._
_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._
CHOCORUA, _Sept. 21, 1904_.
DEAR PAULINE,--Alice went off this morning to Cambridge, to get the
house ready for the advent of the rest of us a week hence--viz.,
Wednesday the 28th. Having breakfasted at 6:30 to bid her God speed, the
weather was so lordly fine (after a heavy rain in the night) that I
trudged across lots to our hill-top, which you never saw, and now lie
there with my back against a stone, scribbling you these lines at
half-past nine. The vacation has run down with an appalling rapidity,
but all has gone well with us, and I have been extraordinarily well and
happy, and mean to be a good boy all next winter, to say nothing of
remoter futures. My brother Henry stayed a delightful fortnight, and
seemed to enjoy nature here intensely--found so much _sentiment_ and
feminine delicacy in it all. It is a pleasure to be with anyone who
takes in things through the eyes. Most people don't. The two "savans"
who were here noticed _absolutely nothing_, though they had never been
in America before.
Naturally I have wondered what things your eyes have been falling on.
Many views from hill-tops? Many magic dells and brooks? I hope so, and
that it has all done you endless good. Such a green and gold and scarlet
morn as this would raise the dead. I hope that your sister Susan has
also got great good from the summer, and that the fair Josephine is glad
to be at home again, and your mother reconciled to losing you. Perhaps
even now you are preparing to go down. I have only written as a
_Lebenszeichen_ and to tell you of our dates. I expect no reply, till
you write a word to say when you are to come to Boston. Unhappily we
can't ask you to Irving St, being mortgaged three deep to foreigners.
Ever yours,
W. J.
It will be recalled that the St. Louis Exposition had occurred shortly
before the date of the last letter and had led a number of learned and
scientific associations to hold international congresses in America.
James kept away from St. Louis, but asked several foreign colleagues to
visit him at Chocorua or in Cambridge before their return to Europe.
Among them were Dr. Pierre Janet of Paris and his wife, Professor C.
Lloyd Morgan of Bristol, and Professor Harold Höffding of Copenhagen.
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
Cambridge, _Oct. 26, 1904_.
DEAR SCHILLER,-- ...Last night the Janets left us--a few days previous,
Lloyd Morgan. I am glad to possess my soul for a while alone. Make much
of dear old Höffding, who is a good pluralist and irrationalist. I took
to him immensely and so did everybody. Lecturing to my class, he told
against the Absolutists an anecdote of an "American" child who asked his
mother if God made the world in six days. "Yes."--"The whole of
it?"--"Yes."--"Then it is finished, all done?"--"Yes."--"Then in what
business now is God?" If he tells it in Oxford you must reply: "Sitting
for his portrait to Royce, Bradley, and Taylor."
Don't return the "McGill Quarterly"!--I have another copy. Good-bye!
W. J.
_To F. J. E. Woodbridge._
Cambridge, _Feb. 6, 1905_.
DEAR WOODBRIDGE,--I appear to be growing into a graphomaniac. Truth
boils over from my organism as muddy water from a Yellowstone Geyser.
Here is another contribution to my radical empiricism, which I send hot
on the heels of the last one. I promise that, with the possible
exception of one post-scriptual thing, not more than eight pages of MS.
long, I shall do no more writing this academic year. So if you accept
this,[56] you have not much more to fear.... I think, on the whole, that
though the present article directly hitches on to the last words of my
last article, "The Thing and Its Relations," the article called the
"Essence of Humanism" had better appear before it.... Always truly yours
Wm. James.
_To Edwin D. Starbuck._
Cambridge, _Feb. 12, 1905_.
DEAR STARBUCK,--I have read your article in No. 2 of Hall's Journal with
great interest and profit. It makes me eager for the book, but pray take
great care of your style in that--it seems to me that this article is
less well written than your "Psychology of Religion" was, less clear,
more involved, more technical in language--probably the result of
rapidity. Our American philosophic literature is dreadful from a
literary point of view. Pierre Janet told me he thought it was much
worse than German stuff--and I begin to believe so; technical and
semi-technical language, half-clear thought, fluency, and no
composition! Turn your face resolutely the other way! But I didn't start
to say this. Your thought in this article is both important and
original, and ought to be worked out in the clearest possible manner....
Your thesis needs to be worked out with great care, and as concretely as
possible. It is a difficult one to put successfully, on account of the
vague character of all its terms. One point you should drive home is
that the anti-religious attitudes (Leuba's, Huxley's, Clifford's), so
far as there is any "pathos" in them, obey exactly the same logic. The
real crux is when you come to define objectively the ideals to which
feeling reacts. "God is a Spirit"--_darauf geht es an_--on the last
available definition of the term Spirit. It may be very abstract.
Love to Mrs. Starbuck. Yours always truly,
Wm. James.
_To F. J. E. Woodbridge._
[_Feb. 22, 1905._]
DEAR WOODBRIDGE,--Here's another! But I solemnly swear to you that this
shall be my very last offense for some months to come. This is the
"postscriptual" article[57] of which I recently wrote you, and I have
now cleaned up the pure-experience philosophy from all the objections
immediately in sight.... Truly yours,
Wm. James.
XV
1905-1907
_The Last Period (II)--Italy and Greece--Philosophical Congress in
Rome--Stanford University--The Earthquake--Resignation of
Professorship_
In the spring of 1905 an escape from influenza, from Cambridge duties,
and from correspondents, became imperative. James had long wanted to see
Athens with his own eyes, and he sailed on April 3 for a short southern
holiday. During the journey he wrote letters to almost no one except his
wife. On his way back from Athens he stopped in Rome with the purpose of
seeing certain young Italian philosophers. A Philosophical Congress was
being held there at the time; and James, though he had originally
declined the invitation to attend it, inevitably became involved in its
proceedings and ended by seizing the occasion to discuss his theory of
consciousness. It was obvious that the appropriate language in which to
address a full meeting of the Congress would be French, and so he shut
himself up in his hotel and composed "La Notion de Conscience." His
experience in writing this paper threw an instructive sidelight on his
process of composition. Ordinarily--when he was writing in
English--twenty-five sheets of manuscript, written in a large hand and
corrected, were a maximum achievement for one day. The address in Rome
was not composed in English and then translated, but was written out in
French. When he had finished the last lines of one day's work, James
found to his astonishment that he had completed and corrected over forty
pages of manuscript. The inhibitions which a habit of careful attention
to points of style ordinarily called into play were largely inoperative
when he wrote in a language which presented to his mind a smaller
variety of possible expressions, and thus imposed limits upon his
self-criticism.
In the following year (1906), James took leave of absence from Harvard
in January and accepted an invitation from Stanford University to give a
course during its spring term. He planned the course as a general
introduction to Philosophy. Had he not been interrupted by the San
Francisco earthquake, he would have rehearsed much of the projected
"Introductory Textbook of Philosophy," in which he meant to outline his
metaphysical system. But the earthquake put an end to the Stanford
lectures in April, as the reader will learn more fully. In the ensuing
autumn and winter (1907), James made the same material the basis of a
half-year's work with his last Harvard class.
In November, 1906, the lectures which compose the volume called
"Pragmatism" were written out and delivered in November at the Lowell
Institute in Boston. In January, 1907, they were repeated at Columbia
University, and then James published them in the spring.
The time had now come for him to stop regular teaching altogether. He
had been continuing to teach, partly in deference to the wishes of the
College; but it had become evident that he must have complete freedom to
use his strength and time for writing when he could write, for special
lectures, like the series on Pragmatism, when such might serve his ends,
and for rest and change when recuperation became necessary. So, in
February, 1907, he sent his resignation to the Harvard Corporation. The
last meeting of his class ended in a way for which he was quite
unprepared. His undergraduate students presented him with a silver
loving-cup, the graduate students and assistants with an inkwell. There
were a couple of short speeches, and words were spoken by which he was
very much moved. Unfortunately there was no record of what was said.
_To Mrs. James._
AMALFI, _Mar. 30, 1905_.
...It is good to get something in full measure, without haggling or
stint, and today I have had the picturesque ladled out in buckets full,
heaped up and running over. I never realized the beauties of this shore,
and forget (in my habit of never noticing proper names till I have been
there) whether you have ever told me of the drive from Sorrento to this
place. Anyhow, I wish that you could have taken it with me this day.
"Thank God for this day!" We came to Sorrento by steamer, and at 10:30
got away in a carriage, lunching at the half-way village of Positano;
and proceeding through Amalfi to Ravello, high up on the mountain side,
whence back here in time for a 7:15 o'clock dinner. Practically six
hours driving through a scenery of which I had never realized the
beauty, or rather the interest, from previous descriptions. The
lime-stone mountains are as _strong_ as anything in Switzerland, though
of course much smaller. The road, a _Cornice_ affair cut for the most
part on the face of cliffs, and crossing little ravines (with beaches)
on the side of which nestle hamlets, is positively ferocious in its
grandeur, and on the side of it the azure sea, dreaming and blooming
like a bed of violets. I didn't look for such Swiss strength, having
heard of naught but beauty. It seems as if this were a race such that,
when anyone wished to express an emotion of any kind, he went and built
a bit of stone-wall and limed it onto the rock, so that now, when they
have accumulated, the works of God and man are inextricably mixed, and
it is as if mankind had been a kind of immemorial coral insect. Every
possible square yard is terraced up, reclaimed and planted, and the
human dwellings are the fiercest examples of cliff-building,
cave-habitation, staircase and foot-path you can imagine. How I do wish
that you could have been along today....
_Mar. 31, 1905_.
From half-past four to half-past six I walked alone through the _old_
Naples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the
very poor, vocal with them too (their voices carry so that every child
seems to be calling to the whole street, goats, donkeys, chickens, and
an occasional cow mixed in), and no light of heaven getting indoors. The
street floor composed of cave-like shops, the people doing their work on
chairs in the street for the sake of light, and in the black inside,
beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and
shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be
hard to match. I have come here too late in life, when the picturesque
has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me
like a passion, and such sights would have then been the solidest of
mental food. I put up then with such inferior substitutional suggestions
as Geneva and Paris afforded--but these black old Naples streets are not
suggestions, they are the reality itself--full orchestra. I have got
such an impression of the essential sociability of this race, especially
in the country. A smile will go so far with them--even without the
accompanying copper. And the children are so sweet. Tell Aleck to drop
his other studies, learn _Italian_ (real Italian, not the awful
gibberish I try to speak), cultivate his beautiful smile, learn a
sentimental song or two, bring a tambourine or banjo, and come down
here and fraternize with the common people along the coast--he can go
far, and make friends, and be a social success, even if he should go
back to a clean hotel of some sort for sleep every night....
_To his Daughter._
On board S.S. Orénogne, approaching
PIRÆUS, GREECE, _Apr. 3, 1905_.
DARLING PEG,--Your loving Dad is surely in luck sailing over this almost
oily sea, under the awning on deck, past the coast of Greece (whose
snow-capped mountains can be seen on the horizon), towards the Piræus,
where we are due to arrive at about two. I had some misgivings about the
steamer from Marseilles, but she has turned out splendid, and the voyage
perfect. A 4000-ton boat, bran new as to all her surface equipment,
stateroom all to myself, by a happy stroke of luck (the boat being
full), clean absolutely, large open window, sea like Lake Champlain,
with the color of Lake Leman, about a hundred and twenty first-class
passengers of the most interesting description, one sixth English
archeologists, one sixth English tourists, one third French
archeologists, etc.,--an international archeological congress opens at
Athens this week,--the rest Dagoes _quelconques_, many distinguished
men, almost all educated and pronounced individualities, and so much
acquaintance and sociability, that the somewhat small upper deck on
which I write resounds with conversation like an afternoon tea. The
meals are tip-top, and the whole thing almost absurdly ideal in its
kind. I only wish your mother could be wafted here for one hour, to sit
by my side and enjoy the scene. The best feature of the boat is little
Miss Boyd, the Cretan excavatress, from Smith College, a perfect little
trump of a thing, who has been through the Greco-Turkish war as nurse
(as well as being nurse at Tampa during our Cuban war), and is the
simplest, most generally intelligent little thing, who knows Greece by
heart and can smooth one's path beautifully. Waldstein of Cambridge is
on board, also M. Sylvain of the Théâtre Français, and his
daughter--going to recite prologues or something at the representation
of Sophocles's "Antigone," which is to take place--he looking just like
your uncle Henry--both eminent comedians--I mean the two Sylvains. On
the bench opposite me is the most beautiful woman on board, a sort of
Mary Salter translated into French, though she is with rather common
men. Well, now I will stop, and use my Zeiss glass on the land, which is
getting nearer. My heart wells over with love and gratitude at having
such a family--meaning Alice, you, Harry, Bill, Aleck, and
Mother-in-law--and resolutions to live so as to be more worthy of them.
I will finish this on land.
* * * * *
Well, dear family,--We got in duly in an indescribable _embrouillement_
of small boats (our boatman, by the way, when Miss Boyd asked him his
name, replied "Dionysos"; our wine-bottle was labelled "John Solon and
Co."), sailing past the Island of Ægina and the Bay of Salamis, with the
Parthenon visible ahead--a worthy termination to a delightful voyage. We
drove the three miles from the Piræus in a carriage, common and very
dusty country road, also close by the Parthenon, through the cheap
little town to this hotel, after which George Putnam and I, washing our
hands, strolled forth to see what we could, the first thing being Mrs.
Sam Hoar at the theatre of Bacchus. Then the rest of the Acropolis,
which is all and more than all the talk. There is a mystery of
_rightness_ about that Parthenon that I cannot understand. It sets a
standard for other human things, showing that absolute rightness is not
out of reach. But I am not in descriptive mood, so I spare you. Suffice
it that I couldn't keep the tears from welling into my eyes. "J'ai vu la
beauté parfaite." Santayana is in a neighboring hotel, but we have
missed each other thrice. The Forbeses are on the Peloponnesus, but
expected back tomorrow. Well, dear ones all, good-night! Thus far, and
no farther! Hence I turn westward again. The Greek lower orders seem far
less avid and rapacious than the Southern Italians. God bless you all. I
must get to another hotel, and be more to myself. Good and dear as the
Putnams are and extremely helpful as they've been, it keeps me too much
in company. Good-night again. Your loving father, _respective_ husband,
W. J.
_To Mrs. James._
ROME, _Apr. 25, 1905_.
...Strong telegraphed me yesterday from Lausanne that he ... expected to
be at Cannes on the 4th of May. I was glad of this, for I had been
feeling more and more as if I ought to stay here, and it makes
everything square out well. This morning I went to the meeting-place of
the Congress to inscribe myself definitely, and when I gave my name, the
lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me,
or words to that effect, and called in poor Professor de Sanctis, the
Vice President or Secretary or whatever, who treated me in the same
manner, and finally got me to consent to make an address at one of the
general meetings, of which there are four, in place of Sully, Flournoy,
Richet, Lipps, and Brentano, who were announced but are not to come. I
fancy they have been pretty unscrupulous with their program here,
printing conditional futures as categorical ones. So I'm in for it
again, having no power to resist flattery. I shall try to express my
"Does Consciousness Exist?" in twenty minutes--and possibly in the
French tongue! Strange after the deep sense of nothingness that has been
besetting me the last two weeks (mere fatigue symptom) to be told that
_my_ name was attracting many of the young professors to the Congress!
Then I went to the Museum in the baths of Diocletian or whatever it is,
off there by the R. R., then to the Capitol, and then to lunch off the
Corso, at a restaurant, after buying a French book whose author says in
his preface that Sully, W. J., and Bergson are his masters. And I am
absolute 0 in my own home!...
_Apr. 30, 1905._ 7 P.M.
...If you never had a tired husband, at least you've got one now! The
_ideer_ of being in such delightful conditions and interesting
surroundings, and being conscious of nothing but one's preposterous
physical distress, is too ridiculous! I have just said good-bye to my
circle of admirers, relatively youthful, at the hotel door, under the
pretext (a truth until this morning) that I had to get ready to go to
Lausanne tonight, and I taper off my activity by subsiding upon you.
Yesterday till three, and the day before till five, I was writing my
address, which this morning I gave--in French. I wrote it carefully and
surprised myself by the ease with which I slung the Gallic accent and
intonation, being excited by the occasion.[58] Janet expressed himself
as _stupéfait_, from the linguistic point of view. The thing lasted 40
minutes, and was followed by a discussion which showed that the critics
with one exception had wholly failed to catch the point of view; but
that was quite _en régle_, so I don't care; and I have given the thing
to Claparède to print in Flournoy's "Archives." The Congress was far
too vast, but filled with strange and interesting creatures of all
sorts, and socially _very_ nutritious to anyone who can stand
sociability without distress. A fête of some sort every day--this P.M. I
have just returned from a great afternoon tea given us by some
"Minister" at the Borghese Palace--in the Museum. (The King, you know,
has bought the splendid Borghese park and given it to the City of Rome
as a democratic possession _in perpetuo_. A splendid gift.) The pictures
too! Tonight there is a great banquet with speeches, to which of course
I can't go. I lunched at the da Vitis,--a big table full, she very
simple and nice,--and I have been having this afternoon a very good and
rather intimate talk with the little band of "pragmatists," Papini,
Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, etc., most of whom inhabit Florence,
publish the monthly journal "Leonardo" at their own expense, and carry
on a very serious philosophic movement, apparently _really_ inspired by
Schiller and myself (I never could believe it before, although Ferrari
had assured me), and show an enthusiasm, and also a literary swing and
activity that I know nothing of in our own land, and that probably our
damned academic technics and Ph.D.-machinery and university organization
prevents from ever coming to a birth. These men, of whom Ferrari is one,
are none of them _Fach-philosophers_, and few of them teachers at all.
It has given me a certain new idea of the way in which truth ought to
find its way into the world.
I have seen such a lot of _important_-looking faces,--probably
everything in the stock in the shop-window,--and witnessed such
charmingly gracious manners, that it is a lesson. The woodenness of our
Anglo-Saxon social ways! I had a really splendid audience for quality
this A.M. (about 200), even though they didn't understand....
_To George Santayana._
ORVIETO, _May 2, 1905_.
DEAR SANTAYANA,--I came here yesterday from Rome and have been enjoying
the solitude. I stayed at the exquisite Albergo de Russie, and didn't
shirk the Congress--in fact they stuck me for a "general" address, to
fill the vacuum left by Flournoy and Sully, who had been announced and
came not (I spoke _agin_ "consciousness," but nobody understood) and I
got _fearfully tired_. On the whole it was an agreeable
nightmare--agreeable on account of the perfectly charming _gentillezza_
of the bloody Dagoes, the way they caress and flatter you--"il piu grand
psicologo del mondo," etc., and of the elaborate provisions for general
entertainment--nightmare, because of my absurd bodily fatigue. However,
these things are "neither here nor there." What I really write to you
for is to tell you to send (if not sent already) your "Life of Reason"
to the "Revue de Philosophie," or rather to its editor, M. Peillaube,
Rue des Revues 160, and to the editor of "Leonardo" (the great little
Florentine philosophical journal), Sig. Giovanni Papini, 14 Borgo
Albizi, Florence. The most interesting, and in fact genuinely edifying,
part of my trip has been meeting this little _cénacle_, who have taken
my own writings, _entre autres, au grand sérieux_, but who are carrying
on their philosophical mission in anything but a technically serious
way, inasmuch as "Leonardo" (of which I have hitherto only known a few
odd numbers) is devoted to good and lively literary form. The sight of
their belligerent young enthusiasm has given me a queer sense of the
gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young Ph.D.'s, boring each
other at seminaries, writing those direful reports of literature in the
"Philosophical Review" and elsewhere, fed on "books of reference," and
never confounding "Æsthetik" with "Erkentnisstheorie." Faugh! I shall
never deal with them again--on _those_ terms! Can't you and I, who in
spite of such divergence have yet so much in common in our
_Weltanschauung_, start a systematic movement at Harvard against the
desiccating and pedantifying process? I have been cracking you up
greatly to both Peillaube and Papini, and quoted you twice in my speech,
which was in French and will be published in Flournoy's "Archives de
Psychologie." I hope you're enjoying the Eastern Empire to the full, and
that you had some Grecian "country life." Münsterberg has been called to
Koenigsberg and has refused. Better be America's ancestor than Kant's
successor! Ostwald, to my great delight, is coming to us next year, not
as your replacer, but in exchange with Germany for F. G. Peabody. I go
now to Cannes, to meet Strong, back from his operation. Ever truly
yours,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. James._
CANNES, _May 13, 1905_.
...I came Sunday night, and this is Saturday. The six days have been
busy ones in one sense, but have rested me very much in another. No
sight-seeing fatigues, but more usual, and therefore more normal
occupations.... I have written some 25 letters, long and short, to
European correspondents since being here, have walked and driven with
Strong, and have had philosophy hot and heavy with him almost all the
time. I never knew such an unremitting, untiring, monotonous addiction
as that of his mind to truth. He goes by points, pinning each one
definitely, and has, I think, the very clearest mind I ever knew. Add to
it his absolute sincerity and candor and it is no wonder that he is a
"growing" man. I suspect that he will outgrow us all, for his rate
accelerates, and he never stands still. He is an admirable philosophic
figure, and I am glad to say that in most things he and I are fully in
accord. He gains a great deal from such talks, noting every point down
afterwards, and I gain great stimulation, though in a vaguer way. I
shall be glad, however, on Monday afternoon, to relax....
_To Mrs. James._
[Post-card]
GENEVA, _May 17, 1905_.
So far, thank Heaven, on my way towards home! A rather useful time with
the superior, but sticky X----, at Marseilles, and as far as Lyons in
the train, into which an hour beyond Lyons there came (till then I was
alone in my compartment) a Spanish bishop, canon and "familar," an aged
holy woman, sister of the bishop, a lay-brother and sister, a dog, and
more baggage than I ever saw before, including a feather-bed. They spoke
no French--the bishop about as much Italian as I, and the lay-sister as
much of English as I of Spanish. They took out their rosaries and began
mumbling their litanies forthwith, whereon I took off my hat, which
seemed to touch them so, when they discovered I was a Protestant, that
we all grew very affectionate and I soon felt ashamed of the way in
which I had at first regarded their black and superstitious invasion of
my privacy. Good, saintly people on their way to Rome. I go now to our
old haunts and to the Flournoys'....
W.
_To H. G. Wells._
S. S. CEDRIC, _June 6, 1905_.
MY DEAR MR. WELLS,--I have just read your "Utopia" (given me by F. C. S.
Schiller on the one day that I spent in Oxford on my way back to
Cambridge, Mass., after a few weeks on the Continent), and
"Anticipations," and "Mankind in the Making" having duly preceded,
together with numerous other lighter volumes of yours, the "summation of
stimuli" reaches the threshold of discharge and I can't help overflowing
in a note of gratitude. You "have your faults, as who has not?" but your
virtues are unparalleled and transcendent, and I believe that you will
prove to have given a shove to the practical thought of the next
generation that will be amongst the greatest of its influences for good.
All in the line of the English genius too, no wire-drawn French
doctrines, and no German shop technicalities inflicted in an
_unerbittlich consequent_ manner, but everywhere the sense of the full
concrete, and the air of freedom playing through all the joints of your
argument. You have a tri-dimensional human heart, and to use your own
metaphor, don't see different levels projected on one plane. In this
last book you beautifully soften cocksureness by the penumbra of the
outlines--in fact you're a trump and a jewel, and for human perception
you beat Kipling, and for hitting off a thing with the right word, you
are unique. Heaven bless and preserve you!--You are now an eccentric;
perhaps 50 years hence you will figure as a classic! Your Samurai
chapter is magnificent, though I find myself wondering what developments
in the way of partisan politics those same Samurai would develop, when
it came to questions of appointment and running this or that man in.
_That_ I believe to be human nature's ruling passion. Live long! and
keep writing; and believe me, yours admiringly and sincerely,
Wm. James.
_To Henry L. Higginson._
Cambridge, _July 18 [1905]_.
DEAR H.,--You asked me how rich I was getting by my own (as
distinguished from _your_) exertions....
I find on reaching home today a letter from Longmans, Green & Co. with a
check ... which I have mailed to your house in State Street....
This ought to please you slightly; but don't reply! Instead, think of
the virtues of Roosevelt, either as permanent sovereign of this great
country, or as President of Harvard University. I've been having a
discussion with Fanny Morse about him, which has resulted in making me
his faithful henchman for life, Fanny was so violent. Think of the
mighty good-will of him, of his enjoyment of his post, of his power as a
preacher, of the number of things to which he gives his attention, of
the safety of his second thoughts, of the increased courage he is
showing, and above all of the fact that he is an open, instead of an
underground leader, whom the voters can control once in four years, when
he runs away, whose heart is in the right place, who is an enemy of red
tape and quibbling and everything that in general the word "politician"
stands for. That significance of him in the popular mind is a great
national asset, and it would be a shame to let it run to waste until it
has done a lot more work for us. His ambitions are not selfish--he wants
to do good only! Bless him--and damn all his detractors like you and F.
M.![59]
Don't reply, but vote! Your affectionately
Wm. James.
_To T. S. Perry._
Cambridge, _Aug. 24, 1905_.
DEAR THOS!--You're a _philosophe sans le savoir_ and, when you write
your treatise against philosophy, you will be classed as the
arch-metaphysician. Every philosopher (W. J., _e.g._) pretends that all
the others are metaphysicians against whom he is simply defending the
rights of common sense. As for Nietzsche, the worst break of his I
recall was in a posthumous article in one of the French reviews a few
months back. In his high and mighty way he was laying down the law about
all the European countries. Russia, he said, is "the only one that has
any possible future--and that she owes to the strength of the principle
of autocracy to which she alone remains faithful," Unfortunately one
can't appeal to the principle of democracy to explain Japan's recent
successes.
I am very glad you've done something about poor dear old John Fiske, and
I should think that you would have no difficulty in swelling it up to
the full "Beacon Biography" size. If you want an extra anecdote, you
might tell how, when Chauncey Wright, Chas. Peirce, St. John Green,
Warner and I appointed an evening to discuss the "Cosmic Philosophy,"
just out, J. F. went to sleep under our noses.
I hope that life as a farmer agrees with you, and that your "womenkind"
wish nothing better than to be farmers' wives, daughters or other
relatives. Unluckily we let our farm this summer; so I am here in
Cambridge with Alice, both of us a prey to as bad an attack of grippe as
the winter solstice ever brought forth. Today, the 10th day, I am weaker
than any kitten. Don't ever let _your_ farm! Affectionately,
W. J.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Nov. 10, 1905_.
DEAR MILLER,--W. R. Warren has just been here and says he has just seen
you; the which precipitates me into a letter to you which has long hung
fire. I hope that all goes well. You must be in a rather cheerful
quarter of the City. Do you go home Sundays, or not? I hope that the
work is congenial. How do you like your students as compared with those
here? I reckon you get more out of your colleagues than you did
here--barring of course _der Einzige_. We are all such old stories to
each other that we say nothing. Santayana is the only [one] about whom
we had any curiosity, and he has now quenched that. Perry and Holt have
some ideas in reserve.... The fact is that the classroom exhausts our
powers of speech. Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all
the stuff I wrote last year--to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to
others, if he has read, it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel
trenches and hardly show our heads.
Santayana's book[60] is a great one, if the inclusion of opposites is a
measure of greatness. I think it will probably be reckoned great by
posterity. It has no _rational_ foundation, being merely one man's way
of viewing things: so much of experience admitted and no more, so much
criticism and questioning admitted and no more. He is a paragon of
Emersonianism.--declare your intuitions, though no other man share them;
and the integrity with which he does it is as fine as it is rare. And
his naturalism, materialism, Platonism, and atheism form a combination
of which the centre of gravity is, I think, very deep. But there is
something profoundly alienating in his unsympathetic tone, his
"preciousness" and superciliousness. The book is Emerson's first rival
and successor, but how different the reader's feeling! The same things
in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive,
expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great
indraught; S. as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling
spray outward over the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an
"atomizer." ... I fear that the real originality of the book will be
lost on nineteen-twentieths of the members of the Philosophical and
Psychological Association!! The enemies of Harvard will find lots of
blasphemous texts in him to injure us withal. But it is a great feather
in our cap to harbor such an absolutely free expresser of individual
convictions. But enough!
"Phil. 9" is going well. I think I _lecture_ better than I ever did; in
fact I know I do. But this professional evolution goes with an
involution of all miscellaneous faculty. I am well, and efficient
enough, but purposely going slow so as to keep efficient into the Palo
Alto summer, which means that I have written nothing. I am pestered by
doubts as to whether to put my resignation through this year, in spite
of opposition, or to drag along another year or two. I think it is
inertia against energy, energy in my case meaning being my own man
absolutely. American philosophers, young and old, seem scratching where
the wool is short. Important things are being published; but all of them
too technical. The thing will never clear up satisfactorily till someone
writes out its resultant in decent English....
* * * * *
The reader will have understood "the Palo Alto summer" to refer to the
lectures to be delivered at Stanford University during the coming
spring. The Stanford engagement was again in James's mind when he spoke,
in the next letter, of "dreading the prospect of lecturing till
mid-May."
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Dec. 6, 1905_.
DEAR MILLER,-- ...You seem to take radical empiricism more simply than I
can. What I mean by it is the thesis that there is no fact "not
actually experienced to be such." In other words, the concept of "being"
or "fact" is not wider than or prior to the concept "content of
experience"; and you can't talk of _experiences being_ this or that, but
only of _things experienced as being_ this or that. But such a thesis
would, it seems to me, if literally taken, force one to drop the notion
that in point of fact one experience is _ex_ another, so long as the
_ex_-ness is not itself a "content" of experience. In the matter of two
minds not having the same content, it seems to me that your view commits
you to an assertion _about their experiences_; and such an assertion
assumes a realm in which the experiences lie, which overlaps and
surrounds the "content" of them. This, it seems to me, breaks down
radical empiricism, which I hate to do; and I can't yet clearly see my
way out of the quandary. I am much boggled and muddled; and the total
upshot with me is to see that all the hoary errors and prejudices of man
in matters philosophical are based on something pretty inevitable in the
structure of our thinking, and to distrust summary executions by
conviction of contradiction. I suspect your execution of being too
summary; but I have copied the last paragraph of the sheets (which I
return with heartiest thanks) for the extraordinarily neat statement....
I dread the prospect of lecturing till mid-May, but the wine being
ordered, I must drink it. I dislike lecturing more and more. Have just
definitely withdrawn my candidacy for the Sorbonne job, with great
internal relief, and wish I could withdraw from the whole business, and
get at writing.[61] Not a line of writing possible this year--except of
course occasional note-making. All the things that one is really
concerned with are too nice and fine to use in lectures. You remember
the definition of T. H. Greene's student: "The universe is a thick
complexus of intelligible relations." Yesterday I got _my_ system
similarly defined in an examination-book, by a student whom I appear to
have converted to the view that "the Universe is a vague pulsating mass
of next-to-next movement, always feeling its way along to a good
purpose, or trying to." That is about as far as lectures can carry them.
I particularly like the "trying to."
I wish I could have been at your recent discussion. I am getting
impatient with the awful abstract rigmarole in which our American
philosophers obscure the truth. It will be fatal. It revives the palmy
days of Hegelianism. It means utter relaxation of intellectual duty, and
God will smite it. If there's anything he hates, it is that kind of oozy
writing.
I have just read Busse's book, in which I find a lot of reality by the
way, but a pathetic waste of work on side issues--for against the
Strong-Heymans view of things, it seems to me that he brings no solid
objection whatever. Heymans's book is a wonder.[62] Good-bye, dear
Miller. _Come to us_, if you can, as soon as your lectures are over.
Your affectionate
W. J.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
[Post-card]
Cambridge, _Dec. 9. 1905_.
"My idea of Algebra," says a non-mathematically-minded student, "is that
it is a sort of form of low cunning."
W. J.
_To Daniel Merriman._
Cambridge, _Dec. 9, 1905_.
No, dear Merriman, not "e'en for thy sake." After an unblemished record
of declining to give addresses, successfully maintained for four years
(I have certainly declined 100 in the past twelve-month), I am not going
to break down now, for Abbot Academy, and go dishonored to my grave. It
is better, as the "Bhagavat-Gita" says, to lead your own life, however
bad, than to lead another's, however good. Emerson teaches the same
doctrine, and I live by it as bad and congenial a life as I can. If
there is anything that God despises more than a man who is constantly
making speeches, it is another man who is constantly accepting
invitations. What must he think, when they are both rolled into one? Get
thee behind me, Merriman,--I 'm sure that your saintly partner would
never have sent me such a request,--and believe me, as ever, fondly
yours,
Wm. James.
_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._
EL TOVAR,
GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA, _Jan. 3, 1906_.
DEAR PAOLINA,--I am breaking my journey by a day here, and it seems a
good place from which to date my New Year's greeting to you. But we
correspond so rarely that when it comes to the point of tracing actual
words with the pen, the last impressions of one's day and the more
permanent interest of one's life block the way for each other. I think,
however, that a word about the Canyon may fitly take precedence. It
certainly is equal to the brag; and, like so many of the more stupendous
freaks of nature, seems at first-sight smaller and more manageable than
one had supposed. But it grows in immensity as the eye penetrates it
more intimately. It is so entirely alone in character, that one has no
habits of association with "the likes" of it, and at first it seems a
foreign curiosity; but already in this one day I am feeling myself grow
nearer, and can well imagine that, with greater intimacy, it might
become the passion of one's life--so far as "Nature" goes. The
conditions have been unfavorable for intimate communion. Three degrees
above zero, and a spring overcoat, prevent that forgetting of "self"
which is said to be indispensable to absorption in Beauty. Moreover, I
have kept upon the "rim," seeing the Canyon from several points some
miles apart. I meant to go down, having but this day; but they couldn't
send me or any one today; and I confess that, with my precipice-disliking
soul, I was relieved, though it very likely would have proved less
uncomfortable than I have been told. (I resolved to go, in order to be
worthy of being your correspondent.) As Chas. Lamb says, there is
nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by
accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to
be prevented by "circumstances beyond your control" from even trying to
execute them. But if ever I get here in summer, I shall go straight down
and live there. I'm sure that it is indispensable. But it is vain to
waste descriptive words on the wondrous apparition, with its symphonies
of architecture and of color. I have just been watching its peaks blush
in the setting sun, and slowly lose their fire. Night nestling in the
depths. Solemn, solemn! And a unity of design that makes it seem like an
individual, an animated being. Good-night, old chasm!...
_To Henry James._
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Feb. 1, 1906_.
BELOVED H.,--Verily 'tis long since I have written to thee, but I have
had many and mighty things to do, and lately many business letters to
write, so I came not at it. Your last was your delightful reply to my
remarks about your "third manner," wherein you said that you would
consider your bald head dishonored if you ever came to pleasing _me_ by
what you wrote, so shocking was my taste.[63] Well! only write _for_ me,
and leave the question of pleasing open! I have to admit that in "The
Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove," you have succeeded _in getting
there_ after a fashion, in spite of the perversity of the method and its
_longness_, which I am not the only one to deplore.
But enough! let me tell you of my own fortunes!
I got here (after five pestilentially close-aired days in the train, and
one entrancing one off at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado) on the 8th,
and have now given nine lectures, to 300 enrolled students and about 150
visitors, partly colleagues. I take great pains, prepare a printed
syllabus, very fully; and really feel for the first time in my life, as
if I were lecturing _well_. High time, after 30 years of practice! It
earns me $5000, if I can keep it up till May 27th; but apart from that,
I think it is a bad way of expending energy. I ought to be writing my
everlastingly postponed book, which this job again absolutely adjourns.
I can't write a line of it while doing this other thing. (A propos to
which, I got a telegram from Eliot this A.M., asking if I would be
Harvard Professor for the first half of next year at the University of
Berlin. I had no difficulty in declining that, but I probably shall not
decline _Paris_, if they offer it to me year after next.) I am expecting
Alice to arrive in a fortnight. I have got a very decent little second
story, just enough for the two of us, or rather amply enough, sunny,
good fire-place, bathroom, little kitchen, etc., on one of the three
residential streets of the University land, and with a boarding-house
for meals just opposite, we shall have a sort of honeymoon picnic time.
And, sooth to say, Alice must need the simplification....
You've seen this wonderful spot, so I needn't describe it. It is really
a miracle; and so simple the life and so benign the elements, that for a
young ambitious professor who wishes to leave his mark on Pacific
civilization while it is most plastic, or for _any one_ who wants to
teach and work under the most perfect conditions for eight or nine
months, and _who is able to get to the East, or Europe, for the
remaining three_, I can't imagine anything finer. It is Utopian.
Perfection of weather. Cold nights, though above freezing. Fire pleasant
until 10 o'clock A.M., then unpleasant. In short, the "simple life" with
all the essential higher elements thrown in as communal possessions. The
drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum--the historic
silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen--and the social
insipidity. I'm glad I came, and with God's blessing I may pull through.
One calendar month is over, anyway. Do you know aught of G. K.
Chesterton? I've just read his "Heretics." A tremendously strong writer
and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradox. Wells's "Kipps" is
good. Good-bye. Of course you 're breathing the fog of London while I am
bathed in warmest lucency. Keep well. Your loving,
W. J.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Feb. 9, 1906_.
DEAR FLOURNOY.--Your post-card of Jan. 22nd arrives and reminds me how
little I have communicated with you during the past twelve months....
Let me begin by congratulating Mlle. Alice, but more particularly Mr.
Werner, on the engagement which you announce. Surely she is a splendid
prize for anyone to capture. I hope that it has been a romantic
love-affair, and will remain so to the end. May her paternal and
maternal example be the model which their married life will follow! They
could find no better model. You do not tell the day of the
wedding--probably it is not yet appointed.
Yes! [Richard] Hodgson's death was ultra-sudden. He fell dead while
playing a violent game of "hand-ball." He was tremendously athletic and
had said to a friend only a week before that he thought he could
reasonably count on twenty-five years more of life. None of his work was
finished, vast materials amassed, which no one can ever get acquainted
with as he had gradually got acquainted; so now good-bye forever to at
least two unusually solid and instructive books which he would have soon
begun to write on "psychic" subjects. As a _man_, Hodgson was splendid,
a real man; as an investigator, it is my private impression that he
lately got into a sort of obsession about Mrs. Piper, cared too little
for other clues, and continued working with her when all the sides of
her mediumship were amply exhibited. I suspect that our American Branch
of the S.P.R. will have to dissolve this year, for lack of a competent
secretary. Hodgson was our only worker, except Hyslop, and _he_ is
engaged in founding an "Institute" of his own, which will employ more
popular methods. To tell the truth, I 'm rather glad of the prospect of
the Branch ending, for the Piper-investigation--and nothing else--had
begun to bore me to extinction....
To change the subject--you ought to see this extraordinary little
University. It was founded only fourteen years ago in the absolute
wilderness, by a pair of rich Californians named Stanford, as a memorial
to their only child, a son who died at 16. Endowed with I know not how
many square miles of land, which some day will come into the market and
yield a big income, it has already funds that yield $750,000 yearly, and
buildings, of really _beautiful_ architecture, that have been paid for
out of income, and have cost over $5,000,000. (I mention the cost to let
you see that they must be solid.) There are now 1500 students of both
sexes, who pay nothing for tuition, and a town of 15,000 inhabitants has
grown up a mile away, beyond the gates. The landscape is exquisite and
classical, San Francisco only an hour and a quarter away by train; the
climate is one of the most perfect in the world, life is absolutely
simple, no one being rich, servants almost unattainable (most of the
house-work being done by students who come in at odd hours), many of
them Japanese, and the professors' wives, I fear, having in great
measure to do their own cooking. No social excesses or complications
therefore. In fact, nothing but essentials, and _all_ the essentials.
Fine music, for example, every afternoon, in the Church of the
University. There couldn't be imagined a better environment for an
intellectual man to teach and work in, for eight or nine months in the
year, if he were then free to spend three or four months in the crowded
centres of civilization--for the social insipidity is great here, and
the historic vacuum and silence appalling, and one ought to be free to
change.
Unfortunately the authorities of the University seem not to be gifted
with imagination enough to see its proper rôle. Its geographical
environment and material basis being unique, they ought to aim at unique
quality all through, and get _sommités_ to come here to work and teach,
by offering large stipends. They might, I think, thus easily build up
something very distinguished. Instead of which, they pay small sums to
young men who chafe at not being able to travel, and whose wives get
worn out with domestic drudgery. The whole thing _might_ be Utopian; it
_is_ only half-Utopian. A characteristic American affair! But the
half-success is great enough to make one see the great advantages that
come to this country from encouraging public-spirited millionaires to
indulge their freaks, however eccentric. In what the Stanfords have
already done, there is an assured potentiality of great things of _some_
sort for all future time. My coming here is an exception. They have had
psychology well represented from the first by Frank Angell and Miss
Martin; but no philosophy except for a year at a time. I start a new
régime--next year they will have two good professors.
I lecture three times a week to 400 listeners, printing a syllabus
daily, and making them read Paulsen's textbook for examinations. I find
it hard work,[64] and only pray that I may have strength to run till
June without collapsing. The students, though rustic, are very earnest
and wholesome.
I am pleased, but also amused, by what you say of Woodbridge's Journal:
"la palme est maintenant à l'Amérique." It is true that a lot of
youngsters in that Journal are doing some real thinking, but of all the
_bad writing_ that the world has seen, I think that our American writing
is getting to be the worst. X----'s ideas have unchained formlessness of
expression that beats the bad writing of the Hegelian epoch in Germany.
I can hardly believe you sincere when you praise that journal as you do.
I am so busy teaching that I do no writing and but little reading this
year. I have declined to go to Paris next year, and also declined an
invitation to Berlin, as "International Exchange" [Professor]. The year
after, if asked, I _may_ go to Paris--but never to Berlin. We have had
Ostwald, a most delightful human _Erscheinung_, as international
exchange at Harvard this year. But I don't believe in the system....
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
HOTEL DEL MONTE,
MONTEREY, CAL., _Apr. 7, 1906_.
...What I really want to write about is Papini, the concluding chapter
of his "Crepuscolo dei Filosofi," and the February number of the
"Leonardo." Likewise Dewey's "Beliefs and Realities," in the
"Philosophical Review" for March. I must be very damp powder, slow to
burn, and I must be terribly respectful of other people, for I confess
that it is only after reading these things (in spite of all you have
written to the same effect, and in spite of your tone of announcing
judgment to a sinful world), that I seem to have grasped the full import
for life and regeneration, the _great_ perspective of the programme, and
the renovating character for _all things_, of Humanism; and the
outwornness as of a scarecrow's garments, simulating life by flapping in
the wind of nightfall, of all intellectualism, and the blindness and
deadness of all who worship intellectualist idols, the Royces and
Taylors, and, worse than all, their followers, who, with no inward
excuse of nature (being too unoriginal really to _prefer_ anything),
just blunder on to the wrong scent, when it is so easy to catch the
right one, and then stick to it with the fidelity of inorganic matter.
Ha! ha! would that I were young again with this inspiration! Papini is a
jewel! To think of that little Dago putting himself ahead of every one
of us (even of you, with his _Uomo-Dio_) at a single stride. And what a
writer! and what fecundity! and what courage (careless of nicknames, for
it is so easy to call him now the Cyrano de Bergerac of Philosophy)! and
what humor and what truth! Dewey's powerful stuff seems also to ring the
death-knell of a sentenced world. Yet none of _them_ will see it--Taylor
will still write his refutations, etc., etc., when the living world will
all be drifting after _us_. It is queer to be assisting at the
_éclosion_ of a great new mental epoch, life, religion, and philosophy
in one--I wish I didn't have to lecture, so that I might bear some part
of the burden of writing it all out, as we must do, pushing it into all
sort of details. But I must for one year longer. We don't get back till
June, but pray tell Wells (whose address _fehlt mir_) to make our house
his headquarters if he gets to Boston and finds it the least convenient
to do so. Our boys will hug him to their bosoms. Ever thine,
W. J.
The San Francisco earthquake occurred at about five o'clock in the
morning on April 18. Rumors of the destruction wrought in the city
reached Stanford within a couple of hours and were easily credited, for
buildings had been shaken down at Stanford. Miss L. J. Martin, a member
of the philosophical department, was thrown into great anxiety about
relatives of hers who were in the city, and James offered to accompany
her in a search for them, and left Stanford with her by an early morning
train. He also promised Mrs. Wm. F. Snow to try to get her news of her
husband. Miss Martin found her relatives, and James met Dr. Snow early
in the afternoon, and then spent several hours in wandering about the
stricken city. He subsequently wrote an account of the disaster, which
may be found in "Memories and Studies."[65]
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Apr. 22, 1906_.
DEAREST FANNY,--Three letters from you and nary one from us in all these
weeks! Well, I have been heavily burdened, and although disposed to
write, have kept postponing; and with Alice--cooking, washing dishes and
doing housework, as well as keeping up a large social life--it has been
very much the same. All is now over, since the earthquake; I mean that
lectures and syllabuses are called off, and no more exams to be held
("ill-wind," etc.), so one can write. We shall get East again as soon as
we can manage it, and tell you face to face. We can now pose as experts
on Earthquakes--pardon the egotistic form of talking about the latter,
but it makes it more real. The last thing Bakewell said to me, while I
was leaving Cambridge, was: "I hope they'll treat you to a little bit of
an earthquake while you're there. It's a pity you shouldn't have that
local experience." Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that
morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was,
"Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo
and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was
shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can
possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an _entity_ that had been
waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying,
"Now, _go_ it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by
a will, so vicious was the temper displayed--everything _down_, in the
room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid
and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a
wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of
the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify
itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in
the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the
extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney
down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles
of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the
dreadful news from San Francisco.
I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the
evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that
our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that she
_must_ see what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was
very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population
in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses
about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily
advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in
the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and
furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for
four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but
the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its
architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck
solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service.
But you will know all these details by the papers better than I know
them now, before this reaches you, and in three weeks we shall be back.
I am very glad that Jim's [Putnam] lectures went off so well. He wrote
me himself a good letter--won't you, by the way, send him this one as a
partial answer?--and his syllabus was first-rate and the stuff must have
been helpful. It is jolly to think of both him and Marian really getting
off together to enjoy themselves! But between Vesuvius and San Francisco
enjoyment has small elbow-room. Love to your mother, dearest Fanny, to
Mary and the men folks, from us both. Your ever affectionate,
W. J.
A few days after the earthquake, train-service from Stanford to the East
was reëstablished and James and his wife returned to Cambridge. The
reader will infer correctly from the next letter that Henry James (and
William James, Jr., who was staying with him in Rye) had been in great
anxiety and had been by no means reassured by the brief cablegram which
was the only personal communication that it was possible to send them
during the days immediately following the disaster.
_To Henry James and William James, Jr._
Cambridge, _May 9, 1906_.
DEAREST BROTHER AND SON,--Your cablegram of response was duly received,
and we have been also "joyous" in the thought of your being together. I
knew, of course, Henry, that you would be solicitous about us in the
earthquake, but didn't reckon at all on the extremity of your anguish as
evinced by your frequent cablegrams home, and finally by the letter to
Harry which arrived a couple of days ago and told how you were unable to
settle down to any other occupation, the thought of our mangled forms,
hollow eyes, starving bodies, minds insane with fear, haunting you so.
We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety on your part, I say, and
so never thought of cabling you direct, as we might well have done from
Oakland on the day we left, namely April 27th. I much regret this
callousness on our part. For _all_ the anguish was yours; and in general
this experience only rubs in what I have always known, that in battles,
sieges and other great calamities, the pathos and agony is in general
solely felt by those at a distance; and although physical pain is
suffered most by its immediate victims, those at the _scene of action_
have no _sentimental_ suffering whatever. Everyone at San Francisco
seemed in a good hearty frame of mind; there was work for every moment
of the day and a kind of uplift in the sense of a "common lot" that took
away the sense of loneliness that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to
the more usual kind of misfortune that may befall a man. But it was a
queer sight, on our journey through the City on the 26th (eight days
after the disaster), to see the inmates of the houses of the quarter
left standing, all cooking their dinners at little brick camp-fires in
the middle of the streets, the chimneys being condemned. If such a
disaster had to happen, somehow it couldn't have chosen a better place
than San Francisco (where everyone knew about camping, and was familiar
with the creation of civilizations out of the bare ground), and at
five-thirty in the morning, when few fires were lighted and everyone,
after a good sleep, was in bed. Later, there would have been great loss
of life in the streets, and the more numerous foci of conflagration
would have burned the city in one day instead of four, and made things
vastly worse.
In general you may be sure that when any disaster befalls our country it
will be _you_ only who are wringing of hands, and we who are smiling
with "interest or laughing with gleeful excitement." I didn't hear one
pathetic word uttered at the scene of disaster, though of course the
crop of "nervous wrecks" is very likely to come in a month or so.
Although we have been home six days, such has been the stream of broken
occupations, people to see, and small urgent jobs to attend to, that I
have written no letter till now. Today, one sees more clearly and begins
to rest. "Home" looks extraordinarily pleasant, and though damp and
chilly, it is the divine budding moment of the year. Not, however, the
lustrous light and sky of Stanford University....
I have just read your paper on Boston in the "North American Review." I
am glad you threw away the scabbard and made your critical remarks so
straight. What you say about "pay" here being the easily won "salve" for
privations, in view of which we cease to "mind" them, is as true as it
is strikingly pat. _Les intellectuels_, wedged between the millionaires
and the handworkers, are the really pinched class here. They feel the
frustrations and they can't get the salve. _My_ attainment of so much
pay in the past few years brings home to me what an all-benumbing salve
it is. That whole article is of your best. We long to hear from W., Jr.
No word yet. Your ever loving,
W. J.
In "The Energies of Men" there is a long quotation from an unnamed
European correspondent who had been subjecting himself to Yoga
disciplinary exercise. What follows is a comment written upon the first
receipt of the report quoted in the "Energies."
_To W. Lutoslawski._
Cambridge, _May 6, 1906_.
...Your long and beautiful letter about Yoga, etc., greets me on my
return from California. It is a most precious human document, and some
day, along with that sketch of your religious evolution and other
shorter letters of yours, it must see the light of day. What strikes me
first in it is the evidence of improved moral "tone"--a calm, firm,
sustained joyousness, hard to describe, and striking a new note in your
epistles--which is already a convincing argument of the genuineness of
the improvement wrought in you by Yoga practices....
You are mistaken about my having tried Yoga discipline--I never meant to
suggest that. I have read several books (A. B., by the way, used to be a
student of mine, but in spite of many noble qualities, he always had an
unbalanced mind--obsessed by certain morbid ideas, etc.), and in the
slightest possible way tried breathing exercises. These go terribly
against the grain with me, are extremely disagreeable, and, even when
tried this winter (somewhat perseveringly), to put myself asleep, after
lying awake at night, failed to have any soporific effect. What
impresses me most in your narrative is the obstinate strength of will
shown by yourself and your chela in your methodical abstentions and
exercises. When could I hope for such will-power? I find, when my
general energy is _in Anspruch genommen_ by hard lecturing and other
professional work, that then particularly what little _ascetic_ energy I
have has to be remitted, because the exertion of inhibitory and
stimulative will required increases my general fatigue instead of
"tonifying" me.
But your sober experience gives me new hopes. Your whole narrative
suggests in me the wonder whether the Yoga discipline may not be, after
all, in all its phases, simply a methodical way of _waking up deeper
levels of will-power than are habitually used_, and thereby increasing
the individual's vital tone and energy. I have no doubt whatever that
most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a
very restricted circle of their potential being. They _make use_ of a
very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's
resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily
organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little
finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital
resources are than we had supposed. Pierre Janet discussed lately some
cases of pathological impulsion or obsession in what he has called the
"psychasthenic" type of individual, bulimia, exaggerated walking, morbid
love of feeling pain, and explains the phenomenon as based on the
underlying _sentiment d'incomplétude_, as he calls it, or _sentiment de
l'irréel_ with which these patients are habitually afflicted, and which
they find is abolished by the violent appeal to some exaggerated
activity or other, discovered accidentally perhaps, and then used
habitually. I was reminded of his article in reading your descriptions
and prescriptions. May the Yoga practices not be, after all, methods of
getting at our deeper functional levels? And thus only be substitutes
for entirely different crises that may occur in other individuals,
religious crises, indignation-crises, love-crises, etc.?
What you say of diet is in striking accordance with the views lately
made popular by Horace Fletcher--I dare say you have heard of them. You
see I am trying to generalize the Yoga idea, and redeem it from the
pretension that, for example, there is something intrinsically holy in
the various grotesque postures of Hatha Yoga. I have spoken with various
Hindus, particularly with three last winter, one a Yogi and apostle of
Vedanta; one a "Christian" of scientific training; one a Bramo-Somaj
professor. The former made great claims of increase of "power," but
admitted that those who had it could in no way demonstrate it _ad
oculos_, to outsiders. The other two both said that Yoga was less and
less frequently practised by the more intellectual, and that the
old-fashioned _Guru_ was becoming quite a rarity.
I believe with you, fully, that the so-called "normal man" of commerce,
so to speak, the healthy philistine, is a mere extract from the
potentially realizable individual whom he represents, and that we all
have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. The
practical problem is "how to get at them." And the answer varies with
the individual. Most of us never can, or never do get at them. _You_
have indubitably got at your own deeper levels by the Yoga methods. I
hope that what you have gained will never again be lost to you. You must
keep there! _My_ deeper levels seem very hard to find--I am so
rebellious at all formal and prescriptive methods--a dry and bony
_individual_, repelling fusion, and avoiding voluntary exertion. No
matter, art is long! and _qui vivra verra_. I shall try fasting and
again try breathing--discovering perhaps some individual rhythm that is
more tolerable....
_To John Jay Chapman._
Cambridge, _May 18, 1906_.
DEAR OLD JACK C.,--Having this minute come into the possession of a new
type-writer, what can I do better than express my pride in the same by
writing to you?[66]
I spent last night at George Dorr's and he read me several letters from
you, telling me also of your visit, and of how well you seemed. For
years past I have been on the point of writing to you to assure [you] of
my continued love and to express my commiseration for your poor wife,
who has had so long to bear the brunt of your temper--you see I have
been there already and I know how one's irritability is exasperated by
conditions of nervous prostration--but now I can write and congratulate
you on having recovered, temper and all. (As I write, it bethinks me
that in a previous letter I have made identical jokes about your temper
which, I fear, will give Mrs. Chapman a very low opinion of my
humoristic resources, and in sooth they are small; but we are as God
makes us and must not try to be anything else, so pray condone the
silliness and let it pass.) The main thing is that you seem practically
to have recovered, in spite of everything; and I am heartily glad.
I too am well enough for all practical purposes, but I have to go slow
and not try to do too many things in a day. Simplification of life and
consciousness I find to be the great thing, but a hard thing to compass
when one lives in city conditions. How our dear Sarah Whitman lived in
the sort of railroad station she made of her life--I confess it's a
mystery to me. If I lived at a place called Barrytown, it would probably
go better--don't you ever go back to New York to live!
Alice and I had a jovial time at sweet little Stanford University. It
was the simple life in the best sense of the term. I am glad for once to
have been part of the working machine of California, and a pretty deep
part too, as it afterwards turned out. The earthquake also was a
memorable bit of experience, and altogether we have found it
mind-enlarging and are very glad we ben there. But the whole
intermediate West is awful--a sort of penal doom to have to live there;
and in general the result with me of having lived 65 years in America is
to make me feel as if I had at least bought the right to a certain
capriciousness, and were free now to live for the remainder of my days
wherever I prefer and can make my wife and children consent--it is more
likely to be in rural than in urban surroundings, and in the maturer
than in the _rawrer_ parts of the world. But the first thing is to get
out of the treadmill of teaching, which I hate and shall resign from
next year. After that, I can use my small available store of energy in
writing, which is not only a much more economical way of working it, but
more satisfactory in point of quality, and more lucrative as well.
Now, J. C., when are you going to get at writing again? The world is
hungry for your wares. No one touches certain deep notes of moral truth
as you do, and your humor is _köstlich_ and _impayable_. You ought to
join the band of "pragmatistic" or "humanistic" philosophers. I almost
fear that Barrytown may not yet have begun to be disturbed by the rumor
of their achievements, the which are of the greatest, and seriously I du
think that the world of thought is on the eve of a renovation no less
important than that contributed by Locke. The leaders of the new
movement are Dewey, Schiller of Oxford, in a sense Bergson of Paris, a
young Florentine named Papini, and last and least worthy, W. J. H. G.
Wells ought to be counted in, and if I mistake not G. K. Chesterton as
well.[67] I hope you know and love the last-named writer, who seems to
me a great teller of the truth. His systematic preference for
contradictions and paradoxical forms of statement seems to me a
mannerism somewhat to be regretted in so wealthy a mind; but that is a
blemish from which some of our very greatest intellects are not
altogether free--the philosopher of Barrytown himself being not wholly
exempt. Join us, O Jack, and in the historic and perspective sense your
fame will be secure. All future Histories of Philosophy will print your
name.
But although my love for you is not exhausted, my type-writing energy
is. It communicates stiffness and cramps, both to the body and the mind.
Nevertheless I think I have been doing pretty well for a first attempt,
don't you? If you return me a good long letter telling me more
particularly about the process of your recovery, I will write again,
even if I have to take a pen to do it, and in any case I will do it much
better than this time.
Believe me, dear old J. C., with hearty affection and delight at your
recovery--all these months I have been on the brink of writing to find
out how you were--and with very best regards to your wife, whom some day
I wish we may be permitted to know better. Yours very truly,
Wm. James.
Everyone dead! Hodgson, Shaler, James Peirce this winter--to go no
further afield! _Resserrons les rangs!_
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _Sept. 10, 1906_.
DEAREST H.,--I got back from the Adirondacks, where I had spent a
fortnight, the night before last, and in three or four hours Alice,
Aleck and I will be spinning towards Chocorua, it being now five A.M.
Elly [Temple] Hunter will join us, with Grenville, in a few days; but
for the most part, thank Heaven, we shall be alone till the end of the
month. I found two letters from you awaiting me, and two from Bill. They
all breathed a spirit of happiness, and brought a waft of the beautiful
European summer with them. It has been a beautiful summer here too; and
now, sad to say, it is counting the last beads of its chaplet of hot
days out--the hot days which are really the absolutely friendly ones to
man--you wish they would get cooler when you have them, and when they
are departed, you wish you could have their exquisite gentleness again.
I have just been reading in the volume by Richard Jefferies called the
"Life of the Fields" a wonderful rhapsody, "The Pageant of Summer." It
needs to be read twice over and very attentively, being nothing but an
enumeration of all the details visible in the corner of an old field
with a hedge and ditch. But rightly taken in, it is probably the highest
flight of human genius in the direction of nature-worship. I don't see
why it should not count as an immortal thing. You missed it, when here,
in not getting to Keene Valley, where I have just been, and of which the
sylvan beauty, especially by moonlight, is probably unlike aught that
Europe has to show. Imperishable freshness!...
This is definitely my last year of lecturing, but I wish it were my
first of non-lecturing. Simplification of the field of duties I find
more and more to be the _summum bonum_ for me; and I live in
apprehension lest the Avenger should cut me off before I get my message
out. Not that the message is particularly needed by the human race,
which can live along perfectly well without any one philosopher; but
objectively I hate to leave the volumes I have already published without
their logical complement. It is an esthetic tragedy to have a bridge
begun, and stopped in the middle of an arch.
But I hear Alice stirring upstairs, so I must go up and finish packing.
I hope that you and W. J., Jr., will again form a harmonious
combination. I hope also that he will stop painting for a time. He will
do all the better, when he gets home, for having had a fallow interval.
Good-bye! and my blessing upon both of you. Your ever loving,
W. J.
_To H. G. Wells._
CHOCORUA, _Sept. 11, 1906_.
DEAR MR. WELLS,--I've read your "Two Studies in Disappointment" in
"Harper's Weekly," and must thank you from the bottom of my heart. _Rem
acu tetegisti!_ Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is _the_
sinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible
feature, of our U. S. civilization. How you hit upon it so neatly and
singled it out so truly (and talked of it so tactfully!) God only knows:
He evidently created you to do such things! I never heard of the
MacQueen case before, but I've known of plenty of others. When the
ordinary American hears of them, instead of the idealist within him
beginning to "see red" with the higher indignation, instead of the
spirit of English history growing alive in his breast, he begins to
pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from
his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency. "It's probably
right enough"; "Scoundrelly, as you say," but understandable, "from the
point of view of parties interested"--but understandable in onlooking
citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive
worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That--with the squalid cash
interpretation put on the word success--is our national disease. Hit it
hard! Your book _must_ have a great effect. Do you remember the glorious
remarks about success in Chesterton's "Heretics"? You will undoubtedly
have written _the_ medicinal book about America. And what good humor!
and what tact! Sincerely yours,
Wm. James.
_To Miss Theodora Sedgwick._
CHOCORUA, _Sept. 13, 1906_.
DEAR THEODORA,--Here we are in this sweet delicate little place, after a
pretty agitated summer, and the quiet seems very nice. Likewise the
stillness. I have thought often of you, and _almost_ written; but there
never seemed exactly to be time or place for it, so I let the sally of
the heart to-you-ward suffice. A week ago, I spent a night with H. L.
Higginson, whom I found all alone at his house by the Lake, and he told
me your improvement had been continuous and great, which I heartily hope
has really been the case. I don't see why it should not have been the
case, under such delightful conditions. What good things friends are!
And what better thing than lend it, can one do with one's house? I was
struck by Henry Higginson's high level of mental tension, so to call it,
which made him talk, incessantly and passionately about one subject
after another, never running dry, and reminding me more of myself when I
was twenty years old. It isn't so much a man's eminence of elementary
faculties that pulls him through. They may be rare, and he do nothing.
It is the steam pressure to the square inch behind that moves the
machine. The amount of that is what makes the great difference between
us. Henry has it high. Previous to seeing him I had spent ten days in
beautiful Keene Valley, dividing them between the two ends. The St.
Hubert's end is, I verily believe, one of the most beautiful things in
this beautiful world--too dissimilar to anything in Europe to be
compared therewith, and consequently able to stand on its merits all
alone. But the great [forest] fire of four years ago came to the very
edge of wiping it out! And any year it may go.
I also had a delightful week all alone on the Maine Coast, among the
islands.
Back here, one is oppressed by sadness at the amount of work waiting to
be done on the place and no one to be hired to do it. The entire meaning
and essence of "land" is something to be worked over--even if it be only
a wood-lot, it must be kept trimmed and cleaned. And for one who _can_
work and who _likes_ work with his arms and hands, there is nothing so
delightful as a piece of land to work over--it responds to every hour
you give it, and smiles with the "improvement" year by year. I neither
can work now, nor do I like it, so an irremediable bad conscience
afflicts my ownership of this place. With Cambridge as headquarters for
August, and a little lot of land there, I think I could almost be ready
to give up this place, and trust to the luck of hotels, and other
opportunities of rustication without responsibility. But perhaps we can
get this place [taken care of?] some day!
I don't know how much you read. I've taken great pleasure this summer in
Bielshowski's "Life of Goethe" (a wonderful piece of art) and in
Birukoff's "Life of Tolstoy."
Alice is very well and happy in the stillness here. Elly Hunter is
coming this evening, tomorrow the Merrimans for a day, and then Mrs.
Hodder till the end of the month.
Faithful love from both of us, dear Theodora. Your affectionate
W. J.
_To his Daughter._
Cambridge, _Jan. 20, 1907_, 6.15 P.M.
SWEET PEGLEIN,--Just before tea! and your Grandam, Mar, and I going to
hear the Revd. Percy Grant in the College chapel just after. We are
getting to be great church-goers. 'T will have to be Crothers next. He,
sweet man, is staying with the Brookses. After him, the Christian
Science Church, and after that the deluge!
I have spent all day preparing next Tuesday's lecture, which is my last
before a class in Harvard University, so help me God amen! I am almost
_afraid_ at so much freedom. Three quarters of an hour ago Aleck and I
went for a walk in Somerville; warm, young moon, bare trees, clearing in
the west, stars out, old-fashioned streets, not sordid--a beautiful
walk. Last night to Bernard Shaw's ex-_quis_-ite play of "Cæsar and
Cleopatra"--exquisitely acted too, by F. Robertson and Maxine Elliot's
sister Gert. Your Mar will have told you that, after these weeks of
persistent labor, culminating in New York, I am going to take sanctuary
on Saturday the 2nd of Feb. in your arms at Bryn Mawr. I do not want,
wish, or desire to "talk" to the crowd, but your mother pushing so, if
you and the philosophy club also pull, I mean pull _hard_, Jimmy[68]
will try to articulate something not too technical. But it will have to
be, if ever, on that Saturday night. It will also have to be very short;
and the less of a "reception," the better, after it.
Your two last letters were tiptop. I never seen such _growth_!
I go to N. Y., to be at the Harvard Club, on Monday the 28th. Kühnemann
left yesterday. A most dear man. Your loving
DAD.
_To Henry James and William James, Jr._
Cambridge, _Feb. 14, 1907_.
DEAR BROTHER AND SON,--I dare say that you will be together in Paris
when you get this, but I address it to Lamb House all the same. You
twain are more "blessed" than I, in the way of correspondence this
winter, for you give more than you receive, Bill's letters being as
remarkable for wit and humor as Henry's are for copiousness, considering
that the market value of what he either writes or types is so many
shillings a word. When _I_ write other things, I find it almost
impossible to write letters. I've been at it _stiddy_, however, for
three days, since my return from New York, finding, as I did, a great
stack of correspondence to attend to. The first impression of New York,
if you stay there not more than 36 hours, which has been my limit for
twenty years past, is one of repulsion at the clangor, disorder, and
permanent earthquake conditions. But this time, installed as I was at
the Harvard Club (44th St.) in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the
pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated _mit_, and found
it simply magnificent. I'm surprised at you, Henry, not having been more
enthusiastic, but perhaps that superbly powerful and beautiful subway
was not opened when you were there. It is an _entirely_ new New York, in
soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in
retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the
_lightness_ withal, as if there was nothing that was not easy, and the
great pulses and bounds of progress, so many in directions all
simultaneous that the coördination is indefinitely future, give a kind
of _drumming background_ of life that I never felt before. I'm sure that
once _in_ that movement, and at home, all other places would seem
insipid. I observe that your book,--"The American Scene,"--dear H., is
just out. I must get it and devour again the chapters relative to New
York. On my last night, I dined with Norman Hapgood, along with men who
were successfully and happily in the vibration. H. and his most
winning-faced young partner, Collier, Jerome, Peter Dunne, F. M. Colby,
and Mark Twain. (The latter, poor man, is only good for monologue, in
his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he's a dear little genius all
the same.) I got such an impression of easy efficiency in the midst of
their bewildering conditions of speed and complexity of adjustment.
Jerome, particularly, with the world's eyes on his court-room, in the
very crux of the Thaw trial, as if he had nothing serious to do. Balzac
ought to come to life again. His Rastignac imagination sketched the
possibility of it long ago. I lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted,
out, every day of my stay, vibrated between 44th St., seldom going
lower, and 149th, with Columbia University at 116th as my chief relay
station, the magnificent space-devouring Subway roaring me back and
forth, lecturing to a thousand daily,[69] and having four separate
dinners at the Columbia Faculty Club, where colleagues severally
compassed me about, many of them being old students of mine, wagged
their tongues at me and made me explain.[70] It was certainly the high
tide of my existence, so far as _energizing_ and being "recognized" were
concerned, but I took it all very "easy" and am hardly a bit tired.
Total abstinence from every stimulant whatever is the one condition of
living at a rapid pace. I am now going whack at the writing of the rest
of the lectures, which will be more original and (I believe) important
than my previous works....
_To Moorfield Storey._
Cambridge, _Feb._ 21, 1907.
DEAR MOORFIELD,--Your letter of three weeks ago has inadvertently lain
unnoticed--not because it didn't do me good, but because I went to New
York for a fortnight, and since coming home have been too druv to pay
any tributes to friendship. I haven't got many letters either of
condolence or congratulation on my retirement,--which, by the way,
doesn't take place till the end of the year,--the papers have railroaded
me out too soon.[71] But I confess that the thought is sweet to me of
being able to hear the College bell ring without any tendency to "move"
in consequence, and of seeing the last Thursday in September go by, and
remaining in the country careless of what becomes of its youth. It's the
_harness_ and the _hours_ that are so galling! I expect to shed truths
in dazzling profusion on the world for many years.
As for you, retire too! Let you, Eliot, Roosevelt and me, first relax;
then take to landscape painting, which has a very soothing effect; then
write out all the truths which a long life of intimacy with mankind has
recommended to each of us as most useful. I think we can use the ebb
tide of our energies best in that way. I'm sure that _your_
contributions would be the most useful of all. Affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
Cambridge, _Mar._ 26, 1907.
DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this
morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to
a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging
on his lips! You have made me really _happy_ for at least twenty-four
hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like
that. They write about themselves--you write about _me_. You know the
definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about
_himself_, when you want to talk about _yourself_." Reverdin has told me
of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been
communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have
grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to
hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagné." It is absolutely the only
philosophy with _no_ humbug in it, and I am certain that it is _your_
philosophy. Have you read Papini's article in the February "Leonardo"?
That seems to me really splendid. You say that my ideas have formed the
real _centre de ralliment_ of the pragmatist tendencies. To me it is the
youthful and _empanaché_ Papini who has best put himself at the centre
of equilibrium whence all the motor tendencies start. He (and Schiller)
has given me great confidence and courage. I shall dedicate my book,
however, to the memory of J. S. Mill.
I hope that you are careful to distinguish in my own work between the
pragmatism and the "radical empiricism" (Conception de Conscience,[72]
etc.) which to my own mind have no necessary connexion with each other.
My first proofs came in this morning, along with your letter, and the
little book ought to be out by the first of June. You shall have a very
early copy. It is exceedingly untechnical, and I can't help suspecting
that it will make a real impression. Münsterberg, who hitherto has been
rather pooh-poohing my thought, now, after reading the lecture on truth
which I sent you a while ago, says I seem to be ignorant that Kant ever
wrote, Kant having already said all that I say. I regard this as a very
good symptom. The third stage of opinion about a new idea, already
arrived: _1st_: absurd! _2nd_: trivial! _3rd_: _we_ discovered it! I
don't suppose you mean to print these lectures of yours, but I wish you
would. If you would translate my lectures, what could make me happier?
But, as I said apropos of the "Varieties," I hate to think of you doing
that drudgery when you might be formulating your own ideas. But, in one
way or the other, I hope you will join in the great strategic
combination against the forces of rationalism and bad abstractionism! A
good _coup de collier_ all round, and I verily believe that a new
philosophic movement will begin....
I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very
happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute
bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The _1st_
function is the essential one, officially considered. The _2nd_ is the
only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a
professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for
the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes!
But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only
_meant_ to write a line! Love to you all from
W. J.
_To Charles A. Strong._
Cambridge, _Apr._ 9, 1907.
DEAR STRONG,--Your tightly woven little letter reached me this A.M.,
just as I was about writing to you to find out how you are. Your long
silence had made me apprehensive about your condition, and this news
cheers me up very much. Rome is great; and I like to think of you there;
if I spend another winter in Europe, it shall be mainly in Rome. You
don't say where you're staying, however, so my imagination is at fault,
I hope it may be at the _Russie_, that most delightful of hotels. I am
overwhelmed with duties, so I must be very brief _in re religionis_.
Your warnings against my superstitious tendencies, for such I suppose
they are,--this is the second heavy one I remember,--touch me, but not
in the prophetic way, for they don't weaken my trust in the healthiness
of my own attitude, which in part (I fancy) is less remote from your own
than you suppose. For instance, my "God of things as they are," being
part of a pluralistic system, is responsible for only such of them as he
knows enough and has enough power to have accomplished. For the rest he
is identical with your "ideal" God. The "omniscient" and "omnipotent"
God of theology I regard as a disease of the philosophy-shop. But,
having thrown away so much of the philosophy-shop, you may ask me why I
don't throw away the whole? That would mean too strong a negative
will-to-believe for me. It would mean a dogmatic disbelief in any extant
consciousness higher than that of the "normal" human mind; and this in
the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce
with something ideal that _feels as if it_ were also actual (I have no
such commerce--I wish I had, but I can't close my eyes to its vitality
in others); and in the teeth of such analogies as Fechner uses to show
that there may be other-consciousness than man's. If other, then why not
higher and bigger? Why _may_ we not be in the universe as our dogs and
cats are in our drawing-rooms and libraries? It's a will-to-believe on
both sides: I am perfectly willing that others should disbelieve: why
should you not be tolerantly interested in the spectacle of my belief?
What harm does the little residuum or germ of actuality that I leave in
God do? If ideal, why (except on epiphenomenist principles) may he not
have got himself at least partly real by this time? I do not believe it
to be healthy-minded to nurse the notion that ideals are self-sufficient
and require no actualization to make us content. It is a quite
unnecessarily heroic form of resignation and sour grapes. Ideals ought
to aim at the _transformation of reality_--no less! When you defer to
what you suppose a certain authority in scientists as confirming these
negations, I am surprised. Of all insufficient authorities as to the
total nature of reality, give me the "scientists," from Münsterberg up,
or down. Their interests are most incomplete and their professional
conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite
of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored,
and their splendid achievement there. Their only authority _at large_ is
for _method_--and the pragmatic method completes and enlarges them
there. When you shall have read my whole set of lectures (now with the
printer, to be out by June 1st) I doubt whether you will find any great
harm in the God I patronize--the poor thing is so largely an ideal
possibility. Meanwhile I take delight, or _shall_ take delight, in any
efforts you may make to negate all superhuman consciousness, for only by
these counter-attempts can a finally satisfactory modus vivendi be
reached. I don't feel sure that I know just what you mean by
"freedom,"--but no matter. Have you read in Schiller's new Studies in
Humanism what seem to me two excellent chapters, one on "Freedom," and
the other on the "making of reality"?...
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
Cambridge, _Apr._ 19, 1907.
DEAR SCHILLER,--Two letters and a card from you within ten days is
pretty good. I have been in New York for a week, so haven't written as
promptly as I should have done.
All right for the Gilbert Murrays! We shall be glad to see them.
Too late for "humanism" in my book--all in type! I dislike "pragmatism,"
but it seems to have the _international_ right of way at present. Let's
both go ahead--God will know his own!
When your book first came I lent it to my student Kallen (who was
writing a thesis on the subject), thereby losing it for three weeks.
Then the grippe, and my own proofs followed, along with much other
business, so that I've only read about a quarter of it even now. The
essays on Freedom and the Making of Reality seem to be written with my
own heart's blood--it's startling that two people should be found to
think so exactly alike. A great argument for the truth of what they say,
too! I find that my own chapter on Truth printed in the J. of P.
already,[73] convinces no one as yet, not even my most _gleichgesinnten_
cronies. It will have to be worked in by much future labor, for I _know_
that I see all round the subject and they don't, and I think that the
theory of truth is the key to all the rest of our positions.
You ask what I am going to "reply" to Bradley. But why need one reply to
everything and everybody? B.'s article is constructive rather than
polemic, is evidently sincere, softens much of his old outline, is
difficult to read, and ought, I should think, to be left to its own
destiny. How sweetly, by the way, he feels towards me as compared with
you! All because you have been too bumptious. I confess I think that
your _gaudium certaminis_ injures your influence. _We_'ve got a thing
big enough to set forth now affirmatively, and I think that readers
generally hate _minute_ polemics and recriminations. All polemic of ours
should, I believe, be either very broad statements of contrast, or fine
points treated singly, and as far as possible impersonally. Inborn
rationalists and inborn pragmatists will never convert each other. We
shall always look on them as spectral and they on us as
trashy--irredeemably both! As far as the rising generation goes, why not
simply express ourselves positively, and trust that the truer view
quietly will displace the other. Here again "God will know his own."
False views don't need much direct refutation--they get superseded, and
I feel absolutely certain of the supersessive power of pragmato-humanism,
if persuasively enough set forth.... The world is wide enough to harbor
various ways of thinking, and the present Bradley's units of mental
operation are so diverse from ours that the labor of reckoning over from
one set of terms to the other doesn't bring reward enough to pay for it.
Of course his way of treating "truth" as an entity trying all the while
to identify herself with reality, while reality is equally trying to
identify herself with the more ideal entity truth, isn't _false_. It's
one way, very remote and allegorical, of stating the facts, and it
"agrees" with a good deal of reality, but it has so little pragmatic
value that its tottering form can be left for time to deal with. The
good it does him is small, for it leaves him in this queer, surly,
grumbling state about the best that can be done by it for philosophy.
His great vice seems to me his perversity in logical activities, his bad
reasonings. I vote to go on, from now on, not trying to keep account of
the relations of his with our system. He can't be influencing disciples,
being himself nowadays so difficult. And once for all, there _will_ be
minds who _cannot_ _help_ regarding our growing universe as _sheer
trash_, metaphysically considered. Yours ever,
W. J.
The next letter is addressed to an active promoter of reform in the
treatment of the insane, the author of "A Mind that Found Itself." The
Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene and the National Committee for
Mental Hygiene have already performed so great a public service, that
anyone may now see that in 1907 the time had come to employ such
instrumentalities in improving the care of the insane. But when Mr.
Beers, just out of an asylum himself, appeared with the manuscript of
his own story in his hands, it was not so clear that these agencies were
needed, nor yet evident to anyone that he was a person who could bring
about their organization.
James's own opinion as to the treatment of the insane is not in the
least overstated in the following letter. He recognized the genuineness
of Mr. Beers's personal experience and its value for propaganda, and he
immediately helped to get it published. From his first acquaintance with
Mr. Beers, he gave time, counsel, and money to further the organization
of the Mental Hygiene Committee; and he even departed, in its interest,
from his fixed policy of "keeping out of Committees and Societies." He
lived long enough to know that the movement had begun to gather
momentum; and he drew great satisfaction from the knowledge.
_To Clifford W. Beers._
Cambridge, _Apr. 21, 1907_.
DEAR MR. BEERS,--You ask for my opinion as to the advisability and
feasibility of a National Society, such as you propose, for the
improvement of conditions among the insane.
I have never ceased to believe that such improvement is one of the most
"crying" needs of civilization; and the functions of such a Society seem
to me to be well drawn up by you. Your plea for its being founded
before your book appears is well grounded, you being an author who
naturally would like to cast seed upon a ground already prepared for it
to germinate practically without delay.
I have to confess to being myself a very impractical man, with no
experience whatever in the details, difficulties, etc., of philanthropic
or charity organization, so my opinion as to the _feasibility_ of your
plan is worth nothing, and is undecided. Of course the first
consideration is to get your money, the second, your Secretary and
Trustees. All that _I_ wish to bear witness to is the great need of a
National Society such as you describe, or failing that, of a State
Society somewhere that might serve as a model in other States.
Nowhere is there massed together as much suffering as in the asylums.
Nowhere is there so much sodden routine, and fatalistic insensibility in
those who have to treat it. Nowhere is an ideal treatment more costly.
The officials in charge grow resigned to the conditions under which they
have to labor. They cannot plead their cause as an auxiliary
organization can plead it for them. Public opinion is too glad to remain
ignorant. As mediator between officials, patients, and the public
conscience, a society such as you sketch is absolutely required, and the
sooner it gets under way the better.[74] Sincerely yours,
WILLIAM JAMES.
At the date of the next letter William James, Jr., was studying painting
in Paris.
_To his Son William._
Cambridge, _Apr. 24, 1907_.
DEAREST BILL,--I haven't written to you for ages, yet you keep showering
the most masterly and charming epistles upon all of us in turn,
including the fair Rosamund.[75] Be sure they are appreciated! Your Ma
and I dined last night at Ellen and Loulie Hooper's to meet Rosalind
Huidekoper and her swain. Loulie had heard from Bancel [La Farge] of
your getting a "mention"--if for the model, I'm not surprised; if for
the composition, I'm immensely pleased. Of course you'll tell us of it!
We've had a very raw cold April, and today it's blowing great guns from
all quarters of the sky, preparatory to clearing from the N.W., I think.
We are rooting up the entire lawn to a depth of 18 inches to try to
regenerate it. Four diggers and two carts have been at it for a week,
with your mother, bareheaded and cloaked, and ruddy-cheeked, sticking to
them like a burr. She doesn't handle pick or shovel, but she stands
there all day long in a way it would do your heart good to see; and so
democratic and hearty withal that I'm sure they like it, though working
under such a great taskmaster's eye deprives them of those intervals of
stolen leisure so dear to "workers" of every description. She makes it
up to them by inviting them to an afternoon tea daily, with piles of
cake and doughnuts. I fancy they like her well.
We've let Chocorua to the Goldmarks. Aleck took his April recess along
with his schoolmate Henderson and Gerald Thayer, partly on the summit,
partly around the base, of Monadnock. The weather was fiercely wintry,
and your mother and I said "poor blind little Aleck--he's got to learn
thru experience." [She said "through"!] He came back happier and more
exultant than I've ever seen him, and six months older morally and
intellectually for the week with Gerald and Abbott Thayer. A great step
forward. They burglarized the Thayer house, and were tracked and
arrested by the posse, and had a paragraph in the Boston "Globe" about
the robbery. As the thing involved an ascent of Monadnock after dark,
with their packs, in deep snow, a day and a night there in snowstorm, a
16-mile walk and out of bed till 2 A.M.. the night of the burglary, a
"lying low" indoors all the next day at the Hendersons' empty house,
three in a bed and the police waking them at dawn, I ventured to suggest
a doubt as to whether the Thayer household were the greatest victims of
the illustrious practical joke. "What," cries Aleck, starting to his
feet, "nine men with revolvers and guns around your bed, and a revolver
pointed close to your ear as you wake--don't you call that a success, I
should like to know?" The Tom Sawyer phase of evolution is immortal!
Gerald, who is staying with us now, is really a splendid fellow. I'm so
glad he's taken to Aleck, who now is aflame with plans for being an
artist. I wish he might--it would certainly suit his temperament better
than "business."
There 's the lunch bell.
I have got my "Pragmatism" proofs all corrected. The most important
thing I've written yet, and bound, I am sure, to stir up a lot of
attention. But I'm dog-tired; and, in order to escape the social
engagements that at this time of year grow more frequent than ever, I'm
going off on Friday (this is Wednesday) to the country somewhere for ten
days. If only there might be warm weather! We've just backed out from a
dinner to William Leonard Darwin and his wife, and the Geo. Hodgeses,
etc. W. T. Stead spent three hours here on Sunday and lectured in the
Union on Monday--a splendid fellow whom I could get along with after a
fashion. Let no one run him down to you. I've been to New York to the
Peace Congress. Interesting but tiresome.
Mary Salter is with us. Margaret and Rosamund just arrived at 107. No
news else! Yours,
W. J.
_To Henry James._
SALISBURY, CONN., _May 4, 1907_.
DEAREST H.-- ...I've been so overwhelmed with work, and the mountain of
the _Unread_ has piled up so, that only in these days here have I really
been able to settle down to your "American Scene," which in its peculiar
way seems to me _supremely great_. You know how opposed your whole
"third manner" of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my
crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence
as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever;
yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and
sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had
a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the
illusion of a solid object, made (like the "ghost" at the Polytechnic)
wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences
of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But you _do_
it, that's the queerness! And the complication of innuendo and
associative reference on the enormous scale to which you give way to it
does so _build out_ the matter for the reader that the result is to
solidify, by the mere bulk of the process, the like perception from
which _he_ has to start. As air, by dint of its volume, will weigh like
a corporeal body; so his own poor little initial perception, swathed in
this gigantic envelopment of suggestive atmosphere, grows like a germ
into something vastly bigger and more substantial. But it's the rummest
method for one to employ systematically as you do nowadays; and you
employ it at your peril. In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages
that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can't
skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy
readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: "Say it _out_, for
God's sake," they cry, "and have done with it." And so I say now, give
us _one_ thing in your older directer manner, just to show that, in
spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, you _can_
still write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and
then continue like the "curiosity of literature" which you have become.
For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are
unapproachable, but the _core_ of literature is solid. Give it to us
_once_ again! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and
the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum.
For God's sake don't _answer_ these remarks, which (as Uncle Howard used
to say of Father's writings) are but the peristaltic belchings of my own
crabbed organism. For one thing, your account of America is largely one
of its omissions, silences, vacancies. You work them up like solids, for
those readers who already germinally perceive them (to others you are
_totally_ incomprehensible). I said to myself over and over in reading:
"How much greater the triumph, if instead of dwelling thus only upon
America's vacuities, he could make positive suggestion of what in
'Europe' or Asia may exist to fill them." That would be nutritious to so
many American readers whose souls are only too ready to leap to
suggestion, but who are now too inexperienced to know what is meant by
the contrast-effect from which alone your book is written. If you could
supply the background which is the foil, in terms more full and
positive! At present it is supplied only by the abstract geographic term
"Europe." But of course anything of that kind is excessively difficult;
and you will probably say that you _are_ supplying it all along by your
novels. Well, the verve and animal spirits with which you can keep your
method going, first on one place then on another, through all those
tightly printed pages is something marvelous; and there are pages surely
doomed to be immortal, those on the "drummers," _e.g._, at the beginning
of "Florida." They are in the best sense Rabelaisian.
But a truce, a truce! I had no idea, when I sat down, of pouring such a
bath of my own subjectivity over you. Forgive! forgive! and don't reply,
don't at any rate in the sense of defending yourself, but only in that
of attacking _me_, if you feel so minded. I have just finished the
proofs of a little book called "Pragmatism" which even you _may_ enjoy
reading. It is a very "sincere" and, from the point of view of ordinary
philosophy-professorial manners, a very unconventional utterance, not
particularly original at any one point, yet, in the midst of the
literature of the way of thinking which it represents, with just that
amount of squeak or shrillness in the voice that enables one book to
_tell_, when others don't, to supersede its brethren, and be treated
later as "representative." I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence
it should be rated as "epoch-making," for of the definitive triumph of
that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever--I
believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation.
You can't tell how happy I am at having thrown off the nightmare of my
"professorship." As a "professor" I always felt myself a sham, with its
chief duties of being a walking encyclopedia of erudition. I am now at
liberty to be a _reality_, and the comfort is unspeakable--literally
unspeakable, to be my own man, after 35 years of being owned by others.
I can now live for truth pure and simple, instead of for truth
accommodated to the most unheard-of requirements set by others.... Your
affectionate
W. J.
This letter appears never to have been answered, although Henry James
wrote on May 31, 1907: "You shall have, after a little more patience, a
reply to your so rich and luminous reflections on my book--a reply
almost as interesting as, and far more illuminating than, your letter
itself."
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
Cambridge, _May 18, 1907_.
...One word about the said proof [of your article]. It convinces me that
you ought to be an academic personage, a "professor." For thirty-five
years I have been suffering from the exigencies of being one, the
pretension and the duty, namely, of meeting the mental needs and
difficulties of other persons, needs that I couldn't possibly imagine
and difficulties that I couldn't possibly understand; and now that I
have shuffled off the professorial coil, the sense of freedom that comes
to me is as surprising as it is exquisite. I wake up every morning with
it. What! not to have to accommodate myself to this mass of alien and
recalcitrant humanity, not to think under resistance, not to have to
square myself with others at every step I make--hurrah! it is too good
to be true. To be alone with truth and God! _Es ist nicht zu glauben!_
What a future! What a vision of ease! But here you are loving it and
courting it unnecessarily. You're fit to continue a professor in all
your successive reincarnations, with never a release. It was so easy to
let Bradley with his approximations and grumblings alone. So few people
would find these last statements of his seductive enough to build them
into their own thought. But you, for the pure pleasure of the operation,
chase him up and down his windings, flog him into and out of his
corners, stop him and cross-reference him and counter on him, as if
required to do so by your office. It makes very difficult reading, it
obliges one to re-read Bradley, and I don't believe there are three
persons living who will take it in with the pains required to estimate
its value. B. himself will very likely not read it with any care. It is
subtle and clear, like everything you write, but it is too minute. And
where a few broad comments would have sufficed, it is too complex, and
too much like a criminal conviction in tone and temper. Leave him in his
_dunklem Drange_--he is drifting in the right direction evidently, and
when a certain amount of positive construction on our side has been
added, he will say that that was what he had meant all along--and the
world will be the better for containing so much difficult polemic
reading the less.
I admit that your remarks are penetrating, and let air into the joints
of the subject; but I respectfully submit that they are not _called for_
in the interests of the final triumph of truth. That will come by the
way of displacement of error, quite effortlessly. I can't help
suspecting that you unduly magnify the influence of Bradleyan Absolutism
on the undergraduate mind. Taylor is the only fruit so far--at least
within my purview. One practical point: I don't quite like your first
paragraph, and wonder if it be too late to have the references to me at
least expunged. I can't recognize the truth of the ten-years' change of
opinion about my "Will to Believe." I don't find anyone--not even my
dearest friends, as Miller and Strong--one whit persuaded. Taylor's and
Hobhouse's attacks are of recent date, etc. Moreover, the reference to
Bradley's relation to me in this article is too ironical not to seem a
little "nasty" to some readers; therefore out with it, if it be not too
late.
See how different our methods are! All that Humanism needs now is to
make applications of itself to special problems. Get a school of
youngsters at work. Refutations of error should be left to the
rationalists alone. They are a stock function of that school....
I'm fearfully _tired_, but expect the summer to get me right again.
Affectionately thine,
W. J.
XVI
1907-1909
_The Last Period (III)--Hibbert Lectures in Oxford--The Hodgson Report_
The story of the remaining years is written so fully in the letters
themselves as to require little explanation.
Angina pectoris and such minor ailments as are only too likely to
afflict a man of sixty-five years and impaired constitution interrupted
the progress of reading and writing more and more. Physical exertion,
particularly that involved in talking long to many people, now brought
on pain and difficulty in breathing. But James still carried himself
erect, still walked with a light step, and until a few weeks before his
death wore the appearance of a much younger and stronger man than he
really was. None but those near to him realized how often he was in
discomfort or pain, or how constantly he was using himself to the limit
of his endurance. He bore his ills without complaint and ordinarily
without mention; although he finally made up his mind to try to
discourage the appeals and requests of all sorts that still harassed
him, by proclaiming the fact that he was an invalid. As his power of
work became more and more reduced, frustrations became harder to bear,
and the sense that they were unavoidable oppressed him. When an
invitation to deliver a course of lectures on the Hibbert Foundation at
Manchester College, Oxford, arrived, he was torn between an impulse to
clutch at this engagement as a means of hastening the writing-out of
certain material that was in his mind, and the fear, only too
reasonable, that the obligation to have the lectures ready by a certain
date would strain him to the snapping point. After some hesitation he
agreed, however, and the lectures were, ultimately, prepared and
delivered successfully.
In proportion as the number of hours a day that he could spend on
literary work and professional reading decreased, James's general
reading increased again. He began for the first time to browse in
military biographies, and commenced to collect material for a study
which he sometimes spoke of as a "Psychology of Jingoism," sometimes as
a "Varieties of Military Experience." What such a work would have been,
had he ever completed it, it is impossible to tell. It was never more
than a rather vague project, turned to occasionally as a diversion. But
it is safe to reckon that two remarkable papers--the "Energies of Men"
(written in 1906) and the "Moral Equivalent of War" (written in
1909)--would have appeared to be related to this study. That it would
not have been a utopian flight in the direction of pacifism need hardly
be said. However he might have described it, James was not disposed to
underestimate the "fighting instinct." He saw it as a persistent and
highly irritable force, underlying the society of all the dominant
races; and he advocated international courts, reduction of armaments,
and any other measures that might prevent appeals to the war-waging
passion as commendable devices for getting along without arousing it.
"The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know
that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential
checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of
enterprise.... All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the
anti-militarist party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to
be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically
organized preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline.... In
the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems
drifting, we must still subject ourselves collectively to those
severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly
hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the
manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial
virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness,
surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain
the rock upon which states are built--unless, indeed, we wish for
dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and
liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for
military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their
neighborhood."[76]
Any utterances about war, arbitration, and disarmament, are now likely
to have their original meaning distorted by reason of what may justly be
called the present fevered state of public opinion on such questions. It
should be clear that the foregoing sentences were not directed to any
particular question of domestic or foreign policy. They were part of a
broad picture of the fighting instinct, and led up to a suggestion for
diverting it into non-destructive channels. As to particular instances,
circumstances were always to be reckoned with. James believed in
organizing and strengthening the machinery of arbitration, but did not
think that the day for universal arbitration had yet come. He saw a
danger in military establishments, went so far--in the presence of the
"jingoism" aroused by Cleveland's Venezuela message--as to urge
opposition to any increase of the American army and navy, encouraged
peace-societies, and was willing to challenge attention by calling
himself a pacifist.[77] "The first thing to learn in intercourse with
others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy,
provided those ways do not presume to interfere by violence with
ours."[78] Tolerance--social, religious, and political--was fundamental
in his scheme of belief; but he took pains to make a proviso, and drew
the line at tolerating interference or oppression. Where he recognized a
military danger, there he would have had matters so governed as to meet
it, not evade it. Writing of the British garrison in Halifax in 1897, he
said: "By Jove, if England should ever be licked by a Continental army,
it would only be Divine justice upon her for keeping up the Tommy Atkins
recruiting system when the others have compulsory service."
* * * * *
In the case of one undertaking, which was much too troublesome to be
reckoned as a diversion, he let himself be drawn away from his
metaphysical work. He had taken no active part in the work of the
Society for Psychical Research since 1896. In December, 1905, Richard
Hodgson, the secretary of the American Branch, had died suddenly, and
almost immediately thereafter Mrs. Piper, the medium whose trances
Hodgson had spent years in studying, had purported to give
communications from Hodgson's departed spirit. In 1909 James made a
report to the S. P. R. on "Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control." The full
report will be found in its Proceedings for 19O9,[79] and the concluding
pages, in which James stated, more analytically than elsewhere, the
hypotheses which the phenomena suggested to him, have been reprinted in
the volume of "Collected Essays and Reviews." At the same time he wrote
out a more popular statement, in a paper which will be found in
"Memories and Studies." As to his final opinion of the spirit-theory,
the following letter, given somewhat out of its chronological place,
states what was still James's opinion in 1910.
_To Charles Lewis Slattery._
Cambridge, _Apr. 21, 1907_.
DEAR MR. SLATTERY,--My state of mind is this: Mrs. Piper has supernormal
knowledge in her trances; but whether it comes from "tapping the minds"
of living people, or from some common cosmic reservoir of memories, or
from surviving "spirits" of the departed, is a question impossible for
_me_ to answer just now to my own satisfaction. The spirit-theory is
undoubtedly not only the most natural, but the simplest, and I have
great respect for Hodgson's and Hyslop's arguments when they adopt it.
At the same time the electric current called _belief_ has not yet closed
in my mind.
Whatever the explanation be, trance-mediumship is an excessively complex
phenomenon, in which many concurrent factors are engaged. That is why
interpretation is so hard.
Make any use, public or private, that you like of this.
In great haste, yours,
Wm. James.
The next letter should be understood as referring to the abandonment of
an excursion to Lake Champlain with Henry L. Higginson. The celebration
alluded to in the last part of the letter had been arranged by the
Cambridge Historical Society in honor of the hundredth anniversary of
the birth of Louis Agassiz.
_To Henry L. Higginson._
CHOCORUA, N. H., _circa, June 1, 1907_.
DEAR HENRY,--On getting your resignation by telephone, I came straight
up here instead, without having time to write you my acceptance as I
meant to; and now comes your note of the fourth, before I have done so.
I am exceedingly sorry, my dear old boy, that it is the doctor's advice
that has made you fear to go. I hope the liability to relapse will soon
fade out and leave you free again; for say what they will of _Alters
Schwäche_ and resignation to decay, and _entbehren sollst du, sollst
entbehren_, it means only sour grapes, and the insides of one always
want to be doing the free and active things. However, a river can still
be lively in a shrunken bed, and we must not pay too much attention to
the difference of level. If you should summon me again this summer, I
can probably respond. I shall be here for a fortnight, then back to
Cambridge again for a short time.
I thought the Agassiz celebration went off very nicely indeed, didn't
you?--John Gray's part in it being of course the best. X---- was heavy,
but respectable, and the heavy respectable _ought_ to be one ingredient
in anything of the kind. But how well Shaler would have done that part
of the job had he been there! Love to both of you!
W. J.
_To W. Cameron Forbes._
CHOCORUA, _June 11, 1907_.
DEAR CAMERON FORBES,--Your letter from Baguio of the 18th of April
touches me by its genuine friendliness, and is a tremendous temptation.
Why am I not ten years younger? Even now I hesitate to say no, and the
only reason why I don't say yes, with a roar, is that certain rather
serious drawbacks in the way of health of late seem to make me unfit for
the various activities which such a visit ought to carry in its train. I
am afraid my program from now onwards ought to be sedentary. I ought to
be getting out a book next winter. Last winter I could hardly do any
walking, owing to a trouble with my heart.
Does your invitation mean to include my wife? And have you a good
crematory so that she might bring home my ashes in case of need?
I think if you had me on the spot you would find me a less impractical
kind of an anti-imperialist than you have supposed me to be. I think
that the manner in which the McKinley administration railroaded the
country into its policy of conquest was abominable, and the way the
country pucked up its ancient soul at the first touch of temptation, and
followed, was sickening. But with the establishment of the civil
commission McKinley did what he could to redeem things and now what the
Islands want is CONTINUITY OF ADMINISTRATION to form new habits that may
to some degree be hoped to last when we, as controllers, are gone. WHEN?
that is the question. And much difference of opinion may be fair as to
the answer. That we can't stay forever seems to follow from the fact
that the educated Philippinos differ from all previous colonials in
having been inoculated before our occupation with the ideas of the
French Revolution; and that is a virus to which history shows as yet no
anti-toxine. As I am at present influenced, I think that the U. S. ought
to solemnly proclaim a date for our going (or at least for a plebiscitum
as to whether we should go) and stand by all the risks. _Some_ date,
rather than indefinitely drift. And shape the whole interval towards
securing things in view of the change. As to this, I may be wrong, and
am always willing to be convinced. I wish I could go, and see you all
at work. Heaven knows I admire the spirit with which you are animated--a
new thing in colonial work.
It must have been a great pleasure to you to see so many of the family
at once. I have seen none of them since their return, but hope to do so
ere the summer speeds. The only dark spot was poor F----'s death.
Believe me, with affectionate regards, yours truly,
Wm. James.
I am ordering a little book of mine, just out, to be sent to you. Some
one of your circle may find entertainment in it.
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
[Post-card]
CHOCORUA, _June_ 13, 1907.
Yours of the 27th ult. received and highly appreciated. I'm glad you
relish my book so well. You go on playing the Boreas and I shedding the
sunbeams, and between us we'll get the cloak off the philosophic
traveler! But _have_ you read Bergson's new book?[80]It seems to me that
nothing is important in comparison with that divine apparition. All
_our_ positions, real time, a growing world, asserted magisterially, and
the beast intellectualism killed absolutely _dead_! The whole flowed
round by a style incomparable as it seems to me. Read it, and digest it
if you can. Much of it I can't yet assimilate.
[_No signature._]
_To Henri Bergson._
CHOCORUA, _June 13, 1907_.
O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real
wonder in the history of philosophy, making, if I mistake not, an
entirely new era in respect of matter, but unlike the works of genius of
the "transcendentalist" movement (which are so obscurely and abominably
and inaccessibly written), a pure classic in point of form. You may be
amused at the comparison, but in finishing it I found the same
after-taste remaining as after finishing "Madame Bovary," such a flavor
of persistent _euphony_, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran
thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
Then the aptness of your illustrations, that never scratch or stand out
at right angles, but invariably simplify the thought and help to pour it
along! Oh, indeed you are a magician! And if your next book proves to be
as great an advance on this one as this is on its two predecessors, your
name will surely go down as one of the great creative names in
philosophy.
There! have I praised you enough? What every genuine philosopher (every
genuine man, in fact) craves most is _praise_--although the philosophers
generally call it "recognition"! If you want still more praise, let me
know, and I will send it, for my features have been on a broad smile
from the first page to the last, at the chain of felicities that never
stopped. I feel rejuvenated.
As to the content of it, I am not in a mood at present to make any
definite reaction. There is so much that is absolutely new that it will
take a long time for your contemporaries to assimilate it, and I imagine
that much of the development of detail will have to be performed by
younger men whom your ideas will stimulate to coruscate in manners
unexpected by yourself. To me at present the vital achievement of the
book is that it inflicts an irrecoverable death-wound upon
Intellectualism. It can never resuscitate! But it will die hard, for all
the inertia of the past is in it, and the spirit of professionalism and
pedantry as well as the æsthetic-intellectual delight of dealing with
categories logically distinct yet logically connected, will rally for a
desperate defense. The _élan vital_, all contentless and vague as you
are obliged to leave it, will be an easy substitute to make fun of. But
the beast _has_ its death-wound now, and the manner in which you have
inflicted it (interval _versus_ temps d'arrêt, etc.) is masterly in the
extreme. I don't know why this later _rédaction_ of your critique of the
mathematics of movement has seemed to me so much more telling than the
early statement--I suppose it is because of the wider _use_ made of the
principle in the book. You will be receiving my own little "pragmatism"
book simultaneously with this letter. How jejune and inconsiderable it
seems in comparison with your great system! But it is so congruent with
parts of your system, fits so well into interstices thereof, that you
will easily understand why I am so enthusiastic. I feel that at bottom
we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks. The
position we are rescuing is "Tychism" and a really growing world. But
whereas I have hitherto found no better way of defending Tychism than by
affirming the spontaneous addition of _discrete_ elements of being (or
their subtraction), thereby playing the game with intellectualist
weapons, you set things straight at a single stroke by your fundamental
conception of the continuously creative nature of reality. I think that
one of your happiest strokes is your reduction of "finality," as usually
taken, to its status alongside of efficient causality, as the
twin-daughters of intellectualism. But this vaguer and truer finality
restored to its rights will be a difficult thing to give content to.
Altogether your reality lurks so in the background, in this book, that I
am wondering whether you _couldn't_ give it any more development _in
concreto_ here, or whether you perhaps were holding back developments,
already in your possession, for a future volume. They are sure to come
to you later anyhow, and to make a new volume; and altogether, the clash
of these ideas of yours with the traditional ones will be sure to make
sparks fly that will illuminate all sorts of dark places and bring
innumerable new considerations into view. But the process may be slow,
for the ideas are so revolutionary. Were it not for your style, your
book might last 100 years unnoticed; but your way of writing is so
absolutely commanding that your theories have to be attended to
immediately. I feel very much in the dark still about the relations of
the progressive to the regressive movement, and this great precipitate
of nature subject to static categories. With a frank pluralism of
_beings_ endowed with vital impulses you can get oppositions and
compromises easily enough, and a stagnant deposit; but after my one
reading I don't exactly "catch on" to the way in which the continuum of
reality resists itself so as to have to act, etc., etc.
The only part of the work which I felt like positively criticising was
the discussion of the idea of nonentity, which seemed to me somewhat
overelaborated, and yet didn't leave me with a sense that the last word
had been said on the subject. But all these things must be very slowly
digested by me. I can see that, when the tide turns in your favor, many
previous tendencies in philosophy will start up, crying "This is nothing
but what _we_ have contended for all along." Schopenhauer's blind will,
Hartmann's unconscious, Fichte's aboriginal freedom (reëdited at Harvard
in the most "unreal" possible way by Münsterberg) will all be claimants
for priority. But no matter--all the better if you are in some ancient
lines of tendency. Mysticism also must make claims and doubtless just
ones. I say nothing more now--this is just my first reaction; but I am
so enthusiastic as to have said only two days ago, "I thank heaven that
I have lived to this date--that I have witnessed the Russo-Japanese war,
and seen Bergson's new book appear--the two great modern turning-points
of history and of thought!" Best congratulations and cordialest regards!
Wm. James.
_To T. S. Perry._
SILVER LAKE, N.H., _June 24, 1907_.
DEAR THOS.,--Yours of the 11th is at hand, true philosopher that you
are. No one but one bawn & bred in the philosophic briar-patch could
appreciate Bergson as you do, without in the least understanding him. I
am in an identical predicament. This last of his is the _divinest_ book
that has appeared in _my_ life-time, and (unless I am the falsest
prophet) it is destined to rank with the greatest works of all time. The
style of it is as wonderful as the matter. By all means send it to Chas.
Peirce, but address him Prescott Hall, Cambridge. I am sending you my
"Pragmatism," which Bergson's work makes seem like small potatoes
enough.
Are you going to Russia to take Stolypin's place? or to head the
Revolution? I would I were at Giverny to talk metaphysics with you, and
enjoy a country where I am not responsible for the droughts and the
garden. Have been here two weeks at Chocorua, getting our place ready
for a tenant.
Affectionate regards to you all.
W. J.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
LINCOLN, MASS., _Aug. 5, 1907_.
DEAR MILLER,--I got your letter about "Pragmatism," etc., some time ago.
I hear that you are booked to review it for the "Hibbert Journal." Lay
on, Macduff! as hard as you can--I want to have the weak places pointed
out. I sent you a week ago a "Journal of Philosophy"[81] with a word
more about Truth in it, written _at_ you mainly; but I hardly dare hope
that I have cleared up my position. A letter from Strong, two days ago,
written after receiving a proof of that paper, still thinks that I deny
the existence of realities outside of the thinker; and [R. B.] Perry,
who seems to me to have written far and away the most important critical
remarks on Pragmatism (possibly the _only_ important ones), accused
Pragmatists (though he doesn't name _me_) of ignoring or denying that
the real object plays any part in deciding what ideas are true. I
confess that such misunderstandings seem to me hardly credible, and cast
a "lurid light" on the mutual understandings of philosophers generally.
Apparently it all comes from the _word_ Pragmatism--and a most unlucky
word it may prove to have been. I am a natural realist. The world _per
se_ may be likened to a cast of beans on a table. By themselves they
spell nothing. An onlooker may group them as he likes. He may simply
count them all and map them. He may select groups and name these
capriciously, or name them to suit certain extrinsic purposes of his.
Whatever he does, so long as he _takes account_ of them, his account is
neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true? It
_fits_ the beans-_minus_-him, and _expresses_ the _total_ fact, of
beans-_plus_-him. Truth in this total sense is partially ambiguous,
then. If he simply counts or maps, he obeys a subjective interest as
much as if he traces figures. Let that stand for pure "intellectual"
treatment of the beans, while grouping them variously stands for
non-intellectual interests. All that Schiller and I contend for is that
there is _no_ "truth" without _some_ interest, and that non-intellectual
interests play a part as well as intellectual ones. Whereupon we are
accused of denying the beans, or denying being in anyway constrained by
them! It's too silly!...
_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._
PUTNAM SHANTY,
KEENE VALLEY, _Sept. 14, 1907_.
DEAR PAULINE,-- ...No "camping" for me this side the grave! A party of
fourteen left here yesterday for Panther Gorge, meaning to return by the
Range, as they call your "summit trail." Apparently it is easier than
when on that to me memorable day we took it, for Charley Putnam swears
he has done it in five and a half hours. I don't well understand the
difference, except that they don't reach Haystack over Marcy as we did,
and there is now a good trail. Past and future play such a part in the
way one feels the present. To these youngsters, as to me long ago, and
to you today, the rapture of the connexion with these hills is partly
made of the sense of future power over them and their like. That being
removed from me, I can only mix memories of past power over them with
the present. But I have always observed a curious _fading_ in what
Tennyson calls the "passion" of the past. Memories awaken little or no
sentiment when they are too old; and I have taken everything here so
prosily this summer that I find myself wondering whether the time-limit
has been exceeded, and whether for emotional purpose I am a new self.
We know not what we shall become; and that is what makes life so
interesting. Always a turn of the kaleidoscope; and when one is utterly
maimed for action, then the glorious time for _reading_ other men's
lives! I fairly revel in that prospect, which in its full richness has
to be postponed, for I'm not sufficiently maimed-for-action yet. By
going slowly and alone, I find I can compass such things as the Giant's
Washbowl, Beaver Meadow Falls, etc., and they make me feel very good. I
have even been dallying with the temptation to visit Cameron Forbes at
Manila; but I have put it behind me for this year at least. I think I
shall probably give some more lectures (of a much less "popular" sort)
at Columbia next winter--so you see there's life in the old dog yet.
Nevertheless, how different from the life that courses through _your_
arteries and capillaries! Today is the first honestly fine day there has
been since I arrived here on the 2nd. (They must have been heavily
rained on at Panther Gorge yesterday evening.) After writing a couple
more letters I will take a book and repair to "Mosso's Ledge" for the
enjoyment of the prospect....
_To W. Jerusalem_ (Vienna).
ST. HUBERT'S, N.Y. _Sept._ 15, 1907.
DEAR PROFESSOR JERUSALEM,--Your letter of the 1st of September,
forwarded from Cambridge, reaches me here in the Adirondack Mountains
today. I am glad the publisher is found, and that you are enjoying the
drudgery of translating ["Pragmatism"]. Also that you find the book more
and more in agreement with your own philosophy. I fear that its
untechnicality of style--or rather its deliberate
_anti_-technicality--will make the German _Gelehrtes Publikum_,[82] as
well as the professors, consider it _oberflächliches Zeug_[83]--which
it assuredly is not, although, being only a sketch, it ought to be
followed by something _tighter_ and abounding in discriminations.
Pragmatism is an unlucky word in some respects, and the two meanings I
give for it are somewhat heterogeneous. But it was already in vogue in
France and Italy as well as in England and America, and it was
_tactically_ advantageous to use it....
_To Henry James._
STONEHURST, INTERVALE, N.H., _Oct._ 6, 1907.
DEAREST BROTHER,--I write this at the [James] Bryces', who have taken
the Merrimans' house for the summer, and whither I came the day before
yesterday, after closing our Chocorua house, and seeing Alice leave for
home. We had been there a fortnight, trying to get some work done, and
having to do most of it with our own hands, or rather with Alice's
heroic hands, for mine are worth almost nothing in these degenerate
days. It is enough to make your heart break to see the scarcity of
"labor," and the whole country tells the same story. Our future at
Chocorua is a somewhat problematic one, though I think we shall manage
to pass next summer there and get it into better shape for good renting,
thereafter, at any cost (not the renting but the shaping). After that
what _I_ want is a free foot, and the children are now not dependent on
a family summer any longer....
I spent the first three weeks of September--warm ones--in my beloved and
exquisite Keene Valley, where I was able to do a good deal of uphill
walking, with good rather than bad effects, much to my joy. Yesterday I
took a three hours walk here, three quarters of an hour of it uphill. I
have to go alone, and slowly; but it's none the worse for that and makes
one feel like old times. I leave this P.M. for two more days at
Chocorua--at the hotel. The fall is late, but the woods are beginning
to redden beautifully. With the sun behind them, some maples look like
stained-glass windows. But the penury of the human part of this region
is depressing, and I begin to have an appetite for Europe again. Alice
too! To be at Cambridge with no lecturing and no students to nurse along
with their thesis-work is an almost incredibly delightful prospect. I am
going to settle down to the composition of another small book, more
original and ground-breaking than anything I have yet put forth(!),
which I expect to print by the spring; after which I can lie back and
write at leisure more routine things for the rest of my days.
The Bryces are wholly unchanged, excellent friends and hosts, and I like
her as much as him. The trouble with him is that his insatiable love of
information makes him try to pump _you_ all the time instead of letting
you pump _him_, and I have let my own tongue wag so, that, when gone, I
shall feel like a fool, and remember all kinds of things that I have
forgotten to ask him. I have just been reading to Mrs. B., with great
gusto on her part and renewed gusto on mine, the first few pages of your
chapter on Florida in "The American Scene." _Köstlich_ stuff! I had just
been reading to myself almost 50 pages of the New England part of the
book, and fairly melting with delight over the Chocorua portion.
Evidently that book will last, and bear reading over and over again--a
few pages at a time, which is the right way for "literature" fitly so
called. It all makes me wish that we had you here again, and you will
doubtless soon come. I mustn't forget to thank you for the gold
pencil-case souvenir. I have had a plated silver one for a year past,
now worn through, and experienced what a "comfort" they are. Good-bye,
and Heaven bless you. Your loving
W. J.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
Cambridge, _Jan._ 2, 1908.
...I am just back from the American Philosophical Association, which had
a really delightful meeting at Cornell University in the State of New
York. Mostly epistemological. We are getting to know each other and
understand each other better, and shall do so year by year, Everyone
cursed my doctrine and Schiller's about "truth." I think it largely is
misunderstanding, but it is also due to our having expressed our meaning
very ill. The general blanket-word pragmatism covers so many different
opinions, that it naturally arouses irritation to see it flourished as a
revolutionary flag. I am also partly to blame here; but it was
_tactically_ wise to use it as a title. Far more persons have had their
attention attracted, and the result has been that everybody has been
forced to think. Substantially I have nothing to alter in what I have
said....
I have just read the first half of Fechner's "Zend-Avesta," a wonderful
book, by a wonderful genius. He had his vision and he knows how to
discuss it, as no one's vision ever was discussed.
I may tell you in confidence (I don't talk of it here because my damned
arteries may in the end make me give it up--for a year past I have a
sort of angina when I make efforts) that I have accepted an invitation
to give eight public lectures at Oxford next May. I was ashamed to
refuse; but the work of preparing them will be hard (the title is "The
Present Situation in Philosophy"[84]) and they doom me to relapse into
the "popular lecture" form just as I thought I had done with it forever.
(What I wished to write this winter was something ultra dry in form,
impersonal and exact.) I find that my free and easy and personal way of
writing, especially in "Pragmatism," has made me an object of loathing
to many respectable academic minds, and I am rather tired of awakening
that feeling, which more popular lecturing on my part will probably
destine me to increase.
...I have been with Strong, who goes to Rome this month. Good,
truth-loving man! and a very penetrating mind. I think he will write a
great book. We greatly enjoyed seeing your friend Schwarz, the teacher.
A fine fellow who will, I hope, succeed.
A happy New Year to you now, dear Flournoy, and loving regards from us
all to you all. Yours as ever
Wm. James.
_To Norman Kemp Smith._
[Post-card]
Cambridge, _Jan._ 31, 1908.
I have only just "got round" to your singularly solid and compact study
of Avenarius in "Mind." I find it clear and very clarifying, after the
innumerable hours I have spent in trying to dishevel him. I have read
the "Weltbegriff" three times, and have half expected to have to read
both books over again to assimilate his immortal message to man, of
which I have hitherto been able to make nothing. You set me free! I
shall not re-read him! but leave him to his spiritual dryness and
preposterous pedantry. His only really original idea seems to be that of
the _Vitalreihe_, and that, so far as I can see, is quite false,
certainly no improvement on the notion of adaptive reflex actions.
Wm. James.
_To his Daughter._
Cambridge, _Apr._ 2, 1908,
DARLING PEG,--You must have wondered at my silence since your dear
mother returned. I hoped to write to you each day, but the strict
routine of my hours now crowded it out. I write on my Oxford job till
one, then lunch, then nap, then to my ... doctor at four daily, and from
then till dinner-time making calls, and keeping "out" as much as
possible. To bed as soon after 8 as possible--all my odd reading done
between 3 and 5 A.M., an hour not favorable for letter-writing--so that
my necessary business notes have to get in just before dinner (as now)
or after dinner, which I hate and try to avoid. I think I see my way
clear to go [to Oxford] now, if I don't get more fatigued than at
present. Four and a quarter lectures are fully written, and the rest are
down-hill work, much raw material being ready now....
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _April_ 15, 1908.
DEAREST HENRY,--Your good letter to Harry has brought news of your play,
of which I had only seen an enigmatic paragraph in the papers. I'm right
glad it is a success, and that such good artists as the Robertsons are
in it. I hope it will have a first-rate run in London. Your apologies
for not writing are the most uncalled-for things--your assiduity and the
length of your letters to this family are a standing marvel--especially
considering the market-value of your "copy"! So waste no more in that
direction. 'Tis I who should be prostrating myself--silent as I've been
for months in spite of the fact that I'm so soon to descend upon you.
The fact is I've been trying to compose the accursed lectures in a state
of abominable brain-fatigue--a race between myself and time. I've got
six now done out of the eight, so I'm safe, but sorry that the infernal
nervous condition that with me always accompanies literary production
must continue at Oxford and add itself to the other fatigues--a fixed
habit of wakefulness, etc. I ought not to have accepted, but they've
panned out good, so far, and if I get through them successfully, I shall
be very glad that the opportunity came. They will be a good thing to
_have done_. Previously, in such states of fatigue, I have had a break
and got away, but this time no day without its half dozen pages--but the
thing hangs on so long!...
_To Henry James._
R. M. S. IVERNIA,
[Arriving at Liverpool], _Apr. 29, 1908_.
DEAR H.,--Your letter of the 26th, unstamped or post-marked, has just
been wafted into our lap--I suppose mailed under another cover to the
agent's care.
I'm glad you're not hurrying from Paris--I feared you might be awaiting
us in London, and wrote you a letter yesterday to the Reform Club, which
you will doubtless get ere you get this, telling you of our prosperous
though tedious voyage in good condition.
We cut out London and go straight to Oxford, _via_ Chester. I have been
sleeping like a top, and feel in good fighting trim again, eager for the
scalp of the Absolute. My lectures will put his wretched clerical
defenders fairly on the defensive. They begin on Monday. Since you'll
have the whole months of May and June, if you urge it, to see us, I pray
you not to hasten back from "gay Paree" for the purpose.... Up since two
A.M.
W. J.
_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._
PATTERDALE, ENGLAND, _July 2, 1908_.
Your letter, beloved Pauline, greeted me on my arrival here three hours
ago.... How I _do wish_ that I could be in Italy alongside of you now,
now or any time! You could do me so much good, and your ardor of
enjoyment of the country, the towns and the folk would warm up my cold
soul. I might even learn to speak Italian by conversing in that tongue
with you. But I fear that you'd find me betraying the coldness of my
soul by complaining of the heat of my body--a most unworthy attitude to
strike. Dear Paolina, never, never think of whether your body is hot or
cold; live in the _objective_ world, above such miserable
considerations. I have been up here eight days, Alice having gone down
last Saturday, the 27th, to meet Peggy and Harry at London, after only
two days of it. After all the social and other fever of the past six and
a half weeks (save for the blessed nine days at Bibury), it looked like
the beginning of a real vacation, and it would be such but for the
extreme heat, and the accident of one of my recent malignant "colds"
beginning. I have been riding about on stage-coaches for five days past,
but the hills are so treeless that one gets little shade, and the sun's
glare is tremendous. It is a lovely country, however, for
pedestrianizing in cooler weather. Mountains and valleys compressed
together as in the Adirondacks, great reaches of pink and green hillside
and lovely lakes, the higher parts quite fully alpine in character but
for the fact that no snow mountains form the distant background. A
strong and noble region, well worthy of one's life-long devotion, if one
were a Briton. And on the whole, what a magnificent land and race is
this Britain! Every thing about them is of better quality than the
corresponding thing in the U.S.--with but few exceptions, I imagine. And
the equilibrium is so well achieved, and the human tone so cheery,
blithe and manly! and the manners so delightfully good. Not one
_unwholesome_-looking man or woman does one meet here for 250 that one
meets in America. Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually
the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it, and thou
in 22nd St. and I in Irving St. must do our respective strokes, which
after 1000 years will help to have made the glorious collective
resultant. Meanwhile, as my brother Henry once wrote, thank God for a
world that holds so rich an England, so rare an Italy! Alice is entirely
_aufgegangen_ in her idealization of it. And truly enough, the gardens,
the manners, the manliness are an excuse.
But profound as is my own moral respect and admiration, for a _vacation_
give me the Continent! The civilization here is too heavy, too _stodgy_,
if one could use so unamiable a word. The very stability and good-nature
of all things (of course we are leaving out the slum-life!) rest on the
basis of the national stupidity, or rather unintellectuality, on which
as on a safe foundation of non-explosible material, the magnificent
minds of the élite of the race can coruscate as they will, safely. Not
until those weeks at Oxford, and these days at Durham, have I had any
sense of what a part the Church plays in the national life. So massive
and all-pervasive, so authoritative, and on the whole so decent, in
spite of the iniquity and farcicality of the whole thing. Never were
incompatibles so happily yoked together. Talk about the genius of
Romanism! It's nothing to the genius of Anglicanism, for Catholicism
still contains some haggard elements, that ally it with the Palestinian
desert, whereas Anglicanism remains obese and round and comfortable and
decent with this world's decencies, without an _acute_ note in its whole
life or history, in spite of the shrill Jewish words on which its ears
are fed, and the nitro-glycerine of the Gospels and Epistles which has
been injected into its veins. Strange feat to have achieved! Yet the
success is great--the whole Church-machine makes for all sorts of graces
and decencies, and is not incompatible with a high type of Churchman,
high, that is, on the side of moral and worldly virtue....
How I wish you were beside me at this moment! A breeze has arisen on the
Lake which is spread out before the "smoking-room" window at which I
write, and is very grateful. The lake much resembles Lake George. Your
ever grateful and loving
W. J.
_To Charles Eliot Norton._
PATTERDALE, ENGLAND, _July 6, 1908_.
DEAR CHARLES,--Going to Coniston Lake the other day and seeing the
moving little Ruskin Museum at Coniston (admission a penny) made me
think rather vividly of you, and make a resolution to write to you on
the earliest opportunity. It was truly moving to see such a collection
of R.'s busy handiwork, exquisite and loving, in the way of drawing,
sketching, engraving and note-taking, and also such a varied lot of
photographs of him, especially in his old age. Glorious old Don Quixote
that he was! At Durham, where Alice and I spent three and a half
delightful days at the house of F. B. Jevons, Principal of one of the
two colleges of which the University is composed, I had a good deal of
talk with the very remarkable octogenarian Dean of the Cathedral and
Lord of the University, a thorough liberal, or rather radical, in his
mind, with a voice like a bell, and an alertness to match, who had been
a college friend of Ruskin's and known him intimately all his life, and
loved him. He knew not of his correspondence with you, of which I have
been happy to be able to order Kent of Harvard Square to send him a
copy. His name is Kitchin.
The whole scene at Durham was tremendously impressive (though York
Cathedral made the stronger impression on me). It was so unlike Oxford,
so much more American in its personnel, in a way, yet nestling in the
very bosom of those mediæval stage-properties and ecclesiastical-principality
suggestions. Oxford is all spread out in length and breadth, Durham
concentrated in depth and thickness. There is a great deal of flummery
about Oxford, but I think if I were an Oxonian, in spite of my
radicalism generally, I might vote against all change there. It is an
absolutely unique fruit of human endeavor, and like the cathedrals, can
never to the end of time be reproduced, when the conditions that once
made it are changed. Let other places of learning go in for all the
improvements! The world can afford to keep her one Oxford unreformed. I
know that this is a superficial judgment in both ways, for Oxford does
manage to keep pace with the utilitarian spirit, and at the same time
preserve lots of her flummery unchanged. On the whole it is a thoroughly
_democratic_ place, so far as aristocracy in the strict sense goes. But
I'm out of it, and doubt whether I want ever to put foot into it
again....
England has changed in many respects. The West End of London, which used
at this season to be so impressive from its splendor, is now a mixed and
mongrel horde of straw hats and cads of every description. Motor-buses
of the most brutal sort have replaced the old carriages, Bond and Regent
Streets are cheap-jack shows, everything is tumultuous and confused and
has run down in quality. I have been "motoring" a good deal through this
"Lake District," owing to the kindness of some excellent people in the
hotel, dissenters who rejoice in the name of Squance and inhabit the
neighborhood of Durham. It is wondrous fine, but especially adapted to
trampers, which I no longer am. Altogether England seems to have got
itself into a magnificently fine state of civilization, especially in
regard to the cheery and wholesome tone of manners of the people,
improved as it is getting to be by the greater infusion of the
democratic temper. Everything here seems about twice as good as the
corresponding thing with us. But I suspect we have the bigger eventual
destiny after all; and give us a thousand years and we may catch up in
many details. I think of you as still at Cambridge, and I do hope that
physical ills are bearing on more gently. Lily, too, I hope is her well
self again. You mustn't think of answering this, which is only an
ejaculation of friendship--I shall be home almost before you can get an
answer over. Love to all your circle, including Theodora, whom I miss
greatly. Affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
_To Henri Bergson._
LAMB HOUSE, _July 28, 1908_.
DEAR BERGSON,--(can't we cease "Professor"-ing each other?--that title
establishes a "disjunctive relation" between man and man, and our
relation should be "endosmotic" socially as well as intellectually, I
think),--
_Jacta est alea_, I am not to go to Switzerland! I find, after a week or
more here, that the monotony and simplification is doing my nervous
centres so much good, that my wife has decided to go off with our
daughter to Geneva, and to leave me alone with my brother here, for
repairs. It is a great disappointment in other ways than in not seeing
you, but I know that it is best. Perhaps later in the season the
_Zusammenkunft_ may take place, for nothing is decided beyond the next
three weeks.
Meanwhile let me say how rarely delighted your letter made me. There are
many points in your philosophy which I don't yet grasp, but I have
seemed to myself to understand your anti-intellectualistic campaign very
clearly, and that I have really done it so well in your opinion makes me
proud. I am sending your letter to Strong, partly out of vanity, partly
because of your reference to him. It does seem to me that philosophy is
turning towards a new orientation. Are you a reader of Fechner? I wish
that you would read his "Zend-Avesta," which in the second edition
(1904, I think) is better printed and much easier to read than it looks
at the first glance. He seems to me of the real race of prophets, and I
cannot help thinking that _you_, in particular, if not already
acquainted with this book, would find it very stimulating and
suggestive. His day, I fancy, is yet to come. I will write no more now,
but merely express my regret (and hope) and sign myself, yours most
warmly and sincerely,
Wm. James.
The subject of the next letter was a volume of "Essays Philosophical and
Psychological, in Honor of William James,"[85] by nineteen contributors,
which had been issued by Columbia University in the spring of 1908. A
note at the beginning of the book said: "This volume is intended to mark
in some degree its authors' sense of Professor James's memorable
services in philosophy and psychology, the vitality he has added to
those studies, and the encouragement that has flowed from him to
colleagues without number. Early in 1907, at the invitation of Columbia
University, he delivered a course of lectures there, and met the members
of the Philosophical and Psychological Departments on several occasions
for social discussion. They have an added motive for the present work in
the recollections of this visit."
_To John Dewey._
RYE, SUSSEX, _Aug. 4, 1908_.
DEAR DEWEY,--I don't know whether this will find you in the Adirondacks
or elsewhere, but I hope 'twill be on East Hill. My own copy of the
Essays in my "honor," which took me by complete surprise on the eve of
my departure, was too handsome to take along, so I have but just got
round to reading the book, which I find at my brother Henry's, where I
have recently come. It is a masterly set of essays of which we may all
be proud, distinguished by good style, direct dealing with the facts,
and hot running on the trail of truth, regardless of previous
conventions and categories. I am sure it hitches the subject of
epistemology a good day's journey ahead, and proud indeed am I that it
should be dedicated to my memory.
Your own contribution is to my mind the most _weighty_--unless perhaps
Strong's should prove to be so. I rejoice exceedingly that you should
have got it out. No one yet has succeeded, it seems to me, in jumping
into the centre of your vision. Once there, all the perspectives are
clear and open; and when you or some one else of us shall have spoken
the exact word that opens the centre to everyone, mediating between it
and the old categories and prejudices, people will wonder that there
ever could have been any other philosophy. That it is the philosophy of
the future, I'll bet my life. Admiringly and affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
LAMB HOUSE, RYE, _Aug. 9, 1908_.
DEAR FLOURNOY,--I can't make out from my wife's letters whether she has
seen you face to face, or only heard accounts of you from Madame
Flournoy. She reports you very tired from the "Congress"--but I don't
know what Congress has been meeting at Geneva just now. I don't suppose
that you will go to the philosophical congress at Heidelberg--I
certainly shall not. I doubt whether philosophers will gain so much by
talking with each other as other classes of _Gelehrten_ do. One needs to
_frequenter_ a colleague daily for a month before one can begin to
understand him. It seems to me that the collective life of philosophers
is little more than an organization of misunderstandings. I gave eight
lectures at Oxford, but besides Schiller and one other tutor, only two
persons ever _mentioned_ them to me, and those were the two heads of
Manchester College by whom I had been invited. Philosophical work it
seems to me must go on in silence and in print exclusively.
You will have heard (either directly or indirectly) from my wife of my
reasons for not accompanying them to Geneva. I have been for more than
three weeks now at my brother's, and am much better for the
simplification. I am very sorry not to have met with you, but I think I
took the prudent course in staying away.
I have just read Miss Johnson's report in the last S. P. R.
"Proceedings," and a good bit of the proofs of Piddington's on
cross-correspondences between Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, and Mrs.
Holland, which is to appear in the next number. You will be much
interested, if you can gather the philosophical energy, to go through
such an amount of tiresome detail. It seems to me that these reports
open a new chapter in the history of automatism; and Piddington's and
Johnson's ability is of the highest order. Evidently "automatism" is a
word that covers an extraordinary variety of fact. I suppose that you
have on the whole been gratified by the "vindication" of Eusapia
[Paladino] at the hands of Morselli _et al._ in Italy. Physical
phenomena also seem to be entering upon a new phase in their history.
Well, I will stop, this is only a word of greeting and regret at not
seeing you. I got your letter of many weeks ago when we were at Oxford.
Don't take the trouble to _write_ now--my wife will bring me all the
news of you and your family, and will have given you all mine. Love to
Madame F. and all the young ones, too, please. Your ever affectionate
W. J.
_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._
PAIGNTON, S. DEVON, _Oct. 3, 1908_.
DEAR HODGSON,--I have been five months in England (you have doubtless
heard of my lecturing at Oxford) yet never given you a sign of life. The
reason is that I have sedulously kept away from London, which I admire,
but at my present time of life abhor, and only touched it two or three
times for thirty-six hours to help my wife do her "shopping" (strange
use for an elderly philosopher to be put to). The last time I was in
London, about a month ago, I called at your affectionately remembered
No. 45, only to find you gone to Yorkshire, as I feared I should. I go
back in an hour, en route for Liverpool, whence, with wife and daughter,
I sail for Boston in the Saxonia. I am literally enchanted with rural
England, yet I doubt whether I ever return. I never had a fair chance of
getting acquainted with the country here, and if I were a stout
pedestrian, which I no longer am, I think I should frequent this land
every summer. But in my decrepitude I must make the best of the more
effortless relations which I enjoy with nature in my own country. I have
seen many philosophers, at Oxford, especially, and James Ward at
Cambridge; but, apart from _very_ few conversations, didn't get at
close quarters with any of them, and they probably gained as little
from me as I from them. "We are columns left alone, of a temple once
complete." The power of mutual misunderstanding in philosophy seems
infinite, and grows discouraging. Schiller of course, and his pragmatic
friend Captain Knox, James Ward, and McDougall, stand out as the most
satisfactory talkers. But there is too much fencing and scoring of
"points" at Oxford to make construction active.
Good-bye! dear Hodgson, and pray think of me with a little of the
affection and intellectual interest with which I always think of you. My
Oxford lectures won't appear till next April. Don't read the extracts
which the "Hibbert Journal" is publishing. They are torn out of their
natural setting. I have, as you probably know, ceased teaching and am
enjoying a Carnegie pension. Yours ever fondly,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
LONDON, _Oct. 4, 1908_.
DEAR FLOURNOY,--I got your delightful letter duly two weeks ago, or
more. I always have a bad conscience on receiving a letter from you,
because I feel as if I _forced_ you to write it, and I know too well by
your own confessions (as well as by my own far less extreme experience
of reluctance to write) what a nuisance and an effort letters are apt to
be. But no matter! this letter of yours was a good one indeed....
We sail from Liverpool the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow will be a
busy day winding up our affairs and making some last purchases of small
things. Alice has an insatiable desire (as Mrs. Flournoy may have
noticed at Geneva) to increase her possessions, whilst I, like an
American Tolstoy, wish to diminish them. The most convenient
arrangement for a Tolstoy is to have an anti-Tolstoyan wife to "run the
house" for him. We have been for three days in Devonshire, and for four
days at Oxford previous to that. Extraordinary warm summer weather, with
exquisite atmospheric effects. I am extremely glad to leave England with
my last optical images so beautiful. In any case the harmony and
softness of the landscape of rural England probably excels everything in
the world in that line.
At Oxford I saw McDougall and Schiller quite intimately, also Schiller's
friend, Capt. Knox, who, retired from the army, lives at Gründelwald,
and is an extremely acute mind, and fine character, I should think. He
is a militant "Pragmatist." Before that I spent three days at Cambridge,
where again I saw James Ward intimately. I prophesy that if he gets his
health again ... he will become also a militant pluralist of some sort.
I think he has worked out his original monistic-theistic vein and is
steering straight towards a "critical point" where the umbrella will
turn inside out, and not go back. I hope so! I made the acquaintance of
Boutroux here last week. He came to the "Moral Education Congress" where
he made a very fine address. I find him very _simpatico_.
[Illustration: William James and Henry Clement, at the "Putnam Shanty,"
in the Adirondacks (1907?).]
But the best of all these meetings has been one of three hours this very
morning with Bergson, who is here visiting his relatives. So modest and
unpretending a man, but such a genius intellectually! We talked very
easily together, or rather _he_ talked easily, for he talked much more
than I did, and although I can't say that I follow the folds of his
system much more clearly than I did before, he has made some points much
plainer. I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has
brought to a focus will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch
will be a sort of turning-point in the history of philosophy. So many
things converge towards an anti-rationalistic crystallization.
_Qui vivra verra!_
I am very glad indeed to go on board ship. For two months I have been
more than ready to get back to my own habits, my own library and
writing-table and bed.... I wish you, and all of you, a prosperous and
healthy and resultful winter, and am, with old-time affection, your ever
faithful friend,
Wm. James.
If the duty of writing weighs so heavily on you, why obey it? Why, for
example, write any more reviews? I absolutely refuse to, and find that
one great alleviation.
_To Henri Bergson._
LONDON, _Oct. 4, 1908_.
DEAR BERGSON,--My brother was sorry that you couldn't come. He wishes me
to say that he is returning to Rye the day after tomorrow and is so
engaged tomorrow that he will postpone the pleasure of meeting you to
some future opportunity.
I need hardly repeat how much I enjoyed our talk today. You must take
care of yourself and economize all your energies for your own creative
work. I want very much to see what you will have to say on the
_Substanzbegriff_! Why should life be so short? I wish that you and I
and Strong and Flournoy and McDougall and Ward could live on some
mountain-top for a month, together, and whenever we got tired of
philosophizing, calm our minds by taking refuge in the scenery.
Always truly yours,
Wm. James.
_To H. G. Wells._
Cambridge, _Nov. 28, 1908_.
DEAR WELLS,--"First and Last Things" is a great achievement. The first
two "books" should be entitled "philosophy without humbug" and used as a
textbook in all the colleges of the world. You have put your finger
accurately on the true emphases, and--in the main--on what seem to me
the true solutions (you are more monistic in your faith than I should
be, but as long as you only call it "faith," that's your right and
privilege), and the simplicity of your statements ought to make us
"professionals" blush. I have been 35 years on the way to similar
conclusions--simply because I started as a professional and had to
_débrouiller_ them from all the traditional school rubbish.
The other two books exhibit you in the character of the Tolstoy of the
English world. A sunny and healthy-minded Tolstoy, as he is a
pessimistic and morbid-minded Wells. Where the "higher synthesis" will
be born, who shall combine the pair of you, Heaven only knows. But you
are carrying on the same function, not only in that neither of your
minds is boxed and boarded up like the mind of an ordinary human being,
but all the contents down to the very bottom come out freely and
unreservedly and simply, but in that you both have the power of
contagious speech, and set the similar mood vibrating in the reader. Be
happy in that such power has been put into your hands! This book is
worth any 100 volumes on Metaphysics and any 200 of Ethics, of the
ordinary sort.
Yours, with friendliest regards to Mrs. Wells, most sincerely,
Wm. James.
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _Dec. 19, 1908_.
DEAREST H.,-- ...I write this at 6.30 [A.M.], in the library, which the
blessed hard-coal fire has kept warm all night. The night has been
still, thermometer 20°, and the dawn is breaking in a pure red line
behind Grace Norton's house, into a sky empty save for a big morning
star and the crescent of the waning moon. Not a cloud--a true American
winter effect. But somehow "le grand puits de l'aurore" doesn't appeal
to my sense of life, or challenge my spirits as formerly. It suggests no
more enterprises to the decrepitude of age, which vegetates along,
drawing interest merely on the investment of its earlier enterprises.
The accursed "thoracic symptom" is a killer of enterprise with me, and I
dare say that it is little better with you. But the less said of it the
better--it doesn't diminish!
My time has been consumed by interruptions almost totally, until a week
ago, when I finally got down seriously to work upon my Hodgson report.
It means much more labor than one would suppose, and very little result.
I wish that I had never undertaken it. I am sending off a preliminary
installment of it to be read at the S. P. R. meeting in January. That
done, the rest will run off easily, and in a month I expect to actually
begin the "Introduction to Philosophy," which has been postponed so
long, and which I hope will add to income for a number of years to come.
Your Volumes XIII and XIV arrived the other day--many thanks. We're
subscribing to two copies of the work, sending them as wedding presents.
I hope it will sell. Very enticing-looking, but I can't settle down to
the prefaces as yet, the only thing I have been able to read lately
being Lowes Dickinson's last book, "Justice and Liberty," which seems to
me a decidedly big achievement from every point of view, and probably
destined to have a considerable influence in moulding the opinion of the
educated. Stroke upon stroke, from pens of genius, the competitive
régime, so idolized 75 years ago, seems to be getting wounded to death.
What will follow will be something better, but I never saw so clearly
the slow effect of [the] accumulation of the influence of successive
individuals in changing prevalent ideals. Wells and Dickinson will
undoubtedly make the biggest steps of change....
Well dear brother! a merry Christmas to you--to you both, I trust, for I
fancy Aleck will be with you when this arrives--and a happy New Year at
its tail! Your loving
W. J.
_To T. S. Perry._
Cambridge, _Jan. 29, 1909_.
BELOVED THOMAS, cher maître et confrère,--Your delightful letter about
my Fechner article and about your having become a professional
philosopher yourself came to hand duly, four days ago, and filled the
heart of self and wife with joy. I always knew you was one, for to be a
real philosopher all that is necessary is to _hate_ some one else's type
of thinking, and if that some one else be a representative of the
"classic" type of thought, then one is a pragmatist and owns the fulness
of the truth. Fechner is indeed a dear, and I am glad to have
introduced, so to speak, his speculations to the English world, although
the Revd. Elwood Worcester has done so in a somewhat more limited manner
in a recent book of his called "The Living Word"-(Worcester of Emmanuel
Church, I mean, whom everyone has now begun to fall foul of for trying
to reanimate the Church's healing virtue). Another case of newspaper
crime! The reporters all got hold of it with their megaphones, and made
the nation sick of the sound of its name. Whereas in former ages men
strove hard for fame, obscurity is now the one thing to be _striven_
for. For _fame_, all one need do is to exist; and the reporter will do
the rest--especially if you give them the address of your fotographer. I
hope you're a spelling reformer--I send you the last publication from
that quarter. I'm sure that simple spelling will make a page look
better, just as a crowd looks better if everyone's clothes fit.
Apropos of pragmatism, a learned Theban named---- has written a
circus-performance of which he is the clown, called "Anti-pragmatisme."
It has so much verve and good spirit that I feel like patting him on the
back, and "sicking him on," but Lord! what a fool! I think I shall leave
it unnoticed. I'm tired of reëxplaining what is already explained to
satiety. Let _them_ say, now, for it is their turn, what the relation
called truth consists in, what it is known as!
I have had you on my mind ever since Jan. 1st, when we had our Friday
evening Club-dinner, and I was deputed to cable you a happy New Year.
The next day I couldn't get to the telegraph office; the day after I
said to myself, "I'll save the money, and save him the money, for if he
gets a cable, he'll be sure to cable back; so I'll write"; the following
day, I forgot to; the next day I postponed the act; so from postponement
to postponement, here I am. Forgive, forgive! Most affectionate remarks
were made about you at the dinner, which generally doesn't err by
wasting words on absentees, even on those gone to eternity....
I have just got off my report on the Hodgson control, which has stuck to
my fingers all this time. It is a hedging sort of an affair, and I don't
know what the Perry family will think of it. The truth is that the
"case" is a particularly poor one for testing Mrs. Piper's claim to
bring back spirits. It is _leakier_ than any other case, and
intrinsically, I think, no stronger than many of her other good cases,
certainly weaker than the G. P. case. I am also now engaged in writing a
popular article, "the avowals of a psychical researcher," for the
"American Magazine," in which I simply state without argument my own
convictions, and put myself on record. I think that public opinion is
just now taking a step forward in these matters--_vide_ the Eusapian
boom! and possibly both these _Schriften_ of mine will add their
influence. Thank you for the Charmes reception and for the earthquake
correspondence! I envy you in clean and intelligent Paris, though our
winter is treating us very mildly. A lovely sunny day today! Love to all
of you! Yours fondly,
W. J.
The "Charmes reception" was a report of the speeches at the French
Academy's reception of Francis Charmes. The "Eusapian boom" will have
been understood to refer to current discussions of the medium Eusapia
Paladino.
* * * * *
The next letter refers to a paper in which both James and Münsterberg
had been "attacked" in such a manner that Münsterberg proposed to send a
protest to the American Psychological Association.
_To Hugo Münsterberg._
Cambridge, _Mar. 16, 1909_.
DEAR MÜNSTERBERG,--Witmer has sent me the _corpus delicti_, and I find
myself curiously unmoved. In fact he takes so much trouble over me, and
goes at the job with such zest that I feel like "sicking him on," as
they say to dogs. Perhaps the honor of so many pages devoted to one
makes up for the dishonor of their content. It is really a great
compliment to have anyone take so much trouble about one. Think of
copying all Wundt's notes!
But, dear Münsterberg, I hope you'll withdraw a second time your
protest. I think it undignified to take such an attack seriously. Its
excessive dimensions (in my case at any rate), and the smallness and
remoteness of the provocation, stamp it as simply eccentric, and to show
sensitiveness only gives it importance in the eyes of readers who
otherwise would only smile at its extravagance. Besides, since these
temperamental antipathies exist--why isn't it healthy that they should
express themselves? For my part, I feel rather glad than otherwise that
psychology is so live a subject that psychologists should "go for" each
other in this way, and I think it all ought to happen _inside_ of our
Association. We ought to cultivate tough hides there, so I hope that you
will withdraw the protest. I have mentioned it only to Royce, and will
mention it to no one else. I don't like the notion of Harvard people
seeming "touchy"! Your fellow victim,
W. J.
_To John Jay Chapman._
Cambridge, _Apr. 30, 1909_.
DEAR JACK C.,--I'm not expecting you to _read_ my book, but only to
"give me a thought" when you look at the cover. A certain witness at a
poisoning case was asked how the corpse looked. "Pleasant-like and
foaming at the mouth," was the reply. A good description of you,
describing philosophy, in your letter. All that you say is true, and yet
the conspiracy has to be carried on by us professors. Reality has to be
_returned to_, after this long circumbendibus, though _Gavroche_ has it
already. There _are_ concepts, anyhow. I am glad you lost the volume.
It makes one less in existence and ought to send up the price of the
remainder.
Blessed spring! blessed spring! Love to you both from yours,
Wm. James.
The next post-card was written in acknowledgment of Professor Palmer's
comments on "A Pluralistic Universe."
_To G. H. Palmer._
[Post-card]
Cambridge, _May 13, 1909_.
"The finest critical mind of our time!" No one can mix the honey and the
gall as you do! My conceit appropriates the honey--for the gall it makes
indulgent allowance, as the inevitable watering of a pair of aged
rationalist eyes at the effulgent sunrise of a new philosophic day!
Thanks! thanks! for the honey.
W. J.
TO THEODORE FLOURNOY.
CHOCORUA, JUNE 18, 1909.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--You must have been wondering during all these weeks
what has been the explanation of my silence. It has had two simple
causes; 1st, laziness; and 2nd, uncertainty, until within a couple of
days, about whether or not I was myself going to Geneva for the
University Jubilee. I have been strongly tempted, not only by the
"doctorate of theology," which you confidentially told me of (and which
would have been a fertile subject of triumph over my dear friend Royce
on my part, and of sarcasm on his part about academic distinctions, as
well as a diverting episode generally among my friends,--I being so
essentially profane a character), but by the hope of seeing you, and by
the prospect of a few weeks in dear old Switzerland again. But the
economical, hygienic and domestic reasons were all against the journey;
so a few days ago I ceased coquetting with the idea of it, and have
finally given it up. This postpones any possible meeting with you till
next summer, when I think it pretty certain that Alice and I and Peggy
will go to Europe again, and probably stay there for two years....
What with the Jubilee and the Congress, dear Flournoy, I fear that your
own summer will not yield much healing repose. "Go through it like an
automaton" is the best advice I can give you. I find that it is
possible, on occasions of great strain, to get relief by ceasing all
voluntary control. _Do_ nothing, and I find that something will do
itself! and not so stupidly in the eyes of outsiders as in one's own.
Claparède will, I suppose, be the chief executive officer at the
Congress. It is a pleasure to see how he is rising to the top among
psychologists, how large a field he covers, and with both originality
and "humanity" (in the sense of the omission of the superfluous and
technical, and preference for the probable). When will the Germans learn
that part? I have just been reading Driesch's Gifford lectures, Volume
II. Very exact and careful, and the work of a most powerful intellect.
But why lug in, as he does, all that Kantian apparatus, when the
questions he treats of are real enough and important enough to be
handled directly and not smothered in that opaque and artificial veil? I
find the book extremely suggestive, and should like to believe in its
thesis, but I can't help suspecting that Driesch is unjust to the
possibilities of purely mechanical action. Candle-flames, waterfalls,
eddies in streams, to say nothing of "vortex atoms," seem to perpetuate
themselves and repair their injuries. You ought to receive very soon my
report on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control. Some theoretic remarks I make at
the end may interest you. I rejoice in the triumph of Eusapia all along
the line--also in Ochorowicz's young Polish medium, whom you have seen.
It looks at last as if something definitive and positive were in sight.
I am correcting the proofs of a collection of what I have written on the
subject of "truth"--it will appear in September under the title of "The
Meaning of Truth, a Sequel to Pragmatism." It is already evident from
the letters I am getting about the "Pluralistic Universe" that that book
will 1st, be _read_; 2nd, be _rejected_ almost unanimously at first, and
for very diverse reasons; but, 3rd, will continue to be bought and
referred to, and will end by strongly influencing English philosophy.
And now, dear Flournoy, good-bye! and believe me with sincerest
affection for Mrs. Flournoy and the young people as well as for
yourself, yours faithfully,
Wm. James.
_To Miss Theodora Sedgwick._
CHOCORUA, _July 12, 1909_.
DEAR THEODORA,--We got your letter a week ago, and were very glad to
hear of your prosperous installation, and good impressions of the place.
I am sorry that Harry couldn't go to see you the first Sunday, but hope,
if he didn't go for yesterday, that he will do so yet. When your social
circle gets established, and routine life set up, I am sure that you
will like Newport very much. As for ourselves, the place is only just
beginning to smooth out. The instruments of labor had well-nigh all
disappeared, and had to come piecemeal, each forty-eight hours after
being ordered, so we have been using the cow as a lawn-mower, silver
knives to carve with, and finger-nails for technical purposes
generally. There is no labor known to man in which Alice has not
indulged, and I have sought safety among the mosquitoes in the woods
rather than remain to shirk my responsibilities in full view of them. We
have hired a little mare, fearless of automobiles, we get our mail
dally, we had company to dinner yesterday, relatives of Alice, the
children will be here by the middle of the week, the woods are
deliciously fragrant, and the weather, so far, cool--in fact we are
_launched_ and the regular summer equilibrium will soon set in. The
place is both pathetic and irresistible; I want to sell it, Alice wants
to enlarge it--we shall end by doing neither, but discuss it to the end
of our days.
I have just read Shaler's autobiography, and it has fairly haunted me
with the overflowing impression of his myriad-minded character. Full of
excesses as he was, due to his intense vivacity, impulsiveness, and
imaginativeness, his centre of gravity was absolutely steady, and I knew
no man whose sense of the larger relation of things was always so true
and right. Of all the minds I have known, his leaves the largest
impression, and I miss him more than I have missed anyone before. You
ought to read the book, especially the autobiographic half. Good-bye,
dear Theodora. Alice joins her love to mine, and I am, as ever, yours
affectionately,
Wm. James.
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
_Chocorua_, _Aug. 14, 1909_.
DEAR SCHILLER,-- ...I got the other day a very candid letter from A. S.
Pringle-Pattison, about my "Pluralistic Universe," in which he said: "It
is supremely difficult to accept the conclusion of an actually growing
universe, an actual addition to the sum of being or (if that expression
be objectionable) to the intensity and scope of existence, to a growing
God, in fact."--This seems to me very significant. On such minute little
snags and hooks, do all the "difficulties" of philosophy hang. Call them
categories, and sacred laws, principles of reason, etc., and you have
the actual state of metaphysics, calling all the analogies of phenomenal
life impossibilities.
No more lecturing from W. J., thank you! either at Oxford or elsewhere.
Affectionately thine,
W. J.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
CHOCORUA, S_ept. 28, 1909_.
DEAR FLOURNOY,--We had fondly hoped that before now you might both,
accepting my half-invitation, half-suggestion, be with us in this
uncared-for-nature, so different from Switzerland, and you getting
strengthened and refreshed by the change. _Dieu dispose_, indeed! The
fact that _is_ never entered into our imagination! I give up all hope of
you this year, unless it be for Cambridge, where, however, the
conditions of repose will be less favorable for you.... I am myself
going down to Cambridge on the fifth of October for two days of
"inauguration" ceremonies of our new president, Lawrence Lowell....
There are so many rival universities in our country that advantage has
to be taken of such changes to make the newspaper talk, and keep the
name of Harvard in the public ear, so the occasion is to be almost as
elaborate as a "Jubilee"; but I shall keep as much out of it as is
officially possible, and come back to Chocorua on the 8th, to stay as
late into October as we can, though probably not later than the 20th,
after which the Cambridge winter will begin. It hasn't gone well with my
health this summer, and beyond a little reading, I have done no work at
all. I have, however, succeeded during the past year in preparing a
volume on the "Meaning of Truth"--already printed papers for the most
part--which you will receive in a few days after getting this letter,
and which I think may help you to set the "pragmatic" account of
Knowledge in a clearer light. I will also send you a magazine article on
the mediums, which has just appeared, and which may divert you.[86]
Eusapia Paladino, I understand, has just signed a contract to come to
New York to be at the disposition of Hereward Carrington, an expert in
medium's tricks, and author of a book on the same, who, together with
Fielding and Bagally, also experts, formed the Committee of the London
S. P. R., who saw her at Naples.... After Courtier's report on Eusapia,
I don't think any "investigation" here will be worth much
"scientifically"--the only advantage of her coming may possibly be to
get some scientific men to believe that there is really a problem. Two
other cases have been reported to me lately, which are worth looking up,
and I shall hope to do so.
How much your interests and mine keep step with each other, dear
Flournoy. "Functional psychology," and the twilight region that
surrounds the clearly lighted centre of experience! Speaking of
"functional" psychology, Clark University, of which Stanley Hall is
president, had a little international congress the other day in honor of
the twentieth year of its existence. I went there for one day in order
to see what Freud was like, and met also Yung of Zürich, who professed
great esteem for you, and made a very pleasant impression. I hope that
Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits, so
that we may learn what they are. They can't fail to throw light on
human nature; but I confess that he made on me personally the impression
of a man obsessed with fixed ideas. I can make nothing in my own case
with his dream theories, and obviously "symbolism" is a most dangerous
method. A newspaper report of the congress said that Freud had condemned
the American religious therapy (which has such extensive results) as
very "dangerous" because so "unscientific." Bah!
Well, it is pouring rain and so dark that I must close. Alice joins me,
dear Flournoy, in sending you our united love, in which all your
children have a share. Ever yours,
W. J.
_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._
Cambridge, _Jan._ 1, 1910.
A happy New Year to you, dear Hodgson, and may it bring a state of mind
more recognizant of truth when you see it! Your jocose salutation of my
account of truth is an epigrammatic commentary on the cross-purposes of
philosophers, considering that on the very day (yesterday) of its
reaching me, I had replied to a Belgian student writing a thesis on
pragmatism, who had asked me to name my sources of inspiration, that I
could only recognize two, Peirce, as quoted, and "S. H. H." with his
method of attacking problems, by asking what their terms are "Known-as."
Unhappy world, where grandfathers can't recognize their own
grandchildren! Let us love each other all the same, dear Hodgson, though
the grandchild be in your eyes a "prodigal." Affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
The news of James's election as _Associé étranger_ of the Académie des
Sciences Morales et Politiques, which had appeared in the Boston
"Journal" a day or two before the next letter, had, of course, reached
the American newspapers directly from Paris. The unread book by Bergson
of which Mr. Chapman was to forward his manuscript-review was obviously
"Le Rire," and Mr. Chapman's review may be found, not where the next
letter but one might lead one to seek it, but in the files of the
"Hibbert Journal."
_To John Jay Chapman._
Cambridge, _Jan._ 30, 1910.
DEAR JACK,--Invincible epistolary laziness and a conscience humbled to
the dust have conspired to retard this letter. God sent me straight to
you with my story about Bergson's cablegram--the only other person to
whom I have told it was Henry Higginson. _One_ of you must have put it
into the Boston "Journal" of the next day,--_you_ of course, to
humiliate me still the more,--so now I lie in the dust, spurning all the
decorations and honors under which the powers and principalities are
trying to bury me, and seeking to manifest the naked truth in my
uncomely form. Never again, never again! Naked came I into life, and
this world's vanities are not for me! You, dear Jack, are the only
reincarnation of Isaiah and Job, and I praise God that he has let me
live in your day. _Real_ values are known only to _you_!
As for Bergson, I think your change of the word "comic" into the word
"tragic" throughout his book is _impayable_, and I have no doubt it is
true. I have only read half of him, so don't know how he is coming out.
Meanwhile send me your own foolishness on the same subject, commend me
to your liege lady, and believe me, shamefully yours,
W. J.
_To John Jay Chapman._
Cambridge, _Feb._ 8, 1910.
DEAR JACK,--Wonderful! wonderful! Shallow, incoherent, obnoxious to its
own criticism of Chesterton and Shaw, off its balance, accidental,
whimsical, false; but with central fires of truth "blazing fuliginous
mid murkiest confusion," telling the reader nothing of the Comic except
that it's smaller than the Tragic, but _readable_ and splendid, showing
that the _man who wrote it_ is more than anything he can write!
Pray patch some kind of a finale to it and send it to the "Atlantic"!
Yours ever fondly,
W. J.
(Membre de I'Institut!)
* * * * *
The "specimen" which was enclosed with the following note has been lost.
It was perhaps a bit of adulatory verse. What is said about "Harris and
Shakespeare," as also in a later letter to Mr. T. S. Perry on the same
subject, was written apropos of a book entitled "The Man Shakespeare,
His Tragic Life-Story."[87]
_To John Jay Chapman._
Cambridge, _Feb._ 15, 1910.
DEAR JACK,--Just a word to say that it pleases me to hear you write this
about Harris and Shakespeare. H. is surely false in much that he claims;
yet 'tis the only way in which Shakespeare ought to be handled, so his
_is_ the best book. The trouble with S. was his intolerable fluency. He
improvised so easily that it kept down his level. It is hard to see how
the man that wrote his best things could possibly have let himself do
ranting bombast and complication on such a large scale elsewhere. 'T is
mighty fun to read him through in order.
I send you a specimen of the kind of thing that tends to hang upon me as
the ivy on the oak. When will the day come? Never till, like me, you
give yourself out as a poetry-hater. Thine ever,
[Illustration: signature
my new signature]
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Mar. 26, 1910_.
DEAR MILLER,--Your study of me arrives! and I have pantingly turned the
pages to find the eulogistic adjectives, and find them in such abundance
that my head swims. Glory to God that I have lived to see this day! to
have so much said about me, and to be embalmed in literature like the
great ones of the past! I didn't know I was so much, was all these
things, and yet, as I read, I see that I was (or am?), and shall boldly
assert myself when I go abroad.
To speak in all dull soberness, dear Miller, it touches me to the quick
that you should have hatched out this elaborate description of me with
such patient and loving incubation. I have only spent five minutes over
it so far, meaning to take it on the steamer, but I get the impression
that it is almost unexampled in our literature as a piece of profound
analysis of an individual mind. I'm sorry you stick so much to my
psychological phase, which I care little for, now, and never cared much.
This epistemological and metaphysical phase seems to me more original
and important, and I haven't lost hopes of converting you entirely yet.
Meanwhile, thanks! thanks! [Émile] Boutroux, who is a regular angel, has
just left our house. I've written an account of his lectures which the
"Nation" will print on the 31st. I should like you to look it over,
hasty as it is.
...I hope that all these lectures on contemporaries (What a live place
Columbia is!) will appear together in a volume. I can't easily believe
that any will compare with yours as a thorough piece of interpretative
work.
We sail on Tuesday next. My thorax has been going the wrong way badly
this winter, and I hope that Nauheim may patch it up.
Strength to your elbow! Affectionately and gratefully yours,
Wm. James.
XVII
1910
_Final Months--The End_
SEVERAL reasons combined to take James to Europe in the early spring of
1910. His heart had been giving him more discomfort. He wished to
consult a specialist in Paris from whom an acquaintance of his,
similarly afflicted, had received great benefit. He believed that
another course of Nauheim baths would be helpful. Last, and not least,
he wished to be within reach of his brother Henry, who was ill and
concerning whose condition he was much distressed. In reality it was he,
not his brother, who already stood in the shadow of Death's door.
Accordingly he sailed for England with Mrs. James, and went first to
Lamb House. Thence he crossed alone to Paris, and thence went on to
Nauheim, leaving Mrs. James to bring his brother to Nauheim to join him.
The Parisian specialist could do nothing but confirm previous diagnoses.
Too much "sitting up and talking" with friends in Paris exhausted him
seriously, and, after leaving Paris, he failed for the first time to
shake off his fatigue. The immediate effect of the Nauheim baths proved
to be very debilitating, and, again, he failed to rally and improve when
he had finished them. By July, after trying the air of Lucerne and
Geneva, only to find that the altitude caused him unbearable distress,
he despaired of any relief beyond what now looked like the incomparable
consolations of being at rest in his own home. So he turned his face
westward.
The next letters bid good-bye for the summer to two tried friends. Five
months later it seemed as if James had been at more pains to make his
adieus than he usually put himself to on account of a summer's absence.
When Mrs. James returned to the Cambridge house in the autumn, after he
had died, and had occasion to open his desk copy of the Harvard
Catalogue, she found these words jotted at the head of the Faculty List:
"A thousand regrets cover every beloved name." It grieved him that life
was too short and too full for him to see many of them as often as he
wanted to. One day before he sailed, his eye had been caught by the
familiar names and, as a throng of comradely intentions filled his
heart, he had had a moment of foreboding, and he had let his hand trace
the words that cried this needless "Forgive me!" and recorded an
incommunicable Farewell.
_To Henry L. Higginson._
Cambridge, _Mar. 28, 1910_.
BELOVED HENRY,--I had most positive hopes of driving in to see you ere
the deep engulfs us, but the press is too great here, and it remains
impossible. This is just a word to say that you are not forgotten, or
ever to be forgotten, and that (after what Mrs. Higginson said) I am
hoping you may sail yourself pretty soon, and have a refreshing time,
and cross our path. We go straight to Rye, expecting to be in Paris for
the beginning of April for a week, and then to Nauheim, whence Alice,
after seeing me safely settled, will probably return to Rye for the heft
of the summer. It would pay you to turn up both there and at Nauheim and
see the mode of life.
Hoping you'll have a good [Club] dinner Friday night, and never need any
surgery again, I am ever thine,
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
Cambridge, _March 29, 1910_.
DEAREST FANNY,--Your beautiful roses and your card arrived duly--the
roses were not deserved, not at least by W. J. I have about given up all
visits to Boston this winter, and the racket has been so incessant in
the house, owing to foreigners of late, that we haven't had the strength
to send for you. I sail on the 29th in the Megantic, first to see Henry,
who has been ill, not dangerously, but very miserably. Our Harry is with
him now. I shall then go to Paris for a certain medical experiment, and
after that report at Nauheim, where they probably will keep me for some
weeks. I hope that I may get home again next fall with my organism in
better shape, and be able to see more of my friends.
After Thursday, when the good Boutrouxs go, I shall try to arrange a
meeting with you, dear Fanny. At present we are "contemporaries," that
is all, and the one of us who becomes survivor will have regrets that we
were no more!
What a lugubrious ending! With love to your mother, and love from Alice,
believe me, dearest Fanny, most affectionately yours,
W. J.
_To T, S. Perry._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 22, 1910_.
BELOVED THOS.,--I have two letters from you--one about ... Harris on
Shakespeare. _Re_ Harris, I did think you were a bit supercilious _a
priori_, but I thought of your youth and excused you. Harris himself is
horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but
nevertheless _that's the way to write about Shakespeare_, and I am sure
that, if Shakespeare were a Piper-control, he would say that he
relished Harris far more than the pack of reverent commentators who
treat him as a classic moralist. He seems to me to have been a
professional _amuser_, in the first instance, with a productivity like
that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has
possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has
made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he
was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperæsthetic, with a playful
graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly
melancholy; but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork
in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical
ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention,
he was simply an æolian harp passively resounding to the stage's call.
Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction
against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I
know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as
soulless in this respect?--But _halte-la_! or I shall become a Harris
myself!... With love to you all, believe me ever thine,
W. J.
Read Daniel Halévy's exquisitely discreet "Vie de Nietzsche," if you
haven't already done so. Do you know G. Courtelines' "Les Marionettes de
la Vie" (Flammarion)? It beats Labiche.
_To François Pillon._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 25, 1910_.
MY DEAR PILLON,--I have been here a week, taking the baths for my
unfortunate cardiac complications, and shall probably stay six weeks
longer. I passed through Paris, where I spent a week, partly with my
friend the philosopher Strong, partly at the Fondation Thiers with the
Boutrouxs, who had been our guests in America when he lectured a few
months ago at Harvard. Every day I said: "I will get to the Pillons this
afternoon"; but every day I found it impossible to attempt your four
flights of stairs, and finally had to run away from the Boutrouxs' to
save my life from the fatigue and pectoral pain which resulted from my
seeing so many people. I have a dilatation of the aorta, which causes
anginoid pain of a bad kind whenever I make any exertion, muscular,
intellectual, or social, and I should not have thought at all of going
through Paris were it not that I wished to consult a certain Dr. Moutier
there, who is strong on arteries, but who told me that he could do
nothing for my case. I hope that these baths may arrest the disagreeable
tendency to _pejoration_ from which I have suffered in the past year.
This is why I didn't come to see the dear Pillons; a loss for which I
felt, and shall always feel, deep regret.
The sight of the new "Année Philosophique" at Boutroux's showed me how
valiant and solid you still are for literary work. I read a number of
the book reviews, but none of the articles, which seemed uncommonly
varied and interesting. Your short notice of Schinz's really _bouffon_
book showed me to my regret that even you have not yet caught the true
inwardness of my notion of Truth. You speak as if I allowed no _valeur
de connaissance proprement dite_, which is a quite false accusation.
When an idea "works" successfully among _all the other ideas_ which
relate to the object of which it is our mental substitute, associating
and comparing itself with them harmoniously, the workings are wholly
inside of the intellectual world, and the idea's value purely
intellectual, for the time, at least. This is my doctrine and
Schiller's, but it seems very hard to express it so as to get it
understood!
I hope that, in spite of the devouring years, dear Madame Pillon's state
of health may be less deplorable than it has been so long. In particular
I wish that the neuritis may have ceased. I wish! I wish! but what's the
use of wishing, against the universal law that "youth's a stuff will not
endure," and that we must simply make the best of it? Boutroux gave some
beautiful lectures at Harvard, and is the gentlest and most lovable of
characters. Believe me, dear Pillon, and dear Madame Pillon, your ever
affectionate old friend,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 29, 1910_.
...Paris was splendid, but fatiguing. Among other things I was
introduced to the Académie des Sciences Morales, of which you may likely
have heard that I am now an _associé étranger_(!!). Boutroux says that
Renan, when he took his seat after being received at the Académie
Française, said: "Qu'on est bien dans ce fauteuil" (it is nothing but a
cushioned bench with no back!). "Peut-être n'y a-t-il que cela de vrai!"
Delicious Renanesque remark!...
W. J.
* * * * *
The arrangement by which Mrs. James and Henry James were to have arrived
at Nauheim had been upset. The two, who were to come from England
together, were delayed by Henry's condition; and for a while James was
at Nauheim alone.
_To his Daughter._
_Bad-Nauheim_, _May 29, 1910_.
BELOVED PÉGUY,--The very _fust_ thing I want you to do is to look in the
drawer marked "Blood" in my tall filing case in the library closet, and
find the _date_ of a number of the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy"
there that contains an article called "Philosophic Reveries." Send this
_date_ (not the article) to the Revd. Prof. L. P. Jacks, 28 Holywell,
Oxford, if you find it, _immediately_. He will understand what to do
with it. If you don't find the article, do nothing! Jacks is notified. I
have just corrected the proofs of an article on Blood for the "Hibbert
Journal," which, I think, will make people sit up and rub their eyes at
the apparition of a new great writer of English. I want Blood himself to
get it as a surprise.
_I_ got as a surprise your finely typed copy of the rest of my MS., the
other day. I thank you for it; also for your delightful letters. The
type-writing seems to set free both your and Aleck's genius more than
the pen. (If you need a new ribbon it must be got from the agency in
Milk St. just above Devonshire--but you'll find it hard work to get it
into its place.) You seem to be leading a very handsome and domestic
life, avoiding social excitements, and hearing of them only from the
brethren. It is good sometimes to face the naked ribs of reality as it
reveals itself in homes. I face them _here_ with no one but the
blackbirds and the trees for my companions, save some rather odd
Americans at the _Mittagstisch_ and _Abendessen_, and the good smiling
_Dienstmädchen_ who brings me my breakfast in the morning.... I went to
my bath at 6 o'clock this morning, and had the Park all to the
blackbirds and myself. This was because I am expecting a certain Prof.
Goldstein from Darmstadt to come to see me this morning, and I had to
get the bath out of the way. He is a powerful young writer, and is
translating my "Pluralistic Universe." But the weather has grown so
threatening that I hope now that he won't come till next Sunday. It is a
shame to converse here and not be in the open air. I would to Heaven
_thou_ wert _mit_--I think thou wouldst enjoy it very much for a week
or more. The German civilization is _good_! Only this place would give a
very false impression of our wicked earth to a Mars-_Bewohner_ who
should descend and leave and see nothing else. Not a dark spot (save
what the patients' hearts individually conceal), no poverty, no vice,
nothing but prettiness and simplicity of life. I snip out a
concert-program (the afternoon one unusually good) which I find lying on
my table. The like is given free in the open air every day. The baths
weaken one so that I have little brain for reading, and must write
letters to all kinds of people every day. A big quarrel is on in Paris
between my would-be translators and publishers. I wish translators would
let my books alone--they are written for my own people exclusively! You
will have received Hewlett's delightful "Halfway House," sent to our
steamer by Pauline Goldmark, I think. I have been reading a charmingly
discreet life of Nietzsche by D. Halévy, and have invested in a couple
more of his (N.'s) books, but haven't yet begun to read them. I am half
through "Waffen-nieder!" a _first-rate_ anti-war novel by Baroness von
Suttner. It has been translated, and I recommend it as in many ways
instructive. How are Rebecca and Maggie [the cook and house-maid]? You
don't say how you enjoy ordering the bill of fare every day. You can't
vary it properly unless you make a _list_ and keep it. A good sweet dish
is _rothe Grütze_, a form of fine sago consolidated by currant-jelly
juice, and sauced with custard, or, I suppose, cream.
Well! no more today! Give no end of love to the good boys, and to your
Grandam, and believe me, ever thy affectionate,
W. J.
_To Henry P. Bowditch._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 4, 1910_.
DEAREST HEINRICH,--The envelope in which this letter goes was addrest in
Cambridge, Mass., and expected to go towards you with a letter in it,
long before now. But better late than never, so here goes! I came over,
as you may remember, for the double purpose of seeing my brother Henry,
who had been having a sort of nervous breakdown, and of getting my
heart, if possible, tuned up by foreign experts. I stayed upwards of a
month with Henry, and then came hither _über_ Paris, where I stayed ten
days. I have been here two and a half weeks, taking the baths, and
enjoying the feeling of the strong, calm, successful, new German
civilization all about me. Germany is _great_, and no mistake! But what
a contrast, in the well-set-up, well-groomed, smart-looking German man
of today, and his rather clumsily drest, dingy, and unworldly-looking
father of forty years ago! But something of the old _Gemüthlichkeit_
remains, the friendly manners, and the disposition to talk with you and
take you seriously and to respect the serious side of whatever comes
along. But I can write you more interestingly of physiology than I can
of sociology.... The baths may or may not arrest for a while the
downward tendency which has been so marked in the past year--but at any
rate it is a comfort to know that my sufferings have a respectable
organic basis, and are not, as so many of my friends tell me, due to
pure "nervousness." Dear Henry, you see that you are not the only pebble
on the beach, or toad in the puddle, of senile degeneration! I admit
that the form of your tragedy beats that of that of most of us; but
youth's a stuff that won't endure, in any one, and to have had it, as
you and I have had it, is a good deal gained anyhow, while to see the
daylight still under _any_ conditions is perhaps also better than
nothing, and meanwhile the good months are sure to bring the final
relief after which, "when you and I behind the veil are passed, Oh, but
the long, long time the world shall last!" etc., etc. Rather gloomy
moralizing, this, to end an affectionate family letter with; but the
circumstances seem to justify it, and I know that you won't take it
amiss.
Alice is staying with Henry, but they will both be here in a fortnight
or less. I find it pretty lonely all by myself, and the German language
doesn't run as trippingly off the tongue as it did forty years ago.
Passage back is taken for August 12th....
Well, I must stop! Pray give my love to Selma, the faithful one. Also to
Fanny, Harold, and Friedel. With Harold's engagement you are more and
more of a patriarch. Heaven keep you, dear Henry.
Believe me, ever your affectionately sympathetic old friend,
Wm. James.
_To François Pillon._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 8, 1910_.
MY DEAR PILLON,--I have your good letter of the 4th--which I finally had
to take a magnifying-glass to read (!)--and remained full of admiration
for the nervous centres which, after 80 years of work, could still guide
the fingers to execute, without slipping or trembling, that masterpiece
of microscopic calligraphy! Truly your nervous centres are "well
preserved"--the optical ones also, in spite of the cataracts and loss of
accommodation! How proud I should be if now, at the comparatively
youthful age of 68, I could flatter _myself_ with the hope of doing what
you have done, and living down victoriously twelve more devouring
enemies of years! With a fresh volume produced, to mark each year by! I
give you leave, as a garland and reward, to misinterpret my doctrine of
truth _ad libitum_ and to your heart's content, in all your future
writings. I will never think the worse of you for it.
What you say of dear Madame Pillon awakens in me very different
feelings. She has led, indeed, a life of suffering for many years, and
it seems to me a real tragedy that she should now be confined to the
house so absolutely. If only you might inhabit the country, where, on
fine days, with no stairs to mount or descend, she could sit with
flowers and trees around her! The city is not good when one is confined
to one's apartment. Pray give Madame Pillon my sincerest love--I never
think of her without affection--I am almost ashamed to accept year after
year your "Année Philosophique," and to give you so little in return for
it. I am expecting my wife and brother to arrive here from England this
afternoon, and we shall _probably_ all return together through Paris, by
the middle of July. I will then come and see you, with the wife, so
please keep the "Année" till then, and put it into my hands. I can read
nothing serious here--the baths destroy one's strength so. Whether they
will do any good to my circulatory organs remains to be seen--there is
no good effect perceptible so far. Believe me, dear old friend, with
every message of affection to you both, yours ever faithfully,
Wm. James.
* * * * *
The letters which follow concern Henry Adams's "Letter to American
Teachers," originally printed for private circulation, but recently
published, with a preface by Mr. Brooks Adams, under the title: "The
Degradation of Democratic Dogma."
_To Henry Adams._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 17, 1910_.
DEAR HENRY ADAMS,--I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths
here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any
reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your
"letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To
tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and
erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker
can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing
to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No,
sir, you can't do it, can't impress God in that way. So far as our
scientific conceptions go, it may be admitted that your Creator (and
mine) started the universe with a certain amount of "energy" latent in
it, and decreed that everything that should happen thereafter should be
a result of parts of that energy falling to lower levels; raising other
parts higher, to be sure, in so doing, but never in equivalent amount,
owing to the constant radiation of unrecoverable warmth incidental to
the process. It is customary for gentlemen to pretend to believe one
another, and until some one hits upon a newer revolutionary concept
(which may be tomorrow) all physicists must play the game by holding
religiously to the above doctrine. It involves of course the ultimate
cessation of all perceptible happening, and the end of human history.
With this general conception as _surrounding_ everything you say in your
"letter," no one can find any fault--in the present stage of scientific
conventions and fashions. But I protest against your interpretation of
some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of
the original high-level energy. If, instead of criticizing what you seem
to me to say, I express my own interpretation dogmatically, and leave
you to make the comparison, it will doubtless conduce to brevity and
economize recrimination.
To begin with, the _amount_ of cosmic energy it costs to buy a certain
distribution of fact which humanly we regard as precious, seems to me to
be an altogether secondary matter as regards the question of history and
progress. Certain arrangements of matter _on the same energy-level_ are,
from the point of view of man's appreciation, superior, while others are
inferior. Physically a dinosaur's brain may show as much intensity of
energy-exchange as a man's, but it can do infinitely fewer things,
because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur's muscles,
while the man's brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can
by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres
Cathedral, etc., and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into
channels which never would have been entered otherwise--in short, _make_
history. Therefore the man's brain and muscles are, from the point of
view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange,
small as this may be when measured in absolute physical units.
The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"--save that it sets a
terminus--for history is the course of things before that terminus, and
all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must
invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of
difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties
itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its
effects, of _which_ rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills
has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most
important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity"
factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such
rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in
getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of
human institutions--their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to
do with their energy-budget--being wholly a question of the form the
energy flows through. Though the _ultimate_ state of the universe may be
its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to
interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the
millennium--in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of
energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully _canalisés_ that a
maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In
short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I
am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't
believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik"
to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate,
but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one
question.
There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths--so I won't
write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help
doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably
won't jaw back.--It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically
unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar
energy. Yours ever truly,
Wm. James.
[Illustration: Facsimile of Post-card addressed to Henry Adams.]
[Post-card]
NAUHEIM, _June 19, 1910_.
P. S. Another illustration of my meaning: The clock of the universe is
running down, and by so doing makes the hands move. The energy absorbed
by the hands and the _mechanical_ work they do is the same day after
day, no matter how far the weights have descended from the position they
were originally wound up to. The _history_ which the hands perpetrate
has nothing to do with the _quantity_ of this work, but follows the
_significance_ of the figures which they cover on the dial. If they move
from O to XII, there is "progress," if from XII to O, there is "decay,"
etc. etc.
W. J.
_To Henry Adams._
[Post-card]
CONSTANCE, _June 26, [1910]_.
Yours of the 20th, just arriving, pleases me by its docility of spirit
and passive subjection to philosophic opinion. Never, never pretend to
an opinion of your own! that way lies every annoyance and madness! You
tempt me to offer you another illustration--that of the _hydraulic ram_
(thrown back to me in an exam, as a "hydraulic goat" by an
insufficiently intelligent student). Let this arrangement of metal,
placed in the course of a brook, symbolize the machine of human life. It
works, clap, clap, clap, day and night, so long as the brook runs _at
all_, and no matter how full the brook (which symbolizes the descending
cosmic energy) may be, it works always to the same effect, of raising so
many kilogrammeters of water. What the _value_ of this work as history
may be, depends on the uses to which the water is put in the house which
the ram serves.
W. J.
_To Benjamin Paul Blood._
CONSTANCE, _June 25, 1910_.
MY DEAR BLOOD,--About the time you will receive this, you will also be
surprised by receiving the "Hibbert Journal" for July, with an article
signed by me, but written mainly by yourself.[88] Tired of waiting for
your final synthetic pronunciamento, and fearing I might be cut off ere
it came, I took time by the forelock, and at the risk of making ducks
and drakes of your thoughts, I resolved to save at any rate some of your
rhetoric, and the result is what you see. Forgive! forgive! forgive! It
will at any rate have made you famous, for the circulation of the H. J.
is choice, as well as large (12,000 or more, I'm told), and the print
and paper the best ever yet, I seem to have lost the editor's letter, or
I would send it to you. He wrote, in accepting the article in May, "I
have already 40 articles accepted, and some of the writers threaten
lawsuits for non-publication, yet such was the exquisite refreshment
Blood's writing gave me, under the cataract of sawdust in which
editorially I live, that I have this day sent the article to the
printer. Actions speak louder than words! Blood is simply _great_, and
you are to be thanked for having dug him out. L. P. JACKS." Of course
I've used you for my own purposes, and probably misused you; but I'm
sure you will feel more pleasure than pain, and perhaps write again in
the "Hibbert" to set yourself right. You're sure of being printed,
whatever you may send. How I wish that I too could write poetry, for
pluralism is in its _Sturm und Drang_ period, and verse is the only way
to express certain things, I've just been taking the "cure" at Nauheim
for my unlucky heart--no results so far!
Sail for home again on August 12th. Address always Cambridge, Mass.;
things are forwarded. Warm regards, fellow pluralist. Yours ever,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
GENEVA, _July 9, 1910_.
DEAREST FLOURNOY,--Your two letters, of yesterday, and of July 4th sent
to Nauheim, came this morning. I am sorry that the Nauheim one was not
written earlier, since you had the trouble of writing it at all. I thank
you for all the considerateness you show--you understand entirely my
situation. My dyspnoea gets worse at an accelerated rate, and all I
care for now is to get home--doing _nothing_ on the way. It is partly a
spasmodic phenomenon I am sure, for the aeration of my tissues, judging
by the color of my lips, seems to be sufficient. I will leave Geneva now
without seeing you again--better not come, unless just to shake hands
with my wife! Through all these years I have wished I might live nearer
to you and see more of you and exchange more ideas, for we seem two men
particularly well _faits pour nous comprendre_. Particularly, now, as my
own intellectual house-keeping has seemed on the point of working out
some good results, would it have been good to work out the less unworthy
parts of it in your company. But that is impossible!--I doubt if I ever
do any more writing of a serious sort; and as I am able to look upon my
life rather lightly, I can truly say that "I don't care"--don't care in
the least pathetically or tragically, at any rate.--I hope that Ragacz
will be a success, or at any rate a wholesome way of passing the month,
and that little by little you will reach your new equilibrium. Those
dear daughters, at any rate, are something to live for--to show them
Italy should be rejuvenating. I can write no more, my very dear old
friend, but only ask you to think of me as ever lovingly yours,
W. J.
After leaving Geneva James rested at Lamb House for a few days before
going to Liverpool to embark. Walking, talking and writing had all
become impossible or painful. The short northern route to Quebec was
chosen for the home voyage. When he and Mrs. James and his brother Henry
landed there, they went straight to Chocorua. The afternoon light was
fading from the familiar hills on August 19th, when the motor brought
them to the little house, and James sank into a chair beside the fire,
and sobbed, "It's so good to get home!"
A change for the worse occurred within forty-eight hours and the true
situation became apparent. The effort by which he had kept up a certain
interest in what was going on about him during the last weeks of his
journey, and a certain semblance of strength, had spent itself. He had
been clinging to life only in order to get home.
Death occurred without pain in the early afternoon of August 26th.
His body was taken to Cambridge, where there was a funeral service in
the College Chapel. After cremation, his ashes were placed beside the
graves of his parents in the Cambridge Cemetery.
THE END
APPENDIXES
APPENDIX I
THREE CRITICISMS FOR STUDENTS
In his smaller classes, made up of advanced students, James found it
possible to comment in detail on the work of individuals. Three letters
have come into the hands of the editor, from which extracts may be taken
to illustrate such comments. They were written for persons with whom he
could communicate only by letter, and are extended enough to suggest the
_viva voce_ comments which many a student recalls, but of which there is
no record. The first is from a letter to a former pupil and refers to
work of Bertrand Russell and others which the pupil was studying at the
time. The second and third comment on manuscripts that had been prepared
as "theses" and had been submitted to James for unofficial criticism.
They exhibit him, characteristically, as encouraging the student to
formulate something more positive.
_Jan. 26, 1908._
Those propositions or supposals which [Russell, Moore and Meinong] make
the exclusive vehicles of truth are mongrel curs that have no real place
between realities on the one hand and beliefs on the other. The
negative, disjunctive and hypothetic truths which they so conveniently
express can all, perfectly well (so far as I see), be translated into
relations between beliefs and positive realities. "Propositions" are
expressly devised for quibbling between realities and beliefs. They seem
to have the objectivity of the one and the subjectivity of the other,
and he who uses them can straddle as he likes, owing to the ambiguity of
the word _that_, which is essential to them. "_That_ Cæsar existed" is
"true," sometimes means the _fact that_ be existed is real, sometimes
the _belief that_ he existed is true. You can get no honest discussion
out of such terms....
_Aug. 15, 1908._
Dear K----, ...[I have] read your thesis once through. I only finished
it yesterday. It is a big effort, hard to grasp at a single reading,
and I'm too lazy to go over it a second time in its present physically
inconvenient shape. It is obvious that parts of it have been written
rapidly and not boiled down; and my impression is that you have left
over in it too much of the complication of form in which our ideas, our
critical ideas especially, first come to us, and which has, with much
rewriting, to be straightened out. You were dealing with dialecticians
and logic-choppers, and you have met them on their own ground with a
logic-chopping even more diseased than theirs. So far as I can see, you
_have_ met them, though your own expressions are often far from lucid
(--result of haste?); but in some cases I doubt whether they themselves
would think that they were met at all. I fear a little that both Bradley
and Royce will think that your _reductiones ad absurdum_ are too fine
spun and ingenious to have real force. Too complicated, too complicated!
is the verdict of my horse-like mind on much of this thesis. Your
defense will be, of course, that it is a thesis, and as such, expected
to be barbaric. But then I point to the careless, hasty writing of much
of it. You _must_ simplify yourself, if you hope to have any influence
in print.
The writing becomes more careful and the style clearer, the moment you
tackle Russell in the 6th part. And when you come to your own dogmatic
statement of your vision of things in the last 30 pages or so, I think
the thesis splendid, prophetic in tone and _very_ felicitous, often, in
expression. This is indeed the _philosophie de l'avenir_, and a dogmatic
expression of it will be far more effective than critical demolition of
its alternatives. It will render that unnecessary if able enough. One
will simply _feel_ them to be diseased. My total impression is that the
critter K---- has a _really magnificent vision_ of the lay of the land
in philosophy,--of the land of bondage, as well as of that of
promise,--but that he has a tremendous lot of work to do yet in the way
of getting himself into straight and effective literary shape. He has
_elements_ of extraordinary literary power, but they are buried in much
sand and shingle....
_May. 26, 1900._
Dear Miss S----, I am a caitiff! I have left your essay on my poor self
unanswered.... It is a great compliment to me to be taken so
philologically and importantly; and I must say that from the technical
point of view you may be proud of your production. I like greatly the
objective and dispassionate key in which you keep everything, and the
number of subdivisions and articulations which you make gives me
vertiginous admiration. Nevertheless, the tragic fact remains that I
don't feel wounded at all by all that output of ability, and for reasons
which I think I can set down briefly enough. It all comes, in my eyes,
from too much philological method--as a Ph.D. thesis your essay is
supreme, but why don't you go farther? You take utterances of mine
written at different dates, for different audiences belonging to
different universes of discourse, and string them together as the
abstract elements of a total philosophy which you then show to be
inwardly incoherent. This is splendid philology, but is it live
criticism of anyone's _Weltanschauung_? Your use of the method only
strengthens the impression I have got from reading criticisms of my
"pragmatic" account of "truth," that the whole Ph.D. industry of
building up an author's meaning out of separate texts leads nowhere,
unless you have first grasped his centre of vision, by an act of
imagination. That, it seems to me, you lack in my case.
For instance: [Seven examples are next dealt with in two and a half
pages of type-writing. These pages are omitted.]
...I have been unpardonably long; and if you were a man, I should
assuredly not expect to influence you a jot by what I write. Being a
woman, there may be yet a gleam of hope!--which may serve as the excuse
for my prolixity. (It is not for the likes of _you_, however, to hurl
accusations of prolixity!) Now if I may presume to give a word of advice
to one so much more accomplished than myself in dialectic technique, may
I urge, since you have shown what a superb mistress you are in that
difficult art of discriminating abstractions and opposing them to each
other one by one, since in short there is no university extant that
wouldn't give you its _summa cum laude_,--I should certainly so reward
your thesis at Harvard,--may I urge, I say, that you should now turn
your back upon that academic sort of artificiality altogether, and
devote your great talents to the study of reality in its concreteness?
In other words, do some _positive_ work at the problem of what truth
signifies, substitute a definitive alternative for the humanism which I
present, as the latter's substitute. Not by proving their inward
incoherence does one refute philosophies--every human being is
incoherent--but only by superseding them by other philosophies more
satisfactory. Your wonderful technical skill ought to serve you in good
stead if you would exchange the philological kind of criticism for
constructive work. I fear however that you won't--the iron may have
bitten too deeply into your soul!!
Have you seen Knox's paper on pragmatism in the "Quarterly Review" for
April--perhaps the deepest-cutting thing yet written on the pragmatist
side? On the other side read Bertrand Russell's paper in the "Edinburgh
Review" just out. A thing after your own heart, but ruined in my eyes by
the same kind of vicious abstractionism which your thesis shows. It is
amusing to see the critics of the will to believe furnish such exquisite
instances of it in their own persons. _E.g._, Russell's own splendid
atheistic-titanic confession of faith in that volume of essays on
"Ideals of Science and of Faith" edited by one Hand. X----, whom you
quote, has recently worked himself up to the pass of being ordained in
the Episcopal church.... I justify them both; for only by such
experiments on the part of individuals will social man gain the evidence
required. They meanwhile seem to think that the only "true" position to
hold is that everything not imposed upon a will-less and non-coöperant
intellect must count as false--a preposterous principle which no human
being follows in real life.
Well! There! that is all! But, dear Madam, I should like to know where
you come from, who you are, what your present "situation" is, etc.,
etc.--It is natural to have some personal curiosity about a lady who has
taken such an extraordinary amount of pains for me!
Believe me, dear Miss S----, with renewed apologies for the extreme
tardiness of this acknowledgment, yours with mingled admiration and
abhorrence,
WM. JAMES.
APPENDIX II
BOOKS BY WILLIAM JAMES
The following chronological list includes books only, but it gives the
essays and chapters contained in each.
Professor R. B. Perry's "Bibliography" (see below) lists a great number
of contributions to periodicals, which have never been reprinted, and
includes notes indicative of the matter of each.
(No attempt has been made to compile a list of references to literature
about William James, but the following may be mentioned as easily
obtainable: _William James_, by ÉMILE BOUTROUX. Paris, 1911.
Translation: Longmans, Green & Co., New York and London, 1912. _La
Philosophie de William James_, by THEODORE FLOURNOY. St. Blaise, 1911.
Translation: _The Philosophy of William James._ Henry Holt & Co., New
York, 1917.)
_Literary Remains of Henry James, Sr._, with an Introduction by
WILLIAM JAMES. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884.
_The Principles of Psychology._ New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London:
Macmillan & Co., 1890.
_Volume I._ Scope of Psychology--Functions of the Brain--Conditions
of Brain Activity--Habit--The Automaton Theory--The Mind-Stuff
Theory--Methods and Snares of Psychology--Relations of Minds to
Other Things--The Stream of Thought--The Consciousness of
Self--Attention--Conception--Discrimination and
Comparison--Association--The Perception of Time--Memory.
_Volume II._ Sensation--Imagination--Perception of Things--The
Perception of Space--The Perception of Reality--Reasoning--The
Production of Movement--Instinct--The
Emotions--Will--Hypnotism--Necessary Truth and the Effects of
Experience.
_A Text-Book of Psychology._ Briefer Course. New York: Henry Holt &
Co.; London: Macmillan & Co., 1892.
Introductory--Sensation--Sight--Hearing--Touch--Sensations of
Motion--Structure of the Brain--Functions of the Brain--Some
General Conditions of Neural Activity--Habit--Stream of
Consciousness--The
Self--Attention--Conception--Discrimination--Association--Sense of
Time--Memory--Imagination--Perception--The Perception of
Space--Reasoning--Consciousness and
Movement--Emotion--Instinct--Will--Psychology and Philosophy.
_The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy._ New
York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897.
The Will to Believe--Is Life Worth Living?--The Sentiment of
Rationality--Reflex Action and Theism--The Dilemma of
Determinism--The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life--Great Men
and their Environment--The Importance of Individuals--On Some
Hegelisms--What Psychical Research has Accomplished.
_Human Immortality, Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine._
London: Constable & Co., also Dent & Sons; Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., 1898.
_The Same._ A New Edition with Preface in Reply to His Critics.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.
_Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life's
Ideals._ New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1899.
Psychology and the Teaching Art--The Stream of Consciousness--The
Child as a Behaving Organism--Education and Behavior--The Necessity
of Reactions--Native and Acquired Reactions--What the Native
Reactions Are--The Laws of Habit--Association of
Ideas--Interest--Attention--Memory--Acquisition of
Ideas--Apperception--The Will.
Talks to Students: The Gospel of Relaxation--On a Certain Blindness
in Human Beings--What Makes Life Significant?
_The Varieties of Religious Experience._ A Study in Human Nature.
The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, Edinburgh, 1901-1902. New
York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902.
Religion and Neurology--Circumscription of the Topic--The Reality
of the Unseen--The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness--The Sick
Soul--The Divided Self, and the Process of its
Unification--Conversion--Saintliness--The Value of
Saintliness--Mysticism--Philosophy--Other
Characteristics--Conclusions--Postscript.
_Pragmatism._ A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York
and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907.
The Present Dilemma in Philosophy--What Pragmatism Means--Some
Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered--The One and the
Many--Pragmatism and Common Sense--Pragmatism's Conception of
Truth--Pragmatism and Humanism--Pragmatism and Religion.
_A Pluralistic Universe._ Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College.
New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909.
The Types of Philosophic Thinking--Monistic Idealism--Hegel and his
Method--Concerning Fechner--Compounding of Consciousness--Bergson
and his Critique of Intellectualism--The Continuity of
Experience--Conclusions---- Appendixes: _A._ The Thing and its
Relations. _B._ The Experience of Activity. _C._ On the Notion of
Reality as Changing.
_The Meaning of Truth._ A Sequel to _Pragmatism_. New York and
London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909.
The Function of Cognition--The Tigers in India--Humanism and
Truth--The Relation between Knower and Known--The Essence of
Humanism--A Word More about Truth--Professor Pratt on Truth--The
Pragmatist Account of Truth and its Misunderstanders--The Meaning
of the Word Truth--The Existence of Julius Cæsar--The Absolute and
the Strenuous Life--Hébert on Pragmatism--Abstractionism and
"Relativismus"--Two English Critics--A Dialogue.
_Some Problems of Philosophy._ A Beginning of an Introduction to
Philosophy. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911.
Philosophy and its Critics--The Problems of Metaphysics--The
Problem of Being--Percept and Concept--The One and the Many--The
Problem of Novelty--Novelty and the Infinite--Novelty and
Causation---- Appendix: Faith and the Right to Believe.
_Memories and Studies._ New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1911.
Louis Agassiz--Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord--Robert
Gould Shaw--Francis Boott--Thomas Davidson--Herbert Spencer's
Autobiography--Frederick Myers's Services to Psychology--Final
Impressions of a Psychical Researcher--On Some Mental Effects of
the Earthquake--The Energies of Men--The Moral Equivalent of
War--Remarks at the Peace Banquet--The Social Value of the
College-bred--The Ph.D. Octopus--The True Harvard--Stanford's Ideal
Destiny--A Pluralistic Mystic (B. P. Blood).
_Essays in Radical Empiricism._ Edited by RALPH BARTON PERRY. New
York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912.
Introduction--Does Consciousness Exist?--A World of Pure
Experience--The Thing and its Relations--How Two Minds can Know One
Thing--The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure
Experience--The Experience of Activity--The Essence of
Humanism--_La Notion de Conscience_--Is Radical Empiricism
Solipsistic?--Mr. Pitkin's Refutation of Radical
Empiricism--Humanism and Truth Once More--Absolutism and
Empiricism.
_Collected Essays and Reviews._ Edited by _Ralph Barton Perry_. New
York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920.
Review of E. Sargent's _Planchette_ (1869)--Review of G. H. Lewes's
_Problems of Life and Mind_ (1875)--Review entitled "German
Pessimism" (1875)--Chauncey Wright (1875)--Review of "Bain and
Renouvier" (1876)--Review of Renan's _Dialogues_ (1876)--Review of
G. H. Lewes's _Physical Basis of Mind_ (1877)--Remarks on Spencer's
Definition of Mind as Correspondence (1878)--Quelques
Considérations sur la Méthode Subjective (1878)--The Sentiment of
Rationality (1879)--Review (unsigned) of W. K. Clifford's _Lectures
and Essays_ (1879)--Review of Herbert Spencer's _Data of Ethics_
(1879)--The Feeling of Effort (1880)--The Sense of Dizziness in
Deaf Mutes (1882)--What is an Emotion? (1884)--Review of Royce's
_The Religious Aspect of Philosophy_ (1885)--The Consciousness of
Lost Limbs (1887)--Réponse de W. James aux Remarques de M.
Renouvier sur sa théorie de la volonté (1888)--The Psychological
Theory of Extension (1889)--A Plea for Psychology as a Natural
Science (1892)--The Original Datum of Space Consciousness
(1893)--Mr. Bradley on Immediate Resemblance (1893)--Immediate
Resemblance--Review of G. T. Ladd's _Psychology_ (1894)--The
Physical Basis of Emotion (1894)--The Knowing of Things Together
(1895)--Review of W. Hirsch's _Genie und Entartung_
(1895)--Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results
(1898)--Review of R. Hodgson's _A Further Record of Observations of
Certain Phenomena of Trance_ (1898)--Review of Sturt's _Personal
Idealism_ (1903)--The Chicago School (1904)--Review of F. C. S.
Schiller's _Humanism_ (1904)--Laura Bridgman (1904)--G. Papini and
the Pragmatist Movement in Italy (1906)--The Mad Absolute
(1906)--Controversy about Truth with John E. Russell (1907)--Report
on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson Control; Conclusion (1909)--Bradley or
Bergson? (1910)--A Suggestion about Mysticism (1910).
_A List of the Published Writings of William James_, with notes,
and an index; by RALPH BARTON PERRY. New York and London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1920.
INDEX
THROUGHOUT the index the initial =J.= stands for William James. In the
list of references to his own writings, arranged alphabetically at the
end of the entries under his name, the titles of separate papers are set
in roman and quoted, those of volumes in italics.
The words "See Contents" under a name indicate that letters addressed to
the person in question are to be sought in the Table of Contents, where
all letters are listed.
Abauzit, F., =1=, 145, =2=, 185.
Abbot, F. E., _Scientific Theism_, =1=, 247.
Absolute, Philosophy of the, =1=, 238.
Absolute Unity, =1=, 231.
Académie Française, =2=, 338.
Académie des Sciences Morales, et Politiques, =J.= a corresponding
member of, =2=, 75;
=J.= an _associé étranger_ of, 328, 319, 338.
Adams, Brooks, =2=, 343.
Adams, Henry, _Letter to American Teachers_, =2=, 343 _ff._;
mentioned, 10. _See Contents._
Adirondack range, =1=, 194, 195.
Adirondacks. _See_ Keene Valley.
Adler, Waldo, =2=, 75, 76, 163.
Æsthetics, Study of, and Art, =2=, 87.
Agassiz, Alexander, =1=, 31.
Agassiz, Louis, =J.= joins his Brazilian expedition, =1=, 54 _ff._,
=J.= quoted on, 55;
quoted, on =J.=, 56;
on the Brazilian expedition, 56, 57, 59, 61, 67, 68, 69;
described by =J.=, 65, 66;
centenary of, =2=, 287, 288;
mentioned, =1=, 34, 35, 37, 4=2=, 47, 48, 72, =2=, 2.
Agassiz, Mrs. Louis, her 80th birthday, =2=, 180 and _n._, 181;
mentioned, =1=, 60, 65, 67. _See Contents_.
Aguinaldo, Emilio, =2=, 148.
Alcott, A. Bronson, =1=, 18 _n._
Allen, John A., =1=, 74.
Amalfi, Sorrento to, =2=, 22=1=, 222.
Amazon, the, Agassiz's expedition to. _See_ Brazil.
America, general aspect of the country, =1=, 346, 347 and _n._
And _see_ United States.
American Philosophical Association, =2=, 163, 164, 300.
Americans, in Germany, =1=, 87.
Angell, James R., =1=, 345, =2=, 14.
Anglican Church, =2=, 305.
Anglicanism and Romanism, =2=, 305.
Anglophobia in U. S. revealed by Venezuela incident, =2=, 27, 31, 32.
Annunzio, Gabriele d', =2=, 63.
"Anti-pragmatisme," =2=, 319.
Aristotle, =1=, 283.
_Aristotelian Society Proceedings_, =2=, 207.
Arnim, Gisela von. _See_ Grimm, Mrs. Herman.
Ashburner, Anne, =1=, 179, 181, 315.
Ashburner, Grace, =1=, 181, 315. _See Contents_.
Ashfield, annual dinner at, =2=, 199.
Athens, =2=, 224, 225. And _see_ Parthenon, the.
Atkinson, Charles, =1=, 35.
Ausable Lakes, =1=, 194.
Austria, political conditions in (1867), =1=, 95.
Avenarius, =2=, 301.
Baginsky, Dr., =1=, 214.
Bain, Alexander, =1=, 143, 164.
Bakewell, Charles M., =2=, 14, 81, 85, 120, 248.
Baldwin, James M., =2=, 20.
Baldwin, William, =1=, 337.
Balfour, A. J., _Foundations of Belief_, =2=, 20.
Balzac, Honoré de, =1=, 106, =2=, 265.
Bancroft, George, =1=, 107, 109.
Bancroft, Mrs. George, =1=, 135.
Bancroft, John C., =1=, 70.
Baring Bros., =1=, 73.
Barber, Catherine, marries William James I, =1=, 4;
her ancestry, 4 and _n._
And _see_ James, Mrs. Catherine (Barber).
Barber, Francis, =1=, 5.
Barber, Jannet, =1=, 4 _n._
Barber, John, =J.='s great-grandfather, in the Revolutionary army,
=1=, 4 and _n._;
H. James, Senior, on, 5.
Barber, Mrs. John, =1=, 5.
Barber, Patrick, =1=, 4 _n._
Barber family, the, =1=, 4, 5.
Bashkirtseff, Marie, Diary of, =1=, 307, =2=, 148.
Bastien-Lepage, Jules, =1=, 210 and _n._
"Bay." _See_ Emmet, Ellen.
Bayard, Thomas F., =2=, 27 _n._
Beers, Clifford W., _A Mind that Found Itself_, =2=, 273, 274 and _n._
_See Contents_.
Beethoven, Ludwig von, _Fidelio_, =1=, 112.
Belgium, philosophers in, =1=, 216.
Benn, A. W., =1=, 333, 334.
Berenson, Bernhard, =2=, 138.
Bergson, Henri, _Matière et Mémoire_, =2=, 178, 179;
his system, 179;
=J.='s enthusiasm for, 179, 180 _n._;
_L'Evolution Créatrice_, 290 _ff._;
_Le Rire_, 329;
mentioned, 17=2=, 226, 257, 314, 315.
_See Contents._
Berkeley, Sir W., _Principles_, =2=, 179.
Berlin, =1=, 100, 105, 106, 11=2=, 122.
Berlin, University of, =1=, 118, 120, 121.
Bernard, Claude, =1=, 72, 156.
Bhagavat-Gita, the, =2=, 238.
Bible, the, and orthodox theology, =2=, 196.
Bielshowski, A., _Life of Goethe_, =2=, 262.
Bigelow, Henry J., =1=, 72.
Bigelow, W., Sturgis, =2=, 10.
Birukoff, _Life of Tolstoy_, =2=, 262.
Black, W., _Strange Adventures of a Phaeton_, =1=, 173.
Blood, Benjamin Paul, _The Flaw in Supremacy_, =2=, 39;
J.'s article on, in _Hibbert Journal_, 39 _n._, 347, 348;
his _Anæsthetic Revolution_ reviewed by =J.=, 40 and _n._;
his strictures on =J.='s English, 59;
mentioned, 22, 338, 339.
_See Contents._
Bôcher, Ferdinand, =1=, 337.
Boer War, the, =2=, 118, 140.
Bonn-am-Rhein, =1=, 20.
Boott, Elizabeth (Mrs. Frank Duveneck), =1=, 153, 155.
Boott, Francis, J.'s commemorative address on, =1=, 153;
mentioned, 155, 341 _n._, =2=, 191.
_See Contents._
Bornemann, Fraülein, =1=, 116, 135.
Bosanquet, B., quoted, =2=, 126.
Boston _Journal_, =2=, 329.
Boston _Transcript_, J.'s letter to, on Medical License bill, =2=, 68-70;
72 and _n._, 124, 125.
Boulogne, Collège de, =1=, 20.
Bourget, Paul, _Idylle Tragique_, =2=, 37;
and Tolstoy, 37, 38;
mentioned, =1=, 348.
Bourget, Mme. Paul, =1=, 348.
Bourkhardt, James, =1=, 64, 70.
Bourne, Ansel, =1=, 294.
Boutroux, Émile, =2=, 314, 33=2=, 335, 337, 338.
Bowditch, Henry I., =1=, 124.
Bowditch, Henry P., =1=, 7=1=, 10=2=, 138, 139, 149, 167, 169, 195.
_See Contents._
Bowen, Francis, =1=, 53.
Boyd, Harriet A. (Mrs. C. H. Hawes), =2=, 223, 224.
Bradley, Francis H., _Logic_, =1=, 258;
mentioned, =2=, 142, 208, 216, 271, 272, 281, 282.
Brazil, Agassiz's expedition to, =1=, 54 _ff._;
letters written by =J.=, 56-70;
recalled, on Mrs. Agassiz's 80th birthday, =2=, 181.
Brazilians, the, =1=, 59, 66.
Brighton (England) Aquarium, =1=, 287.
British Guiana, =2=, 26.
British intellectuality, =1=, 270.
Brown-Séquard, Charles E., =1=, 71.
Browning, Robert, "A Grammarian's Funeral," =1=, 129, 130;
mentioned, =2=, 123.
Bruno, Giordano, inscription on statue of, =2=, 139,
Bryce, James, =1=, 303, 345, =2=, 65, 298, 299.
Bryce, Mrs. James, =2=, 298, 299.
Bryn Mawr College, =2=, 120, 121.
Bull, Mrs. Ole, =2=, 144.
Bunch, a dog, =1=, 183.
Burkhardt, Jacob, _Renaissance in Italy_, =1=, 176.
Busse, _Leib und Seele, Geist and Körper_, =2=, 237 and _n._
Butler, Joseph, _Analogy_, =1=, 189.
Butler, Samuel, =1=, 283.
Cabot, J. Elliot, =1=, 204.
Caird, Edward, =1=, 205, 305.
California, impressions of, =2=, 82.
California, Northern, =2=, 80.
California, University of, =2=, 5.
California Champagne, Gift of, =1=, 291.
Canadian Pacific Ry., =2=, 80.
Carlyle, "Jenny," =2=, 192.
Carlyle, Thomas, and H. James, Senior, compared, =1=, 241;
mentioned, 220.
Carnegie, Andrew, =2=, 18.
Carpenter, William B., =1=, 143.
Carqueiranne, Château de, =2=, 114.
Carrington, Hereward, =2=, 327.
Cams, Karl G., =1=, 96.
Casey, Silas, =1=, 155.
Castle Malwood, =2=, 160.
Catholic Church, =J.='s attitude toward, =1=, 296, 297.
Catholics, "concrete," differentiated from their church, =1=, 297.
Cattell, J. M., quoted, =1=, 300;
mentioned, =2=, 32.
Census of Hallucinations in America, conducted by =J.=, =1=, 228,
229, =2=, 50.
Chamberlain, Joseph, =1=, 303.
Chambers, Dr., _Clinical Lectures_, =1=, 150.
Chanzy, Antoine E. A., =1=, 160.
Chapman, John J., _Practical Agitation_, =2=, 124;
_Political Nursery_, 128;
mentioned, 125, 329.
_See Contents._
Chapman, Mrs. John J., =2=, 256.
Charmes, Francis, =2=, 320.
Chatrian, L. G. C. A. _See_ Erckmann-Chatrian.
Chautauqua, =J.='s lectures at, and impressions of, =2=, 40 _ff._
Chesterton, Gilbert K., _Heretics_, =2=, 241, 260;
mentioned, 257 and =n.=, 330.
Chicago, anarchist riot in, and English newspapers, =1=, 252.
Chicago University, School of Thought, =2=, 201, 202.
Child, Francis J., death of, =2=, 52;
mentioned, =1=, 51, 169, 195, 291, 315 and _n._, 317.
_See Contents._
Child, Mrs. F. J., =1=, 51, 197, =2=, 52.
Chocorua, =J.='s summer home at, =1=, 267, 268;
life at, 271, 272;
=J.='s life ends at, =2=, 350;
=1=, 261, 323.
Christian Scientists, and the Medical License bill, =2=, 68, 69.
Christian Theology, position with reference to, =2=, 213, 214.
Clairvoyance. _See_ Psychic phenomena.
Claparède, Edward, =2=, 226, 227, 323.
Clark University, =2=, 327.
Clarke, Joseph Thatcher, =2=, 130.
Clemens, Samuel L. _See_ Twain, Mark.
Cleveland, Grover, his Venezuela Message, and its reaction on
=J.=, =2=, 26 _ff._, 31, 32, 33, =2=, 285.
Clifford, W. K., =2=, 218.
Club, the, =2=, 9, 10.
Colby, F. M., =2=, 264.
Collier, Robert J. F., =2=, 264.
Colorado Springs, summer school at, =2=, 24.
Columbia Faculty Club, =J.='s talks at, =2=, 265 and _n._
Columbia University, =2=, 332.
Columbus, Christopher, and Dr. Bowditch, =1=, 124.
Common sense, =2=, 198.
Concord, Mass., Emerson centenary at, =2=, 194.
Concord Summer School of Philosophy, =1=, 230, 255.
Congress of the U. S., and the Spanish War, =2=, 73, 74.
Coniston, Ruskin Museum at, =2=, 306.
Continent, the, and England, contrasts between, =2=, 152, 305.
Conversion, =2=, 57.
Correggio, Antonio de, his Shepherds' Adoration, =1=, 90;
and Rafael, 90.
Corruption, in Europe and America, =2=, 101.
Courtelines, G., _Les Marionettes de la Vie_, =2=, 336.
Courtier, M., =2=, 327.
Cousin, Victor, =1=, 117.
Crafts, James W., =2=, 10.
Cranch, Christopher P., =1=, 131.
_Critique Philosophique_, =1=, 188, 207.
Crothers, Samuel M., =2=, 262.
Cuba, and the Spanish War, =2=, 73, 74.
Danriac, Lionel, =2=, 45, 203.
Dante Alighieri, =1=, 331.
Darwin, Charles R., =1=, 225.
Darwin, Mrs. W. E. (Sara Sedgwick), =1=, 76, 179, =2=, 152.
Darwin, William E., =2=, 152.
Darwin, William Leonard, =2=, 276.
Daudet, Alphonse, =2=, 168.
Davidson. Thomas, =J.='s essay on, =2=, 107 _n._;
=J.= lectures at his summer school, 197, 199;
mentioned, =1=, 192, 202, 204, 249, 255, =2=, 156.
_See Contents._
Davis, Jefferson, =1=, 66, 67.
Death, reflections concerning, =2=, 154.
Delboeuf, J., =1=, 216, 217.
Demoniacal possession, =2=, 56, 57.
Derby, Richard, =1=, 122.
Descartes, René C., =1=, 188, =2=, 13.
Determinism, =1=, 245, 246.
Dewey, John, _Beliefs and Realities_, =2=, 245, 246;
mentioned, 202, 257.
_See Contents._
Dexter, Newton, =1=, 68, 73.
Dibblee, Anita, =2=, 82, 84.
Dibblee, B. H., =2=, 82.
Dibblee, Mrs., =2=, 82, 84.
Dickinson, G. Lowes, _Justice and Liberty_, =2=, 317, 318.
Diderot, Denis, _OEuvres Choisis_, =1=, 106, 107;
mentioned, 142.
Dilthey, W., =1=, 109, 110, 111.
Divonne, =1=, 137, 138.
Dixwell, Epes S., =1=, 124.
Dixwell, Fanny, =1=, 76 and _n._
And _see_ Holmes, Mrs. Fanny Dixwell.
Dooley, Mr. _See_ Dunne, Finley P.
Dorr, George B., =2=, 255.
Dorrs, the, =2=, 63.
Dresden, =1=, 86, 9=2=, 93, 104.
Dresden Gallery, =1=, 90.
Dreyfus Case, the, =2=, 89, 97 _ff._, 102.
Driesch, Hans, _Gifford Lectures_, =2=, 323.
Driver, Dr., =2=, 118.
Du Bois, W. E. B., _The Souls of Black Folk_, =2=, 196 and _n._
Du Bois-Raymond, Emil, =1=, 121.
Dudevant, Mme. Aurore. _See_ Sand, George.
Du Maurier, George, _Peter Ibbetson_, =1=, 318.
Dunne, Finley P., =2=, 94, 264.
Durham, =2=, 306, 307.
Duveneck, Frank, =1=, 153, 337 and _n._, 341.
Duveneck, Mrs. Frank. _See_ Boott, Elizabeth.
Dwight, Thomas, =1=, 97, 98, 122, 124, 165, 166, 170.
Edinburgh, praise of, =2=, 146, 147, 150;
social amenities in, 147, 148.
Education, importance of, =1=, 119.
Eliot, Charles W., quoted, on =J.= in Scientific School, =1=, 31, 32 and _n._;
on J. Wyman, 47, 48;
on courses given by =J.=, =2=, 4 _n._;
mentioned, =1=, 35, 165, 166, 202, 262, =2=, 3, 15, 86, 137, 266.
Eliot, George, _Daniel Deronda_, =1=, 185.
Elliot, Gertrude, =2=, 263.
Elliot, John W., =2=, 129.
Elliot, Mrs. John W. (Mary Morse), =1=, 197, 199, =2=, 129.
Ellis, Rufus, =1=, 192.
Emerson, Edward W., on H. James, Senior, =1=, 17, 18 and _n._;
mentioned, 33.
Emerson, Mary Moody, and H. James, Senior, =1=, 18 _n._
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, letters of H. James, Senior, to, quoted, =1=, 11;
centenary of, =2=, 187, 190, 193, 194 (=J.='s address at);
"the divine," 190, 191;
his devotion to truth, 190;
_Representative Men_, 192, 193;
and Santayana, 234, 235;
mentioned, =1=, 9, 18 _n._, 125, =2=, 23, 196, 197.
Emmet, Ellen, =1=, 316, =2=, 61, 82, 83, 84.
_See Contents._
Emmet, Mrs. Temple (Ellen Temple), =2=, 64.
Emmet, Rosina H., =2=, 38, 61, 62, 64.
_See Contents._
Emmet, Temple, =2=, 61.
Empiricism, =1=, 152. And _see_ Radical Empiricism.
England, in 1871, =1=, 161;
gardens in, 288;
impressions of, in 1901, =2=, 152;
contrasted with Continental countries, 152, 305;
and the U. S., 304, 305;
changes in, 307;
high state of civilization in, 307, 308.
English, in Germany, =1=, 87.
English language, the teaching of the, =1=, 341.
English newspapers, and the anarchist riot in Chicago, =1=, 252;
attitude of, on Venezuela Message, =2=, 33;
mentioned, 125, 126.
English people, one aspect of the greatness of, =1=, 288.
English social and political system, =1=, 232, 233.
Erb, Dr., =2=, 128.
Erckmann (Émile)-Chatrian (L. G. C. A.), _L'Ami Fritz_, =1=, 101;
_Les Confessions d'un Joueur de Clarinette_, 101;
_Histoire d'un Sous-Maître_, 162;
mentioned, 106, 136.
Erdmann, Johann E., =1=, 345.
Erie Canal, the, =1=, 3.
_Essays Philosophical and Philological in Honor of William
James_, =2=, 309, 310.
Esterhazy M. (Dreyfus case), =2=, 98, 100.
Evans, Mrs. Glendower. _See Contents._
Evans, Mary Anne. _See_ Eliot, George.
Everett, Charles Carroll, =1=, 202, =2=, 156.
Everett, William, =1=, 51.
Experience, The philosophy of, =2=, 184, 185, 187.
Faidherbe, Louis L. C., =1=, 160.
Fairchild, Sally, =2=, 205.
Faith-curers, and the Medical License bill, =2=, 68, 69, 70, 71.
Farlow, William G., =1=, 71.
Fechner, Gustav T., _Zend-Avesta_, =2=, 300, 309;
mentioned, =1=, 160, =2=, 269, 318.
Fichte, Johann G., =1=, 141, =2=, 293.
Field, Kate, _Washington_, =1=, 308.
_Figaro_, =2=, 97, 99.
Fischer, Kuno, Essay on Lessing's _Nathan der Weise_, =1=, 94;
_Hegel's Leben, Werke und Lehre_, =2=, 134, 135, 138.
Fiske, John, death of, =2=, 156, 157;
_Cosmic Philosophy_, =2=, 233;
mentioned, =1=, 347, =2=, 10.
Fitz, Reginald H., =1=, 162.
Flaubert, Gustave, _Madame Bovary_, =2=, 291;
mentioned, =1=, 182.
Fletcher, Horace, =2=, 254.
Flint, Austin, =1=, 167.
Florence, Boboli Garden, =1=, 177; 180, 181, 328 _ff._, 340, 342.
Flournoy, Theodore, _William James_, =1=, 145 and _n._;
beginnings of =J.='s friendship with, 320;
_Métaphysique et Psychologie_, =2=, 25;
on religious psychology, 185;
reviews Myers's _Human Personality_, 185;
lectures on pragmatism, 267;
mentioned, 129, 172, 180 _n._, 227, 228, 315.
His children referred to:
Alice, =2=, 129, 241, 242;
Ariane-Dorothée, 129;
Henri, 186, 187;
Marguerite, 129.
_See Contents._
Flournoy, Mme. Theodore, =1=, 325, 326, =2=, 23, 25, 46,
48, 53, 55, 129, 187, 310, 313.
Foote, Henry W., =1=, 111, 112, 113, 153.
Forbes, W. Cameron, =2=, 297. _See Contents._
Forbes-Robertson, J., =2=, 263.
Fouillée, Alfred, Renouvier's articles on, =1=, 231;
mentioned, 324.
France, and Prussia (1867), =1=, 95;
religious and revolutionary parties in, 161, 162;
influence of Catholic education in, 162;
and the Dreyfus case, =2=, 89;
decadence of, 105, 106.
France, Anatole, =2=, 63.
Francis of Assisi, St., =2=, 142.
Francis Joseph, Emperor, =1=, 88.
Franco-Prussian War, =J.='s views on, =1=, 159, 160, 161.
Frazer, J. G., =2=, 139.
Free will, influence on =J.= of Renouvier's writings on, =1=, 147, 164,
165, 169;
and determinism, 186;
S. H, Hodgson's paper on, 244, 245.
French language, =1=, 341.
Freud, Sigmund, =2=, 327, 328.
Galileo, =2=, 1 =n.=
Galileo anniversary at Padua, =1=, 333.
Gardiner, H. N., =2=, 163. _See Contents._
Gardner, Mrs. John L., =2=, 205.
Garibaldi, statue of, =2=, 139.
Gautier, Théophile, =1=, 106.
Geneva, "Academy" of, =1=, 20, =2=, 187;
Museum at, 21.
German art, =1=, 105.
German character, =1=, 126.
German education, =1=, 121.
German essayists, discussed, =1=, 94, 95.
German genius, its massiveness, =2=, 176.
German language, =J.='s progress in learning, =1=, 87, 101, 108, 116, 121;
mentioned, 87, 88, 89, 92, 341.
German motto, the, =1=, 213.
German universities, and Harvard, =1=, 217, 218 and _n._
Germans, =J.='s opinion of, =1=, 100, 101, 121, 122, =2=, 104.
Germany, =J.='s impressions of, =1=, 86, 105;
peasant-women in, 211;
philosophers in, 216, 217;
in 1910, =2=, 341.
Gibbens, Alice H., early life, =1=, 192;
marries =J.=, 192. And _see_ James, Mrs. William.
Gibbens, Mrs. E. P., =1=, 192, 222, 247, 248, 260, 339,
=2=, 118. _See Contents._
Gibbens, Margaret, =1=, 248, 260, 279, 28=1=, 318. And
_see_ Gregor, Mrs. Leigh R.
_See Contents._
Gibbens, Mary, marries W. M. Salter, =1=, 248.
Gifford Lectures. _See_ this title under James, William, Works of.
Gilman, Daniel Coit, =1=, 202, 203.
Gizycki, Herr von, =1=, 214, 248.
Gladstone, William E., =2=, 31.
Glenmore, Davidson's summer school of philosophy at, =2=, 197 _n._, 199.
God, conceptions of, =2=, 211, 213, 269, 270.
Goddard, George A., =1=, 274.
Godkin, E. L., Life of, quoted, =1=, 17, 115 _n._;
=J.='s opinion of, 284, 285;
_Comments and Reflections_, =2=, 30;
illness of, 160, 161;
his death, 181;
proposed memorial to, 18=1=, 182;
his home life and his "life against the world," 182;
mentioned, =1=, 118, 239, =2=, 167.
_See Contents._
Godkin, Mrs. E. L., =1=, 240, 241, =2=, 30, 167.
Godkin, Lawrence, =2=, 30.
Goethe, Johann W. von, quoted, =1=, 54;
_Italienische Reise_, 91;
Vischer on Faust, 94;
_Gedichte_, =2=, 176;
mentioned, =1=, 104, 107.
Goldmark, Charles, =2=, 75, 77.
Goldmark, Josephine, =2=, 215.
Goldmark, Pauline, =2=, 75, 76, 94. _See Contents._
Goldmarks, the, =2=, 275.
Goldstein, Julius, =2=, 339.
Goodwin, William W., =1=, 51.
Gordon, George A., =1=, 277.
Grand Canyon of Arizona, =2=, 238, 239.
Grandfather Mountain, =1=, 316, 317.
Grant, Sir Ludovic, =2=, 144.
Grant, Percy, =2=, 262.
Grant, Ulysses S., =1=, 155.
Gray, John C., Jr., =1=, 102, 127, 154, 155, 168, 169, =2=, 9, 10, 288.
_See Contents._
Gray, Roland, =2=, 109.
Great Britain, and Venezuela, =2=, 26, 27;
and the Boer War, 140, 141.
And _see_ England.
Greeks, the, =2=, 225.
Green, St. John, =2=, 233.
Greene, T. H., =2=, 237.
Gregor, Mrs. Leigh R. (Margaret Gibbens), =1=, 338, =2=, 106.
And _see_ Gibbens, Margaret.
Gregor, Rosamund, =2=, 275 and _n._
Grimm, Herman, his _Unüberwindliche Mächte_, reviewed by
=J.=, =1=, 103, 104 and _n._;
his arrant moralism, 104;
"suckled by Goethe," 104;
J. dines with, 109 _ff._;
his costume, 110;
on Homer, 111;
mentioned, 107, 108, 125.
Grimm, Mrs. Herman (Gisela von Arnim), =1=, 111, 116.
Grimm Brothers, =1=, 107, 110.
Grinnell, Charles E., =2=, 10.
Gryon, Switzerland, =1=, 321, 322.
Gurney, Edmund, _Phantasms of the Living_, =1=, 267;
his death, 279;
=J.='s regard for, 280 and _n._;
mentioned, 222, 229 _n._, 242, 25=1=, 255, =2=, 30.
Gurney, Mrs. Edmund, =1=, 279, 287.
Gurney, Ephraim W., =1=, 76 _n._, 151.
Gurney, Mrs. Ephraim W. (Ellen Hooper), =1=, 76 _n._
Habit, Chapter on, in the _Psychology_, =1=, 297.
Halévy, Daniel, _Vie de Nietzsche_, =2=, 336, 340.
Hall, G. Stanley, quoted, =1=, 188, 189, 307;
his new Journal, =2=, 210, 217;
mentioned, =1=, 255, 269, =2=, 327.
Hallucinations, Census of. _See_ Census.
Hamilton, Alexander, =1=, 5.
Hamilton, Sir W., =1=, 189.
Hampton Court, =1=, 287.
Hapgood, Norman, =2=, 264.
Harris, Frank, _The Man Shakespeare_, =2=, 330, 335, 336.
Harris, William T., =1=, 201, 202, 204.
Hartmann, Karl R. E. von, =1=, 19=1=, =2=, 293.
Harvard Medical School, in the sixties, =1=, 71 _ff._;
and the Medical License Bill, =2=, 67.
Harvard Psychological Laboratory, beginning of, =1=, 179 _n._;
Münsterberg in charge of, 301, 302.
Harvard Summer School, =2=, 4.
Harvard University, beginning of =J.='s service in, =1=, 165;
courses in philosophy offered by, 191;
Hegelism at, 208;
contrasted with German universities, 217, 218 and _n._;
Department of Philosophy, =J.= on the future of, 317, 318;
=J.='s new courses at, =2=, 3, 4;
routine business of professors, 45 and _n._;
a possible genuine philosophic universe at, 122;
confers LL.D. on =J.=, 173 and _n._;
=J.= resigns professorship at, 220, 266 and _n._;
Roosevelt as possible President of, 232 and _n._
Havens, Kate, =1=, 85 _n._
Hawthorne Julian, _Bressant_, =1=, 167.
Hay, John, =1=, 251.
Hegel, Georg W. F., _Aesthetik_, =1=, 87;
mentioned, 202, 205, 208, 305.
Hegelianism (Hegelism), at Harvard, =1=, 208;
in the _Psychology_, 304 and _n._, 305;
mentioned, =2=, 237.
Hegelians, =1=, 205.
Heidelberg, =1=, 137.
Helmholtz, H. L. F. von, _Optics_, =1=, 266;
mentioned, 72, 119, 123, 137, 224, 225, 347.
Helmholtz, Frau von, =1=, 347.
Henderson, Gerard C., =2=, 275.
Henry, Joseph, =1=, 7.
Henry, Colonel (Dreyfus case), =2=, 98.
Herder, Johann G. von, =1=, 141.
Hering, Ewald, =1=, 212.
Hewlett, Maurice, _Halfway House_, =2=, 340.
Heymans, G., _Einführung in die Metaphysik_, =2=, 237 and _n._
Hibbert Foundation lectures (Manchester College), =2=, 283, 284.
_Hibbert Journal_, =2=, 313, 348,
Higginson, Henry L., takes charge of =J.='s patrimony, =1=, 233;
and the Harvard Union, =2=, 108 and _n._;
mentioned, 9, 10, 18=1=, 19=1=, 26=1=, 287, 329.
_See Contents._
Higginson, James J., =1=, 102, 127.
Higginson, Storrow, =1=, 35.
Higginson, T. W., =2=, 191.
Hildreth, J. L., =1=, 275, 277.
Hildreth, Mrs. J. L., =1=, 276.
Hoar, George F., =2=, 191.
Hobhouse, L. T., and "The Will to Believe," =2=, 207, 209;
mentioned, 282. _See Contents._
Hodder, Alfred, =2=, 14.
Hodges, George, =2=, 276,
Hodgson, Richard, death of, =2=, 242, 258;
his work and character, 242;
and Mrs. Piper, 242;
=J.= investigates Mrs. Piper's claim to give communications
from his spirit, 286, 287;
=J.='s report thereon, 317, 319, 324;
mentioned, =1=, 228, 229 _n._, 254, 281.
Hodgson, Shadworth H., "Time and Space," =1=, 188;
"Theory of Practice," 188;
"Philosophy and Experience," and "Dialogue on the Will," 243-245;
mentioned, 143, 191, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 222.
_See Contents._
Höffding, Harold, =2=, 216.
Holland, Mrs. _See_ Mediums.
Holmes, O. W., =1=, 71.
Holmes, O. W., Jr., =1=, 60, 73, 76, 80, 154, 155, =2=, 10, 51.
_See Contents._
Holmes, Mrs. O. W., Jr. (Fanny Dixwell), her "panel" and its
inscription, =2=, 156 and _n._, 157.
Holt, Edwin B., =2=, 234.
Holt, Henry, =2=, 18. _See Contents._
Holt, Henry, & Co., J. contracts to write volume on Psychology for, =1=, 194.
Homer, =1=, 111.
Hooper, Edward W., =2=, 156.
Hooper, Ellen, =1=, 76 and _n._
Hooper, Ellen (Mrs. John Potter), =2=, 275.
Hooper, Louisa, =2=, 275.
Hopkins, Woolsey R., describes accident to H. James, Senior, =1=, 7, 8.
Horace Mann Auditorium, =2=, 17.
Horse-swapping, =1=, 271.
House of Commons, =1=, 345, 346.
Howells, W. D., _Indian Summer_, =1=, 253;
_Shadow of a Dream_, 298;
_Hazard of New Fortunes_, 298, 299;
_Rise of Silas Lapham_, 307;
_Minister's Charge_, 307, 308;
_Lemuel Barker_, 308;
_Criticism and Fiction_, 308;
mentioned, =1=, 158, =2=, 10.
_See Contents._
Howells, Mrs. W. D., =1=, 253, 298, 299.
Howison, George H., =1=, 239 _n._, 304, =2=, 78.
_See Contents._
Hugo, Victor, _Les Misérables_, =1=, 263;
_La Légende des Siècles_, =2=, 63;
mentioned, =1=, 90, =2=, 51.
Huidekoper, Rosamund, =2=, 275.
Humanism, =2=, 245, 282.
Humboldt, H. A. von, _Travels_, =1=, 62.
Humboldt, W., letters of, =1=, 141.
Hume, David, =1=, 187, =2=, 18, 123, 165.
Hunnewell, Walter, =1=, 68.
Hunt, William M., =1=, 24.
Hunter, Ellen (Temple), =2=, 258, 262.
Huxley, Thomas H., =J.= quoted on, =1=, 226 _n._;
his _Life and Letters_, 226 _n._, =2=, 248;
mentioned, =2=, 218.
Hyatt, Alpheus, =1=, 31.
Hyslop, James H., =2=, 242, 287.
Ideal, the, =1=, 238.
Idealism, Absolute, Royce's argument for, =1=, 242.
Immortality, =1=, 310, =2=, 214, 287.
Imperialism, =2=, 74.
Indians, in Brazil, =1=, 66, 67, 70.
Indifferentism, =1=, 238.
Insane, proposed national society to improve condition of, =2=, 273, 274.
Intellectualism, =2=, 291, 292.
Italian language, =1=, 341, =2=, 222.
Italy, =1=, 175, 180, 181.
Jacks, L. P., =2=, 339, 348.
Jackson Henry, =1=, 274, 275.
Jacobi, Friedrich H., =1=, 141.
James, Alexander R. (=J.='s son), =2=, 37, 43, 92. _See Contents._
James, Alice (=J.='s sister), her diary quoted, =1=, 16;
in England with H. James, Jr., from 1885 on, 258;
her illness, 258, 259, 284;
her diary quoted, 259 _n._;
quoted, on =J.='s European trip in 1889, 289, 290;
her death, 319;
mentioned, 18, 47, 60, 69, 91, 103, 142, 172, 183, 217,
220, 281, 285, 286, =2=, 127.
_See Contents._
James, Mrs. Catherine (Barber), third wife of W. James I, (=J.='s paternal
grandmother), "a dear gentle lady," =1=, 6;
her house in Albany, 105;
mentioned, 4, 5 _n._, 7.
James, Garth Wilkinson (=J.='s brother), wounded at Fort Wagner,
=1=, 43, 44, 49;
mentioned, =1=, 17, 33, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 51, 52, 60,
69, 70, 88, 135 _n._, 136, 192.
James, Henry, Senior (=J.='s father), quoted, on his father, =1=, 4,
his grandfather, 5,
and his mother, 5 and _n._;
his habit of thought expressed in his description of his mother, 5 _n._;
sketch of his life and character, 7-19;
maimed for life by accident, 7, 8;
his discontent with orthodox dispensation, 8;
marries Mary Walsh, 8;
=J.='s striking resemblance to, 10;
relations with his children, 10, 18, 19;
=J.='s introduction
to his _Literary Remains_, 10, 13;
letters of, to Emerson, 11;
effect of Swedenborg's works on, 12;
the only business of his later life, 1=2=, 13;
=J.='s
estimate of, 13;
Henry James quoted on, 14;
letter of, to editor of _New Jerusalem Messenger_, 14-16;
his directions regarding his funeral service, 16;
Godkin quoted on, 17;
E. W. Emerson quoted on, 17, 18 and _n._;
and Miss Emerson, 18 _n._;
influence of his "full and homely idiom" on the conversation of
his sons, 18;
his philosophy, discussed by =J.=, 96, 97;
his essay on Swedenborg, 117;
letter of, to Henry James, 169;
dangerously ill, 218;
=J.='s last letter to, 218-220;
his _Secret of Swedenborg_, 220;
his death, 221;
=J.='s memories of, 221, 222;
his mentality described, 241, 242;
compared with Carlyle, 241;
mentioned, =2=, 6, 7, 27, 36, 53, 68, 80, 92, 103, 104, 115 and
_n._, 118, 135 _n._, 153, 157, 158 and _n._, 175,
217, 260, 289, 290, 316, =2=, 39, 278.
_See Contents._
_Literary Remains_ of, edited by =J.=, =1=, 4 and _n._, 5 _n._, 10,
13, 236, 239, 240, 241.
James, Mrs. Henry, Senior (Mary Walsh), (=J.='s mother), her character,
=1=, 9;
her death, 218;
mentioned, 8, 69, 80, 103, 117, 156, 175, 183, 219, 220. _See Contents._
James, Henry, Jr. (=J.='s brother), impressions of an elder generation
reflected in _The Wings of the Dove_, =1=, 7;
and his mother, 9; his birth, 9;
quoted, on his father, 14;
influence of his father's "idiom" on his speech, 18;
at the Collège de Boulogne, 20;
early secret passion for authorship, 21;
his "meteorological blunder," 21; quoted, on =J.=, as
"he sits drawing," 22, 23;
letter of his father to, 169;
his feeling for Europe, 209;
its reaction on him and on =J.=, contrasted, 209, 210;
described by =J.=, 288;
his "third manner" of writing criticized by =J.=, =2=, 240, 277-279;
his paper on Boston, 252;
mentioned, =1=, 17, 25, 33, 36, 40, 41, 45, 51, 53, 68,
70, 76, 80, 90, 94, 95, 99, 100, 115, 117, 118, 136, 138,
141, 148 _n._, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 218, 219, 240, 258,
260, 262, 269, 283, 284, 286, 287, 289, 290, 319, =2=, 10,
35, 61, 62, 84, 105, 106, 110, 161, 167, 168, 169, 170, 192,
193, 215, 224, 250, 280, 315, 333, 335, 338, 341, 350.
_See Contents._
Works of: _The American_, =1=, 185;
_The American Scene_, =2=, 264, 277, 299;
_The Bostonians_, =1=, 250, 25=1=, 25=2=, 253;
_The Golden Bowl_, =2=, 240;
Notes _of a Son and Brother_, =1=, 10, 11 _n._, 24, 32, 36, 135 _n._;
_Partial Portraits_, 280;
_The Portrait of a Lady_, 36;
_Princess Cassamassima_, 251;
_The Reverberator_, 280;
_Roderick Hudson_, 184;
_W. W. Story, Life of_, 27 _n._;
_The Tragic Muse_, 299;
_A Small Boy and Others_, 4 _n._, 8 _n._, 9, 10, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23;
_The Wings of the Dove_, 7, 36, =2=, 240.
James, Henry, 3d (=J.='s son), =1=, 275, 278, 279, 282, 329, 330,
336, 343, =2=,
30, 31, 84, 129, 143, 145, 147, 159, 324.
_See Contents._
James, Hermann (J.'s son), birth of, =1=, 234, 235; death of, 247.
James, Margaret M. (=J.='s daughter), birth of, =1=, 267;
mentioned, 275, 276, 279, 281, 322, 332, 336, =2=, 43, 54,
98, 102, 110, 130, 191.
_See Contents._
James, Robertson (=J.='s brother), in Union army, =1=, 43, 44;
mentioned, 17, 33, 41, 43, 52, 60, 69, 70, 81, 136.
James, William, =J.='s grandfather, his career, from penury to
great wealth, =1=, 2, 3;
a leading citizen of Albany, 3;
personal appearance, 3;
anecdotes of, 3, 4;
H. James, Senior, quoted on, 4;
his stiff Presbyterianism and its results, 4;
his will disallowed by court, 4, 6;
marries Catherine Barber, 4.
James, William, (=J.='s uncle), =1=, 6.
JAMES, WILLIAM.
His ancestors in America, =1=, 1;
recurrence of his father's habit of thought in, 5 _n._;
and his mother, 9;
resemblance of, to his father, 10;
quoted, on his father, 13;
influence of his father's "idiom," 18 and _n._;
frequent changes of schools and tutors, 19;
in Europe, 1855 to 1858, 19;
at the Collège de Boulogne, and the "Academy" of Geneva, 20;
quoted, on his education, 20;
interest in exact knowledge, 20;
begins study of anatomy at Geneva, 21;
his cosmopolitanism of consciousness, 22;
widely read in three languages, 22;
effect of his early training, 22;
takes up painting, 22-24;
portrait of Katharine Temple, 24;
physique, personal appearance and dress, 24, 25;
temperament and conversation, 26;
"smiting" quality of his best talk, 27;
keen about new things, 28;
disadvantage
of being too encouraging to "little geniuses," 28, 29;
freer criticism of those who had arrived, 29;
influence as a teacher at Harvard, 29, 30;
in Lawrence Scientific School, 31 and _n._;
physical condition keeps him out of army in Civil War, 47;
transfers from Chemistry to Comparative Anatomy, 47;
and Jeffries Wyman, 48, 49;
begins course at Medical School, 53;
philosophy begins to beckon, 53;
joins Agassiz's expedition to the Amazon, 54;
his nine months with Agassiz not wasted, 55, 56;
has small-pox at Rio, 60, 61, 63 and _n._;
interne at Mass. General Hospital, 71;
again in Medical School, 71-84.
Impaired health causes his visit to Germany, 84, 85;
in Dresden, Berlin and Teplitz, 85, 86;
describes his condition in letter to his father, 95, 96;
returns to U. S., 139;
takes degree of M.D. (1869), 140;
eye-weakness, 140, 141;
scope of his reading, 141, 142 and _n._, 143;
his note-books, 143, 144;
relation between earlier and later writings, 144 and _n._;
morbid depression, 145;
chapter on the "sick soul" the story of his own case, 145-147;
return of resolution and self-confidence, 147, 148;
Instructor in Physiology, 165;
his real subject, physiological psychology, 165, 166;
his deepest inclination always toward philosophy, 166;
H. James, Senior's, letter on the change in =J.='s mental tone
and outlook, 169, 170;
decides to devote himself to biology, 171;
Europe again, 171;
end of the period of morbid depression, 171;
gives course in Psychology and organizes Psychological Laboratory,
179 and _n_,;
contributions to periodicals, 180;
on teaching of philosophy in American colleges, 189 _ff._
Marries Alice H. Gibbens, 192;
effect of his new domesticity, 193;
importance of his wife's companionship and understanding, 193;
contracts to write a volume on Psychology, 194;
vacations in Keene Valley, 195;
his mode of life there, 195;
a bit of self-analysis, 199, 200;
first work on _Psychology_, 203, 223;
declines invitation to teach at Johns Hopkins, 203;
in Europe, 1880-83, 208 _ff._;
and Henry James, 209, 210;
"reaction" on Europe, 209, 210;
death of his mother, 218, and of his father, 221;
his memories of them, 221, 222;
corresponding member of English Society for Psychical Research, 227;
an organizer and officer of the American Society, 227;
investigates psychic phenomena, 227 _ff._;
conducts American Census of Hallucinations, 228, 229;
edits his father's _Literary Remains_, 236, 239 _ff._;
his life at Chocorua, 271, 272, 273.
Abroad in 1889, 286 _ff._;
at International Congress of Physiological Psychology, 288, 289, 290;
his new house in Cambridge, 290, 291;
his inclination toward the under-dog, 292, 293, =2=, 178;
completion of the _Psychology_, =1=, 293 _ff._;
effect of its publication on his reputation, 300;
prepares an abridgment (_Briefer Course_), 300, 301;
turns his attention more fully toward philosophy, 301;
raises money for Harvard Laboratory, 301, and recommends Münsterberg
as its head, 301;
his sabbatical year abroad, 302, 320 _ff._;
beginning of his friendship with Flournoy, 320;
receives honorary degree at Padua, 333.
How his mind was moving during the nineties, =2=, 2 _ff._;
his opinion of psychology, 2;
new courses at Harvard, 3, 4;
outside lecturing, 4;
would devote his thought and work to metaphysical and religious
questions, 5;
frustrations, 5, 6;
personal appearance, 6, 7;
his daily round, 7-9;
the Club, 9, 10;
nervous break-down, 10;
D. S. Miller quoted on, 11-17;
attitude toward spelling reform, 18, 19;
and Cleveland's Venezuela Message, 26 _ff._;
experiments with mescal, 35, 37;
Chautauqua lectures, 40 _ff._;
work on college committees, 45 _n._,
at Faculty meetings, 45 _n._,
lectures at Lowell Institute, 54 and _n._, 55;
invited to deliver Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, 55;
Blood's strictures on his English, 59;
on a proposed Medical License bill, 66 _ff._;
on the Spanish War, 73, 74;
corresponding member of Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 75;
a memorable night in the Adirondacks, 75-77.
Effect on his health of misadventures in the Adirondack, 78, 79, 90, 91;
two years of exile and illness, 92 _ff._;
an individualist and a liberal, 93;
opposed to Philippine policy of McKinley administration, 93, 94;
his teaching limited to a half-course a year, 171;
lectures and contributions to philosophic journals, 171;
strain on his strength, 171;
the spirit in which he did his work, 172, 173;
receives LL.D. from Harvard, 173 and _n._;
replies to Prof. Pratt's _Questionnaire_, 212-215;
at Philosophical Congress at Rome, 219, 220, 225 _ff._;
lectures at Stanford University, 220, 235, 240, 244 and _n._;
and the San Francisco earthquake, 220, 246 _ff._;
_Pragmatism_, 220;
resigns his professorship, 220, 266 and _n._;
the last meeting of his class, 220, 221, 262.
Declining health, 283, 333;
lectures on Hibbert Foundation at Oxford, 283, 284;
uncompleted projects, 284;
his attitude toward war, 284, 285, and universal arbitration, 285;
tolerance fundamental in his scheme of belief, 286;
his report on "Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control," 286, 287;
last months in Europe, 333 _ff._;
farewell to Harvard Faculty, 334;
returns to Chocorua, 350;
the end, 350.
Letters containing moral counsel, or touching upon problems of _Belief_,
=2=, 57, 65, 76, 77, 149, 150, 196, 197, 210, 211, 212-215, 269, 326,
344-346;
_Conduct_, =1=, 77-79, 100, 128 _ff._, 148, 199, 200, =2=, 131, 132;
_Life and Death_, =1=, 218-220, 309-311, =2=, 130, 154.
WORKS OF:--
"Address of the President before the Society for Psychical Research,"
=2=, 30 and _n._
"Bain and Renouvier," 1, 186.
_Briefer Course_ (abridgment of the _Principles of Psychology_), =1=,
300, 301, 304, 314.
"Brute and Human Intellect," =1=, 180.
"Certain Blindness in Human Beings, A," =2=, 5.
_Collected Essays and Reviews_, =1=, 225 _n._, =2=, 20 _n._, 287, 295 _n_.
"Confidences of a Psychical Researcher," =2=, 327 and _n._
"Dilemma of Determinism, The," =1=, 237 and _n._, 238.
"Does Consciousness Exist?" _See_ "Notion de Conscience, La."
"Energies of Men, The," =2=, 252, 284.
"Feeling of Effort, The," =1=, 207.
"Frederick Myers's Service to Psychology," =2=, 151 and _n._
"German-American Novel, A." =1=, 104 _n._
Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, =J.= invited to deliver, =2=, 55;
preparing for, 85, 92, 93;
delivered, 144 _ff._;
success of, 147, 149, 150, 151;
outline of, 150;
published as _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 169;
mentioned, 75, 96, 97, 105, 108, 111, 115, 127, 134, =2=, 162, 164, 165.
And _see_ _Varieties of Religious Experience_, _infra_.
"How Two Minds can Know One Thing," =2=, 217 and _n._
_Human Immortality_, =2=, 180 and _n._
"Introspective Psychology, On Some Omissions of," =1=, 230.
"Knight-Errant of the Intellectual Life, A," =2=, 107 _n._
Lowell Institute Lectures, =2=, 54 and _n._, 55.
_Meaning of Truth, The_, =2=, 20 _n._, 327.
_Memories and Studies_, =1=, 153, 226 _n._, 229 _n._, =2=, 39
_n._, 59 _n._, 107 _n._, 151 _n._,
193, 247, 285 _n._, 287, 327 _n._
"Moral Equivalent of War, The," =2=, 284.
"Notion de Conscience, La," =2=, 226 and _n._, 267 and _n._
"Perception of Space, The," =1=, 266 _n._
"Perception of Time, The," =1=, 266.
"Philosophic Reveries," =2=, 339.
"Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," =2=, 5.
_Philosophy, Some Problems of_, =1=, 144 _n._, 186.
_Pluralistic Mystic, A._ (lectures on Hibbert Foundation), =2=, 39 _n._,
300, 311, 313, 322, 324, 325, 326, 339.
_Pragmatism_, =2=, 17, 276, 279, 292, 294, 295, 300;
translated by W. Jerusalem, 297.
"Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," =2=, 271 and _n._
"Proposed Shortening of the College Course," =2=, 45 _n._
_Psychology, Principles of_, =1=, 194, 203, 223, 224, 249,
268, 269, 283, 293 _ff._, 296, 297, 300, 301, 304 and _n._, 305,
307, 320, =2=, 12, 13.
"Quelques Considérations sur la Méthode Subjective," =1=, 180.
_Radical Empiricism, Essays in_, =2=, 267 _n._
"Radical Empiricism, Is it Solipsistic?" =2=, 218.
"Radical Empiricism as a Philosophy," =2=, 197 _n._
_Selected Essays and Reviews_, =2=, 271.
"Sentiment of Rationality, The," =1=, 203 and _n._
"Shaw Monument, Oration on Unveiling of," =2=, 59, 60.
"Spatial Quale, The," =1=, 205 and _n._
"Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence," =1=, 180.
_Talks to Teachers and Students on Some of Life's Problems_, =2=,
4, 5, 40, 79, 286.
"Tigers in India, The," =2=, 20 _n._
_Varieties of Religious Experience._ (Gifford Lectures), =1=, 145-147,
293, =2=, 169, 170, 209, 210, 268.
"What Psychical Research has Accomplished," =1=, 229 and _n._, 306.
"_Will to Believe, The_," =2=, 44, 48, 85, 87, 88, 207, 208, 209, 282.
_Will to Believe, The, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy_, =1=, 229
_n._, 237 _n._, 280 _n._, =2=, 4, 5, 34, 58 _n._, 64.
"Word More about Truth, A," =2=, 295.
_See_ also list of Dates at the beginning of Volume I, and the partial
bibliography (Appendix II, _infra_).
James, Mrs. William (Alice Gibbens), =1=, 192, 193, 195, 196, 217, 218, 232,
237, 247, 269, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 286, 288, 294, 297, 298, 316, 319,
321, 325, 328, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 346, =2=, 5, 7, 8, 9, 20, 24, 34,
35, 36, 37, 38, 52, 59, 60, 63, 92, 93, 96, 97, 110, 111, 112, 113, 129,
134, 145, 147, 158, 159, 161, 165, 175, 176, 182, 187, 188, 193, 215, 223,
233, 247, 250, 256, 258, 259, 275, 312, 313, 333, 334, 338, 350.
_See Contents._
James, William (=J.='s son), birth of, =1=, 234;
mentioned, 237, 260, 275, 276, 277, 282, 329, 330, 336, 346, =2=,
92, 98, 129, 159, 174, 175, 185, 186, 187, 250, 258, 259, 274, 275, 276.
_See Contents._
Jameson Raid, =2=, 27.
Janet, Pierre, =2=, 216, 217, 226, 254.
Janet, Mme. Pierre, =2=, 216.
Jap, a dog, =1=, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279.
Jefferies, Richard, _The Life of the Fields_, =2=, 258, 259.
Jeffries, B. Joy, =1=, 163.
Jerome, W. T., =2=, 264.
Jerusalem, W. _See Contents._
Jevons, F. B., =2=, 306.
"Jimmy," students' name for the _Briefer Course_, =1=, 301.
Johns Hopkins University, =J.= declines invitation to teach at, =1=, 203.
Johnson, Alice, =2=, 311.
_Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, =1=, 266, =2=, 339.
Jung-Stilling, Johann K., _Autobiography_, =1=, 155.
Kallen, Horace M., =2=, 271.
Kant, Immanuel, _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, =1=, 138, =2=, 179;
=J.= lectures on, 45, 47, 51, 54;
mentioned, =1=, 117, 141, 191, 202, 205, =2=, 3.
Kaulbach, W. von, =1=, 90.
Keane, Bishop, =1=, 294.
Keene Valley, Adirondacks, =J.='s summer holidays in, =1=, 194, 195, 196;
an eventful 24 hours, and its effect, =2=, 75-79, 95;
his further misadventure, 90, 91;
mentioned, =1=, 232, =2=, 51, 259, 261, 296, 297.
Kipling, Rudyard, _The Light that Failed_, =1=, 307;
mentioned, =2=, 21, 22, 231.
Kitchin, George W., =2=, 306.
Knox, H. V., =2=, 313, 314.
Kruger, Paul, =2=, 27.
Kolliker, R. A. von, =1=, 123.
Kosmos, the startling discoveries concerning, =1=, 101.
Kühnemann, Eugen, =2=, 263.
La Farge, Bancel, =2=, 275.
La Farge, John, =1=, 24, 91, =2=, 173.
Lamar, Lucuis Q. C., =1=, 251.
Lamb, Charles, =2=, 239.
Lamb House, Rye, Henry James's English home, =2=, 107, 111.
Lawrence Scientific School, Chemical laboratory in, =1=, 31;
C. W. Eliot quoted on =J.='s course in, 31, 32 and _n._
Leibnitz, Baron G. W. von, =2=, 13.
Lemaître, Jules, =2=, 63.
_Leonardo_, =2=, 227, 228, 245.
Leopardi, Giacomo, "To Sylvia," =1=, 246 and _n._
Lesley, Susan I., _Recollections of my Mother_, =2=, 135 and _n._
Lessing, Gotthold E., _Emilia Galotti_, =1=, 91;
Fischer's Essay on _Nathan der Weise_, 94.
Leuba, James H., =2=, 210, 211, 218.
_See Contents._
Lincoln, Abraham, effect of his death, =1=, 66, 67;
characterized by =J.=, 67.
Linville, N. C., =1=, 316, 317.
Lister, Sir Joseph, =1=, 72.
Lloyd, Henry D., =2=, 166.
Locke, John, =1=, 191, =2=, 165, 257.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, =2=, 30.
Lodge, Sir Oliver, =1=, 229 _n._
Loeser, Charles A., =1=, 337, 339.
Lombroso, Cesar, =2=, 15.
London, =1=, 175, =2=, 307.
London, _Times_, =2=, 43, 65, 118.
Long, George, =1=, 78.
Loring, Katharine P., =1=, 259, 262, 311, 316.
Lotze, Rudolf H., =1=, 206, 208.
Loubet, Émile, President of France, =2=, 89, 98.
Lowell, A. Lawrence, =2=, 326.
Lowell, James Russell, death of, =1=, 314, 315 _n._;
=J.='s memory of, 315;
mentioned, 195.
Lucerne, =2=, 133.
Ludwig, Karl F. W., =1=, 72, 160, 215.
Lutoslawski, W., =2=, 103, 171.
_See Contents._
McDougall, William, =2=, 313, 314, 315.
McKinley, William, and the Spanish War, =2=, 74;
Philippine Policy of his administration disapproved by =J.=, 93, 94, 289;
and Roosevelt, =J.='s description of, 94;
mentioned, 50, 101, 102, 109.
MacMonnies, F. W., Bacchante, =2=, 62 and _n._, 63.
Macaulay, Thomas B., Lord, =1=, 225.
Mach, Ernst, =1=, 211, 212.
Maine, U. S. S., explosion of, =2=, 73.
Manchester College. _See_ Hibbert Foundation.
Marcus Aurelius, =1=, 78, 79.
Marshall, Henry Rutgers, _Instinct and Reason_, =1=, 87.
_See Contents_.
Martin, L. J., =2=, 246, 249.
Martineau, James, =1=, 283.
Mascagni, Pietro, _I Rantzau_, =1=, 334, 335.
Massachusetts General Hospital, =1=, 71, 72.
Materialism, =1=, 82, 83.
Maudsley, Henry, =1=, 143.
Maupassant, Guy de, =1=, 282.
Medical License bill (proposed), in Mass., =2=, 66 _ff._
Mediums, =1=, 228, =2=, 287, 311.
And _see_ Paladino, Eusapia, and Piper, Mrs.
Mental Hygiene, Connecticut Society for, =2=, 273;
National Committee for, 273.
Merriman, Daniel. _See Contents._
Merriman, Mrs. Daniel, =2=, 118.
Merriman, R. B., =2=, 63, 66, 132, 175.
Mescal, =J.='s experiment with, =2=, 35, 37.
Metaphysical problems, =J.='s mind haunted by, =2=, 2.
Metaphysics, outline of course offered by =J.= in, =2=, 3, 4;
=J.='s proposed system of, 179, 180.
Meysenbug, Malwida von, _Memoiren einer Idealistin_, =2=, 135 and _n._
Mezes, Sidney E., =2=, 14.
Mill, John Stuart, =1=, 164, =2=, 267.
Miller, Dickinson S., quoted, on =J.= as a teacher and lecturer, =2=, 11-17;
"Truth and Error," 18;
quoted, on =J.='s talks with Columbia Faculty Club, 265 _n._;
his "study" of =J.=, 331, 332;
mentioned, 87, 88, 137, 163, 232 _n._, 282.
_See Contents._
_Mind_, =1=, 254, 255.
Mind-curers. _See_ Faith-curers.
Miracles, =2=, 57, 58.
Mitchell, S. Weir, =2=, 37.
Monism, =1=, 238, 244, 245.
Montgomery, Edmund, =1=, 254, 255.
Morgan, C. Lloyd, =2=, 216.
Moritz, C. P., =1=, 141.
Morley, John, _Voltaire_, =1=, 144 _n._
Morse, Frances R., =1=, 197, =2=, 106, 113, 232.
_See Contents._
Morse, Mary. _See_ Elliot, Mrs. John W.
Morse, John T., =2=, 10.
Motterone, Monte, =1=, 324.
Müller, G. E., =1=, 312, 313.
Munich Congress, =2=, 46, 50.
Munk, H., =1=, 213, 114.
Münsterberg, Hugo, recommended by =J.= as head
of Harvard Psychological Laboratory, =1=, 301, 302;
"the Rudyard Kipling of philosophy," 318;
"an immense success," 332;
criticizes =J.=, =2=, 267, 268;
mentioned, =1=, 312, =2=, 2, 18, 121, 229, 270, 293, 320.
_See Contents._
Murray, Gilbert, =2=, 271.
Musset, Alfred de, =2=, 63.
Myers, F. W. H., _Human Personality_, =1=, 229 _n._, =2=, 151, 185 and _n._;
death of, 141;
=J.='s tribute to, 141, 151, 157;
mentioned, =1=, 287, 290, =2=, 57, 114, 118, 156, 157, 161.
_See Contents._
Myers, Mrs. F. W. H., =1=, 290, 345, =2=, 151, 157.
Naples, =2=, 222.
_Nation, The_, review of _Literary Remains of Henry James_ in, =1=, 240, 241;
=J.='s comments on, 284;
and Cleveland's Venezuela Message, =2=, 28;
mentioned, =1=, 70, 92, 104 and _n._, 117, 118, 161,
186, 188, 189, =2=, 42, 182, 332.
Nauheim (Bad), =2=, 92, 93, 95, 104, 107, 134, 135, 157, 158, 160, 333, 338.
Neilson, Adelaide, =1=, 168.
Nevins, John C., _Demon Possession and Allied Themes_, =2=, 56 and _n._
New Forest, The, =2=, 160, 161.
_New Jerusalem Messenger_, H. James, Senior's, letter to
editor of, =1=, 14-16.
_New World, The_, =1=, 334, =2=, 44.
New York City, =2=, 264, 265.
Newcomb, Simon, =1=, 250.
Newport, R. I., =2=, 202, 203.
Newton, Sir Isaac, =2=, 1 _n._
Nichols, Herbert, =1=, 335, =2=, 14.
Nietzsche, Friedrich W., =2=, 233.
Nivedita, Sister, =2=, 144.
Nonentity, Idea of, =2=, 293.
Nordau, Max S., _Entartung_, =2=, 19;
mentioned, 17.
Norton, Charles Eliot, Ruskin's letters to, =2=, 206;
mentioned, =1=, 181, 291, 331, 338, 347, =2=, 191, 199.
_See Contents._
Norton, Grace, =1=, 284, =2=, 191.
_See Contents._
Norton, Mrs. Charles E. (Susan Sedgwick), =1=, 181.
Norton Woods, the, =2=, 201.
Olney, Richard, and the Venezuela Message, =2=, 27, 29.
Optimism, =1=, 83, 238.
Oregon, forest fires in, =2=, 80.
Ostensacken, Baron, =1=, 337, 339.
Ostwald, W., =2=, 229.
Oxford, =2=, 307.
Padua, Galileo anniversary at, =1=, 333 and _n._;
University of, confers degree on =J.=, 333.
Pædagogy, =2=, 47.
Paladino, Eusapia, =2=, 186 and _n._, 311, 320, 327.
Paley, William, =1=, 283.
Pallanza, Italy, =1=, 329.
Palmer, George H., a Hegelian, =1=, 205, 208;
investigates psychic phenomena with =J.=, 227;
mentioned, 202, 292, 335, =2=, 2, 18.
_See Contents._
Palmer, Mrs. Alice Freeman, =2=, 124.
Papini, Giovanni, _Crepuscolo dei Filosofi_, =2=, 245, 246;
mentioned, 172, 227, 228, 229, 257, 267.
Paris, =1=, 174, 175, 217.
Paris Commune (1871), =1=, 161.
Parkman, Francis, =2=, 10.
Parkman, Mrs. Henry, =2=, 205.
Parthenon, the, =2=, 224, 225.
Party spirit, the only permanent force of corruption in the U. S., =2=, 100.
Pasteur, Louis, =1=, 72, 225.
Paty du Clam, Colonel du, =2=, 98.
Paulsen, Friederich, _Einleitung_, =1=, 346, =2=, 244.
Peabody, Elizabeth, =1=, 112.
Peabody, Frances G., =2=, 229.
Peace Congress, =2=, 277.
Peillaube, M., =2=, 228, 229.
Peirce, Benjamin, =1=, 32.
Peirce, Charles S., =1=, 33, 34, 80, 149, 169, =2=, 191, 233, 294, 328.
Peirce, James M., =2=, 258.
Perry, Ralph Barton, his _List of Published Writings_
of =J.=, =1=, 144, 223, 224;
mentioned, =2=, 121, 163, 234, 295.
Perry, Thomas S., with =J.= in Berlin, =1=, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 117, 124;
mentioned, 40 _n._, 60, 91, 94, 102, 106, 134, 151, 157, 169, =2=, 10.
_See Contents._
Pertz, Mrs. Emma (Wilkinson), =1=, 135 and _n._
Pessimism, =1=, 238.
Peterson, Ellis, =1=, 166.
Pflüger, Dr., =1=, 156.
Phelps, Edward J., =2=, 27 _n._
Philippine question, the, =2=, 167, 168.
Philippines, policy of McKinley administration concerning, =2=, 93, 94;
duty of U. S. with regard to, 289.
Philosophical Club, University of California, =J.='s lectures to, =2=, 79.
_Philosophical Review_, =2=, 228.
Philosophical Society, =J.= refuses to join, =2=, 164.
Philosophy, =J.= begins to feel the pull of, =1=, 53, 54;
difficulties attending teaching of, in American colleges, 188, 189, 190.
Physiological Psychology, =1=, 165, 166, 179.
Physiological Psychology, International Congress of, =1=, 288, 289, 290.
Physiology, =J.= attends lectures on, in Berlin, =1=, 118, 120, 121;
=J.='s first teaching subject, 165.
Picquart, M. G. (Dreyfus case), =2=, 67, 98.
Piddington, J. G., =2=, 311.
Pierce, George W., =2=, 14.
Pillon, François, =1=, 208, 229, 233, 343, =2=, 45, 79.
_See Contents._
Pillon, Mme. François, =2=, 73, 204, 338, 343.
Pinkham, Lydia E., "the Venus of Medicine," =1=, 261 and _n._
Piper, Mrs. William, =J.= quoted on, =1=, 227, 228;
mentioned, =2=, 242, 311, 319, 320.
And _see_ Hodgson, R.
Plato, =1=, 283.
Pluralism, =1=, 186, =2=, 155.
Pluralistic idealism, =2=, 22.
Pollock, Sir Frederick, =1=, 222, =2=, 199.
Pomfret, Conn., =1=, 153, 154.
_Popular Science Monthly_, =1=, 190.
Porter, Noah, =1=, 231, 232.
Porter, Samuel, =1=, 214.
Porto Rico, =2=, 74.
Potter, Horatio, =1=, 59.
Powderly, Terence V., =1=, 284.
Pragmatism, and radical empiricism, distinction between, =2=, 267;
disadvantages of the word as a title, 271, 295, 298.
Prague, =1=, 211, 212, 213.
Pratt, James B., =J.='s replies to his questionnaire on
religious belief, =2=, 212-215.
Pratt, M., =2=, 204.
Prince, William H., =1=, 37, 39, 42, 44.
Prince, Mrs. William H. (Katharine James), =1=, 42.
_See Contents._
Princeton Theological Seminary, H. James, Senior, at, =1=, 8.
Pringle-Pattison, A. S., =2=, 325, 326.
And _see_ Seth, Andrew.
Profession, choice of, =1=, 75, 79, 123.
Prussia, political conditions in (1867), =1=, 95;
and France, 95.
Prussians, =1=, 122.
Psychic phenomena, investigated by =J.= and Palmer, =1=, 225 _ff._;
mentioned, 248, 250, 305, 306, =2=, 56, 287, 320.
Psychical Research, American Society for, =J.= active in organizing, =1=, 227;
amalgamated with English Society, 227;
=J.= on its function, 249, 250, =2=, 242, 286, 306.
Psychical Research, English Society for, founded, =1=, 227;
=J.= a corresponding member, vice-president, and president
of, 227, 229 _n._, 248.
Psychologists, American Association of, =2=, 20.
Psychology, =J.= begins to read on, =1=, 118, 119;
=J.= gives course in, 179;
=J.= helps to make it a modern science, 224, 225;
"a nasty little subject," =2=, 2.
Psychology, Experimental, in U. S., History of, =1=, 179 _n._
Psychology, Physiological. _See_ Physiological Psychology.
Putnam, Charles P., =1=, 71, 195, 196, 327, =2=, 296.
Putnam, Frederick W., =1=, 31.
Putnam, George, =2=, 224, 225.
Putnam, James J., letter to =J.= on Medical License bill, =2=, 72 _n._;
mentioned, =1=, 71, 168, 195, 196, =2=, 112, 128, 147, 249.
_See Contents._
Putnam, Marian (Mrs. James J.), =2=, 249.
Quincy, Henry P., =1=, 77, 122.
Radcliffe College, =2=, 4, 24, 180 _n._, 181.
Radcliffe College, =J.='s class at. _See Contents._
Radical Empiricism and pragmatism, distinction between, =2=, 267;
mentioned, 203, 204.
Rafael Sanzio, the Sistine Madonna, =1=, 90.
Raffaello, Florentine cook, =1=, 339, 341.
Rankin, Henry W., =2=, 55.
_See Contents._
Reed, Thomas B., =2=, 50.
Reid, Carveth, =1=, 205, 222.
Religion, =J.='s views on, =2=, 64, 65, 127, 149, 150, 211 _ff._, 269.
Renan, Ernest, death of, =1=, 326;
mentioned, 110, =2=, 123, 338.
Renouvier, Charles, the _Année 1867 Philosophique_, =1=, 138, 186;
influence on =J.= of his writings on free will, 147, 169;
=J.='s first acquaintance with his work, 186;
=J.='s correspondence with, 186;
translates some of =J.='s papers, 186;
his articles on Fouillée, 231;
_Principes de la Nature_, 334;
his _Philosophy of History_, =2=, 44, 47;
his death, 204;
_Monadologie_ and _Personalisme_, 204;
mentioned, =1=, 138, 205.
_See Contents._
Republican Party, the, in 1899, =2=, 94.
Reverdin, M., =2=, 267.
Rhea, Jannet, =1=, 4 _n._
Rhea, Matthew, =1=, 4 _n._
Rhodes, James F., _History of the U. S._, =2=, 27 _n._;
mentioned, 10.
Richet, Charles, =1=, 229 _n._, =2=, 114, 225.
Richter, Jean Paul, =1=, 141.
Rindge, Frederick H., =1=, 330, =2=, 39.
Rio de Janeiro, =1=, 58 _ff._
Risks, choice of, =2=, 49, 50.
Ritter, Charles, =1=, 23, =2=, 25, 55.
Robertson, Alexander, =1=, 8, 9.
Robertson, G. Croom, editor of _Mind_, =1=, 222, 254.
_See Contents._
Robeson, Andrew R., =1=, 33.
Romanism and Anglicanism, =2=, 305.
Romanticism, =1=, 256.
Rome, Philosophical Congress at, =2=, 225 _ff._, 228;
mentioned, =1=, 178, 180, =2=, 138, 139, 269.
Roosevelt, Theodore, as possible President of Harvard, =2=, 232 and _n._;
mentioned, 94, 266.
Ropes, John C., death of, =2=, 108, 109;
mentioned, =1=, 35, =2=, 10, 156.
Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio, =1=, 295.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, =1=, 142.
Royce, Josiah, early life, =1=, 200, 201;
quoted, on his first acquaintance with =J.=, 200, 201;
brought to Harvard through =J.='s influence, 201;
his _Religious Aspect of Philosophy_, 239, 242, 265;
"a perfect little Socrates," 249;
made professor, 332;
and =J.=, as teachers, compared by Miller, =2=, 16;
"the Rubens of philosophy," 86;
_The World and the Individual_, 113 and _n._, 114, 116, 121 and _n._;
his system, 114;
a sketcher in philosophy, 114, 116;
mentioned, =1=, 238, 239, 255, 262, 280, 291, 318, 347,
=2=, 18, 122, 143, 216, 234, 321, 322.
_See Contents._
Ruskin, John, his letters to C. E. Norton, =2=, 206, 207;
characterized by =J.=, 206;
_Modern Painters_, 206;
mentioned, =1=, 220, =2=, 306.
Rye (England), =2=, 104.
And _see_ Lamb House.
Sabatier, Paul, =2=, 142.
St. Gaudens, Augustus, his monument to R. G. Shaw unveiled, =2=, 59-61.
St. Louis, hurricane at, =2=, 35, 36.
St. Louis Exposition (1904), =2=, 216.
Sainte-Beuve, C. A., =1=, 142.
Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Marquis of, =2=, 27.
Salter, C. C., =1=, 51.
Salter, W. M., =1=, 248, 346, =2=, 97.
_See Contents._
Salter, Mrs. W. M. (Mary Gibbens), =1=, 248.
San Francisco, earthquake at, =2=, 246 _ff._, 251, 256;
mentioned, 80, 81.
Sanctis, Professor di, =2=, 225.
Sand, George, and A. de Musset, =2=, 63;
mentioned, =1=, 106, 182, 183.
Santayana, George, _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_, =2=, 122-124;
_Life of Reason_, 234, 235;
mentioned, =1=, 335, =2=, 14, 121, 225.
_See Contents._
Sardou, Victorien, _Agnes_, =1=, 168.
Sargent, Epes, _Planchette_, reviewed by =J.=, =1=, 225 _n._
Sargent, John S., =1=, 303.
_Saturday Club, Early Years of the_. _See_ Emerson, Edward W.
Saxons, the, =1=, 86.
Scenery, part played by, in =J.='s spiritual experience, =2=, 174, 175.
Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von, =1=, 14.
Schiller, F. C. S., his article on =J.= in _Mind_, =2=, 65, 66;
_Studies in Humanism_, 270;
mentioned, 172, 186 _n._, 208, 230, 257, 267, 296, 300, 311, 313, 314, 337.
_See Contents._
Schiller, J. C. Friedrich von, =1=, 91, 141, 202.
Schinz, Herr, =2=, 337.
Schlegel, August W. von, =1=, 141.
Schlegel, Karl W. F. von, =1=, 141.
Schmidt, Heinrich J., _History of German Literature_, =1=, 141.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, =1=, 191, =2=, 293.
Schott, Dr. (Nauheim), =2=, 124, 128, 134, 157.
Schurman, Jacob G., =1=, 334, =2=, 166.
Scotland, =J.= strongly attracted by, =1=, 286.
Scott, Sir Walter, his _Journal_, =1=, 309.
Scripture, Edward W., =1=, 334.
Scudder, Samuel H., =1=, 31.
Sea, =J.='s views of traveling by, =1=, 58.
Seals, trained, =1=, 278.
Sécretan, Charles, =1=, 324.
Sedgwick, Arthur G., =1=, 320 and _n._, =2=, 10.
Sedgwick, Lucy (Mrs. Arthur G.), =1=, 320 and _n._
Sedgwick, Sara, =1=, 76 and _n._
And _see_ Darwin, Mrs. W. E.
Sedgwick, Theodora, =1=, 181, 291, 315, 317, 328, 331,
=2=, 151, 152, 191, 200, 207, 308.
_See Contents._
Selberg, "a swell young Jew," =1=, 112, 114, 115.
Semler, Dr., =1=, 87.
Seth, Andrew, =2=, 96, 116, 144.
And _see_ Pringle-Pattison, A. S.
Seth, James, =2=, 144.
Shakespeare:
H. Grimm on _Hamlet_, =1=, 111;
_As You Like It_, 144 _n._, 190;
at Stratford, =2=, 166;
mentioned, 330, 335, 336.
Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, on J. Wyman, =1=, 48;
_The Individual_, =2=, 153 and _n._, 154;
_Autobiography_, 325;
mentioned, =1=, 31, =2=, 258, 288.
_See Contents._
Shaw, G. Bernard, _Cæsar and Cleopatra_, =2=, 263;
mentioned, 330.
Shaw, Robert G., unveiling of St. Gaudens's monument to, =2=, 59-61;
mentioned, =1=, 43.
Sherman, William T., =1=, 56, 57.
Sidgwick, Henry, "Lecture against Lecturing," =2=, 12;
death of, 141;
mentioned, =1=, 229 _n._, 287, 290, 345, =2=, 50, 156.
Slattery, Charles L. _See Contents._
Smith, Adam, =1=, 283.
Smith, Norman K. _See Contents._
Smith, Paulina C., =2=, 106.
Smith, Pearsall, =1=, 287.
Snow, William F., quoted, on =J.= and the San Francisco
earthquake, =2=, 247 _n._
Snow, Mrs. W. F., =2=, 246.
Society for Psychical Research. _See_ Psychical Research, Society for.
Solomons, Leon M., death of, =2=, 119;
his character and work, 119, 120.
Sorbonne, the, =J.= declines appointment as exchange
professor at, =2=, 236 and _n._
Sorrento, to Amalfi, =2=, 221, 222.
Spain, misrule of, in Cuba, =2=, 73.
Spanish War, the, =2=, 73, 74.
Spannenberg, Frau, =1=, 85.
_Spectator, The_, =2=, 126.
Spelling reform, =J.='s attitude toward, =2=, 18, 19.
Spencer, Herbert, _Psychology_, =1=, 188;
_Data of Ethics_, 264;
mentioned, 143, 164, 191, 254.
Spinoza, Baruch, =1=, 283, =2=, 13.
Spirit-theory, the. _See_ Psychic phenomena.
Spiritualism. _See_ Psychic phenomena.
Spiritualists, and the Medical License bill, =2=, 68.
Springfield _Republican_, =2=, 125.
Stanford, Leland, =2=, 242, 244.
Stanford, Mrs. Leland, =1=, 242, 244.
Stanford, Leland, Jr.,=1=, 243.
Stanford University, =J.='s lectures at, =2=, 235, 240, 244 and _n._;
a miracle, 241;
its history, 242, 243;
what it might be made, 243, 244.
Stanley, Sir Henry M., =1=, 303.
Stanley, Lady, =1=, 303.
Starbuck, E. D., _Psychology of Religion_, =2=, 217.
_See Contents._
Stead, W. T., =2=, 276, 277.
Steffens, Heinrich, =1=, 141.
Stephen. Sir James Fitz-James, "Essay on Spirit-Rapping," =1=, 34 _n._
Stephen, Sir Leslie, _Utilitarians_, =2=, 152;
his letters, 176.
Steuben, Baron von, =1=, 5.
Storey, Moorfield, =1=, 109, =2=, 10.
_See Contents._
Stout, G. F., =2=, 47, 65.
Strasburg, =1=, 86, 87.
Stratford-on-Avon, and the Baconian theory, =2=, 166.
Strong, Charles A., =2=, 198, 225, 229, 230,
282, 295, 301, 309, 310, 315, 337.
_See Contents._
Stumpf, Carl, _Tonpsychologie_, =1=, 266, 267;
mentioned, 211, 212, 213, 216, 289.
_See Contents._
Sturgis, James, =1=, 184.
Style in philosophic writing, =2=, 217, 228, 229, 237,
244, 245, 257, 272, 281, 300.
Subjectivism, tendency to, =1=, 249.
Subliminal, Problem of the, =2=, 141, 149, 150, 212.
Success, worship of, =2=, 260.
Sully, James, =2=, 1 _n._, 225, 226, 218.
_See Contents._
"Supernatural" matters. _See_ Psychic phenomena.
Suttner, Baroness von, _Waffennieder_, =2=, 340.
Swedenborg, Emmanuel, influence of his works on H. James,
Senior, =1=, 12, 13, 14;
_Society of the Redeemed Form of Man_, quoted, 12 and _n._;
H. James, Senior's, essay on, 117;
mentioned, =2=, 40.
Switzerland, =1=, 322, 323, 327, 328, 336.
Sylvain, Mlle., =2=, 224.
Sylvain, M., =2=, 224.
Tappan, Mary, =2=, 200.
_See Contents._
Tappan, Mrs., =1=, 118.
Taylor, A. E., =2=, 208, 216, 281, 282.
Temple, Ellen, =1=, 38, 39, 51, =2=, 61, 81.
And _see_ Emmet, Mrs. Temple.
Temple, Henrietta, =1=, 39.
Temple, Katharine, =J.='s portrait of, =1=, 24;
mentioned, 36, 51, 74, 75.
_See Contents._
Temple, "Minny," the original of two of Henry James's heroines, =1=, 36;
=J.= quoted on, 36, 37;
her "madness," 38;
mentioned, 43, 51, 74, 75, 98.
Temple, Mrs. Robert (=J.='s aunt), =1=, 36.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, =2=, 276.
Teplitz, =1=, 133, 134, 137.
Thames, the, =1=, 287.
Thatness. _See_ Whatness.
Thaw, Henry, trial of, =2=, 264.
Thayer, Abbott, =2=, 276.
Thayer, Gerald, =2=, 275, 276.
Thayer, Joseph Henry, =1=, 323.
Thayer, Miriam, =1=, 323.
Thayer Expedition. _See_ Brazil, Agassiz's expedition to.
Thies, Louis, =1=, 107, 112, 157.
Thies, Miss, =1=, 116.
Thompson, Daniel G., =1=, 295.
Tieck, Ludwig, =1=, 141.
Tolstoy, Leo, _War and Peace_, =2=, 37, 40, 48;
and P. Bourget, 37, 38;
_Anna Karenina_, 41, 48;
and H. G. Wells, 316;
mentioned, 44, 45, 51, 52, 63.
Torquay, =2=, 167.
Townsend, Henry E., =1=, 122.
Truth, the, obscured by American philosophers, =2=, 237, 272, 337.
Tuck, Henry, =1=, 122, 124.
Tuckerman, Emily, =2=, 168.
Turgenieff, Ivan, =1=, 177, 182, 185.
Twain, Mark, =1=, 333, 341, 342, =2=, 264.
Tweedie, Mrs. Edmund, =1=, 36.
Tweedies, the, =1=, 117, 184.
Tychism, =2=, 204, 292.
Tychistic and pluralistic philosophy of pure experience, =2=, 187.
Union College, H. James, Senior, graduates at, =1=, 8.
_Unitarian Review_, Davidson's article in, =1=, 236.
Unitarianism (Boston), the "bloodless pallor" of, =1=, 236.
United States, =J.='s remarks on, =1=, 216, 217;
and the Philippines, =2=, 140, 141;
rushing to wallow in the mire of empire, 141;
manner of eating boiled eggs in, 188;
vocalization of people of, 189;
and England, 304, 305.
Upham, Miss, =1=, 34, 50.
Uphues, =1=, 345, 346.
Van Buren, "Elly," =1=, 70, 74, 75.
Van Rensselaer, Stephen, =1=, 3.
Venezuela Message, Cleveland's, =2=, 26 _ff._
Venus de Milo, =1=, 113.
Verne, Jules, _Tour of the World in Eighty Days_, =1=, 173.
Veronese, Paul, =1=, 90.
Verrall, Mrs. A. W. _See_ Mediums.
Vers-chez-les-Blanc, =1=, 320, 345, =2=, 48.
Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, =2=, 227.
Victoria, Queen, her Jubilee, =1=, 270.
Vienna, exhibition of French paintings at, =1=, 210.
Villari, Pasquale, =1=, 338, 339, 342.
Villari, Mrs., =1=, 338, 339, 342.
Vincent, George E., =2=, 41, 42.
Virchow, Rudolf, =1=, 72.
Vischer, F. T., Essays, =1=, 94;
_Aesthetik_, 94.
Viti, Signor da, =2=, 227.
Vivekananda, =2=, 144.
Voltaire, =1=, 144 _n._
Vulpian, A., =1=, 156.
Walcott, Henry P., =1=, 347, =2=, 10.
Waldstein, Charles, =1=, 274, =2=, 224.
_See Contents._
Walsh, Catherine (=J.='s 'Aunt Kate'), =1=, 41,
51, 60, 61, 70, 80, 81, 114, 118, 183, 218,
259, 280, 282, 285.
Walsh, Hugh, =1=, 8.
Walsh, Rev. Hugh, =1=, 8 _n._
Walsh, James (=J.='s maternal grandfather), =1=, 8.
Walsh, Mary, marries H. James, Senior, =1=, 8;
her ancestry, 8, 9.
And _see_ James, Mrs. William.
Walsh, Mrs. Mary (Robertson), =1=, 8.
Walston, Sir Charles. _See_ Waldstein, Charles.
Wambaugh, Eugene, =2=, 132.
Ward, James, =2=, 312, 313, 314, 315.
Ward, Samuel, =1=, 73.
Ward, Thomas W., on the Brazilian expedition, =1=, 59, 60, 65;
mentioned, 33.
_See Contents._
Ward, Dorothy, =2=, 166.
Ware, William R., =1=, 124, 153.
Waring, Daisy, =2=, 202.
Waring, George E., quoted, on Henry James, =1=, 184, 185.
Warner, Joseph B., =2=, 160, 233.
Warren, W. R., =2=, 233.
Washington, Booker T., _Up from Slavery_, =2=, 148;
mentioned, 60, 61.
Washington, Mrs. Booker T., at Ashfield, =2=, 199.
Washington, George, =1=, 5, 277.
Washington, State of, forest fires in, =2=, 80.
Wells, H. G., _Utopia_, =2=, 230, 231;
_Anticipations_, 231;
_Mankind in the Making_, 231;
=J.='s appreciation of, 231;
_Kipps_, 241;
"Two Studies in Disappointment," 259, 260;
_First and Last Things_, 316;
the Tolstoy of the English World, 316;
mentioned, 246, 257, 318.
_See Contents._
Werner, G., =2=, 242.
Whatness and thatness, =1=, 244, 245.
"White man's burden," cant about the, =2=, 88.
Whitman, Henry, death of, =2=, 156;
mentioned, =1=, 298, 302.
Whitman, Sarah (Mrs. Henry), her character and
accomplishments, =1=, 302, =2=, 205, 206;
last illness and death, 204, 205, 207;
mentioned, =1=, 309 _n._, 348, =2=, 156, 256.
_See Contents._
Whitman, Walt, =2=, 123.
Whole, Idolatry of the, =1=, 246, 247.
Wilkinson, Emma. _See_ Pertz, Mrs. Emma.
Wilkinson, J. J. Garth, =1=, 135 _n._
William II of Germany, his message to Kruger, =2=, 27, 28.
Wilmarth, Mrs., =2=, 50.
Witmer, Lightner, =2=, 320.
Wolff, Christian, =1=, 264.
Woodberry, George E., _The Heart of Man._ =2=, 89, 90.
Woodbridge, F. J. E., _Journal_, =2=, 244.
_See Contents._
Worcester, Elwood, _The Living World_, =2=, 318.
Wordsworth, W., _The Excursion_, =1=, 168, 169.
Wright, Chauncy, and =J.=, =1=, 152 _n._;
mentioned, =2=, 233.
Wundt, Wilhelm M., as a type of the German professor, =1=, 263;
his _System_, 333;
mentioned, 119, 215, 216, 224, 264, 295, =2=, 321.
Wyman, Jeffries, influence as a teacher, =1=, 47;
C. W. Eliot and N. S. Shaler quoted on, 47, 48;
=J.= quoted on, 48, 49;
mentioned, 35, 37, 50, 71, 72, 150, 155, 160, 163, 170.
Yale University, =1=, 231.
Yankees, a German lady's idea of, =1=, 89, 90.
Yoga practices, =2=, 252 _ff._
Yosemite Valley, =2=, 81.
Zennig's restaurant (Berlin), =1=, 112, 113.
_Zion's Herald_, Emerson number of, =2=, 197.
Zola, Émile, _Germinal_, =1=, 287;
mentioned, =2=, 67, 73.
MCGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS
GRAPHIC ARTS BLDG.
BOSTON
* * * * *
The following typographical errors have been corrected by the etext
transcriber:
mutally encouraging=>mutually encouraging
Malvida von Meysenbug, Stuttgart, 1877=>Malwida von Meysenbug,
Stuttgart, 1877
Meysenbug, Malvida von, _Memoiren einer Idealistin_=>Meysenbug, Malwida
von, _Memoiren einer Idealistin_
Rome eems to beat=>Rome seems to beat
Qu'on est bien dans çe fauteuil=>Qu'on est bien dans ce fauteuil
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "It seems to me that psychology is like physics before Galileo's
time--not a single elementary law yet caught a glimpse of. A great
chance for some future psychologue to make a greater name than Newton's;
but who then will read the books of this generation? Not many, I trow.
Meanwhile they must be written." To James Sully, July 8, 1890.
[2] President Eliot, in a memorandum already referred to (vol. 1, p. 32,
note), calls attention to these courses and remarks: "These frequent
changes were highly characteristic of James's whole career as a teacher.
He changed topics, textbooks and methods frequently, thus utilizing his
own wide range of reading and interest and his own progress in
philosophy, and experimenting from year to year on the mutual contacts
and relations with his students." James continued to be titular
Professor of Psychology until 1897, just as he had been nominally
Assistant Professor of Physiology for several years during which the
original and important part of his teaching was psychological. His title
never indicated exactly what he was teaching.
[3] At this meeting he delivered a presidential address "On the Knowing
of Things Together," a part of which is reprinted in _The Meaning of
Truth_, p. 43, under the title, "The Tigers in India." _Vide_, also,
_Collected Essays and Reviews_.
[4] In a brief letter to the _Harvard Crimson_ (Jan. 9, 1896), James
urged the right and duty of individuals to stand up for their opinions
publicly during such crises, even though in opposition to the
administration. Mr. Rhodes, in his _History of the United States,
1877-1896_, makes the following observation: "Cleveland, in his chapter
on the 'Venezuelan Boundary Controversy,' rates the un-Americans who
lauded 'the extreme forbearance and kindness of England.' ... The
reference ... need trouble no one who allows himself to be guided by two
of Cleveland's trusted servants and friends. Thomas F. Bayard, Secretary
of State during the first administration, and actual ambassador to Great
Britain, wrote in a private letter on May 25, 1895, 'There is no
question now open between the United States and Great Britain that needs
any but frank, amicable and just treatment.' Edward J. Phelps, his first
minister to England, in a public address on March 30, 1896, condemned
emphatically the President's Venezuela policy." See Rhodes, _History_,
vol. VIII, p. 454; also p. 443 _et seq._
[5] "The Evolution of the Summer Resort."
[6] "Address of the President before the Society for Psychical
Research." Proc. of the (Eng.) Soc. for Psych. Res. 1896, vol. XII, pp.
2-10; also in _Science_, 1896, N. S., vol. IV, pp. 881-888.
[7] From the last paragraph of Cleveland's Venezuela message.
[8] In 1910--during his final illness, in fact--James fulfilled this
promise. See "A Pluralistic Mystic," included in Memories and Studies;
also letter of June 25, 1910, p. 348 _infra_.
[9] Cf. William James's unsigned review of Blood's _Anæsthetic
Revelation_ in the _Atlantic Monthly_, 1874, vol. XXXIV, p. 627.
[10] James always did a reasonable share of college committee work,
especially for the committee of his own department. But although he had
exercised a determining influence in the selection of every member of
the Philosophical Department who contributed to its fame in his time
(except Professor Palmer, who was his senior in service), he never
consented to be chairman of the Department. He attended the weekly
meetings of the whole Faculty for any business in which he was
concerned; otherwise irregularly. He spoke seldom in Faculty.
Occasionally he served on special committees. He usually formed an
opinion of his own quite quickly, but his habitual tolerance in matters
of judgment showed itself in good-natured patience with discussion--this
despite the fact that he often chafed at the amount of time consumed.
"Now although I happen accidentally to have been on all the committees
which have had to do with the proposed reform, and have listened to the
interminable Faculty debates last winter, I disclaim all powers or right
to speak in the _name_ of the majority. Members of our dear Faculty have
a way of discovering reasons fitted exclusively for their idiosyncratic
use, and though voting with their neighbors, will often do so on
incommunicable grounds. This is doubtless the effect of much learning
upon originally ingenious minds; and the result is that the abundance of
different points and aspects which a simple question ends by presenting,
after a long Faculty discussion, beggars both calculation beforehand and
enumeration after the fact."--"The Proposed Shortening of the College
Course." _Harvard Monthly_, Jan., 1891.
[1] "I _loved_ Child more than any man I know." Sept. 12, '96.
[11] Eight lectures on "Abnormal Mental States" were delivered at the
Lowell Institute in Boston, but were never published. Their several
titles were "Dreams and Hypnotism," "Hysteria," "Automatisms," "Multiple
Personality," "Demoniacal Possession," "Witchcraft," "Degeneration,"
"Genius." In a letter to Professor Howison (Apr. 5, 1897) James said,
"In these lectures I did not go into psychical research so-called, and
although the subjects were decidedly morbid, I tried to shape them
towards optimistic and hygienic conclusions, and the audience regarded
them as decidedly anti-morbid in their tone."
[12] _Demon Possession and Allied Themes_, by John C. Nevius.
[13] _The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy_ had
just appeared.
[14] The Address has been reprinted in _Memories and Studies_.
[15] For a short while MacMonnies's Bacchante stood in the court of the
Boston Public Library.
[16] These words were not employed in public, but were once applied to a
well-known professor in a private letter.
[17] A full report of the speech made at the Legislative hearing was
printed in the _Banner of Light_, Mar. 12, 1898. The letter to the
Boston _Transcript_ in 1894 appeared in the issue of Mar. 24.
[18] _James J. Putnam to William James_
BOSTON, _Mar. 9, 1898_.
DEAR WILLIAM,--We have thought and talked a good deal about the subject
of your speech in the course of the last week. I prepared with infinite
labor a letter intended for the _Transcript_ of last Saturday, but it
was not a weighty contribution and I am rather glad it was too late to
get in. I think it is generally felt among the best doctors that your
position was the liberal one, and that it would be a mistake to try to
exact an examination of the mind-healers and Christian Scientists. On
the other hand, I am afraid most of the doctors, even including myself,
do not have any great feeling of fondness for them, and we are more in
the way of seeing the fanatical spirit in which they proceed and the
harm that they sometimes do than you are. Of course they do also good
things which would remain otherwise not done, and that is the important
point, and sincere fanatics are almost always, and in this case I think
certainly, of real value.
Always affectionately,
JAMES J. P.
[19] That is, there was here no path to follow, only "blazes" on the
trees.
[20] The housekeeper at the Putnam-Bowditch "shanty."
[21] Photograph of a boy and girl standing on a rock which hangs dizzily
over a great precipice above the Yosemite Valley.
[22] G. E. Woodberry: _The Heart of Man_; 1899.
[23] James's house was number 95, his mother-in-law's number 107.
[24] Augusta was the house-maid; Dinah, a bull-terrier.
[25] It will be recalled that Davidson had a summer School of Philosophy
at his place called Glenmore on East Hill, and that East Hill is at one
end of Keene Valley. See also James's essay on Thomas Davidson, "A
Knight Errant of the Intellectual Life," in _Memories and Studies_.
[26] A gift which provided for building the "Harvard Union."
[27] "You have never spent a night under our roof, or eaten a meal in
our house!" This fictitious charge had become the recognized theme of
frequent elaborations.
[28] _The World and the Individual_, vol. I. Mrs. Evans was inclined to
contend for Royce's philosophy.
[29] The name of an American claret which his correspondent had
"discovered" and in which it also pleased James to find merit.
[30] The second volume of _The World and the Individual_. (Gifford
Lectures at the University of Aberdeen.)
[31] _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion._ New York, 1900.
[32] _Memoiren einer Idealistin_, by Malwida von Meysenbug, Stuttgart,
1877.
[33] _Recollections of My Mother_ [Anne Jean Lyman], by Susan I. Lesley,
Boston, 1886.
[34] Sister Nivedita.
[35] Booker T. Washington's _Up from Slavery_.
[36] "Frederick Myers's Services to Psychology." Reprinted in _Memories
and Studies_.
[37] _The Individual, A Study of Life and Death_. New York, 1900. This
letter is reproduced from the _Autobiography_ of N. S. Shaler, where it
has already been published.
[38] Mrs. O. W. Holmes had used the following translation of an epitaph
in the Greek Anthology:--
A shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast
Bids thee take sail.
Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.
[39] "And base things of the world and things which are despised hath
God chosen, yes, and things which are not, to bring to naught things
that are."
[40] Kitchen.
[41] Although James had received the usual hint that Harvard intended to
confer an honorary degree upon him, he had absented himself from both
the honors and fatigues of Commencement time. The next year he was
present, and the LL.D. was conferred.
[42] "I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have
read in years has so excited and stimulated my thought. Four years ago I
couldn't understand him at all, though I felt his power. I am sure that
that philosophy has a great future. It breaks through old _cadres_ and
brings things into a solution from which new crystals can be got." (From
a letter to Flournoy, Jan. 27, 1902.)
[43] The Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality.
[44] There had been a celebration of Mrs. Agassiz's eightieth birthday
at Radcliffe College, of which she was President.
[45] On the Amazon in 1865-66.
[46] An 8-page _Syllabus_ printed for the use of his students in the
course on the "Philosophy of Nature" which James was giving during the
first half of the college year.
[47] _Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death_, by F. W. H.
Myers.
[48] "The piles driven into the quicksand are too few for such a
structure. But it is essential as a preliminary attempt at methodizing,
and will doubtless keep a very honorable place in history." To F. C. S.
Schiller, April 8, 1903.
[49] Eusapia Paladino, the Italian "medium." The physical manifestations
which occurred during her trance had excited much discussion.
[50] The name of a student-society.
[51] The horse.
[52] W. E. B. Du Bois: _The Souls of Black Folk_.
[53] These five lectures were delivered at the summer school at
"Glenmore," which Thomas Davidson had founded. Their subject was
"Radical Empiricism as a Philosophy"; but they were neither written out
nor reported.
[54] _Aristotelian Society Proceedings_, vol. IV, pp. 87-110.
[55] James's answers are printed in italics.
[56] "How Two Minds Can Know One Thing," _Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, 1905, vol. II, p. 176.
[57] "Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?" _Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, 1905, vol. II, p. 235.
[58] This address, "La Notion de Conscience," was printed first in the
_Archives de Psychologie_, 1905, vol. V, p. 1. It will also be found in
the _Essays in Radical Empiricism_.
[59] "My own desire to see Roosevelt president here for a limited term
of years was quenched by a speech he made at the Harvard Union a couple
of years ago." (To D. S. Miller, Jan. 2, 1908.)
[60] _The Life of Reason._ New York, 1905.
[61] He had been "sounded" regarding an appointment as Harvard Exchange
Lecturer at the Sorbonne, and had at first been inclined to accept.
[62] Busse, _Leib und Seele, Geist und Körper_; Heymans, _Einführung in
die Metaphysik_.
[63] _Vide Letters of Henry James_, vol. II, p. 43.
[64] "Also outside 'addresses,' impossible to refuse. Damn them! Four in
this Hotel [in San Francisco] where I was one of four orators who spoke
for two hours on 'Reason and Faith,' before a Unitarian Association of
Pacific Coasters. Consequence: _gout_ on waking this morning! _Unitarian
gout_--was such a thing ever heard of?" (To T. S. Perry, Feb. 6, 1906.)
[65] Dr. Snow kindly wrote an account of the afternoon that he spent in
James's company in the city and it may here be given in part.
"When I met Professor James in San Francisco early in the afternoon of
the day of the earthquake, he was full of questions about my personal
feelings and reactions and my observations concerning the conduct and
evidences of self-control and fear or other emotions of individuals with
whom I had been closely thrown, not only in the medical work which I
did, but in the experiences I had on the fire-lines in dragging hose and
clearing buildings in advance of the dynamiting squads.
"I described to him an incident concerning a great crowd of people who
desired to make a short cut to the open space of a park at a time when
there was danger of all of them not getting across before certain
buildings were dynamited. Several of the city's police had stretched a
rope across this street and were volubly and vigorously combating the
onrush of the crowd, using their clubs rather freely. Some one cut the
rope. At that instant, a lieutenant of the regular army with three
privates appeared to take up guard duty. The lieutenant placed his guard
and passed on. The three soldiers immediately began their beat, dividing
the width of the street among themselves. The crowd waited, breathless,
to see what the leaders of the charge upon the police would now do. One
man started to run across the street and was knocked down cleverly by
the sentry, with the butt of his gun. This sentry coolly continued his
patrol and the man sat up, apparently thinking himself wounded, then
scuttled back into the crowd, drawing from every one a laugh which was
evidently with the soldiers. Immediately, the crowd began to melt away
and proceed up a side street in the direction laid out for them.
"In connection with this story Professor James casually mentioned that
not long before, where there were no soldiers or police, he had run on
to a crowd stringing a man to a lamp-post because of his endeavor to rob
the body of a woman of some rings. At the time, I did not learn other
details of this particular incident, us Professor James was so full of
the many scenes he had witnessed and was particularly intent on
gathering from me impressions of what I had seen. I suppose he had
similarly been gathering observations from others whom he met,
"An incident which struck me as humorous at the time was that he should
have gathered up a box of "Zu-zu gingersnaps," and, as I recall it, some
small pieces of cheese. I do not now recall his comment on where he had
obtained these, but there was some humorous incident connected with the
transaction, and he was quite happy and of opinion that he was enjoying
a nourishing meal.
"Professor James told me vividly and in a few words the circumstances of
the damage done by the earthquake at Stanford University, and I left him
to make arrangements for going down to the University that night to
provide for my family. As it turned out, Professor James returned to the
campus before I did, and true to his promise thoughtfully hunted up Mrs.
Snow and told her that he had seen me and that I was alive and well."
[66] James had not used a type-writer since the time when his eyes
troubled him in the seventies. The machine now had the fascination of a
strange toy again.
[67] He did mistake, as Mr. Chesterton's subsequent utterances showed.
[68] As to "Jimmy," _vide_ vol. I, p. 301 _supra_.
[69] _Cf._ pp. 16, 17, and 220 _supra_.
[70] Dr. Miller writes: "These four evenings at the Faculty Club were
singularly interesting occasions. One was a meeting of the Philosophical
Club of New York, whose members, about a dozen in number, were of
different institutions. The others were impromptu meetings arranged
either by members of the Department of Philosophy at Columbia or a wider
group. At one of them Mr. James sat in a literal circle of chairs, with
professors of Biology, Mathematics, etc., as well as Philosophy, and
answered in a particularly friendly and charming way the frank
objections of a group that were by no means all opponents. At the close,
when he was thanked for his patience, he remarked in his humorously
disclaiming manner that he was not accustomed to be taken so seriously.
Privately he remarked how pleasantly such an unaffected, easy meeting
contrasted with a certain formal and august dinner club, the exaggerated
amusement of the diners at each other's jokes, etc."
[71] His resignation did not take effect until the end of the Academic
year, although his last meeting with the class to which he was giving a
"half-course," occurred at the mid-year.
[72] "La Notion de Conscience," _Archives de Psychologie_, vol. V, No.
17, June, 1905. Later included in _Essays in Radical Empiricism_.
[73] "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth." Included in _Selected Essays
and Reviews_.
[74] The story of the Committee for Mental Hygiene is interestingly told
in Part V of the 4th Edition of C. W. Beers's _A Mind that Found
Itself_. Several letters from James are incorporated in the story.
_Vide_ pp. 339 and 340; also pp. 320, 352.
[75] Mrs. James's niece, Rosamund Gregor, age 6.
[76] _Memories and Studies_, pp. 286 _et seq._
[77] The reader need hardly be reminded that new meanings and
associations have attached themselves to this word in particular.
[78] _Talks to Teachers_, p. 265.
[79] Proceedings of (English) S.P.R., vol. XXIII, pp. 1-121. Also, Proc.
American S.P.R., vol. III, p. 470.
[80] _L'Évolution Créatrice._
[81] "A Word More about Truth," reprinted in _Collected Essays and
Reviews_.
[82] Learned public.
[83] Superficial stuff.
[84] The lectures were published as _A Pluralistic Universe_.
[85] New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908.
[86] "The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher," reprinted in _Memories
and Studies_ under the title "Final Impressions of a Psychical
Researcher."
[87] By Frank Harris; New York: 1909.
[88] See the footnote on p. 39 _supra_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Letters of William James, Vol. II" ***
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