PARIS,Nov. 22, 1882.
Dear H.,—Found at Hottinguer's thisA.M.your letter with all the enclosures—and a wail you had sent to Berlin. Also six letters from my wife and seven or eight others, not counting papers and magazines. I will mail back yours and father's letter to me. Alice [Mrs. W. J.] speaks of father's indubitable improvement in strength, but our sister Alice apparently is somewhat run down.—Paris looks delicious—I shall try to get settled as soon as possible and meanwhile feel as if the confusion of life was recommencing. I saw in Germany all the men I cared to see and talked with most of them. With three or four I had a really nutritious time. The trip has amply paid for itself. I found third-classNichtraucheralmost always empty and perfectly comfortable. The great use of such experiences is less the definite information you gain from anyone, than a sort of solidification of your own foothold on life. Nowhere did I see a university which seems to do forallits students anything like what Harvard does. Our methods throughout are better. It is only in the select "Seminaria" (private classes) that a few German students making researches with the professor gain something from him personally which his genius alone can give. I certainly got a most distinct impression of my owninformationin regard tomodernphilosophic matters being broader than that of any one I met, and our Harvard post of observation being more cosmopolitan. Delbœuf in Liège was an angel and much thebest teacher I've seen....[67]"The Century," with your very good portrait, etc., was at Hottinguer's thisA.M., sent by my wife. I shall read it presently. I'm off now to see if I can get your leather trunk, sent from London, arrested by inundations, and ordered to be returned to Paris. I never needed its contents a second. And in your little American valise and my flabby black hand-bag and shawl-straps and a small satchel, I carried not only everything I used, but collected a whole library of books in Leipsig, some pieces of Venetian glass in their balky bolsters of seaweed, a quart bottle of eau de Cologne, and a lot of other acquisitions. I feel remarkably tough now, and fairly ravenous for my psychologic work. Address Hottinguer's.
W. J.
James's mother had died during the preceding winter. Now, just after his arrival in Paris, he received news that his father was dangerously ill.
He went to London immediately, with the intention of getting home as soon as possible. On arriving at his brother Henry's lodgings, he found that Henry had already sailed. He also received a despatch advising him that the danger was not immediate and that he should wait. He remained, but with misgivings which the next news intensified.
Bolton St., London,Dec. 14, 1882.
Darling old Father,—Two letters, one from my Alice last night, and one from Aunt Kate to Harry just now, havesomewhat dispelled the mystery in which the telegrams left your condition; and although their news is several days earlier than the telegrams, I am free to suppose that the latter report only an aggravation of the symptoms the letters describe. It is far more agreeable to think of this than of some dreadful unknown and sudden malady.
We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you've given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten; you are here left alone, and on the other side, let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for you to join her. If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing. Only, if you are still in possession of your normal consciousness, I should like to see you once again before we part. I stayed here only in obedience to the last telegram, and am waiting now for Harry—who knows the exact state of my mind, and who will know yours—to telegraph again what I shall do. Meanwhile, my blessed old Father, I scribble this line (which may reach you though I should come too late), just to tell you how full of the tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last few days been filled. In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the present soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I'm sure there's a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating,—so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence. You need be in no anxiety about your literary remains. I will see them welltaken care of, and that your words shall not suffer for being concealed. At Paris I heard that Milsand, whose name you may remember in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" and elsewhere, was an admirer of the "Secret of Swedenborg," and Hodgson told me your last book had deeply impressed him. So will it be; especially, I think, if a collection ofextractsfrom your various writings were published, after the manner of the extracts from Carlyle, Ruskin, & Co. I have long thought such a volume would be the best monument to you.—As for us; we shall live on each in his way,—feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory. We will stand by each other and by Alice, try to transmit the torch in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as you. As for myself, I know what trouble I've given you at various times through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up, I shall learn more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in superintending the development of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show how mysympathywith you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to fade—and not for the sake of regrets.—As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, Ican'tsay anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if thatweretrue, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don't see you again—Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your
WILLIAM.
The elder Henry James died on the nineteenth of December. A cablegram was sent to London; and on learning of his father's death, James wrote a letter to his wife from which the following extract is taken.
...Father's boyhood up in Albany, Grandmother's house, the father and brothers and sister, with their passions and turbulent histories, his burning, amputation and sickness, his college days and ramblings, his theological throes, his engagement and marriage and fatherhood, his finding more and more of the truths he finally settled down in, his travels in Europe, the days of the old house in New York and all the men I used to see there, at last his quieter motion down the later years of life in Newport, Boston and Cambridge, with his friends and correspondents about him, and his books more and more easily brought forth—how long, how long all these things were in the living, but how short their memory now is! What remains is a few printed pages, us and our children and some incalculable modifications of other people's lives, influenced this day or that by what he said or did. For me, the humor, the good spirits, the humanity, the faith in the divine, and the sense of his right to have a say about the deepest reasons of the universe, are what will stay by me. I wish I could believe I should transmit some of them to our babes. We all of us have some of his virtues and some of his shortcomings. Unlike the cool, dry thin-edged men who now abound, he was full of the fumes of theur-sprünglichhuman nature; things turbid, more than he could formulate, wrought within him and made his judgments of rejection of so much of what was brought [before him] seem like revelations aswell as knock-down blows.... I hope that rich soil of human nature will not become more rare!...
Two months later James said in a letter to Mrs. Gibbens: "It is singular how I'm learning every day now how the thought of his comment on my experiences has hitherto formed an integral part of my daily consciousness, without my having realized it at all. I interrupt myself incessantly now in the old habit of imagining what he will say when I tell him this or that thing I have seen or heard."
James remained in London until mid-February of 1883, and took advantage of the opportunity to see more of certain men there—among them Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, Croom Robertson, Frederick Pollock, Leslie Stephen, Carveth Reid, and Francis Galton. His eyes were troubling him again, but he did some writing on psychology. After paying another short visit to Paris, he sailed for home in March.
Writing the "Principles of Psychology"—Psychical Research—The Place at Chocorua—The Irving Street House—The Paris Psychological Congress of 1889
JAMEShad now found his feet, professionally, as well as in other ways. He strode ahead on the next stage of his journey with a firmness of which he would have been incapable in the seventies, and carried a heavy burden of work forward, with never a long halt and without ever setting it down, until he had finished the two large volumes of the "Principles of Psychology" in 1890. The previous decade had counted steadily for inward clarification, for health and for confidence. He was no longer harassed by serious illnesses and pursued by the spectre of possible invalidism. Marriage, parenthood—these immense events in a man's spiritual journey—had happened for him within the last four years and had brought him new loves and ambitions. He was no longer perplexed by misgivings about his aims and abilities, but had arrived at the conception of his treatise on psychology and had begun to formulate its chapters. He had become a very successful teacher, and might fairly have suspected himself of being an inspiring one. His work was beginning to be well known outside the halls of his own University.
It is not the purpose of this book to trace the origin of his ideas or their influence on contemporary discussion. But any reader who will glance at Professor Perry's annotated"List" of his published work may see that he had written important papers by 1883, and that most of what was original in his psychology must by then have been present to his mind. During the visit he had just made to Europe, he had got a personal impression of the transatlantic colleagues whose writings had interested him especially, and had spent many hours in the company of certain among them with whom he found himself to be particularly in sympathy. Thus he had gained a bracing sense of comradeship with the men who were collaborating in his field. Last of all, he had brought home with him a happy conviction that the most propitious place for him to teach and write his book in was the philosophical department of his own University.
So far as the "textbook on Psychology" was concerned, however, he still underestimated the amount of original investigation and thought which his instinct for "concrete" reality was to exact of him. Perhaps also he made too little allowance for the inadequacies of current laboratory methods and of the existing literature of the subject. Helmholtz and Wundt had already published important reports from their laboratories in Germany; but psychology was still generally considered to be an inductive science, which achieved its purposes by introspection and description, and which had no very broad connection with physiology nor many laboratory methods of its own. James had still to help make a modern science of it by his own immense effort. He may perhaps be said to have set to work when he offered the course on "The Relation between Physiology and Psychology" to graduate students in 1875, and made the class take part in experiments which he arranged in a room in the Lawrence Scientific School building.[68]
Thus with teaching, experimenting, and occasionally writing out his conclusions as he went along, he ploughed his way through his subject. The triple process is familiar enough today to most men of science. But James and the majority of his contemporaries had been trained differently or not at all; and their generation, following a few great leaders like Pasteur, Darwin and Helmholtz, had to establish new standards of criticism and new methods of inquiry in every department of science. When the "Psychology" was drawing to its completion, James wrote two sentences about his difficulties to his brother Henry. They might equally well have been written at any other time during the eighties. "I have," he said, "to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. It is like walking through the densest brush-wood."
There was one peculiarly stubborn and irreducible class of facts which he took up and gave much thought to during this period.
As early as 1869 he had recognized the desirability of examining the class of phenomena that are popularly called psychic[69]in a critical and modern spirit. This was not because he was in the least impressed by the lucubrations of the kind of mind which can be well described, in Macaulay's phrase, as "utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition." But an instinctive "love of sportsmanlike fair play" was stirred in him by the indifference with which menwho professed to be students of nature,[70]and particularly scientists whose prime concern was with our mental life, usually declined to examine phenomena which have occurred in every known human race and generation. He was in cordial sympathy with the announced intention of the Society for Psychical Research to investigate the abnormal and "supernormal" occurrences. He referred aptly to such occurrences as "wild facts," having as yet no scientific "stall or pigeon-hole."[71]Above all, he was conscious, from the beginning, of the proximity and possible relevance to his psychological and philosophical problems of this large body of unanalyzed material.
Most people cannot approach such matters without emotional bias. The atmosphere in which the public discussion of them goes on is still poisoned by superstition and clouded by prejudice. No scientific man involves himself in such inquiries, even now, without the certitude that hisstatements will be misconstrued by some of his professional brethren, and that his name will be taken in vain by newspapers and charlatans. James recognized all this, but saw in it no excuse for avoiding the subject; rather, a reason for examining it in an unprejudiced spirit and for avowing his conclusions openly.
The English Society for Psychical Research had been founded in 1882. In 1884 James became a corresponding member and concerned himself actively in organizing an American society of the same name in Boston. He made contributions to the "Proceedings" of this society during the six years of its existence; and, when it amalgamated with the English Society in 1890, he became a Vice-President of the latter. With the exception of a term during which he served as its President (in 1894-95), he continued to be a Vice-President of the S. P. R. until his death, and occasionally published through its "Proceedings."
In the eighties he took up his share of the drudgery which was involved in investigating alleged cases of apparition, thought-transference, and mediumship. For one entire winter he and Professor G. H. Palmer attended "cabinet séances" every Saturday without discovering anything that they could report as other than fraudulent. But in the following year he got upon the track of the now famous Mrs. Piper, and he made his first report on her trance-state to the S. P. R. in 1886. After many tests and trials he was unable to "resist the conviction that knowledge appeared in her trances which she had never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, ears and wits." Withholding his acceptance from the spirit-message hypothesis, he added: "What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not a glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge Ican see no escape."[72]He continued to find time for the investigation of other cases, and could sometimes console himself by laughing over expeditions which were quite fruitless of interesting result. A few sentences from letters addressed to Mrs. James in 1888, reporting an adventure with Richard Hodgson in New York, will serve as illustration:—
"[Apr. 6.] Hodgson and I started after our baggage arrived, to find Mr. B——, who, you may have seen by the papers, is making a scandal by having given himself over (hand and foot) to a medium, 'Madam D——,' who does most extraordinarily described physical performances. We found the old girl herself, a type for Alexandre Dumas, obese, wicked, jolly, intellectual, with no end of go and animal spirits, who entertained us for an hour, gave us an appointment for a sitting on Monday, and asked us to come and see Mr. B. tonight. What will come of it all I don't know. It will be baffling, I suppose, like everything else of that kind."
"[Apr. 7.] Mr. B. and Mrs. D. were 'too tired' to see us last night! I suspect that will be the case next Monday. It is the knowing thing to do under the circumstances. But that woman is one with whom one would fallwildlyin love, if in love at all—she is such a fat,fatold villain...."
"[Apr. 24th.] In bed at 11.30, after the most hideously inept psychical night, in Charleston, over a much-praised female medium who fraudulently played on the guitar. A plague take all white-livered, anæmic, flaccid, weak-voiced Yankee frauds! Give me a full blooded red-lipped villain like dear old D.—when shall I look upon her like again?"
In 1889 James undertook the labor of conducting the "Census of Hallucinations" in America. The census sought to discover, from lists of people selected at random,how many of them, when in good health and awake, had ever heard a voice, seen a form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for. James received about seven thousand answers to the inquiries that were sent out in America; and after he had digested and reported them, the results turned out to be in remarkable conformity with the returns from other parts of the world. Some of James's own deductions from the returns will be found in the essay, "What Psychical Research has Accomplished."[73]Among other things, the census showed apparitions corresponding with a distant event as occurring more than four hundred times oftener than could be expected from a calculation of chances.
After this task had been completed, he usually avoided spending time in personal investigations.
KEENEVALLEY,Aug. 5, 1883ADIRONDACKS.
My dear Monsieur Renouvier,—My silence has been so protracted that I fear you must have wondered what its reasons could be. Only the old ones!—much to do, and little power to do it, obliging procrastination. You will doubtless have heard from the Pillons of my safe return home. I have spent the interval in the house of my mother-in-law in Cambridge, trying to do some work in the way of psychologic writing before the fatal day should arrive whenthe College bell, summoningmeas well as my colleagues to the lecture-room, should make literary work almost impossible. Although my bodily condition, thanks to my winter abroad, has been better than in many years at a corresponding period, what I succeeded in accomplishing was well-nigh zero. I floundered round in the morasses of the theory of cognition,—the Object and the Ego,—tore up almost each day what I had written the day before, and although I am inwardly, of course, more aware than I was before of where the difficulties of the subject lie, outwardly I have hardly any manuscript to show for my pains. Your unparalleled literary fecundity is a perfect wonder to me. You should return pious thanks to the one or many gods who had a hand in your production, not only for endowing you with so clear a head, but for giving you so admirable a working temperament. The most rapid piece of literary work I ever did was completed ten days ago, and sent to "Mind," where it will doubtless soon appear. I had promised to give three lectures at a rather absurd little "Summer School of Philosophy," which has flourished for four or five years past in the little town of Concord near Boston, and which has an audience of from twenty to fifty persons, including the lecturers themselves; and, finding at the last moment that I could do nothing with my much meditated subject of the Object and the Ego, I turned round and lectured "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,"[74]and wrote the substance of the lectures out immediately after giving them—the whole occupying six days. I hope you may read the paper some time and approve it—though it is out of the current of your own favorite topics and consequently hardly a proper candidate for the honours of translation in the "Critique."
I understand now why no really good classic manual of psychology exists; why all that do exist only treat of particular points and chapters with any thoroughness. It is impossible to write one at present, so infinitely more numerous are the difficulties of the task than the means of their solution. Every chapter bristles with obstructions that refer one to the next ten years of work for their mitigation.
With all this I have done very little consecutive reading. I have not yet got at your historic survey in the "Critique Religieuse," for which my brain nevertheless itches. But I have read your articles apropos of Fouillée, and found them—the latest one especially—admirable for clearness and completeness of statement. Surely nothing like them has ever been written—no such stripping of the question down to its naked essentials. Those who, like Fouillée, have the intuition of the Absolute Unity, will of course not profit by them or anything else. Why can all others view their own beliefs aspossiblyonly hypotheses—theyonly not? Why does the Absolute Unity make its votaries so much moreconceitedat having attained it, than any other supposed truth does? This inner sense of superiority to all antagonists gives Fouillée hisfougueand adds to his cleverness, and no doubt increases immensely the effectiveness of his writing over the average reader's mind. But it also makes him careless and liable to overshoot the mark.
I have just been interrupted by a visit from Noah Porter, D.D., President of Yale College, whose bulky work on "The Human Intellect" you may have in your library, possibly. An American college president is a very peculiar type of character, partly man of business, partly diplomatist, partly clergyman, and partly professor of metaphysics, armed with great authority and influence if his college is an important one—which Yale is; and Porteris the paragon of the type—bonhomme et rusé, learned and simple, kindhearted and sociable, yet possessed of great decision and obstinacy. He is over seventy, but comes every summer here to the woods to refresh himself by long mountain walks and life in "camp," sleeping on a bed of green boughs before a great fire in the open air. He looks like a farmer or a fisherman, and there is no sort of human being who does not immediately feel himself entirely at home in his company.
I have been here myself just a week. The virgin forest comes close to our house, and the diversity of walks through it, the brooks and the ascensions of hilltops are infinite. I doubt if there be anything like it in Europe. Your mountains are grander, but you have nowhere this carpet of absolutely primitive forest, with its indescribably sweet exhalations, spreading in every direction unbroken. I shall stay here doing hardly any work till late in September. I need to lead a purely animal life for at least two months to carry me through the teaching year. My wife and two children are here, all well. I would send you her photograph and mine, save that hers—the only one I have—is too bad to send to anyone, and my own are for the moment exhausted. I find myself counting the years till my next visit to Europe becomes possible. Then it shall occur under more cheerful circumstances, if possible; and I shall stay the full fifteen months instead of only six. As I look back now upon the winter, I find the strongest impression I received was that of the singularly artificial, yet deeply vital and soundly healthy, character of the English social and political system as it now exists. It is one of the mostbizarreoutbirths of time, one of the most abnormal, in certain ways, and yet one of the most successful. I know nothing that so much confirms your philosophy as this spectacleof an accumulation of individual initiativesall preserved. I hope both you and the Pillons are well. I shall never forget their friendliness, nor the spirit of human kindness that filled their household. I am ashamed to ask for letters from you, when after so long a silence I can myself give you so little that is of philosophic interest. But we must take long views; and, if life be granted, I shall do something yet, both in the way of reading and writing. Ever truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
At about this time Major Henry L. Higginson, then the junior partner in the banking house of Lee, Higginson & Company and soon to be widely known as the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, undertook to look after the small patrimony which James had inherited. He tactfully assumed the initiative respecting whatever had to be done, and continued to render this friendly service as long as James lived. On his side James, who knew nothing about investments and was incapable of considering them without involving himself in excessive and unprofitable worry, was delighted to leave decisions to his friend's wiser judgment. Occasional jocose communications like the following came to be almost his only incursions into his own "affairs."
Oct. 14[1883?].
My dear Henry,—I receive today from your office two documents, one containing some unintelligible hieroglyphics, "C. B.& Q., 138" etc., etc.; the other winding up with a statement that I owe you $12,674.97!!
The latter explains your mysterious interest in my affairs. I feared as much! Go on, Shylock, go on! you have me in your power. The peculiar combination of ignoranceand poverty which I present makes me an easy victim. And I confess that as a psychologist I am curious to see how far your instincts of cupidity will carry you. I await eagerly the ulterior developments. Yours, etc.,
WM. JAMES.
[Enclosed with the foregoing]
Extract from a biographic sketch of W. J. soon to be published in the "Harvard Register":—
"He now fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint, and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; converses rationally, reads the newspapers, where every talk of distress attracts his notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that he has earned the right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the table; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old friends, he is quite conscious of his real position; but the conviction is so exquisitely painful that he will not let himself believe it."
[Post-card]
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.,Jan. 31[1884].
Heute den 31ten Januar wurde mir vor 2 Stunden in rascher Aufeinander-folgeein(1) wunderschöner jüdischaussehender, kräftiger und munterer Knabe geboren. Alles geht nach Wunsch, und bittet um stiller Theilnahme der glückliche Vater.
W. J.
[Translation.]
Today the 31st of January, two hours since, there was born to me in rapid successionone(I) wonderfully beautiful,Jewish-looking, sturdy and lively boy. Everything is going as one would wish, and the happy father craves your hushed sympathy.
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Mar. 30, 1884.
My dear Davidson,—I am in receipt of two letters from you since my last, the latest one of them from Capri. I am very sorry to hear of your continued bad physical condition. You have a queer constitution,—with such an unusual amount of strength in most ways,—to be a constant prey to ailment. I have long ago come to think that the right measure of a man's health is not how much comfort or discomfort he feels in the year, but how much work, through thick and thin, he manages to get through. Judged by that standard, you doubtless score an unusually high number. But when I hear you talking about Texas, I confess I really begin to feel alarmed. From Rome to Austin! How can you think of such a thing? Are you sure M—— is not playing the part of the tailless fox in the fable? I know not a living soul in Texas, and if I did I should have moral scruples about becoming an accomplice in any plot for transporting you there. Why is it that everything in this world is offered us on no medium terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for a professorship. I pine for your leisure to write and study. Teaching duties have really devoured the whole of my time this winter, and with hardly any intellectual profit whatever. I have read nothing, and written nothing save one lecture on the freedom of the will. How it is going to end, I don't well see. The four months of non-lecturing study I had at home last year, when I slept welland led a really intellectual life, seem like a sort of lost paradise. However, vacations make amends. This summer I am to edit my poor father's literary remains, "with a sketch of his writings" which will largely consist of extracts and no doubt help to the making him better known.
You ask why I don't write oftener. If you could see the arrears of work under which my table groans, and the number of semi-business letters and notes I now have to write with my infernal eyesight, you would ask no longer. In fact I am beginning to ask whether it be not my bounden duty to stop corresponding with my friends altogether. Only at that price does there seem to be any prospect of doing any reading at all.
I had neither seen your article in the Unitarian Review[75]nor heard of it, but ran for it as soon as I got your announcement of its existence. I know not what to think of it practically; though I confess the idea of engrafting the bloodless pallor of Boston Unitarianism on the Roman temperament strikes one at first sight as rather queer. Unitarianism seems to have a sort of moribund vitality here, because it is a branch of protestantism and the tree keeps the branch sticking out. But whether it could be grafted on a catholic trunk seems to me problematic. I confess I rather despair of any popular religion of a philosophic character; and I sometimes find myself wondering whether there can be any popular religion raised on the ruins of the old Christianity without the presence of that element which in the past has presided over the origin of all religions, namely, a belief in newphysicalfacts and possibilities. Abstract considerations about the soul and the reality of a moral order will not do in a year what the glimpse into a world of new phenomenal possibilities enveloping those of the presentlife, afforded by an extension of our insight into the order of nature, would do in an instant. Are the much despised "Spiritualism" and the "Society for Psychical Research" to be the chosen instruments for a new era of faith? It would surely be strange if they were; but if they are not, I see no other agency that can do the work.
I like your formula that in consciousness there must be two irreducibles, "being and feeling," and nothing else. But I can't put philosophy into letters. When is our long-postponed talk to take place?Aufgeschobenfor another summer, and I fear another winter too, from what you write. It is too bad!
We have a week's recess in a couple of days and I start to look up summer lodgings. Alice and the two-month-old baby are very well and send you love. Always truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
CAMBRIDGE,Feb. 5, 1885.
My dear Howison,—I've just reread (for the fourth time, I believe) your letter of the 30th November. I need not say how tickled I am at your too generous words about my Divinity school address on Determinism.[76]Sweet are the praises of an enemy. There is, thank Heaven! a plane below all formulas and below enmities due to formulas, where men occasionally meet each other moving, and recognize each other as brothers inhabiting thesame depths. Such is this depth of theproblemof determinism—howe'er we solve it, we are brothers if we know it to be aproblem. No man on either side awakens any sense of intellectualrespect in me who regards the solution as a cock-sure and immediately given thing, and wonders that any one should hesitate to choose his party. You find fault with my deterministic disjunction, "pessimism or subjectivism," and ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral activity," etc. (You probably remember.) I didn't forget it. It entered for me into pessimism, for, since such activity has failed to be universally realized, it was (deterministically)impossible from eternity, and the Universe in so far forth not an object of pure worship, not an Absolute. My trouble, you see, lies with monism. Determinism = monism; and a monism like this world can't be an object of pure optimistic contemplation. By pessimism I simply meanultimatenon-optimism. The Ideal is only a part of this world. Make the world a Pluralism, and you forthwith have an object to worship. Make it a Unit, on the other hand, and worship and abhorrence are equally one-sided and equally legitimate reactions.Indifferentismis the true condition of such a world, and turn the matter how you will, I don't see how any philosophy of the Absolute can ever escape from that capricious alternation of mysticism and satanism in the treatment of its great Idol, which history has always shown. Reverence is an accidental personal mood in such a philosophy, and has naught to do with the essentials of the system. At least, so it seems to me; and in view of that, I prefer to stick in the wooden finitude of an ultimate pluralism, because that at least gives me something definite to worship and fight for.
However, I know I haven't exhausted all wisdom, and am too well aware that this position, like everything else, is aparti prisand apis aller,—faute de mieux,—to continue the Gallic idiom. Your predecessor Royce thinks he's got the thing at last. It is too soon for me to criticizehis book; but I must say it seems to me one of the very freshest, profoundest, solidest, most human bits of philosophical work I've seen in a long time. In fact, it makes one think of Royce as a man from whom nothing is too great to expect.
Your list of thirty lectures makes one bow down in reverence before you. I should be afraid you were over-working. Your Hume-Kant circular shall be diligently scanned when my Hume lectures come off, in about six weeks. I am better as to the eyes, which gives me much hope. Am, however, "maturing" building plans for a house, which is bad for sleep. I do hope and trust there will be no "Enttäuschung" about Berkeley,[77]and that not only the work, but the place and the climate, may prove well adapted to both you and Mrs. Howison. Ever truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
The next letters relate to the "Literary Remains of Henry James," which had just been published, and in which William James had collected a number of his father's papers and edited them with an introductory essay on their author's philosophy. Needless to say, the two letters to Godkin have not been included among these with any thought of the unfortunate review to which they refer. They furnish too good an illustration of James's loyalty and magnanimity to be omitted. If more critics, and more of the criticized, were to cultivate the manliness and generosity with which James always entered discussion, there would be less reviewers "never-quite-forgiven," and less feuds in the world of science.
CAMBRIDGE, [Feb.] 16, 1885.
My dear Godkin,—Doesn't the impartiality which I suppose is striven for in the "Nation," sometimes overshoot the mark "and fall on t'other side"? Poor Harry's books seem always given out to critics with antipathy to his literary temperament; and now for this only and last review of my father—a writer exclusively religious—a personage seems to have been selected for whom the religious life is completeterra incognita. A severe review by one interested in the subject is one thing; a contemptuous review by one with the subject out of his sight is another.
Make no reply to this! One must disgorge his bile.
I was taken ill in Philadelphia the day after seeing you, and had to return home after some days without stopping in N.Y. Imayget there the week after next, and if so shall claimonedinner, over which I trust no cloud will be cast by the beginning of this note! With best respects to Mrs. Godkin, always truly yours
WM. JAMES.
CAMBRIDGE,Feb. 19, 1885.
My dear Godkin,—Your cry of remorse or regret is so "whole-souled" and complete that I should not be human were I not melted almost to tears by it, and sorry I "ever spoke to you as I did." I felt pretty sure that you had no positive oversight of the thing in this case, but I addressed you as the official head. And myemotionwas less that of filial injury than of irritation at what seemed to me editorial stupidity in giving out the book to the wrongsortof person altogether—a Theist of some sort being the only proper reviewer. I am heartily sorry that the thing should havedistressed you so much more than it did me. You can take your consolation in the fact that it has now afforded you an opportunity for the display of those admirable qualities of the heart which your friends know, but which the ordinary readers of the "Nation" probably do not suspect to slumber beneath the gory surface of that savage sheet.
I hear that you are soon coming to give us some political economy. I am very glad on every account, and suppose Mrs. Godkin will comemit. Always truly yours
WM. JAMES.
CAMBRIDGE,20 Feb., 1885.
My dear Hodgson,—Your letter of the 7th was most welcome. Anything responsive about my poor old father's writing falls most gratefully upon my heart. For I fear he foundmepretty unresponsive during his lifetime; and that through my means any post-mortem response should come seems a sort of atonement. You would have enjoyed knowing him. I know of no one except Carlyle who had such a smitingUrsprünglichkeitof intuition, and such a deep sort of humor where human nature was concerned. He bowled one over in such a careless way. He was like Carlyle in being noreasonerat all, in the sense in which philosophers are reasoners. Reasoning was only an unfortunate necessity of exposition for them both. Hisideas, however, were the exact inversion of Carlyle's; and he had nothing to correspond to Carlyle's insatiable learning of historic facts and memory. As you say, the world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him.Thoseelements were very deep ones, and had theological names. Under "Man" he would willingly have included all flesh, even that resident in Sirius or etherealworlds. But he felt no need of positively looking so far. He was the humanest and most genial being in his impulses whom I have ever personally known, and had a bigness and power of nature that everybody felt. I thank you heartily for your interest. I wish that somebody couldtake upsomething from his system into a system more articulately scientific. As it is, most people will feel thepresenceof something real and true for the while they read, and go away and presently, unable to dovetail [it] into their own framework, forget it altogether.
I am hoping to write you a letter ere long, a letter philosophical. I am going over Idealism again, and mean to review your utterances on the subject. You know that, to quote what Gurney said one evening, to attain to assimilating your thought is the chief purpose of one's life. But you know also how hard it is for the likes of me to write, and how much that is felt is unthought, and that as thought [it] goes and must go unspoken. Brother Royce tells me he has sent you his "Religious Aspect of Philosophy." He is a wonderfully powerful fellow, not yet thirty, and this book seems to me to have a real fresh smell of the Earth about it. You will enjoy it, I know. I am very curious to hear what you think of his brand-new argument for Absolute Idealism.
I and mine are well. But the precious time as usual slips away with little work done. Happy you, whose time is all your own!
WM. JAMES
CAMBRIDGE,Apr. 1, 1885.
...I am running along quite smoothly, and my eyes,—you never knew such an improvement! It has continuedgradually, so that practically I can use them all I will. It saves my life.Whyit should come now, when, bully them as I would, it wouldn't come in the past few years, is one of the secrets of the nervous system which the last trump, but nothing earlier, may reveal. A week's recess begins today, and the day after tomorrow I shall start for the South Shore to look up summer quarters. I want to try how sailing suits me as a summer kill-time. The walking in Keene Valley suits me not, and driving is too "cost-playful." I have made a start with my psychology which I shall work at, temperately, through the vacation and hope to get finished a year from next fall,sans faute. Then shall the star of your romances be eclipst!...
NEWPORT,Dec. 30, 1885.
My dear Hodgson,—I have just read your "Philosophy and Experience" address, and re-read with much care your "Dialogue on Free Will" in the last "Mind." I thank you kindly for the address. But isn't philosophy a sad mistress, estranging the more intimately those who in all other respects are most intimately united,—although 'tis true she unites them afresh by their very estrangement! I feel for the first time now, after these readings, as if I might be catching sight of your foundations. Always hitherto has there been something elusive, a sense that what I caught could not beall. Now I feel as if it might be all, and yet for me 'tis not enough.
Your "method" (which surely afterthisneeds no additional expository touch) I seem at last to understand, but it shrinks in the understanding. For what is your famous "two aspects" principle more than the postulate that the world is thoroughlyintelligiblein nature? And what thepractical outcome of the distinction betweenwhatnessandthatnesssave the sending us to experience to ascertain the connections among things, and the declaration that no amount of insight into their intrinsic qualities will account for their existence? I can now get no more than that out of the method, which seems in truth to me an over-subtle way of getting at and expressing pretty simple truths, which others share who know nothing of your formulations. In fact your wondrously delicate retouchings and discriminations appear rather to darken the matter from the point of view of teaching. One gains much by the way, of course, that he would have lost by a shorter path, but one risks losing the end altogether. (I reserve what you say at the end of both articles about Conscience, etc.—which is original and beautiful and which I feel I have not yet assimilated. I will only ask whether all you say about the decisions of conscience implying a future verification does not hold of scientific decisions as well, so thatallreflectivecognitivejudgments, as well as practical judgments, project themselves ideally into eternity?)
As for the Free Will article, I have very little to say, for it leaves entirely untouched what seems to me the only living issue involved. The paper is an exquisite piece of literary goldsmith's work,—nothing like it in that respect since Berkeley,—but it hangs in the air of speculation and touches not the earth of life, and the beautiful distinctions it keeps making gratify only the understanding which has no end in view but to exercise its eyes by the way. The distinctions betweenvis impressaandvis insita, and compulsion and "reaction"meannothing in a monistic world; and any world is a monism in which the parts to come are, as they are in your world, absolutely involved and presupposed in the parts that are already given. Were sucha monism a palpable optimism, no man would be so foolish as to care whether it was predetermined or not, or to ask whether he was or was not what you call a "real agent." He would acquiesce in the flow and drift of things, of which he found himself a part, and rejoice that it was such a whole. The question of free will owes its entire being to a difficulty you disdain to notice, namely that wecannotrejoice in such a whole, for it isnota palpable optimism, and yet, if it be predetermined, wemust treatit as a whole. Indeterminism is the only way tobreakthe world into good parts and into bad, and to stand by the former as against the latter.
I can understand the determinism of the mere mechanical intellect which will not hear of a moral dimension to existence. I can understand that of mystical monism shutting its eyes on the concretes of life, for the sake of its abstract rapture. I can understand that of mental defeat and despair saying, "it's all a muddle, and here I go, along with it." I cannotunderstand a determinism like yours, which rejoices in clearness and distinctions, and which is at the same time alive to moral ones—unless it be that the latter are purely speculative for it, and have little to do with its real feeling of the way lifeismade up.
For lifeisevil. Two souls are in my breast; I see the better, and in the very act of seeing it I do the worse. To say that the molecules of the nebula implied this andshall have implied itto all eternity, so often as it recurs, is to condemn me to that "dilemma" of pessimism or subjectivism of which I once wrote, and which seems to have so little urgency to you, and to which all talk about abstractions erected into entities; and compulsionvs."freedom" are simply irrelevant. What living man cares for such niceties, when the real problem stares him in the face of how practically to meet a world foredone, with no possibilities left in it?
What a mockery then seems your distinction between determination and compulsion, between passivity and an "activity" every minutest feature of which is preappointed, both as to itswhatnessand as to itsthatness, by what went before! What an insignificant difference then the difference between "impediments from within" and "impediments from without"!—between being fated to do the thingwillinglyor not! The point is not as to how it is done, but as to its being done at all. It seems a wrong complement to the rest of life, which rest of life (according to your precious "free-will determinism," as to any other fatalism), whilst shrieking aloud at itswhatness, nevertheless exacts rigorously itsthatnessthen and there. Is that a reasonable world from the moral point of view? And is it made more reasonable by the fact that when I brought about thethatnessof the evilwhatnessdecreed to come by thethatnessof all else beside, I did so consentingly and aware of no "impediments outside of my own nature"? With what can Isidein such a world as this? this monstrous indifferentism which brings forth everythingeodem jure? Our nature demands somethingobjectiveto take sides with. If the world is a Unit of this sort thereareno sides—there's the moral rub! And you don't see it!
Ah, Hodgson! Hodgsonmio!from whom I hoped so much! Most spirited, most clean, most thoroughbred of philosophers!Perchè di tanto inganni i figli tuoi?[78]If you want to reconcile us rationally to Determinism, write a Theodicy, reconcile us toEvil, but don't talk of the distinction between impediments from within and without when the within and the without of which you speak are both within thatWholewhich is the only real agent in yourphilosophy. There is no such superstition as the idolatry of theWhole.
I originally finished this letter on sheet number one—but it occurred to me afterwards that the end was too short, so I scratched out the first lines of the crossed writing, and refer you now to what follows them.—[Lines from sheet numberI.] It makes me sick at heart, this discord among the only men who ought to agree. I am the more sick this moment as I must write to your ancient foe (at least the stimulus to an old "Mind" article of yours), one F. E. Abbot who recently gave me his little book "Scientific Theism"—the burden of his life—which makes me groan that I cannot digest a word of it. Farewell! Heaven bless you all the same—and enable you to forgive me. We are well and I hope you are the same. Ever faithfully yours,
W. J.
[From the final sheet.] Let me add a wish for a happy New Year and the expression of my undying regard. You are tenfold more precious to me now that I have braved you thus! Adieu!
CAMBRIDGE,Jan. 1, 1886.
My dear Stumpf,—...Let me tell you of my own fate since I wrote you last. It has been an eventful and in some respects a sad year. We lost our youngest child in the summer—the flower of the flock, 18 months old—with a painful and lingering whooping-cough complicated with pneumonia. My wife has borne it like an angel, however, which is something to be thankful for. Her mother, close to whom we have always lived, has had a severe pulmonary illness, which has obliged her to repairto Italy for health. She is now on the Ocean, with her youngest and only unmarried daughter, the second one having only a month ago become the wife of that [W. M.] Salter whose essays on ethics have lately been translated by von Gizycki in Berlin. So I have gained him as a brother-in-law, and regard it as a real gain. I have also gained a full Professorship with an increase of pay, and have moved into a larger and more commodious house.[79]My eyes, too, are much better than they were a year ago, and I am able to do more work, so there is plenty of sweet as well as bitter in the cup.
I don't know whether you have heard of the London "Society for Psychical Research," which is seriously and laboriously investigating all sorts of "supernatural" matters, clairvoyance, apparitions, etc. I don't know what you think of such work; but I think that the present condition of opinion regarding it is scandalous, there being a mass of testimony, or apparent testimony, about such things, at which the only men capable of a critical judgment—men of scientific education—will not even look. We have founded a similar society here within the year,—some of us thought that the publications of the London society deserved at least to be treated as if worthy of experimental disproof,—and although work advances very slowly owing to the small amount of disposable time on the part of the members, who are all very busy men, we have already stumbled on some rather inexplicable facts out of which something may come. It is a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon areimpossible.
My teaching is much the same as it was—a little better in quality, I hope. I enjoy very much a new philosophic colleague, Josiah Royce, from California, who is just thirty years old and a perfect little Socrates for wisdom and humor. I still try to write a little psychology, but it is exceedingly slow work. No sooner do I get interested than bang! goes my sleep, and I have to stop a week or ten days, during which my ideas get all cold again. Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.... I try to spend two hours a day in a laboratory for psycho-physics which I started last year, but of which I fear thefruitswill be slow in ripening, as my experimental aptitude is but small. But I am convinced that one must guard in some such way as that against the growing tendency tosubjectivismin one's thinking, as life goes on. I am hypnotizing, on a large scale, the students, and have hit one or two rather pretty unpublished things of which some day I hope I may send you an account.... Ever faithfully yours,
WM. JAMES.
When the American Society for Psychical Research was organized in Boston in the autumn of 1884, Thomas Davidson wrote to comment on its apparent anti-spiritual bias. In the following reply, dated February 1, 1885, but more easily understood if inserted here out of its chronological place, James defined the society's conception of its function. In so doing he described his own attitude toward psychical research quite exactly:—
"As for any 'antispiritual bias' of our Society, no theoretic basis, orbiasof any sort whatever, so far as I can make out, exists in it. The one thing that has struck me all along in the men who have had to do with it is their complete colorlessness philosophically. They seem to have no preferencesfor any generalismwhatever. I doubt if this could be matched in Europe. Anyhow, it would make no difference in the important work to be done, what theoretic bias the members had. For I take it the urgent thing, to rescue us from the present disgraceful condition, is to ascertain in a manner so thorough as to constituteevidencethat will be accepted by outsiders, just what thephenomenal conditions of certainconcrete phenomenal occurrences are. Not till that is done, can spiritualistic or anti-spiritualistic theories be even mooted. I'm sure that the more we can steer clear of theories at first, the better. The choice of officers was largely dictated by motives of policy. Not that scientific men are necessarily better judges of all truth than others, but that their adhesion would popularly seem betterevidencethan the adhesion of others, in the matter. And what we want is not only truth, but evidence. We shall be lucky if our scientific names don't grow discredited the instant they subscribe to any 'spiritual' manifestations. But how much easier to discredit literary men, philosophers or clergymen! I think Newcomb, for President, was an uncommon hit—if he believes, he will probably carry others. You'd better chip in, and not complicate matters by talking either of spiritualism or anti-spiritualism. 'Facts' are what are wanted."
CAMBRIDGE,May 9, 1886.
My dear Harry,—I seize my pen the first leisure moment I have had for a week to tell you that I have read "The Bostonians" in the full flamingness of its bulk, and consider it an exquisite production. My growling letter was written to you before the end of Book I had appeared in the "Atlantic"; and the suspense of narrative in thatregion, to let the relation of Olive and Verena grow, was enlarged by the vacant months between the numbers of the magazine, so that it seemed to me so slow a thing had ne'er been writ. Never again shall I attack one of your novels in the magazine. I've only read one number of the "Princess Casamassima"—though I hear all the people about me saying it is the best thing you've done yet. To return to "The Bostonians"; the two last books are simply sweet. There isn't a hair wrong in Verena, you've made her neither too little nor too much—but absolutelyliebenswürdig. It would have been so easy to spoil her picture by some little excess or false note. Her moral situation, between Woman's rights and Ransom, is of course deep, and her discovery of the truth on the Central Park day, etc., inimitably given. Ransom's character, which at first did not become alive to me, does so, handsomely, at last. In Washington, Hay told me that Secretary Lamar was delighted with it; Hay himself ditto, but especially with "Casamassima." I enclose a sheet from a letter of Gurney's but just received. You see how seriously he takes it. And I suppose he's right from a profoundly serious point of view,—i.e., he would be right if the characters were real,—but as the story stands, I don't feel his objection. Thefancyis more tickled by R.'s victory being complete. I hear very little said of the book, and I imagine it is being less read than its predecessors. The truth about it, combining what I said in my previous letter with what I have just written, seems to be this, that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that method of doing such a thing at all. Really thedatumseems to me to belong rather to the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and made into a bright, short, sparkling thingof a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute success. But you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into near 500—charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work—but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter and less art. I can truly say, however, that as I have lain on my back after dinner each day for ten days past reading it to myself, my enjoyment has been complete. I imagine that inhabitants of other parts of the country have read it more than natives of these parts. They have bought it for the sake of the information. The way you have touched off the bits of American nature, Central Park, the Cape, etc., is exquisitely true and calls up just the feeling. Knowing you had done such a good thing makes the meekness of your reply to me last summer all the more wonderful.
I cannot write more—being much overloaded and in bad condition. The spring is opening deliciously—all the trees half out, and the white, bright, afternoon east winds beginning. Our household is well....
Don't be alarmed about the labor troubles here. I am quite sure they are a most healthy phase of evolution, a little costly, but normal, and sure to do lots of good to all hands in the end. I don't speak of the senseless "anarchist" riot in Chicago, which has nothing to do with "Knights of Labor," but is the work of a lot of pathological Germans and Poles. I'm amused at the anti-Gladstonian capital which the English papers are telegraphed to be making of it. All the Irish names are among the killed and wounded policemen. Almost every anarchist name is Continental. Affectly.,
W. J.
James read "The Bostonians," and wrote to his brother about it, with that special shade of detachment which is peculiar to fraternal judgments. He was less careful to measure his praise when he wrote to other authors about their novels.
Jaffrey, N.H.,July 21, 1886.
My dear Howells,—I "snatch" a moment from the limitless vacation peace and leisure in which I lie embedded and which doesn't leave me "time" for anything, to tell you that I have been reading your "Indian Summer," and that it has given me about as exquisite a kind of delight as anything I ever read in my life, in the line to which it belongs. How you tread the narrow line of nature's truth so infallibly is more than I can understand. Then the profanity, the humor, the humanity, the morality—the everything! In short, 'tis cubical, and set it up any way you please 'twill stand. That blessed young female made me squeal at every page. Howcanyou have got back to the conversations of your prime?
But I won't discriminate or analyze. This is only meant for an inarticulate cry ofviva Howells. I repeat it: long live Howells! God grant you may do as good things again! I don't believe you can do better.
With warmest congratulations to Mrs. Howells that youandshe were born, I am ever yours,
WM. JAMES.
Mr. Howells called such letters "whoops of blessing." When a new book pleased James particularly, he was apt to send a "whoop" to its author.
With respect to the next letter, it will be recalled that Croom Robertson was the Editor of "Mind." Richard Hodgson was later for many years the Secretary of the American Branch of the Society for Psychical Research, in Boston. He became a warm friend. Other allusions to him occur later.
Aug. 13, 1886.
My dear Robertson,—...I have just been reading the last number of "Mind," and find it rather below par. R. Hodgson muddled, clotted, dusky and ineffectual, save for a gleam or two of light in as many separate points. How can an adult man spend his time in trying to torture an accurate meaning into Spencer's incoherent accidentalities? It is so much more easy to do the work over for oneself. I rubbed my eyes at the Macdonald paper, as a dim sense came over me that it might be a Divinity student who "sat under" me for a part of last year. I ween it is. Little did I know the viper I was nourishing. Why don't you have a special "Neo-Hegelian Department" in "Mind," like the "Children's Department" or the "Agricultural Department" in our newspapers—which educated readers skip? With Montgomery's paper I am for the most part in warm sympathy, though he might make a discrimination or two more. I'm sorry I've not yet read his first number. His non-empirical style, so different from that of the British school, will stand in the way of his views' deglutition by the ordinary reader. I've got the same stuff all neatly down in black and white, in a very empirical style, which alas! must wait perhaps years till the other chapters are finished. However, in these matters, no matter how muchdifferent men strike the same vein, they do it in such differentways, that no one of them absolutely supersedes the need of the others.
Davidson I saw the other day in Cambridge. He was fresh from the Concord School, where they had been belaboring Goethe as theirpièce de résistanceand topping off with pantheism as dessert. He had read aloud a paper of Montgomery's against pantheism, as well as one of his own on Goethe's Titanism. Montgomery's is shortly to appear in a journal here. I am rather curious to read it.
To go on with "Mind," Hull's paper (Donaldson's) is refreshing. X—— is a little stub-and-twist fellow who also sat under me last year, and now has a fellowship for next year. He is a silent, mannerless little cub, but has first-rate stuff in him, I think, as an original worker; theological training. Have you had time yet to look into Royce's book? Royce seems to me to be a man of the greatest promise, performance too, in that book. I wish you would have it worthily reviewed.
Here I have run on about the accidents of the hour, instead of the eternal things of the soul. No matter; all is a symbol, and these words will probably waft my presence somehow into yours....
Pray drop me even a short line soon, to let me know about you and Mrs. Robertson. I've heard nothingofyou, even, for many months. Haven't you a brother, or something, to send over here, since there seems no hope of having you yourself? Gurney wrote the other day that he was about to send his brother.
Farewell! I think of you both often, and am with heartiest affection, Yours always,
WM. JAMES.
Jaffrey, N.H.,Sept. 12, 1886.
My dear Hodgson,—I ought long ere this to have written you a genuine letter in reply to your two of Feb. 3,respectiveMarch 6. (The latter by the way came to me many weeks too late, all blurred and water-stained, with a notice gummed on it telling as how it had been rescued from the Oregon sunken on the bottom of the Ocean. This makes it ex-as well as in-trinsically interesting, and does honor to our nineteenth-century post-office perfection.) I suppose one reason for my procrastination has been the shrinking-back of the fleshly man from another gnashing of the teeth over the free-will business. I have just been reading your letters again, and beautiful letters they are—also your pregnant little paper on Monism. But I'm blest if they make me budge an inch from my inveterate way of looking at the question. I hate to think that controversy should be useless, and arguments of no avail, but the history of opinion on this problem is ominous; so I will be very short, hardly more than "yea, yea! nay, nay!"
The subject of my concern seems entirely different from yours. I care absolutely nothing whether there be "agents" or no agents, or whether man's actions be really "his" or not.
What I care for is that my moral reactions should find a real outward application. All those who, like you, hold that the world is a system of "uniform law" which repels all variation as so much "chaos," oblige, it seems to me, the world to be judged integrally. Now the onlyintegralemotional reaction which can be called forth by such a world as this of our experience, is that of dramatic or melodramatic interest—romanticism—whichisthe emotional reaction upon it of all intellects who are neither religious nor moral.The moment you seek to go deeper, you must break the world into parts, the parts that seem good and those that seem bad. Whatever Indian mystics may say about overcoming the bonds of good and evil, forusthere is no higher synthesis in which their contradiction merges, nooneway of judging that world which holds them both. Either close your eyes and adopt an optimism or a pessimism equally daft; or exclude moral categories altogether from a place in the world's definition, which leaves the worldunheimlich, reptilian, and foreign to man; or else, sticking to it that the moral judgmentisapplicable, give up the hope of applying it to thewhole, and admit that, whilst some parts are good, others are bad, and being bad,oughtnot to have been, "argal," possiblymightnot have been. In short, be an indeterminist on moral grounds with which the differences between compulsory or spontaneous uniformity and perceptive and conceptive order have absolutely nothing to do.
But enough! I am far beyond the yea and nay I promised, and feel more like gossiping with you as a friend than wrangling with you as a foe. I hope things are going well with you in these months and that politics have not exasperated you beyond the possibility of philosophizing.... I got successfully through the academic year, in spite of the fact that I wasted a great deal of time on "psychical research" and had other interruptions from work which I would fain have done. I intendper fas aut nefasto make more time for myself next year. The family is very well; and with the exception of an attack of illness of a couple of weeks, the vacation has been a delightful and beneficial one. I wish I could live in the country all the year round, or rather nine months of it. When I retire from the harness, if that ever happens, I probably shall.
I have just been on a little trip to the White Mountains and may possibly buy a small farm which I saw in a convenient and romantic neighborhood. New England farms are now dirt cheap—the natives going West, the Irish coming in and making a better living than the Yankees could. Here were seventy-five acres of land, two thirds of it oak and pine timber, one third hay, a splendid spring of water, fair little house and large barn, close to a beautiful lake and under a mountain 3500 feet high, four and a half hours from Boston, for 900 dollars! A rivulet of great beauty runs through it. I am only waiting to see if I can get the strip between it and the lake shore to buy....
I have just read, with infinite zest and stimulation, Bradley's "Logic." I suppose you have read it. It is surely "epoch-making" in English philosophy. Both empiricists and pan-rationalists must settle their accounts with it. It breaks up all the traditional lines. And what a fighter the cuss is! Do you know him? What is he personally? Whether churlish and sour, or simply redundantly ironical and irrepressible, I can't make out from his polemic tone; but should apprehend the former. It will be long ere I settle my accounts with his book.
Well! adieu and good luck to you, in spite of your viciousness in the matter of determinism! Send me all you write and believe me as ever, Always most affectionately yours,