CAMBRIDGE,March27[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.
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 thisA.M.and the country robed in snow. Princeton is a beautiful place....
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....
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 portalsof 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 reallyamnothing,not becominga savage as I would be, and failing to be the civilizee that I really ought to be content with being! But I wish thatyoualso 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 insidesof 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 acorrespondent!" 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.
CAMBRIDGE,July 17, 1895.
My dear Howison,—How youhavemisunderstood 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 sprucesand sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better tobethan to define your being. I am a victim of neurasthenia and of the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it. And philosophic literaturewilloften 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.
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 fairdemoiselles! I may say that one reason of my long silence has been the hope that when I wrote I shouldhave 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 largetrain de maisonhitherto, 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 thedemoiselleswho is mostromanesque. 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 reportedépuisé.
With warmest possible regards to both of you, and to all five of the descendants, believe me ever faithfully yours,
W. James.
El Paso, Colo.,Aug. 8, 1895.
Sweetest of LivingPegs,—Your letter made glad my heart the day before yesterday, and I marveled to see what an improvement had come over your handwriting in theshort 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 waggingallthe 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 alreadypassed 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]TheEnglish 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.
CAMBRIDGE,Christmas Eve [1895].
Darling old Godkin,—The only Christmas present I can send you is a word of thanks and abravo bravissimofor 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 insomecause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
Two things are, however,désormaiscertain: Three daysof 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.Yousaw 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.
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 loftyKultur-historischbackground; 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 SpaniardsAmerica. 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. Oncereallywaked, 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 hopeyou'llread 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 XXIXjust 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.
CAMBRIDGE,Feb. 5, 1896.
Dear Myers,—Voicithe proof! Praysend me a revise—Cattell wants to print it simultaneouslyin extensoin "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 nocrime of which it doesn't sincerely begin to believe its oppressor, the lamb down-stream, to be guilty. The great proof that civilizationdoesmove, however, is the magnificent conduct of the British press. Yours everlastingly,
W. J.
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.
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 thecraving 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.
[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' vacationviaNew 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 nextweek. 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 dutiesvous incombentwhen your neighbours are destroyed. And telling that poor man's wife!—Lifeisheroic—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 Iwon't. Strange how practically all one's sense of news from the U. S. here is huge Horrors and Catastrophes. It's a terrible countrynotto 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.
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 greatfêteof 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 ofnotliving 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. Itmaytake 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"!! ItrequiresEngland, 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 withmescal, 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 theKatzenjammerthe 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 ofthings—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 lewdnessso obligatory that it hardly seems as if it were part of a moraldonnéeat 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 gladyouare 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 likelyneedto 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 toseeit, 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....
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 lifein 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 noAbsolute" 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."
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, 9.30P.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 burstingWeltschmerzand 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 thisA.M.I have heard 4½ 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, 12:30P.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, achorus 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 anotheren masse. One was on bread-making, with practical demonstrations. One was onwalking, 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. Noepicureanismof 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 theLondon "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. Lifeisheroic 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 Armenianmassacre, 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 bestretchedto his utmost, if not in one way then in another!...
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 untoyou: "Smooth out your voicesif you want to be saved"!!...
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 "morbidpsychology," "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 lastAnnéeexcept 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.
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 Genevain the State of New York! andthatLake 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 ratebeen, 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 supposethat 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 knewperfectionin 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 elderlycommensalwho 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.
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 beliefsbased on "inner evidence" and beliefs based on "craving." I can findnothingsharp (or susceptible of schoolmaster's codification) in the different degrees of "liveliness" in hypotheses concerning the universe, or distinguisha prioribetween legitimate and illegitimate cravings. And when an hypothesisisonce a live one, oneriskssomething in one's practical relations towards truth and error,whicheverof 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 mylogic, which seems to me to cover your cases entirely in its compartments. I class you as one to whom the religious hypothesis isvon vornhereinso 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 yousaythis, 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" alsois 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 myAuseinandersetzungof thelogical situationof man's mindgegenüberthe 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.
Burlington, Vt.,Sept. 28, 1896.
Dear Henry,—The summer is over! alas! alas! I left Keene Valley thisA.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 theA.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 aredone, 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, andeven 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.[10a]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.
1893-1899 (Continued)
The Will to Believe—Talks to Teachers—Defense of Mental Healers—Excessive Climbing in the Adirondacks
[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 goodfor 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.
Ihave 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 inmy 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 longeigenhändig. Meanwhile believe me, with lots of love to you all, especially toces 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.
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 nogeneral theoryas 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 standwith 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 idioticallyconceited ignoranceof 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 reallyasks. 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 twoself-systemsin 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 casespsychologically, and leaves all thereligious importanceto 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 antagonizingGod and winning away his adherents has never yet taken hold of my imagination. I prefer an open mind of inquiry, firstabout 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.