QUESTIONNAIRE[55]It is being realized as never before that religion, as one of the most important things in the life both of the community and of the individual, deserves close and extended study. Such study can be of value only if based upon the personal experiences of many individuals. If you are in sympathy with such study and are willing to assist in it, will you kindly write out the answers to the following questions and return them with this questionnaire, as soon as you conveniently can, toJames B. Pratt, 20 Shepard Street, Cambridge, Mass.Please answer the questions at length and in detail. Do not give philosophical generalizations, but your own personal experience.1. What does religion mean to you personally? Is it(1) A belief that something exists?Yes.(2) An emotional experience?Not powerfully so, yet asocialreality.(3) A general attitude of the will toward God or toward righteousness!It involves these.(4) Or something else?If it has several elements, which is for you the most important?The social appeal for corroboration, consolation, etc., when things are going wrong with my causes (my truth denied), etc.2. What do you mean by God?A combination of Ideality and (final) efficacity.(1) Is He a person—if so, what do you mean by His being a person?He must be cognizant and responsive in some way.(2) Or is He only a Force?He mustdo.(3) Or is God an attitude of the Universe toward you?Yes, but more conscious. "God" to me, is not the only spiritual reality to believe in. Religion means primarily a universe of spiritual relations surrounding the earthly practical ones, not merely relations of "value," but agencies and their activities. I suppose that the chief premise for my hospitality towards the religious testimony of others is my conviction that "normal" or "sane" consciousness is so small a part of actual experience. What e'er be true, it is not true exclusively, as philistine scientific opinion assumes. The other kinds of consciousness bear witness to a much wider universe of experiences, from which our belief selects and emphasizes such parts as best satisfy our needs.How do you apprehend his relation to mankind-Uncertain.If your position on any of these matters is uncertain, please state the fact.3. Why do you believe in God? Is it(1) From some argument?Emphatically, no.Or (2) Because you have experienced His presence?No, but rather because I need it so that it "must" be true.Or (3) From authority, such as that of the Bible or of some prophetic person?Only the whole tradition of religious people, to which something in me makes admiring response.Or (4) From any other reason?Only for the social reasons.If from several of these reasons, please indicate carefully the order of their importance.4. Or do you not so muchbelievein God as want touseHim?I can't use him very definitely, yet I believe.Do you accept Him not so much as a real existent Being, but rather as an ideal to live by?More as a more powerful ally of my own ideals.If you should become thoroughly convinced that there was no God, would it make any great difference in your life—either in happiness, morality, or in other respects?Hard to say. It would surely make some difference.5. Is God very real to you, as real as an earthly friend, though different?Dimly [real]; not [as an earthly friend].Do you feel that you have experienced His presence? If so, please describe what you mean by such an experience.Never.How vague or how distinct is it? How does it affect you mentally and physically?If you have had no such experience, do you accept the testimony of others who claim to have felt God's presence directly? Please answer this question with special care and in as great detail as possible.Yes! The whole line of testimony on this point is so strong that I am unable to pooh-pooh it away. No doubt there is a germ in me of something similar that makes response.6. Do you pray, and if so, why? That is, is it purely from habit, and social custom, or do you really believe that God hears your prayers?I can't possibly pray—I feel foolish and artificial.Is prayer with you one-sided or two-sided—i.e., do you sometimes feel that in prayer you receive something—such as strength or the divine spirit—from God? Is it a real communion?7. What do you mean by "spirituality"?Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of "other worldly" fancy. Otherwise you have mere morality, or "taste."Describe a typical spiritual person.Phillips Brooks.8. Do you believe in personal immortality?Never keenly; but more strongly as I grow older.If so, why?Because I am just getting fit to live.9. Do you accept the Bible asauthorityin religious matters? Are your religious faith and your religious life based on it? If so, how would your belief in God and your life toward Him and your fellow men be affected by loss of faith in theauthorityof theBible?No. No. No. It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authorship can survive the reading of it.10. What do you mean by a "religious experience"?Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more "home" to one.
QUESTIONNAIRE[55]
It is being realized as never before that religion, as one of the most important things in the life both of the community and of the individual, deserves close and extended study. Such study can be of value only if based upon the personal experiences of many individuals. If you are in sympathy with such study and are willing to assist in it, will you kindly write out the answers to the following questions and return them with this questionnaire, as soon as you conveniently can, toJames B. Pratt, 20 Shepard Street, Cambridge, Mass.
Please answer the questions at length and in detail. Do not give philosophical generalizations, but your own personal experience.
1. What does religion mean to you personally? Is it
(1) A belief that something exists?Yes.
(2) An emotional experience?Not powerfully so, yet asocialreality.
(3) A general attitude of the will toward God or toward righteousness!It involves these.
(4) Or something else?
If it has several elements, which is for you the most important?The social appeal for corroboration, consolation, etc., when things are going wrong with my causes (my truth denied), etc.
2. What do you mean by God?A combination of Ideality and (final) efficacity.
(1) Is He a person—if so, what do you mean by His being a person?He must be cognizant and responsive in some way.
(2) Or is He only a Force?He mustdo.
(3) Or is God an attitude of the Universe toward you?Yes, but more conscious. "God" to me, is not the only spiritual reality to believe in. Religion means primarily a universe of spiritual relations surrounding the earthly practical ones, not merely relations of "value," but agencies and their activities. I suppose that the chief premise for my hospitality towards the religious testimony of others is my conviction that "normal" or "sane" consciousness is so small a part of actual experience. What e'er be true, it is not true exclusively, as philistine scientific opinion assumes. The other kinds of consciousness bear witness to a much wider universe of experiences, from which our belief selects and emphasizes such parts as best satisfy our needs.
3. Why do you believe in God? Is it
(1) From some argument?Emphatically, no.
Or (2) Because you have experienced His presence?No, but rather because I need it so that it "must" be true.
Or (3) From authority, such as that of the Bible or of some prophetic person?Only the whole tradition of religious people, to which something in me makes admiring response.
Or (4) From any other reason?Only for the social reasons.
If from several of these reasons, please indicate carefully the order of their importance.
4. Or do you not so muchbelievein God as want touseHim?I can't use him very definitely, yet I believe.Do you accept Him not so much as a real existent Being, but rather as an ideal to live by?More as a more powerful ally of my own ideals.If you should become thoroughly convinced that there was no God, would it make any great difference in your life—either in happiness, morality, or in other respects?Hard to say. It would surely make some difference.
5. Is God very real to you, as real as an earthly friend, though different?Dimly [real]; not [as an earthly friend].
Do you feel that you have experienced His presence? If so, please describe what you mean by such an experience.Never.
How vague or how distinct is it? How does it affect you mentally and physically?
If you have had no such experience, do you accept the testimony of others who claim to have felt God's presence directly? Please answer this question with special care and in as great detail as possible.Yes! The whole line of testimony on this point is so strong that I am unable to pooh-pooh it away. No doubt there is a germ in me of something similar that makes response.
6. Do you pray, and if so, why? That is, is it purely from habit, and social custom, or do you really believe that God hears your prayers?I can't possibly pray—I feel foolish and artificial.
Is prayer with you one-sided or two-sided—i.e., do you sometimes feel that in prayer you receive something—such as strength or the divine spirit—from God? Is it a real communion?
7. What do you mean by "spirituality"?Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of "other worldly" fancy. Otherwise you have mere morality, or "taste."
Describe a typical spiritual person.Phillips Brooks.
8. Do you believe in personal immortality?Never keenly; but more strongly as I grow older.If so, why?Because I am just getting fit to live.
9. Do you accept the Bible asauthorityin religious matters? Are your religious faith and your religious life based on it? If so, how would your belief in God and your life toward Him and your fellow men be affected by loss of faith in theauthorityof theBible?No. No. No. It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authorship can survive the reading of it.
10. What do you mean by a "religious experience"?Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more "home" to one.
CHOCORUA,Sept. 21, 1904.
Dear Pauline,—Alice went off this morning to Cambridge, to get the house ready for the advent of the rest of us a week hence—viz., Wednesday the 28th. Having breakfasted at 6:30 to bid her God speed, the weather was so lordly fine (after a heavy rain in the night) that I trudged across lots to our hill-top, which you never saw, and now lie there with my back against a stone, scribbling you these lines at half-past nine. The vacation has run down with an appalling rapidity, but all has gone well with us, and I have been extraordinarily well and happy, and mean to be a good boy all next winter, to say nothing of remoter futures. My brother Henry stayed a delightful fortnight, and seemed to enjoy nature here intensely—found so muchsentimentand feminine delicacy in it all. It is a pleasure to be with anyone who takes in things through the eyes. Most people don't. The two "savans" who were here noticedabsolutely nothing, though they had never been in America before.
Naturally I have wondered what things your eyes have been falling on. Many views from hill-tops? Many magic dells and brooks? I hope so, and that it has all done you endless good. Such a green and gold and scarlet morn as this would raise the dead. I hope that your sister Susan has also got great good from the summer, and that the fair Josephine is glad to be at home again, and your mother reconciled to losing you. Perhaps even now you are preparingto go down. I have only written as aLebenszeichenand to tell you of our dates. I expect no reply, till you write a word to say when you are to come to Boston. Unhappily we can't ask you to Irving St, being mortgaged three deep to foreigners. Ever yours,
W. J.
It will be recalled that the St. Louis Exposition had occurred shortly before the date of the last letter and had led a number of learned and scientific associations to hold international congresses in America. James kept away from St. Louis, but asked several foreign colleagues to visit him at Chocorua or in Cambridge before their return to Europe. Among them were Dr. Pierre Janet of Paris and his wife, Professor C. Lloyd Morgan of Bristol, and Professor Harold Höffding of Copenhagen.
CAMBRIDGE,Oct. 26, 1904.
Dear Schiller,— ...Last night the Janets left us—a few days previous, Lloyd Morgan. I am glad to possess my soul for a while alone. Make much of dear old Höffding, who is a good pluralist and irrationalist. I took to him immensely and so did everybody. Lecturing to my class, he told against the Absolutists an anecdote of an "American" child who asked his mother if God made the world in six days. "Yes."—"The whole of it?"—"Yes."—"Then it is finished, all done?"—"Yes."—"Then in what business now is God?" If he tells it in Oxford you must reply: "Sitting for his portrait to Royce, Bradley, and Taylor."
Don't return the "McGill Quarterly"!—I have another copy. Good-bye!
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Feb. 6, 1905.
Dear Woodbridge,—I appear to be growing into a graphomaniac. Truth boils over from my organism as muddy water from a Yellowstone Geyser. Here is another contribution to my radical empiricism, which I send hot on the heels of the last one. I promise that, with the possible exception of one post-scriptual thing, not more than eight pages of MS. long, I shall do no more writing this academic year. So if you accept this,[56]you have not much more to fear.... I think, on the whole, that though the present article directly hitches on to the last words of my last article, "The Thing and Its Relations," the article called the "Essence of Humanism" had better appear before it.... Always truly yours
WM. JAMES.
CAMBRIDGE,Feb. 12, 1905.
Dear Starbuck,—I have read your article in No. 2 of Hall's Journal with great interest and profit. It makes me eager for the book, but pray take great care of your style in that—it seems to me that this article is less well written than your "Psychology of Religion" was, less clear, more involved, more technical in language—probably the result of rapidity. Our American philosophic literature is dreadful from a literary point of view. Pierre Janet told me he thought it was much worse than German stuff—and I begin to believe so; technical and semi-technical language, half-clear thought, fluency, and no composition! Turn your face resolutely the other way! But I didn't start tosay this. Your thought in this article is both important and original, and ought to be worked out in the clearest possible manner.... Your thesis needs to be worked out with great care, and as concretely as possible. It is a difficult one to put successfully, on account of the vague character of all its terms. One point you should drive home is that the anti-religious attitudes (Leuba's, Huxley's, Clifford's), so far as there is any "pathos" in them, obey exactly the same logic. The real crux is when you come to define objectively the ideals to which feeling reacts. "God is a Spirit"—darauf geht es an—on the last available definition of the term Spirit. It may be very abstract.
Love to Mrs. Starbuck. Yours always truly,
WM. JAMES.
[Feb. 22, 1905.]
Dear Woodbridge,—Here's another! But I solemnly swear to you that this shall be my very last offense for some months to come. This is the "postscriptual" article[57]of which I recently wrote you, and I have now cleaned up the pure-experience philosophy from all the objections immediately in sight.... Truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
1905-1907
The Last Period (II)—Italy and Greece—Philosophical Congress in Rome—Stanford University—The Earthquake—Resignation of Professorship
In the spring of 1905 an escape from influenza, from Cambridge duties, and from correspondents, became imperative. James had long wanted to see Athens with his own eyes, and he sailed on April 3 for a short southern holiday. During the journey he wrote letters to almost no one except his wife. On his way back from Athens he stopped in Rome with the purpose of seeing certain young Italian philosophers. A Philosophical Congress was being held there at the time; and James, though he had originally declined the invitation to attend it, inevitably became involved in its proceedings and ended by seizing the occasion to discuss his theory of consciousness. It was obvious that the appropriate language in which to address a full meeting of the Congress would be French, and so he shut himself up in his hotel and composed "La Notion de Conscience." His experience in writing this paper threw an instructive sidelight on his process of composition. Ordinarily—when he was writing in English—twenty-five sheets of manuscript, written in a large hand and corrected, were a maximum achievement for one day. The address in Rome was not composed in English and then translated, but was written out in French. When he had finished the last lines of one day's work, James found to his astonishment that he had completed and corrected over forty pages of manuscript.The inhibitions which a habit of careful attention to points of style ordinarily called into play were largely inoperative when he wrote in a language which presented to his mind a smaller variety of possible expressions, and thus imposed limits upon his self-criticism.
In the following year (1906), James took leave of absence from Harvard in January and accepted an invitation from Stanford University to give a course during its spring term. He planned the course as a general introduction to Philosophy. Had he not been interrupted by the San Francisco earthquake, he would have rehearsed much of the projected "Introductory Textbook of Philosophy," in which he meant to outline his metaphysical system. But the earthquake put an end to the Stanford lectures in April, as the reader will learn more fully. In the ensuing autumn and winter (1907), James made the same material the basis of a half-year's work with his last Harvard class.
In November, 1906, the lectures which compose the volume called "Pragmatism" were written out and delivered in November at the Lowell Institute in Boston. In January, 1907, they were repeated at Columbia University, and then James published them in the spring.
The time had now come for him to stop regular teaching altogether. He had been continuing to teach, partly in deference to the wishes of the College; but it had become evident that he must have complete freedom to use his strength and time for writing when he could write, for special lectures, like the series on Pragmatism, when such might serve his ends, and for rest and change when recuperation became necessary. So, in February, 1907, he sent his resignation to the Harvard Corporation. The last meeting of his class ended in a way for which he was quite unprepared. His undergraduate students presented him with asilver loving-cup, the graduate students and assistants with an inkwell. There were a couple of short speeches, and words were spoken by which he was very much moved. Unfortunately there was no record of what was said.
Amalfi,Mar. 30, 1905.
...It is good to get something in full measure, without haggling or stint, and today I have had the picturesque ladled out in buckets full, heaped up and running over. I never realized the beauties of this shore, and forget (in my habit of never noticing proper names till I have been there) whether you have ever told me of the drive from Sorrento to this place. Anyhow, I wish that you could have taken it with me this day. "Thank God for this day!" We came to Sorrento by steamer, and at 10:30 got away in a carriage, lunching at the half-way village of Positano; and proceeding through Amalfi to Ravello, high up on the mountain side, whence back here in time for a 7:15 o'clock dinner. Practically six hours driving through a scenery of which I had never realized the beauty, or rather the interest, from previous descriptions. The lime-stone mountains are asstrongas anything in Switzerland, though of course much smaller. The road, aCorniceaffair cut for the most part on the face of cliffs, and crossing little ravines (with beaches) on the side of which nestle hamlets, is positively ferocious in its grandeur, and on the side of it the azure sea, dreaming and blooming like a bed of violets. I didn't look for such Swiss strength, having heard of naught but beauty. It seems as if this were a race such that, when anyone wished to express an emotion of any kind, he went and built a bit of stone-wall and limed it onto the rock, so that now, when they have accumulated,the works of God and man are inextricably mixed, and it is as if mankind had been a kind of immemorial coral insect. Every possible square yard is terraced up, reclaimed and planted, and the human dwellings are the fiercest examples of cliff-building, cave-habitation, staircase and foot-path you can imagine. How I do wish that you could have been along today....
Mar. 31, 1905.
From half-past four to half-past six I walked alone through theoldNaples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the very poor, vocal with them too (their voices carry so that every child seems to be calling to the whole street, goats, donkeys, chickens, and an occasional cow mixed in), and no light of heaven getting indoors. The street floor composed of cave-like shops, the people doing their work on chairs in the street for the sake of light, and in the black inside, beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be hard to match. I have come here too late in life, when the picturesque has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me like a passion, and such sights would have then been the solidest of mental food. I put up then with such inferior substitutional suggestions as Geneva and Paris afforded—but these black old Naples streets are not suggestions, they are the reality itself—full orchestra. I have got such an impression of the essential sociability of this race, especially in the country. A smile will go so far with them—even without the accompanying copper. And the children are so sweet. Tell Aleck to drop his other studies, learnItalian(real Italian, not the awful gibberish I try to speak), cultivate his beautiful smile, learn a sentimental song or two, bring a tambourineor banjo, and come down here and fraternize with the common people along the coast—he can go far, and make friends, and be a social success, even if he should go back to a clean hotel of some sort for sleep every night....
On board S.S. Orénogne, approachingPiræus, Greece,Apr. 3, 1905.
Darling Peg,—Your loving Dad is surely in luck sailing over this almost oily sea, under the awning on deck, past the coast of Greece (whose snow-capped mountains can be seen on the horizon), towards the Piræus, where we are due to arrive at about two. I had some misgivings about the steamer from Marseilles, but she has turned out splendid, and the voyage perfect. A 4000-ton boat, bran new as to all her surface equipment, stateroom all to myself, by a happy stroke of luck (the boat being full), clean absolutely, large open window, sea like Lake Champlain, with the color of Lake Leman, about a hundred and twenty first-class passengers of the most interesting description, one sixth English archeologists, one sixth English tourists, one third French archeologists, etc.,—an international archeological congress opens at Athens this week,—the rest Dagoesquelconques, many distinguished men, almost all educated and pronounced individualities, and so much acquaintance and sociability, that the somewhat small upper deck on which I write resounds with conversation like an afternoon tea. The meals are tip-top, and the whole thing almost absurdly ideal in its kind. I only wish your mother could be wafted here for one hour, to sit by my side and enjoy the scene. The best feature of the boat is little Miss Boyd, the Cretan excavatress, from Smith College, a perfect little trump of a thing, who has been through the Greco-Turkishwar as nurse (as well as being nurse at Tampa during our Cuban war), and is the simplest, most generally intelligent little thing, who knows Greece by heart and can smooth one's path beautifully. Waldstein of Cambridge is on board, also M. Sylvain of the Théâtre Français, and his daughter—going to recite prologues or something at the representation of Sophocles's "Antigone," which is to take place—he looking just like your uncle Henry—both eminent comedians—I mean the two Sylvains. On the bench opposite me is the most beautiful woman on board, a sort of Mary Salter translated into French, though she is with rather common men. Well, now I will stop, and use my Zeiss glass on the land, which is getting nearer. My heart wells over with love and gratitude at having such a family—meaning Alice, you, Harry, Bill, Aleck, and Mother-in-law—and resolutions to live so as to be more worthy of them. I will finish this on land.
Well, dear family,—We got in duly in an indescribableembrouillementof small boats (our boatman, by the way, when Miss Boyd asked him his name, replied "Dionysos"; our wine-bottle was labelled "John Solon and Co."), sailing past the Island of Ægina and the Bay of Salamis, with the Parthenon visible ahead—a worthy termination to a delightful voyage. We drove the three miles from the Piræus in a carriage, common and very dusty country road, also close by the Parthenon, through the cheap little town to this hotel, after which George Putnam and I, washing our hands, strolled forth to see what we could, the first thing being Mrs. Sam Hoar at the theatre of Bacchus. Then the rest of the Acropolis, which is all and more than all the talk. There is a mystery ofrightnessabout that Parthenon that I cannot understand. It sets a standard for otherhuman things, showing that absolute rightness is not out of reach. But I am not in descriptive mood, so I spare you. Suffice it that I couldn't keep the tears from welling into my eyes. "J'ai vu la beauté parfaite." Santayana is in a neighboring hotel, but we have missed each other thrice. The Forbeses are on the Peloponnesus, but expected back tomorrow. Well, dear ones all, good-night! Thus far, and no farther! Hence I turn westward again. The Greek lower orders seem far less avid and rapacious than the Southern Italians. God bless you all. I must get to another hotel, and be more to myself. Good and dear as the Putnams are and extremely helpful as they've been, it keeps me too much in company. Good-night again. Your loving father,respectivehusband,
W. J.
Rome,Apr. 25, 1905.
...Strong telegraphed me yesterday from Lausanne that he ... expected to be at Cannes on the 4th of May. I was glad of this, for I had been feeling more and more as if I ought to stay here, and it makes everything square out well. This morning I went to the meeting-place of the Congress to inscribe myself definitely, and when I gave my name, the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me, or words to that effect, and called in poor Professor de Sanctis, the Vice President or Secretary or whatever, who treated me in the same manner, and finally got me to consent to make an address at one of the general meetings, of which there are four, in place of Sully, Flournoy, Richet, Lipps, and Brentano, who were announced but are not to come. I fancy they have been pretty unscrupulous with their program here, printing conditional futures as categorical ones. So I'm in for it again, havingno power to resist flattery. I shall try to express my "Does Consciousness Exist?" in twenty minutes—and possibly in the French tongue! Strange after the deep sense of nothingness that has been besetting me the last two weeks (mere fatigue symptom) to be told thatmyname was attracting many of the young professors to the Congress!
Then I went to the Museum in the baths of Diocletian or whatever it is, off there by the R. R., then to the Capitol, and then to lunch off the Corso, at a restaurant, after buying a French book whose author says in his preface that Sully, W. J., and Bergson are his masters. And I am absolute 0 in my own home!...
Apr. 30, 1905.7P.M.
...If you never had a tired husband, at least you've got one now! Theideerof being in such delightful conditions and interesting surroundings, and being conscious of nothing but one's preposterous physical distress, is too ridiculous! I have just said good-bye to my circle of admirers, relatively youthful, at the hotel door, under the pretext (a truth until this morning) that I had to get ready to go to Lausanne tonight, and I taper off my activity by subsiding upon you. Yesterday till three, and the day before till five, I was writing my address, which this morning I gave—in French. I wrote it carefully and surprised myself by the ease with which I slung the Gallic accent and intonation, being excited by the occasion.[58]Janet expressed himself asstupéfait, from the linguistic point of view. The thing lasted 40 minutes, and was followed by a discussion which showed that the critics with one exception had wholly failed to catch the point of view; but that was quiteen régle, so I don't care; and I have given the thing to Claparèdeto print in Flournoy's "Archives." The Congress was far too vast, but filled with strange and interesting creatures of all sorts, and sociallyverynutritious to anyone who can stand sociability without distress. A fête of some sort every day—thisP.M.I have just returned from a great afternoon tea given us by some "Minister" at the Borghese Palace—in the Museum. (The King, you know, has bought the splendid Borghese park and given it to the City of Rome as a democratic possessionin perpetuo. A splendid gift.) The pictures too! Tonight there is a great banquet with speeches, to which of course I can't go. I lunched at the da Vitis,—a big table full, she very simple and nice,—and I have been having this afternoon a very good and rather intimate talk with the little band of "pragmatists," Papini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, etc., most of whom inhabit Florence, publish the monthly journal "Leonardo" at their own expense, and carry on a very serious philosophic movement, apparentlyreallyinspired by Schiller and myself (I never could believe it before, although Ferrari had assured me), and show an enthusiasm, and also a literary swing and activity that I know nothing of in our own land, and that probably our damned academic technics and Ph.D.-machinery and university organization prevents from ever coming to a birth. These men, of whom Ferrari is one, are none of themFach-philosophers, and few of them teachers at all. It has given me a certain new idea of the way in which truth ought to find its way into the world.
I have seen such a lot ofimportant-looking faces,—probably everything in the stock in the shop-window,—and witnessed such charmingly gracious manners, that it is a lesson. The woodenness of our Anglo-Saxon social ways! I had a really splendid audience for quality thisA.M.(about 200), even though they didn't understand....
Orvieto,May 2, 1905.
Dear Santayana,—I came here yesterday from Rome and have been enjoying the solitude. I stayed at the exquisite Albergo de Russie, and didn't shirk the Congress—in fact they stuck me for a "general" address, to fill the vacuum left by Flournoy and Sully, who had been announced and came not (I spokeagin"consciousness," but nobody understood) and I gotfearfully tired. On the whole it was an agreeable nightmare—agreeable on account of the perfectly charminggentillezzaof the bloody Dagoes, the way they caress and flatter you—"il piu grand psicologo del mondo," etc., and of the elaborate provisions for general entertainment—nightmare, because of my absurd bodily fatigue. However, these things are "neither here nor there." What I really write to you for is to tell you to send (if not sent already) your "Life of Reason" to the "Revue de Philosophie," or rather to its editor, M. Peillaube, Rue des Revues 160, and to the editor of "Leonardo" (the great little Florentine philosophical journal), Sig. Giovanni Papini, 14 Borgo Albizi, Florence. The most interesting, and in fact genuinely edifying, part of my trip has been meeting this littlecénacle, who have taken my own writings,entre autres, au grand sérieux, but who are carrying on their philosophical mission in anything but a technically serious way, inasmuch as "Leonardo" (of which I have hitherto only known a few odd numbers) is devoted to good and lively literary form. The sight of their belligerent young enthusiasm has given me a queer sense of the gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young Ph.D.'s, boring each other at seminaries, writing those direful reports of literature in the "Philosophical Review" and elsewhere, fed on "books of reference," and never confounding "Æsthetik"with "Erkentnisstheorie." Faugh! I shall never deal with them again—onthoseterms! Can't you and I, who in spite of such divergence have yet so much in common in ourWeltanschauung, start a systematic movement at Harvard against the desiccating and pedantifying process? I have been cracking you up greatly to both Peillaube and Papini, and quoted you twice in my speech, which was in French and will be published in Flournoy's "Archives de Psychologie." I hope you're enjoying the Eastern Empire to the full, and that you had some Grecian "country life." Münsterberg has been called to Koenigsberg and has refused. Better be America's ancestor than Kant's successor! Ostwald, to my great delight, is coming to us next year, not as your replacer, but in exchange with Germany for F. G. Peabody. I go now to Cannes, to meet Strong, back from his operation. Ever truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
Cannes,May 13, 1905.
...I came Sunday night, and this is Saturday. The six days have been busy ones in one sense, but have rested me very much in another. No sight-seeing fatigues, but more usual, and therefore more normal occupations.... I have written some 25 letters, long and short, to European correspondents since being here, have walked and driven with Strong, and have had philosophy hot and heavy with him almost all the time. I never knew such an unremitting, untiring, monotonous addiction as that of his mind to truth. He goes by points, pinning each one definitely, and has, I think, the very clearest mind I ever knew. Add to it his absolute sincerity and candor and it is no wonder that he is a "growing" man. I suspect that he will outgrow us all, for his rate accelerates, and he never stands still. He is anadmirable philosophic figure, and I am glad to say that in most things he and I are fully in accord. He gains a great deal from such talks, noting every point down afterwards, and I gain great stimulation, though in a vaguer way. I shall be glad, however, on Monday afternoon, to relax....
[Post-card]
Geneva,May 17, 1905.
So far, thank Heaven, on my way towards home! A rather useful time with the superior, but sticky X——, at Marseilles, and as far as Lyons in the train, into which an hour beyond Lyons there came (till then I was alone in my compartment) a Spanish bishop, canon and "familar," an aged holy woman, sister of the bishop, a lay-brother and sister, a dog, and more baggage than I ever saw before, including a feather-bed. They spoke no French—the bishop about as much Italian as I, and the lay-sister as much of English as I of Spanish. They took out their rosaries and began mumbling their litanies forthwith, whereon I took off my hat, which seemed to touch them so, when they discovered I was a Protestant, that we all grew very affectionate and I soon felt ashamed of the way in which I had at first regarded their black and superstitious invasion of my privacy. Good, saintly people on their way to Rome. I go now to our old haunts and to the Flournoys'....
W.
S. S.Cedric,June 6, 1905.
My dear Mr. Wells,—I have just read your "Utopia" (given me by F. C. S. Schiller on the one day that I spent in Oxford on my way back to Cambridge, Mass., after a few weeks on the Continent), and "Anticipations," and "Mankindin the Making" having duly preceded, together with numerous other lighter volumes of yours, the "summation of stimuli" reaches the threshold of discharge and I can't help overflowing in a note of gratitude. You "have your faults, as who has not?" but your virtues are unparalleled and transcendent, and I believe that you will prove to have given a shove to the practical thought of the next generation that will be amongst the greatest of its influences for good. All in the line of the English genius too, no wire-drawn French doctrines, and no German shop technicalities inflicted in anunerbittlich consequentmanner, but everywhere the sense of the full concrete, and the air of freedom playing through all the joints of your argument. You have a tri-dimensional human heart, and to use your own metaphor, don't see different levels projected on one plane. In this last book you beautifully soften cocksureness by the penumbra of the outlines—in fact you're a trump and a jewel, and for human perception you beat Kipling, and for hitting off a thing with the right word, you are unique. Heaven bless and preserve you!—You are now an eccentric; perhaps 50 years hence you will figure as a classic! Your Samurai chapter is magnificent, though I find myself wondering what developments in the way of partisan politics those same Samurai would develop, when it came to questions of appointment and running this or that man in.ThatI believe to be human nature's ruling passion. Live long! and keep writing; and believe me, yours admiringly and sincerely,
WM. JAMES.
CAMBRIDGE,July 18 [1905].
Dear H.,—You asked me how rich I was getting by my own (as distinguished fromyour) exertions....
I find on reaching home today a letter from Longmans, Green & Co. with a check ... which I have mailed to your house in State Street....
This ought to please you slightly; but don't reply! Instead, think of the virtues of Roosevelt, either as permanent sovereign of this great country, or as President of Harvard University. I've been having a discussion with Fanny Morse about him, which has resulted in making me his faithful henchman for life, Fanny was so violent. Think of the mighty good-will of him, of his enjoyment of his post, of his power as a preacher, of the number of things to which he gives his attention, of the safety of his second thoughts, of the increased courage he is showing, and above all of the fact that he is an open, instead of an underground leader, whom the voters can control once in four years, when he runs away, whose heart is in the right place, who is an enemy of red tape and quibbling and everything that in general the word "politician" stands for. That significance of him in the popular mind is a great national asset, and it would be a shame to let it run to waste until it has done a lot more work for us. His ambitions are not selfish—he wants to do good only! Bless him—and damn all his detractors like you and F. M.![59]
Don't reply, but vote! Your affectionately
WM. JAMES.
CAMBRIDGE,Aug. 24, 1905.
Dear Thos!—You're aphilosophe sans le savoirand, when you write your treatise against philosophy, you will be classed as the arch-metaphysician. Every philosopher(W. J.,e.g.) pretends that all the others are metaphysicians against whom he is simply defending the rights of common sense. As for Nietzsche, the worst break of his I recall was in a posthumous article in one of the French reviews a few months back. In his high and mighty way he was laying down the law about all the European countries. Russia, he said, is "the only one that has any possible future—and that she owes to the strength of the principle of autocracy to which she alone remains faithful," Unfortunately one can't appeal to the principle of democracy to explain Japan's recent successes.
I am very glad you've done something about poor dear old John Fiske, and I should think that you would have no difficulty in swelling it up to the full "Beacon Biography" size. If you want an extra anecdote, you might tell how, when Chauncey Wright, Chas. Peirce, St. John Green, Warner and I appointed an evening to discuss the "Cosmic Philosophy," just out, J. F. went to sleep under our noses.
I hope that life as a farmer agrees with you, and that your "womenkind" wish nothing better than to be farmers' wives, daughters or other relatives. Unluckily we let our farm this summer; so I am here in Cambridge with Alice, both of us a prey to as bad an attack of grippe as the winter solstice ever brought forth. Today, the 10th day, I am weaker than any kitten. Don't ever letyourfarm! Affectionately,
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Nov. 10, 1905.
Dear Miller,—W. R. Warren has just been here and says he has just seen you; the which precipitates me into a letter to you which has long hung fire. I hope that all goeswell. You must be in a rather cheerful quarter of the City. Do you go home Sundays, or not? I hope that the work is congenial. How do you like your students as compared with those here? I reckon you get more out of your colleagues than you did here—barring of courseder Einzige. We are all such old stories to each other that we say nothing. Santayana is the only [one] about whom we had any curiosity, and he has now quenched that. Perry and Holt have some ideas in reserve.... The fact is that the classroom exhausts our powers of speech. Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all the stuff I wrote last year—to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to others, if he has read, it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel trenches and hardly show our heads.
Santayana's book[60]is a great one, if the inclusion of opposites is a measure of greatness. I think it will probably be reckoned great by posterity. It has norationalfoundation, being merely one man's way of viewing things: so much of experience admitted and no more, so much criticism and questioning admitted and no more. He is a paragon of Emersonianism.—declare your intuitions, though no other man share them; and the integrity with which he does it is as fine as it is rare. And his naturalism, materialism, Platonism, and atheism form a combination of which the centre of gravity is, I think, very deep. But there is something profoundly alienating in his unsympathetic tone, his "preciousness" and superciliousness. The book is Emerson's first rival and successor, but how different the reader's feeling! The same things in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive, expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great indraught; S. as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling spray outwardover the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an "atomizer." ... I fear that the real originality of the book will be lost on nineteen-twentieths of the members of the Philosophical and Psychological Association!! The enemies of Harvard will find lots of blasphemous texts in him to injure us withal. But it is a great feather in our cap to harbor such an absolutely free expresser of individual convictions. But enough!
"Phil. 9" is going well. I think Ilecturebetter than I ever did; in fact I know I do. But this professional evolution goes with an involution of all miscellaneous faculty. I am well, and efficient enough, but purposely going slow so as to keep efficient into the Palo Alto summer, which means that I have written nothing. I am pestered by doubts as to whether to put my resignation through this year, in spite of opposition, or to drag along another year or two. I think it is inertia against energy, energy in my case meaning being my own man absolutely. American philosophers, young and old, seem scratching where the wool is short. Important things are being published; but all of them too technical. The thing will never clear up satisfactorily till someone writes out its resultant in decent English....
The reader will have understood "the Palo Alto summer" to refer to the lectures to be delivered at Stanford University during the coming spring. The Stanford engagement was again in James's mind when he spoke, in the next letter, of "dreading the prospect of lecturing till mid-May."
CAMBRIDGE,Dec. 6, 1905.
Dear Miller,— ...You seem to take radical empiricism more simply than I can. What I mean by it is thethesis that there is no fact "not actually experienced to be such." In other words, the concept of "being" or "fact" is not wider than or prior to the concept "content of experience"; and you can't talk ofexperiences beingthis or that, but only ofthings experienced as beingthis or that. But such a thesis would, it seems to me, if literally taken, force one to drop the notion that in point of fact one experience isexanother, so long as theex-ness is not itself a "content" of experience. In the matter of two minds not having the same content, it seems to me that your view commits you to an assertionabout their experiences; and such an assertion assumes a realm in which the experiences lie, which overlaps and surrounds the "content" of them. This, it seems to me, breaks down radical empiricism, which I hate to do; and I can't yet clearly see my way out of the quandary. I am much boggled and muddled; and the total upshot with me is to see that all the hoary errors and prejudices of man in matters philosophical are based on something pretty inevitable in the structure of our thinking, and to distrust summary executions by conviction of contradiction. I suspect your execution of being too summary; but I have copied the last paragraph of the sheets (which I return with heartiest thanks) for the extraordinarily neat statement....
I dread the prospect of lecturing till mid-May, but the wine being ordered, I must drink it. I dislike lecturing more and more. Have just definitely withdrawn my candidacy for the Sorbonne job, with great internal relief, and wish I could withdraw from the whole business, and get at writing.[61]Not a line of writing possible this year—except of course occasional note-making. All the things that one isreally concerned with are too nice and fine to use in lectures. You remember the definition of T. H. Greene's student: "The universe is a thick complexus of intelligible relations." Yesterday I gotmysystem similarly defined in an examination-book, by a student whom I appear to have converted to the view that "the Universe is a vague pulsating mass of next-to-next movement, always feeling its way along to a good purpose, or trying to." That is about as far as lectures can carry them. I particularly like the "trying to."
I wish I could have been at your recent discussion. I am getting impatient with the awful abstract rigmarole in which our American philosophers obscure the truth. It will be fatal. It revives the palmy days of Hegelianism. It means utter relaxation of intellectual duty, and God will smite it. If there's anything he hates, it is that kind of oozy writing.
I have just read Busse's book, in which I find a lot of reality by the way, but a pathetic waste of work on side issues—for against the Strong-Heymans view of things, it seems to me that he brings no solid objection whatever. Heymans's book is a wonder.[62]Good-bye, dear Miller.Come to us, if you can, as soon as your lectures are over.
Your affectionate
W. J.
[Post-card]
CAMBRIDGE,Dec. 9. 1905.
"My idea of Algebra," says a non-mathematically-minded student, "is that it is a sort of form of low cunning."
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Dec. 9, 1905.
No, dear Merriman, not "e'en for thy sake." After an unblemished record of declining to give addresses, successfully maintained for four years (I have certainly declined 100 in the past twelve-month), I am not going to break down now, for Abbot Academy, and go dishonored to my grave. It is better, as the "Bhagavat-Gita" says, to lead your own life, however bad, than to lead another's, however good. Emerson teaches the same doctrine, and I live by it as bad and congenial a life as I can. If there is anything that God despises more than a man who is constantly making speeches, it is another man who is constantly accepting invitations. What must he think, when they are both rolled into one? Get thee behind me, Merriman,—I 'm sure that your saintly partner would never have sent me such a request,—and believe me, as ever, fondly yours,
WM. JAMES.
El Tovar,Grand Canyon, Arizona,Jan. 3, 1906.
Dear Paolina,—I am breaking my journey by a day here, and it seems a good place from which to date my New Year's greeting to you. But we correspond so rarely that when it comes to the point of tracing actual words with the pen, the last impressions of one's day and the more permanent interest of one's life block the way for each other. I think, however, that a word about the Canyon may fitly take precedence. It certainly is equal to the brag; and, like so many of the more stupendous freaks of nature, seems at first-sight smaller and more manageable than one had supposed. But it grows in immensity as the eye penetrates it more intimately. It is so entirely alone in character,that one has no habits of association with "the likes" of it, and at first it seems a foreign curiosity; but already in this one day I am feeling myself grow nearer, and can well imagine that, with greater intimacy, it might become the passion of one's life—so far as "Nature" goes. The conditions have been unfavorable for intimate communion. Three degrees above zero, and a spring overcoat, prevent that forgetting of "self" which is said to be indispensable to absorption in Beauty. Moreover, I have kept upon the "rim," seeing the Canyon from several points some miles apart. I meant to go down, having but this day; but they couldn't send me or any one today; and I confess that, with my precipice-disliking soul, I was relieved, though it very likely would have proved less uncomfortable than I have been told. (I resolved to go, in order to be worthy of being your correspondent.) As Chas. Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by "circumstances beyond your control" from even trying to execute them. But if ever I get here in summer, I shall go straight down and live there. I'm sure that it is indispensable. But it is vain to waste descriptive words on the wondrous apparition, with its symphonies of architecture and of color. I have just been watching its peaks blush in the setting sun, and slowly lose their fire. Night nestling in the depths. Solemn, solemn! And a unity of design that makes it seem like an individual, an animated being. Good-night, old chasm!...
Stanford University,Feb. 1, 1906.
Beloved H.,—Verily 'tis long since I have written to thee, but I have had many and mighty things to do, andlately many business letters to write, so I came not at it. Your last was your delightful reply to my remarks about your "third manner," wherein you said that you would consider your bald head dishonored if you ever came to pleasingmeby what you wrote, so shocking was my taste.[63]Well! only writeforme, and leave the question of pleasing open! I have to admit that in "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove," you have succeededin getting thereafter a fashion, in spite of the perversity of the method and itslongness, which I am not the only one to deplore.
But enough! let me tell you of my own fortunes!
I got here (after five pestilentially close-aired days in the train, and one entrancing one off at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado) on the 8th, and have now given nine lectures, to 300 enrolled students and about 150 visitors, partly colleagues. I take great pains, prepare a printed syllabus, very fully; and really feel for the first time in my life, as if I were lecturingwell. High time, after 30 years of practice! It earns me $5000, if I can keep it up till May 27th; but apart from that, I think it is a bad way of expending energy. I ought to be writing my everlastingly postponed book, which this job again absolutely adjourns. I can't write a line of it while doing this other thing. (A propos to which, I got a telegram from Eliot thisA.M., asking if I would be Harvard Professor for the first half of next year at the University of Berlin. I had no difficulty in declining that, but I probably shall not declineParis, if they offer it to me year after next.) I am expecting Alice to arrive in a fortnight. I have got a very decent little second story, just enough for the two of us, or rather amply enough, sunny, good fire-place, bathroom, little kitchen, etc., on one of the three residential streets of the University land, and with aboarding-house for meals just opposite, we shall have a sort of honeymoon picnic time. And, sooth to say, Alice must need the simplification....
You've seen this wonderful spot, so I needn't describe it. It is really a miracle; and so simple the life and so benign the elements, that for a young ambitious professor who wishes to leave his mark on Pacific civilization while it is most plastic, or forany onewho wants to teach and work under the most perfect conditions for eight or nine months, andwho is able to get to the East, or Europe, for the remaining three, I can't imagine anything finer. It is Utopian. Perfection of weather. Cold nights, though above freezing. Fire pleasant until 10 o'clockA.M., then unpleasant. In short, the "simple life" with all the essential higher elements thrown in as communal possessions. The drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum—the historic silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen—and the social insipidity. I'm glad I came, and with God's blessing I may pull through. One calendar month is over, anyway. Do you know aught of G. K. Chesterton? I've just read his "Heretics." A tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradox. Wells's "Kipps" is good. Good-bye. Of course you 're breathing the fog of London while I am bathed in warmest lucency. Keep well. Your loving,
W. J.
Stanford University,Feb. 9, 1906.
Dear Flournoy.—Your post-card of Jan. 22nd arrives and reminds me how little I have communicated with you during the past twelve months....
Let me begin by congratulating Mlle. Alice, but moreparticularly Mr. Werner, on the engagement which you announce. Surely she is a splendid prize for anyone to capture. I hope that it has been a romantic love-affair, and will remain so to the end. May her paternal and maternal example be the model which their married life will follow! They could find no better model. You do not tell the day of the wedding—probably it is not yet appointed.
Yes! [Richard] Hodgson's death was ultra-sudden. He fell dead while playing a violent game of "hand-ball." He was tremendously athletic and had said to a friend only a week before that he thought he could reasonably count on twenty-five years more of life. None of his work was finished, vast materials amassed, which no one can ever get acquainted with as he had gradually got acquainted; so now good-bye forever to at least two unusually solid and instructive books which he would have soon begun to write on "psychic" subjects. As aman, Hodgson was splendid, a real man; as an investigator, it is my private impression that he lately got into a sort of obsession about Mrs. Piper, cared too little for other clues, and continued working with her when all the sides of her mediumship were amply exhibited. I suspect that our American Branch of the S.P.R. will have to dissolve this year, for lack of a competent secretary. Hodgson was our only worker, except Hyslop, andheis engaged in founding an "Institute" of his own, which will employ more popular methods. To tell the truth, I 'm rather glad of the prospect of the Branch ending, for the Piper-investigation—and nothing else—had begun to bore me to extinction....
To change the subject—you ought to see this extraordinary little University. It was founded only fourteen years ago in the absolute wilderness, by a pair of rich Californians named Stanford, as a memorial to their only child,a son who died at 16. Endowed with I know not how many square miles of land, which some day will come into the market and yield a big income, it has already funds that yield $750,000 yearly, and buildings, of reallybeautifularchitecture, that have been paid for out of income, and have cost over $5,000,000. (I mention the cost to let you see that they must be solid.) There are now 1500 students of both sexes, who pay nothing for tuition, and a town of 15,000 inhabitants has grown up a mile away, beyond the gates. The landscape is exquisite and classical, San Francisco only an hour and a quarter away by train; the climate is one of the most perfect in the world, life is absolutely simple, no one being rich, servants almost unattainable (most of the house-work being done by students who come in at odd hours), many of them Japanese, and the professors' wives, I fear, having in great measure to do their own cooking. No social excesses or complications therefore. In fact, nothing but essentials, andallthe essentials. Fine music, for example, every afternoon, in the Church of the University. There couldn't be imagined a better environment for an intellectual man to teach and work in, for eight or nine months in the year, if he were then free to spend three or four months in the crowded centres of civilization—for the social insipidity is great here, and the historic vacuum and silence appalling, and one ought to be free to change.
Unfortunately the authorities of the University seem not to be gifted with imagination enough to see its proper rôle. Its geographical environment and material basis being unique, they ought to aim at unique quality all through, and getsommitésto come here to work and teach, by offering large stipends. They might, I think, thus easily build up something very distinguished. Instead of which, they paysmall sums to young men who chafe at not being able to travel, and whose wives get worn out with domestic drudgery. The whole thingmightbe Utopian; itisonly half-Utopian. A characteristic American affair! But the half-success is great enough to make one see the great advantages that come to this country from encouraging public-spirited millionaires to indulge their freaks, however eccentric. In what the Stanfords have already done, there is an assured potentiality of great things ofsomesort for all future time. My coming here is an exception. They have had psychology well represented from the first by Frank Angell and Miss Martin; but no philosophy except for a year at a time. I start a new régime—next year they will have two good professors.
I lecture three times a week to 400 listeners, printing a syllabus daily, and making them read Paulsen's textbook for examinations. I find it hard work,[64]and only pray that I may have strength to run till June without collapsing. The students, though rustic, are very earnest and wholesome.
I am pleased, but also amused, by what you say of Woodbridge's Journal: "la palme est maintenant à l'Amérique." It is true that a lot of youngsters in that Journal are doing some real thinking, but of all thebad writingthat the world has seen, I think that our American writing is getting to be the worst. X——'s ideas have unchained formlessness of expression that beats the bad writing of the Hegelian epoch in Germany. I can hardly believe you sincere when you praise that journal as you do. I am so busy teachingthat I do no writing and but little reading this year. I have declined to go to Paris next year, and also declined an invitation to Berlin, as "International Exchange" [Professor]. The year after, if asked, Imaygo to Paris—but never to Berlin. We have had Ostwald, a most delightful humanErscheinung, as international exchange at Harvard this year. But I don't believe in the system....
Hotel Del Monte,Monterey, Cal.,Apr. 7, 1906.
...What I really want to write about is Papini, the concluding chapter of his "Crepuscolo dei Filosofi," and the February number of the "Leonardo." Likewise Dewey's "Beliefs and Realities," in the "Philosophical Review" for March. I must be very damp powder, slow to burn, and I must be terribly respectful of other people, for I confess that it is only after reading these things (in spite of all you have written to the same effect, and in spite of your tone of announcing judgment to a sinful world), that I seem to have grasped the full import for life and regeneration, thegreatperspective of the programme, and the renovating character forall things, of Humanism; and the outwornness as of a scarecrow's garments, simulating life by flapping in the wind of nightfall, of all intellectualism, and the blindness and deadness of all who worship intellectualist idols, the Royces and Taylors, and, worse than all, their followers, who, with no inward excuse of nature (being too unoriginal really topreferanything), just blunder on to the wrong scent, when it is so easy to catch the right one, and then stick to it with the fidelity of inorganic matter. Ha! ha! would that I were young again with this inspiration! Papini is a jewel! To think of that little Dago putting himself aheadof every one of us (even of you, with hisUomo-Dio) at a single stride. And what a writer! and what fecundity! and what courage (careless of nicknames, for it is so easy to call him now the Cyrano de Bergerac of Philosophy)! and what humor and what truth! Dewey's powerful stuff seems also to ring the death-knell of a sentenced world. Yet none ofthemwill see it—Taylor will still write his refutations, etc., etc., when the living world will all be drifting afterus. It is queer to be assisting at theéclosionof a great new mental epoch, life, religion, and philosophy in one—I wish I didn't have to lecture, so that I might bear some part of the burden of writing it all out, as we must do, pushing it into all sort of details. But I must for one year longer. We don't get back till June, but pray tell Wells (whose addressfehlt mir) to make our house his headquarters if he gets to Boston and finds it the least convenient to do so. Our boys will hug him to their bosoms. Ever thine,
W. J.
The San Francisco earthquake occurred at about five o'clock in the morning on April 18. Rumors of the destruction wrought in the city reached Stanford within a couple of hours and were easily credited, for buildings had been shaken down at Stanford. Miss L. J. Martin, a member of the philosophical department, was thrown into great anxiety about relatives of hers who were in the city, and James offered to accompany her in a search for them, and left Stanford with her by an early morning train. He also promised Mrs. Wm. F. Snow to try to get her news of her husband. Miss Martin found her relatives, and James met Dr. Snow early in the afternoon, and then spent several hours in wandering about the stricken city. He subsequentlywrote an account of the disaster, which may be found in "Memories and Studies."[65]
Stanford University,Apr. 22, 1906.
Dearest Fanny,—Three letters from you and nary one from us in all these weeks! Well, I have been heavily burdened, and although disposed to write, have kept postponing; and with Alice—cooking, washing dishes and doing housework, as well as keeping up a large social life—it has been very much the same. All is now over, since the earthquake; I mean that lectures and syllabuses are calledoff, and no more exams to be held ("ill-wind," etc.), so one can write. We shall get East again as soon as we can manage it, and tell you face to face. We can now pose as experts on Earthquakes—pardon the egotistic form of talking about the latter, but it makes it more real. The last thing Bakewell said to me, while I was leaving Cambridge, was: "I hope they'll treat you to a little bit of an earthquake while you're there. It's a pity you shouldn't have that local experience." Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was, "Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely anentitythat had been waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying, "Now,goit!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by a will, so vicious was the temper displayed—everythingdown, in the room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room,the extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the dreadful news from San Francisco.
I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that shemustsee what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service.
But you will know all these details by the papers better than I know them now, before this reaches you, and in three weeks we shall be back.
I am very glad that Jim's [Putnam] lectures went off so well. He wrote me himself a good letter—won't you, by the way, send him this one as a partial answer?—and his syllabus was first-rate and the stuff must have been helpful. It is jolly to think of both him and Marian really getting off together to enjoy themselves! But between Vesuvius and San Francisco enjoyment has smallelbow-room. Love to your mother, dearest Fanny, to Mary and the men folks, from us both. Your ever affectionate,
W. J.
A few days after the earthquake, train-service from Stanford to the East was reëstablished and James and his wife returned to Cambridge. The reader will infer correctly from the next letter that Henry James (and William James, Jr., who was staying with him in Rye) had been in great anxiety and had been by no means reassured by the brief cablegram which was the only personal communication that it was possible to send them during the days immediately following the disaster.
CAMBRIDGE,May 9, 1906.
Dearest Brother and Son,—Your cablegram of response was duly received, and we have been also "joyous" in the thought of your being together. I knew, of course, Henry, that you would be solicitous about us in the earthquake, but didn't reckon at all on the extremity of your anguish as evinced by your frequent cablegrams home, and finally by the letter to Harry which arrived a couple of days ago and told how you were unable to settle down to any other occupation, the thought of our mangled forms, hollow eyes, starving bodies, minds insane with fear, haunting you so. We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety on your part, I say, and so never thought of cabling you direct, as we might well have done from Oakland on the day we left, namely April 27th. I much regret this callousness on our part. Forallthe anguish was yours; and in general this experience only rubs in what I have always known, that in battles, sieges and other great calamities, the pathosand agony is in general solely felt by those at a distance; and although physical pain is suffered most by its immediate victims, those at thescene of actionhave nosentimentalsuffering whatever. Everyone at San Francisco seemed in a good hearty frame of mind; there was work for every moment of the day and a kind of uplift in the sense of a "common lot" that took away the sense of loneliness that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to the more usual kind of misfortune that may befall a man. But it was a queer sight, on our journey through the City on the 26th (eight days after the disaster), to see the inmates of the houses of the quarter left standing, all cooking their dinners at little brick camp-fires in the middle of the streets, the chimneys being condemned. If such a disaster had to happen, somehow it couldn't have chosen a better place than San Francisco (where everyone knew about camping, and was familiar with the creation of civilizations out of the bare ground), and at five-thirty in the morning, when few fires were lighted and everyone, after a good sleep, was in bed. Later, there would have been great loss of life in the streets, and the more numerous foci of conflagration would have burned the city in one day instead of four, and made things vastly worse.
In general you may be sure that when any disaster befalls our country it will beyouonly who are wringing of hands, and we who are smiling with "interest or laughing with gleeful excitement." I didn't hear one pathetic word uttered at the scene of disaster, though of course the crop of "nervous wrecks" is very likely to come in a month or so.
Although we have been home six days, such has been the stream of broken occupations, people to see, and small urgent jobs to attend to, that I have written no letter till now. Today, one sees more clearly and begins to rest. "Home" looks extraordinarily pleasant, and though dampand chilly, it is the divine budding moment of the year. Not, however, the lustrous light and sky of Stanford University....
I have just read your paper on Boston in the "North American Review." I am glad you threw away the scabbard and made your critical remarks so straight. What you say about "pay" here being the easily won "salve" for privations, in view of which we cease to "mind" them, is as true as it is strikingly pat.Les intellectuels, wedged between the millionaires and the handworkers, are the really pinched class here. They feel the frustrations and they can't get the salve.Myattainment of so much pay in the past few years brings home to me what an all-benumbing salve it is. That whole article is of your best. We long to hear from W., Jr. No word yet. Your ever loving,
W. J.
In "The Energies of Men" there is a long quotation from an unnamed European correspondent who had been subjecting himself to Yoga disciplinary exercise. What follows is a comment written upon the first receipt of the report quoted in the "Energies."