CAMBRIDGE,May 6, 1906.
...Your long and beautiful letter about Yoga, etc., greets me on my return from California. It is a most precious human document, and some day, along with that sketch of your religious evolution and other shorter letters of yours, it must see the light of day. What strikes me first in it is the evidence of improved moral "tone"—a calm, firm, sustained joyousness, hard to describe, and striking a new note in your epistles—which is already a convincingargument of the genuineness of the improvement wrought in you by Yoga practices....
You are mistaken about my having tried Yoga discipline—I never meant to suggest that. I have read several books (A. B., by the way, used to be a student of mine, but in spite of many noble qualities, he always had an unbalanced mind—obsessed by certain morbid ideas, etc.), and in the slightest possible way tried breathing exercises. These go terribly against the grain with me, are extremely disagreeable, and, even when tried this winter (somewhat perseveringly), to put myself asleep, after lying awake at night, failed to have any soporific effect. What impresses me most in your narrative is the obstinate strength of will shown by yourself and your chela in your methodical abstentions and exercises. When could I hope for such will-power? I find, when my general energy isin Anspruch genommenby hard lecturing and other professional work, that then particularly what littleasceticenergy I have has to be remitted, because the exertion of inhibitory and stimulative will required increases my general fatigue instead of "tonifying" me.
But your sober experience gives me new hopes. Your whole narrative suggests in me the wonder whether the Yoga discipline may not be, after all, in all its phases, simply a methodical way ofwaking up deeper levels of will-power than are habitually used, and thereby increasing the individual's vital tone and energy. I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. Theymake useof a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his littlefinger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. Pierre Janet discussed lately some cases of pathological impulsion or obsession in what he has called the "psychasthenic" type of individual, bulimia, exaggerated walking, morbid love of feeling pain, and explains the phenomenon as based on the underlyingsentiment d'incomplétude, as he calls it, orsentiment de l'irréelwith which these patients are habitually afflicted, and which they find is abolished by the violent appeal to some exaggerated activity or other, discovered accidentally perhaps, and then used habitually. I was reminded of his article in reading your descriptions and prescriptions. May the Yoga practices not be, after all, methods of getting at our deeper functional levels? And thus only be substitutes for entirely different crises that may occur in other individuals, religious crises, indignation-crises, love-crises, etc.?
What you say of diet is in striking accordance with the views lately made popular by Horace Fletcher—I dare say you have heard of them. You see I am trying to generalize the Yoga idea, and redeem it from the pretension that, for example, there is something intrinsically holy in the various grotesque postures of Hatha Yoga. I have spoken with various Hindus, particularly with three last winter, one a Yogi and apostle of Vedanta; one a "Christian" of scientific training; one a Bramo-Somaj professor. The former made great claims of increase of "power," but admitted that those who had it could in no way demonstrate itad oculos, to outsiders. The other two both said that Yoga was less and less frequently practised by the more intellectual, and that the old-fashionedGuruwas becoming quite a rarity.
I believe with you, fully, that the so-called "normal man"of commerce, so to speak, the healthy philistine, is a mere extract from the potentially realizable individual whom he represents, and that we all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. The practical problem is "how to get at them." And the answer varies with the individual. Most of us never can, or never do get at them.Youhave indubitably got at your own deeper levels by the Yoga methods. I hope that what you have gained will never again be lost to you. You must keep there!Mydeeper levels seem very hard to find—I am so rebellious at all formal and prescriptive methods—a dry and bonyindividual, repelling fusion, and avoiding voluntary exertion. No matter, art is long! andqui vivra verra. I shall try fasting and again try breathing—discovering perhaps some individual rhythm that is more tolerable....
CAMBRIDGE,May 18, 1906.
Dear Old Jack C.,—Having this minute come into the possession of a new type-writer, what can I do better than express my pride in the same by writing to you?[66]
I spent last night at George Dorr's and he read me several letters from you, telling me also of your visit, and of how well you seemed. For years past I have been on the point of writing to you to assure [you] of my continued love and to express my commiseration for your poor wife, who has had so long to bear the brunt of your temper—you see I have been there already and I know how one's irritability is exasperated by conditions of nervous prostration—but now I can write and congratulate you on having recovered, temper and all. (As I write, it bethinks me thatin a previous letter I have made identical jokes about your temper which, I fear, will give Mrs. Chapman a very low opinion of my humoristic resources, and in sooth they are small; but we are as God makes us and must not try to be anything else, so pray condone the silliness and let it pass.) The main thing is that you seem practically to have recovered, in spite of everything; and I am heartily glad.
I too am well enough for all practical purposes, but I have to go slow and not try to do too many things in a day. Simplification of life and consciousness I find to be the great thing, but a hard thing to compass when one lives in city conditions. How our dear Sarah Whitman lived in the sort of railroad station she made of her life—I confess it's a mystery to me. If I lived at a place called Barrytown, it would probably go better—don't you ever go back to New York to live!
Alice and I had a jovial time at sweet little Stanford University. It was the simple life in the best sense of the term. I am glad for once to have been part of the working machine of California, and a pretty deep part too, as it afterwards turned out. The earthquake also was a memorable bit of experience, and altogether we have found it mind-enlarging and are very glad we ben there. But the whole intermediate West is awful—a sort of penal doom to have to live there; and in general the result with me of having lived 65 years in America is to make me feel as if I had at least bought the right to a certain capriciousness, and were free now to live for the remainder of my days wherever I prefer and can make my wife and children consent—it is more likely to be in rural than in urban surroundings, and in the maturer than in therawrerparts of the world. But the first thing is to get out of the treadmill of teaching, which I hate and shall resign from next year. After that,I can use my small available store of energy in writing, which is not only a much more economical way of working it, but more satisfactory in point of quality, and more lucrative as well.
Now, J. C., when are you going to get at writing again? The world is hungry for your wares. No one touches certain deep notes of moral truth as you do, and your humor isköstlichandimpayable. You ought to join the band of "pragmatistic" or "humanistic" philosophers. I almost fear that Barrytown may not yet have begun to be disturbed by the rumor of their achievements, the which are of the greatest, and seriously I du think that the world of thought is on the eve of a renovation no less important than that contributed by Locke. The leaders of the new movement are Dewey, Schiller of Oxford, in a sense Bergson of Paris, a young Florentine named Papini, and last and least worthy, W. J. H. G. Wells ought to be counted in, and if I mistake not G. K. Chesterton as well.[67]I hope you know and love the last-named writer, who seems to me a great teller of the truth. His systematic preference for contradictions and paradoxical forms of statement seems to me a mannerism somewhat to be regretted in so wealthy a mind; but that is a blemish from which some of our very greatest intellects are not altogether free—the philosopher of Barrytown himself being not wholly exempt. Join us, O Jack, and in the historic and perspective sense your fame will be secure. All future Histories of Philosophy will print your name.
But although my love for you is not exhausted, my type-writing energy is. It communicates stiffness and cramps, both to the body and the mind. Nevertheless I think I have been doing pretty well for a first attempt, don't you?If you return me a good long letter telling me more particularly about the process of your recovery, I will write again, even if I have to take a pen to do it, and in any case I will do it much better than this time.
Believe me, dear old J. C., with hearty affection and delight at your recovery—all these months I have been on the brink of writing to find out how you were—and with very best regards to your wife, whom some day I wish we may be permitted to know better. Yours very truly,
WM. JAMES.
Everyone dead! Hodgson, Shaler, James Peirce this winter—to go no further afield!Resserrons les rangs!
CAMBRIDGE,Sept. 10, 1906.
Dearest H.,—I got back from the Adirondacks, where I had spent a fortnight, the night before last, and in three or four hours Alice, Aleck and I will be spinning towards Chocorua, it being now fiveA.M.Elly [Temple] Hunter will join us, with Grenville, in a few days; but for the most part, thank Heaven, we shall be alone till the end of the month. I found two letters from you awaiting me, and two from Bill. They all breathed a spirit of happiness, and brought a waft of the beautiful European summer with them. It has been a beautiful summer here too; and now, sad to say, it is counting the last beads of its chaplet of hot days out—the hot days which are really the absolutely friendly ones to man—you wish they would get cooler when you have them, and when they are departed, you wish you could have their exquisite gentleness again. I have just been reading in the volume by Richard Jefferies called the "Life of the Fields" a wonderful rhapsody, "The Pageant of Summer." It needs to be read twice over andvery attentively, being nothing but an enumeration of all the details visible in the corner of an old field with a hedge and ditch. But rightly taken in, it is probably the highest flight of human genius in the direction of nature-worship. I don't see why it should not count as an immortal thing. You missed it, when here, in not getting to Keene Valley, where I have just been, and of which the sylvan beauty, especially by moonlight, is probably unlike aught that Europe has to show. Imperishable freshness!...
This is definitely my last year of lecturing, but I wish it were my first of non-lecturing. Simplification of the field of duties I find more and more to be thesummum bonumfor me; and I live in apprehension lest the Avenger should cut me off before I get my message out. Not that the message is particularly needed by the human race, which can live along perfectly well without any one philosopher; but objectively I hate to leave the volumes I have already published without their logical complement. It is an esthetic tragedy to have a bridge begun, and stopped in the middle of an arch.
But I hear Alice stirring upstairs, so I must go up and finish packing. I hope that you and W. J., Jr., will again form a harmonious combination. I hope also that he will stop painting for a time. He will do all the better, when he gets home, for having had a fallow interval.
Good-bye! and my blessing upon both of you. Your ever loving,
W. J.
CHOCORUA,Sept. 11, 1906.
Dear Mr. Wells,—I've read your "Two Studies in Disappointment" in "Harper's Weekly," and must thankyou from the bottom of my heart.Rem acu tetegisti!Exactly that callousness to abstract justice isthesinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible feature, of our U. S. civilization. How you hit upon it so neatly and singled it out so truly (and talked of it so tactfully!) God only knows: He evidently created you to do such things! I never heard of the MacQueen case before, but I've known of plenty of others. When the ordinary American hears of them, instead of the idealist within him beginning to "see red" with the higher indignation, instead of the spirit of English history growing alive in his breast, he begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency. "It's probably right enough"; "Scoundrelly, as you say," but understandable, "from the point of view of parties interested"—but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddessSuccess. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease. Hit it hard! Your bookmusthave a great effect. Do you remember the glorious remarks about success in Chesterton's "Heretics"? You will undoubtedly have writtenthemedicinal book about America. And what good humor! and what tact! Sincerely yours,
WM. JAMES.
CHOCORUA,Sept. 13, 1906.
Dear Theodora,—Here we are in this sweet delicate little place, after a pretty agitated summer, and the quiet seems very nice. Likewise the stillness. I have thought often of you, andalmostwritten; but there never seemedexactly to be time or place for it, so I let the sally of the heart to-you-ward suffice. A week ago, I spent a night with H. L. Higginson, whom I found all alone at his house by the Lake, and he told me your improvement had been continuous and great, which I heartily hope has really been the case. I don't see why it should not have been the case, under such delightful conditions. What good things friends are! And what better thing than lend it, can one do with one's house? I was struck by Henry Higginson's high level of mental tension, so to call it, which made him talk, incessantly and passionately about one subject after another, never running dry, and reminding me more of myself when I was twenty years old. It isn't so much a man's eminence of elementary faculties that pulls him through. They may be rare, and he do nothing. It is the steam pressure to the square inch behind that moves the machine. The amount of that is what makes the great difference between us. Henry has it high. Previous to seeing him I had spent ten days in beautiful Keene Valley, dividing them between the two ends. The St. Hubert's end is, I verily believe, one of the most beautiful things in this beautiful world—too dissimilar to anything in Europe to be compared therewith, and consequently able to stand on its merits all alone. But the great [forest] fire of four years ago came to the very edge of wiping it out! And any year it may go.
I also had a delightful week all alone on the Maine Coast, among the islands.
Back here, one is oppressed by sadness at the amount of work waiting to be done on the place and no one to be hired to do it. The entire meaning and essence of "land" is something to be worked over—even if it be only a wood-lot, it must be kept trimmed and cleaned. And for one whocanwork and wholikeswork with his arms and hands,there is nothing so delightful as a piece of land to work over—it responds to every hour you give it, and smiles with the "improvement" year by year. I neither can work now, nor do I like it, so an irremediable bad conscience afflicts my ownership of this place. With Cambridge as headquarters for August, and a little lot of land there, I think I could almost be ready to give up this place, and trust to the luck of hotels, and other opportunities of rustication without responsibility. But perhaps we can get this place [taken care of?] some day!
I don't know how much you read. I've taken great pleasure this summer in Bielshowski's "Life of Goethe" (a wonderful piece of art) and in Birukoff's "Life of Tolstoy."
Alice is very well and happy in the stillness here. Elly Hunter is coming this evening, tomorrow the Merrimans for a day, and then Mrs. Hodder till the end of the month.
Faithful love from both of us, dear Theodora. Your affectionate
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Jan. 20, 1907, 6.15P.M.
Sweet Peglein,—Just before tea! and your Grandam, Mar, and I going to hear the Revd. Percy Grant in the College chapel just after. We are getting to be great church-goers. 'T will have to be Crothers next. He, sweet man, is staying with the Brookses. After him, the Christian Science Church, and after that the deluge!
I have spent all day preparing next Tuesday's lecture, which is my last before a class in Harvard University, so help me God amen! I am almostafraidat so much freedom. Three quarters of an hour ago Aleck and I went for a walk in Somerville; warm, young moon, bare trees, clearing in the west, stars out, old-fashioned streets, not sordid—a beautiful walk. Last night to Bernard Shaw's ex-quis-ite play of "Cæsar and Cleopatra"—exquisitely acted too, by F. Robertson and Maxine Elliot's sister Gert. Your Mar will have told you that, after these weeks of persistent labor, culminating in New York, I am going to take sanctuary on Saturday the 2nd of Feb. in your arms at Bryn Mawr. I do not want, wish, or desire to "talk" to the crowd, but your mother pushing so, if you and the philosophy club also pull, I mean pullhard, Jimmy[68]will try to articulate something not too technical. But it will have to be, if ever, on that Saturday night. It will also have to be very short; and the less of a "reception," the better, after it.
Your two last letters were tiptop. I never seen suchgrowth!
I go to N. Y., to be at the Harvard Club, on Monday the 28th. Kühnemann left yesterday. A most dear man. Your loving
Dad.
CAMBRIDGE,Feb. 14, 1907.
Dear Brother and Son,—I dare say that you will be together in Paris when you get this, but I address it to Lamb House all the same. You twain are more "blessed" than I, in the way of correspondence this winter, for you give more than you receive, Bill's letters being as remarkable for wit and humor as Henry's are for copiousness, considering that the market value of what he either writes or types is so many shillings a word. WhenIwrite other things, I find it almost impossible to write letters. I've been at itstiddy, however, for three days, since my returnfrom New York, finding, as I did, a great stack of correspondence to attend to. The first impression of New York, if you stay there not more than 36 hours, which has been my limit for twenty years past, is one of repulsion at the clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions. But this time, installed as I was at the Harvard Club (44th St.) in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibratedmit, and found it simply magnificent. I'm surprised at you, Henry, not having been more enthusiastic, but perhaps that superbly powerful and beautiful subway was not opened when you were there. It is anentirelynew New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and thelightnesswithal, as if there was nothing that was not easy, and the great pulses and bounds of progress, so many in directions all simultaneous that the coördination is indefinitely future, give a kind ofdrumming backgroundof life that I never felt before. I'm sure that onceinthat movement, and at home, all other places would seem insipid. I observe that your book,—"The American Scene,"—dear H., is just out. I must get it and devour again the chapters relative to New York. On my last night, I dined with Norman Hapgood, along with men who were successfully and happily in the vibration. H. and his most winning-faced young partner, Collier, Jerome, Peter Dunne, F. M. Colby, and Mark Twain. (The latter, poor man, is only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he's a dear little genius all the same.) I got such an impression of easy efficiency in the midst of their bewildering conditions of speed and complexity of adjustment. Jerome, particularly, with the world's eyes on his court-room, in the very crux of the Thaw trial, as if he hadnothing serious to do. Balzac ought to come to life again. His Rastignac imagination sketched the possibility of it long ago. I lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted, out, every day of my stay, vibrated between 44th St., seldom going lower, and 149th, with Columbia University at 116th as my chief relay station, the magnificent space-devouring Subway roaring me back and forth, lecturing to a thousand daily,[69]and having four separate dinners at the Columbia Faculty Club, where colleagues severally compassed me about, many of them being old students of mine, wagged their tongues at me and made me explain.[70]It was certainly the high tide of my existence, so far asenergizingand being "recognized" were concerned, but I took it all very "easy" and am hardly a bit tired. Total abstinence from every stimulant whatever is the one condition of living at a rapid pace. I am now going whack at the writing of the rest of the lectures, which will be more original and (I believe) important than my previous works....
CAMBRIDGE,Feb.21, 1907.
Dear Moorfield,—Your letter of three weeks ago has inadvertently lain unnoticed—not because it didn't dome good, but because I went to New York for a fortnight, and since coming home have been too druv to pay any tributes to friendship. I haven't got many letters either of condolence or congratulation on my retirement,—which, by the way, doesn't take place till the end of the year,—the papers have railroaded me out too soon.[71]But I confess that the thought is sweet to me of being able to hear the College bell ring without any tendency to "move" in consequence, and of seeing the last Thursday in September go by, and remaining in the country careless of what becomes of its youth. It's theharnessand thehoursthat are so galling! I expect to shed truths in dazzling profusion on the world for many years.
As for you, retire too! Let you, Eliot, Roosevelt and me, first relax; then take to landscape painting, which has a very soothing effect; then write out all the truths which a long life of intimacy with mankind has recommended to each of us as most useful. I think we can use the ebb tide of our energies best in that way. I'm sure thatyourcontributions would be the most useful of all. Affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
CAMBRIDGE,Mar.26, 1907.
Dear Flournoy,—Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me reallyhappyfor at least twenty-four hours!My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves—you write aboutme. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking abouthimself, when you want to talk aboutyourself." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagné." It is absolutely the only philosophy withnohumbug in it, and I am certain that it isyourphilosophy. Have you read Papini's article in the February "Leonardo"? That seems to me really splendid. You say that my ideas have formed the realcentre de rallimentof the pragmatist tendencies. To me it is the youthful andempanachéPapini who has best put himself at the centre of equilibrium whence all the motor tendencies start. He (and Schiller) has given me great confidence and courage. I shall dedicate my book, however, to the memory of J. S. Mill.
I hope that you are careful to distinguish in my own work between the pragmatism and the "radical empiricism" (Conception de Conscience,[72]etc.) which to my own mind have no necessary connexion with each other. My first proofs came in this morning, along with your letter, and the little book ought to be out by the first of June. You shall have a very early copy. It is exceedingly untechnical, and I can't help suspecting that it will make a real impression. Münsterberg, who hitherto has been rather pooh-poohing my thought, now, after reading the lecture on truth which I sent you a while ago, says I seem to be ignorant that Kant ever wrote, Kant having already said allthat I say. I regard this as a very good symptom. The third stage of opinion about a new idea, already arrived:1st: absurd!2nd: trivial!3rd:wediscovered it! I don't suppose you mean to print these lectures of yours, but I wish you would. If you would translate my lectures, what could make me happier? But, as I said apropos of the "Varieties," I hate to think of you doing that drudgery when you might be formulating your own ideas. But, in one way or the other, I hope you will join in the great strategic combination against the forces of rationalism and bad abstractionism! A goodcoup de collierall round, and I verily believe that a new philosophic movement will begin....
I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The1stfunction is the essential one, officially considered. The2ndis the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I onlymeantto write a line! Love to you all from
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Apr.9, 1907.
Dear Strong,—Your tightly woven little letter reached me thisA.M., just as I was about writing to you to find out how you are. Your long silence had made me apprehensive about your condition, and this news cheers me up very much. Rome is great; and I like to think of you there; if I spend another winter in Europe, it shall be mainly inRome. You don't say where you're staying, however, so my imagination is at fault, I hope it may be at theRussie, that most delightful of hotels. I am overwhelmed with duties, so I must be very briefin re religionis. Your warnings against my superstitious tendencies, for such I suppose they are,—this is the second heavy one I remember,—touch me, but not in the prophetic way, for they don't weaken my trust in the healthiness of my own attitude, which in part (I fancy) is less remote from your own than you suppose. For instance, my "God of things as they are," being part of a pluralistic system, is responsible for only such of them as he knows enough and has enough power to have accomplished. For the rest he is identical with your "ideal" God. The "omniscient" and "omnipotent" God of theology I regard as a disease of the philosophy-shop. But, having thrown away so much of the philosophy-shop, you may ask me why I don't throw away the whole? That would mean too strong a negative will-to-believe for me. It would mean a dogmatic disbelief in any extant consciousness higher than that of the "normal" human mind; and this in the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce with something ideal thatfeels as if itwere also actual (I have no such commerce—I wish I had, but I can't close my eyes to its vitality in others); and in the teeth of such analogies as Fechner uses to show that there may be other-consciousness than man's. If other, then why not higher and bigger? Whymaywe not be in the universe as our dogs and cats are in our drawing-rooms and libraries? It's a will-to-believe on both sides: I am perfectly willing that others should disbelieve: why should you not be tolerantly interested in the spectacle of my belief? What harm does the little residuum or germ of actuality that I leave in God do? If ideal, why (except onepiphenomenist principles) may he not have got himself at least partly real by this time? I do not believe it to be healthy-minded to nurse the notion that ideals are self-sufficient and require no actualization to make us content. It is a quite unnecessarily heroic form of resignation and sour grapes. Ideals ought to aim at thetransformation of reality—no less! When you defer to what you suppose a certain authority in scientists as confirming these negations, I am surprised. Of all insufficient authorities as to the total nature of reality, give me the "scientists," from Münsterberg up, or down. Their interests are most incomplete and their professional conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored, and their splendid achievement there. Their only authorityat largeis formethod—and the pragmatic method completes and enlarges them there. When you shall have read my whole set of lectures (now with the printer, to be out by June 1st) I doubt whether you will find any great harm in the God I patronize—the poor thing is so largely an ideal possibility. Meanwhile I take delight, orshalltake delight, in any efforts you may make to negate all superhuman consciousness, for only by these counter-attempts can a finally satisfactory modus vivendi be reached. I don't feel sure that I know just what you mean by "freedom,"—but no matter. Have you read in Schiller's new Studies in Humanism what seem to me two excellent chapters, one on "Freedom," and the other on the "making of reality"?...
CAMBRIDGE,Apr.19, 1907.
Dear Schiller,—Two letters and a card from you within ten days is pretty good. I have been in New York for aweek, so haven't written as promptly as I should have done.
All right for the Gilbert Murrays! We shall be glad to see them.
Too late for "humanism" in my book—all in type! I dislike "pragmatism," but it seems to have theinternationalright of way at present. Let's both go ahead—God will know his own!
When your book first came I lent it to my student Kallen (who was writing a thesis on the subject), thereby losing it for three weeks. Then the grippe, and my own proofs followed, along with much other business, so that I've only read about a quarter of it even now. The essays on Freedom and the Making of Reality seem to be written with my own heart's blood—it's startling that two people should be found to think so exactly alike. A great argument for the truth of what they say, too! I find that my own chapter on Truth printed in the J. of P. already,[73]convinces no one as yet, not even my mostgleichgesinntencronies. It will have to be worked in by much future labor, for Iknowthat I see all round the subject and they don't, and I think that the theory of truth is the key to all the rest of our positions.
You ask what I am going to "reply" to Bradley. But why need one reply to everything and everybody? B.'s article is constructive rather than polemic, is evidently sincere, softens much of his old outline, is difficult to read, and ought, I should think, to be left to its own destiny. How sweetly, by the way, he feels towards me as compared with you! All because you have been too bumptious. I confess I think that yourgaudium certaminisinjures your influence.We've got a thing big enough to set forth now affirmatively, and I think that readers generally hateminutepolemics and recriminations. All polemic of ours should,I believe, be either very broad statements of contrast, or fine points treated singly, and as far as possible impersonally. Inborn rationalists and inborn pragmatists will never convert each other. We shall always look on them as spectral and they on us as trashy—irredeemably both! As far as the rising generation goes, why not simply express ourselves positively, and trust that the truer view quietly will displace the other. Here again "God will know his own." False views don't need much direct refutation—they get superseded, and I feel absolutely certain of the supersessive power of pragmato-humanism, if persuasively enough set forth.... The world is wide enough to harbor various ways of thinking, and the present Bradley's units of mental operation are so diverse from ours that the labor of reckoning over from one set of terms to the other doesn't bring reward enough to pay for it. Of course his way of treating "truth" as an entity trying all the while to identify herself with reality, while reality is equally trying to identify herself with the more ideal entity truth, isn'tfalse. It's one way, very remote and allegorical, of stating the facts, and it "agrees" with a good deal of reality, but it has so little pragmatic value that its tottering form can be left for time to deal with. The good it does him is small, for it leaves him in this queer, surly, grumbling state about the best that can be done by it for philosophy. His great vice seems to me his perversity in logical activities, his bad reasonings. I vote to go on, from now on, not trying to keep account of the relations of his with our system. He can't be influencing disciples, being himself nowadays so difficult. And once for all, therewillbe minds whocannothelpregarding our growing universe assheer trash, metaphysically considered. Yours ever,
W. J.
The next letter is addressed to an active promoter of reform in the treatment of the insane, the author of "A Mind that Found Itself." The Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene have already performed so great a public service, that anyone may now see that in 1907 the time had come to employ such instrumentalities in improving the care of the insane. But when Mr. Beers, just out of an asylum himself, appeared with the manuscript of his own story in his hands, it was not so clear that these agencies were needed, nor yet evident to anyone that he was a person who could bring about their organization.
James's own opinion as to the treatment of the insane is not in the least overstated in the following letter. He recognized the genuineness of Mr. Beers's personal experience and its value for propaganda, and he immediately helped to get it published. From his first acquaintance with Mr. Beers, he gave time, counsel, and money to further the organization of the Mental Hygiene Committee; and he even departed, in its interest, from his fixed policy of "keeping out of Committees and Societies." He lived long enough to know that the movement had begun to gather momentum; and he drew great satisfaction from the knowledge.
CAMBRIDGE,Apr. 21, 1907.
Dear Mr. Beers,—You ask for my opinion as to the advisability and feasibility of a National Society, such as you propose, for the improvement of conditions among the insane.
I have never ceased to believe that such improvement is one of the most "crying" needs of civilization; and the functions of such a Society seem to me to be well drawn upby you. Your plea for its being founded before your book appears is well grounded, you being an author who naturally would like to cast seed upon a ground already prepared for it to germinate practically without delay.
I have to confess to being myself a very impractical man, with no experience whatever in the details, difficulties, etc., of philanthropic or charity organization, so my opinion as to thefeasibilityof your plan is worth nothing, and is undecided. Of course the first consideration is to get your money, the second, your Secretary and Trustees. All thatIwish to bear witness to is the great need of a National Society such as you describe, or failing that, of a State Society somewhere that might serve as a model in other States.
Nowhere is there massed together as much suffering as in the asylums. Nowhere is there so much sodden routine, and fatalistic insensibility in those who have to treat it. Nowhere is an ideal treatment more costly. The officials in charge grow resigned to the conditions under which they have to labor. They cannot plead their cause as an auxiliary organization can plead it for them. Public opinion is too glad to remain ignorant. As mediator between officials, patients, and the public conscience, a society such as you sketch is absolutely required, and the sooner it gets under way the better.[74]Sincerely yours,
William James.
At the date of the next letter William James, Jr., was studying painting in Paris.
CAMBRIDGE,Apr. 24, 1907.
Dearest Bill,—I haven't written to you for ages, yet you keep showering the most masterly and charming epistles upon all of us in turn, including the fair Rosamund.[75]Be sure they are appreciated! Your Ma and I dined last night at Ellen and Loulie Hooper's to meet Rosalind Huidekoper and her swain. Loulie had heard from Bancel [La Farge] of your getting a "mention"—if for the model, I'm not surprised; if for the composition, I'm immensely pleased. Of course you'll tell us of it! We've had a very raw cold April, and today it's blowing great guns from all quarters of the sky, preparatory to clearing from the N.W., I think. We are rooting up the entire lawn to a depth of 18 inches to try to regenerate it. Four diggers and two carts have been at it for a week, with your mother, bareheaded and cloaked, and ruddy-cheeked, sticking to them like a burr. She doesn't handle pick or shovel, but she stands there all day long in a way it would do your heart good to see; and so democratic and hearty withal that I'm sure they like it, though working under such a great taskmaster's eye deprives them of those intervals of stolen leisure so dear to "workers" of every description. She makes it up to them by inviting them to an afternoon tea daily, with piles of cake and doughnuts. I fancy they like her well.
We've let Chocorua to the Goldmarks. Aleck took his April recess along with his schoolmate Henderson and Gerald Thayer, partly on the summit, partly around the base, of Monadnock. The weather was fiercely wintry, and your mother and I said "poor blind little Aleck—he's got to learn thru experience." [She said "through"!]He came back happier and more exultant than I've ever seen him, and six months older morally and intellectually for the week with Gerald and Abbott Thayer. A great step forward. They burglarized the Thayer house, and were tracked and arrested by the posse, and had a paragraph in the Boston "Globe" about the robbery. As the thing involved an ascent of Monadnock after dark, with their packs, in deep snow, a day and a night there in snowstorm, a 16-mile walk and out of bed till 2A.M.. the night of the burglary, a "lying low" indoors all the next day at the Hendersons' empty house, three in a bed and the police waking them at dawn, I ventured to suggest a doubt as to whether the Thayer household were the greatest victims of the illustrious practical joke. "What," cries Aleck, starting to his feet, "nine men with revolvers and guns around your bed, and a revolver pointed close to your ear as you wake—don't you call that a success, I should like to know?" The Tom Sawyer phase of evolution is immortal! Gerald, who is staying with us now, is really a splendid fellow. I'm so glad he's taken to Aleck, who now is aflame with plans for being an artist. I wish he might—it would certainly suit his temperament better than "business."
There 's the lunch bell.
I have got my "Pragmatism" proofs all corrected. The most important thing I've written yet, and bound, I am sure, to stir up a lot of attention. But I'm dog-tired; and, in order to escape the social engagements that at this time of year grow more frequent than ever, I'm going off on Friday (this is Wednesday) to the country somewhere for ten days. If only there might be warm weather! We've just backed out from a dinner to William Leonard Darwin and his wife, and the Geo. Hodgeses, etc. W. T. Stead spent three hours here on Sunday and lectured in the Unionon Monday—a splendid fellow whom I could get along with after a fashion. Let no one run him down to you. I've been to New York to the Peace Congress. Interesting but tiresome.
Mary Salter is with us. Margaret and Rosamund just arrived at 107. No news else! Yours,
W. J.
Salisbury, Conn.,May 4, 1907.
DearestH.— ...I've been so overwhelmed with work, and the mountain of theUnreadhas piled up so, that only in these days here have I really been able to settle down to your "American Scene," which in its peculiar way seems to mesupremely great. You know how opposed your whole "third manner" of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever; yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the "ghost" at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But youdoit, that's the queerness! And the complication of innuendo and associative reference on the enormous scale to which you give way to it does sobuild outthe matter for the reader that the result is to solidify, by the mere bulk of the process, the like perception from whichhehas to start. As air, by dint of its volume, will weigh like a corporeal body; so his own poor little initial perception, swathed in this giganticenvelopment of suggestive atmosphere, grows like a germ into something vastly bigger and more substantial. But it's the rummest method for one to employ systematically as you do nowadays; and you employ it at your peril. In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can't skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: "Say itout, for God's sake," they cry, "and have done with it." And so I say now, give usonething in your older directer manner, just to show that, in spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, youcanstill write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and then continue like the "curiosity of literature" which you have become. For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are unapproachable, but thecoreof literature is solid. Give it to usonceagain! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum.
For God's sake don'tanswerthese remarks, which (as Uncle Howard used to say of Father's writings) are but the peristaltic belchings of my own crabbed organism. For one thing, your account of America is largely one of its omissions, silences, vacancies. You work them up like solids, for those readers who already germinally perceive them (to others you aretotallyincomprehensible). I said to myself over and over in reading: "How much greater the triumph, if instead of dwelling thus only upon America's vacuities, he could make positive suggestion of what in 'Europe' or Asia may exist to fill them." That would be nutritious to so many American readers whose souls are only too ready to leap to suggestion, but who are now too inexperienced to know what is meant by the contrast-effectfrom which alone your book is written. If you could supply the background which is the foil, in terms more full and positive! At present it is supplied only by the abstract geographic term "Europe." But of course anything of that kind is excessively difficult; and you will probably say that youaresupplying it all along by your novels. Well, the verve and animal spirits with which you can keep your method going, first on one place then on another, through all those tightly printed pages is something marvelous; and there are pages surely doomed to be immortal, those on the "drummers,"e.g., at the beginning of "Florida." They are in the best sense Rabelaisian.
But a truce, a truce! I had no idea, when I sat down, of pouring such a bath of my own subjectivity over you. Forgive! forgive! and don't reply, don't at any rate in the sense of defending yourself, but only in that of attackingme, if you feel so minded. I have just finished the proofs of a little book called "Pragmatism" which even youmayenjoy reading. It is a very "sincere" and, from the point of view of ordinary philosophy-professorial manners, a very unconventional utterance, not particularly original at any one point, yet, in the midst of the literature of the way of thinking which it represents, with just that amount of squeak or shrillness in the voice that enables one book totell, when others don't, to supersede its brethren, and be treated later as "representative." I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence it should be rated as "epoch-making," for of the definitive triumph of that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever—I believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation.
You can't tell how happy I am at having thrown off the nightmare of my "professorship." As a "professor" I always felt myself a sham, with its chief duties of being awalking encyclopedia of erudition. I am now at liberty to be areality, and the comfort is unspeakable—literally unspeakable, to be my own man, after 35 years of being owned by others. I can now live for truth pure and simple, instead of for truth accommodated to the most unheard-of requirements set by others.... Your affectionate
W. J.
This letter appears never to have been answered, although Henry James wrote on May 31, 1907: "You shall have, after a little more patience, a reply to your so rich and luminous reflections on my book—a reply almost as interesting as, and far more illuminating than, your letter itself."
CAMBRIDGE,May 18, 1907.
...One word about the said proof [of your article]. It convinces me that you ought to be an academic personage, a "professor." For thirty-five years I have been suffering from the exigencies of being one, the pretension and the duty, namely, of meeting the mental needs and difficulties of other persons, needs that I couldn't possibly imagine and difficulties that I couldn't possibly understand; and now that I have shuffled off the professorial coil, the sense of freedom that comes to me is as surprising as it is exquisite. I wake up every morning with it. What! not to have to accommodate myself to this mass of alien and recalcitrant humanity, not to think under resistance, not to have to square myself with others at every step I make—hurrah! it is too good to be true. To be alone with truth and God!Es ist nicht zu glauben!What a future! What a vision of ease! But here you are loving it and courting it unnecessarily.You're fit to continue a professor in all your successive reincarnations, with never a release. It was so easy to let Bradley with his approximations and grumblings alone. So few people would find these last statements of his seductive enough to build them into their own thought. But you, for the pure pleasure of the operation, chase him up and down his windings, flog him into and out of his corners, stop him and cross-reference him and counter on him, as if required to do so by your office. It makes very difficult reading, it obliges one to re-read Bradley, and I don't believe there are three persons living who will take it in with the pains required to estimate its value. B. himself will very likely not read it with any care. It is subtle and clear, like everything you write, but it is too minute. And where a few broad comments would have sufficed, it is too complex, and too much like a criminal conviction in tone and temper. Leave him in hisdunklem Drange—he is drifting in the right direction evidently, and when a certain amount of positive construction on our side has been added, he will say that that was what he had meant all along—and the world will be the better for containing so much difficult polemic reading the less.
I admit that your remarks are penetrating, and let air into the joints of the subject; but I respectfully submit that they are notcalled forin the interests of the final triumph of truth. That will come by the way of displacement of error, quite effortlessly. I can't help suspecting that you unduly magnify the influence of Bradleyan Absolutism on the undergraduate mind. Taylor is the only fruit so far—at least within my purview. One practical point: I don't quite like your first paragraph, and wonder if it be too late to have the references to me at least expunged. I can't recognize the truth of the ten-years' change of opinion aboutmy "Will to Believe." I don't find anyone—not even my dearest friends, as Miller and Strong—one whit persuaded. Taylor's and Hobhouse's attacks are of recent date, etc. Moreover, the reference to Bradley's relation to me in this article is too ironical not to seem a little "nasty" to some readers; therefore out with it, if it be not too late.
See how different our methods are! All that Humanism needs now is to make applications of itself to special problems. Get a school of youngsters at work. Refutations of error should be left to the rationalists alone. They are a stock function of that school....
I'm fearfullytired, but expect the summer to get me right again. Affectionately thine,
W. J.
1907-1909
The Last Period (III)—Hibbert Lectures in Oxford—The Hodgson Report
The story of the remaining years is written so fully in the letters themselves as to require little explanation.
Angina pectoris and such minor ailments as are only too likely to afflict a man of sixty-five years and impaired constitution interrupted the progress of reading and writing more and more. Physical exertion, particularly that involved in talking long to many people, now brought on pain and difficulty in breathing. But James still carried himself erect, still walked with a light step, and until a few weeks before his death wore the appearance of a much younger and stronger man than he really was. None but those near to him realized how often he was in discomfort or pain, or how constantly he was using himself to the limit of his endurance. He bore his ills without complaint and ordinarily without mention; although he finally made up his mind to try to discourage the appeals and requests of all sorts that still harassed him, by proclaiming the fact that he was an invalid. As his power of work became more and more reduced, frustrations became harder to bear, and the sense that they were unavoidable oppressed him. When an invitation to deliver a course of lectures on the Hibbert Foundation at Manchester College, Oxford, arrived, he was torn between an impulse to clutch at this engagement as a means of hastening the writing-out of certain material that was in his mind, andthe fear, only too reasonable, that the obligation to have the lectures ready by a certain date would strain him to the snapping point. After some hesitation he agreed, however, and the lectures were, ultimately, prepared and delivered successfully.
In proportion as the number of hours a day that he could spend on literary work and professional reading decreased, James's general reading increased again. He began for the first time to browse in military biographies, and commenced to collect material for a study which he sometimes spoke of as a "Psychology of Jingoism," sometimes as a "Varieties of Military Experience." What such a work would have been, had he ever completed it, it is impossible to tell. It was never more than a rather vague project, turned to occasionally as a diversion. But it is safe to reckon that two remarkable papers—the "Energies of Men" (written in 1906) and the "Moral Equivalent of War" (written in 1909)—would have appeared to be related to this study. That it would not have been a utopian flight in the direction of pacifism need hardly be said. However he might have described it, James was not disposed to underestimate the "fighting instinct." He saw it as a persistent and highly irritable force, underlying the society of all the dominant races; and he advocated international courts, reduction of armaments, and any other measures that might prevent appeals to the war-waging passion as commendable devices for getting along without arousing it.
"The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise.... All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-militarist party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will bepermanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline.... In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting, we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood."[76]
Any utterances about war, arbitration, and disarmament, are now likely to have their original meaning distorted by reason of what may justly be called the present fevered state of public opinion on such questions. It should be clear that the foregoing sentences were not directed to any particular question of domestic or foreign policy. They were part of a broad picture of the fighting instinct, and led up to a suggestion for diverting it into non-destructive channels. As to particular instances, circumstances were always to be reckoned with. James believed in organizing and strengthening the machinery of arbitration, but did not think that the day for universal arbitration had yet come. He saw a danger in military establishments, went so far—in the presence of the "jingoism" aroused by Cleveland's Venezuela message—as to urge opposition to any increase of the American army and navy, encouraged peace-societies, and was willing to challenge attention by calling himself apacifist.[77]"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not presume to interfere by violence with ours."[78]Tolerance—social, religious, and political—was fundamental in his scheme of belief; but he took pains to make a proviso, and drew the line at tolerating interference or oppression. Where he recognized a military danger, there he would have had matters so governed as to meet it, not evade it. Writing of the British garrison in Halifax in 1897, he said: "By Jove, if England should ever be licked by a Continental army, it would only be Divine justice upon her for keeping up the Tommy Atkins recruiting system when the others have compulsory service."
In the case of one undertaking, which was much too troublesome to be reckoned as a diversion, he let himself be drawn away from his metaphysical work. He had taken no active part in the work of the Society for Psychical Research since 1896. In December, 1905, Richard Hodgson, the secretary of the American Branch, had died suddenly, and almost immediately thereafter Mrs. Piper, the medium whose trances Hodgson had spent years in studying, had purported to give communications from Hodgson's departed spirit. In 1909 James made a report to the S. P. R. on "Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control." The full report will be found in its Proceedings for 19O9,[79]and the concluding pages, in which James stated, more analytically than elsewhere, the hypotheses which the phenomena suggested to him,have been reprinted in the volume of "Collected Essays and Reviews." At the same time he wrote out a more popular statement, in a paper which will be found in "Memories and Studies." As to his final opinion of the spirit-theory, the following letter, given somewhat out of its chronological place, states what was still James's opinion in 1910.
CAMBRIDGE,Apr. 21, 1907.
Dear Mr. Slattery,—My state of mind is this: Mrs. Piper has supernormal knowledge in her trances; but whether it comes from "tapping the minds" of living people, or from some common cosmic reservoir of memories, or from surviving "spirits" of the departed, is a question impossible formeto answer just now to my own satisfaction. The spirit-theory is undoubtedly not only the most natural, but the simplest, and I have great respect for Hodgson's and Hyslop's arguments when they adopt it. At the same time the electric current calledbeliefhas not yet closed in my mind.
Whatever the explanation be, trance-mediumship is an excessively complex phenomenon, in which many concurrent factors are engaged. That is why interpretation is so hard.
Make any use, public or private, that you like of this.
In great haste, yours,
WM. JAMES.
The next letter should be understood as referring to the abandonment of an excursion to Lake Champlain with Henry L. Higginson. The celebration alluded to in the last part of the letter had been arranged by the Cambridge Historical Society in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Louis Agassiz.
CHOCORUA, N. H.,circa, June 1, 1907.
Dear Henry,—On getting your resignation by telephone, I came straight up here instead, without having time to write you my acceptance as I meant to; and now comes your note of the fourth, before I have done so.
I am exceedingly sorry, my dear old boy, that it is the doctor's advice that has made you fear to go. I hope the liability to relapse will soon fade out and leave you free again; for say what they will ofAlters Schwächeand resignation to decay, andentbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren, it means only sour grapes, and the insides of one always want to be doing the free and active things. However, a river can still be lively in a shrunken bed, and we must not pay too much attention to the difference of level. If you should summon me again this summer, I can probably respond. I shall be here for a fortnight, then back to Cambridge again for a short time.
I thought the Agassiz celebration went off very nicely indeed, didn't you?—John Gray's part in it being of course the best. X—— was heavy, but respectable, and the heavy respectableoughtto be one ingredient in anything of the kind. But how well Shaler would have done that part of the job had he been there! Love to both of you!
W. J.
CHOCORUA,June 11, 1907.
Dear Cameron Forbes,—Your letter from Baguio of the 18th of April touches me by its genuine friendliness, and is a tremendous temptation. Why am I not ten years younger? Even now I hesitate to say no, and the only reason why I don't say yes, with a roar, is that certain ratherserious drawbacks in the way of health of late seem to make me unfit for the various activities which such a visit ought to carry in its train. I am afraid my program from now onwards ought to be sedentary. I ought to be getting out a book next winter. Last winter I could hardly do any walking, owing to a trouble with my heart.
Does your invitation mean to include my wife? And have you a good crematory so that she might bring home my ashes in case of need?
I think if you had me on the spot you would find me a less impractical kind of an anti-imperialist than you have supposed me to be. I think that the manner in which the McKinley administration railroaded the country into its policy of conquest was abominable, and the way the country pucked up its ancient soul at the first touch of temptation, and followed, was sickening. But with the establishment of the civil commission McKinley did what he could to redeem things and now what the Islands want isCONTINUITY OF ADMINISTRATIONto form new habits that may to some degree be hoped to last when we, as controllers, are gone.When?that is the question. And much difference of opinion may be fair as to the answer. That we can't stay forever seems to follow from the fact that the educated Philippinos differ from all previous colonials in having been inoculated before our occupation with the ideas of the French Revolution; and that is a virus to which history shows as yet no anti-toxine. As I am at present influenced, I think that the U. S. ought to solemnly proclaim a date for our going (or at least for a plebiscitum as to whether we should go) and stand by all the risks.Somedate, rather than indefinitely drift. And shape the whole interval towards securing things in view of the change. As to this, I may be wrong, and am always willing to be convinced. I wishI could go, and see you all at work. Heaven knows I admire the spirit with which you are animated—a new thing in colonial work.
It must have been a great pleasure to you to see so many of the family at once. I have seen none of them since their return, but hope to do so ere the summer speeds. The only dark spot was poor F——'s death.
Believe me, with affectionate regards, yours truly,
WM. JAMES.
I am ordering a little book of mine, just out, to be sent to you. Some one of your circle may find entertainment in it.
[Post-card]
CHOCORUA,June13, 1907.
Yours of the 27th ult. received and highly appreciated. I'm glad you relish my book so well. You go on playing the Boreas and I shedding the sunbeams, and between us we'll get the cloak off the philosophic traveler! Buthaveyou read Bergson's new book?[80]It seems to me that nothing is important in comparison with that divine apparition. Allourpositions, real time, a growing world, asserted magisterially, and the beast intellectualism killed absolutelydead! The whole flowed round by a style incomparable as it seems to me. Read it, and digest it if you can. Much of it I can't yet assimilate.
[No signature.]
CHOCORUA,June 13, 1907.
O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy, making,if I mistake not, an entirely new era in respect of matter, but unlike the works of genius of the "transcendentalist" movement (which are so obscurely and abominably and inaccessibly written), a pure classic in point of form. You may be amused at the comparison, but in finishing it I found the same after-taste remaining as after finishing "Madame Bovary," such a flavor of persistenteuphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim. Then the aptness of your illustrations, that never scratch or stand out at right angles, but invariably simplify the thought and help to pour it along! Oh, indeed you are a magician! And if your next book proves to be as great an advance on this one as this is on its two predecessors, your name will surely go down as one of the great creative names in philosophy.
There! have I praised you enough? What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most ispraise—although the philosophers generally call it "recognition"! If you want still more praise, let me know, and I will send it, for my features have been on a broad smile from the first page to the last, at the chain of felicities that never stopped. I feel rejuvenated.
As to the content of it, I am not in a mood at present to make any definite reaction. There is so much that is absolutely new that it will take a long time for your contemporaries to assimilate it, and I imagine that much of the development of detail will have to be performed by younger men whom your ideas will stimulate to coruscate in manners unexpected by yourself. To me at present the vital achievement of the book is that it inflicts an irrecoverable death-wound upon Intellectualism. It can never resuscitate! But it will die hard, for all the inertia of the past isin it, and the spirit of professionalism and pedantry as well as the æsthetic-intellectual delight of dealing with categories logically distinct yet logically connected, will rally for a desperate defense. Theélan vital, all contentless and vague as you are obliged to leave it, will be an easy substitute to make fun of. But the beasthasits death-wound now, and the manner in which you have inflicted it (intervalversustemps d'arrêt, etc.) is masterly in the extreme. I don't know why this laterrédactionof your critique of the mathematics of movement has seemed to me so much more telling than the early statement—I suppose it is because of the widerusemade of the principle in the book. You will be receiving my own little "pragmatism" book simultaneously with this letter. How jejune and inconsiderable it seems in comparison with your great system! But it is so congruent with parts of your system, fits so well into interstices thereof, that you will easily understand why I am so enthusiastic. I feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks. The position we are rescuing is "Tychism" and a really growing world. But whereas I have hitherto found no better way of defending Tychism than by affirming the spontaneous addition ofdiscreteelements of being (or their subtraction), thereby playing the game with intellectualist weapons, you set things straight at a single stroke by your fundamental conception of the continuously creative nature of reality. I think that one of your happiest strokes is your reduction of "finality," as usually taken, to its status alongside of efficient causality, as the twin-daughters of intellectualism. But this vaguer and truer finality restored to its rights will be a difficult thing to give content to. Altogether your reality lurks so in the background, in this book, that I am wondering whether youcouldn'tgive it any more developmentin concretohere, or whether you perhaps were holding back developments, already in your possession, for a future volume. They are sure to come to you later anyhow, and to make a new volume; and altogether, the clash of these ideas of yours with the traditional ones will be sure to make sparks fly that will illuminate all sorts of dark places and bring innumerable new considerations into view. But the process may be slow, for the ideas are so revolutionary. Were it not for your style, your book might last 100 years unnoticed; but your way of writing is so absolutely commanding that your theories have to be attended to immediately. I feel very much in the dark still about the relations of the progressive to the regressive movement, and this great precipitate of nature subject to static categories. With a frank pluralism ofbeingsendowed with vital impulses you can get oppositions and compromises easily enough, and a stagnant deposit; but after my one reading I don't exactly "catch on" to the way in which the continuum of reality resists itself so as to have to act, etc., etc.
The only part of the work which I felt like positively criticising was the discussion of the idea of nonentity, which seemed to me somewhat overelaborated, and yet didn't leave me with a sense that the last word had been said on the subject. But all these things must be very slowly digested by me. I can see that, when the tide turns in your favor, many previous tendencies in philosophy will start up, crying "This is nothing but whatwehave contended for all along." Schopenhauer's blind will, Hartmann's unconscious, Fichte's aboriginal freedom (reëdited at Harvard in the most "unreal" possible way by Münsterberg) will all be claimants for priority. But no matter—all the better if you are in some ancient lines of tendency. Mysticismalso must make claims and doubtless just ones. I say nothing more now—this is just my first reaction; but I am so enthusiastic as to have said only two days ago, "I thank heaven that I have lived to this date—that I have witnessed the Russo-Japanese war, and seen Bergson's new book appear—the two great modern turning-points of history and of thought!" Best congratulations and cordialest regards!