letter of the 30th November. I need not say how tickled I am at your too
generous words about my Divinity school address on Determinism.[76]
Sweet are the praises of an enemy. There is, thank Heaven! a plane below
all formulas and below enmities due to formulas, where men occasionally
meet each other moving, and recognize each other as brothers inhabiting
the _same depths_. Such is this depth of the _problem_ of
determinism--howe'er we solve it, we are brothers if we know it to be a
_problem_. No man on either side awakens any sense of intellectual
respect in me who regards the solution as a cock-sure and immediately
given thing, and wonders that any one should hesitate to choose his
party. You find fault with my deterministic disjunction, "pessimism or
subjectivism," and ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral
activity," etc. (You probably remember.) I didn't forget it. It entered
for me into pessimism, for, since such activity has failed to be
universally realized, it was (deterministically) _impossible from
eternity_, and the Universe in so far forth not an object of pure
worship, not an Absolute. My trouble, you see, lies with monism.
Determinism = monism; and a monism like this world can't be an object of
pure optimistic contemplation. By pessimism I simply mean _ultimate_
non-optimism. The Ideal is only a part of this world. Make the world a
Pluralism, and you forthwith have an object to worship. Make it a Unit,
on the other hand, and worship and abhorrence are equally one-sided and
equally legitimate reactions. _Indifferentism_ is the true condition of
such a world, and turn the matter how you will, I don't see how any
philosophy of the Absolute can ever escape from that capricious
alternation of mysticism and satanism in the treatment of its great
Idol, which history has always shown. Reverence is an accidental
personal mood in such a philosophy, and has naught to do with the
essentials of the system. At least, so it seems to me; and in view of
that, I prefer to stick in the wooden finitude of an ultimate pluralism,
because that at least gives me something definite to worship and fight
for.
However, I know I haven't exhausted all wisdom, and am too well aware
that this position, like everything else, is a _parti pris_ and a _pis
aller_,--_faute de mieux_,--to continue the Gallic idiom. Your
predecessor Royce thinks he's got the thing at last. It is too soon for
me to criticize his book; but I must say it seems to me one of the very
freshest, profoundest, solidest, most human bits of philosophical work
I've seen in a long time. In fact, it makes one think of Royce as a man
from whom nothing is too great to expect.
Your list of thirty lectures makes one bow down in reverence before you.
I should be afraid you were over-working. Your Hume-Kant circular shall
be diligently scanned when my Hume lectures come off, in about six
weeks. I am better as to the eyes, which gives me much hope. Am,
however, "maturing" building plans for a house, which is bad for sleep.
I do hope and trust there will be no "Enttäuschung" about Berkeley,[77]
and that not only the work, but the place and the climate, may prove
well adapted to both you and Mrs. Howison. Ever truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
The next letters relate to the "Literary Remains of Henry James," which
had just been published, and in which William James had collected a
number of his father's papers and edited them with an introductory essay
on their author's philosophy. Needless to say, the two letters to Godkin
have not been included among these with any thought of the unfortunate
review to which they refer. They furnish too good an illustration of
James's loyalty and magnanimity to be omitted. If more critics, and more
of the criticized, were to cultivate the manliness and generosity with
which James always entered discussion, there would be less reviewers
"never-quite-forgiven," and less feuds in the world of science.
_To E. L. Godkin._
CAMBRIDGE, [_Feb._] 16, 1885.
MY DEAR GODKIN,--Doesn't the impartiality which I suppose is striven for
in the "Nation," sometimes overshoot the mark "and fall on t'other
side"? Poor Harry's books seem always given out to critics with
antipathy to his literary temperament; and now for this only and last
review of my father--a writer exclusively religious--a personage seems
to have been selected for whom the religious life is complete _terra
incognita_. A severe review by one interested in the subject is one
thing; a contemptuous review by one with the subject out of his sight is
another.
Make no reply to this! One must disgorge his bile.
I was taken ill in Philadelphia the day after seeing you, and had to
return home after some days without stopping in N.Y. I _may_ get there
the week after next, and if so shall claim _one_ dinner, over which I
trust no cloud will be cast by the beginning of this note! With best
respects to Mrs. Godkin, always truly yours
WM. JAMES.
_To E. L. Godkin._
CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 19, 1885_.
MY DEAR GODKIN,--Your cry of remorse or regret is so "whole-souled" and
complete that I should not be human were I not melted almost to tears by
it, and sorry I "ever spoke to you as I did." I felt pretty sure that
you had no positive oversight of the thing in this case, but I addressed
you as the official head. And my _emotion_ was less that of filial
injury than of irritation at what seemed to me editorial stupidity in
giving out the book to the wrong _sort_ of person altogether--a Theist
of some sort being the only proper reviewer. I am heartily sorry that
the thing should have distressed you so much more than it did me. You
can take your consolation in the fact that it has now afforded you an
opportunity for the display of those admirable qualities of the heart
which your friends know, but which the ordinary readers of the "Nation"
probably do not suspect to slumber beneath the gory surface of that
savage sheet.
I hear that you are soon coming to give us some political economy. I am
very glad on every account, and suppose Mrs. Godkin will come _mit_.
Always truly yours
WM. JAMES.
_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._
CAMBRIDGE, _20 Feb., 1885_.
MY DEAR HODGSON,--Your letter of the 7th was most welcome. Anything
responsive about my poor old father's writing falls most gratefully upon
my heart. For I fear he found _me_ pretty unresponsive during his
lifetime; and that through my means any post-mortem response should come
seems a sort of atonement. You would have enjoyed knowing him. I know of
no one except Carlyle who had such a smiting _Ursprünglichkeit_ of
intuition, and such a deep sort of humor where human nature was
concerned. He bowled one over in such a careless way. He was like
Carlyle in being no _reasoner_ at all, in the sense in which
philosophers are reasoners. Reasoning was only an unfortunate necessity
of exposition for them both. His _ideas_, however, were the exact
inversion of Carlyle's; and he had nothing to correspond to Carlyle's
insatiable learning of historic facts and memory. As you say, the world
of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him.
_Those_ elements were very deep ones, and had theological names. Under
"Man" he would willingly have included all flesh, even that resident in
Sirius or ethereal worlds. But he felt no need of positively looking so
far. He was the humanest and most genial being in his impulses whom I
have ever personally known, and had a bigness and power of nature that
everybody felt. I thank you heartily for your interest. I wish that
somebody could _take up_ something from his system into a system more
articulately scientific. As it is, most people will feel the _presence_
of something real and true for the while they read, and go away and
presently, unable to dovetail [it] into their own framework, forget it
altogether.
I am hoping to write you a letter ere long, a letter philosophical. I am
going over Idealism again, and mean to review your utterances on the
subject. You know that, to quote what Gurney said one evening, to attain
to assimilating your thought is the chief purpose of one's life. But you
know also how hard it is for the likes of me to write, and how much that
is felt is unthought, and that as thought [it] goes and must go
unspoken. Brother Royce tells me he has sent you his "Religious Aspect
of Philosophy." He is a wonderfully powerful fellow, not yet thirty, and
this book seems to me to have a real fresh smell of the Earth about it.
You will enjoy it, I know. I am very curious to hear what you think of
his brand-new argument for Absolute Idealism.
I and mine are well. But the precious time as usual slips away with
little work done. Happy you, whose time is all your own!
WM. JAMES
_To Henry James._
CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 1, 1885_.
...I am running along quite smoothly, and my eyes,--you never knew such
an improvement! It has continued gradually, so that practically I can
use them all I will. It saves my life. _Why_ it should come now, when,
bully them as I would, it wouldn't come in the past few years, is one of
the secrets of the nervous system which the last trump, but nothing
earlier, may reveal. A week's recess begins today, and the day after
tomorrow I shall start for the South Shore to look up summer quarters. I
want to try how sailing suits me as a summer kill-time. The walking in
Keene Valley suits me not, and driving is too "cost-playful." I have
made a start with my psychology which I shall work at, temperately,
through the vacation and hope to get finished a year from next fall,
_sans faute_. Then shall the star of your romances be eclipst!...
_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._
NEWPORT, _Dec. 30, 1885_.
MY DEAR HODGSON,--I have just read your "Philosophy and Experience"
address, and re-read with much care your "Dialogue on Free Will" in the
last "Mind." I thank you kindly for the address. But isn't philosophy a
sad mistress, estranging the more intimately those who in all other
respects are most intimately united,--although 'tis true she unites them
afresh by their very estrangement! I feel for the first time now, after
these readings, as if I might be catching sight of your foundations.
Always hitherto has there been something elusive, a sense that what I
caught could not be _all_. Now I feel as if it might be all, and yet for
me 'tis not enough.
Your "method" (which surely after _this_ needs no additional expository
touch) I seem at last to understand, but it shrinks in the
understanding. For what is your famous "two aspects" principle more than
the postulate that the world is thoroughly _intelligible_ in nature? And
what the practical outcome of the distinction between _whatness_ and
_thatness_ save the sending us to experience to ascertain the
connections among things, and the declaration that no amount of insight
into their intrinsic qualities will account for their existence? I can
now get no more than that out of the method, which seems in truth to me
an over-subtle way of getting at and expressing pretty simple truths,
which others share who know nothing of your formulations. In fact your
wondrously delicate retouchings and discriminations appear rather to
darken the matter from the point of view of teaching. One gains much by
the way, of course, that he would have lost by a shorter path, but one
risks losing the end altogether. (I reserve what you say at the end of
both articles about Conscience, etc.--which is original and beautiful
and which I feel I have not yet assimilated. I will only ask whether all
you say about the decisions of conscience implying a future verification
does not hold of scientific decisions as well, so that _all_ reflective
_cognitive_ judgments, as well as practical judgments, project
themselves ideally into eternity?)
As for the Free Will article, I have very little to say, for it leaves
entirely untouched what seems to me the only living issue involved. The
paper is an exquisite piece of literary goldsmith's work,--nothing like
it in that respect since Berkeley,--but it hangs in the air of
speculation and touches not the earth of life, and the beautiful
distinctions it keeps making gratify only the understanding which has no
end in view but to exercise its eyes by the way. The distinctions
between _vis impressa_ and _vis insita_, and compulsion and "reaction"
_mean_ nothing in a monistic world; and any world is a monism in which
the parts to come are, as they are in your world, absolutely involved
and presupposed in the parts that are already given. Were such a monism
a palpable optimism, no man would be so foolish as to care whether it
was predetermined or not, or to ask whether he was or was not what you
call a "real agent." He would acquiesce in the flow and drift of things,
of which he found himself a part, and rejoice that it was such a whole.
The question of free will owes its entire being to a difficulty you
disdain to notice, namely that we _cannot_ rejoice in such a whole, for
it is _not_ a palpable optimism, and yet, if it be predetermined, we
_must treat_ it as a whole. Indeterminism is the only way to _break_ the
world into good parts and into bad, and to stand by the former as
against the latter.
I can understand the determinism of the mere mechanical intellect which
will not hear of a moral dimension to existence. I can understand that
of mystical monism shutting its eyes on the concretes of life, for the
sake of its abstract rapture. I can understand that of mental defeat and
despair saying, "it's all a muddle, and here I go, along with it." I can
_not_ understand a determinism like yours, which rejoices in clearness
and distinctions, and which is at the same time alive to moral
ones--unless it be that the latter are purely speculative for it, and
have little to do with its real feeling of the way life _is_ made up.
For life _is_ evil. Two souls are in my breast; I see the better, and in
the very act of seeing it I do the worse. To say that the molecules of
the nebula implied this and _shall have implied it_ to all eternity, so
often as it recurs, is to condemn me to that "dilemma" of pessimism or
subjectivism of which I once wrote, and which seems to have so little
urgency to you, and to which all talk about abstractions erected into
entities; and compulsion _vs._ "freedom" are simply irrelevant. What
living man cares for such niceties, when the real problem stares him in
the face of how practically to meet a world foredone, with no
possibilities left in it?
What a mockery then seems your distinction between determination and
compulsion, between passivity and an "activity" every minutest feature
of which is preappointed, both as to its _whatness_ and as to its
_thatness_, by what went before! What an insignificant difference then
the difference between "impediments from within" and "impediments from
without"!--between being fated to do the thing _willingly_ or not! The
point is not as to how it is done, but as to its being done at all. It
seems a wrong complement to the rest of life, which rest of life
(according to your precious "free-will determinism," as to any other
fatalism), whilst shrieking aloud at its _whatness_, nevertheless exacts
rigorously its _thatness_ then and there. Is that a reasonable world
from the moral point of view? And is it made more reasonable by the fact
that when I brought about the _thatness_ of the evil _whatness_ decreed
to come by the _thatness_ of all else beside, I did so consentingly and
aware of no "impediments outside of my own nature"? With what can I
_side_ in such a world as this? this monstrous indifferentism which
brings forth everything _eodem jure_? Our nature demands something
_objective_ to take sides with. If the world is a Unit of this sort
there _are_ no sides--there's the moral rub! And you don't see it!
Ah, Hodgson! Hodgson _mio!_ from whom I hoped so much! Most spirited,
most clean, most thoroughbred of philosophers! _Perchè di tanto inganni
i figli tuoi?_[78] If you want to reconcile us rationally to
Determinism, write a Theodicy, reconcile us to _Evil_, but don't talk of
the distinction between impediments from within and without when the
within and the without of which you speak are both within that _Whole_
which is the only real agent in your philosophy. There is no such
superstition as the idolatry of the _Whole_.
I originally finished this letter on sheet number one--but it occurred
to me afterwards that the end was too short, so I scratched out the
first lines of the crossed writing, and refer you now to what follows
them.--[_Lines from sheet number I._] It makes me sick at heart, this
discord among the only men who ought to agree. I am the more sick this
moment as I must write to your ancient foe (at least the stimulus to an
old "Mind" article of yours), one F. E. Abbot who recently gave me his
little book "Scientific Theism"--the burden of his life--which makes me
groan that I cannot digest a word of it. Farewell! Heaven bless you all
the same--and enable you to forgive me. We are well and I hope you are
the same. Ever faithfully yours,
W. J.
[_From the final sheet._] Let me add a wish for a happy New Year and the
expression of my undying regard. You are tenfold more precious to me now
that I have braved you thus! Adieu!
_To Carl Stumpf._
CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 1, 1886_.
MY DEAR STUMPF,--...Let me tell you of my own fate since I wrote you
last. It has been an eventful and in some respects a sad year. We lost
our youngest child in the summer--the flower of the flock, 18 months
old--with a painful and lingering whooping-cough complicated with
pneumonia. My wife has borne it like an angel, however, which is
something to be thankful for. Her mother, close to whom we have always
lived, has had a severe pulmonary illness, which has obliged her to
repair to Italy for health. She is now on the Ocean, with her youngest
and only unmarried daughter, the second one having only a month ago
become the wife of that [W. M.] Salter whose essays on ethics have
lately been translated by von Gizycki in Berlin. So I have gained him as
a brother-in-law, and regard it as a real gain. I have also gained a
full Professorship with an increase of pay, and have moved into a larger
and more commodious house.[79] My eyes, too, are much better than they
were a year ago, and I am able to do more work, so there is plenty of
sweet as well as bitter in the cup.
I don't know whether you have heard of the London "Society for Psychical
Research," which is seriously and laboriously investigating all sorts of
"supernatural" matters, clairvoyance, apparitions, etc. I don't know
what you think of such work; but I think that the present condition of
opinion regarding it is scandalous, there being a mass of testimony, or
apparent testimony, about such things, at which the only men capable of
a critical judgment--men of scientific education--will not even look. We
have founded a similar society here within the year,--some of us thought
that the publications of the London society deserved at least to be
treated as if worthy of experimental disproof,--and although work
advances very slowly owing to the small amount of disposable time on the
part of the members, who are all very busy men, we have already stumbled
on some rather inexplicable facts out of which something may come. It is
a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I
believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature
which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon
are _impossible_.
My teaching is much the same as it was--a little better in quality, I
hope. I enjoy very much a new philosophic colleague, Josiah Royce, from
California, who is just thirty years old and a perfect little Socrates
for wisdom and humor. I still try to write a little psychology, but it
is exceedingly slow work. No sooner do I get interested than bang! goes
my sleep, and I have to stop a week or ten days, during which my ideas
get all cold again. Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an
uncompleted task.... I try to spend two hours a day in a laboratory for
psycho-physics which I started last year, but of which I fear the
_fruits_ will be slow in ripening, as my experimental aptitude is but
small. But I am convinced that one must guard in some such way as that
against the growing tendency to _subjectivism_ in one's thinking, as
life goes on. I am hypnotizing, on a large scale, the students, and have
hit one or two rather pretty unpublished things of which some day I hope
I may send you an account.... Ever faithfully yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
When the American Society for Psychical Research was organized in Boston
in the autumn of 1884, Thomas Davidson wrote to comment on its apparent
anti-spiritual bias. In the following reply, dated February 1, 1885, but
more easily understood if inserted here out of its chronological place,
James defined the society's conception of its function. In so doing he
described his own attitude toward psychical research quite exactly:--
"As for any 'antispiritual bias' of our Society, no theoretic basis, or
_bias_ of any sort whatever, so far as I can make out, exists in it. The
one thing that has struck me all along in the men who have had to do
with it is their complete colorlessness philosophically. They seem to
have no preferences for any general _ism_ whatever. I doubt if this
could be matched in Europe. Anyhow, it would make no difference in the
important work to be done, what theoretic bias the members had. For I
take it the urgent thing, to rescue us from the present disgraceful
condition, is to ascertain in a manner so thorough as to constitute
_evidence_ that will be accepted by outsiders, just what the _phenomenal
conditions of certain_ concrete phenomenal occurrences are. Not till
that is done, can spiritualistic or anti-spiritualistic theories be even
mooted. I'm sure that the more we can steer clear of theories at first,
the better. The choice of officers was largely dictated by motives of
policy. Not that scientific men are necessarily better judges of all
truth than others, but that their adhesion would popularly seem better
_evidence_ than the adhesion of others, in the matter. And what we want
is not only truth, but evidence. We shall be lucky if our scientific
names don't grow discredited the instant they subscribe to any
'spiritual' manifestations. But how much easier to discredit literary
men, philosophers or clergymen! I think Newcomb, for President, was an
uncommon hit--if he believes, he will probably carry others. You'd
better chip in, and not complicate matters by talking either of
spiritualism or anti-spiritualism. '_Facts_' are what are wanted."
_To Henry James._
CAMBRIDGE, _May 9, 1886_.