THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
[Illustration: WILLIAM JAMES
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ABOUT 1895]
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
EDITED BY HIS SON
HENRY JAMES
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME II
[Illustration]
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HENRY JAMES
CONTENTS
XI. 1893-1899 1-52
_Turning to Philosophy--A Student's Impressions--Popular
Lecturing--Chautauqua._
LETTERS:--
To Dickinson S. Miller 17
To Henry Holt 19
To Henry James 20
To Henry James 20
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 20
To G. H. Howison 22
To Theodore Flournoy 23
To his Daughter 25
To E. L. Godkin 28
To F. W. H. Myers 30
To F. W. H. Myers 32
To Henry Holt 33
To his Class at Radcliffe College 33
To Henry James 34
To Henry James 36
To Benjamin P. Blood 38
To Mrs. James 40
To Miss Rosina H. Emmet 44
To Charles Renouvier 44
To Theodore Flournoy 46
To Dickinson S. Miller 48
To Henry James 51
XII. 1893-1899 (Continued) 53-91
_The Will to Believe--Talks to Teachers--Defense of Mental
Healers--Excessive Climbing in the Adirondacks._
LETTERS:--
To Theodore Flournoy 53
To Henry W. Rankin 56
To Benjamin P. Blood 58
To Henry James 60
To Miss Ellen Emmet 62
To E. L. Godkin 64
To F. C. S. Schiller 65
To James J. Putnam 66
To James J. Putnam 72
To François Pillon 73
To Mrs. James 75
To G. H. Howison 79
To Henry James 80
To his Son Alexander 81
To Miss Rosina H. Emmet 82
To Dickinson S. Miller 84
To Dickinson S. Miller 86
To Henry Rutgers Marshall 86
To Henry Rutgers Marshall 88
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 88
XIII. 1899-1902 92-170
_Two Years of Illness in Europe--Retirement from Active Duty at
Harvard--The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures._
LETTERS:--
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 95
To Mrs. E. P. Gibbens 96
To William M. Salter 99
To Miss Frances R. Morse 102
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 103
To Thomas Davidson 106
To John C. Gray 108
To Miss Frances R. Morse 109
To Mrs. Glendower Evans 112
To Dickinson S. Miller 115
To Francis Boott 117
To Hugo Münsterberg 119
To G. H. Palmer 120
To Miss Frances R. Morse 124
To his Son Alexander 129
To his Daughter 130
To Miss Frances R. Morse 133
To Miss Frances R. Morse 133
To Josiah Royce 135
To Miss Frances R. Morse 138
To James Sully 140
To Miss Frances R. Morse 142
To F. C. S. Schiller 142
To Miss Frances R. Morse 143
To Miss Frances R. Morse 146
To Henry W. Rankin 148
To Charles Eliot Norton 150
To N. S. Shaler 153
To Miss Frances R. Morse 155
To Henry James 159
To E. L. Godkin 159
To E. L. Godkin 161
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 162
To H. N. Gardiner 164
To F. C. S. Schiller 164
To Charles Eliot Norton 166
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 167
XIV. 1902-1905 171-218
_The Last Period (I)--Statements of Religious Belief--Philosophical
Writing._
LETTERS:--
To Henry L. Higginson 173
To Miss Grace Norton 173
To Miss Frances R. Morse 175
To Henry L. Higginson 176
To Henri Bergson 178
To Mrs. Louis Agassiz 180
To Henry L. Higginson 182
To Henri Bergson 183
To Theodore Flournoy 185
To Henry James 188
To his Daughter 192
To Miss Frances R. Morse 193
To Henry James 195
To Henry W. Rankin 196
To Dickinson S. Miller 197
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 198
To Miss Frances R. Morse 200
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 201
To Henry James 202
To François Pillon 203
To Henry James 204
To Charles Eliot Norton 206
To L. T. Hobhouse 207
To Edwin D. Starbuck 209
To James Henry Leuba 211
Answers to the Pratt Questionnaire on Religious Belief 212
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 215
To F. C. S. Schiller 216
To F. J. E. Woodbridge 217
To Edwin D. Starbuck 217
To F. J. E. Woodbridge 218
XV. 1905-1907 219-282
_The Last Period (II)--Italy and Greece--Philosophical Congress in
Rome--Stanford University--The Earthquake--Resignation of
Professorship._
LETTERS:--
To Mrs. James 221
To his Daughter 223
To Mrs. James 225
To George Santayana 228
To Mrs. James 229
To Mrs. James 230
To H. G. Wells 230
To Henry L. Higginson 231
To T. S. Perry 232
To Dickinson S. Miller 233
To Dickinson S. Miller 235
To Dickinson S. Miller 237
To Daniel Merriman 238
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 238
To Henry James 239
To Theodore Flournoy 241
To F. C. S. Schiller 245
To Miss Frances R. Morse 247
To Henry James and W. James, Jr. 250
To W. Lutoslawski 252
To John Jay Chapman 255
To Henry James 258
To H. G. Wells 259
To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 260
To his Daughter 262
To Henry James and W. James, Jr. 263
To Moorfield Storey 265
To Theodore Flournoy 266
To Charles A. Strong 268
To F. C. S. Schiller 270
To Clifford W. Beers 273
To William James, Jr. 275
To Henry James 277
To F. C. S. Schiller 280
XVI. 1907-1909 283-332
_The Last Period (III)--Hibbert Lectures in Oxford--The Hodgson Report._
LETTERS:--
To Charles Lewis Slattery 287
To Henry L. Higginson 288
To W. Cameron Forbes 288
To F. C. S. Schiller 290
To Henri Bergson 290
To T. S. Perry 294
To Dickinson S. Miller 295
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 296
To W. Jerusalem 297
To Henry James 298
To Theodore Flournoy 300
To Norman Kemp Smith 301
To his Daughter 301
To Henry James 302
To Henry James 303
To Miss Pauline Goldmark 303
To Charles Eliot Norton 306
To Henri Bergson 308
To John Dewey 310
To Theodore Flournoy 310
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 312
To Theodore Flournoy 313
To Henri Bergson 315
To H. G. Wells 316
To Henry James 317
To T. S. Perry 318
To Hugo Münsterberg 320
To John Jay Chapman 321
To G. H. Palmer 322
To Theodore Flournoy 322
To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 324
To F. C. S. Schiller 325
To Theodore Flournoy 326
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 328
To John Jay Chapman 329
To John Jay Chapman 330
To John Jay Chapman 330
To Dickinson S. Miller 331
XVII. 1910 333-350
_Final Months--The End._
LETTERS:--
To Henry L. Higginson 334
To Miss Frances R. Morse 335
To T. S. Perry 335
To François Pillon 336
To Theodore Flournoy 338
To his Daughter 338
To Henry P. Bowditch 341
To François Pillon 342
To Henry Adams 344
To Henry Adams 346
To Henry Adams 347
To Benjamin P. Blood 347
To Theodore Flournoy 349
APPENDIX I. 353
Three Criticisms for Students.
APPENDIX II. 357
Books by William James.
INDEX 363
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
William James in middle life _Frontispiece_
"Damn the Absolute": two snapshots of William
James and Josiah Royce 135
William James and Henry James posing for a
kodak in 1900 161
William James and Henry Clement at the "Putnam
Shanty" in the Adirondacks (1907?) 315
Facsimile of Post-card addressed to Henry Adams 347
THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
XI
1893-1899
_Turning to Philosophy--A Student's Impressions--Popular
Lecturing--Chautauqua_
When James returned from Europe, he was fifty-two years old. If he had
been another man, he might have settled down to the intensive
cultivation of the field in which he had already achieved renown and
influence. He would then have spent the rest of his life in working out
special problems in psychology, in deducing a few theories, in making
particular applications of his conclusions, in administering a growing
laboratory, in surrounding himself with assistants and disciples--in
weeding and gathering where he had tilled. But the fact was that the
publication of his two books on psychology operated for him as a welcome
release from the subject.
He had no illusion of finality about what he had written.[1] But he
would have said that whatever original contribution he was capable of
making to psychology had already been made; that he must pass on and
leave addition and revision to others. He gradually disencumbered
himself of responsibility for teaching the subject in the College. The
laboratory had already been placed under Professor Münsterberg's charge.
For one year, during which Münsterberg returned to Germany, James was
compelled to direct its conduct; but he let it be known that he would
resign his professorship rather than concern himself with it
indefinitely.
Readers of this book will have seen that the centre of his interest had
always been religious and philosophical. To be sure, the currents by
which science was being carried forward during the sixties and seventies
had supported him in his distrust of conclusions based largely on
introspection and _a priori_ reasoning. As early as 1865 he had said,
apropos of Agassiz, "No one sees farther into a generalization than his
own knowledge of details extends." In the spirit of that remark he had
spent years on brain-physiology, on the theory of the emotions, on the
feeling of effort in mental processes, in studying the measurements and
exact experiments by means of which the science of the mind was being
brought into quickening relation with the physical and biological
sciences. But all the while he had been driven on by a curiosity that
embraced ulterior problems. In half of the field of his consciousness
questions had been stirring which now held his attention completely.
Does consciousness really exist? Could a radically empirical conception
of the universe be formulated? What is knowledge? What truth? Where is
freedom? and where is there room for faith? Metaphysical problems
haunted his mind; discussions that ran in strictly psychological
channels bored him. He called psychology "a nasty little subject,"
according to Professor Palmer, and added, "all one cares to know lies
outside." He would not consider spending time on a revised edition of
his textbook (the "Briefer Course") except for a bribe that was too
great ever to be urged upon him. As time went on, he became more and
more irritated at being addressed or referred to as a "psychologist." In
June, 1903, when he became aware that Harvard was intending to confer an
honorary degree on him, he went about for days before Commencement in a
half-serious state of dread lest, at the fatal moment, he should hear
President Eliot's voice naming him "Psychologist, psychical researcher,
willer-to-believe, religious experiencer." He could not say whether the
impossible last epithets would be less to his taste than "psychologist."
Only along the borderland between normal and pathological mental states,
and particularly in the region of "religious experience," did he
continue to collect psychological data and to explore them.
The new subjects which he offered at Harvard during the nineties are
indicative of the directions in which his mind was moving. In the first
winter after his return he gave a course on Cosmology, which he had
never taught before and which he described in the department
announcement as "a study of the fundamental conceptions of natural
science with especial reference to the theories of evolution and
materialism," and for the first time announced that his graduate
"seminar" would be wholly devoted to questions in mental pathology
"embracing a review of the principal forms of abnormal or exceptional
mental life." In 1895 the second half of his psychological seminar was
announced as "a discussion of certain theoretic problems, as
Consciousness, Knowledge, Self, the relations of Mind and Body." In 1896
he offered a course on the philosophy of Kant for the first time. In
1898 the announcement of his "elective" on Metaphysics explained that
the class would consider "the unity or pluralism of the world ground,
and its knowability or unknowability; realism and idealism, freedom,
teleology and theism."[2]
But there is another aspect of the nineties which must be touched upon.
After getting back "to harness" in 1893 James took up, not only his full
college duties, but an amount of outside lecturing such as he had never
done before. In so doing he overburdened himself and postponed the
attainment of his true purpose; but the temptation to accept the
requests which now poured in on him was made irresistible by practical
considerations. He not only repeated some of his Harvard courses at
Radcliffe College, and gave instruction in the Harvard Summer School in
addition to the regular work of the term; but delivered lectures at
teachers' meetings and before other special audiences in places as far
from Cambridge as Colorado and California. A number of the papers that
are included in "The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy" (1897) and "Talks to Teachers and Students on Some of Life's
Ideals" (1897) were thus prepared as lectures. Some of them were read
many times before they were published. When he stopped for a rest in
1899, he was exhausted to the verge of a formidable break-down.
Even a glance at this period tempts one to wonder whether this record
would not have been richer if it had been different. Might-have-beens
can never be measured or verified; and yet sometimes it cannot be
doubted that possibilities never realized were actual possibilities
once. By 1893 James was inwardly eager, as has already been said, to
devote all his thought and working time to metaphysical and religious
questions. More than that--he had already conceived the important terms
of his own _Welt-anschauung_. "The Will to Believe" was written by 1896.
In the preface to the "Talks to Teachers" he said of the essay called "A
Certain Blindness in Human Beings," "it connects itself with a definite
view of the World and our Moral relations to the same.... I mean the
pluralistic or individualistic philosophy." This was no more than a
statement of a general philosophic attitude which had for some years
been familiar to his students and to readers of his occasional papers.
The lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,"
delivered at the University of California in 1898, forecast "Pragmatism"
and the "Meaning of Truth." If his time and energy had not been
otherwise consumed, the nineties might well have witnessed the
appearance of papers which were not written until the next decade. If he
had been able to apply an undistracted attention to what his spirit was
all the while straining toward, the disastrous breakdown of 1899-1902
might not have happened. But instead, these best years of his maturity
were largely sacrificed to the practical business of supporting his
family. His salary as a Harvard professor was insufficient to his needs.
On his salary alone he could not educate his four children as he wanted
to, and make provision for his old age and their future and his wife's,
except by denying himself movement and social and professional contacts
and by withdrawing into isolation that would have been utterly
paralyzing and depressing to his genius. He possessed private means, to
be sure; but, considering his family, these amounted to no more than a
partial insurance against accident and a moderate supplement to his
salary. His books had not yet begun to yield him a substantial increase
of income. It is true that he made certain lecture engagements serve as
the occasion for casting philosophical conceptions in more or less
popular form, and that he frequently paid the expenses of refreshing
travels by means of these lectures. But after he had economized in every
direction,--as for instance, by giving up horse and hired man at
Chocorua,--the bald fact remained that for six years he spent most of
the time that he could spare from regular college duties, and about all
his vacations, in carrying the fruits of the previous fifteen years of
psychological work into the popular market. His public reputation was
increased thereby. Teachers, audiences, and the "general reader" had
reason to be thankful. But science and philosophy paid for the gain. His
case was no worse than that of plenty of other men of productive genius
who were enmeshed in an inadequately supported academic system. It would
have been much more distressing under the conditions that prevail today.
So James took the limitations of the situation as a matter of course and
made no complaint. But when he died, the systematic statement of his
philosophy had not been "rounded out" and he knew that he was leaving it
"too much like an arch built only on one side."
* * * * *
James's appearance at this period is well shown by the frontispiece of
this volume. Almost anyone who was at Harvard in the nineties can recall
him as he went back and forth in Kirkland Street between the College and
his Irving Street house, and can in memory see again that erect figure
walking with a step that was somehow firm and light without being
particularly rapid, two or three thick volumes and a note-book under
one arm, and on his face a look of abstraction that used suddenly to
give way to an expression of delighted and friendly curiosity. Sometimes
it was an acquaintance who caught his eye and received a cordial word;
sometimes it was an occurrence in the street that arrested him;
sometimes the terrier dog, who had been roving along unwatched and
forgotten, embroiled himself in an adventure or a fight and brought
James out of his thoughts. One day he would have worn the Norfolk jacket
that he usually worked in at home to his lecture-room; the next, he
would have forgotten to change the black coat that he had put on for a
formal occasion. At twenty minutes before nine in the morning he could
usually be seen going to the College Chapel for the fifteen-minute
service with which the College day began. If he was returning home for
lunch, he was likely to be hurrying; for he had probably let himself be
detained after a lecture to discuss some question with a few of his
class. He was apt then to have some student with him whom he was
bringing home to lunch and to finish the discussion at the family table,
or merely for the purpose of establishing more personal relations than
were possible in the class-room. At the end of the afternoon, or in the
early evening, he would frequently be bicycling or walking again. He
would then have been working until his head was tired, and would have
laid his spectacles down on his desk and have started out again to get a
breath of air and perhaps to drop in on a Cambridge neighbor.
In his own house it seemed as if he was always at work; all the more,
perhaps, because it was obvious that he possessed no instinct for
arranging his day and protecting himself from interruptions. He managed
reasonably well to keep his mornings clear; or rather he allowed his
wife to stand guard over them with fair success. But soon after he had
taken an essential after-lunch nap, he was pretty sure to be "caught" by
callers and visitors. From six o'clock on, he usually had one or two of
the children sitting, more or less subdued, in the library, while he
himself read or dashed off letters, or (if his eyes were tired) dictated
them to Mrs. James. He always had letters and post-cards to write. At
any odd time--with his overcoat on and during a last moment before
hurrying off to an appointment or a train--he would sit down at his desk
and do one more note or card--always in the beautiful and flowing hand
that hardly changed between his eighteenth and his sixty-eighth years.
He seemed to feel no need of solitude except when he was reading
technical literature or writing philosophy. If other members of the
household were talking and laughing in the room that adjoined his study,
he used to keep the door open and occasionally pop in for a word, or to
talk for a quarter of an hour. It was with the greatest difficulty that
Mrs. James finally persuaded him to let the door be closed up. He never
struck an equilibrium between wishing to see his students and neighbors
freely and often, and wishing not to be interrupted by even the most
agreeable reminder of the existence of anyone or anything outside the
matter in which he was absorbed.
It was customary for each member of the Harvard Faculty to announce in
the college catalogue at what hour of the day he could be consulted by
students. Year after year James assigned the hour of his evening meal
for such calls. Sometimes he left the table to deal with the caller in
private; sometimes a student, who had pretty certainly eaten already and
was visibly abashed at finding himself walking in on a second dinner,
would be brought into the dining-room and made to talk about other
things than his business.
He allowed his conscience to be constantly burdened with a sense of
obligation to all sorts of people. The list of neighbors, students,
strangers visiting Cambridge, to whom he and Mrs. James felt responsible
for civilities, was never closed, and the cordiality which animated his
intentions kept him reminded of every one on it.
And yet, whenever his wife wisely prepared for a suitable time and made
engagements for some sort of hospitality otherwise than by hap-hazard,
it was perversely likely to be the case, when the appointed hour
arrived, that James was "going on his nerves" and in no mood for "being
entertaining." The most comradely of men, nothing galled him like
_having to be_ sociable. The "hollow mockery of our social conventions"
would then be described in furious and lurid speech. Luckily the guests
were not yet there to hear him. But they did not always get away without
catching a glimpse of his state of mind. On one such occasion,--an
evening reception for his graduate class had been arranged,--Mrs. James
encountered a young man in the hall whose expression was so perturbed
that she asked him what had happened to him. "I've come in again," he
replied, "to get my hat. I was trying to find my way to the dining-room
when Mr. James swooped at me and said, 'Here, Smith, you want to get out
of this _Hell_, don't you? I'll show you how. There!' And before I could
answer, he'd popped me out through a back-door. But, really, I do not
want to go!"
The dinners of a club to which allusions will occur in this volume, (in
letters to Henry L. Higginson, T. S. Perry, and John C. Gray) were
occasions apart from all others; for James could go to them at the last
moment, without any sense of responsibility and knowing that he would
find congenial company and old friends. So he continued to go to these
dinners, even after he had stopped accepting all invitations to dine.
The Club (for it never had any name) had been started in 1870. James had
been one of the original group who agreed to dine together once a month
during the winter. Among the other early members had been his brother
Henry, W. D. Howells, O. W. Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, John C. Gray, Henry
Adams, T. S. Perry, John C. Ropes, A. G. Sedgwick, and F. Parkman. The
more faithful diners, who constituted the nucleus of the Club during the
later years, included Henry L. Higginson, Sturgis Bigelow, John C.
Ropes, John T. Morse, Charles Grinnell, James Ford Rhodes, Moorfield
Storey, James W. Crafts, and H. P. Walcott.
* * * * *
Every little while James's sleep would "go to pieces," and he would go
off to Newport, the Adirondacks, or elsewhere, for a few days. This
happened both summer and winter. It was not the effect of the place or
climate in which he was living, but simply that his dangerously high
average of nervous tension had been momentarily raised to the snapping
point. Writing was almost certain to bring on this result. When he had
an essay or a lecture to prepare, he could not do it by bits. In order
to begin such a task, he tried to seize upon a free day--more often a
Sunday than any other. Then he would shut himself into his library, or
disappear into a room at the top of the house, and remain hidden all
day. If things went well, twenty or thirty sheets of much-corrected
manuscript (about twenty-five hundred words in his free hand) might
result from such a day. As many more would have gone into the
waste-basket. Two or three successive days of such writing "took it out
of him" visibly.
Short holidays, or intervals in college lecturing, were often employed
for writing in this way, the longer vacations of the latter nineties
being filled, as has been said, with traveling and lecture engagements.
In the intervals there would be a few days, or sometimes two or three
whole weeks, at Chocorua. Or, one evening, all the windows of the
deserted Irving Street house would suddenly be wide open to the night
air, and passers on the sidewalk could see James sitting in his
shirt-sleeves within the circle of the bright light that stood on his
library table. He was writing letters, making notes, and skirmishing
through the piles of journals and pamphlets that had accumulated during
an absence.
* * * * *
The impression which he made on a student who sat under him in several
classes shortly before the date at which this volume begins have been
set down in a form in which they can be given here.
"I have a vivid recollection" (writes Dr. Dickinson S. Miller) "of
James's lectures, classes, conferences, seminars, laboratory interests,
and the side that students saw of him generally. Fellow-manliness seemed
to me a good name for his quality. The one thing apparently impossible
to him was to speak _ex cathedra_ from heights of scientific erudition
and attainment. There were not a few 'if's' and 'maybe's' in his
remarks. Moreover he seldom followed for long an orderly system of
argument or unfolding of a theory, but was always apt to puncture such
systematic pretensions when in the midst of them with some entirely
unaffected doubt or question that put the matter upon a basis of common
sense at once. He had drawn from his laboratory experience in chemistry
and his study of medicine a keen sense that the imposing formulas of
science that impress laymen are not so 'exact' as they sound. He was
not, in my time at least, much of a believer in lecturing in the sense
of continuous exposition.
"I can well remember the first meeting of the course in psychology in
1890, in a ground-floor room of the old Lawrence Scientific School. He
took a considerable part of the hour by reading extracts from Henry
Sidgwick's Lecture against Lecturing, proceeding to explain that we
should use as a textbook his own 'Principles of Psychology,' appearing
for the first time that very week from the press, and should spend the
hours in conference, in which we should discuss and ask questions, on
both sides. So during the year's course we read the two volumes through,
with some amount of running commentary and controversy. There were four
or five men of previous psychological training in a class of (I think)
between twenty and thirty, two of whom were disposed to take up cudgels
for the British associational psychology and were particularly troubled
by the repeated doctrine of the 'Principles' that a state of
consciousness had no parts or elements, but was one indivisible fact. He
bore questions that really were criticisms with inexhaustible patience
and what I may call (the subject invites the word often) _human_
attention; invited written questions as well, and would often return
them with a reply penciled on the back when he thought the discussion
too special in interest to be pursued before the class. Moreover, he
bore with us with never a sign of impatience if we lingered after class,
and even walked up Kirkland Street with him on his way home. Yet he was
really not argumentative, not inclined to dialectic or pertinacious
debate of any sort. It must always have required an effort of
self-control to put up with it. He almost never, even in private
conversation, contended for his own opinion. He had a way of often
falling back on the language of perception, insight, sensibility, vision
of possibilities. I recall how on one occasion after class, as I parted
with him at the gate of the Memorial Hall triangle, his last words were
something like these: 'Well, Miller, that theory's not a warm reality to
me yet--still a cold conception'; and the charm of the comradely smile
with which he said it! The disinclination to formal logical system and
the more prolonged purely intellectual analyses was felt by some men as
a lack in his classroom work, though they recognized that these analyses
were present in the 'Psychology.' On the other hand, the very tendency
to _feel_ ideas lent a kind of emotional or æsthetic color which
deepened the interest.
"In the course of the year he asked the men each to write some word of
suggestion, if he were so inclined, for improvement in the method with
which the course was conducted; and, if I remember rightly, there were
not a few respectful suggestions that too much time was allowed to the
few wrangling disputants. In a pretty full and varied experience of
lecture-rooms at home and abroad I cannot recall another where the class
was asked to criticize the methods of the lecturer.
"Another class of twelve or fourteen, in the same year, on Descartes,
Spinoza, and Leibnitz, met in one of the 'tower rooms' of Sever Hall,
sitting around a table. Here we had to do mostly with pure metaphysics.
And more striking still was the prominence of humanity and sensibility
in his way of taking philosophic problems. I can see him now, sitting at
the head of that heavy table of light-colored oak near the bow-window
that formed the end of the room. My brother, a visitor at Cambridge,
dropping in for an hour and seeing him with his vigorous air, bronzed
and sanguine complexion, and brown tweeds, said, 'He looks more like a
sportsman than a professor.' I think that the sporting men in college
always felt a certain affinity to themselves on one side in the
freshness and manhood that distinguished him in mind, appearance, and
diction. It was, by the way, in this latter course that I first heard
some of the philosophic phrases now identified with him. There was a
great deal about the monist and pluralist views of the universe. The
world of the monist was described as a 'block-universe' and the monist
himself as 'wallowing in a sense of unbridled unity,' or something of
the sort. He always wanted the men to write one or two 'theses' in the
course of the year and to get to work early on them. He made a great
deal of bibliography. He would say, 'I am no man for editions and
references, no exact bibliographer.' But none the less he would put upon
the blackboard full lists of books, English, French, German, and
Italian, on our subject. His own reading was immense and systematic. No
one has ever done justice to it, partly because he spoke with unaffected
modesty of that side of his equipment.
"Of course this knowledge came to the foreground in his 'seminar.' In my
second year I was with him in one of these for both terms, the first
half-year studying the psychology of pleasure and pain, and the second,
mental pathology. Here each of us undertook a special topic, the reading
for which was suggested by him. The students were an interesting group,
including Professor Santayana, then an instructor, Dr. Herbert Nichols,
Messrs. Mezes (now President of the City College, New York), Pierce
(late Professor at Smith College), Angell (Professor of Psychology at
Chicago, and now President of the Carnegie Corporation), Bakewell
(Professor at Yale), and Alfred Hodder (who became instructor at Bryn
Mawr College, then abandoned academic life for literature and politics).
In this seminar I was deeply impressed by his judicious and often
judicial quality. His range of intellectual experience, his profound
cultivation in literature, in science and in art (has there been in our
generation a more cultivated man?), his absolutely unfettered and
untrammeled mind, ready to do sympathetic justice to the most
unaccredited, audacious, or despised hypotheses, yet always keeping his
own sense of proportion and the balance of evidence--merely to know
these qualities, as we sat about that council-board, was to receive, so
far as we were capable of absorbing it, in a heightened sense of the
good old adjective, 'liberal' education. Of all the services he did us
in this seminar perhaps the greatest was his running commentary on the
students' reports on such authors as Lombroso and Nordau, and all
theories of degeneracy and morbid human types. His thought was that
there is no sharp line to be drawn between 'healthy' and 'unhealthy'
minds, that all have something of both. Once when we were returning from
two insane asylums which he had arranged for the class to visit, and at
one of which we had seen a dangerous, almost naked maniac, I remember
his saying, 'President Eliot might not like to admit that there is no
sharp line between himself and the men we have just seen, but it is
true.' He would emphasize that people who had great nervous burdens to
carry, hereditary perhaps, could order their lives fruitfully and
perhaps derive some gain from their 'degenerate' sensitiveness, whatever
it might be. The doctrine is set forth with regard to religion in an
early chapter of his 'Varieties of Religious Experience,' but for us it
was applied to life at large.
"In private conversation he had a mastery of words, a voice, a vigor, a
freedom, a dignity, and therefore what one might call an authority, in
which he stood quite alone. Yet brilliant man as he was, he never quite
outgrew a perceptible shyness or diffidence in the lecture-room, which
showed sometimes in a heightened color. Going to lecture in one of the
last courses he ever gave at Harvard, he said to a colleague whom he met
on the way, 'I have lectured so and so many years, and yet here am I on
the way to my class in trepidation!'
"Professor Royce's style of exposition was continuous, even, unfailing,
composed. Professor James was more conversational, varied, broken, at
times struggling for expression--in spite of what has been mentioned as
his mastery of words. This was natural, for the one was deeply and
comfortably installed in a theory (to be sure a great theory), and the
other was peering out in quest of something greater which he did not
distinctly see. James's method gave us in the classroom more of his own
exploration and _aperçu_. We felt his mind at work.
"Royce in lecturing sat immovable. James would rise with a peculiar
suddenness and make bold and rapid strokes for a diagram on the
black-board--I can remember his abstracted air as he wrestled with some
idea, standing by his chair with one foot upon it, elbow on knee, hand
to chin. A friend has described a scene at a little class that, in a
still earlier year, met in James's own study. In the effort to
illustrate he brought out a black-board. He stood it on a chair and in
various other positions, but could not at once write upon it, hold it
steady, and keep it in the class's vision. Entirely bent on what he was
doing, his efforts resulted at last in his standing it on the floor
while he lay down at full length, holding it with one hand, drawing with
the other, and continuing the flow of his commentary. I can myself
remember how, after one of his lectures on Pragmatism in the Horace Mann
Auditorium in New York, being assailed with questions by people who came
up to the edge of the platform, he ended by sitting on that edge
himself, all in his frock-coat as he was, his feet hanging down, with
his usual complete absorption in the subject, and the look of human and
mellow consideration which distinguished him at such moments, meeting
the thoughts of the inquirers, whose attention also was entirely
riveted. If this suggests a lack of dignity, it misleads, for dignity
never forsook him, such was the inherent strength of tone and bearing.
In one respect these particular lectures (afterwards published as his
book on Pragmatism) stand alone in my recollection. An audience may
easily be large the first time, but if there is a change it usually
falls away more or less on the subsequent occasions. These lectures were
announced for one of the larger lecture-halls. This was so crowded
before the lecture began, some not being able to gain admittance, that
the audience had to be asked to move to the large 'auditorium' I have
mentioned. But in it also the numbers grew, till on the last day it
presented much the same appearance as the other hall on the first."
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Nov._ 19, 1893.
MY DEAR MILLER,--I have found the work of recommencing teaching
unexpectedly formidable after our year of gentlemanly irresponsibility.
I seem to have forgotten everything, especially psychology, and the
subjects themselves have become so paltry and insignificant-seeming that
each lecture has appeared a ghastly farce. Of late things are getting
more real; but the experience brings startlingly near to one the wild
desert of old-age which lies ahead, and makes me feel like impressing on
all chicken-professors like you the paramount urgency of providing for
the time when you'll be old fogies, by laying by from your very first
year of service a fund on which you may be enabled to "retire" before
you're sixty and incapable of any cognitive operation that wasn't ground
into you twenty years before, or of any emotion save bewilderment and
jealousy of the thinkers of the rising generation.
I am glad to hear that you have more writings on the stocks. I read your
paper on "Truth and Error" with bewilderment and jealousy. Either it is
Dr. Johnson _redivivus_ striking the earth with his stick and saying,
"Matter exists and there's an end on 't," or it is a new David Hume,
reincarnated in your form, and so subtle in his simplicity that a
decaying mind like mine fails to seize any of the deeper import of his
words. The trouble is, I can't tell which it is. But with the help of
God I will go at it again this winter, when I settle down to my final
bout with Royce's theory, which must result in my either _actively_
becoming a propagator thereof, or actively its enemy and destroyer. It
is high time that this more decisive attitude were generated in me, and
it ought to take place this winter.
I hardly see more of my colleagues this winter than I did last year.
Each of us lies in his burrow, and we meet on the street. Münsterberg is
going really _splendidly_ and the Laboratory is a bower of delight. But
I do not work there. Royce is in powerful condition.... Yours ever,
W. J.
Although, in the next letter, James poked fun at reformed spelling, he
was really in sympathy with the movement to which his correspondent was
giving an outspoken support--as Mr. Holt of course understood. "Isn't it
abominable"--Professor Palmer has quoted James as exclaiming--"that
everybody is expected to spell the same way!" He lent his name to Mr.
Carnegie's simplified spelling program, and used to wax honestly
indignant when people opposed spelling reform with purely conservative
arguments. He cared little about etymology, and saw clearly enough that
mere accident and fashion have helped to determine orthography. But in
his own writing he never put himself to great pains to reëducate his
reflexes. He let his hand write _through_ as often as _thro'_ or _thru_,
and only occasionally bethought him to write 'filosofy' and 'telefone.'
When he published, the text of his books showed very few reforms.
_To Henry Holt._
Cambridge, _March_ 27[1894].
_Autographically written, and spelt spontaneously._
DEAR HOLT,--The Introduction to filosofy is what I ment--I dont no the
other book.
I will try Nordau's Entartung this summer--as a rule however it duzn't
profit me to read Jeremiads against evil--the example of a little good
has more effect.
A propo of kitchen ranges, I wish you wood remoov your recommendation
from that Boynton Furnace Company's affair. We have struggld with it for
five years--lost 2 cooks in consequens--burnt countless tons of extra
coal, never had anything decently baikt, and now, having got rid of it
for 15 dollars, are having a happy kitchen for the 1st time in our
experience--all through your unprinsipld recommendation! You ought to
hear my wife sware when she hears your name!
I will try about a translator for Nordau--though the only man I can
think of needs munny more than fame, and coodn't do the job for pure
love of the publisher or author, or on an unsertainty.
Yours affectionately,
WILLIAM JAMES.
_To Henry James_.
PRINCETON, _Dec. 29, 1894_.
DEAR H.,--I have been here for three days at my co-psychologist
Baldwin's house, presiding over a meeting of the American Association of
Psychologists, which has proved a very solid and successful affair.[3]
Strange to say, we are getting to be veterans, and the brunt of the
discussions was borne by former students of mine. It is a very healthy
movement. Alice is with me, the weather is frosty clear and cold,
touching zero this A.M. and the country robed in snow. Princeton is a
beautiful place....
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _Apr. 26, 1895_.
...I have been reading Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" with immense
gusto. It almost makes me a Liberal-Unionist! If I mistake not, it will
have a profound effect eventually, and it is a pleasure to see old
England coming to the fore every time with some big stroke. There is
more real philosophy in such a book than in fifty German ones of which
the eminence consists in heaping up subtleties and technicalities about
the subject. The English genius makes the vitals plain by scuffing the
technicalities away. B. is a great man....
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
SPRINGFIELD CENTRE, N.Y., _June 16, 1895_.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--About the 22nd! I will come if you command it; but
reflect on my situation ere you do so. Just reviving from the addled and
corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the
portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have
sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get
there; just about to get a little health into me, a little
simplification and solidification and purification and sanification--things
which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to
satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of
so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the
spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its
waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken
forest--oh, Madam, Madam! do you know what medicinal things you ask me
to give up? Alas!
I aspire downwards, and really _am_ nothing, _not becoming_ a savage as
I would be, and failing to be the civilizee that I really ought to be
content with being! But I wish that _you_ also aspired to the
wilderness. There are some nooks and summits in that Adirondack region
where one can really "recline on one's divine composure," and, as long
as one stays up there, seem for a while to enjoy one's birth-right of
freedom and relief from every fever and falsity. Stretched out on such a
shelf,--with thee beside me singing in the wilderness,--what babblings
might go on, what judgment-day discourse!
Command me to give it up and return, if you will, by telegram addressed
"Adirondack Lodge, North Elba, N.Y." In any case I shall return before
the end of the month, and later shall be hanging about Cambridge some
time in July, giving lectures (for my sins) in the Summer School. I am
staying now with a cousin on Otsego Lake, a dear old country-place that
has been in their family for a century, and is rich and ample and
reposeful. The Kipling visit went off splendidly--he's a regular little
brick of a man; but it's strange that with so much sympathy with the
insides of every living thing, brute or human, drunk or sober, he
should have so little sympathy with those of a Yankee--who also is, in
the last analysis, one of God's creatures. I have stopped at
Williamstown, at Albany, at Amsterdam, at Utica, at Syracuse, and
finally here, each time to visit human beings with whom I had business
of some sort or other. The best was Benj. Paul Blood at Amsterdam, a son
of the soil, but a man with extraordinary power over the English tongue,
of whom I will tell you more some day. I will by the way enclose some
clippings from his latest "effort." "Yes, Paul is quite a
_correspondent_!" as a citizen remarked to me from whom I inquired the
way to his dwelling. Don't you think "correspondent" rather a good
generic term for "man of letters," from the point of view of the
country-town newspaper reader?...
Now, dear, noble, incredibly perfect Madam, you won't take ill my
reluctance about going to Beverly, even to your abode, so soon. I am a
badly mixed critter, and I experience a certain organic need for
simplification and solitude that is quite imperious, and so vital as
actually to be respectable even by others. So be indulgent to your ever
faithful and worshipful,
W. J.
_To G. H. Howison._
Cambridge, _July 17, 1895_.
MY DEAR HOWISON,--How you _have_ misunderstood the application of my
word "trivial" as being discriminatively applied to your pluralistic
idealism! Quite the reverse--if there be a philosophy that I believe in,
it's that. The word came out of one who is unfit to be a philosopher
because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a
vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking
him through with the conviction that it is better to _be_ than to define
your being. I am a victim of neurasthenia and of the sense of hollowness
and unreality that goes with it. And philosophic literature _will_ often
seem to me the hollowest thing. My word trivial was a general reflection
exhaling from this mood, vile indeed in a supposed professor. Where it
will end with me, I do not know. I wish I could give it all up. But
perhaps it is a grand climacteric and will pass away. At present I am
philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next
year, if I can do it at all. And I envy you your stalwart and steadfast
enthusiasm and faith. Always devotedly yours,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
GLENWOOD SPRINGS,
COLORADO, _Aug. 13, 1895_.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Ever since last January an envelope addressed to you
has been lying before my eyes on my library table. I mention this to
assure you that you have not been absent from my thoughts; but I will
waste no time or paper in making excuses. As the sage Emerson says, when
you visit a man do not degrade the occasion with apologies for not
having visited him before. Visit him now! Make him feel that the highest
truth has come to see him in you its lowliest organ. I don't know about
the highest truth transpiring through this letter, but I feel as if
there were plenty of affection and personal gossip to express
themselves. To begin with, your photograph and Mrs. Flournoy's were
splendid. What we need now is the photographs of those fair
_demoiselles_! I may say that one reason of my long silence has been the
hope that when I wrote I should have my wife's photograph to send you.
But alas! it has not been taken yet. She is well, very well, and is now
in our little New Hampshire country-place with the children, living very
quietly and happily. We have had a rather large _train de maison_
hitherto, and this summer we are shrunken to our bare essentials--a very
pleasant change.
I, you see, am farther away from home than I have ever been before on
this side of the Atlantic, namely, in the state of Colorado, and just
now in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. I have been giving a course of
six lectures on psychology "for teachers" at a so-called "summer-school"
in Colorado Springs. I had to remain for three nights and three days in
the train to get there, and it has made me understand the vastness of my
dear native land better than I ever did before.... The trouble with all
this new civilization is that it is based, not on saving, but on
borrowing; and when hard times come, as they did come three years ago,
everyone goes bankrupt. But the vision of the future, the dreams of the
possible, keep everyone enthusiastic, and so the work goes on. Such
conditions have never existed before on so enormous a scale. But I must
not write you a treatise on national economy!--I got through the year
very well in regard to health, and gave in the course of it, what I had
never done before, a number of lectures to teachers in Boston and New
York. I also repeated my course in Cosmology in the new woman's College
which has lately been established in connection with our University. The
consequence is that I laid by more than a thousand dollars, an
absolutely new and proportionately pleasant experience for me. To make
up for it, I haven't had an idea or written anything to speak of except
the "presidential address" which I sent you, and which really contained
nothing new....