conceive yours to be, can be made to work, and will reconcile many of
the old inveterate oppositions of the schools. I think that your radical
denial (the manner of it at any rate) of the notion that the brain can
be in any way the _causa fiendi_ of consciousness, has introduced a very
sudden clearness, and eliminated a part of the idealistic paradox. But
your unconscious or subconscious permanence of memories is in its turn a
notion that offers difficulties, seeming in fact to be the equivalent of
the "soul" in another shape, and the manner in which these memories
"insert" themselves into the brain action, and in fact the whole
conception of the difference between the outer and inner worlds in your
philosophy, still need to me a great deal of elucidation. But behold me
challenging you to answer me _par écrit_!
I have read with great delight your article in the "Revue de
Métaphysique" for January, agree thoroughly with all its critical part,
and wish that I might see in your _intuition métaphysique_ the full
equivalent for a philosophy of concepts. _Neither_ seems to be a full
equivalent for the other, unless indeed the intuition becomes completely
mystical (and that I am willing to believe), but I don't think that that
is just what _you_ mean. The _Syllabus_[46] which I sent you the other
day is (I fear), from its great abbreviation, somewhat unintelligible,
but it will show you the sort of lines upon which I have been working. I
think that a normal philosophy, like a science, must live by
hypotheses--I think that the indispensable hypothesis in a philosophy of
pure experience is that of many kinds of other experience than ours,
{ co-consciousness }
that the question of { } (its conditions, etc.)
{ conscious synthesis }
becomes a most urgent question, as does also the question of the
relations of what is possible only to what is actual, what is past or
future to what is present. These are all urgent matters in your
philosophy also, I imagine. How exquisitely you do _write_! Believe me,
with renewed thanks for the telegram, yours most sincerely,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
Cambridge, _Apr. 30, 1903_.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--I forget whether I wrote you my applause or not, on
reading your chapter on religious psychology in the "Archives." I
thought it a splendid thing, and well adapted to set the subject in the
proper light before students. Abauzit has written to me for
authorization to translate my book, and both he and W. J., Junior, have
quoted you as assured of his competency. I myself feel confident of it,
and have given him the authorization required. Possibly you may supply
him with as much of your own translation as you have executed, so that
the time you have spent on the latter may not be absolutely lost.
"Billy" also says that you have executed a review of Myers's book,[47]
finding it a more difficult task than you had anticipated. I am highly
curious to see what you have found to say. I, also, wrote a notice of
the volumes, and found it exceeding difficult to know how to go at the
job. At last I decided just to skeletonize the points of his reasoning,
but on correcting the proof just now, what I have written seems deadly
flat and unprofitable and makes me wish that I had stuck to my original
intention of refusing to review the book at all. The fact is, such a
book need not be _criticized_ at all at present. It is obviously too
soon for it to be either refuted or established by mere criticism. It
is a hypothetical construction of genius which must be kept hanging up,
as it were, for new observations to be referred to. As the years
accumulate these in a more favorable or in a more unfavorable sense, it
will tend to stand or to fall. I confess that reading the volumes has
given me a higher opinion than ever of Myers's constructive gifts, but
on the whole a lower opinion of the objective solidity of the system. So
many of the facts which form its pillars are still dubious.[48]
Bill says that you were again convinced by Eusapia,[49] but that the
conditions were not satisfactory enough (so I understood) to make the
experiments likely to convince absent hearers. Forever baffling is all
this subject, and I confess that I begin to lose my interest. Believe
me, in whatever difficulties your review of Myers may have occasioned
you, you have my fullest sympathy!
Bill has had a perfectly splendid winter in Geneva, thanks almost
entirely to your introductions, and to the generous manner in which you
took him into your own family. I wish we could ever requite you by
similar treatment of Henri, or of _ces demoiselles_. He seems to labor
under an apprehension of not being able to make you all believe how
appreciative and grateful he is, and he urges me to "Make you understand
it" when I write. I imagine that you understand it anyhow, so far as he
is concerned, so I simply assure you that _our_ gratitude here is of the
strongest and sincerest kind. I imagine that this has been by far the
most profitable and educative winter of his life, and I rejoice
exceedingly that he has obtained in so short a time so complete a sense
of being at home in, and so lively an affection for, the Swiss people
and country. (As for _your_ family he has written more than once that
the Flournoy family seems to be "the finest family" he has ever seen in
his life.)
His experience is a good measure of the improvement in the world's
conditions. Thirty years ago _I_ spent nine months in Geneva--but in how
inferior an "Academy," and with what inferior privileges and
experiences! Never inside a private house, and only after three months
or more familiar enough with other students to be admitted to
Zofingue.[50] Ignorant of 1000 things which have come to my son and
yours in the course of education. It _is_ a more evolved world, and no
mistake.
I find myself very tired and unable to work this spring, but I think it
will depart when I get to the country, as we soon shall. I am neither
writing nor lecturing, and reading nothing heavy, only Emerson's works
again (divine things, some of them!) in order to make a fifteen-minute
address about him on his centennial birthday. What I want to get at, and
let no interruptions interfere, is (at last) my _system of tychistic and
pluralistic philosophy of pure experience_.
I wish, and even more ardently does Alice wish, that you and Mrs.
Flournoy, and all the children, or any of them, might pay us a visit. I
don't _urge_ you, for there is so little in America that pays one to
come, except sociological observation. But in the big slow steamers, the
voyage is always interesting--and once here, how happy we should be to
harbor you. In any case, perhaps Henri and one of his sisters will come
and spend a year. From the point of view of education, Cambridge is
first-rate. Love to you all from us both.
Wm. James.
Late in April came a letter from Henry James in which he spoke, as if
with many misgivings, of returning to America for a six months' visit.
"I should wish," he said, "to write a book of 'impressions' and to that
end get quite away from Boston and New York--really _see_ the country at
large. On the other hand I don't see myself prowling alone in Western
cities and hotels or finding my way about by myself, and it is all
darksome and tangled. Some light may break--but meanwhile next Wednesday
(awful fact) is my 60th birthday." He had not been in America for more
than twenty years, and had never known anything of the country outside
of New England and New York.
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _May 3, 1903_.
...Your long and _inhaltsvoll_ letter of April 10th arrived duly, and
constituted, as usual, an "event." Theodora had already given us your
message of an intended visit to these shores; and your letter made Alice
positively overflow with joyous anticipations. On my part they are less
unmixed, for I feel more keenly a good many of the _désagréments_ to
which you will inevitably be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical
loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.
It takes a long time to notice such things no longer. One thing, for
example, which would reconcile _me_ most easily to abandoning my native
country forever would be the certainty of immunity, when traveling, from
the sight of my fellow beings at hotels and dining-cars having their
boiled eggs brought to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten
with butter. How irrational this dislike is, is proved both by logic,
and by the pleasure taken in the custom by the élite of mankind over
here.... Yet of such irrational sympathies and aversions (quite
conventional for the most part) does our pleasure in a country depend,
and in your case far more than in that of most men. The _vocalization_
of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful
that the process of hardening oneself thereto is very slow, and would in
your case be impossible. It is simply incredibly loathsome. I should
hate to have you come and, as a result, feel that you had now _done_
with America forever, even in an ideal and imaginative sense, which
after a fashion you can still indulge in. As far as your copyright
interests go, couldn't they be even more effectually and just as cheaply
or more cheaply attended to by your [engaging an agent] over here. Alice
foresees Lowell [Institute] lectures; but lectures have such an awful
side (when not academic) that I myself have foresworn them--it is a sort
of prostitution of one's person. This is rather a throwing of cold
water; but it is well to realize both sides, and I think I can realize
certain things for you better than the sanguine and hospitable Alice
does.
Now for the other side, there are things in the American out-of-door
nature, as well as comforts indoors that can't be beat, and from which
_I_ get an infinite pleasure. If you avoided the _banalité_ of the
Eastern cities, and traveled far and wide, to the South, the Colorado,
over the Canadian Pacific to that coast, possibly to the Hawaiian
Islands, etc., you would get some reward, at the expense, it is true, of
a considerable amount of cash. I think you ought to come in March or
April and stay till the end of October or into November. The hot summer
months you could pass in an absolutely quiet way--if you wished to--at
Chocorua with us, where you could do as much writing as you liked,
continuous, and undisturbed, and would (I am sure) grow fond of, as you
grew more and more intimate with, the sweet rough country there. After
June, 1904, _I_ shall be free, to go and come as I like, for I have
fully decided to resign, and nothing would please me so well (if I found
then that I could afford it) as to do some of that proposed traveling
along with you. I could take you into certain places that perhaps you
wouldn't see alone. Don't come therefore, if you do come, before the
spring of 1904!
I have been doing nothing in the way of work of late, and consequently
have kept my fatigue somewhat at bay. The reading of the divine Emerson,
volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has
thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in
which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the
Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and
reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his
limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however
urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and
clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all
found to be most propitious, seems to me a moral lesson to all men who
have any genius, however small, to foster. I see now with absolute
clearness, that greatly as I have been helped and enlarged by my
University business hitherto, the time has come when the remnant of my
life must be passed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and
with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to
report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has
received from the Universe. This I mean to stick to, and am only sorry
that I am obliged to stay in the University one other year. It is giving
up the inessentials which have grown beyond one's powers, for the sake
of the duties which, after all, are most essentially imposed on one by
the nature of one's powers.
Emerson is exquisite! I think I told you that I have to hold forth in
praise of him at Concord on the 25th--in company with Senator Hoar, T.
W. Higginson, and Charles Norton--quite a _vieille garde_, to which I
now seem to belong. You too have been leading an Emersonian life--though
the environment differs to suit the needs of the different
psychophysical organism which you present.
I have but little other news to tell you. Charles Peirce is lecturing
here--queer being.... Boott is in good spirits, and as sociable as ever.
Grace Norton ditto. I breakfasted this Sunday morning, as of yore, with
Theodora [Sedgwick], who had a bad voyage in length but not in quality,
though she lay in her berth the whole time. I can hardly conceive of
being willing to travel under such conditions. Otherwise we are well
enough, except Peggy, whose poor condition I imagine to result from
influenza. Aleck has been regenerated through and through by "bird
lore," happy as the day is long, and growing acquainted with the country
all about Boston. All in consequence of a neighboring boy on the street,
14 years old and an ornithological genius, having taken him under his
protection. Yesterday, all day long in the open air, from seven to
seven, at Wayland, spying and listening to birds, counting them, and
writing down their names!
I shall go off tomorrow or next day to the country again, by myself,
joining Henry Higginson and a colleague at the end of the week, and
returning by the 14th for Ph.D. examinations which I hate profoundly. H.
H. has bought some five miles of the shore of Lake Champlain adjoining
his own place there, and thinks of handing it over to the University for
the surveying, engineering, forestry and mining school. He is as
liberal-hearted a man as the Lord ever walloped entrails into....
What a devil of a bore your forced purchase of the unnecessary
neighboring land must have been. _I_ am just buying 150 acres more at
Chocorua, to round off our second estate there. Keep well and
prolific--everyone speaks praise of your "Better Sort," which I am
keeping for the country....
_To his Daughter._
FABYANS, N. H., _May 6, 1903_.
SWEET MARY,--Although I wrote to thy mother this P.M. I can't refrain
from writing to thee ere I go up to bed. I left Intervale at 3.30 under
a cloudy sky and slight rain, passing through the gloomy Notch to
Crawford's and then here, where I am lodged in a house full of working
men, though with a good clean bedroom. I write this in the office, with
an enormous air-tight stove, a parrot and some gold-fish as my
companions. I took a slow walk of an hour and a half before supper over
this great dreary mountain plateau, pent in by hills and woods still
free from buds. Although it is only 1500 feet high, the air is real
mountain air, soft and strong at once. I wish that you could have taken
that four-hour drive with Topsy[51] and me this morning. You would
already be well--it had so healing an influence. Poverty-stricken this
New Hampshire country may be--weak in a certain sense, shabby, thin,
pathetic--say all that, yet, like "Jenny," it _kissed_ me; and it is not
_vulgar_--even H. J. can't accuse it of that--or of "stodginess,"
especially at this emaciated season. It remains pure, and clear and
distinguished--Bless it! Once more, would thou hadst been along! I have
just been reading Emerson's "Representative Men." What luminous truths
he communicates about their home-life--for instance: "Nature never
sends a Great Man into the planet without confiding the secret to
another soul"--namely your mother's! How he hits her off, and how I
recognized whom he meant immediately. Kiss the dear tender-hearted
thing.
Common men also have their advantages. I have seen all day long such a
succession of handsome, stalwart, burnt-faced, out-of-door workers as
made me glad to be, however degenerate myself, one of their tribe.
Splendid, honest, good-natured fellows.
Good-night! I'm now going to bed, to read myself to sleep with a tiptop
novel sent me by one Barry, an old pupil of mine. 'T is called "A
Daughter of Thespis." Is this the day of your mother's great and noble
lunch? If so, I pray that it may have gone off well. Kisses to her, and
all. Your loving
PAPA.
The next letter describes the Emerson Centenary at Concord. The Address
which James delivered was published in the special volume commemorative
of the proceedings, and also in "Memories and Studies."
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
Cambridge, _May 26, 1903_.
DEAREST FANNY,--On Friday I called at your house and to my sorrow found
the blinds all down. I had not supposed that you would leave so soon,
though I might well have done so if I had reflected. It has been a
sorrow to me to have seen so little of you lately, but so goes the
_train du monde_. Collapsed condition, absences, interruptions of all
sorts, have made the year end with most of the desiderata postponed to
next year. I meant to write to you on Friday evening, then on Saturday
morning. But I went to Lincoln on Saturday P.M. and stayed over the
Emerson racket, without returning home, and have been packing and
winding up affairs all day in order to get off to Chocorua tomorrow at
7.30. These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished
life winds up.
I wish that you had been at Concord. It was the most harmoniously
æsthetic or æsthetically harmonious thing! The weather, the beauty of
the village, the charming old meeting-house, the descendants of the
grand old man in such profusion, the mixture of Concord and Boston
heads, so many of them of our own circle, the allusions to great
thoughts and things, and the old-time New England rusticity and
rurality, the silver polls and ancient voices of the _vieille garde_ who
did the orating (including this 'yer child), all made a matchless
combination, took one back to one's childhood, and made that rarely
realized marriage of reality with ideality, that usually only occurs in
fiction or poetry.
It was a sweet and memorable day, and I am glad that I had an active
share in it. I thank you for your sweet words to Alice about my address.
I let R. W. E. speak for himself, and I find now, hearing so much from
others of him, that there are only a few things that _can_ be said of
him; he was so squarely and simply himself as to impress every one in
the same manner. Reading the whole of him over again continuously has
made me feel his real greatness as I never did before. He's really a
critter to be thankful for. Good-night, dear Fanny. I shall be back here
by Commencement, and somehow we must see you at Chocorua this summer.
Love to your mother as well as to yourself, from your ever affectionate
Wm. James.
The letter of May 3rd drew from Henry James a long reply which may be
found in the "Letters of Henry James," under date of May 24th; the
reply, in its turn, elicited this response:--
_To Henry James._
CHOCORUA, _June 6, 1903_.
DEAREST HENRY,--Your long and excitingly interesting type-written letter
about coming hither arrived yesterday, and I hasten to retract all my
dampening remarks, now that I understand the motives fully. The only
ones I had imagined, blindling that I am, were fraternal piety and
patriotic duty. Against those I thought I ought to proffer the thought
of "eggs" and other shocks, so that when they came I might be able to
say that you went not unwarned. But the moment it appears that what you
crave is millions of just such shocks, and that a new lease of artistic
life, with the lamp of genius fed by the oil of twentieth-century
American life, is to be the end and aim of the voyage, all my stingy
doubts wither and are replaced by enthusiasm that you are still so
young-feeling, receptive and hungry for more raw material and
experience. It cheers me immensely, and makes me feel more so myself. It
is pathetic to hear you talk so about your career and its going to seed
without the contact of new material; but feeling as you do about the new
material, I augur a great revival of energy and internal effervescence
from the execution of your project. Drop your English ideas and take
America and Americans as they take themselves, and you will certainly
experience a rejuvenation. This is all I have to say _today_--merely to
let you see how the prospect exhilarates us.
August, 1904, will be an excellent time to begin. I should like to go
South with you,--possibly to Cuba,--but as for California, I fear the
expense. I am sending you a decidedly moving book by a mulatto
ex-student of mine, Du Bois, professor of history at Atlanta (Georgia)
negro College.[52] Read Chapters VII to XI for local color, etc.
We have been up here for ten days; the physical luxury of the
simplification is something that money can't buy. Every breath is a
pleasure--this in spite of the fact that the whole country is drying up
and burning up--it makes one ashamed that one can be so happy. The smoke
here has been so thick for five days that the opposite shore [of the
Lake] is hidden. We have a first-rate hired man, a good cow, nice horse,
dog, cook, second-girl, etc. Come up and see us in August, 1904! Your
ever loving
W. J.
_To Henry W. Rankin._
CHOCORUA, _June 10, 1903_.
MY DEAR RANKIN,--Once more has my graphophobia placed me heavily in your
debt. Your two long letters, though unanswered, were and are
appreciated, in spite of the fact that, as you know, I do not (and I
fear cannot) follow the gospel scheme as you do, and that the Bible
itself, in both its testaments (omitting parts of John and the
Apocalypse) seems to me, by its intense naturalness and humanness, the
most fatal document that one can read against the orthodox theology, in
so far as the latter claims the words of the Bible to be its basis. I
myself believe that the orthodox theology contains elements that are
permanently true, and that such writers as Emerson, by reason of their
extraordinary healthy-mindedness and "once-born"-ness, are incapable of
appreciating. I believe that they will have to be expressed in any
ultimately valid religious philosophy; and I see in the temper of
friendliness of such a man as you for such writings as Emerson's and
mine (_magnus comp. parvo_) a foretaste of the day when the abstract
essentials of belief will be the basis of communion more than the
particular forms and concrete doctrines in which they articulate
themselves. Your letter about Emerson seemed to me so admirably written
that I was on the point of sending it back to you, thinking it might be
well that you should publish it somewhere. I will still do so, if you
ask me. I have myself been a little scandalized at the non-resisting
manner in which orthodox sheets have celebrated his anniversary. An
"Emerson number" of "Zion's Herald" strikes me as _tant soit peu_ of an
anomaly, and yet I am told that such a number appeared. Rereading him
_in extenso_, almost _in toto_, lately, has made him loom larger than
ever to me as a human being, but I feel the distinct lack in him of too
little understanding of the morbid side of life.
I have been in the country two weeks, delicious in spite of drought and
smoke, and still more delicious now that rain has come, and I cannot
bear to think of you still lingering in Brooklyn. Perhaps you are
already at Northfield. Indeed I hope so, and that the long Brooklyn
winter will have put you in a condition for its better enjoyment, and
for better cooperation with its work.
I shall get at Shields some day--but I'm slow in getting round! Yours
ever faithfully,
Wm. James.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Aug. 18, 1903_.
DEAR M.,-- ...I am in good condition, but in somewhat of a funk about my
lectures,[53] now that the audience draws near. I have got my mind
working on the infernal old problem of mind and brain, and how to
construct the world out of pure experiences, and feel foiled again and
inwardly sick with the fever. But I verily believe that it is only work
that makes one sick in that way that has any chance of breaking old
shells and getting a step ahead. It is a sort of madness however when it
is on you. The total result is to make me admire "Common Sense" as
having done by far the biggest stroke of genius ever made in philosophy
when it reduced the chaos of crude experience to order by its luminous
_Denkmittel_ of the stable "thing," and its dualism of thought and
matter.
I find Strong's book charming and a wonderful piece of clear and
thorough work--quite classical in fact, and surely destined to renown.
The Clifford-Prince-Strong theory has now full rights to citizenship.
Nevertheless, in spite of his so carefully blocking every avenue which
leads sideways from his conclusion, he has not convinced me yet. But I
can[not] say briefly why.... Yours in haste,
W. J.