HOTEL ----,
PORT HENRY, N.Y., _Aug. 22, 1903_.
DEAR FRIEND,--Obliged to "stop over" for the night at this loathsome
spot, for lack of train connexion, what is more natural than that I
should seek to escape the odious actual by turning to the distant
Ideal--by which term you will easily recognize _Yourself_. I didn't
write the conventional letter to you after leaving your house in June,
preferring to wait till the tension should accumulate, and knowing your
indulgence of my unfashionable ways. I haven't heard a word about you
since that day, but I hope that the times have treated you kindly, and
that you have not been "overdoing" in your usual naughty way. I, with
the exception of six days lately with the Merrimans, have been sitting
solidly at home, and have found myself in much better condition than I
was in last summer, and consequently better than for several years. It
is pleasant to find that one's organism has such reparative capacities
even after sixty years have been told out. But I feel as if the
remainder couldn't be very long, at least for "creative" purposes, and I
find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow
itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire
to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance
lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had
before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I
actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one
more book, which shall be _epoch-machend_ at last, and a title of honor
to my children! Childish idiot--as if formulas about the Universe could
ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were
not eternally the really real!--I am on my way from Ashfield, where I
was a guest at the annual dinner, to _feu_ Davidson's "school" at
Glenmore, where, in a sanguine hour, I agreed to give five discourses.
Apparently they are having a good season there. Mrs. Booker Washington
was the hero of the Ashfield occasion--a big hearty handsome natural
creature, quite worthy to be her husband's mate. Fred Pollock made a
tip-top speech.... Charles Norton appeared to great advantage as a
benignant patriarch, and the place was very pretty. Have you read Loti's
"Inde sans les Anglais"? If not, then begin. I seem to myself to have
been doing some pretty good reading this summer, but when I try to
recall it, nothing but philosophic works come up. Good-bye! and Heaven
keep you! Yours affectionately,
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
CHOCORUA, _Sept. 24, 1903_.
DEAREST FANNY,--It is so long since we have held communion that I think
it is time to recommence. Our summer is ending quietly enough, not only
you, but Theodora and Mary Tappan, having all together conspired to
leave us in September solitude, and some young fellows, companions of
Harry and Billy, having just gone down. The cook goes tomorrow for a
fortnight of vacation, but Alice and I, and probably both the older
boys, hope to stay up here more or less until the middle of October. My
"seminary" begins on Friday, October 2nd, and for the rest of the year
Friday is my only day with a college exercise in it--an arrangement
which leaves me extraordinarily free, and of which I intend to take
advantage by making excursions. Hitherto, during the entire 30 years of
my College service, I have had a midday exercise every day in the week.
This has always kept me tied too tight to Cambridge. I am _vastly_
better in nervous tone than I was a year ago, my work is simplified down
to the exact thing I want to do, and I ought to be happy in spite of the
lopping off of so many faculties of activity. The only thing to do, as
with the process of the suns one finds one's faculties dropping away one
by one, is to be good-natured about it, remember that the next
generation is as young as ever, and try to live and have a sympathetic
share in their activities. I spent three days lately (only three, alas!)
at the "Shanty" [in Keene Valley], and was moved to admiration at the
foundation for a consciousness that was being laid in the children by
the bare-headed and bare-legged existence "close to nature" of which the
memory was being stored up in them in these years. They lay around the
camp-fire at night at the feet of their elders, in every attitude of
soft recumbency, heads on stomachs and legs mixed up, happy and dreamy,
just like the young of some prolific carnivorous species. The coming
generation ought to reap the benefit of all this healthy animality. What
wouldn't I give to have been educated in it!...
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
Cambridge, _Oct. 29, 1903_.
MY DEAR "S. W.,"--On inquiry at your studio last Monday I was told that
you would be in the country for ten days or a fortnight more. I confess
that this pleased me much for it showed you both happy and prudent.
Surely the winter is long enough, however much we cut off of this
end--the city winter I mean; and the country this month has been little
short of divine.
We came down on the 16th, and I have to get mine (my country, I mean)
from the "Norton Woods." But they are very good indeed,--indeed, indeed!
I am better, both physically and morally, than for years past. The whole
James family thrives; and were it not for one's "duties" one could be
happy. But that things should give pain proves that something is being
_effected_, so I take that consolation. I have the duty on Monday of
reporting at a "Philosophical Conference" on the Chicago School of
Thought. Chicago University has during the past six months given birth
to the fruit of its ten years of gestation under John Dewey. The result
is wonderful--a _real school_, and _real Thought_. Important thought,
too! Did you ever hear of such a city or such a University? Here we
have thought, but no school. At Yale a school, but no thought. Chicago
has both.... But this, dear Madam, is not intended as a letter--only a
word of greeting and congratulation at your absence. I don't know why it
makes me so happy to hear of anyone being in the country. I suppose
_they_ must be happy.
Your last letter went to the right spot--but I don't expect to hear from
you now until I see you. Ever affectionately yours,
W. J.
_To Henry James._
NEWPORT, _Jan. 20, 1904_.
...I came down here the night before last, to see if a change of air
might loosen the grip of my influenza, now in its sixth week and me
still weak as a baby, almost, from its virulent effects.... Yesterday
A.M. the thermometer fell to 4 below zero. I walked as far as Tweedy's
(I am staying at a boarding-house, Mrs. Robinson's, Catherine St., close
to Touro Avenue, Daisy Waring being the only other boarder)--the snow
loudly creaking under foot and under teams however distant, the sky
luminously white and dazzling, no distance, everything equally near to
the eye, and the architecture in the town more huddled, discordant,
cheap, ugly and contemptible than I had ever seen it. It brought back
old times so vividly. So it did in the evening, when I went after sunset
down Kay Street to the termination. That low West that I've so often fed
on, with a sombre but intense crimson vestige smouldering close to the
horizon-line, economical but profound, and the western well of sky
shading upward from it through infinite shades of transparent luminosity
in darkness to the deep blue darkness overhead. It was purely American.
You never see that western sky anywhere else. Solemn and wonderful. I
should think you'd like to see it again, if only for the sake of
shuddering at it!...
_To François Pillon._
Cambridge, _June 12, 1904_.
DEAR PILLON,--Once more I get your faithful and indefatigable "Année"
and feel almost ashamed of receiving it thus from you, year after year,
when I make nothing of a return! So you are 75 years old--I had no idea
of it, but thought that you were much younger. I am only(!) 62, and wish
that I could expect another 13 years of such activity as you have shown.
I fear I cannot. My arteries are senile, and none of my ancestors, so
far as I know of them, have lived past 72, many of them dying much
earlier. This is my last day in Cambridge; tomorrow I get away into the
country, where "the family" already is, for my vacation. I shall take
your "Année" with me, and shall be greatly interested in both Danriac's
article and yours. What a mercy it is that your eyes, in spite of
cataract-operations, are still good for reading. I have had a very bad
winter for work--two attacks of influenza, one very long and bad, three
of gout, one of erysipelas, etc., etc. I expected to have written at
least 400 or 500 pages of my magnum opus,--a general treatise on
philosophy which has been slowly maturing in my mind,--but I have
written only 32 pages! That tells the whole story. I resigned from my
professorship, but they would not accept my resignation, and owing to
certain peculiarities in the financial situation of our University just
now, I felt myself obliged in honor to remain.
My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a
"tychism," which represents order as being gradually won and always in
the making. It is theistic, but not _essentially_ so. It rejects all
doctrines of the Absolute. It is finitist; but it does not attribute to
the question of the Infinite the great methodological importance which
you and Renouvier attribute to it. I fear that you may find my system
too _bottomless_ and romantic. I am sure that, be it in the end judged
true or false, it is essential to the evolution of clearness in
philosophic thought that _someone_ should defend a pluralistic
empiricism radically. And all that I fear is that, with the impairment
of my working powers from which I suffer, the Angel of Death may
overtake me before I can get my thoughts on to paper. Life here in the
University consists altogether of _interruptions_.
I thought much of you at the time of Renouvier's death, and I wanted to
write; but I let that go, with a thousand other things that had to go.
What a life! and what touching and memorable last words were those which
M. Pratt published in the "Revue de Métaphysique"--memorable, I mean
from the mere fact that the old man could dictate them at all. I have
left unread his last publications, except for some parts of the
"Monadologie" and the "Personalisme." He will remain a great figure in
philosophic history; and the sense of his absence must make a great
difference to your consciousness and to that of Madame Pillon. My own
wife and children are well.... Ever affectionately yours,
Wm. James.
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _June 28, 1904_.
DEAR H.,--I came down from Chocorua yesterday A.M. to go to--
Mrs. Whitman's funeral!
She had lost ground steadily during the winter. The last time I saw her
was five weeks ago, when at noon I went up to her studio thinking she
might be there.... She told me that she was to go on the following day
to the Massachusetts General Hospital, for a cure of rest and seclusion.
There she died last Friday evening, having improved in her cardiac
symptoms, but pneumonia supervening a week ago. It's a great mercy that
the end was so unexpectedly quick. What I had feared was a slow
deterioration for a year or more to come, with all the nameless
misery--peculiarly so in her case--of death by heart disease. As it was,
she may be said to have died standing, a thing she always wished to do.
She went to every dinner-party and evening party last winter, had an
extension, a sort of ball-room, built to her Mount Vernon house, etc.
The funeral was beautiful both in Trinity Church and at the grave in Mt.
Auburn. I was one of the eight pall-bearers--the others of whom you
would hardly know. The flowers and greenery had been arranged in
absolutely Whitmanian style by Mrs. Jack Gardner, Mrs. Henry Parkman,
and Sally Fairchild. The scene at the grave was _beautiful_. She had no
blood relatives, and all Boston--I mean the few whom we know--had gone
out, and seemed swayed by an overpowering emotion which abolished all
estrangement and self-consciousness. It was the sort of ending that
would please her, could she know of it. An extraordinary and indefinable
creature! I used often to feel coldly towards her on account of her way
of taking people as a great society "business" proceeding, but now that
her agitated life of tip-toe reaching in so many directions, of
genuinest amiability, is over, pure tenderness asserts its own. Against
that dark background of natural annihilation she seems to have been a
pathetic little slender worm, writhing and curving blindly through its
little day, expending such intensities of consciousness to terminate in
that small grave.
She was a most peculiar person. I wish that you had known her whole life
here more intimately, and understood its significance. You might then
write a worthy article about her. For me, it is impossible to define
her. She leaves a dreadful vacuum in Boston. I have often wondered
whether I should survive her--and here it has come in the night, without
the sound of a footstep, and the same world is here--but without her as
its witness....
_To Charles Eliot Norton._
Cambridge, _June 30, 1904_.
DEAR CHARLES,--I have just read the July "Atlantic," and am so moved by
your Ruskin letters that I can't refrain from overflowing. They seem to
me immortal documents--as the clouds clear away he will surely take his
stable place as one of the noblest of the sons of men. Mere sanity is
the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes.
The chief "cloud" is the bulk of "Modern Painters" and the other
artistic writings, which have made us take him primarily as an
art-connoisseur and critic. Regard all that as inessential, and his
inconsistencies and extravagances fall out of sight and leave the Great
Heart alone visible.
Do you suppose that there are many other correspondents of R. who will
yield up their treasures in our time to the light? I wish that your
modesty had not suppressed certain passages which evidently expressed
too much regard for yourself. The point should have been _his_
expression of that sort of thing--no matter to whom addressed! I
understand and sympathize fully with his attitude about our war. Granted
him and his date, that is the way he ought to have felt, and I revere
him perhaps the more for it....
S. W.'s sudden defection is a pathetic thing! It makes one feel like
closing the ranks.
Affectionately--to all of you--including Theodora,
W. J.
_To L. T. Hobhouse._
CHOCORUA, _Aug. 12, 1904_.
DEAR BROTHER HOBHOUSE,--Don't you think it a _tant soit peu_ scurvy
trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the
informed reader the reference is transparent--I say nothing of poor
Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104
_ff_.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to
Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title
the _Right_ to Believe) in the guise of an _alternative and substitute_
for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your
charmingly written essay, _substitute a travesty_ for which I defy any
candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged
the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions
and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of
tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible
cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals,
because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to
include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that
faith could not be absolutely _vetoed_, as certain champions of
"science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a
function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world.
You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic
point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from _my_
polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk.
Your essay, granting that emphasis and barring the injustice to me,
seems to me exquisite, and, taking it as a unit, I subscribe
unreservedly to almost every positive word.--I say "positive," for I
doubt whether you have seen enough of the extraordinarily invigorating
effect of mind-_cum_-philosophy on certain people to justify your
somewhat negative treatment of that subject; and I say "almost" because
your distinction between "spurious" and "genuine" courage (page 91)
reminds me a bit too much of "true" and "false" freedom, and other
sanctimonious come-offs.--Could you not have made an equally sympathetic
reading of _me_?
I shouldn't have cared a copper for the misrepresentation were it not a
"summation of stimuli" affair. I have just been reading Bradley on
Schiller in the July "Mind," and A. E. Taylor on the Will to Believe in
the "McGill Quarterly" of Montreal. Both are vastly worse than you; and
I cry to Heaven to tell me of what insane root my "leading
contemporaries" have eaten, that they are so smitten with blindness as
to the meaning of printed texts. Or are we others absolutely incapable
of making our meaning clear?
I imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but
that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of
consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object.
Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation; and each, for his
contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the
enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties.
In my essay the evil shape was a vision of "Science" in the form of
abstraction, priggishness and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the
sterilest scientific prig and cad you know, compare him with the
richest religious intellect you know, and you would not, any more than I
would, give the former the exclusive right of way. But up to page 104 of
your essay he will deem you altogether on his side.
Pardon the familiarity of this epistle. I like and admire your theory of
Knowledge so much, and you re-duplicate (I _don't_ mean _copy_) my views
so beautifully in this article, that I hate to let you go unchidden.
Believe me, with the highest esteem (plus some indignation, for you
ought to know better!), Yours faithfully,
Wm. James.
_To Edwin D. Starbuck._
SALISBURY, CONN. _Aug, 24, 1904_.
DEAR STARBUCK,-- ...Of the strictures you make [in your review of my
"Varieties"], the first one (undue emphasis on extreme case) is, I find,
almost universally made; so it must in some sense be correct. Yet it
would never do to study the passion of love on examples of ordinary
liking or friendly affection, or that of homicidal pugnacity on examples
of our ordinary impatiences with our kind. So here it must be that the
extreme examples let us more deeply into the secrets of the religious
life, explain why the tamer ones value their religion so much, tame
though it be, because it is so continuous with a so much acuter ideal.
But I have long been conscious that there is on this matter something to
be said which neither my critics have said, nor I can say, and which I
must therefore commit to the future.
The second stricture (in your paragraph 4 on pages 104 _ff_.) is of
course deeply important, if true. At present I can see but vaguely just
what sort of outer relations our inner organism might respond to, which
our feelings and intellect interpret by religious thought. You ought to
work your program for all it is worth in the way of growth in
definiteness. I look forward with great eagerness to your forthcoming
book, and meanwhile urge strongly that you should publish the advance
article you speak of in Hall's new Journal. I can't see any possible
risk. It will objectify a part of your material for you, and possibly,
by arousing criticism, enable you to strengthen your points.
Your third stricture, about Higher Powers, is also very important, and I
am not at all sure that you may not be right. I have frankly to confess
that my "Varieties" carried "theory" as far as I could then carry it,
and that I can carry it no farther today. I can't see clearly over that
edge. Yet I am sure that tracks have got to be made there--I think that
the fixed point with me is the conviction that our "rational"
consciousness touches but a portion of the real universe and that our
life is fed by the "mystical" region as well. I have no mystical
experience of my own, but just enough of the germ of mysticism in me to
recognize the region from which their voice comes when I hear it.
I was much disappointed in Leuba's review of my book in the
"International Journal of Ethics." ... I confess that the way in which
he stamps out all mysticism whatever, using the common pathological
arguments, seemed to me unduly crude. I wrote him an expostulatory
letter, which evidently made no impression at all, and which he possibly
might send you if you had the curiosity to apply.
I am having a happy summer, feeling quite hearty again. I congratulate
you on being settled, though I know nothing of the place. I congratulate
you and Mrs. Starbuck also on airy fairy Lilian, who makes, I believe,
the third. Long may they live and make their parents proud. With best
regards to you both, I am yours ever truly,
Wm. James.
The "expostulatory" letter to Professor Leuba began with a series of
objections to statements which he had made, and continued with the
passage which follows.
_To James Henry Leuba._
Cambridge, _Apr. 17, 1904_.
...My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce
with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a
sense would help me immensely. The Divine, for my _active_ life, is
limited to abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine
me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God
might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but
differences of intensity may make one's whole centre of energy shift.
Now, although I am so devoid of _Gottesbewustsein_ in the directer and
stronger sense, yet there is _something in me_ which _makes response_
when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the
deeper voice. Something tells me, "_thither lies truth_"--and I am
_sure_ it is not old theistic habits and prejudices of infancy. Those
are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement
therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from
and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical
_germ_. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of
believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most
cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but _interpretative_ criticism
(not of the mere "hysteria" and "nerves" order) it can energetically
combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure _non possumus_:
"Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every
particular, or nothing. Therefore they are _nothing_, for anyone else
than their owner." Why may they not be _something_, although not
everything?
Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic
atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germ in us, that, I
believe, is where we all should _unhesitatingly_ be today.
Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe
that we are in my position. Of course the "subliminal" theory is an
inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is
equally inessential.
I am letting loose a deluge on you! Don't reply at length, or at all.
_I_ hate to reply to anybody, and will sympathize with your silence. But
I had to restate my position more clearly. Yours truly,
Wm. James.
The following document is not a letter, but a series of answers to a
questionnaire upon the subject of religious belief, which was sent out
in 1904 by Professor James B. Pratt of Williams College, and to which
James filled out a reply at an unascertained date in the autumn of that
year.
QUESTIONNAIRE[55]