just as I was about writing to you to find out how you are. Your long
silence had made me apprehensive about your condition, and this news
cheers me up very much. Rome is great; and I like to think of you there;
if I spend another winter in Europe, it shall be mainly in Rome. You
don't say where you're staying, however, so my imagination is at fault,
I hope it may be at the _Russie_, that most delightful of hotels. I am
overwhelmed with duties, so I must be very brief _in re religionis_.
Your warnings against my superstitious tendencies, for such I suppose
they are,--this is the second heavy one I remember,--touch me, but not
in the prophetic way, for they don't weaken my trust in the healthiness
of my own attitude, which in part (I fancy) is less remote from your own
than you suppose. For instance, my "God of things as they are," being
part of a pluralistic system, is responsible for only such of them as he
knows enough and has enough power to have accomplished. For the rest he
is identical with your "ideal" God. The "omniscient" and "omnipotent"
God of theology I regard as a disease of the philosophy-shop. But,
having thrown away so much of the philosophy-shop, you may ask me why I
don't throw away the whole? That would mean too strong a negative
will-to-believe for me. It would mean a dogmatic disbelief in any extant
consciousness higher than that of the "normal" human mind; and this in
the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce
with something ideal that _feels as if it_ were also actual (I have no
such commerce--I wish I had, but I can't close my eyes to its vitality
in others); and in the teeth of such analogies as Fechner uses to show
that there may be other-consciousness than man's. If other, then why not
higher and bigger? Why _may_ we not be in the universe as our dogs and
cats are in our drawing-rooms and libraries? It's a will-to-believe on
both sides: I am perfectly willing that others should disbelieve: why
should you not be tolerantly interested in the spectacle of my belief?
What harm does the little residuum or germ of actuality that I leave in
God do? If ideal, why (except on epiphenomenist principles) may he not
have got himself at least partly real by this time? I do not believe it
to be healthy-minded to nurse the notion that ideals are self-sufficient
and require no actualization to make us content. It is a quite
unnecessarily heroic form of resignation and sour grapes. Ideals ought
to aim at the _transformation of reality_--no less! When you defer to
what you suppose a certain authority in scientists as confirming these
negations, I am surprised. Of all insufficient authorities as to the
total nature of reality, give me the "scientists," from Münsterberg up,
or down. Their interests are most incomplete and their professional
conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite
of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored,
and their splendid achievement there. Their only authority _at large_ is
for _method_--and the pragmatic method completes and enlarges them
there. When you shall have read my whole set of lectures (now with the
printer, to be out by June 1st) I doubt whether you will find any great
harm in the God I patronize--the poor thing is so largely an ideal
possibility. Meanwhile I take delight, or _shall_ take delight, in any
efforts you may make to negate all superhuman consciousness, for only by
these counter-attempts can a finally satisfactory modus vivendi be
reached. I don't feel sure that I know just what you mean by
"freedom,"--but no matter. Have you read in Schiller's new Studies in
Humanism what seem to me two excellent chapters, one on "Freedom," and
the other on the "making of reality"?...
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
Cambridge, _Apr._ 19, 1907.
DEAR SCHILLER,--Two letters and a card from you within ten days is
pretty good. I have been in New York for a week, so haven't written as
promptly as I should have done.
All right for the Gilbert Murrays! We shall be glad to see them.
Too late for "humanism" in my book--all in type! I dislike "pragmatism,"
but it seems to have the _international_ right of way at present. Let's
both go ahead--God will know his own!
When your book first came I lent it to my student Kallen (who was
writing a thesis on the subject), thereby losing it for three weeks.
Then the grippe, and my own proofs followed, along with much other
business, so that I've only read about a quarter of it even now. The
essays on Freedom and the Making of Reality seem to be written with my
own heart's blood--it's startling that two people should be found to
think so exactly alike. A great argument for the truth of what they say,
too! I find that my own chapter on Truth printed in the J. of P.
already,[73] convinces no one as yet, not even my most _gleichgesinnten_
cronies. It will have to be worked in by much future labor, for I _know_
that I see all round the subject and they don't, and I think that the
theory of truth is the key to all the rest of our positions.
You ask what I am going to "reply" to Bradley. But why need one reply to
everything and everybody? B.'s article is constructive rather than
polemic, is evidently sincere, softens much of his old outline, is
difficult to read, and ought, I should think, to be left to its own
destiny. How sweetly, by the way, he feels towards me as compared with
you! All because you have been too bumptious. I confess I think that
your _gaudium certaminis_ injures your influence. _We_'ve got a thing
big enough to set forth now affirmatively, and I think that readers
generally hate _minute_ polemics and recriminations. All polemic of ours
should, I believe, be either very broad statements of contrast, or fine
points treated singly, and as far as possible impersonally. Inborn
rationalists and inborn pragmatists will never convert each other. We
shall always look on them as spectral and they on us as
trashy--irredeemably both! As far as the rising generation goes, why not
simply express ourselves positively, and trust that the truer view
quietly will displace the other. Here again "God will know his own."
False views don't need much direct refutation--they get superseded, and
I feel absolutely certain of the supersessive power of pragmato-humanism,
if persuasively enough set forth.... The world is wide enough to harbor
various ways of thinking, and the present Bradley's units of mental
operation are so diverse from ours that the labor of reckoning over from
one set of terms to the other doesn't bring reward enough to pay for it.
Of course his way of treating "truth" as an entity trying all the while
to identify herself with reality, while reality is equally trying to
identify herself with the more ideal entity truth, isn't _false_. It's
one way, very remote and allegorical, of stating the facts, and it
"agrees" with a good deal of reality, but it has so little pragmatic
value that its tottering form can be left for time to deal with. The
good it does him is small, for it leaves him in this queer, surly,
grumbling state about the best that can be done by it for philosophy.
His great vice seems to me his perversity in logical activities, his bad
reasonings. I vote to go on, from now on, not trying to keep account of
the relations of his with our system. He can't be influencing disciples,
being himself nowadays so difficult. And once for all, there _will_ be
minds who _cannot_ _help_ regarding our growing universe as _sheer
trash_, metaphysically considered. Yours ever,
W. J.
The next letter is addressed to an active promoter of reform in the
treatment of the insane, the author of "A Mind that Found Itself." The
Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene and the National Committee for
Mental Hygiene have already performed so great a public service, that
anyone may now see that in 1907 the time had come to employ such
instrumentalities in improving the care of the insane. But when Mr.
Beers, just out of an asylum himself, appeared with the manuscript of
his own story in his hands, it was not so clear that these agencies were
needed, nor yet evident to anyone that he was a person who could bring
about their organization.
James's own opinion as to the treatment of the insane is not in the
least overstated in the following letter. He recognized the genuineness
of Mr. Beers's personal experience and its value for propaganda, and he
immediately helped to get it published. From his first acquaintance with
Mr. Beers, he gave time, counsel, and money to further the organization
of the Mental Hygiene Committee; and he even departed, in its interest,
from his fixed policy of "keeping out of Committees and Societies." He
lived long enough to know that the movement had begun to gather
momentum; and he drew great satisfaction from the knowledge.
_To Clifford W. Beers._
Cambridge, _Apr. 21, 1907_.
DEAR MR. BEERS,--You ask for my opinion as to the advisability and
feasibility of a National Society, such as you propose, for the
improvement of conditions among the insane.
I have never ceased to believe that such improvement is one of the most
"crying" needs of civilization; and the functions of such a Society seem
to me to be well drawn up by you. Your plea for its being founded
before your book appears is well grounded, you being an author who
naturally would like to cast seed upon a ground already prepared for it
to germinate practically without delay.
I have to confess to being myself a very impractical man, with no
experience whatever in the details, difficulties, etc., of philanthropic
or charity organization, so my opinion as to the _feasibility_ of your
plan is worth nothing, and is undecided. Of course the first
consideration is to get your money, the second, your Secretary and
Trustees. All that _I_ wish to bear witness to is the great need of a
National Society such as you describe, or failing that, of a State
Society somewhere that might serve as a model in other States.
Nowhere is there massed together as much suffering as in the asylums.
Nowhere is there so much sodden routine, and fatalistic insensibility in
those who have to treat it. Nowhere is an ideal treatment more costly.
The officials in charge grow resigned to the conditions under which they
have to labor. They cannot plead their cause as an auxiliary
organization can plead it for them. Public opinion is too glad to remain
ignorant. As mediator between officials, patients, and the public
conscience, a society such as you sketch is absolutely required, and the
sooner it gets under way the better.[74] Sincerely yours,
WILLIAM JAMES.
At the date of the next letter William James, Jr., was studying painting
in Paris.
_To his Son William._
Cambridge, _Apr. 24, 1907_.
DEAREST BILL,--I haven't written to you for ages, yet you keep showering
the most masterly and charming epistles upon all of us in turn,
including the fair Rosamund.[75] Be sure they are appreciated! Your Ma
and I dined last night at Ellen and Loulie Hooper's to meet Rosalind
Huidekoper and her swain. Loulie had heard from Bancel [La Farge] of
your getting a "mention"--if for the model, I'm not surprised; if for
the composition, I'm immensely pleased. Of course you'll tell us of it!
We've had a very raw cold April, and today it's blowing great guns from
all quarters of the sky, preparatory to clearing from the N.W., I think.
We are rooting up the entire lawn to a depth of 18 inches to try to
regenerate it. Four diggers and two carts have been at it for a week,
with your mother, bareheaded and cloaked, and ruddy-cheeked, sticking to
them like a burr. She doesn't handle pick or shovel, but she stands
there all day long in a way it would do your heart good to see; and so
democratic and hearty withal that I'm sure they like it, though working
under such a great taskmaster's eye deprives them of those intervals of
stolen leisure so dear to "workers" of every description. She makes it
up to them by inviting them to an afternoon tea daily, with piles of
cake and doughnuts. I fancy they like her well.
We've let Chocorua to the Goldmarks. Aleck took his April recess along
with his schoolmate Henderson and Gerald Thayer, partly on the summit,
partly around the base, of Monadnock. The weather was fiercely wintry,
and your mother and I said "poor blind little Aleck--he's got to learn
thru experience." [She said "through"!] He came back happier and more
exultant than I've ever seen him, and six months older morally and
intellectually for the week with Gerald and Abbott Thayer. A great step
forward. They burglarized the Thayer house, and were tracked and
arrested by the posse, and had a paragraph in the Boston "Globe" about
the robbery. As the thing involved an ascent of Monadnock after dark,
with their packs, in deep snow, a day and a night there in snowstorm, a
16-mile walk and out of bed till 2 A.M.. the night of the burglary, a
"lying low" indoors all the next day at the Hendersons' empty house,
three in a bed and the police waking them at dawn, I ventured to suggest
a doubt as to whether the Thayer household were the greatest victims of
the illustrious practical joke. "What," cries Aleck, starting to his
feet, "nine men with revolvers and guns around your bed, and a revolver
pointed close to your ear as you wake--don't you call that a success, I
should like to know?" The Tom Sawyer phase of evolution is immortal!
Gerald, who is staying with us now, is really a splendid fellow. I'm so
glad he's taken to Aleck, who now is aflame with plans for being an
artist. I wish he might--it would certainly suit his temperament better
than "business."
There 's the lunch bell.
I have got my "Pragmatism" proofs all corrected. The most important
thing I've written yet, and bound, I am sure, to stir up a lot of
attention. But I'm dog-tired; and, in order to escape the social
engagements that at this time of year grow more frequent than ever, I'm
going off on Friday (this is Wednesday) to the country somewhere for ten
days. If only there might be warm weather! We've just backed out from a
dinner to William Leonard Darwin and his wife, and the Geo. Hodgeses,
etc. W. T. Stead spent three hours here on Sunday and lectured in the
Union on Monday--a splendid fellow whom I could get along with after a
fashion. Let no one run him down to you. I've been to New York to the
Peace Congress. Interesting but tiresome.
Mary Salter is with us. Margaret and Rosamund just arrived at 107. No
news else! Yours,
W. J.
_To Henry James._
SALISBURY, CONN., _May 4, 1907_.
DEAREST H.-- ...I've been so overwhelmed with work, and the mountain of
the _Unread_ has piled up so, that only in these days here have I really
been able to settle down to your "American Scene," which in its peculiar
way seems to me _supremely great_. You know how opposed your whole
"third manner" of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my
crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence
as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever;
yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and
sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had
a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the
illusion of a solid object, made (like the "ghost" at the Polytechnic)
wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences
of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But you _do_
it, that's the queerness! And the complication of innuendo and
associative reference on the enormous scale to which you give way to it
does so _build out_ the matter for the reader that the result is to
solidify, by the mere bulk of the process, the like perception from
which _he_ has to start. As air, by dint of its volume, will weigh like
a corporeal body; so his own poor little initial perception, swathed in
this gigantic envelopment of suggestive atmosphere, grows like a germ
into something vastly bigger and more substantial. But it's the rummest
method for one to employ systematically as you do nowadays; and you
employ it at your peril. In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages
that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can't
skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy
readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: "Say it _out_, for
God's sake," they cry, "and have done with it." And so I say now, give
us _one_ thing in your older directer manner, just to show that, in
spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, you _can_
still write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and
then continue like the "curiosity of literature" which you have become.
For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are
unapproachable, but the _core_ of literature is solid. Give it to us
_once_ again! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and
the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum.
For God's sake don't _answer_ these remarks, which (as Uncle Howard used
to say of Father's writings) are but the peristaltic belchings of my own
crabbed organism. For one thing, your account of America is largely one
of its omissions, silences, vacancies. You work them up like solids, for
those readers who already germinally perceive them (to others you are
_totally_ incomprehensible). I said to myself over and over in reading:
"How much greater the triumph, if instead of dwelling thus only upon
America's vacuities, he could make positive suggestion of what in
'Europe' or Asia may exist to fill them." That would be nutritious to so
many American readers whose souls are only too ready to leap to
suggestion, but who are now too inexperienced to know what is meant by
the contrast-effect from which alone your book is written. If you could
supply the background which is the foil, in terms more full and
positive! At present it is supplied only by the abstract geographic term
"Europe." But of course anything of that kind is excessively difficult;
and you will probably say that you _are_ supplying it all along by your
novels. Well, the verve and animal spirits with which you can keep your
method going, first on one place then on another, through all those
tightly printed pages is something marvelous; and there are pages surely
doomed to be immortal, those on the "drummers," _e.g._, at the beginning
of "Florida." They are in the best sense Rabelaisian.
But a truce, a truce! I had no idea, when I sat down, of pouring such a
bath of my own subjectivity over you. Forgive! forgive! and don't reply,
don't at any rate in the sense of defending yourself, but only in that
of attacking _me_, if you feel so minded. I have just finished the
proofs of a little book called "Pragmatism" which even you _may_ enjoy
reading. It is a very "sincere" and, from the point of view of ordinary
philosophy-professorial manners, a very unconventional utterance, not
particularly original at any one point, yet, in the midst of the
literature of the way of thinking which it represents, with just that
amount of squeak or shrillness in the voice that enables one book to
_tell_, when others don't, to supersede its brethren, and be treated
later as "representative." I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence
it should be rated as "epoch-making," for of the definitive triumph of
that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever--I
believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation.
You can't tell how happy I am at having thrown off the nightmare of my
"professorship." As a "professor" I always felt myself a sham, with its
chief duties of being a walking encyclopedia of erudition. I am now at
liberty to be a _reality_, and the comfort is unspeakable--literally
unspeakable, to be my own man, after 35 years of being owned by others.
I can now live for truth pure and simple, instead of for truth
accommodated to the most unheard-of requirements set by others.... Your
affectionate
W. J.
This letter appears never to have been answered, although Henry James
wrote on May 31, 1907: "You shall have, after a little more patience, a
reply to your so rich and luminous reflections on my book--a reply
almost as interesting as, and far more illuminating than, your letter
itself."
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
Cambridge, _May 18, 1907_.
...One word about the said proof [of your article]. It convinces me that
you ought to be an academic personage, a "professor." For thirty-five
years I have been suffering from the exigencies of being one, the
pretension and the duty, namely, of meeting the mental needs and
difficulties of other persons, needs that I couldn't possibly imagine
and difficulties that I couldn't possibly understand; and now that I
have shuffled off the professorial coil, the sense of freedom that comes
to me is as surprising as it is exquisite. I wake up every morning with
it. What! not to have to accommodate myself to this mass of alien and
recalcitrant humanity, not to think under resistance, not to have to
square myself with others at every step I make--hurrah! it is too good
to be true. To be alone with truth and God! _Es ist nicht zu glauben!_
What a future! What a vision of ease! But here you are loving it and
courting it unnecessarily. You're fit to continue a professor in all
your successive reincarnations, with never a release. It was so easy to
let Bradley with his approximations and grumblings alone. So few people
would find these last statements of his seductive enough to build them
into their own thought. But you, for the pure pleasure of the operation,
chase him up and down his windings, flog him into and out of his
corners, stop him and cross-reference him and counter on him, as if
required to do so by your office. It makes very difficult reading, it
obliges one to re-read Bradley, and I don't believe there are three
persons living who will take it in with the pains required to estimate
its value. B. himself will very likely not read it with any care. It is
subtle and clear, like everything you write, but it is too minute. And
where a few broad comments would have sufficed, it is too complex, and
too much like a criminal conviction in tone and temper. Leave him in his
_dunklem Drange_--he is drifting in the right direction evidently, and
when a certain amount of positive construction on our side has been
added, he will say that that was what he had meant all along--and the
world will be the better for containing so much difficult polemic
reading the less.
I admit that your remarks are penetrating, and let air into the joints
of the subject; but I respectfully submit that they are not _called for_
in the interests of the final triumph of truth. That will come by the
way of displacement of error, quite effortlessly. I can't help
suspecting that you unduly magnify the influence of Bradleyan Absolutism
on the undergraduate mind. Taylor is the only fruit so far--at least
within my purview. One practical point: I don't quite like your first
paragraph, and wonder if it be too late to have the references to me at
least expunged. I can't recognize the truth of the ten-years' change of
opinion about my "Will to Believe." I don't find anyone--not even my
dearest friends, as Miller and Strong--one whit persuaded. Taylor's and
Hobhouse's attacks are of recent date, etc. Moreover, the reference to
Bradley's relation to me in this article is too ironical not to seem a
little "nasty" to some readers; therefore out with it, if it be not too
late.
See how different our methods are! All that Humanism needs now is to
make applications of itself to special problems. Get a school of
youngsters at work. Refutations of error should be left to the
rationalists alone. They are a stock function of that school....
I'm fearfully _tired_, but expect the summer to get me right again.
Affectionately thine,
W. J.
XVI
1907-1909
_The Last Period (III)--Hibbert Lectures in Oxford--The Hodgson Report_
The story of the remaining years is written so fully in the letters
themselves as to require little explanation.
Angina pectoris and such minor ailments as are only too likely to
afflict a man of sixty-five years and impaired constitution interrupted
the progress of reading and writing more and more. Physical exertion,
particularly that involved in talking long to many people, now brought
on pain and difficulty in breathing. But James still carried himself
erect, still walked with a light step, and until a few weeks before his
death wore the appearance of a much younger and stronger man than he
really was. None but those near to him realized how often he was in
discomfort or pain, or how constantly he was using himself to the limit
of his endurance. He bore his ills without complaint and ordinarily
without mention; although he finally made up his mind to try to
discourage the appeals and requests of all sorts that still harassed
him, by proclaiming the fact that he was an invalid. As his power of
work became more and more reduced, frustrations became harder to bear,
and the sense that they were unavoidable oppressed him. When an
invitation to deliver a course of lectures on the Hibbert Foundation at
Manchester College, Oxford, arrived, he was torn between an impulse to
clutch at this engagement as a means of hastening the writing-out of
certain material that was in his mind, and the fear, only too
reasonable, that the obligation to have the lectures ready by a certain
date would strain him to the snapping point. After some hesitation he
agreed, however, and the lectures were, ultimately, prepared and
delivered successfully.