to take a magnifying-glass to read (!)--and remained full of admiration
for the nervous centres which, after 80 years of work, could still guide
the fingers to execute, without slipping or trembling, that masterpiece
of microscopic calligraphy! Truly your nervous centres are "well
preserved"--the optical ones also, in spite of the cataracts and loss of
accommodation! How proud I should be if now, at the comparatively
youthful age of 68, I could flatter _myself_ with the hope of doing what
you have done, and living down victoriously twelve more devouring
enemies of years! With a fresh volume produced, to mark each year by! I
give you leave, as a garland and reward, to misinterpret my doctrine of
truth _ad libitum_ and to your heart's content, in all your future
writings. I will never think the worse of you for it.
What you say of dear Madame Pillon awakens in me very different
feelings. She has led, indeed, a life of suffering for many years, and
it seems to me a real tragedy that she should now be confined to the
house so absolutely. If only you might inhabit the country, where, on
fine days, with no stairs to mount or descend, she could sit with
flowers and trees around her! The city is not good when one is confined
to one's apartment. Pray give Madame Pillon my sincerest love--I never
think of her without affection--I am almost ashamed to accept year after
year your "Année Philosophique," and to give you so little in return for
it. I am expecting my wife and brother to arrive here from England this
afternoon, and we shall _probably_ all return together through Paris, by
the middle of July. I will then come and see you, with the wife, so
please keep the "Année" till then, and put it into my hands. I can read
nothing serious here--the baths destroy one's strength so. Whether they
will do any good to my circulatory organs remains to be seen--there is
no good effect perceptible so far. Believe me, dear old friend, with
every message of affection to you both, yours ever faithfully,
Wm. James.
* * * * *
The letters which follow concern Henry Adams's "Letter to American
Teachers," originally printed for private circulation, but recently
published, with a preface by Mr. Brooks Adams, under the title: "The
Degradation of Democratic Dogma."
_To Henry Adams._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 17, 1910_.
DEAR HENRY ADAMS,--I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths
here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any
reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your
"letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To
tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and
erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker
can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing
to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No,
sir, you can't do it, can't impress God in that way. So far as our
scientific conceptions go, it may be admitted that your Creator (and
mine) started the universe with a certain amount of "energy" latent in
it, and decreed that everything that should happen thereafter should be
a result of parts of that energy falling to lower levels; raising other
parts higher, to be sure, in so doing, but never in equivalent amount,
owing to the constant radiation of unrecoverable warmth incidental to
the process. It is customary for gentlemen to pretend to believe one
another, and until some one hits upon a newer revolutionary concept
(which may be tomorrow) all physicists must play the game by holding
religiously to the above doctrine. It involves of course the ultimate
cessation of all perceptible happening, and the end of human history.
With this general conception as _surrounding_ everything you say in your
"letter," no one can find any fault--in the present stage of scientific
conventions and fashions. But I protest against your interpretation of
some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of
the original high-level energy. If, instead of criticizing what you seem
to me to say, I express my own interpretation dogmatically, and leave
you to make the comparison, it will doubtless conduce to brevity and
economize recrimination.
To begin with, the _amount_ of cosmic energy it costs to buy a certain
distribution of fact which humanly we regard as precious, seems to me to
be an altogether secondary matter as regards the question of history and
progress. Certain arrangements of matter _on the same energy-level_ are,
from the point of view of man's appreciation, superior, while others are
inferior. Physically a dinosaur's brain may show as much intensity of
energy-exchange as a man's, but it can do infinitely fewer things,
because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur's muscles,
while the man's brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can
by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres
Cathedral, etc., and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into
channels which never would have been entered otherwise--in short, _make_
history. Therefore the man's brain and muscles are, from the point of
view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange,
small as this may be when measured in absolute physical units.
The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"--save that it sets a
terminus--for history is the course of things before that terminus, and
all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must
invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of
difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties
itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its
effects, of _which_ rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills
has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most
important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity"
factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such
rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in
getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of
human institutions--their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to
do with their energy-budget--being wholly a question of the form the
energy flows through. Though the _ultimate_ state of the universe may be
its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to
interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the
millennium--in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of
energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully _canalisés_ that a
maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In
short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I
am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't
believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik"
to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate,
but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one
question.
There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths--so I won't
write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help
doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably
won't jaw back.--It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically
unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar
energy. Yours ever truly,
Wm. James.
[Illustration: Facsimile of Post-card addressed to Henry Adams.]
[Post-card]
NAUHEIM, _June 19, 1910_.
P. S. Another illustration of my meaning: The clock of the universe is
running down, and by so doing makes the hands move. The energy absorbed
by the hands and the _mechanical_ work they do is the same day after
day, no matter how far the weights have descended from the position they
were originally wound up to. The _history_ which the hands perpetrate
has nothing to do with the _quantity_ of this work, but follows the
_significance_ of the figures which they cover on the dial. If they move
from O to XII, there is "progress," if from XII to O, there is "decay,"
etc. etc.
W. J.
_To Henry Adams._
[Post-card]
CONSTANCE, _June 26, [1910]_.
Yours of the 20th, just arriving, pleases me by its docility of spirit
and passive subjection to philosophic opinion. Never, never pretend to
an opinion of your own! that way lies every annoyance and madness! You
tempt me to offer you another illustration--that of the _hydraulic ram_
(thrown back to me in an exam, as a "hydraulic goat" by an
insufficiently intelligent student). Let this arrangement of metal,
placed in the course of a brook, symbolize the machine of human life. It
works, clap, clap, clap, day and night, so long as the brook runs _at
all_, and no matter how full the brook (which symbolizes the descending
cosmic energy) may be, it works always to the same effect, of raising so
many kilogrammeters of water. What the _value_ of this work as history
may be, depends on the uses to which the water is put in the house which
the ram serves.
W. J.
_To Benjamin Paul Blood._
CONSTANCE, _June 25, 1910_.
MY DEAR BLOOD,--About the time you will receive this, you will also be
surprised by receiving the "Hibbert Journal" for July, with an article
signed by me, but written mainly by yourself.[88] Tired of waiting for
your final synthetic pronunciamento, and fearing I might be cut off ere
it came, I took time by the forelock, and at the risk of making ducks
and drakes of your thoughts, I resolved to save at any rate some of your
rhetoric, and the result is what you see. Forgive! forgive! forgive! It
will at any rate have made you famous, for the circulation of the H. J.
is choice, as well as large (12,000 or more, I'm told), and the print
and paper the best ever yet, I seem to have lost the editor's letter, or
I would send it to you. He wrote, in accepting the article in May, "I
have already 40 articles accepted, and some of the writers threaten
lawsuits for non-publication, yet such was the exquisite refreshment
Blood's writing gave me, under the cataract of sawdust in which
editorially I live, that I have this day sent the article to the
printer. Actions speak louder than words! Blood is simply _great_, and
you are to be thanked for having dug him out. L. P. JACKS." Of course
I've used you for my own purposes, and probably misused you; but I'm
sure you will feel more pleasure than pain, and perhaps write again in
the "Hibbert" to set yourself right. You're sure of being printed,
whatever you may send. How I wish that I too could write poetry, for
pluralism is in its _Sturm und Drang_ period, and verse is the only way
to express certain things, I've just been taking the "cure" at Nauheim
for my unlucky heart--no results so far!
Sail for home again on August 12th. Address always Cambridge, Mass.;
things are forwarded. Warm regards, fellow pluralist. Yours ever,
Wm. James.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
GENEVA, _July 9, 1910_.
DEAREST FLOURNOY,--Your two letters, of yesterday, and of July 4th sent
to Nauheim, came this morning. I am sorry that the Nauheim one was not
written earlier, since you had the trouble of writing it at all. I thank
you for all the considerateness you show--you understand entirely my
situation. My dyspnoea gets worse at an accelerated rate, and all I
care for now is to get home--doing _nothing_ on the way. It is partly a
spasmodic phenomenon I am sure, for the aeration of my tissues, judging
by the color of my lips, seems to be sufficient. I will leave Geneva now
without seeing you again--better not come, unless just to shake hands
with my wife! Through all these years I have wished I might live nearer
to you and see more of you and exchange more ideas, for we seem two men
particularly well _faits pour nous comprendre_. Particularly, now, as my
own intellectual house-keeping has seemed on the point of working out
some good results, would it have been good to work out the less unworthy
parts of it in your company. But that is impossible!--I doubt if I ever
do any more writing of a serious sort; and as I am able to look upon my
life rather lightly, I can truly say that "I don't care"--don't care in
the least pathetically or tragically, at any rate.--I hope that Ragacz
will be a success, or at any rate a wholesome way of passing the month,
and that little by little you will reach your new equilibrium. Those
dear daughters, at any rate, are something to live for--to show them
Italy should be rejuvenating. I can write no more, my very dear old
friend, but only ask you to think of me as ever lovingly yours,
W. J.
After leaving Geneva James rested at Lamb House for a few days before
going to Liverpool to embark. Walking, talking and writing had all
become impossible or painful. The short northern route to Quebec was
chosen for the home voyage. When he and Mrs. James and his brother Henry
landed there, they went straight to Chocorua. The afternoon light was
fading from the familiar hills on August 19th, when the motor brought
them to the little house, and James sank into a chair beside the fire,
and sobbed, "It's so good to get home!"
A change for the worse occurred within forty-eight hours and the true
situation became apparent. The effort by which he had kept up a certain
interest in what was going on about him during the last weeks of his
journey, and a certain semblance of strength, had spent itself. He had
been clinging to life only in order to get home.
Death occurred without pain in the early afternoon of August 26th.
His body was taken to Cambridge, where there was a funeral service in
the College Chapel. After cremation, his ashes were placed beside the
graves of his parents in the Cambridge Cemetery.
THE END
APPENDIXES
APPENDIX I
THREE CRITICISMS FOR STUDENTS
In his smaller classes, made up of advanced students, James found it
possible to comment in detail on the work of individuals. Three letters
have come into the hands of the editor, from which extracts may be taken
to illustrate such comments. They were written for persons with whom he
could communicate only by letter, and are extended enough to suggest the
_viva voce_ comments which many a student recalls, but of which there is
no record. The first is from a letter to a former pupil and refers to
work of Bertrand Russell and others which the pupil was studying at the
time. The second and third comment on manuscripts that had been prepared
as "theses" and had been submitted to James for unofficial criticism.
They exhibit him, characteristically, as encouraging the student to
formulate something more positive.
_Jan. 26, 1908._
Those propositions or supposals which [Russell, Moore and Meinong] make
the exclusive vehicles of truth are mongrel curs that have no real place
between realities on the one hand and beliefs on the other. The
negative, disjunctive and hypothetic truths which they so conveniently
express can all, perfectly well (so far as I see), be translated into
relations between beliefs and positive realities. "Propositions" are
expressly devised for quibbling between realities and beliefs. They seem
to have the objectivity of the one and the subjectivity of the other,
and he who uses them can straddle as he likes, owing to the ambiguity of
the word _that_, which is essential to them. "_That_ Cæsar existed" is
"true," sometimes means the _fact that_ be existed is real, sometimes
the _belief that_ he existed is true. You can get no honest discussion
out of such terms....
_Aug. 15, 1908._
Dear K----, ...[I have] read your thesis once through. I only finished
it yesterday. It is a big effort, hard to grasp at a single reading,
and I'm too lazy to go over it a second time in its present physically
inconvenient shape. It is obvious that parts of it have been written
rapidly and not boiled down; and my impression is that you have left
over in it too much of the complication of form in which our ideas, our
critical ideas especially, first come to us, and which has, with much
rewriting, to be straightened out. You were dealing with dialecticians
and logic-choppers, and you have met them on their own ground with a
logic-chopping even more diseased than theirs. So far as I can see, you
_have_ met them, though your own expressions are often far from lucid
(--result of haste?); but in some cases I doubt whether they themselves
would think that they were met at all. I fear a little that both Bradley
and Royce will think that your _reductiones ad absurdum_ are too fine
spun and ingenious to have real force. Too complicated, too complicated!
is the verdict of my horse-like mind on much of this thesis. Your
defense will be, of course, that it is a thesis, and as such, expected
to be barbaric. But then I point to the careless, hasty writing of much
of it. You _must_ simplify yourself, if you hope to have any influence
in print.
The writing becomes more careful and the style clearer, the moment you
tackle Russell in the 6th part. And when you come to your own dogmatic
statement of your vision of things in the last 30 pages or so, I think
the thesis splendid, prophetic in tone and _very_ felicitous, often, in
expression. This is indeed the _philosophie de l'avenir_, and a dogmatic
expression of it will be far more effective than critical demolition of
its alternatives. It will render that unnecessary if able enough. One
will simply _feel_ them to be diseased. My total impression is that the
critter K---- has a _really magnificent vision_ of the lay of the land
in philosophy,--of the land of bondage, as well as of that of
promise,--but that he has a tremendous lot of work to do yet in the way
of getting himself into straight and effective literary shape. He has
_elements_ of extraordinary literary power, but they are buried in much
sand and shingle....
_May. 26, 1900._
Dear Miss S----, I am a caitiff! I have left your essay on my poor self
unanswered.... It is a great compliment to me to be taken so
philologically and importantly; and I must say that from the technical
point of view you may be proud of your production. I like greatly the
objective and dispassionate key in which you keep everything, and the
number of subdivisions and articulations which you make gives me
vertiginous admiration. Nevertheless, the tragic fact remains that I
don't feel wounded at all by all that output of ability, and for reasons
which I think I can set down briefly enough. It all comes, in my eyes,
from too much philological method--as a Ph.D. thesis your essay is
supreme, but why don't you go farther? You take utterances of mine
written at different dates, for different audiences belonging to
different universes of discourse, and string them together as the
abstract elements of a total philosophy which you then show to be
inwardly incoherent. This is splendid philology, but is it live
criticism of anyone's _Weltanschauung_? Your use of the method only
strengthens the impression I have got from reading criticisms of my
"pragmatic" account of "truth," that the whole Ph.D. industry of
building up an author's meaning out of separate texts leads nowhere,
unless you have first grasped his centre of vision, by an act of
imagination. That, it seems to me, you lack in my case.
For instance: [Seven examples are next dealt with in two and a half
pages of type-writing. These pages are omitted.]
...I have been unpardonably long; and if you were a man, I should
assuredly not expect to influence you a jot by what I write. Being a
woman, there may be yet a gleam of hope!--which may serve as the excuse
for my prolixity. (It is not for the likes of _you_, however, to hurl
accusations of prolixity!) Now if I may presume to give a word of advice
to one so much more accomplished than myself in dialectic technique, may
I urge, since you have shown what a superb mistress you are in that
difficult art of discriminating abstractions and opposing them to each
other one by one, since in short there is no university extant that
wouldn't give you its _summa cum laude_,--I should certainly so reward
your thesis at Harvard,--may I urge, I say, that you should now turn
your back upon that academic sort of artificiality altogether, and
devote your great talents to the study of reality in its concreteness?
In other words, do some _positive_ work at the problem of what truth
signifies, substitute a definitive alternative for the humanism which I
present, as the latter's substitute. Not by proving their inward
incoherence does one refute philosophies--every human being is
incoherent--but only by superseding them by other philosophies more
satisfactory. Your wonderful technical skill ought to serve you in good
stead if you would exchange the philological kind of criticism for
constructive work. I fear however that you won't--the iron may have
bitten too deeply into your soul!!
Have you seen Knox's paper on pragmatism in the "Quarterly Review" for
April--perhaps the deepest-cutting thing yet written on the pragmatist
side? On the other side read Bertrand Russell's paper in the "Edinburgh
Review" just out. A thing after your own heart, but ruined in my eyes by
the same kind of vicious abstractionism which your thesis shows. It is
amusing to see the critics of the will to believe furnish such exquisite
instances of it in their own persons. _E.g._, Russell's own splendid
atheistic-titanic confession of faith in that volume of essays on
"Ideals of Science and of Faith" edited by one Hand. X----, whom you
quote, has recently worked himself up to the pass of being ordained in
the Episcopal church.... I justify them both; for only by such
experiments on the part of individuals will social man gain the evidence
required. They meanwhile seem to think that the only "true" position to
hold is that everything not imposed upon a will-less and non-coöperant
intellect must count as false--a preposterous principle which no human
being follows in real life.
Well! There! that is all! But, dear Madam, I should like to know where
you come from, who you are, what your present "situation" is, etc.,
etc.--It is natural to have some personal curiosity about a lady who has
taken such an extraordinary amount of pains for me!
Believe me, dear Miss S----, with renewed apologies for the extreme
tardiness of this acknowledgment, yours with mingled admiration and
abhorrence,
WM. JAMES.
APPENDIX II
BOOKS BY WILLIAM JAMES
The following chronological list includes books only, but it gives the
essays and chapters contained in each.
Professor R. B. Perry's "Bibliography" (see below) lists a great number
of contributions to periodicals, which have never been reprinted, and
includes notes indicative of the matter of each.
(No attempt has been made to compile a list of references to literature
about William James, but the following may be mentioned as easily
obtainable: _William James_, by ÉMILE BOUTROUX. Paris, 1911.
Translation: Longmans, Green & Co., New York and London, 1912. _La
Philosophie de William James_, by THEODORE FLOURNOY. St. Blaise, 1911.
Translation: _The Philosophy of William James._ Henry Holt & Co., New
York, 1917.)
_Literary Remains of Henry James, Sr._, with an Introduction by
WILLIAM JAMES. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884.
_The Principles of Psychology._ New York: Henry Holt & Co.; London:
Macmillan & Co., 1890.
_Volume I._ Scope of Psychology--Functions of the Brain--Conditions
of Brain Activity--Habit--The Automaton Theory--The Mind-Stuff
Theory--Methods and Snares of Psychology--Relations of Minds to
Other Things--The Stream of Thought--The Consciousness of
Self--Attention--Conception--Discrimination and
Comparison--Association--The Perception of Time--Memory.
_Volume II._ Sensation--Imagination--Perception of Things--The
Perception of Space--The Perception of Reality--Reasoning--The
Production of Movement--Instinct--The
Emotions--Will--Hypnotism--Necessary Truth and the Effects of
Experience.
_A Text-Book of Psychology._ Briefer Course. New York: Henry Holt &
Co.; London: Macmillan & Co., 1892.
Introductory--Sensation--Sight--Hearing--Touch--Sensations of
Motion--Structure of the Brain--Functions of the Brain--Some
General Conditions of Neural Activity--Habit--Stream of
Consciousness--The
Self--Attention--Conception--Discrimination--Association--Sense of
Time--Memory--Imagination--Perception--The Perception of
Space--Reasoning--Consciousness and
Movement--Emotion--Instinct--Will--Psychology and Philosophy.
_The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy._ New
York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897.