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.