1905-1907

The Last Period (II)—Italy and Greece—Philosophical Congress in Rome—Stanford University—The Earthquake—Resignation of Professorship

In the spring of 1905 an escape from influenza, from Cambridge duties, and from correspondents, became imperative. James had long wanted to see Athens with his own eyes, and he sailed on April 3 for a short southern holiday. During the journey he wrote letters to almost no one except his wife. On his way back from Athens he stopped in Rome with the purpose of seeing certain young Italian philosophers. A Philosophical Congress was being held there at the time; and James, though he had originally declined the invitation to attend it, inevitably became involved in its proceedings and ended by seizing the occasion to discuss his theory of consciousness. It was obvious that the appropriate language in which to address a full meeting of the Congress would be French, and so he shut himself up in his hotel and composed "La Notion de Conscience." His experience in writing this paper threw an instructive sidelight on his process of composition. Ordinarily—when he was writing in English—twenty-five sheets of manuscript, written in a large hand and corrected, were a maximum achievement for one day. The address in Rome was not composed in English and then translated, but was written out in French. When he had finished the last lines of one day's work, James found to his astonishment that he had completed and corrected over forty pages of manuscript. The inhibitions which a habit of careful attention to points of style ordinarily called into play were largely inoperative when he wrote in a language which presented to his mind a smaller variety of possible expressions, and thus imposed limits upon his self-criticism.

In the following year (1906), James took leave of absence from Harvard in January and accepted an invitation from Stanford University to give a course during its spring term. He planned the course as a general introduction to Philosophy. Had he not been interrupted by the San Francisco earthquake, he would have rehearsed much of the projected "Introductory Textbook of Philosophy," in which he meant to outline his metaphysical system. But the earthquake put an end to the Stanford lectures in April, as the reader will learn more fully. In the ensuing autumn and winter (1907), James made the same material the basis of a half-year's work with his last Harvard class.

In November, 1906, the lectures which compose the volume called "Pragmatism" were written out and delivered in November at the Lowell Institute in Boston. In January, 1907, they were repeated at Columbia University, and then James published them in the spring.

The time had now come for him to stop regular teaching altogether. He had been continuing to teach, partly in deference to the wishes of the College; but it had become evident that he must have complete freedom to use his strength and time for writing when he could write, for special lectures, like the series on Pragmatism, when such might serve his ends, and for rest and change when recuperation became necessary. So, in February, 1907, he sent his resignation to the Harvard Corporation. The last meeting of his class ended in a way for which he was quite unprepared. His undergraduate students presented him with a silver loving-cup, the graduate students and assistants with an inkwell. There were a couple of short speeches, and words were spoken by which he was very much moved. Unfortunately there was no record of what was said.

To Mrs. James.

Amalfi, Mar. 30, 1905.

...It is good to get something in full measure, without haggling or stint, and today I have had the picturesque ladled out in buckets full, heaped up and running over. I never realized the beauties of this shore, and forget (in my habit of never noticing proper names till I have been there) whether you have ever told me of the drive from Sorrento to this place. Anyhow, I wish that you could have taken it with me this day. "Thank God for this day!" We came to Sorrento by steamer, and at 10:30 got away in a carriage, lunching at the half-way village of Positano; and proceeding through Amalfi to Ravello, high up on the mountain side, whence back here in time for a 7:15 o'clock dinner. Practically six hours driving through a scenery of which I had never realized the beauty, or rather the interest, from previous descriptions. The lime-stone mountains are as strong as anything in Switzerland, though of course much smaller. The road, a Cornice affair cut for the most part on the face of cliffs, and crossing little ravines (with beaches) on the side of which nestle hamlets, is positively ferocious in its grandeur, and on the side of it the azure sea, dreaming and blooming like a bed of violets. I didn't look for such Swiss strength, having heard of naught but beauty. It seems as if this were a race such that, when anyone wished to express an emotion of any kind, he went and built a bit of stone-wall and limed it onto the rock, so that now, when they have accumulated, the works of God and man are inextricably mixed, and it is as if mankind had been a kind of immemorial coral insect. Every possible square yard is terraced up, reclaimed and planted, and the human dwellings are the fiercest examples of cliff-building, cave-habitation, staircase and foot-path you can imagine. How I do wish that you could have been along today....

Mar. 31, 1905.

From half-past four to half-past six I walked alone through the old Naples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the very poor, vocal with them too (their voices carry so that every child seems to be calling to the whole street, goats, donkeys, chickens, and an occasional cow mixed in), and no light of heaven getting indoors. The street floor composed of cave-like shops, the people doing their work on chairs in the street for the sake of light, and in the black inside, beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be hard to match. I have come here too late in life, when the picturesque has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me like a passion, and such sights would have then been the solidest of mental food. I put up then with such inferior substitutional suggestions as Geneva and Paris afforded—but these black old Naples streets are not suggestions, they are the reality itself—full orchestra. I have got such an impression of the essential sociability of this race, especially in the country. A smile will go so far with them—even without the accompanying copper. And the children are so sweet. Tell Aleck to drop his other studies, learn Italian (real Italian, not the awful gibberish I try to speak), cultivate his beautiful smile, learn a sentimental song or two, bring a tambourine or banjo, and come down here and fraternize with the common people along the coast—he can go far, and make friends, and be a social success, even if he should go back to a clean hotel of some sort for sleep every night....

To his Daughter.

On board S.S. OrÉnogne, approaching
PirÆus, Greece, Apr. 3, 1905.

Darling Peg,—Your loving Dad is surely in luck sailing over this almost oily sea, under the awning on deck, past the coast of Greece (whose snow-capped mountains can be seen on the horizon), towards the PirÆus, where we are due to arrive at about two. I had some misgivings about the steamer from Marseilles, but she has turned out splendid, and the voyage perfect. A 4000-ton boat, bran new as to all her surface equipment, stateroom all to myself, by a happy stroke of luck (the boat being full), clean absolutely, large open window, sea like Lake Champlain, with the color of Lake Leman, about a hundred and twenty first-class passengers of the most interesting description, one sixth English archeologists, one sixth English tourists, one third French archeologists, etc.,—an international archeological congress opens at Athens this week,—the rest Dagoes quelconques, many distinguished men, almost all educated and pronounced individualities, and so much acquaintance and sociability, that the somewhat small upper deck on which I write resounds with conversation like an afternoon tea. The meals are tip-top, and the whole thing almost absurdly ideal in its kind. I only wish your mother could be wafted here for one hour, to sit by my side and enjoy the scene. The best feature of the boat is little Miss Boyd, the Cretan excavatress, from Smith College, a perfect little trump of a thing, who has been through the Greco-Turkish war as nurse (as well as being nurse at Tampa during our Cuban war), and is the simplest, most generally intelligent little thing, who knows Greece by heart and can smooth one's path beautifully. Waldstein of Cambridge is on board, also M. Sylvain of the ThÉÂtre FranÇais, and his daughter—going to recite prologues or something at the representation of Sophocles's "Antigone," which is to take place—he looking just like your uncle Henry—both eminent comedians—I mean the two Sylvains. On the bench opposite me is the most beautiful woman on board, a sort of Mary Salter translated into French, though she is with rather common men. Well, now I will stop, and use my Zeiss glass on the land, which is getting nearer. My heart wells over with love and gratitude at having such a family—meaning Alice, you, Harry, Bill, Aleck, and Mother-in-law—and resolutions to live so as to be more worthy of them. I will finish this on land.

Well, dear family,—We got in duly in an indescribable embrouillement of small boats (our boatman, by the way, when Miss Boyd asked him his name, replied "Dionysos"; our wine-bottle was labelled "John Solon and Co."), sailing past the Island of Ægina and the Bay of Salamis, with the Parthenon visible ahead—a worthy termination to a delightful voyage. We drove the three miles from the PirÆus in a carriage, common and very dusty country road, also close by the Parthenon, through the cheap little town to this hotel, after which George Putnam and I, washing our hands, strolled forth to see what we could, the first thing being Mrs. Sam Hoar at the theatre of Bacchus. Then the rest of the Acropolis, which is all and more than all the talk. There is a mystery of rightness about that Parthenon that I cannot understand. It sets a standard for other human things, showing that absolute rightness is not out of reach. But I am not in descriptive mood, so I spare you. Suffice it that I couldn't keep the tears from welling into my eyes. "J'ai vu la beautÉ parfaite." Santayana is in a neighboring hotel, but we have missed each other thrice. The Forbeses are on the Peloponnesus, but expected back tomorrow. Well, dear ones all, good-night! Thus far, and no farther! Hence I turn westward again. The Greek lower orders seem far less avid and rapacious than the Southern Italians. God bless you all. I must get to another hotel, and be more to myself. Good and dear as the Putnams are and extremely helpful as they've been, it keeps me too much in company. Good-night again. Your loving father, respective husband,

W. J.

To Mrs. James.

Rome, Apr. 25, 1905.

...Strong telegraphed me yesterday from Lausanne that he ... expected to be at Cannes on the 4th of May. I was glad of this, for I had been feeling more and more as if I ought to stay here, and it makes everything square out well. This morning I went to the meeting-place of the Congress to inscribe myself definitely, and when I gave my name, the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me, or words to that effect, and called in poor Professor de Sanctis, the Vice President or Secretary or whatever, who treated me in the same manner, and finally got me to consent to make an address at one of the general meetings, of which there are four, in place of Sully, Flournoy, Richet, Lipps, and Brentano, who were announced but are not to come. I fancy they have been pretty unscrupulous with their program here, printing conditional futures as categorical ones. So I'm in for it again, having no power to resist flattery. I shall try to express my "Does Consciousness Exist?" in twenty minutes—and possibly in the French tongue! Strange after the deep sense of nothingness that has been besetting me the last two weeks (mere fatigue symptom) to be told that my name was attracting many of the young professors to the Congress!

Then I went to the Museum in the baths of Diocletian or whatever it is, off there by the R. R., then to the Capitol, and then to lunch off the Corso, at a restaurant, after buying a French book whose author says in his preface that Sully, W. J., and Bergson are his masters. And I am absolute 0 in my own home!...

Apr. 30, 1905. 7 P.M.

...If you never had a tired husband, at least you've got one now! The ideer of being in such delightful conditions and interesting surroundings, and being conscious of nothing but one's preposterous physical distress, is too ridiculous! I have just said good-bye to my circle of admirers, relatively youthful, at the hotel door, under the pretext (a truth until this morning) that I had to get ready to go to Lausanne tonight, and I taper off my activity by subsiding upon you. Yesterday till three, and the day before till five, I was writing my address, which this morning I gave—in French. I wrote it carefully and surprised myself by the ease with which I slung the Gallic accent and intonation, being excited by the occasion.[58] Janet expressed himself as stupÉfait, from the linguistic point of view. The thing lasted 40 minutes, and was followed by a discussion which showed that the critics with one exception had wholly failed to catch the point of view; but that was quite en rÉgle, so I don't care; and I have given the thing to ClaparÈde to print in Flournoy's "Archives." The Congress was far too vast, but filled with strange and interesting creatures of all sorts, and socially very nutritious to anyone who can stand sociability without distress. A fÊte of some sort every day—this P.M. I have just returned from a great afternoon tea given us by some "Minister" at the Borghese Palace—in the Museum. (The King, you know, has bought the splendid Borghese park and given it to the City of Rome as a democratic possession in perpetuo. A splendid gift.) The pictures too! Tonight there is a great banquet with speeches, to which of course I can't go. I lunched at the da Vitis,—a big table full, she very simple and nice,—and I have been having this afternoon a very good and rather intimate talk with the little band of "pragmatists," Papini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, etc., most of whom inhabit Florence, publish the monthly journal "Leonardo" at their own expense, and carry on a very serious philosophic movement, apparently really inspired by Schiller and myself (I never could believe it before, although Ferrari had assured me), and show an enthusiasm, and also a literary swing and activity that I know nothing of in our own land, and that probably our damned academic technics and Ph.D.-machinery and university organization prevents from ever coming to a birth. These men, of whom Ferrari is one, are none of them Fach-philosophers, and few of them teachers at all. It has given me a certain new idea of the way in which truth ought to find its way into the world.

I have seen such a lot of important-looking faces,—probably everything in the stock in the shop-window,—and witnessed such charmingly gracious manners, that it is a lesson. The woodenness of our Anglo-Saxon social ways! I had a really splendid audience for quality this A.M. (about 200), even though they didn't understand....

To George Santayana.

Orvieto, May 2, 1905.

Dear Santayana,—I came here yesterday from Rome and have been enjoying the solitude. I stayed at the exquisite Albergo de Russie, and didn't shirk the Congress—in fact they stuck me for a "general" address, to fill the vacuum left by Flournoy and Sully, who had been announced and came not (I spoke agin "consciousness," but nobody understood) and I got fearfully tired. On the whole it was an agreeable nightmare—agreeable on account of the perfectly charming gentillezza of the bloody Dagoes, the way they caress and flatter you—"il piu grand psicologo del mondo," etc., and of the elaborate provisions for general entertainment—nightmare, because of my absurd bodily fatigue. However, these things are "neither here nor there." What I really write to you for is to tell you to send (if not sent already) your "Life of Reason" to the "Revue de Philosophie," or rather to its editor, M. Peillaube, Rue des Revues 160, and to the editor of "Leonardo" (the great little Florentine philosophical journal), Sig. Giovanni Papini, 14 Borgo Albizi, Florence. The most interesting, and in fact genuinely edifying, part of my trip has been meeting this little cÉnacle, who have taken my own writings, entre autres, au grand sÉrieux, but who are carrying on their philosophical mission in anything but a technically serious way, inasmuch as "Leonardo" (of which I have hitherto only known a few odd numbers) is devoted to good and lively literary form. The sight of their belligerent young enthusiasm has given me a queer sense of the gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young Ph.D.'s, boring each other at seminaries, writing those direful reports of literature in the "Philosophical Review" and elsewhere, fed on "books of reference," and never confounding "Æsthetik" with "Erkentnisstheorie." Faugh! I shall never deal with them again—on those terms! Can't you and I, who in spite of such divergence have yet so much in common in our Weltanschauung, start a systematic movement at Harvard against the desiccating and pedantifying process? I have been cracking you up greatly to both Peillaube and Papini, and quoted you twice in my speech, which was in French and will be published in Flournoy's "Archives de Psychologie." I hope you're enjoying the Eastern Empire to the full, and that you had some Grecian "country life." MÜnsterberg has been called to Koenigsberg and has refused. Better be America's ancestor than Kant's successor! Ostwald, to my great delight, is coming to us next year, not as your replacer, but in exchange with Germany for F. G. Peabody. I go now to Cannes, to meet Strong, back from his operation. Ever truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

To Mrs. James.

Cannes, May 13, 1905.

...I came Sunday night, and this is Saturday. The six days have been busy ones in one sense, but have rested me very much in another. No sight-seeing fatigues, but more usual, and therefore more normal occupations.... I have written some 25 letters, long and short, to European correspondents since being here, have walked and driven with Strong, and have had philosophy hot and heavy with him almost all the time. I never knew such an unremitting, untiring, monotonous addiction as that of his mind to truth. He goes by points, pinning each one definitely, and has, I think, the very clearest mind I ever knew. Add to it his absolute sincerity and candor and it is no wonder that he is a "growing" man. I suspect that he will outgrow us all, for his rate accelerates, and he never stands still. He is an admirable philosophic figure, and I am glad to say that in most things he and I are fully in accord. He gains a great deal from such talks, noting every point down afterwards, and I gain great stimulation, though in a vaguer way. I shall be glad, however, on Monday afternoon, to relax....

To Mrs. James.

[Post-card]

Geneva, May 17, 1905.

So far, thank Heaven, on my way towards home! A rather useful time with the superior, but sticky X——, at Marseilles, and as far as Lyons in the train, into which an hour beyond Lyons there came (till then I was alone in my compartment) a Spanish bishop, canon and "familar," an aged holy woman, sister of the bishop, a lay-brother and sister, a dog, and more baggage than I ever saw before, including a feather-bed. They spoke no French—the bishop about as much Italian as I, and the lay-sister as much of English as I of Spanish. They took out their rosaries and began mumbling their litanies forthwith, whereon I took off my hat, which seemed to touch them so, when they discovered I was a Protestant, that we all grew very affectionate and I soon felt ashamed of the way in which I had at first regarded their black and superstitious invasion of my privacy. Good, saintly people on their way to Rome. I go now to our old haunts and to the Flournoys'....

W.

To H. G. Wells.

S. S. Cedric, June 6, 1905.

My dear Mr. Wells,—I have just read your "Utopia" (given me by F. C. S. Schiller on the one day that I spent in Oxford on my way back to Cambridge, Mass., after a few weeks on the Continent), and "Anticipations," and "Mankind in the Making" having duly preceded, together with numerous other lighter volumes of yours, the "summation of stimuli" reaches the threshold of discharge and I can't help overflowing in a note of gratitude. You "have your faults, as who has not?" but your virtues are unparalleled and transcendent, and I believe that you will prove to have given a shove to the practical thought of the next generation that will be amongst the greatest of its influences for good. All in the line of the English genius too, no wire-drawn French doctrines, and no German shop technicalities inflicted in an unerbittlich consequent manner, but everywhere the sense of the full concrete, and the air of freedom playing through all the joints of your argument. You have a tri-dimensional human heart, and to use your own metaphor, don't see different levels projected on one plane. In this last book you beautifully soften cocksureness by the penumbra of the outlines—in fact you're a trump and a jewel, and for human perception you beat Kipling, and for hitting off a thing with the right word, you are unique. Heaven bless and preserve you!—You are now an eccentric; perhaps 50 years hence you will figure as a classic! Your Samurai chapter is magnificent, though I find myself wondering what developments in the way of partisan politics those same Samurai would develop, when it came to questions of appointment and running this or that man in. That I believe to be human nature's ruling passion. Live long! and keep writing; and believe me, yours admiringly and sincerely,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry L. Higginson.

CAMBRIDGE, July 18 [1905].

Dear H.,—You asked me how rich I was getting by my own (as distinguished from your) exertions....

I find on reaching home today a letter from Longmans, Green & Co. with a check ... which I have mailed to your house in State Street....

This ought to please you slightly; but don't reply! Instead, think of the virtues of Roosevelt, either as permanent sovereign of this great country, or as President of Harvard University. I've been having a discussion with Fanny Morse about him, which has resulted in making me his faithful henchman for life, Fanny was so violent. Think of the mighty good-will of him, of his enjoyment of his post, of his power as a preacher, of the number of things to which he gives his attention, of the safety of his second thoughts, of the increased courage he is showing, and above all of the fact that he is an open, instead of an underground leader, whom the voters can control once in four years, when he runs away, whose heart is in the right place, who is an enemy of red tape and quibbling and everything that in general the word "politician" stands for. That significance of him in the popular mind is a great national asset, and it would be a shame to let it run to waste until it has done a lot more work for us. His ambitions are not selfish—he wants to do good only! Bless him—and damn all his detractors like you and F. M.![59]

Don't reply, but vote! Your affectionately

WM. JAMES.

To T. S. Perry.

CAMBRIDGE, Aug. 24, 1905.

Dear Thos!—You're a philosophe sans le savoir and, when you write your treatise against philosophy, you will be classed as the arch-metaphysician. Every philosopher (W. J., e.g.) pretends that all the others are metaphysicians against whom he is simply defending the rights of common sense. As for Nietzsche, the worst break of his I recall was in a posthumous article in one of the French reviews a few months back. In his high and mighty way he was laying down the law about all the European countries. Russia, he said, is "the only one that has any possible future—and that she owes to the strength of the principle of autocracy to which she alone remains faithful," Unfortunately one can't appeal to the principle of democracy to explain Japan's recent successes.

I am very glad you've done something about poor dear old John Fiske, and I should think that you would have no difficulty in swelling it up to the full "Beacon Biography" size. If you want an extra anecdote, you might tell how, when Chauncey Wright, Chas. Peirce, St. John Green, Warner and I appointed an evening to discuss the "Cosmic Philosophy," just out, J. F. went to sleep under our noses.

I hope that life as a farmer agrees with you, and that your "womenkind" wish nothing better than to be farmers' wives, daughters or other relatives. Unluckily we let our farm this summer; so I am here in Cambridge with Alice, both of us a prey to as bad an attack of grippe as the winter solstice ever brought forth. Today, the 10th day, I am weaker than any kitten. Don't ever let your farm! Affectionately,

W. J.

To Dickinson S. Miller.

CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 10, 1905.

Dear Miller,—W. R. Warren has just been here and says he has just seen you; the which precipitates me into a letter to you which has long hung fire. I hope that all goes well. You must be in a rather cheerful quarter of the City. Do you go home Sundays, or not? I hope that the work is congenial. How do you like your students as compared with those here? I reckon you get more out of your colleagues than you did here—barring of course der Einzige. We are all such old stories to each other that we say nothing. Santayana is the only [one] about whom we had any curiosity, and he has now quenched that. Perry and Holt have some ideas in reserve.... The fact is that the classroom exhausts our powers of speech. Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all the stuff I wrote last year—to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to others, if he has read, it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel trenches and hardly show our heads.

Santayana's book[60] is a great one, if the inclusion of opposites is a measure of greatness. I think it will probably be reckoned great by posterity. It has no rational foundation, being merely one man's way of viewing things: so much of experience admitted and no more, so much criticism and questioning admitted and no more. He is a paragon of Emersonianism.—declare your intuitions, though no other man share them; and the integrity with which he does it is as fine as it is rare. And his naturalism, materialism, Platonism, and atheism form a combination of which the centre of gravity is, I think, very deep. But there is something profoundly alienating in his unsympathetic tone, his "preciousness" and superciliousness. The book is Emerson's first rival and successor, but how different the reader's feeling! The same things in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive, expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great indraught; S. as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling spray outward over the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an "atomizer." ... I fear that the real originality of the book will be lost on nineteen-twentieths of the members of the Philosophical and Psychological Association!! The enemies of Harvard will find lots of blasphemous texts in him to injure us withal. But it is a great feather in our cap to harbor such an absolutely free expresser of individual convictions. But enough!

"Phil. 9" is going well. I think I lecture better than I ever did; in fact I know I do. But this professional evolution goes with an involution of all miscellaneous faculty. I am well, and efficient enough, but purposely going slow so as to keep efficient into the Palo Alto summer, which means that I have written nothing. I am pestered by doubts as to whether to put my resignation through this year, in spite of opposition, or to drag along another year or two. I think it is inertia against energy, energy in my case meaning being my own man absolutely. American philosophers, young and old, seem scratching where the wool is short. Important things are being published; but all of them too technical. The thing will never clear up satisfactorily till someone writes out its resultant in decent English....

The reader will have understood "the Palo Alto summer" to refer to the lectures to be delivered at Stanford University during the coming spring. The Stanford engagement was again in James's mind when he spoke, in the next letter, of "dreading the prospect of lecturing till mid-May."

To Dickinson S. Miller.

CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 6, 1905.

Dear Miller,— ...You seem to take radical empiricism more simply than I can. What I mean by it is the thesis that there is no fact "not actually experienced to be such." In other words, the concept of "being" or "fact" is not wider than or prior to the concept "content of experience"; and you can't talk of experiences being this or that, but only of things experienced as being this or that. But such a thesis would, it seems to me, if literally taken, force one to drop the notion that in point of fact one experience is ex another, so long as the ex-ness is not itself a "content" of experience. In the matter of two minds not having the same content, it seems to me that your view commits you to an assertion about their experiences; and such an assertion assumes a realm in which the experiences lie, which overlaps and surrounds the "content" of them. This, it seems to me, breaks down radical empiricism, which I hate to do; and I can't yet clearly see my way out of the quandary. I am much boggled and muddled; and the total upshot with me is to see that all the hoary errors and prejudices of man in matters philosophical are based on something pretty inevitable in the structure of our thinking, and to distrust summary executions by conviction of contradiction. I suspect your execution of being too summary; but I have copied the last paragraph of the sheets (which I return with heartiest thanks) for the extraordinarily neat statement....

I dread the prospect of lecturing till mid-May, but the wine being ordered, I must drink it. I dislike lecturing more and more. Have just definitely withdrawn my candidacy for the Sorbonne job, with great internal relief, and wish I could withdraw from the whole business, and get at writing.[61] Not a line of writing possible this year—except of course occasional note-making. All the things that one is really concerned with are too nice and fine to use in lectures. You remember the definition of T. H. Greene's student: "The universe is a thick complexus of intelligible relations." Yesterday I got my system similarly defined in an examination-book, by a student whom I appear to have converted to the view that "the Universe is a vague pulsating mass of next-to-next movement, always feeling its way along to a good purpose, or trying to." That is about as far as lectures can carry them. I particularly like the "trying to."

I wish I could have been at your recent discussion. I am getting impatient with the awful abstract rigmarole in which our American philosophers obscure the truth. It will be fatal. It revives the palmy days of Hegelianism. It means utter relaxation of intellectual duty, and God will smite it. If there's anything he hates, it is that kind of oozy writing.

I have just read Busse's book, in which I find a lot of reality by the way, but a pathetic waste of work on side issues—for against the Strong-Heymans view of things, it seems to me that he brings no solid objection whatever. Heymans's book is a wonder.[62] Good-bye, dear Miller. Come to us, if you can, as soon as your lectures are over.

Your affectionate

W. J.

To Dickinson S. Miller.

[Post-card]

CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 9. 1905.

"My idea of Algebra," says a non-mathematically-minded student, "is that it is a sort of form of low cunning."

W. J.

To Daniel Merriman.

CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 9, 1905.

No, dear Merriman, not "e'en for thy sake." After an unblemished record of declining to give addresses, successfully maintained for four years (I have certainly declined 100 in the past twelve-month), I am not going to break down now, for Abbot Academy, and go dishonored to my grave. It is better, as the "Bhagavat-Gita" says, to lead your own life, however bad, than to lead another's, however good. Emerson teaches the same doctrine, and I live by it as bad and congenial a life as I can. If there is anything that God despises more than a man who is constantly making speeches, it is another man who is constantly accepting invitations. What must he think, when they are both rolled into one? Get thee behind me, Merriman,—I 'm sure that your saintly partner would never have sent me such a request,—and believe me, as ever, fondly yours,

WM. JAMES.

To Miss Pauline Goldmark.

El Tovar,
Grand Canyon, Arizona, Jan. 3, 1906.

Dear Paolina,—I am breaking my journey by a day here, and it seems a good place from which to date my New Year's greeting to you. But we correspond so rarely that when it comes to the point of tracing actual words with the pen, the last impressions of one's day and the more permanent interest of one's life block the way for each other. I think, however, that a word about the Canyon may fitly take precedence. It certainly is equal to the brag; and, like so many of the more stupendous freaks of nature, seems at first-sight smaller and more manageable than one had supposed. But it grows in immensity as the eye penetrates it more intimately. It is so entirely alone in character, that one has no habits of association with "the likes" of it, and at first it seems a foreign curiosity; but already in this one day I am feeling myself grow nearer, and can well imagine that, with greater intimacy, it might become the passion of one's life—so far as "Nature" goes. The conditions have been unfavorable for intimate communion. Three degrees above zero, and a spring overcoat, prevent that forgetting of "self" which is said to be indispensable to absorption in Beauty. Moreover, I have kept upon the "rim," seeing the Canyon from several points some miles apart. I meant to go down, having but this day; but they couldn't send me or any one today; and I confess that, with my precipice-disliking soul, I was relieved, though it very likely would have proved less uncomfortable than I have been told. (I resolved to go, in order to be worthy of being your correspondent.) As Chas. Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by "circumstances beyond your control" from even trying to execute them. But if ever I get here in summer, I shall go straight down and live there. I'm sure that it is indispensable. But it is vain to waste descriptive words on the wondrous apparition, with its symphonies of architecture and of color. I have just been watching its peaks blush in the setting sun, and slowly lose their fire. Night nestling in the depths. Solemn, solemn! And a unity of design that makes it seem like an individual, an animated being. Good-night, old chasm!...

To Henry James.

Stanford University, Feb. 1, 1906.

Beloved H.,—Verily 'tis long since I have written to thee, but I have had many and mighty things to do, and lately many business letters to write, so I came not at it. Your last was your delightful reply to my remarks about your "third manner," wherein you said that you would consider your bald head dishonored if you ever came to pleasing me by what you wrote, so shocking was my taste.[63] Well! only write for me, and leave the question of pleasing open! I have to admit that in "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove," you have succeeded in getting there after a fashion, in spite of the perversity of the method and its longness, which I am not the only one to deplore.

But enough! let me tell you of my own fortunes!

I got here (after five pestilentially close-aired days in the train, and one entrancing one off at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado) on the 8th, and have now given nine lectures, to 300 enrolled students and about 150 visitors, partly colleagues. I take great pains, prepare a printed syllabus, very fully; and really feel for the first time in my life, as if I were lecturing well. High time, after 30 years of practice! It earns me $5000, if I can keep it up till May 27th; but apart from that, I think it is a bad way of expending energy. I ought to be writing my everlastingly postponed book, which this job again absolutely adjourns. I can't write a line of it while doing this other thing. (A propos to which, I got a telegram from Eliot this A.M., asking if I would be Harvard Professor for the first half of next year at the University of Berlin. I had no difficulty in declining that, but I probably shall not decline Paris, if they offer it to me year after next.) I am expecting Alice to arrive in a fortnight. I have got a very decent little second story, just enough for the two of us, or rather amply enough, sunny, good fire-place, bathroom, little kitchen, etc., on one of the three residential streets of the University land, and with a boarding-house for meals just opposite, we shall have a sort of honeymoon picnic time. And, sooth to say, Alice must need the simplification....

You've seen this wonderful spot, so I needn't describe it. It is really a miracle; and so simple the life and so benign the elements, that for a young ambitious professor who wishes to leave his mark on Pacific civilization while it is most plastic, or for any one who wants to teach and work under the most perfect conditions for eight or nine months, and who is able to get to the East, or Europe, for the remaining three, I can't imagine anything finer. It is Utopian. Perfection of weather. Cold nights, though above freezing. Fire pleasant until 10 o'clock A.M., then unpleasant. In short, the "simple life" with all the essential higher elements thrown in as communal possessions. The drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum—the historic silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen—and the social insipidity. I'm glad I came, and with God's blessing I may pull through. One calendar month is over, anyway. Do you know aught of G. K. Chesterton? I've just read his "Heretics." A tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradox. Wells's "Kipps" is good. Good-bye. Of course you 're breathing the fog of London while I am bathed in warmest lucency. Keep well. Your loving,

W. J.

To Theodore Flournoy.

Stanford University, Feb. 9, 1906.

Dear Flournoy.—Your post-card of Jan. 22nd arrives and reminds me how little I have communicated with you during the past twelve months....

Let me begin by congratulating Mlle. Alice, but more particularly Mr. Werner, on the engagement which you announce. Surely she is a splendid prize for anyone to capture. I hope that it has been a romantic love-affair, and will remain so to the end. May her paternal and maternal example be the model which their married life will follow! They could find no better model. You do not tell the day of the wedding—probably it is not yet appointed.

Yes! [Richard] Hodgson's death was ultra-sudden. He fell dead while playing a violent game of "hand-ball." He was tremendously athletic and had said to a friend only a week before that he thought he could reasonably count on twenty-five years more of life. None of his work was finished, vast materials amassed, which no one can ever get acquainted with as he had gradually got acquainted; so now good-bye forever to at least two unusually solid and instructive books which he would have soon begun to write on "psychic" subjects. As a man, Hodgson was splendid, a real man; as an investigator, it is my private impression that he lately got into a sort of obsession about Mrs. Piper, cared too little for other clues, and continued working with her when all the sides of her mediumship were amply exhibited. I suspect that our American Branch of the S.P.R. will have to dissolve this year, for lack of a competent secretary. Hodgson was our only worker, except Hyslop, and he is engaged in founding an "Institute" of his own, which will employ more popular methods. To tell the truth, I 'm rather glad of the prospect of the Branch ending, for the Piper-investigation—and nothing else—had begun to bore me to extinction....

To change the subject—you ought to see this extraordinary little University. It was founded only fourteen years ago in the absolute wilderness, by a pair of rich Californians named Stanford, as a memorial to their only child, a son who died at 16. Endowed with I know not how many square miles of land, which some day will come into the market and yield a big income, it has already funds that yield $750,000 yearly, and buildings, of really beautiful architecture, that have been paid for out of income, and have cost over $5,000,000. (I mention the cost to let you see that they must be solid.) There are now 1500 students of both sexes, who pay nothing for tuition, and a town of 15,000 inhabitants has grown up a mile away, beyond the gates. The landscape is exquisite and classical, San Francisco only an hour and a quarter away by train; the climate is one of the most perfect in the world, life is absolutely simple, no one being rich, servants almost unattainable (most of the house-work being done by students who come in at odd hours), many of them Japanese, and the professors' wives, I fear, having in great measure to do their own cooking. No social excesses or complications therefore. In fact, nothing but essentials, and all the essentials. Fine music, for example, every afternoon, in the Church of the University. There couldn't be imagined a better environment for an intellectual man to teach and work in, for eight or nine months in the year, if he were then free to spend three or four months in the crowded centres of civilization—for the social insipidity is great here, and the historic vacuum and silence appalling, and one ought to be free to change.

Unfortunately the authorities of the University seem not to be gifted with imagination enough to see its proper rÔle. Its geographical environment and material basis being unique, they ought to aim at unique quality all through, and get sommitÉs to come here to work and teach, by offering large stipends. They might, I think, thus easily build up something very distinguished. Instead of which, they pay small sums to young men who chafe at not being able to travel, and whose wives get worn out with domestic drudgery. The whole thing might be Utopian; it is only half-Utopian. A characteristic American affair! But the half-success is great enough to make one see the great advantages that come to this country from encouraging public-spirited millionaires to indulge their freaks, however eccentric. In what the Stanfords have already done, there is an assured potentiality of great things of some sort for all future time. My coming here is an exception. They have had psychology well represented from the first by Frank Angell and Miss Martin; but no philosophy except for a year at a time. I start a new rÉgime—next year they will have two good professors.

I lecture three times a week to 400 listeners, printing a syllabus daily, and making them read Paulsen's textbook for examinations. I find it hard work,[64] and only pray that I may have strength to run till June without collapsing. The students, though rustic, are very earnest and wholesome.

I am pleased, but also amused, by what you say of Woodbridge's Journal: "la palme est maintenant À l'AmÉrique." It is true that a lot of youngsters in that Journal are doing some real thinking, but of all the bad writing that the world has seen, I think that our American writing is getting to be the worst. X——'s ideas have unchained formlessness of expression that beats the bad writing of the Hegelian epoch in Germany. I can hardly believe you sincere when you praise that journal as you do. I am so busy teaching that I do no writing and but little reading this year. I have declined to go to Paris next year, and also declined an invitation to Berlin, as "International Exchange" [Professor]. The year after, if asked, I may go to Paris—but never to Berlin. We have had Ostwald, a most delightful human Erscheinung, as international exchange at Harvard this year. But I don't believe in the system....

To F. C. S. Schiller.

Hotel Del Monte,
Monterey, Cal., Apr. 7, 1906.

...What I really want to write about is Papini, the concluding chapter of his "Crepuscolo dei Filosofi," and the February number of the "Leonardo." Likewise Dewey's "Beliefs and Realities," in the "Philosophical Review" for March. I must be very damp powder, slow to burn, and I must be terribly respectful of other people, for I confess that it is only after reading these things (in spite of all you have written to the same effect, and in spite of your tone of announcing judgment to a sinful world), that I seem to have grasped the full import for life and regeneration, the great perspective of the programme, and the renovating character for all things, of Humanism; and the outwornness as of a scarecrow's garments, simulating life by flapping in the wind of nightfall, of all intellectualism, and the blindness and deadness of all who worship intellectualist idols, the Royces and Taylors, and, worse than all, their followers, who, with no inward excuse of nature (being too unoriginal really to prefer anything), just blunder on to the wrong scent, when it is so easy to catch the right one, and then stick to it with the fidelity of inorganic matter. Ha! ha! would that I were young again with this inspiration! Papini is a jewel! To think of that little Dago putting himself ahead of every one of us (even of you, with his Uomo-Dio) at a single stride. And what a writer! and what fecundity! and what courage (careless of nicknames, for it is so easy to call him now the Cyrano de Bergerac of Philosophy)! and what humor and what truth! Dewey's powerful stuff seems also to ring the death-knell of a sentenced world. Yet none of them will see it—Taylor will still write his refutations, etc., etc., when the living world will all be drifting after us. It is queer to be assisting at the Éclosion of a great new mental epoch, life, religion, and philosophy in one—I wish I didn't have to lecture, so that I might bear some part of the burden of writing it all out, as we must do, pushing it into all sort of details. But I must for one year longer. We don't get back till June, but pray tell Wells (whose address fehlt mir) to make our house his headquarters if he gets to Boston and finds it the least convenient to do so. Our boys will hug him to their bosoms. Ever thine,

W. J.

The San Francisco earthquake occurred at about five o'clock in the morning on April 18. Rumors of the destruction wrought in the city reached Stanford within a couple of hours and were easily credited, for buildings had been shaken down at Stanford. Miss L. J. Martin, a member of the philosophical department, was thrown into great anxiety about relatives of hers who were in the city, and James offered to accompany her in a search for them, and left Stanford with her by an early morning train. He also promised Mrs. Wm. F. Snow to try to get her news of her husband. Miss Martin found her relatives, and James met Dr. Snow early in the afternoon, and then spent several hours in wandering about the stricken city. He subsequently wrote an account of the disaster, which may be found in "Memories and Studies."[65]

To Miss Frances R. Morse.

Stanford University, Apr. 22, 1906.

Dearest Fanny,—Three letters from you and nary one from us in all these weeks! Well, I have been heavily burdened, and although disposed to write, have kept postponing; and with Alice—cooking, washing dishes and doing housework, as well as keeping up a large social life—it has been very much the same. All is now over, since the earthquake; I mean that lectures and syllabuses are called off, and no more exams to be held ("ill-wind," etc.), so one can write. We shall get East again as soon as we can manage it, and tell you face to face. We can now pose as experts on Earthquakes—pardon the egotistic form of talking about the latter, but it makes it more real. The last thing Bakewell said to me, while I was leaving Cambridge, was: "I hope they'll treat you to a little bit of an earthquake while you're there. It's a pity you shouldn't have that local experience." Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was, "Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an entity that had been waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying, "Now, go it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by a will, so vicious was the temper displayed—everything down, in the room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the dreadful news from San Francisco.

I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that she must see what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service.

But you will know all these details by the papers better than I know them now, before this reaches you, and in three weeks we shall be back.

I am very glad that Jim's [Putnam] lectures went off so well. He wrote me himself a good letter—won't you, by the way, send him this one as a partial answer?—and his syllabus was first-rate and the stuff must have been helpful. It is jolly to think of both him and Marian really getting off together to enjoy themselves! But between Vesuvius and San Francisco enjoyment has small elbow-room. Love to your mother, dearest Fanny, to Mary and the men folks, from us both. Your ever affectionate,

W. J.

A few days after the earthquake, train-service from Stanford to the East was reËstablished and James and his wife returned to Cambridge. The reader will infer correctly from the next letter that Henry James (and William James, Jr., who was staying with him in Rye) had been in great anxiety and had been by no means reassured by the brief cablegram which was the only personal communication that it was possible to send them during the days immediately following the disaster.

CAMBRIDGE, May 9, 1906.

Dearest Brother and Son,—Your cablegram of response was duly received, and we have been also "joyous" in the thought of your being together. I knew, of course, Henry, that you would be solicitous about us in the earthquake, but didn't reckon at all on the extremity of your anguish as evinced by your frequent cablegrams home, and finally by the letter to Harry which arrived a couple of days ago and told how you were unable to settle down to any other occupation, the thought of our mangled forms, hollow eyes, starving bodies, minds insane with fear, haunting you so. We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety on your part, I say, and so never thought of cabling you direct, as we might well have done from Oakland on the day we left, namely April 27th. I much regret this callousness on our part. For all the anguish was yours; and in general this experience only rubs in what I have always known, that in battles, sieges and other great calamities, the pathos and agony is in general solely felt by those at a distance; and although physical pain is suffered most by its immediate victims, those at the scene of action have no sentimental suffering whatever. Everyone at San Francisco seemed in a good hearty frame of mind; there was work for every moment of the day and a kind of uplift in the sense of a "common lot" that took away the sense of loneliness that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to the more usual kind of misfortune that may befall a man. But it was a queer sight, on our journey through the City on the 26th (eight days after the disaster), to see the inmates of the houses of the quarter left standing, all cooking their dinners at little brick camp-fires in the middle of the streets, the chimneys being condemned. If such a disaster had to happen, somehow it couldn't have chosen a better place than San Francisco (where everyone knew about camping, and was familiar with the creation of civilizations out of the bare ground), and at five-thirty in the morning, when few fires were lighted and everyone, after a good sleep, was in bed. Later, there would have been great loss of life in the streets, and the more numerous foci of conflagration would have burned the city in one day instead of four, and made things vastly worse.

In general you may be sure that when any disaster befalls our country it will be you only who are wringing of hands, and we who are smiling with "interest or laughing with gleeful excitement." I didn't hear one pathetic word uttered at the scene of disaster, though of course the crop of "nervous wrecks" is very likely to come in a month or so.

Although we have been home six days, such has been the stream of broken occupations, people to see, and small urgent jobs to attend to, that I have written no letter till now. Today, one sees more clearly and begins to rest. "Home" looks extraordinarily pleasant, and though damp and chilly, it is the divine budding moment of the year. Not, however, the lustrous light and sky of Stanford University....

I have just read your paper on Boston in the "North American Review." I am glad you threw away the scabbard and made your critical remarks so straight. What you say about "pay" here being the easily won "salve" for privations, in view of which we cease to "mind" them, is as true as it is strikingly pat. Les intellectuels, wedged between the millionaires and the handworkers, are the really pinched class here. They feel the frustrations and they can't get the salve. My attainment of so much pay in the past few years brings home to me what an all-benumbing salve it is. That whole article is of your best. We long to hear from W., Jr. No word yet. Your ever loving,

W. J.

In "The Energies of Men" there is a long quotation from an unnamed European correspondent who had been subjecting himself to Yoga disciplinary exercise. What follows is a comment written upon the first receipt of the report quoted in the "Energies."

To W. Lutoslawski.

CAMBRIDGE, May 6, 1906.

...Your long and beautiful letter about Yoga, etc., greets me on my return from California. It is a most precious human document, and some day, along with that sketch of your religious evolution and other shorter letters of yours, it must see the light of day. What strikes me first in it is the evidence of improved moral "tone"—a calm, firm, sustained joyousness, hard to describe, and striking a new note in your epistles—which is already a convincing argument of the genuineness of the improvement wrought in you by Yoga practices....

You are mistaken about my having tried Yoga discipline—I never meant to suggest that. I have read several books (A. B., by the way, used to be a student of mine, but in spite of many noble qualities, he always had an unbalanced mind—obsessed by certain morbid ideas, etc.), and in the slightest possible way tried breathing exercises. These go terribly against the grain with me, are extremely disagreeable, and, even when tried this winter (somewhat perseveringly), to put myself asleep, after lying awake at night, failed to have any soporific effect. What impresses me most in your narrative is the obstinate strength of will shown by yourself and your chela in your methodical abstentions and exercises. When could I hope for such will-power? I find, when my general energy is in Anspruch genommen by hard lecturing and other professional work, that then particularly what little ascetic energy I have has to be remitted, because the exertion of inhibitory and stimulative will required increases my general fatigue instead of "tonifying" me.

But your sober experience gives me new hopes. Your whole narrative suggests in me the wonder whether the Yoga discipline may not be, after all, in all its phases, simply a methodical way of waking up deeper levels of will-power than are habitually used, and thereby increasing the individual's vital tone and energy. I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. Pierre Janet discussed lately some cases of pathological impulsion or obsession in what he has called the "psychasthenic" type of individual, bulimia, exaggerated walking, morbid love of feeling pain, and explains the phenomenon as based on the underlying sentiment d'incomplÉtude, as he calls it, or sentiment de l'irrÉel with which these patients are habitually afflicted, and which they find is abolished by the violent appeal to some exaggerated activity or other, discovered accidentally perhaps, and then used habitually. I was reminded of his article in reading your descriptions and prescriptions. May the Yoga practices not be, after all, methods of getting at our deeper functional levels? And thus only be substitutes for entirely different crises that may occur in other individuals, religious crises, indignation-crises, love-crises, etc.?

What you say of diet is in striking accordance with the views lately made popular by Horace Fletcher—I dare say you have heard of them. You see I am trying to generalize the Yoga idea, and redeem it from the pretension that, for example, there is something intrinsically holy in the various grotesque postures of Hatha Yoga. I have spoken with various Hindus, particularly with three last winter, one a Yogi and apostle of Vedanta; one a "Christian" of scientific training; one a Bramo-Somaj professor. The former made great claims of increase of "power," but admitted that those who had it could in no way demonstrate it ad oculos, to outsiders. The other two both said that Yoga was less and less frequently practised by the more intellectual, and that the old-fashioned Guru was becoming quite a rarity.

I believe with you, fully, that the so-called "normal man" of commerce, so to speak, the healthy philistine, is a mere extract from the potentially realizable individual whom he represents, and that we all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. The practical problem is "how to get at them." And the answer varies with the individual. Most of us never can, or never do get at them. You have indubitably got at your own deeper levels by the Yoga methods. I hope that what you have gained will never again be lost to you. You must keep there! My deeper levels seem very hard to find—I am so rebellious at all formal and prescriptive methods—a dry and bony individual, repelling fusion, and avoiding voluntary exertion. No matter, art is long! and qui vivra verra. I shall try fasting and again try breathing—discovering perhaps some individual rhythm that is more tolerable....

To John Jay Chapman.

CAMBRIDGE, May 18, 1906.

Dear Old Jack C.,—Having this minute come into the possession of a new type-writer, what can I do better than express my pride in the same by writing to you?[66]

I spent last night at George Dorr's and he read me several letters from you, telling me also of your visit, and of how well you seemed. For years past I have been on the point of writing to you to assure [you] of my continued love and to express my commiseration for your poor wife, who has had so long to bear the brunt of your temper—you see I have been there already and I know how one's irritability is exasperated by conditions of nervous prostration—but now I can write and congratulate you on having recovered, temper and all. (As I write, it bethinks me that in a previous letter I have made identical jokes about your temper which, I fear, will give Mrs. Chapman a very low opinion of my humoristic resources, and in sooth they are small; but we are as God makes us and must not try to be anything else, so pray condone the silliness and let it pass.) The main thing is that you seem practically to have recovered, in spite of everything; and I am heartily glad.

I too am well enough for all practical purposes, but I have to go slow and not try to do too many things in a day. Simplification of life and consciousness I find to be the great thing, but a hard thing to compass when one lives in city conditions. How our dear Sarah Whitman lived in the sort of railroad station she made of her life—I confess it's a mystery to me. If I lived at a place called Barrytown, it would probably go better—don't you ever go back to New York to live!

Alice and I had a jovial time at sweet little Stanford University. It was the simple life in the best sense of the term. I am glad for once to have been part of the working machine of California, and a pretty deep part too, as it afterwards turned out. The earthquake also was a memorable bit of experience, and altogether we have found it mind-enlarging and are very glad we ben there. But the whole intermediate West is awful—a sort of penal doom to have to live there; and in general the result with me of having lived 65 years in America is to make me feel as if I had at least bought the right to a certain capriciousness, and were free now to live for the remainder of my days wherever I prefer and can make my wife and children consent—it is more likely to be in rural than in urban surroundings, and in the maturer than in the rawrer parts of the world. But the first thing is to get out of the treadmill of teaching, which I hate and shall resign from next year. After that, I can use my small available store of energy in writing, which is not only a much more economical way of working it, but more satisfactory in point of quality, and more lucrative as well.

Now, J. C., when are you going to get at writing again? The world is hungry for your wares. No one touches certain deep notes of moral truth as you do, and your humor is kÖstlich and impayable. You ought to join the band of "pragmatistic" or "humanistic" philosophers. I almost fear that Barrytown may not yet have begun to be disturbed by the rumor of their achievements, the which are of the greatest, and seriously I du think that the world of thought is on the eve of a renovation no less important than that contributed by Locke. The leaders of the new movement are Dewey, Schiller of Oxford, in a sense Bergson of Paris, a young Florentine named Papini, and last and least worthy, W. J. H. G. Wells ought to be counted in, and if I mistake not G. K. Chesterton as well.[67] I hope you know and love the last-named writer, who seems to me a great teller of the truth. His systematic preference for contradictions and paradoxical forms of statement seems to me a mannerism somewhat to be regretted in so wealthy a mind; but that is a blemish from which some of our very greatest intellects are not altogether free—the philosopher of Barrytown himself being not wholly exempt. Join us, O Jack, and in the historic and perspective sense your fame will be secure. All future Histories of Philosophy will print your name.

But although my love for you is not exhausted, my type-writing energy is. It communicates stiffness and cramps, both to the body and the mind. Nevertheless I think I have been doing pretty well for a first attempt, don't you? If you return me a good long letter telling me more particularly about the process of your recovery, I will write again, even if I have to take a pen to do it, and in any case I will do it much better than this time.

Believe me, dear old J. C., with hearty affection and delight at your recovery—all these months I have been on the brink of writing to find out how you were—and with very best regards to your wife, whom some day I wish we may be permitted to know better. Yours very truly,

WM. JAMES.

Everyone dead! Hodgson, Shaler, James Peirce this winter—to go no further afield! Resserrons les rangs!

To Henry James.

CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 10, 1906.

Dearest H.,—I got back from the Adirondacks, where I had spent a fortnight, the night before last, and in three or four hours Alice, Aleck and I will be spinning towards Chocorua, it being now five A.M. Elly [Temple] Hunter will join us, with Grenville, in a few days; but for the most part, thank Heaven, we shall be alone till the end of the month. I found two letters from you awaiting me, and two from Bill. They all breathed a spirit of happiness, and brought a waft of the beautiful European summer with them. It has been a beautiful summer here too; and now, sad to say, it is counting the last beads of its chaplet of hot days out—the hot days which are really the absolutely friendly ones to man—you wish they would get cooler when you have them, and when they are departed, you wish you could have their exquisite gentleness again. I have just been reading in the volume by Richard Jefferies called the "Life of the Fields" a wonderful rhapsody, "The Pageant of Summer." It needs to be read twice over and very attentively, being nothing but an enumeration of all the details visible in the corner of an old field with a hedge and ditch. But rightly taken in, it is probably the highest flight of human genius in the direction of nature-worship. I don't see why it should not count as an immortal thing. You missed it, when here, in not getting to Keene Valley, where I have just been, and of which the sylvan beauty, especially by moonlight, is probably unlike aught that Europe has to show. Imperishable freshness!...

This is definitely my last year of lecturing, but I wish it were my first of non-lecturing. Simplification of the field of duties I find more and more to be the summum bonum for me; and I live in apprehension lest the Avenger should cut me off before I get my message out. Not that the message is particularly needed by the human race, which can live along perfectly well without any one philosopher; but objectively I hate to leave the volumes I have already published without their logical complement. It is an esthetic tragedy to have a bridge begun, and stopped in the middle of an arch.

But I hear Alice stirring upstairs, so I must go up and finish packing. I hope that you and W. J., Jr., will again form a harmonious combination. I hope also that he will stop painting for a time. He will do all the better, when he gets home, for having had a fallow interval.

Good-bye! and my blessing upon both of you. Your ever loving,

W. J.

To H. G. Wells.

CHOCORUA, Sept. 11, 1906.

Dear Mr. Wells,—I've read your "Two Studies in Disappointment" in "Harper's Weekly," and must thank you from the bottom of my heart. Rem acu tetegisti! Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is the sinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible feature, of our U. S. civilization. How you hit upon it so neatly and singled it out so truly (and talked of it so tactfully!) God only knows: He evidently created you to do such things! I never heard of the MacQueen case before, but I've known of plenty of others. When the ordinary American hears of them, instead of the idealist within him beginning to "see red" with the higher indignation, instead of the spirit of English history growing alive in his breast, he begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency. "It's probably right enough"; "Scoundrelly, as you say," but understandable, "from the point of view of parties interested"—but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease. Hit it hard! Your book must have a great effect. Do you remember the glorious remarks about success in Chesterton's "Heretics"? You will undoubtedly have written the medicinal book about America. And what good humor! and what tact! Sincerely yours,

WM. JAMES.

To Miss Theodora Sedgwick.

CHOCORUA, Sept. 13, 1906.

Dear Theodora,—Here we are in this sweet delicate little place, after a pretty agitated summer, and the quiet seems very nice. Likewise the stillness. I have thought often of you, and almost written; but there never seemed exactly to be time or place for it, so I let the sally of the heart to-you-ward suffice. A week ago, I spent a night with H. L. Higginson, whom I found all alone at his house by the Lake, and he told me your improvement had been continuous and great, which I heartily hope has really been the case. I don't see why it should not have been the case, under such delightful conditions. What good things friends are! And what better thing than lend it, can one do with one's house? I was struck by Henry Higginson's high level of mental tension, so to call it, which made him talk, incessantly and passionately about one subject after another, never running dry, and reminding me more of myself when I was twenty years old. It isn't so much a man's eminence of elementary faculties that pulls him through. They may be rare, and he do nothing. It is the steam pressure to the square inch behind that moves the machine. The amount of that is what makes the great difference between us. Henry has it high. Previous to seeing him I had spent ten days in beautiful Keene Valley, dividing them between the two ends. The St. Hubert's end is, I verily believe, one of the most beautiful things in this beautiful world—too dissimilar to anything in Europe to be compared therewith, and consequently able to stand on its merits all alone. But the great [forest] fire of four years ago came to the very edge of wiping it out! And any year it may go.

I also had a delightful week all alone on the Maine Coast, among the islands.

Back here, one is oppressed by sadness at the amount of work waiting to be done on the place and no one to be hired to do it. The entire meaning and essence of "land" is something to be worked over—even if it be only a wood-lot, it must be kept trimmed and cleaned. And for one who can work and who likes work with his arms and hands, there is nothing so delightful as a piece of land to work over—it responds to every hour you give it, and smiles with the "improvement" year by year. I neither can work now, nor do I like it, so an irremediable bad conscience afflicts my ownership of this place. With Cambridge as headquarters for August, and a little lot of land there, I think I could almost be ready to give up this place, and trust to the luck of hotels, and other opportunities of rustication without responsibility. But perhaps we can get this place [taken care of?] some day!

I don't know how much you read. I've taken great pleasure this summer in Bielshowski's "Life of Goethe" (a wonderful piece of art) and in Birukoff's "Life of Tolstoy."

Alice is very well and happy in the stillness here. Elly Hunter is coming this evening, tomorrow the Merrimans for a day, and then Mrs. Hodder till the end of the month.

Faithful love from both of us, dear Theodora. Your affectionate

W. J.

To his Daughter.

CAMBRIDGE, Jan. 20, 1907, 6.15 P.M.

Sweet Peglein,—Just before tea! and your Grandam, Mar, and I going to hear the Revd. Percy Grant in the College chapel just after. We are getting to be great church-goers. 'T will have to be Crothers next. He, sweet man, is staying with the Brookses. After him, the Christian Science Church, and after that the deluge!

I have spent all day preparing next Tuesday's lecture, which is my last before a class in Harvard University, so help me God amen! I am almost afraid at so much freedom. Three quarters of an hour ago Aleck and I went for a walk in Somerville; warm, young moon, bare trees, clearing in the west, stars out, old-fashioned streets, not sordid—a beautiful walk. Last night to Bernard Shaw's ex-quis-ite play of "CÆsar and Cleopatra"—exquisitely acted too, by F. Robertson and Maxine Elliot's sister Gert. Your Mar will have told you that, after these weeks of persistent labor, culminating in New York, I am going to take sanctuary on Saturday the 2nd of Feb. in your arms at Bryn Mawr. I do not want, wish, or desire to "talk" to the crowd, but your mother pushing so, if you and the philosophy club also pull, I mean pull hard, Jimmy[68] will try to articulate something not too technical. But it will have to be, if ever, on that Saturday night. It will also have to be very short; and the less of a "reception," the better, after it.

Your two last letters were tiptop. I never seen such growth!

I go to N. Y., to be at the Harvard Club, on Monday the 28th. KÜhnemann left yesterday. A most dear man. Your loving

Dad.

To Henry James and William James, Jr.

CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 14, 1907.

Dear Brother and Son,—I dare say that you will be together in Paris when you get this, but I address it to Lamb House all the same. You twain are more "blessed" than I, in the way of correspondence this winter, for you give more than you receive, Bill's letters being as remarkable for wit and humor as Henry's are for copiousness, considering that the market value of what he either writes or types is so many shillings a word. When I write other things, I find it almost impossible to write letters. I've been at it stiddy, however, for three days, since my return from New York, finding, as I did, a great stack of correspondence to attend to. The first impression of New York, if you stay there not more than 36 hours, which has been my limit for twenty years past, is one of repulsion at the clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions. But this time, installed as I was at the Harvard Club (44th St.) in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated mit, and found it simply magnificent. I'm surprised at you, Henry, not having been more enthusiastic, but perhaps that superbly powerful and beautiful subway was not opened when you were there. It is an entirely new New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the lightness withal, as if there was nothing that was not easy, and the great pulses and bounds of progress, so many in directions all simultaneous that the coÖrdination is indefinitely future, give a kind of drumming background of life that I never felt before. I'm sure that once in that movement, and at home, all other places would seem insipid. I observe that your book,—"The American Scene,"—dear H., is just out. I must get it and devour again the chapters relative to New York. On my last night, I dined with Norman Hapgood, along with men who were successfully and happily in the vibration. H. and his most winning-faced young partner, Collier, Jerome, Peter Dunne, F. M. Colby, and Mark Twain. (The latter, poor man, is only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he's a dear little genius all the same.) I got such an impression of easy efficiency in the midst of their bewildering conditions of speed and complexity of adjustment. Jerome, particularly, with the world's eyes on his court-room, in the very crux of the Thaw trial, as if he had nothing serious to do. Balzac ought to come to life again. His Rastignac imagination sketched the possibility of it long ago. I lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted, out, every day of my stay, vibrated between 44th St., seldom going lower, and 149th, with Columbia University at 116th as my chief relay station, the magnificent space-devouring Subway roaring me back and forth, lecturing to a thousand daily,[69] and having four separate dinners at the Columbia Faculty Club, where colleagues severally compassed me about, many of them being old students of mine, wagged their tongues at me and made me explain.[70] It was certainly the high tide of my existence, so far as energizing and being "recognized" were concerned, but I took it all very "easy" and am hardly a bit tired. Total abstinence from every stimulant whatever is the one condition of living at a rapid pace. I am now going whack at the writing of the rest of the lectures, which will be more original and (I believe) important than my previous works....

To Moorfield Storey.

CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 21, 1907.

Dear Moorfield,—Your letter of three weeks ago has inadvertently lain unnoticed—not because it didn't do me good, but because I went to New York for a fortnight, and since coming home have been too druv to pay any tributes to friendship. I haven't got many letters either of condolence or congratulation on my retirement,—which, by the way, doesn't take place till the end of the year,—the papers have railroaded me out too soon.[71] But I confess that the thought is sweet to me of being able to hear the College bell ring without any tendency to "move" in consequence, and of seeing the last Thursday in September go by, and remaining in the country careless of what becomes of its youth. It's the harness and the hours that are so galling! I expect to shed truths in dazzling profusion on the world for many years.

As for you, retire too! Let you, Eliot, Roosevelt and me, first relax; then take to landscape painting, which has a very soothing effect; then write out all the truths which a long life of intimacy with mankind has recommended to each of us as most useful. I think we can use the ebb tide of our energies best in that way. I'm sure that your contributions would be the most useful of all. Affectionately yours,

Wm. James.

To Theodore Flournoy.

CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 26, 1907.

Dear Flournoy,—Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me really happy for at least twenty-four hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves—you write about me. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about himself, when you want to talk about yourself." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagnÉ." It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it, and I am certain that it is your philosophy. Have you read Papini's article in the February "Leonardo"? That seems to me really splendid. You say that my ideas have formed the real centre de ralliment of the pragmatist tendencies. To me it is the youthful and empanachÉ Papini who has best put himself at the centre of equilibrium whence all the motor tendencies start. He (and Schiller) has given me great confidence and courage. I shall dedicate my book, however, to the memory of J. S. Mill.

I hope that you are careful to distinguish in my own work between the pragmatism and the "radical empiricism" (Conception de Conscience,[72] etc.) which to my own mind have no necessary connexion with each other. My first proofs came in this morning, along with your letter, and the little book ought to be out by the first of June. You shall have a very early copy. It is exceedingly untechnical, and I can't help suspecting that it will make a real impression. MÜnsterberg, who hitherto has been rather pooh-poohing my thought, now, after reading the lecture on truth which I sent you a while ago, says I seem to be ignorant that Kant ever wrote, Kant having already said all that I say. I regard this as a very good symptom. The third stage of opinion about a new idea, already arrived: 1st: absurd! 2nd: trivial! 3rd: we discovered it! I don't suppose you mean to print these lectures of yours, but I wish you would. If you would translate my lectures, what could make me happier? But, as I said apropos of the "Varieties," I hate to think of you doing that drudgery when you might be formulating your own ideas. But, in one way or the other, I hope you will join in the great strategic combination against the forces of rationalism and bad abstractionism! A good coup de collier all round, and I verily believe that a new philosophic movement will begin....

I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The 1st function is the essential one, officially considered. The 2nd is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only meant to write a line! Love to you all from

W. J.

To Charles A. Strong.

CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 9, 1907.

Dear Strong,—Your tightly woven little letter reached me this A.M., 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.