The Letters of William James Volume I Part 19

_To Charles Renouvier._

KEENE VALLEY, _Aug. 5, 1883_ ADIRONDACKS.

MY DEAR MONSIEUR RENOUVIER,--My silence has been so protracted that I fear you must have wondered what its reasons could be. Only the old ones!--much to do, and little power to do it, obliging procrastination.

You will doubtless have heard from the Pillons of my safe return home. I have spent the interval in the house of my mother-in-law in Cambridge, trying to do some work in the way of psychologic writing before the fatal day should arrive when the College bell, summoning _me_ as well as my colleagues to the lecture-room, should make literary work almost impossible. Although my bodily condition, thanks to my winter abroad, has been better than in many years at a corresponding period, what I succeeded in accomplis.h.i.+ng was well-nigh zero. I floundered round in the mora.s.ses of the theory of cognition,--the Object and the Ego,--tore up almost each day what I had written the day before, and although I am inwardly, of course, more aware than I was before of where the difficulties of the subject lie, outwardly I have hardly any ma.n.u.script to show for my pains. Your unparalleled literary fecundity is a perfect wonder to me. You should return pious thanks to the one or many G.o.ds who had a hand in your production, not only for endowing you with so clear a head, but for giving you so admirable a working temperament. The most rapid piece of literary work I ever did was completed ten days ago, and sent to "Mind," where it will doubtless soon appear. I had promised to give three lectures at a rather absurd little "Summer School of Philosophy," which has flourished for four or five years past in the little town of Concord near Boston, and which has an audience of from twenty to fifty persons, including the lecturers themselves; and, finding at the last moment that I could do nothing with my much meditated subject of the Object and the Ego, I turned round and lectured "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,"[74] and wrote the substance of the lectures out immediately after giving them--the whole occupying six days. I hope you may read the paper some time and approve it--though it is out of the current of your own favorite topics and consequently hardly a proper candidate for the honours of translation in the "Critique."

I understand now why no really good cla.s.sic manual of psychology exists; why all that do exist only treat of particular points and chapters with any thoroughness. It is impossible to write one at present, so infinitely more numerous are the difficulties of the task than the means of their solution. Every chapter bristles with obstructions that refer one to the next ten years of work for their mitigation.

With all this I have done very little consecutive reading. I have not yet got at your historic survey in the "Critique Religieuse," for which my brain nevertheless itches. But I have read your articles apropos of Fouillee, and found them--the latest one especially--admirable for clearness and completeness of statement. Surely nothing like them has ever been written--no such stripping of the question down to its naked essentials. Those who, like Fouillee, have the intuition of the Absolute Unity, will of course not profit by them or anything else. Why can all others view their own beliefs as _possibly_ only hypotheses--_they_ only not? Why does the Absolute Unity make its votaries so much more _conceited_ at having attained it, than any other supposed truth does?

This inner sense of superiority to all antagonists gives Fouillee his _fougue_ and adds to his cleverness, and no doubt increases immensely the effectiveness of his writing over the average reader's mind. But it also makes him careless and liable to overshoot the mark.

I have just been interrupted by a visit from Noah Porter, D.D., President of Yale College, whose bulky work on "The Human Intellect" you may have in your library, possibly. An American college president is a very peculiar type of character, partly man of business, partly diplomatist, partly clergyman, and partly professor of metaphysics, armed with great authority and influence if his college is an important one--which Yale is; and Porter is the paragon of the type--_bonhomme et ruse_, learned and simple, kindhearted and sociable, yet possessed of great decision and obstinacy. He is over seventy, but comes every summer here to the woods to refresh himself by long mountain walks and life in "camp," sleeping on a bed of green boughs before a great fire in the open air. He looks like a farmer or a fisherman, and there is no sort of human being who does not immediately feel himself entirely at home in his company.

I have been here myself just a week. The virgin forest comes close to our house, and the diversity of walks through it, the brooks and the ascensions of hilltops are infinite. I doubt if there be anything like it in Europe. Your mountains are grander, but you have nowhere this carpet of absolutely primitive forest, with its indescribably sweet exhalations, spreading in every direction unbroken. I shall stay here doing hardly any work till late in September. I need to lead a purely animal life for at least two months to carry me through the teaching year. My wife and two children are here, all well. I would send you her photograph and mine, save that hers--the only one I have--is too bad to send to anyone, and my own are for the moment exhausted. I find myself counting the years till my next visit to Europe becomes possible. Then it shall occur under more cheerful circ.u.mstances, if possible; and I shall stay the full fifteen months instead of only six. As I look back now upon the winter, I find the strongest impression I received was that of the singularly artificial, yet deeply vital and soundly healthy, character of the English social and political system as it now exists.

It is one of the most _bizarre_ outbirths of time, one of the most abnormal, in certain ways, and yet one of the most successful. I know nothing that so much confirms your philosophy as this spectacle of an acc.u.mulation of individual initiatives _all preserved_. I hope both you and the Pillons are well. I shall never forget their friendliness, nor the spirit of human kindness that filled their household. I am ashamed to ask for letters from you, when after so long a silence I can myself give you so little that is of philosophic interest. But we must take long views; and, if life be granted, I shall do something yet, both in the way of reading and writing. Ever truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

At about this time Major Henry L. Higginson, then the junior partner in the banking house of Lee, Higginson & Company and soon to be widely known as the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, undertook to look after the small patrimony which James had inherited. He tactfully a.s.sumed the initiative respecting whatever had to be done, and continued to render this friendly service as long as James lived. On his side James, who knew nothing about investments and was incapable of considering them without involving himself in excessive and unprofitable worry, was delighted to leave decisions to his friend's wiser judgment.

Occasional jocose communications like the following came to be almost his only incursions into his own "affairs."

_To Henry L. Higginson._

_Oct. 14_ [1883?].

MY DEAR HENRY,--I receive today from your office two doc.u.ments, one containing some unintelligible hieroglyphics, "C. B.& Q., 138" etc., etc.; the other winding up with a statement that I owe you $12,674.97!!

The latter explains your mysterious interest in my affairs. I feared as much! Go on, Shylock, go on! you have me in your power. The peculiar combination of ignorance and poverty which I present makes me an easy victim. And I confess that as a psychologist I am curious to see how far your instincts of cupidity will carry you. I await eagerly the ulterior developments. Yours, etc.,

WM. JAMES.

[_Enclosed with the foregoing_]

Extract from a biographic sketch of W. J. soon to be published in the "Harvard Register":--

"He now fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint, and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; converses rationally, reads the newspapers, where every talk of distress attracts his notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that he has earned the right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the table; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old friends, he is quite conscious of his real position; but the conviction is so exquisitely painful that he will not let himself believe it."

_To H. P. Bowditch._

[Post-card]

CAMBRIDGE, Ma.s.s., _Jan. 31_ [1884].

Heute den 31ten Januar wurde mir vor 2 Stunden in rascher Aufeinander-folge _ein_ (1) wunderschoner judischaussehender, kraftiger und munterer Knabe geboren. Alles geht nach Wunsch, und bittet um stiller Theilnahme der gluckliche Vater.

W. J.

[_Translation._]

Today the 31st of January, two hours since, there was born to me in rapid succession _one_ (I) wonderfully beautiful, Jewish-looking, st.u.r.dy and lively boy. Everything is going as one would wish, and the happy father craves your hushed sympathy.

W. J.

_To Thomas Davidson._

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 30, 1884_.

MY DEAR DAVIDSON,--I am in receipt of two letters from you since my last, the latest one of them from Capri. I am very sorry to hear of your continued bad physical condition. You have a queer const.i.tution,--with such an unusual amount of strength in most ways,--to be a constant prey to ailment. I have long ago come to think that the right measure of a man's health is not how much comfort or discomfort he feels in the year, but how much work, through thick and thin, he manages to get through.

Judged by that standard, you doubtless score an unusually high number.

But when I hear you talking about Texas, I confess I really begin to feel alarmed. From Rome to Austin! How can you think of such a thing?

Are you sure M---- is not playing the part of the tailless fox in the fable? I know not a living soul in Texas, and if I did I should have moral scruples about becoming an accomplice in any plot for transporting you there. Why is it that everything in this world is offered us on no medium terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for a professors.h.i.+p. I pine for your leisure to write and study.

Teaching duties have really devoured the whole of my time this winter, and with hardly any intellectual profit whatever. I have read nothing, and written nothing save one lecture on the freedom of the will. How it is going to end, I don't well see. The four months of non-lecturing study I had at home last year, when I slept well and led a really intellectual life, seem like a sort of lost paradise. However, vacations make amends. This summer I am to edit my poor father's literary remains, "with a sketch of his writings" which will largely consist of extracts and no doubt help to the making him better known.

You ask why I don't write oftener. If you could see the arrears of work under which my table groans, and the number of semi-business letters and notes I now have to write with my infernal eyesight, you would ask no longer. In fact I am beginning to ask whether it be not my bounden duty to stop corresponding with my friends altogether. Only at that price does there seem to be any prospect of doing any reading at all.

I had neither seen your article in the Unitarian Review[75] nor heard of it, but ran for it as soon as I got your announcement of its existence.

I know not what to think of it practically; though I confess the idea of engrafting the bloodless pallor of Boston Unitarianism on the Roman temperament strikes one at first sight as rather queer. Unitarianism seems to have a sort of moribund vitality here, because it is a branch of protestantism and the tree keeps the branch sticking out. But whether it could be grafted on a catholic trunk seems to me problematic. I confess I rather despair of any popular religion of a philosophic character; and I sometimes find myself wondering whether there can be any popular religion raised on the ruins of the old Christianity without the presence of that element which in the past has presided over the origin of all religions, namely, a belief in new _physical_ facts and possibilities. Abstract considerations about the soul and the reality of a moral order will not do in a year what the glimpse into a world of new phenomenal possibilities enveloping those of the present life, afforded by an extension of our insight into the order of nature, would do in an instant. Are the much despised "Spiritualism" and the "Society for Psychical Research" to be the chosen instruments for a new era of faith?

It would surely be strange if they were; but if they are not, I see no other agency that can do the work.

I like your formula that in consciousness there must be two irreducibles, "being and feeling," and nothing else. But I can't put philosophy into letters. When is our long-postponed talk to take place?

_Aufgeschoben_ for another summer, and I fear another winter too, from what you write. It is too bad!

We have a week's recess in a couple of days and I start to look up summer lodgings. Alice and the two-month-old baby are very well and send you love. Always truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To G. H. Howison._