The Letters of William James Volume I Part 20

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1885_.

MY DEAR HOWISON,--I've just reread (for the fourth time, I believe) your letter of the 30th November. I need not say how tickled I am at your too generous words about my Divinity school address on Determinism.[76]

Sweet are the praises of an enemy. There is, thank Heaven! a plane below all formulas and below enmities due to formulas, where men occasionally meet each other moving, and recognize each other as brothers inhabiting the _same depths_. Such is this depth of the _problem_ of determinism--howe'er we solve it, we are brothers if we know it to be a _problem_. No man on either side awakens any sense of intellectual respect in me who regards the solution as a c.o.c.k-sure and immediately given thing, and wonders that any one should hesitate to choose his party. You find fault with my deterministic disjunction, "pessimism or subjectivism," and ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral activity," etc. (You probably remember.) I didn't forget it. It entered for me into pessimism, for, since such activity has failed to be universally realized, it was (deterministically) _impossible from eternity_, and the Universe in so far forth not an object of pure wors.h.i.+p, not an Absolute. My trouble, you see, lies with monism.

Determinism = monism; and a monism like this world can't be an object of pure optimistic contemplation. By pessimism I simply mean _ultimate_ non-optimism. The Ideal is only a part of this world. Make the world a Pluralism, and you forthwith have an object to wors.h.i.+p. Make it a Unit, on the other hand, and wors.h.i.+p and abhorrence are equally one-sided and equally legitimate reactions. _Indifferentism_ is the true condition of such a world, and turn the matter how you will, I don't see how any philosophy of the Absolute can ever escape from that capricious alternation of mysticism and satanism in the treatment of its great Idol, which history has always shown. Reverence is an accidental personal mood in such a philosophy, and has naught to do with the essentials of the system. At least, so it seems to me; and in view of that, I prefer to stick in the wooden finitude of an ultimate pluralism, because that at least gives me something definite to wors.h.i.+p and fight for.

However, I know I haven't exhausted all wisdom, and am too well aware that this position, like everything else, is a _parti pris_ and a _pis aller_,--_faute de mieux_,--to continue the Gallic idiom. Your predecessor Royce thinks he's got the thing at last. It is too soon for me to criticize his book; but I must say it seems to me one of the very freshest, profoundest, solidest, most human bits of philosophical work I've seen in a long time. In fact, it makes one think of Royce as a man from whom nothing is too great to expect.

Your list of thirty lectures makes one bow down in reverence before you.

I should be afraid you were over-working. Your Hume-Kant circular shall be diligently scanned when my Hume lectures come off, in about six weeks. I am better as to the eyes, which gives me much hope. Am, however, "maturing" building plans for a house, which is bad for sleep.

I do hope and trust there will be no "Enttauschung" about Berkeley,[77]

and that not only the work, but the place and the climate, may prove well adapted to both you and Mrs. Howison. Ever truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

The next letters relate to the "Literary Remains of Henry James," which had just been published, and in which William James had collected a number of his father's papers and edited them with an introductory essay on their author's philosophy. Needless to say, the two letters to G.o.dkin have not been included among these with any thought of the unfortunate review to which they refer. They furnish too good an ill.u.s.tration of James's loyalty and magnanimity to be omitted. If more critics, and more of the criticized, were to cultivate the manliness and generosity with which James always entered discussion, there would be less reviewers "never-quite-forgiven," and less feuds in the world of science.

_To E. L. G.o.dkin._

CAMBRIDGE, [_Feb._] 16, 1885.

MY DEAR G.o.dKIN,--Doesn't the impartiality which I suppose is striven for in the "Nation," sometimes overshoot the mark "and fall on t'other side"? Poor Harry's books seem always given out to critics with antipathy to his literary temperament; and now for this only and last review of my father--a writer exclusively religious--a personage seems to have been selected for whom the religious life is complete _terra incognita_. A severe review by one interested in the subject is one thing; a contemptuous review by one with the subject out of his sight is another.

Make no reply to this! One must disgorge his bile.

I was taken ill in Philadelphia the day after seeing you, and had to return home after some days without stopping in N.Y. I _may_ get there the week after next, and if so shall claim _one_ dinner, over which I trust no cloud will be cast by the beginning of this note! With best respects to Mrs. G.o.dkin, always truly yours

WM. JAMES.

_To E. L. G.o.dkin._

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 19, 1885_.

MY DEAR G.o.dKIN,--Your cry of remorse or regret is so "whole-souled" and complete that I should not be human were I not melted almost to tears by it, and sorry I "ever spoke to you as I did." I felt pretty sure that you had no positive oversight of the thing in this case, but I addressed you as the official head. And my _emotion_ was less that of filial injury than of irritation at what seemed to me editorial stupidity in giving out the book to the wrong _sort_ of person altogether--a Theist of some sort being the only proper reviewer. I am heartily sorry that the thing should have distressed you so much more than it did me. You can take your consolation in the fact that it has now afforded you an opportunity for the display of those admirable qualities of the heart which your friends know, but which the ordinary readers of the "Nation"

probably do not suspect to slumber beneath the gory surface of that savage sheet.

I hear that you are soon coming to give us some political economy. I am very glad on every account, and suppose Mrs. G.o.dkin will come _mit_.

Always truly yours

WM. JAMES.

_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._

CAMBRIDGE, _20 Feb., 1885_.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--Your letter of the 7th was most welcome. Anything responsive about my poor old father's writing falls most gratefully upon my heart. For I fear he found _me_ pretty unresponsive during his lifetime; and that through my means any post-mortem response should come seems a sort of atonement. You would have enjoyed knowing him. I know of no one except Carlyle who had such a smiting _Ursprunglichkeit_ of intuition, and such a deep sort of humor where human nature was concerned. He bowled one over in such a careless way. He was like Carlyle in being no _reasoner_ at all, in the sense in which philosophers are reasoners. Reasoning was only an unfortunate necessity of exposition for them both. His _ideas_, however, were the exact inversion of Carlyle's; and he had nothing to correspond to Carlyle's insatiable learning of historic facts and memory. As you say, the world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him.

_Those_ elements were very deep ones, and had theological names. Under "Man" he would willingly have included all flesh, even that resident in Sirius or ethereal worlds. But he felt no need of positively looking so far. He was the humanest and most genial being in his impulses whom I have ever personally known, and had a bigness and power of nature that everybody felt. I thank you heartily for your interest. I wish that somebody could _take up_ something from his system into a system more articulately scientific. As it is, most people will feel the _presence_ of something real and true for the while they read, and go away and presently, unable to dovetail [it] into their own framework, forget it altogether.

I am hoping to write you a letter ere long, a letter philosophical. I am going over Idealism again, and mean to review your utterances on the subject. You know that, to quote what Gurney said one evening, to attain to a.s.similating your thought is the chief purpose of one's life. But you know also how hard it is for the likes of me to write, and how much that is felt is unthought, and that as thought [it] goes and must go unspoken. Brother Royce tells me he has sent you his "Religious Aspect of Philosophy." He is a wonderfully powerful fellow, not yet thirty, and this book seems to me to have a real fresh smell of the Earth about it.

You will enjoy it, I know. I am very curious to hear what you think of his brand-new argument for Absolute Idealism.

I and mine are well. But the precious time as usual slips away with little work done. Happy you, whose time is all your own!

WM. JAMES

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 1, 1885_.

...I am running along quite smoothly, and my eyes,--you never knew such an improvement! It has continued gradually, so that practically I can use them all I will. It saves my life. _Why_ it should come now, when, bully them as I would, it wouldn't come in the past few years, is one of the secrets of the nervous system which the last trump, but nothing earlier, may reveal. A week's recess begins today, and the day after tomorrow I shall start for the South Sh.o.r.e to look up summer quarters. I want to try how sailing suits me as a summer kill-time. The walking in Keene Valley suits me not, and driving is too "cost-playful." I have made a start with my psychology which I shall work at, temperately, through the vacation and hope to get finished a year from next fall, _sans faute_. Then shall the star of your romances be eclipst!...

_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._

NEWPORT, _Dec. 30, 1885_.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--I have just read your "Philosophy and Experience"

address, and re-read with much care your "Dialogue on Free Will" in the last "Mind." I thank you kindly for the address. But isn't philosophy a sad mistress, estranging the more intimately those who in all other respects are most intimately united,--although 'tis true she unites them afresh by their very estrangement! I feel for the first time now, after these readings, as if I might be catching sight of your foundations.

Always. .h.i.therto has there been something elusive, a sense that what I caught could not be _all_. Now I feel as if it might be all, and yet for me 'tis not enough.

Your "method" (which surely after _this_ needs no additional expository touch) I seem at last to understand, but it shrinks in the understanding. For what is your famous "two aspects" principle more than the postulate that the world is thoroughly _intelligible_ in nature? And what the practical outcome of the distinction between _whatness_ and _thatness_ save the sending us to experience to ascertain the connections among things, and the declaration that no amount of insight into their intrinsic qualities will account for their existence? I can now get no more than that out of the method, which seems in truth to me an over-subtle way of getting at and expressing pretty simple truths, which others share who know nothing of your formulations. In fact your wondrously delicate retouchings and discriminations appear rather to darken the matter from the point of view of teaching. One gains much by the way, of course, that he would have lost by a shorter path, but one risks losing the end altogether. (I reserve what you say at the end of both articles about Conscience, etc.--which is original and beautiful and which I feel I have not yet a.s.similated. I will only ask whether all you say about the decisions of conscience implying a future verification does not hold of scientific decisions as well, so that _all_ reflective _cognitive_ judgments, as well as practical judgments, project themselves ideally into eternity?)

As for the Free Will article, I have very little to say, for it leaves entirely untouched what seems to me the only living issue involved. The paper is an exquisite piece of literary goldsmith's work,--nothing like it in that respect since Berkeley,--but it hangs in the air of speculation and touches not the earth of life, and the beautiful distinctions it keeps making gratify only the understanding which has no end in view but to exercise its eyes by the way. The distinctions between _vis impressa_ and _vis insita_, and compulsion and "reaction"

_mean_ nothing in a monistic world; and any world is a monism in which the parts to come are, as they are in your world, absolutely involved and presupposed in the parts that are already given. Were such a monism a palpable optimism, no man would be so foolish as to care whether it was predetermined or not, or to ask whether he was or was not what you call a "real agent." He would acquiesce in the flow and drift of things, of which he found himself a part, and rejoice that it was such a whole.

The question of free will owes its entire being to a difficulty you disdain to notice, namely that we _cannot_ rejoice in such a whole, for it is _not_ a palpable optimism, and yet, if it be predetermined, we _must treat_ it as a whole. Indeterminism is the only way to _break_ the world into good parts and into bad, and to stand by the former as against the latter.

I can understand the determinism of the mere mechanical intellect which will not hear of a moral dimension to existence. I can understand that of mystical monism shutting its eyes on the concretes of life, for the sake of its abstract rapture. I can understand that of mental defeat and despair saying, "it's all a muddle, and here I go, along with it." I can _not_ understand a determinism like yours, which rejoices in clearness and distinctions, and which is at the same time alive to moral ones--unless it be that the latter are purely speculative for it, and have little to do with its real feeling of the way life _is_ made up.