The Letters of William James Volume I Part 22

Farewell! I think of you both often, and am with heartiest affection, Yours always,

WM. JAMES.

_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._

JAFFREY, N.H., _Sept. 12, 1886_.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--I ought long ere this to have written you a genuine letter in reply to your two of Feb. 3, _respective_ March 6. (The latter by the way came to me many weeks too late, all blurred and water-stained, with a notice gummed on it telling as how it had been rescued from the Oregon sunken on the bottom of the Ocean. This makes it ex-as well as in-trinsically interesting, and does honor to our nineteenth-century post-office perfection.) I suppose one reason for my procrastination has been the shrinking-back of the fleshly man from another gnas.h.i.+ng of the teeth over the free-will business. I have just been reading your letters again, and beautiful letters they are--also your pregnant little paper on Monism. But I'm blest if they make me budge an inch from my inveterate way of looking at the question. I hate to think that controversy should be useless, and arguments of no avail, but the history of opinion on this problem is ominous; so I will be very short, hardly more than "yea, yea! nay, nay!"

The subject of my concern seems entirely different from yours. I care absolutely nothing whether there be "agents" or no agents, or whether man's actions be really "_his_" or not.

What I care for is that my moral reactions should find a real outward application. All those who, like you, hold that the world is a system of "uniform law" which repels all variation as so much "chaos," oblige, it seems to me, the world to be judged integrally. Now the only _integral_ emotional reaction which can be called forth by such a world as this of our experience, is that of dramatic or melodramatic interest--romanticism--which _is_ the emotional reaction upon it of all intellects who are neither religious nor moral. The moment you seek to go deeper, you must break the world into parts, the parts that seem good and those that seem bad. Whatever Indian mystics may say about overcoming the bonds of good and evil, for _us_ there is no higher synthesis in which their contradiction merges, no _one_ way of judging that world which holds them both. Either close your eyes and adopt an optimism or a pessimism equally daft; or exclude moral categories altogether from a place in the world's definition, which leaves the world _unheimlich_, reptilian, and foreign to man; or else, sticking to it that the moral judgment _is_ applicable, give up the hope of applying it to the _whole_, and admit that, whilst some parts are good, others are bad, and being bad, _ought_ not to have been, "argal," possibly _might_ not have been. In short, be an indeterminist on moral grounds with which the differences between compulsory or spontaneous uniformity and perceptive and conceptive order have absolutely nothing to do.

But enough! I am far beyond the yea and nay I promised, and feel more like gossiping with you as a friend than wrangling with you as a foe. I hope things are going well with you in these months and that politics have not exasperated you beyond the possibility of philosophizing.... I got successfully through the academic year, in spite of the fact that I wasted a great deal of time on "psychical research" and had other interruptions from work which I would fain have done. I intend _per fas aut nefas_ to make more time for myself next year. The family is very well; and with the exception of an attack of illness of a couple of weeks, the vacation has been a delightful and beneficial one. I wish I could live in the country all the year round, or rather nine months of it. When I retire from the harness, if that ever happens, I probably shall.

I have just been on a little trip to the White Mountains and may possibly buy a small farm which I saw in a convenient and romantic neighborhood. New England farms are now dirt cheap--the natives going West, the Irish coming in and making a better living than the Yankees could. Here were seventy-five acres of land, two thirds of it oak and pine timber, one third hay, a splendid spring of water, fair little house and large barn, close to a beautiful lake and under a mountain 3500 feet high, four and a half hours from Boston, for 900 dollars! A rivulet of great beauty runs through it. I am only waiting to see if I can get the strip between it and the lake sh.o.r.e to buy....

I have just read, with infinite zest and stimulation, Bradley's "Logic."

I suppose you have read it. It is surely "epoch-making" in English philosophy. Both empiricists and pan-rationalists must settle their accounts with it. It breaks up all the traditional lines. And what a fighter the cuss is! Do you know him? What is he personally? Whether churlish and sour, or simply redundantly ironical and irrepressible, I can't make out from his polemic tone; but should apprehend the former.

It will be long ere I settle my accounts with his book.

Well! adieu and good luck to you, in spite of your viciousness in the matter of determinism! Send me all you write and believe me as ever, Always most affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

With respect to the next letter, and others to James's sister, which follow, it should now be explained that Miss Alice James had gone abroad in 1885. The illness which was the cause of her journey developed more and more serious complications. Being near her brother Henry in England, she stayed on there during the remaining six years of her life. In spite of much suffering, she never let herself adopt an invalidish tone,[80] but kept her attention turned toward things outside her sick-room, and was apt to greet expressions of commiseration in a way to discourage their repet.i.tion--as the following letter testifies. "K. P.

L." was a devoted friend, Miss Katharine P. Loring of Boston; "A. K."

was the Aunt Kate mentioned in early letters.

_To his Sister._

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1887_.

DEAREST ALICE,--Your card and, a day or two later, K. P. L.'s letter to A. K., have made us acquainted with your sad tumble-down, for which I am sorrier than I can express, and can only take refuge in the hope, incessantly springing up again from its ashes, that you will "recuperate" more promptly than of late has been the case. I'm glad, at any rate, that it has got you into Harry's lodgings for a while, and hope your next permanent arrangement will prove better than the last.

When, as occasionally happens, I have a day of headache, or of real sickness like that of last summer at Mrs. Dorr's, I think of you whose whole life is woven of that kind of experience, and my heart sinks at the horizon that opens, and wells over with pity. But when all is over, the longest life appears short; and we had better drink the cup, whatever it contains, for it _is_ life. But I will not moralize or sympathize, for fear of awakening more "screams of laughter" similar to those which you wrote of as greeting my former attempts.

We have had but one letter from Harry--soon after his arrival at Florence. I hope he has continued to get pleasure and profit from his outing. I haven't written to him since he left London, nor do I now write him a special letter, but the rest of this is meant for him as well as you, and if he is still to be away, you will forward it to him.

We are getting along very well, on the whole, I keeping very continuously occupied, but not seeming to get ahead much, _for the days grow so short_ with each advancing year. A day is now about a minute--hardly time to turn round in. Mrs. Gibbens arrived from Chicago last night, and in ten days she and Margaret will start, with our little Billy, for Aiken, S.C., to be gone till May. B. is asthmatic, she is glad to go south for her own sake, and the open-air life all day long will be much better for him than our arduous winter and spring. He is the most utterly charming little piece of human nature you ever saw, so packed with life, impatience, and feeling, that I think Father must have been just like him at his age....

I have been paying ten or eleven visits to a mind-cure doctress, a sterling creature, resembling the "Venus of Medicine," Mrs. Lydia E.

Pinkham,[81] made solid and veracious-looking. I sit down beside her and presently drop asleep, whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my mind. She says she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated, so restless, etc. She said my _eyes_, mentally speaking, kept revolving like wheels in front of each other and in front of my face, and it was four or five sittings ere she could get them _fixed_. I am now, _unconsciously to myself_, much better than when I first went, etc. I thought it might please you to hear an opinion of my mind so similar to your own. Meanwhile what boots it to be made unconsciously better, yet all the while consciously to lie awake o' nights, as I still do?

Lectures are temporarily stopped and examinations begun. I seized the opportunity to go to my Chocorua place and see just what was needed to make it habitable for the summer. It is a goodly little spot, but we may not, after all, fit up the buildings till we have spent a summer in the place and "studied" the problem a little more closely. The snow was between two and three feet deep on a level, in spite of the recent thaws. The day after I arrived was one of the most crystalline purity, and the mountain simply exquisite in gradations of tint. I have a tenant in the house, one Sanborn, who owes me a dollar and a half a month, but can't pay it, being of a poetic and contemplative rather than of an active nature, and consequently excessively poor. He has a sign out "Attorney and Pension Agent," and writes and talks like one of the greatest of men. He was working the sewing machine when I was there, and talking of his share in the war, and why he didn't go to live in Boston, etc. (namely that he wasn't known), and my heart was heavy in my breast that so rich a nature, fitted to inhabit a tropical dreamland, should have nothing but that furnitureless cabin within and snow and sky without, to live upon. For, however spotlessly pure and dazzlingly l.u.s.trous snow may be, pure snow, always snow, and naught but snow, for four months on end, is, it must be confessed, a rather lean diet for the human soul--deficient in variety, chiaroscuro, and oleaginous and medieval elements. I felt as I was returning home that some intellectual inferiority _ought_ to accrue to all populations whose environment for many months in the year consisted of pure snow.--You are better off, better off than you know, in that great black-earthed dunghill of an England. I say naught of politics, war, strikes, railroad accidents or public events, unless the departure of C. W. Eliot and his wife for a year in Europe be a public event....

Well, dear old Alice, I hope and pray for you. Lots of love to Harry, and if Katharine is with you, to her. Yours ever,

W. J.

_To Carl Stumpf._

CAMBRIDGE, _6 Feb., 1887_.

MY DEAR STUMPF,--Your two letters from Rugen of Sept. 8th, and from Halle of Jan. 2 came duly, and I can a.s.sure you that their contents was most heartily appreciated, and not by me alone. I fairly squealed with pleasure over the first one and its rich combination of good counsel and humorous commentary, and read the greater part of it to my friend Royce, a.s.sistant professor of philosophy here, who enjoyed it almost as much as I. There is a heartiness and solidity about your letters which is truly German, and makes them as nutritious as they are refres.h.i.+ng to receive.

Your _Kater-Gefuhl_,[82] however, in your second letter, about your _Ausla.s.sungen_[83] on the subject of Wundt, amused me by its speedy evolution into _Ausla.s.sungen_ more animated still. I can well understand why Wundt should make his compatriots impatient. Foreigners can afford to be indifferent for he doesn't _crowd_ them so much. He aims at being a sort of Napoleon of the intellectual world. Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without genius and with no central idea which, if defeated, brings down the whole fabric in ruin.

You remember what Victor Hugo says of Napoleon in the Miserables--"Il genait Dieu"; Wundt only _geners_ his _confreres_; and whilst they make mincemeat of some one of his views by their criticism, he is meanwhile writing a book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no _noeud vital_ in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can't kill him all at once.

But surely you must admit that, since there must be professors in the world, Wundt is the most praiseworthy and never-too-much-to-be-respected type of the species. He isn't a genius, he is a _professor_--a being whose duty is to know everything, and have his own opinion about everything, connected with his _Fach_. Wundt has the most prodigious faculty of appropriating and preserving knowledge, and as for opinions, he takes _au grand serieux_ his duties there. He says of each possible subject, "Here I must have an opinion. Let's see! What shall it be? How many possible opinions are there? three? four? Yes! just four! Shall I take one of these? It will seem more original to take a higher position, a sort of _Vermittelungsansicht_[84] between them all. That I will do, etc., etc." So he acquires a complete a.s.sortment of opinions of his own; and, as his memory is so good, he seldom forgets which they are! But this is not reprehensible; it is admirable--from the professorial point of view. To be sure, one gets tired of that point of view after a while.

But was there ever, since Christian Wolff's time, such a model of the German Professor? He has utilized to the uttermost fibre every gift that Heaven endowed him with at his birth, and made of it all that mortal pertinacity could make. He is the finished example of how much mere _education_ can do for a man. Beside him, Spencer is an ignoramus as well as a charlatan. I admit that Spencer is occasionally more _amusing_ than Wundt. His "Data of Ethics" seems to me incomparably his best book, because it is a more or less frank expression of the man's personal _ideal of living_--which has of course little to do with science, and which, in Spencer's case, is full of definiteness and vigor. Wundt's "Ethics" I have not yet seen, and probably shall not "tackle" it for a good while to come.

I was much entertained by your account of F----, of whom you have seen much more than I have. I am eager to see him, to hear about his visit to Halle, and to get his account of you. But [F.'s place of abode] and Boston are ten hours asunder by rail, and I never go there and he never comes here. He seems a very promising fellow, with a good deal of independence of character; and if you knew the conditions of education in this country, and of the preparation to fill chairs of philosophy in colleges, you would not express any surprise at his, or mine, or any other American's small amount of "Information uber die philosophische Literatur." Times are mending, however, and within the past six or eight years it has been possible, in three or four of our colleges, to get really educated for philosophy as a profession. The most promising man we have in this country is, in my opinion, the above-mentioned Royce, a young Californian of thirty, who is really built for a metaphysician, and who is, besides that, a very complete human being, alive at every point. He wrote a novel last summer, which is now going through the press, and which I am very curious to see. He has just been in here, interrupting this letter, and I have told him he must send a copy of his book, the "Religious Aspect of Philosophy," to you, promising to urge you to read it when you had time. The first half is ethical, and very readable and full of profound and witty details, but to my mind not of vast importance philosophically. The second half is a new argument for monistic idealism, an argument based on the possibility of truth and error in knowledge, subtle in itself, and rather lengthily expounded, but seeming to me to be one of the few big original suggestions of recent philosophical writing. I have vainly tried to escape from it. I still suspect it of inconclusiveness, but I frankly confess that I am _unable_ to overthrow it. Since you too are an anti-idealist, I wish very much you would try your critical teeth upon it. I can a.s.sure you that, if you come to close quarters with it, you will say its author belongs to the genuine philosophic breed.

I am myself doing very well this year, rather light work, etc., but still troubled with bad sleep so as to advance very slowly with private study and writing. However, few days without a line at least. I found to my surprise and pleasure that Robertson was willing to print my chapter on s.p.a.ce in "Mind," even though it should run through all four numbers of the year.[85] So I sent it to him. Most of it was written six or even seven years ago. To tell the truth, I am _off_ of s.p.a.ce now, and can probably carry my little private ingenuity concerning it no farther than I have already done in this essay; and fearing that some evil fiend might put it into Helmholtz's mind to correct all his errors and tell the full truth in the new edition of his "Optics," I felt it was high time that what I had written should see the light and not be lost. It is dry stuff to read, and I hardly dare to recommend it to you; but if you do read it, there is no one whose favorable opinion I should more rejoice to hear; for, as you know, you seem to me, of all writers on s.p.a.ce, the one who, on the whole, has thought out the subject most _philosophically_. Of course, the experimental patience, and skill and freshness of observation of the Helmholtzes and Herings are altogether admirable, and perhaps at bottom _worth_ more than philosophic ability.

s.p.a.ce is really a direfully difficult subject! The third dimension bothers me very much still.

I have this very day corrected the proofs of an essay on the Perception of Time,[86] which I will send you when it shall appear in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" for October last. (The number of "July, 1886"

is not yet out!) I rather enjoyed the writing of it. I have just begun a chapter on "Discrimination and Comparison," subjects which have been long stumbling-blocks in my path. Yesterday it seemed to me that I could perhaps do nothing better than just translate 6 and 7 of the first _Abschnitt_ of your "Tonpsychologie," which is worth more than everything else put together which has been written on the subject. But I will stumble on and try to give it a more personal form. I shall, however, borrow largely from you....

Have you seen [Edmund] Gurney's two bulky tomes, "Phantasms of the Living," an amazingly patient and thorough piece of work? I should not at all wonder if it were the beginning of a new department of natural history. But even if not, it is an important chapter in the statistics of _Volkerpsychologie_, and I think Gurney worthy of the highest praise for his devotion to this unfas.h.i.+onable work. He is not the kind of stuff which the ordinary pachydermatous fanatic and mystic is made of....

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

[Post-card]

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 26_ [1887].

My live-stock is increased by a _Tochterchen_, modest, tactful, unselfish, quite different from a boy, and in fact a really _epochmachendes Erzeugniss_.[87] I shall begin to save for her dowry and perhaps your Harold will marry her. Their ages are suitable.

Grusse an die gnadige Frau.

W. J.