The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 5

DEAR HENRY,--The summer is over! alas! alas! I left Keene Valley this A.M. where I have had three life-and-health-giving weeks in the forest and the mountain air, crossed Lake Champlain in the steamer, not a cloud in the sky, and sleep here tonight, meaning to take the train for Boston in the A.M. and read Kant's Life all day, so as to be able to lecture on it when I first meet my cla.s.s. School begins on Thursday--this being Monday night. It has been a rather cultivating summer for me, and an active one, of which the best impression (after that of the Adirondack woods, or even before it) was that of the greatness of Chicago. It needs a Victor Hugo to celebrate it. But as you won't appreciate it without demonstration, and I can't give the demonstration (at least not now and on paper), I will say no more on that score! Alice came up for a week, but went down and through last night. She brought me up your letter of I don't remember now what date (after your return to London, about Wendell Holmes, Baldwin and Royalty, etc.) which was very delightful and for which I thank. But don't take your epistolary duties hard!

Letter-writing becomes to me more and more of an affliction, I get so many business letters now. At Chicago, I tried a stenographer and type-writer with an alleviation that seemed almost miraculous. I think that I shall have to go in for one some hours a week in Cambridge. It just goes "whiff" and six or eight long letters are _done_, so far as you're concerned. I hear great reports of your "old things," and await the book. My great literary impression this summer has been Tolstoy. On the whole his atmosphere absorbs me into it as no one's else has ever done, and even his religious and melancholy stuff, his insanity, is probably more significant than the sanity of men who haven't been through that phase at all.

But I am forgetting to tell you (strange to say, since it has hung over me like a cloud ever since it happened) of dear old Professor Child's death. We shall never see his curly head and thickset figure more. He had aged greatly in the past three years, since being thrown out of a carriage, and went to the hospital in July to be treated surgically. He never recovered and died in three weeks, after much suffering, his family not being called down from the country till the last days. He had a moral delicacy and a richness of heart that I never saw and never expect to see equaled.[1] The children bear it well, but I fear it will be a bad blow for dear Mrs. Child. She and Alice, I am glad to say, are great friends.... Good-night. _Leb' wohl!_

W. J.

XII

1893-1899 (CONTINUED)

_The Will to Believe--Talks to Teachers--Defense of Mental Healers--Excessive Climbing in the Adirondacks_

_To Theodore Flournoy._

[Dictated]

Cambridge, _Dec. 7, 1896_.

MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your altogether precious and delightful letter reached me duly, and you see I am making a not altogether too dilatory reply. In the first place, we congratulate you upon the new-comer, and think if she only proves as satisfactory a damsel as her charming elder sisters, you will never have any occasion to regret that she is not a boy. I hope that Madame Flournoy is by this time thoroughly strong and well, and that everything is perfect with the baby. I should like to have been at Munich with you; I have heard a good many accounts of the jollity of the proceedings there, but on the whole I did a more wholesome thing to stay in my own country, of which the dangers and dark sides are singularly exaggerated in Europe.

Your lamentations on your cerebral state make me smile, knowing, as I do, under all your subjective feelings, how great your vigor is. Of course I sympathize with you about the laboratory, and advise you, since it seems to me you are in a position to make conditions rather than have them imposed on you, simply to drop it and teach what you prefer.

Whatever the latter may be, it will be as good for the students as if they had something else from you in its place, and I see no need in this world, when there is someone provided somewhere to do everything, for anyone of us to do what he does least willingly and well.

_I_ have got rid of the laboratory forever, and should resign my place immediately if they reimposed its duties upon me. The results that come from all this laboratory work seem to me to grow more and more disappointing and trivial. What is most needed is new ideas. For every man who has one of them one may find a hundred who are willing to drudge patiently at some unimportant experiment. The atmosphere of your mind is in an extraordinary degree sane and balanced on philosophical matters.

That is where your forte lies, and where your University ought to see that its best interests lie in having you employed. Don't consider this advice impertinent. Your temperament is such that I think you need to be strengthened from without in a.s.serting your right to carry out your true vocation.

Everything goes well with us here. The boys are developing finely; both of them taller than I am, and Peggy healthy and well. I have just been giving a course of public lectures of which I enclose you a ticket to amuse you.[11] The audience, a thousand in number, kept its numbers to the last. I was careful not to tread upon the domains of psychical research, although many of my hearers were eager that I should do so. _I am teaching Kant for the first time in my life_, and it gives me much satisfaction. I am also sending a collection of old essays through the press, of which I will send you a copy as soon as they appear; I am sure of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I am afraid that what you never will appreciate is their wonderful English style!

Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison!

Our political crisis is over, but the hard times still endure. Lack of confidence is a disease from which convalescence is not quick. I doubt, notwithstanding certain appearances, whether the country was ever morally in as sound a state as it now is, after all this discussion. And the very silver men, who have been treated as a party of dishonesty, are anything but that. They very likely are victims of the economic delusion, but their intentions are just as good as those of the other side....

If you meet my friend Ritter, please give him my love. I shall write to you again ere long _eigenhandig_. Meanwhile believe me, with lots of love to you all, especially to _ces demoiselles_, and felicitations to their mother, Always yours,

Wm. James.

My wife wishes to convey to Madame Flournoy her most loving regards and hopes for the little one.

James had already been invited to deliver a course of "Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion" at the University of Edinburgh. He had not yet accepted for a definite date; but he had begun to collect ill.u.s.trative material for the proposed lectures. A large number of references to such material were supplied to him by Mr. Henry W. Rankin of East Northfield.

_To Henry W. Rankin._

NEWPORT, R.I., _Feb. 1, 1897_.

DEAR MR. RANKIN,--A pause in lecturing, consequent upon our midyear examinations having begun, has given me a little respite, and I am paying a three-days' visit upon an old friend here, meaning to leave for New York tomorrow where I have a couple of lectures to give. It is an agreeable moment of quiet and enables me to write a letter or two which I have long postponed, and chiefly one to you, who have given me so much without asking anything in return.

One of my lectures in New York is at the Academy of Medicine before the Neurological Society, the subject being "Demoniacal Possession." I shall of course duly advertise the Nevius book.[12] I am not as positive as you are in the belief that the obsessing agency is really demonic individuals. I am perfectly willing to adopt that theory if the facts lend themselves best to it; for who can trace limits to the hierarchies of personal existence in the world? But the lower stages of mere automatism shade off so continuously into the highest supernormal manifestations, through the intermediary ones of imitative hysteria and "suggestibility," that I feel as if no _general theory_ as yet would cover all the facts. So that the most I shall plead for before the neurologists is the recognition of demon possession as a regular "morbid-ent.i.ty" whose commonest h.o.m.ologue today is the "spirit-control"

observed in test-mediums.h.i.+p, and which tends to become the more benignant and less alarming, the less pessimistically it is regarded.

This last remark seems certainly to be true. Of course I shall not ignore the sporadic cases of old-fas.h.i.+oned malignant possession which still occur today. I am convinced that we stand with all these things at the threshold of a long inquiry, of which the end appears as yet to no one, least of all to myself. And I believe that the best theoretic work yet done in the subject is the beginning made by F. W. H. Myers in his papers in the S. P. R. Proceedings. The first thing is to start the medical profession out of its idiotically _conceited ignorance_ of all such matters--matters which have everywhere and at all times played a vital part in human history.

You have written me at different times about conversion, and about miracles, getting as usual no reply, but not because I failed to heed your words, which come from a deep life-experience of your own evidently, and from a deep acquaintance with the experiences of others.

In the matter of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really _asks_.

But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict of two _self-systems_ in a personality up to that time heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion-crisis, the higher loves and powers come definitively to gain the upper-hand and expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down in the position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases _psychologically_, and leaves all the _religious importance_ to the result which it has on any other theory.

As to true and false miracles, I don't know that I can follow you so well, for in any case the notion of a miracle as a mere attestation of superior power is one that I cannot espouse. A miracle must in any case be an expression of personal purpose, but the demon-purpose of antagonizing G.o.d and winning away his adherents has never yet taken hold of my imagination. I prefer an open mind of inquiry, first _about the facts_, in all these matters; and I believe that the S. P. R.

methods, if pertinaciously stuck to, will eventually do much to clear things up.--You see that, although religion is the great interest of my life, I am rather hopelessly non-evangelical, and take the whole thing too impersonally.

But my College work is lightening in a way. Psychology is being handed over to others more and more, and I see a chance ahead for reading and study in other directions from those to which my very feeble powers in that line have hitherto been confined. I am going to give all the fragments of time I can get, after this year is over, to religious biography and philosophy. s.h.i.+eld's book, Steenstra's, Gratry's, and Harris's, I don't yet know, but can easily get at them.

I hope your health is better in this beautiful winter which we are having. I am very well, and so is all my family. Believe me, with affectionate regards, truly yours,

Wm. James.

_To Benjamin Paul Blood._

Cambridge, _Apr. 28, 1897_.

DEAR BLOOD,--Your letter is delectable. From your not having yet acknowledged the book,[13] I began to wonder whether you had got it, but this acknowledgment is almost too good. Your thought is obscure--lightning flashes darting gleams--but that's the way truth is.

And altho' I "put pluralism in the place of philosophy," I do it only so far as philosophy means the articulate and the scientific. Life and mysticism exceed the articulable, and if there is a _One_ (and surely men will never be weaned from the idea of it), it must remain only mystically expressed.

I have been roaring over and quoting some of the pa.s.sages of your letter, in which my wife takes as much delight as I do. As for your strictures on my English, I accept them humbly. I have a tendency towards too great colloquiality, I know, and I trust your sense of English better than any man's in the country. I have a fearful job on hand just now: an address on the unveiling of a military statue. Three thousand people, governor and troops, etc. Why they fell upon me, G.o.d knows; but being challenged, I could not funk. The task is a mechanical one, and the result somewhat of a school-boy composition. If I thought it wouldn't bore you, I should send you a copy for you to go carefully over and correct or rewrite as to the English. I should probably adopt every one of your corrections. What do you say to this? Yours ever,

Wm. James.

_P.S._ Please don't bet.i.tle _me_!

The "copy" which was offered for correction with so much humility was the "Oration" on the unveiling of St. Gaudens's monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Ma.s.sachusetts Infantry (the first colored regiment). James was quite accustomed to lecturing from brief notes and to reading from a complete ma.n.u.script; but on this occasion he thought it necessary to commit his address to memory. He had never done this before and he never tried to do it again. He memorized with great difficulty, found himself placed in an entirely unfamiliar relation to his audience, and felt as much nervous trepidation as any inexperienced speaker.[14]