The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 21

Cambridge, _June 28, 1904_.

DEAR H.,--I came down from Chocorua yesterday A.M. to go to--

Mrs. Whitman's funeral!

She had lost ground steadily during the winter. The last time I saw her was five weeks ago, when at noon I went up to her studio thinking she might be there.... She told me that she was to go on the following day to the Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital, for a cure of rest and seclusion.

There she died last Friday evening, having improved in her cardiac symptoms, but pneumonia supervening a week ago. It's a great mercy that the end was so unexpectedly quick. What I had feared was a slow deterioration for a year or more to come, with all the nameless misery--peculiarly so in her case--of death by heart disease. As it was, she may be said to have died standing, a thing she always wished to do.

She went to every dinner-party and evening party last winter, had an extension, a sort of ball-room, built to her Mount Vernon house, etc.

The funeral was beautiful both in Trinity Church and at the grave in Mt.

Auburn. I was one of the eight pall-bearers--the others of whom you would hardly know. The flowers and greenery had been arranged in absolutely Whitmanian style by Mrs. Jack Gardner, Mrs. Henry Parkman, and Sally Fairchild. The scene at the grave was _beautiful_. She had no blood relatives, and all Boston--I mean the few whom we know--had gone out, and seemed swayed by an overpowering emotion which abolished all estrangement and self-consciousness. It was the sort of ending that would please her, could she know of it. An extraordinary and indefinable creature! I used often to feel coldly towards her on account of her way of taking people as a great society "business" proceeding, but now that her agitated life of tip-toe reaching in so many directions, of genuinest amiability, is over, pure tenderness a.s.serts its own. Against that dark background of natural annihilation she seems to have been a pathetic little slender worm, writhing and curving blindly through its little day, expending such intensities of consciousness to terminate in that small grave.

She was a most peculiar person. I wish that you had known her whole life here more intimately, and understood its significance. You might then write a worthy article about her. For me, it is impossible to define her. She leaves a dreadful vacuum in Boston. I have often wondered whether I should survive her--and here it has come in the night, without the sound of a footstep, and the same world is here--but without her as its witness....

_To Charles Eliot Norton._

Cambridge, _June 30, 1904_.

DEAR CHARLES,--I have just read the July "Atlantic," and am so moved by your Ruskin letters that I can't refrain from overflowing. They seem to me immortal doc.u.ments--as the clouds clear away he will surely take his stable place as one of the n.o.blest of the sons of men. Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes.

The chief "cloud" is the bulk of "Modern Painters" and the other artistic writings, which have made us take him primarily as an art-connoisseur and critic. Regard all that as inessential, and his inconsistencies and extravagances fall out of sight and leave the Great Heart alone visible.

Do you suppose that there are many other correspondents of R. who will yield up their treasures in our time to the light? I wish that your modesty had not suppressed certain pa.s.sages which evidently expressed too much regard for yourself. The point should have been _his_ expression of that sort of thing--no matter to whom addressed! I understand and sympathize fully with his att.i.tude about our war. Granted him and his date, that is the way he ought to have felt, and I revere him perhaps the more for it....

S. W.'s sudden defection is a pathetic thing! It makes one feel like closing the ranks.

Affectionately--to all of you--including Theodora,

W. J.

_To L. T. Hobhouse._

CHOCORUA, _Aug. 12, 1904_.

DEAR BROTHER HOBHOUSE,--Don't you think it a _tant soit peu_ scurvy trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the informed reader the reference is transparent--I say nothing of poor Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104 _ff_.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky t.i.tle the _Right_ to Believe) in the guise of an _alternative and subst.i.tute_ for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your charmingly written essay, _subst.i.tute a travesty_ for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-att.i.tude as a necessity for individuals, because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely _vetoed_, as certain champions of "science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world.

You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from _my_ polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk.

Your essay, granting that emphasis and barring the injustice to me, seems to me exquisite, and, taking it as a unit, I subscribe unreservedly to almost every positive word.--I say "positive," for I doubt whether you have seen enough of the extraordinarily invigorating effect of mind-_c.u.m_-philosophy on certain people to justify your somewhat negative treatment of that subject; and I say "almost" because your distinction between "spurious" and "genuine" courage (page 91) reminds me a bit too much of "true" and "false" freedom, and other sanctimonious come-offs.--Could you not have made an equally sympathetic reading of _me_?

I shouldn't have cared a copper for the misrepresentation were it not a "summation of stimuli" affair. I have just been reading Bradley on Schiller in the July "Mind," and A. E. Taylor on the Will to Believe in the "McGill Quarterly" of Montreal. Both are vastly worse than you; and I cry to Heaven to tell me of what insane root my "leading contemporaries" have eaten, that they are so smitten with blindness as to the meaning of printed texts. Or are we others absolutely incapable of making our meaning clear?

I imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object.

Your bogey is superst.i.tion; my bogey is desiccation; and each, for his contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties.

In my essay the evil shape was a vision of "Science" in the form of abstraction, priggishness and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the sterilest scientific prig and cad you know, compare him with the richest religious intellect you know, and you would not, any more than I would, give the former the exclusive right of way. But up to page 104 of your essay he will deem you altogether on his side.

Pardon the familiarity of this epistle. I like and admire your theory of Knowledge so much, and you re-duplicate (I _don't_ mean _copy_) my views so beautifully in this article, that I hate to let you go unchidden.

Believe me, with the highest esteem (plus some indignation, for you ought to know better!), Yours faithfully,

Wm. James.

_To Edwin D. Starbuck._

SALISBURY, CONN. _Aug, 24, 1904_.

DEAR STARBUCK,-- ...Of the strictures you make [in your review of my "Varieties"], the first one (undue emphasis on extreme case) is, I find, almost universally made; so it must in some sense be correct. Yet it would never do to study the pa.s.sion of love on examples of ordinary liking or friendly affection, or that of homicidal pugnacity on examples of our ordinary impatiences with our kind. So here it must be that the extreme examples let us more deeply into the secrets of the religious life, explain why the tamer ones value their religion so much, tame though it be, because it is so continuous with a so much acuter ideal.

But I have long been conscious that there is on this matter something to be said which neither my critics have said, nor I can say, and which I must therefore commit to the future.

The second stricture (in your paragraph 4 on pages 104 _ff_.) is of course deeply important, if true. At present I can see but vaguely just what sort of outer relations our inner organism might respond to, which our feelings and intellect interpret by religious thought. You ought to work your program for all it is worth in the way of growth in definiteness. I look forward with great eagerness to your forthcoming book, and meanwhile urge strongly that you should publish the advance article you speak of in Hall's new Journal. I can't see any possible risk. It will objectify a part of your material for you, and possibly, by arousing criticism, enable you to strengthen your points.

Your third stricture, about Higher Powers, is also very important, and I am not at all sure that you may not be right. I have frankly to confess that my "Varieties" carried "theory" as far as I could then carry it, and that I can carry it no farther today. I can't see clearly over that edge. Yet I am sure that tracks have got to be made there--I think that the fixed point with me is the conviction that our "rational"

consciousness touches but a portion of the real universe and that our life is fed by the "mystical" region as well. I have no mystical experience of my own, but just enough of the germ of mysticism in me to recognize the region from which their voice comes when I hear it.

I was much disappointed in Leuba's review of my book in the "International Journal of Ethics." ... I confess that the way in which he stamps out all mysticism whatever, using the common pathological arguments, seemed to me unduly crude. I wrote him an expostulatory letter, which evidently made no impression at all, and which he possibly might send you if you had the curiosity to apply.

I am having a happy summer, feeling quite hearty again. I congratulate you on being settled, though I know nothing of the place. I congratulate you and Mrs. Starbuck also on airy fairy Lilian, who makes, I believe, the third. Long may they live and make their parents proud. With best regards to you both, I am yours ever truly,

Wm. James.

The "expostulatory" letter to Professor Leuba began with a series of objections to statements which he had made, and continued with the pa.s.sage which follows.

_To James Henry Leuba._

Cambridge, _Apr. 17, 1904_.

...My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a G.o.d. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely. The Divine, for my _active_ life, is limited to abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of G.o.d might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differences of intensity may make one's whole centre of energy s.h.i.+ft.

Now, although I am so devoid of _Gottesbewustsein_ in the directer and stronger sense, yet there is _something in me_ which _makes response_ when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me, "_thither lies truth_"--and I am _sure_ it is not old theistic habits and prejudices of infancy. Those are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical _germ_. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but _interpretative_ criticism (not of the mere "hysteria" and "nerves" order) it can energetically combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure _non possumus_: "Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every particular, or nothing. Therefore they are _nothing_, for anyone else than their owner." Why may they not be _something_, although not everything?

Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germ in us, that, I believe, is where we all should _unhesitatingly_ be today.

Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe that we are in my position. Of course the "subliminal" theory is an inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is equally inessential.

I am letting loose a deluge on you! Don't reply at length, or at all.