The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 25

stands for. That significance of him in the popular mind is a great national a.s.set, and it would be a shame to let it run to waste until it has done a lot more work for us. His ambitions are not selfish--he wants to do good only! Bless him--and d.a.m.n all his detractors like you and F.

M.![59]

Don't reply, but vote! Your affectionately

Wm. James.

_To T. S. Perry._

Cambridge, _Aug. 24, 1905_.

DEAR THOS!--You're a _philosophe sans le savoir_ and, when you write your treatise against philosophy, you will be cla.s.sed as the arch-metaphysician. Every philosopher (W. J., _e.g._) pretends that all the others are metaphysicians against whom he is simply defending the rights of common sense. As for Nietzsche, the worst break of his I recall was in a posthumous article in one of the French reviews a few months back. In his high and mighty way he was laying down the law about all the European countries. Russia, he said, is "the only one that has any possible future--and that she owes to the strength of the principle of autocracy to which she alone remains faithful," Unfortunately one can't appeal to the principle of democracy to explain j.a.pan's recent successes.

I am very glad you've done something about poor dear old John Fiske, and I should think that you would have no difficulty in swelling it up to the full "Beacon Biography" size. If you want an extra anecdote, you might tell how, when Chauncey Wright, Chas. Peirce, St. John Green, Warner and I appointed an evening to discuss the "Cosmic Philosophy,"

just out, J. F. went to sleep under our noses.

I hope that life as a farmer agrees with you, and that your "womenkind"

wish nothing better than to be farmers' wives, daughters or other relatives. Unluckily we let our farm this summer; so I am here in Cambridge with Alice, both of us a prey to as bad an attack of grippe as the winter solstice ever brought forth. Today, the 10th day, I am weaker than any kitten. Don't ever let _your_ farm! Affectionately,

W. J.

_To d.i.c.kinson S. Miller._

Cambridge, _Nov. 10, 1905_.

DEAR MILLER,--W. R. Warren has just been here and says he has just seen you; the which precipitates me into a letter to you which has long hung fire. I hope that all goes well. You must be in a rather cheerful quarter of the City. Do you go home Sundays, or not? I hope that the work is congenial. How do you like your students as compared with those here? I reckon you get more out of your colleagues than you did here--barring of course _der Einzige_. We are all such old stories to each other that we say nothing. Santayana is the only [one] about whom we had any curiosity, and he has now quenched that. Perry and Holt have some ideas in reserve.... The fact is that the cla.s.sroom exhausts our powers of speech. Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all the stuff I wrote last year--to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to others, if he has read, it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel trenches and hardly show our heads.

Santayana's book[60] is a great one, if the inclusion of opposites is a measure of greatness. I think it will probably be reckoned great by posterity. It has no _rational_ foundation, being merely one man's way of viewing things: so much of experience admitted and no more, so much criticism and questioning admitted and no more. He is a paragon of Emersonianism.--declare your intuitions, though no other man share them; and the integrity with which he does it is as fine as it is rare. And his naturalism, materialism, Platonism, and atheism form a combination of which the centre of gravity is, I think, very deep. But there is something profoundly alienating in his unsympathetic tone, his "preciousness" and superciliousness. The book is Emerson's first rival and successor, but how different the reader's feeling! The same things in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive, expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great indraught; S. as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling spray outward over the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an "atomizer." ... I fear that the real originality of the book will be lost on nineteen-twentieths of the members of the Philosophical and Psychological a.s.sociation!! The enemies of Harvard will find lots of blasphemous texts in him to injure us withal. But it is a great feather in our cap to harbor such an absolutely free expresser of individual convictions. But enough!

"Phil. 9" is going well. I think I _lecture_ better than I ever did; in fact I know I do. But this professional evolution goes with an involution of all miscellaneous faculty. I am well, and efficient enough, but purposely going slow so as to keep efficient into the Palo Alto summer, which means that I have written nothing. I am pestered by doubts as to whether to put my resignation through this year, in spite of opposition, or to drag along another year or two. I think it is inertia against energy, energy in my case meaning being my own man absolutely. American philosophers, young and old, seem scratching where the wool is short. Important things are being published; but all of them too technical. The thing will never clear up satisfactorily till someone writes out its resultant in decent English....

The reader will have understood "the Palo Alto summer" to refer to the lectures to be delivered at Stanford University during the coming spring. The Stanford engagement was again in James's mind when he spoke, in the next letter, of "dreading the prospect of lecturing till mid-May."

_To d.i.c.kinson S. Miller._

Cambridge, _Dec. 6, 1905_.

DEAR MILLER,-- ...You seem to take radical empiricism more simply than I can. What I mean by it is the thesis that there is no fact "not actually experienced to be such." In other words, the concept of "being"

or "fact" is not wider than or prior to the concept "content of experience"; and you can't talk of _experiences being_ this or that, but only of _things experienced as being_ this or that. But such a thesis would, it seems to me, if literally taken, force one to drop the notion that in point of fact one experience is _ex_ another, so long as the _ex_-ness is not itself a "content" of experience. In the matter of two minds not having the same content, it seems to me that your view commits you to an a.s.sertion _about their experiences_; and such an a.s.sertion a.s.sumes a realm in which the experiences lie, which overlaps and surrounds the "content" of them. This, it seems to me, breaks down radical empiricism, which I hate to do; and I can't yet clearly see my way out of the quandary. I am much boggled and muddled; and the total upshot with me is to see that all the h.o.a.ry errors and prejudices of man in matters philosophical are based on something pretty inevitable in the structure of our thinking, and to distrust summary executions by conviction of contradiction. I suspect your execution of being too summary; but I have copied the last paragraph of the sheets (which I return with heartiest thanks) for the extraordinarily neat statement....

I dread the prospect of lecturing till mid-May, but the wine being ordered, I must drink it. I dislike lecturing more and more. Have just definitely withdrawn my candidacy for the Sorbonne job, with great internal relief, and wish I could withdraw from the whole business, and get at writing.[61] Not a line of writing possible this year--except of course occasional note-making. All the things that one is really concerned with are too nice and fine to use in lectures. You remember the definition of T. H. Greene's student: "The universe is a thick complexus of intelligible relations." Yesterday I got _my_ system similarly defined in an examination-book, by a student whom I appear to have converted to the view that "the Universe is a vague pulsating ma.s.s of next-to-next movement, always feeling its way along to a good purpose, or trying to." That is about as far as lectures can carry them.

I particularly like the "trying to."

I wish I could have been at your recent discussion. I am getting impatient with the awful abstract rigmarole in which our American philosophers obscure the truth. It will be fatal. It revives the palmy days of Hegelianism. It means utter relaxation of intellectual duty, and G.o.d will smite it. If there's anything he hates, it is that kind of oozy writing.

I have just read Busse's book, in which I find a lot of reality by the way, but a pathetic waste of work on side issues--for against the Strong-Heymans view of things, it seems to me that he brings no solid objection whatever. Heymans's book is a wonder.[62] Good-bye, dear Miller. _Come to us_, if you can, as soon as your lectures are over.

Your affectionate

W. J.

_To d.i.c.kinson S. Miller._

[Post-card]

Cambridge, _Dec. 9. 1905_.

"My idea of Algebra," says a non-mathematically-minded student, "is that it is a sort of form of low cunning."

W. J.

_To Daniel Merriman._

Cambridge, _Dec. 9, 1905_.

No, dear Merriman, not "e'en for thy sake." After an unblemished record of declining to give addresses, successfully maintained for four years (I have certainly declined 100 in the past twelve-month), I am not going to break down now, for Abbot Academy, and go dishonored to my grave. It is better, as the "Bhagavat-Gita" says, to lead your own life, however bad, than to lead another's, however good. Emerson teaches the same doctrine, and I live by it as bad and congenial a life as I can. If there is anything that G.o.d despises more than a man who is constantly making speeches, it is another man who is constantly accepting invitations. What must he think, when they are both rolled into one? Get thee behind me, Merriman,--I 'm sure that your saintly partner would never have sent me such a request,--and believe me, as ever, fondly yours,

Wm. James.

_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._

EL TOVAR, GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA, _Jan. 3, 1906_.

DEAR PAOLINA,--I am breaking my journey by a day here, and it seems a good place from which to date my New Year's greeting to you. But we correspond so rarely that when it comes to the point of tracing actual words with the pen, the last impressions of one's day and the more permanent interest of one's life block the way for each other. I think, however, that a word about the Canyon may fitly take precedence. It certainly is equal to the brag; and, like so many of the more stupendous freaks of nature, seems at first-sight smaller and more manageable than one had supposed. But it grows in immensity as the eye penetrates it more intimately. It is so entirely alone in character, that one has no habits of a.s.sociation with "the likes" of it, and at first it seems a foreign curiosity; but already in this one day I am feeling myself grow nearer, and can well imagine that, with greater intimacy, it might become the pa.s.sion of one's life--so far as "Nature" goes. The conditions have been unfavorable for intimate communion. Three degrees above zero, and a spring overcoat, prevent that forgetting of "self"