The Letters of William James, Vol. 1

I am very glad that you think the methodical habits you must stick to in book-keeping are going to be good discipline to you. I confess to having had a little feeling of spite when I heard you had gone back on science; for I had always thought you would one day emerge into deep and clear water there—by keeping on long enough. But I really don't think it so all-important what our occupation is, so long as we do respectably and keep a clean bosom. Whatever we are not doing is pretty sure to come to us at intervals, in the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent regrets that it is lost to us. I have felt so about zoölogy whenever I was not studying it, about anthropology when studying physiology, about practical medicine lately, now that I am cut off from it, etc., etc., etc.; and I conclude that that sort of nostalgia is a necessary incident of our having imaginations, and we must expect it more or less whatever we are about. I don't mean to say that in some occupations we should not have less of it though.

My dear old Thomas, you have always sardonically greeted me as the man of calm and clockwork feelings. The reason is that your own vehemence and irregularity was so much greater, that it involuntarily, no matter what my private mood might have been, threw me into an outwardly antagonistic one in which I endeavored to be a clog to your mobility, as it were. So I fancy you have always given me credit for less sympathy with you and understanding of your feelings than I really have had. All last winter, for instance, when I was on the continual verge of suicide, it used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal contentment. The appearance of it arose from my reaction against what seemed to me your unduly noisy and demonstrative despair. The fact is, I think, that we have both gone through a good deal of similar trouble; we resemble each other in being both persons of rather wide sympathies, not particularly logical in the processes of our minds, and of mobile temperament; though your physical temperament being so much more tremendous than mine makes a great quantitative difference both in your favor, and against you, as the case may be.

Well, neither of us wishes to be a mere loafer; each wishes a work which shall by its mere exercise interest him and at the same time allow him to feel that through it he takes hold of the reality of things—whatever that may be—in some measure. Now the first requisite is hard for us to fill, by reason of our wide sympathy and mobility; we can only choose a business in which the evil of feeling restless shall be at a minimum, and then go ahead and make the best of it. That minimum will grow less every year.—In this connection I will again refer to a poem you probably know: "A Grammarian's Funeral," by R. Browning, in "Men and Women." It always strengthens my backbone to read it, and I think the feeling it expresses of throwing upon eternity the responsibility of making good your one-sidedness somehow or other ("Leave now for dogs and apes, Man has forever") is a gallant one, and fit to be trusted if one-sided activity is in itself at all respectable.

The other requirement is hard theoretically, though practically not so hard as the first. All I can tell you is the thought that with me outlasts all others, and onto which, like a rock, I find myself washed up when the waves of doubt are weltering over all the rest of the world; and that is the thought of my having a will, and of my belonging to a brotherhood of men possessed of a capacity for pleasure and pain of different kinds. For even at one's lowest ebb of belief, the fact remains empirically certain (and by our will we can, if not absolutely refrain from looking beyond that empirical fact, at least practically and on the whole accept it and let it suffice us)—that men suffer and enjoy. And if we have to give up all hope of seeing into the purposes of God, or to give up theoretically the idea of final causes, and of God anyhow as vain and leading to nothing for us, we can, by our will, make the enjoyment of our brothers stand us in the stead of a final cause; and through a knowledge of the fact that that enjoyment on the whole depends on what individuals accomplish, lead a life so active, and so sustained by a clean conscience as not to need to fret much. Individuals can add to the welfare of the race in a variety of ways. You may delight its senses or "taste" by some production of luxury or art, comfort it by discovering some moral truth, relieve its pain by concocting a new patent medicine, save its labor by a bit of machinery, or by some new application of a natural product. You may open a road, help start some social or business institution, contribute your mite in any way to the mass of the work which each generation subtracts from the task of the next; and you will come into real relations with your brothers—with some of them at least.

I know that in a certain point of view, and the most popular one, this seems a cold activity for our affections, a stone instead of bread. We long for sympathy, for a purely personal communication, first with the soul of the world, and then with the soul of our fellows. And happy are they who think, or know, that they have got them! But to those who must confess with bitter anguish that they are perfectly isolated from the soul of the world, and that the closest human love encloses a potential germ of estrangement or hatred, that all personal relation is finite, conditional, mixed (vide in Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," stanzas by C. P. Cranch, "Thought is deeper than speech," etc., etc.), it may not prove such an unfruitful substitute. At least, when you have added to the property of the race, even if no one knows your name, yet it is certain that, without what you have done, some individuals must needs be acting now in a somewhat different manner. You have modified their life; you are in real relation with them; you have in so far forth entered into their being. And is that such an unworthy stake to set up for our good, after all? Who are these men anyhow? Our predecessors, even apart from the physical link of generation, have made us what we are. Every thought you now have and every act and intention owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living brothers. Everything we know and are is through men. We have no revelation but through man. Every sentiment that warms your gizzard, every brave act that ever made your pulse bound and your nostril open to a confident breath was a man's act. However mean a man may be, man is the best we know; and your loathing as you turn from what you probably call the vulgarity of human life—your homesick yearning for a Better, somewhere—is furnished by your manhood; your ideal is made up of traits suggested by past men's words and actions. Your manhood shuts you in forever, bounds all your thoughts like an overarching sky—and all the Good and True and High and Dear that you know by virtue of your sharing in it. They are the Natural Product of our Race. So that it seems to me that a sympathy with men as such, and a desire to contribute to the weal of a species, which, whatever may be said of it, contains All that we acknowledge as good, may very well form an external interest sufficient to keep one's moral pot boiling in a very lively manner to a good old age. The idea, in short, of becoming an accomplice in a sort of "Mankind its own God or Providence" scheme is a practical one.

I don't mean, by any means, to affirm that we must come to that, I only say it is a mode of envisaging life; which is capable of affording moral support—and may at any rate help to bridge over the despair of skeptical intervals. I confess that, in the lonesome gloom which beset me for a couple of months last summer, the only feeling that kept me from giving up was that by waiting and living, by hook or crook, long enough, I might make my nick, however small a one, in the raw stuff the race has got to shape, and so assert my reality. The stoic feeling of being a sentinel obeying orders without knowing the general's plans is a noble one. And so is the divine enthusiasm of moral culture (Channing, etc.), and I think that, successively, they may all help to ballast the same man.

What a preacher I'm getting to be! I had no idea when I sat down to begin this long letter that I was going to be carried away so far. I feel like a humbug whenever I endeavor to enunciate moral truths, because I am at bottom so skeptical. But I resolved to throw off "views" to you, because I know how stimulated you are likely to be by any accidental point of view or formula which you may not exactly have struck on before (e.g., what you write me of the effect of that sentence of your mother's about marrying). I had no idea this morning that I had so many of the elements of a Pascal in me. Excuse the presumption.—But to go back. I think that in business as well as in science one can have this philanthropic aspiration satisfied. I have been growing lately to feel that a great mistake of my past life—which has been prejudicial to my education, and by telling me which, and by making me understand it some years ago, some one might have conferred a great benefit on me—is an impatience of results. Inexperience of life is the cause of it, and I imagine it is generally an American characteristic. I think you suffer from it. Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord, from a long enough daily work at a given matter; and I think the work as a mere occupation ought to be the primary interest with us. At least, I am sure this is so in the intellectual realm, and I strongly suspect it is the secret of German prowess therein. Have confidence, even when you seem to yourself to be making no progress, that, if you but go on in your own uninteresting way, they must bloom out in their good time. Ouf, my dear old Tom! I think I must pull up. I have no time or energy left to gossip to thee of our life here....

To his Father

TEPLITZ, Jan. 22, 1868.

My dear Dad,—Don't allow yourself to be shocked with surprise on reading the above date till you hear the reasons which have brought me here at this singular season. They are grounded in the increasing wear and tear of my life in Berlin, and in my growing impatience to get well enough to be able to do some work in the summer.... I find myself getting more interested in physiology and nourishing a hope that I may be able to make its study (and perhaps its teaching) my profession; and, joining the thought that if I came to Teplitz now for three weeks I could have still another turn at it, if necessary, in April,—before the summer semester at Heidelberg began,—to the consciousness that in my present condition I was doing worse than wasting time at Berlin, I took advantage of a fine sunshiny morning four days ago, packed my trunk, said good-bye to T. S. Perry, and took the railroad for this place. I hope you won't think from seeing me back here that my loudly trumpeted improvement in the autumn was fallacious. On the contrary, I feel more than ever, now that I am back in presence of my old measures of strength (distances, etc.), how substantial that improvement was—only it has not yet bridged the way up to complete soundness.

I have been feeling for a month past that I ought to come here, but an effeminate shrinking from loneliness and so forth, and the inhuman blackness of the weather kept me from it. Now that I am here, I am only sorry I deferred it so long. I found the Fürstenbad open, and with four other "cure-guests" in it. All its varletry, male and female, fat as wood-chucks from their winter's repose; a theatre (!) going in town three times a week; the head waiter of the restaurant where in the summer I used, for the price of a glass of milk, to read the "Times" and the "Independence Belge," no longer wearing the pallid look of stern and desperate business with which he used to scud around among the crowded tables, and which used to make me stand in mortal fear of him, but appearing as a comfortable and red-cheeked human being with even greater conversational gifts than usual; every one moreover glad to see me, etc., etc. The veil of winter has been lifted for a week and the buried spring [has] peeped out and taken a-breathing before her time. Today everything is a-dripping, the earth has a moving smell, and the sky is full of spots of melting blue. If such weather but lasts, the time will pass here very quickly. I have brought a lot of good books, and if their interest wanes have the whole circulating library to fall back on. So much for Teplitz.

Sunday before last Mrs. Bancroft told me that the most beautiful woman in Berlin had asked after me with affection and expressed a desire to see me. After making me guess in vain she told me that it was Mrs. Lieutenant Pertz, née Emma Wilkinson.41 I went to see her and found her looking hardly a day older or different, and certainly very good-looking, though probably Mrs. B.'s description was exaggerated. She had the sweetest and simplest of manners and asked all about the family, to whom she sends her love. She told me nothing particular about her own family which we did not know, except that Jamie had an aquiline nose. She has three fine children, much more of the British than the German type, and it was right pleasant to see her. She has very handsome brown eyes. Nice manners are a very charming thing, and some of the ladies here might set a good example to some other young ladies I might mention (who do not live 100 miles from Quincy Street); Fräulein Borneman, for example. Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential; let her face beam with serious beauty, and glow with quiet delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short glimpses of a soul with wings, as it were (but very short ones); let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, and you have no idea how lovely she will become.... I am sorry Wilky has had a relapse of his fever. He and Bob are still the working ones of the family (Harry too, though!), but I hope my day will yet come. Give him and Bob a great deal of love for me. Life in Teplitz is favorable to letter-writing and I will write to Bob next week. Love to every one else, from yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James

Fürstenbad, Teplitz, Mar. 4, 1868.

I have been admitted to the intimacy of a family here named G–, who keep a hotel and restaurant. Immense, bulky, garrulous, kind-hearted woman, father with thick red face, little eyes and snow-white hair, two daughters of about twenty. The whole conversation and tea-taking there reminded me so exactly of Erckmann-Chatrian's stories that I wanted to get a stenographer and a photographer to take them down. The great, thick remarks, all about housekeeping and domestic economy of some sort or other; the jokes; the masses of eatables, from the awful swine soup (tasting of nothing I could think of but the perspiration of the animal and which the terrible mother forced me to gulp down by accusing me, whenever I grew pale and faltered, of not relishing their food), through the sausages (liver sausages, blood sausages, and more), to the beer and wine; then the masses of odoriferous cheese, which I refused in spite of all attacks, entreaties and accusations, and then heard, oh, horrors! with somewhat the feeling I suppose with which a criminal hears the judge pass sentence of death upon him,—then heard an order given for some more sausages to be brought in to me instead; the air of religious earnestness with which the eating of the father was talked about, how the mother told the daughter not to give him so much wine, because he never enjoyed his beer so much after it, while he with his silver spectacles and pointing with his pudgy forefinger to the lines, read out of the newspaper half aloud to himself; the immense long room with walls of dark wood, the big old-fashioned china stove at each end of it, etc., etc.,—all brought up the Taverne du Jambon de Mayence into my mind....

[W. J.]

The water-cure at Teplitz worked no cure; but James repaired to Heidelberg in the spring, to hear Helmholtz lecture and with the hope of following the medical courses during the summer semester. Once more he had to stop work, and for a while he returned to Berlin. From there he traveled by way of Geneva, stopping characteristically for only the very briefest of glances at the familiar scenes of his school-days, and hurrying on to spend the latter part of the summer at another watering-place, Divonne in Savoy. The following brief letter seems to have been written there, and is interesting as a first reference to Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher who later exercised an important influence on James's thinking.

To his Father

[Divonne?], Oct. 5, 1868.

DEAR FATHER,—…I have not been doing much studying lately, nor indeed for some time past, though I manage to keep something dribbling all the while. I began the other day Kant's "Kritik," which is written crabbedly enough, but which strikes me so far as almost the sturdiest and honestest piece of work I ever saw. Whether right or wrong (and it is pretty clearly wrong in a great many details of its Analytik part, however the rest may be), there it stands like a great snag or mark to which everything metaphysical or psychological must be referred. I wish I had read it earlier. It is very slow reading and I shall only give it a couple of hours daily.

I got a little book by a number of authors, "L'Année 1867 Philosophique," which may interest you if you have not got it already. The introduction, a review of the state of philosophy in France for some years back, is by one Charles Renouvier, of whom I never heard before but who, for vigor of style and compression, going to the core of half a dozen things in a single sentence, so different from the namby-pamby diffusiveness of most Frenchmen, is unequaled by anyone. He takes his stand on Kant. I have not read the rest of the book.

Here I stop and take my douche. I will be as economical as I can this winter in details, and next summer will see us together. I wish I had the inclination to write, or anything to write about, as Harry has. I feel ashamed of fattening on the common purse when all the other boys are working, but writing seems for me next to impossible. Lots of love to all. Yours,

W. J.

The "cure" at Divonne was as profitless as had been the similar experiments at Teplitz. So instead of staying abroad for the winter, James turned his face homeward almost immediately. After a fortnight's companionship with H. P. Bowditch in Paris, he embarked on November 7 for America, disappointed in the chief hopes with which he had landed in Europe eighteen months before, but much matured in character and thought, and resolved to seek his health and his career at home.

VI

1869-1872

Invalidism in Cambridge

THE return to Cambridge from Germany in November, 1868, marked the beginning of four outwardly uneventful years. James spent them under his father's roof. His family and intimate friends were usually close at hand; the stream of his correspondence shrank to almost nothing. The few letters that have been preserved do incomplete justice to this period, but can, fortunately, be supplemented by other documents.

James obtained his medical degree easily enough in June, 1869; but he had no thought of engaging in the practice of medicine. He wanted to go on with physiology; but he was not strong enough to work in a laboratory. Condemned to sedentary occupations, and without any definite responsibilities, he seemed, to his own jaundiced vision, to be declining into a desultory and profitless idleness.

In this he was hardly fair to himself or to the conditions. It is true that he had no remunerative occupation, and that he could look forward to no well-defined professional career for which he could be preparing and training himself. He was, also, handicapped by the fact that sometimes he could not use his eyes for more than two hours a day. On the other hand, he would probably not have been happy in any professional harness into which he could then have fitted, and was really more fortunate in having leisure to read and discuss and fill note-books forced upon him between his twenty-seventh and thirty-first years. Such leisure has been the unattained goal of many another man with a mind not one tenth so curious and speculative as his; and few men who have attained it have made as good use of their free time as James made of the years 1869 to 1872.

His eyes were weak, to be sure, and his letters usually bewail his inability to use them more. But, skipping as he had trained himself to, and snatching at every opportunity, he somehow got over a great deal of reading in neurology, physiology of the nervous system, and psychology. He was not confined to the books that were on the shelves of the Quincy Street house, but could borrow from the excellent Harvard and Boston libraries without inconvenience. At times, when he was able to read for several hours a day, he used, as he put it, "to keep himself from using his mind too much" by turning to non-professional literature in German, French, and English. One letter to his brother (June 1, 1869) affords material for reflection upon the range and power of assimilation of a mind which could seek such relaxation. "I have," he writes in this letter, "been reading for recreation, since you left, a good many German books: Steffens and C. P. Moritz's autobiographies, some lyric poetry, W. Humboldt's letters, Schmidt's history of German literature, etc., which have brought to a head the slowly maturing feeling of German culture.... Reading of the revival, or rather the birth, of German literature—Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, [the] Schlegels, Tieck, Richter, Herder, Steffens, W. Humboldt, and a number of others—puts one into a real classical period. These men were all interesting as men, each standing as a type or representative of a certain way of taking life, and beginning at the bottom—taking nothing for granted. In England, the only parallel I can think of is Coleridge, and in France, Rousseau and Diderot. If the heroes and heroines of all of Ste.-Beuve's gossip had had a tenth part of the significance of these and their male and female friends, bad readers like myself would never think of growing impatient with him as an old debauchee." A diary entry made by his sister Alice, a few years later says: "In old days, when [William's] eyes were bad, and I used to begin to tell him something which I thought of interest from whatever book I might be reading … he would invariably say, 'I glanced into that book yesterday and read that.'"42

He had already formed the habit of making marginal notes, of writing down summaries of his reading, and of formulating his ideas on paper—the admirable practice, in short, of confiding in note-books and addressing himself freely to the waste-basket. For instance: "In 1869, when still a medical student, he began to write an essay showing how almost everyone who speculated about brain processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his 'Time and Space'), Maudsley, Lockhart, Clarke, Bain, Dr. Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the confusion. The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its reality."43

He kept some of his memoranda in a series of the alphabetized blank-books which used to be sold under the name of "Todd's Index Rerum" during the sixties, and which were devised to facilitate indexing and reference. He continued to make entries in these books until 1890, and perhaps later. He also filled copy-books and pocket note-books, of which a few mutilated but interesting fragments remain. In these he sometimes copied out quotations, sometimes noted comments on his reading, sometimes tried to clothe an idea of his own in precise words. Occasionally he made diary-like entries that show how familiar a companion he was making of the note-book. He was already at his ease in the practice of the Baconian maxim that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.