The Letters of William James, Vol. 1

A few book-notices or reviews did reach the public. Seven are listed under the years 1868 to 1872 in Professor R. B. Perry's "List of Published Writings." Although the matter of these reviews is seldom of present-day interest, the curious reader will find sentences and paragraphs in them that are prophetic of passages in James's later writings, and will observe that he already commanded a style that expressed the color and quality of his thought.44

Considering that James, while still in his twenties, had found such resources within himself, and had learned how to occupy himself in ways so appropriate to the development of his best faculties, it would seem that he need not have labored under any sense of frustration and impotence. But such a feeling undoubtedly did weigh heavily upon him during more or less of the whole period between his winter in Berlin and 1872. And it was indeed due in great part to something else than the mere fact that he could not yet feel the rungs of the ladder of any particular career under his feet. No reader of the "Varieties of Religious Experience" can have doubted that he had known religious despondency himself as well as observed the distress of it in others. The problem of the moral constitution of things, the question of man's relation to the Universe,—whether significant or impotent and meaningless,—these had clearly come home to him as more than questions of metaphysical discourse. It was during this period that such doubts invaded his consciousness in a way that was personal and intimate and, for the time being, oppressive. He was tormented by misgivings which almost paralyzed his naturally buoyant spirit. Bad health, a feeling of the purposelessness of his own particular existence, his philosophic doubts and his constant preoccupation with them, all these combined to plunge him into a state of morbid depression. He seems to have hidden the depth of it from those who were about him. He even had an experience of that kind of melancholy "which takes the form of panic fear." When he wrote the chapter on the "sick soul" thirty years later, he put into it an account of this experience. He still disguised it as the report of an anonymous "French correspondent." Subsequently he admitted to M. Abauzit that the passage was really the story of his own case,45 and it may be repeated here, for the words of the fictitious French correspondent, who was really James, are the most authentic statement that could be given. They will be found at page 160 of the "Varieties of Religious Experience."

"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight, to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them, inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.

"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.... I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that, if I had not clung to scripture-texts like The eternal God is my refuge, etc., Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, etc., I am the Resurrection and the Life, etc., I think I should have grown really insane."

The date of this experience cannot and need not be fixed exactly. It was undoubtedly later than the Berlin winter and after the return to Cambridge. Perhaps it was during the winter of 1869-70, for one of the note-books contains an entry dated April 30, 1870, in which James's resolution and self-confidence appear to be reasserting themselves. This entry must be quoted too. It is not only illuminating with respect to 1870, but suggests parts of the "Psychology" and of the philosophic essays that later gave comfort and courage to unnumbered readers.

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative Grüblei46 in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the form of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. Principiis obsta—Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in Anschauungen,47 but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation. Passer outre. Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can't be optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in]48 doing and suffering and creating."

The next letter was written from Cambridge during the winter following the return from Germany, and while James was completing the work necessary to entitle him to a medical degree.49 The reader will recognize "the firm of B & J" as the medical partnership proposed to Bowditch in the letter of December 12, 1867.

To Henry P. Bowditch

CAMBRIDGE, Jan. 24, 1869.

My dear Henry,—I am in receipt of two letters from yez (dates forgotten) wherein you speak of having received my money and paid my bills and of Fleury's book. You're a gentleman in all respects. You said nothing about whether the pounds when reduced back to francs and Thalers made exactly the original sum from which the pounds were calculated. If it was but five centimes under and you have concealed it, I shall brand you as a villain where'er I go. So out with the truth. Do I still owe you anything?…

I have just been quit by Chas. S. Peirce, with whom I have been talking about a couple of articles in the St. Louis "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" by him, which I have just read. They are exceedingly bold, subtle and incomprehensible, and I can't say that his vocal elucidations helped me a great deal to their understanding, but they nevertheless interest me strangely. The poor cuss sees no chance of getting a professorship anywhere, and is likely to go into the observatory for good. It seems a great pity that as original a man as he is, who is willing and able to devote the powers of his life to logic and metaphysics, should be starved out of a career, when there are lots of professorships of the sort to be given in the country to "safe," orthodox men. He has had good reason, I know, to feel a little discouraged about the prospect, but I think he ought to hang on, as a German would do, till he grows gray....

I saw Wyman a few weeks ago. He said his Indian collecting, etc., took up all his working time now. Do you keep your room above the freezing point or can't the thing be done? Have you made any bosom friends among French students, or do you find the superficial accidents of language and breeding to hold you wider apart than the deep force of your common humanity can draw you together? It's deuced discouraging to find how this is almost certain to be the case.

The older I grow, the more important does it seem to me for the interest of science and of the sick, and of the firm of B. & J., that you should take charge of a big state lunatic asylum. Think of the interesting cases, and of the autopsies! And if you once took firm root, say at Somerville, I should feel assured of a refuge in my old and destitute days, for you certainly would not be treacherous enough to spurn me from the door when I presented myself—on the pretext that I was only shamming dementia. Think of the matter seriously.

I read a little while ago Chambers's "Clinical Lectures," which are exceedingly interesting and able. The lectures on indigestion in the volume are worth, in quality, ten such books as that Guipon I left in Paris, though more limited in subject. I have been trying to get "Hilton on Rest and Pain," which you recommended, from the Athenæum, but, more librorum, when you want 'em, it keeps "out." …

I hope this letter is décousue enough for you. What is a man to write when a reef is being taken in his existence, and absence from thought and life is all he aspires to. Better times will come, though, and with them better letters. Good-bye! Ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr

[Winter of 1868-69.]

Gents!—entry-thieves—chevaliers d'industrie—well-dressed swindlers—confidence men—wolves in sheep's clothing—asses in lion's skin—gentlemanly pickpockets—beware! The hand of the law is already on your throats and waits but a wink to be tightened. All the resources of the immensely powerful Corporation of Harvard University have been set in motion, and concealment of your miserable selves or of the almost equally miserable (though not as such miserable) goloshes which you stole from our entry on Sunday night is as impossible as would be the concealment of the State House. The motive of your precipitate departure from the house became immediately evident to the remaining guests. But they resolved to ignore the matter provided the overshoes were replaced within a week; if not, no considerations whatever will prevent Messrs. Gurney & Perry50 from proceeding to treat you with the utmost severity of the law. It is high time that some of these genteel adventurers should be made an example of, and your offence just comes in time to make the cup of public and private forbearance overflow. My father and self have pledged our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to see the thing through with Gurney and Perry, as the credit of our house is involved and we might ourselves have been losers, not only from you but from the aforesaid G. & P., who have been heard to go about openly declaring that "if they had known the party was going to be that kind of an affair, d—d if they would not have started off earlier themselves with some of those aristocratic James overcoats, hats, gloves and canes!"

So let me as a friend advise you to send the swag back. No questions will be asked—Mum's the word.

WM. JAMES.

To Thomas W. Ward

March [?], 1869.

I had great movings of my bowels toward thee lately—the distant, cynical isolation in which we live with our heart's best brothers sometimes comes over me with a deep bitterness, and I had a little while ago an experience of life which woke up the spiritual monad within me as has not happened more than once or twice before in my life. "Malgré la vue des misères où nous vivons et qui nous tiennent par la gorge," there is an inextinguishable spark which will, when we least expect it, flash out and reveal the existence, at least, of something real—of reason at the bottom of things. I can't tell you how it was now. I'm swamped in an empirical philosophy.51 I feel that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws; and yet, notwithstanding, we are en rapport with reason.—How to conceive it? Who knows? I'm convinced that the defensive tactics of the French "spiritualists" fighting a steady retreat before materialism will never do anything.—It is not that we are all nature but some point which is reason, but that all is nature and all is reason too. We shall see, damn it, we shall see!…

[W. J.]

"The Bootts," with whom "architect Ware" reported the Reverend Mr. Foote to be hand in glove in Italy in 1867, reappear in the following letter. Francis Boott (Harvard 1832) had early been left a widower, and had just returned from a long European residence which he had devoted to the education of his charming and gifted daughter "Lizzie," later to become the wife of Frank Duveneck of Cincinnati, the painter and sculptor. Boott was about the age of Henry James, Senior, but the intimacy which began at Pomfret during the summer of 1869 ripened into one of those whole-family friendships which obliterate differences of age. Later, although both the elder Jameses and young Mrs. Duveneck had died, William and Boott saw each other frequently in Cambridge. The beautiful little commemorative address which James delivered after Boott's death has been included in the volume of "Memories and Studies."

To Henry P. Bowditch

Pomfret, Conn., Aug. 12, 1869.

I have been at this place since July 1st with my family. There are a few farmhouses close together on the same road, which take boarders. We are in the best of them, and very pleasant it is. The country is beautifully hilly and fertile, and the climate deliciously windy and cool. I came here resolved to lead the life of an absolute caterpillar, and have succeeded very well so far, spending most of my time swinging in a hammock under the pine trees in front of the house, and having hardly read fifty pages of anything in the whole six weeks. It has told on me most advantageously. I am far better every way than when I came, and am beginning to walk about quite actively. Maybe it's the beginning of a final rise to health, but I'm so sick of prophesying that I won't say anything about it till it gets more confirmed. One thing is sure, however, that I've given the policy of "rest" a fair trial and shall consider myself justified next winter in going about visiting and to concerts, etc., regardless of the fatigue.

I am forgetting all this while to tell you that I passed my examination with no difficulty and am entitled to write myself M.D., if I choose. Buckingham's midwifery gave me some embarrassment, but the rest was trifling enough. So there is one epoch of my life closed, and a pretty important one, I feel it, both in its scientific "yield" and in its general educational value as enabling me to see a little the inside workings of an important profession and to learn from it, as an average example, how all the work of human society is performed. I feel a good deal of intellectual hunger nowadays, and if my health would allow, I think there is little doubt that I should make a creditable use of my freedom, in pretty hard study. I hope, even as it is, not to have to remain absolutely idle—and shall try to make whatever reading I can do bear on psychological subjects....

Wendell Holmes and John Gray were on here last Saturday and Sunday, and seemed in very jolly spirits at being turned out to pasture from their Boston pen. I should think Wendell worked too hard. Gray is going to Lenox for a fortnight, but W. is to take no vacation.

During the month of July we had the good fortune to have as fellow boarders Mr. Boott and his daughter from Boston. Miss B., although not overpoweringly beautiful, is one of the very best members of her sex I ever met. She spent the first eighteen years of her life in Europe, and has of course Italian, French and German at her fingers' ends, and I never realized before how much a good education (I mean in its common sense of a wide information) added to the charms of a woman. She has a great talent for drawing, and was very busy painting here, which, as she is in just about the same helpless state in which I was when I abandoned the art, made her particularly interesting to me. You had better come home soon and make her acquaintance—for you know these first-class young spinsters do not always keep for ever, although on the whole they tend to, in Boston.

The successors to the Bootts in this house are Gen. Casey (of "Infantry Tactics" notoriety) and spouse. He is an amiable but mildish old gentleman, and about thirty years older than his wife. I'm glad, on the whole, that General Grant, and not he, was our commander in the late war.

If you want some good light German reading, let me advise you to try at least the first half of Jung-Stilling's autobiography. He was a pious German who lived through the latter half of the last century, and wrote with the utmost vividness and naïveté all his experiences, that the glory of God's Providence might be increased. I read it with great delight a few weeks since; it merits the adjective fresh as well as most books.

I saw Jeffries Wyman a short time before leaving. He said he had heard from you. I'd give much to hear from your lips an account of your plans, hopes and so forth, as well as the Ergebnisse of the past year. I was truly glad to hear of your determination to stick to physiology. However discouraging the work of each day may seem, stick at it long enough, and you'll wake up some morning—a physiologist—just as the man who takes a daily drink finds himself unexpectedly a drunkard. I wish I'd asked you sooner to send me a photograph of Bernard and Vulpian—or any other Parisian medical men worth having—is it too late now?—and too late for Pflüger? I address this still to Bonn, supposing they'll send it after you if you've gone.

Write soon to yours affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

To Miss Mary Tappan

Sunday, April 26 [1870?].

My dear Mary,—Mother says she met you in town this morning, looking more lovely than ever, but—with your bonnet on the back of your head!

I hope that this is a mistake. Mother's eyesight is growing fallacious and frequently leads her to see what she would like to see. I cannot think that you would submit to be swayed in your own views of right bonnet-wearing by the mere vociferation of persons like her and Alice, especially when you had heard me expressly say I agreed with you that the forehead is the truly ladylike place for a bonnet. Enough!– I waded out to Cambridge from your party. If you enjoyed yourselves as much as I did (but I'm afraid you didn't) you will keep on giving them. Somehow your part of the town is very inaccessible to me or I should frequently bore you. Hoping, in spite of this fearful mother story today, that you are still unsophisticated, I am always yours affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

You need not answer this.

[Across top of first page]

Written two days ago—kept back from diffidence—sent now because anything is better than this dead silence between us!

To Henry James

CAMBRIDGE, May 7, 1870.

DEAR HARRY,—'Tis Saturday evening, ten minutes past six of the clock and a cold and rainy day (Indian winter, as T. S. P. calls such). I had a fire lighted in my grate this afternoon. There is nevertheless a broken blue spot in the eastern clouds as I look out, and the grass and buds have started visibly since the morning. The trees are half-way out—you of course have long had them in full leaf—and the early green is like a bath to the eyes. Father is gone to Newport for a day, and is expected back within the hour. My jaw is aching badly in consequence of a tooth I had out two days ago, the which refused to be pulled, was broken, but finally extracted, and has left its neighbors prone to ache since. I hope it won't last much longer. I spent the morning, part of it at least, in fishing the "Revues Germaniques" up from [the] cellar, looking over their contents, and placing them volumewise, and flat, in the two top shelves of the big library bookcase vice Thies's good old books just removed, the shelves being too low to take any of our books upright. I feel melancholy as a whip-poor-will and took up pen and paper to sigh melodiously to you. But sighs are hard to express in words. We have been three weeks now without hearing from you, and if a letter does not come tomorrow or Monday, I don't know what'll become of us. Howells brought, a week ago, a long letter you had written to him on the eve of leaving Malvern, so our next will be from London....

My! how I long to see you, and feel of you, and talk things over. I have at last, I think, begun to rise out of the sloughs of the past three months.... What a blessing this change of seasons is, as you used to say, especially in the spring. The winter is man's enemy, he must exert himself against it to live, or it will squeeze him in one night out of existence. So it is hateful to a sick man, and all the greater is the peace of the latter when it yields to a time when nature seems to coöperate with life and float one passively on. But I hear Father arriving and I must go down to hear his usual compte rendu.52

Sunday, 3 P.M.

No letter from you this morning.... It seems to me that all a man has to depend on in this world, is, in the last resort, mere brute power of resistance. I can't bring myself, as so many men seem able to, to blink the evil out of sight, and gloss it over. It's as real as the good, and if it is denied, good must be denied too. It must be accepted and hated, and resisted while there's breath in our bodies....

To Henry P. Bowditch

CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 29, 1870.

My dear Henry,—Your letter written from Leipzig just before the declaration of war reached me in the country. I have thought of you and of answering you, abundantly, ever since; but have mostly been prevented by sheer physical imbecillitas. Now I am ashamed of such a state, and shall write you a page or so a day till the letter is finished. I have had no idea all this time where or what you have been, traveler, student, or medical army officer. You may imagine how excited I was at the beginning of the war. I had not dared to hope for such a complete triumph of poetic justice as occurred. Now I feel much less interested in the success of the Germans, first because I think it's time that the principle of territorial conquest were abolished, second because success will redound to the credit of autocratic government there, and good as that may happen to be in the particular junctures, it's unsafe and pernicious in the long run. Moreover, if France succeeds in beating off the Germans now, I should think there would be some chance of the peace being kept between them hereafter—the French will have gained an insight they never had of the horrors of a war of conquest, and some degree of loathing for it in the abstract; and they will not have to fight to regain their honor. Moreover, I should like to see the republic succeed. But if Alsace and Lorraine be taken, there must be another war, for them and for honor. On the other hand, justice seems to demand a permanent penalty for the political immorality of France. So that there will be enough good to console one for the bad, whichever way it turns out....