The Letters of William James, Vol. 2

Believe me, with profound regards, your always truly,

WM. JAMES.

To Charles Eliot Norton

Rye, June 26, 1901.

Dear Charles Norton,—Your delightful letter of June 1st has added one more item to my debt of gratitude to you; and now that the Edinburgh strain is over, I can sit down and make you a reply a little more adequate than heretofore has been possible. The lectures went off most successfully, and though I got tired enough, I feel that I am essentially tougher and stronger for the old familiar functional activity. My tone is changed immensely, and that is the main point. To be actually earning one's salt again, after so many months of listless waiting and wondering whether such a thing will ever again become possible, puts a new heart into one, and I now look towards the future with aggressive and hopeful eyes again, though perhaps not with quite the cannibalistic ones of the youth of the new century.

Edinburgh is great. A strong broad city, and, in its spiritual essence, almost exactly feeling to me like old Boston, nuclear Boston, though on a larger, more important scale. People were very friendly, but we had to dodge invitations—hoffentlich I may be able to accept more of them next year. The audience was extraordinarily attentive and reactive—I never had an audience so keen to catch every point. I flatter myself that by blowing alternately hot and cold on their Christian prejudices I succeeded in baffling them completely till the final quarter-hour, when I satisfied their curiosity by showing more plainly my hand. Then, I think, I permanently dissatisfied both extremes, and pleased a mean numerically quite small. Qui vivra verra. London seemed curiously profane and free-and-easy, not exactly shabby, but go-as-you-please, in aspect, as we came down five days ago. Since then I spent a day with poor Mrs. Myers.... I mailed you yesterday a notice I wrote in Rome of him.37 He "looms" upon me after death more than he did in life, and I think that his forthcoming book about "Human Personality" will probably rank hereafter as "epoch-making."

At London I saw Theodora [Sedgwick] and the W. Darwins. Theodora was as good and genial as ever, and Sara [Darwin] looked, I thought, wonderfully "distinguished" and wonderfully little changed considering the length of intervening years and the advance of the Enemy. I was too tired to look up Leslie Stephen, or anyone else save Mrs. John Bancroft when in London, although I wanted much to see L. S. The first volume of his "Utilitarians" seems to me a wonderfully spirited performance—I haven't yet got at the other two.

I am hoping to get off to Nauheim tomorrow, leaving Alice and Harry to follow a little later. I confess that the Continent "draws" me again. I don't know whether it be the essential identity of soul that expresses itself in English things, and makes them seem known by heart already and intellectually dead and unexciting, or whether it is the singular lack of visible sentiment in England, and absence of "charm," or the oppressive ponderosity and superfluity and prominence of the unnecessary, or what it is, but I'm blest if I ever wish to be in England again. Any continental country whatever stimulates and refreshes vastly more, in spite of so much strong picturesqueness here, and so beautiful a Nature. England is ungracious, unamiable and heavy; whilst the Continent is everywhere light and amiably quaint, even where it is ugly, as in many elements it is in Germany. To tell the truth, I long to steep myself in America again and let the broken rootlets make new adhesions to the native soil. A man coquetting with too many countries is as bad as a bigamist, and loses his soul altogether.

I suppose you are at Ashfield and I hope surrounded, or soon to be so, by more children than of late, and all well and happy. Don't feel too bad about the country. We've thrown away our old privileged and prerogative position among the nations, but it only showed we were less sincere about it than we supposed we were. The eternal fight of liberalism has now to be fought by us on much the same terms as in the older countries. We have still the better chance in our freedom from all the corrupting influences from on top from which they suffer.—Good-bye and love from both of us, to you all. Yours ever faithfully,

WM. JAMES.

To Nathaniel S. Shaler

[1901?]

Dear Shaler,—Being a man of methodical sequence in my reading, which in these days is anyhow rather slower than it used to be, I have only just got at your book.38 Once begun, it slipped along "like a novel," and I must confess to you that it leaves a good taste behind; in fact a sort of haunting flavor due to its individuality, which I find it hard to explain or define.

To begin with, it doesn't seem exactly like you, but rather like some quiet and conscientious old passive contemplator of life, not bristling as you are with "points," and vivacity. Its light is dampened and suffused—and all the better perhaps for that. Then it is essentially a confession of faith and a religious attitude—which one doesn't get so much from you upon the street, although even there 'tis clear that you have that within which passeth show. The optimism and healthy-mindedness are yours through and through, so is the wide imagination. But the moderate and non-emphatic way of putting things is not; nor is the absence of any "American humor." So I don't know just when or where or how you wrote it. I can't place it in the Museum or University Hall. Probably it was in Quincy Street, and in a sort of Piperio-Armadan trance! Anyhow it is a sincere book, and tremendously impressive by the gravity and dignity and peacefulness with which it suggests rather than proclaims conclusions on these eternal themes. No more than you can I believe that death is due to selection; yet I wish you had framed some hypothesis as to the physico-chemical necessity thereof, or discussed such hypotheses as have been made. I think you deduce a little too easily from the facts the existence of a general guiding tendency toward ends like those which our mind sets. We never know what ends may have been kept from realization, for the dead tell no tales. The surviving witness would in any case, and whatever he were, draw the conclusion that the universe was planned to make him and the like of him succeed, for it actually did so. But your argument that it is millions to one that it didn't do so by chance doesn't apply. It would apply if the witness had preëxisted in an independent form and framed his scheme, and then the world had realized it. Such a coincidence would prove the world to have a kindred mind to his. But there has been no such coincidence. The world has come but once; the witness is there after the fact and simply approves, dependently. As I understand improbability, it only exists where independents coincide. Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of "probability" at all. I think, therefore, that the excellences we have reached and now approve may be due to no general design but merely to a succession of the short designs we actually know of, taking advantage of opportunity, and adding themselves together from point to point. We are all you say we are, as heirs; we are a mystery of condensation, and yet of extrication and individuation, and we must worship the soil we have so wonderfully sprung from. Yet I don't think we are necessitated to worship it as the Theists do, in the shape of one all-inclusive and all-operative designing power, but rather like polytheists, in the shape of a collection of beings who have each contributed and are now contributing to the realization of ideals more or less like those for which we live ourselves. This more pluralistic style of feeling seems to me both to allow of a warmer sort of loyalty to our past helpers, and to tally more exactly with the mixed condition in which we find the world as to its ideals. What if we did come where we are by chance, or by mere fact, with no one general design? What is gained, is gained, all the same. As to what may have been lost, who knows of it, in any case? or whether it might not have been much better than what came? But if it might, that need not prevent us from building on what we have.

There are lots of impressive passages in the book, which certainly will live and be an influence of a high order. Chapters 8, 10, 14, 15 have struck me most particularly.

I gave at Edinburgh two lectures on "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," contrasting it with that of "the sick soul." I shall soon have to quote your book as a healthy-minded document of the first importance, though I believe myself that the sick soul must have its say, and probably carries authority too.... Ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

To Miss Frances R. Morse

Nauheim, July 10, 1901.

Dearest Fanny,—Your letter of June 28th comes just as I was working myself up to a last European farewell to you, anyhow, the which has far more instigative spur now, with your magnificent effusion in my hands. Dear Fanny, whatever you do, don't die before our return! In these two short years so many of my best friends have been mown down, that I feel uncertainty everywhere, and gasp till the interval is over. John Ropes, Henry Sidgwick, F. Myers, T. Davidson, Carroll Everett, Edward Hooper, John Fiske, all intimate and valuable, some of them extremely so, and the circle grows ever smaller and will grow so to the end of one's own life. Now comes Whitman, whom I never knew very well, but whom I always liked thoroughly, and wish I had known better.... It will be interesting to know what new turn it will give to S. W.'s existence. I haven't the least idea how it will affect her outward life. Doubtless she will be freer to come abroad; but I hope and trust she will not be taking to staying any time in London or Paris, in the brutal cynical atmosphere of which places her little eagerness and efflorescences and cordialities would receive no such sympathetic treatment as they do with us, until she had stayed long enough for people to know her thoroughly and conquered a position by living down the first impression. Nothing so anti-English as S. W.'s whole "sphere." So keep her at home—with occasional sallies abroad; and if she must ever winter abroad, let it be in delightful slipshod old Rome! All which, as you perceive, is somewhat confidential. I trust that the present failure of health with her is something altogether transient, and that she will keep swimming long after everyone else has put into shore.

Which simile reminds me of Mrs. Holmes's panel, with its superb inscription.39 What a sense she has for such things! and how I thank you for quoting it! With your and her permission, I shall make a vital use of it in a future book. It sums up the attitude towards life of a good philosophic pluralist, and that is what, in my capacity of author of that book, I am to be. I thank you also for the reference to I Corinthians, 1, 28, etc.40 I had never expressly noticed that text; but it will make the splendidest motto for Myers's two posthumous volumes, and I am going to write to Mrs. Myers to suggest the same. I thank you also for your sympathetic remarks about my paper on Myers. Fifty or a hundred years hence, people will know better than now whether his instinct for truth was a sound one; and perhaps will then pat me on the back for backing him. At present they give us the cold shoulder. We are righter, in any event, than the Münsterbergs and Jastrows are, because we don't undertake, as a condition of our investigating phenomena, to bargain with them that they shan't upset our "presuppositions."

It is a beautiful summer morning, and I write under an awning on the high-perched corner balcony of the bedroom in which we live, of a corner house on the edge of the little town, with houses on the west of us and the fertile country spreading towards the east and south. A lovely region, though a climate terribly flat. I expect to take my last bath today, and to get my absolution from the terrible Schott; whereupon we shall leave tomorrow morning for Strassburg and the Vosges, for a week of touring up in higher air, and thence, über Paris, as straight as may be for Rye. I keep in a state of subliminal excitement over our sailing on the 31st. It seems too good to be really possible. Yet the ratchet of time will work along its daily cogs, and doubtless bring it safe within our grasp. Last year I felt no distinctly beneficial effect from the baths. This year it is distinct. I have, in other words, continued pretty steadily getting better for four months past; so it is evident that I am in a genuinely ameliorative phase of my existence, of which the acquired momentum may carry me beyond any living man of my age. At any rate, I set no limits now!

When we return I shall go straight up to Chocorua to the Salters'. What I crave most is some wild American country. It is a curious organic-feeling need. One's social relations with European landscape are entirely different, everything being so fenced or planted that you can't lie down and sprawl. Kipling, alluding to the "bleeding raw" appearance of some of our outskirt settlements, says, "Americans don't mix much with their landscape as yet." But we mix a darned sight more than Europeans, so far as our individual organisms go, with our camping and general wild-animal personal relations. Thank Heaven that our Nature is so much less "redeemed"!…

You see, Fanny, that we are in good spirits on the whole, although my poor dear Alice has long sick-headaches that consume a good many days—she is just emerging from a bad one. Happiness, I have lately discovered, is no positive feeling, but a negative condition of freedom from a number of restrictive sensations of which our organism usually seems to be the seat. When they are wiped out, the clearness and cleanness of the contrast is happiness. This is why anesthetics make us so happy. But don't you take to drink on that account! Love to your mother, Mary, and all. Write to us no more. How happy that responsibility gone must make you! We both send warmest love,

W. J.

To Henry James

[Post-card]Bad-Nauheim, July 11, [1901].

Your letter and paper, with the shock of John Fiske's death, came yesterday. It is too bad, for he had lots of good work in him yet, and is a loss to American letters as well as to his family. Singularly simple, solid, honest creature, he will be hugely missed by many! Everybody seems to be going! We stay. Life here is absolutely monotonous, but very sweet. The country is so innocently pretty. I sit up here on a terrace-restaurant, looking down on park and town, with the leaves playing in the warm breeze above me, and the little Gothic town of Friedberg only a mile off, in the midst of the great fertile plain all chequer-boarded with the different tinted crops and framed in a far-off horizon of low hills and woods. Alice and Harry, kept in by the heat, come later. He went for a distant walk yesterday P.M. and, not returning till near eleven, we thought he might have got lost in the woods. Yale beat the University race, but Bill's four[-oared crew] beat the Yale four. On such things is human contentment based. The baths stir up my aortic feeling and make me depressed, but I've had 6 of them, and the rest will pass quickly. Love.

W. J.

To E. L. Godkin

Bad-Nauheim, July 25, 1901.

Dear Godkin,—Yours of the 9th, which came duly, gave me great pleasure, first because it showed that your love for me had not grown cold, and, second, because it seemed to reveal in you tendencies towards sociability at large which are incompatible with a very alarming condition of health. Nothing can give us greater pleasure than to come and see you before we sail. We shall stick here, probably, for a fortnight longer, then go for a week to the Hartz mountains to brace up a little—the baths being very debilitating and the air of Nauheim sedative. Then straight to Rye until we sail—on August 31st. I hope that you enjoy the "New Forest"—the "Children" thereof, by Capt. Mayne Reid, I think, was one of my most mysteriously impressive books about the age of ten. But I fear that there is not much primeval forest to be seen there nowadays. Nauheim is a sweet little place. One never sees a soldier and wouldn't know that Militarismus existed. There are two policemen, one of them an old fellow of 70 who shuffles along to keep his weak knees from giving way. I went on business to the police office t' other day. The building stood in a fine cabbage garden, and over the first door one met on entering stood the word Küche41 in large letters. Quite like the old idyllic pre-Sadowan German days. My heart is getting well! I made an excursion to Homburg yesterday, with J. B. Warner of Cambridge, counsellor at law, and general disputant. For about six hours we discussed the Philippine question, he damning the anti-Imperialists—yet my thoracic contents remained as solid as if cast in Portland cement. Six months ago I should have had the wildest commotion there. Congratulate me! Kindest regards to you both, in which my wife joins. Yours ever affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

It should perhaps be explained that E. L. Godkin had had a cerebral hemorrhage the year before. It had left him clear in mind, but a permanent invalid, with little power of locomotion. James spent several days with him at Castle Malwood near Stony Cross before he sailed for home; and when he was in England again the next year, he repeated the visit.

To E. L. Godkin

Lamb House, Aug. 29, 1901.

My dear Godkin,—Just a line to bid you both farewell! We leave for London tomorrow morning and at four on Saturday we shall be ploughing the deep. All goes well, save that the wife has sprained her ankle, and with the "firmness" that characterizes her lovely sex insists on hobbling about and doing all the packing. I shan't be aisy till I see her in her berth.

After all, in spite of you and Henry, and all Americo-phobes, I'm glad I'm going back to my own country again. Notwithstanding its "humble"ness, its fatigues, and its complications, there's no place like home—though I think the New Forest might come near it as a substitute. England in general is too padded and cushioned for my rustic taste.

The most elevating moral thing I've seen during these two years abroad, after Myers's heroic exit from this world at Rome last winter, has been the gentleness and cheerful spirit with which you are still able to remain in it after such a blow as you have received. Who could suppose so much public ferocity to cover so much private sweetness? Seriously speaking, it is more edifying to us others, dear Godkin, than you yourself can understand it to be, and I for one have learned by the example. I pray that your winter problems may gradually solve themselves without perplexity, and that next spring may find you relieved of all this helplessness. It is a very slow progress, with many steps backwards, but if the length of the forward steps preponderates, one may be well content. Good-bye and bless you both. Affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

James returned to America in early September, in advance of the beginning of the College term. But from this time on he limited his teaching to one half-course during the year. His intention was to husband his strength for writing. The course which he offered during the first half of the College year was accordingly announced as a course on "The Psychological Elements of Religious Life." By the end of the winter, the second series of Gifford lectures, constituting the last half of the "Varieties," had been written out.

To Miss Pauline Goldmark

Silver Lake, N. H., Sept. 14, 1901.

Dear Pauline,—Your kind letter (excuse pencil—pen won't write) appears to have reached London after our departure and has just followed us hither. I had hoped for a word from you, first at Nauheim, then on the steamer, then at Cambridge; but this makes everything right. How good to think of you as the same old loveress of woods and skies and waters, and of your Bryn-Mawr friends. May none of the lot of you ever grow insufficient or forsake each other! The sight of you sporting in Nature's bosom once lifted me into a sympathetic region, and made a better boy of me in ways which it would probably amuse and surprise you to learn of, so strangely are characters useful to each other, and so subtly are destinies intermixed. But with you on the mountain-tops of existence still, and me apparently destined to remain grubbing in the cellar, we seem far enough apart at present and may have to remain so. Alas! how brief is life's glory, at the best. I can't get to Keene Valley this year, and [may] possibly never get there. Give a kindly thought, my friend, to the spectre who once for a few times trudged by your side, and who would do so again if he could. I'm a "motor," and morally ill-adapted to the game of patience. I have reached home in pretty poor case, but I think it's mainly "nerves" at present, and therefore remediable; so I live on the future, but keep my expectations modest. Two years away has been too long, and the "strangeness" which I dreaded (from past experience of it) covers all things American as with a veil. Pathetic and poverty-stricken is all I see! This will pass away, but I don't want good things to pass away also, so I beseech you, Pauline, to sit down and write me a good intimate letter telling me what your life and interest were in New York last winter.

I am very sorry to hear of your sister Susan's illness, and pray that the summer will set her right. Did you see much of Miller this summer? I hate to think of his having grown so delicate! Did you see Perry again? He was at the Putnam Camp? How is Adler after his Cur?—or is he not yet back? What have you read? What have you cared for? Be indulgent to me, and write to me here—I stay for 10 days longer—the family—all well—remain in Cambridge. I find letters a great thing to keep one from slipping out of life.

Love to you all! Your

W. J.

The next letter was written across the back of a circular invitation to join the American Philosophical Association, then being formed, of which Professor Gardiner was Secretary.

To H. N. Gardiner

CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 14, 1901.

Dear Gardiner,—I am still pretty poorly and can't "jine" anything—but, apart from that, I don't foresee much good from a Philosophical Society. Philosophical discussion proper only succeeds between intimates who have learned how to converse by months of weary trials and failure. The philosopher is a lone beast dwelling in his individual burrow.—Count me out!—I hope all goes well with you. I expect to get well, but it needs patience.

WM. JAMES.

On April 1, 1902, James sailed for England, to deliver the second "course" of his series of Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh.

To F. C. S. Schiller

Hatley St. George,Torquay, Apr. 20, 1902.

My dear Schiller,—I could shed tears that you should have been so near me and yet been missed. I got your big envelope on Thursday at the hotel, and your two other missives here this morning. Of the Axioms paper I have only read a sheet and a half at the beginning and the superb conclusion which has just arrived. I shall fairly gloat upon the whole of it, and will write you my impressions and criticisms, if criticisms there be. It is an uplifting thought that truth is to be told at last in a radical and attention-compelling manner. I think I know, though, how the attention of many will find a way not to be compelled—their will is so set on having a technically and artificially and professionally expressed system, that all talk carried on as yours is on principles of common-sense activity is as remote and little worthy of being listened to as the slanging each other of boys in the street as we pass. Men disdain to notice that. It is only after our (i.e. your and my) general way of thinking gets organized enough to become a regular part of the bureaucracy of philosophy that we shall get a serious hearing. Then, I feel inwardly convinced, our day will have come. But then, you may well say, the brains will be out and the man will be dead. Anyhow, vive the Anglo-Saxon amateur, disciple of Locke and Hume, and pereat the German professional!

We are here for a week with the Godkins—poor old G., once such a power, and now an utter wreck after a stroke of paralysis three years ago. Beautiful place, southeast gale, volleying rain and streaming panes and volumes of soft sea-laden wind.