The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 4

The wife said she had my portrait in her bedroom with the words written under it, "I want to bring a balm to human lives"!!!!! Supposed to be a quotation from me!!! After breakfast an extremely interesting lady who has suffered from half-possessional insanity gave me a long account of her case. Life _is_ heroic indeed, as Harry wrote. I shall stay through tomorrow, and get to Syracuse on Tuesday....

_July 27._

...It rained hard last night, and today a part of the time. I took a lesson in roasting, in Delsarte, and I made with my own fair hands a beautiful loaf of graham bread with some rolls, long, flute-like, and delicious. I should have sent them to you by express, only it seemed unnecessary, since I can keep the family in bread easily after my return home. Please tell this, with amplifications, to Peggy and Tweedy....

BUFFALO, N.Y., _July 29_.

...The Chautauqua week, or rather six and a half days, has been a real success. I have learned a lot, but I'm glad to get into something less blameless but more admiration-worthy. The flash of a pistol, a dagger, or a devilish eye, anything to break the unlovely level of 10,000 good people--a crime, murder, rape, elopement, anything would do. I don't see how the younger Vincents stand it, because they are people of such spirit....

SYRACUSE, N.Y., _July 31_.

...Now for Utica and Lake Placid by rail, with East Hill in prospect for tomorrow. You bet I rejoice at the outlook--I long to escape from tepidity. Even an Armenian ma.s.sacre, whether to be killer or killed, would seem an agreeable change from the blamelessness of Chautauqua as she lies soaking year after year in her lakeside sun and showers. Man wants to be _stretched_ to his utmost, if not in one way then in another!...

_To Miss Rosina H. Emmet._

BURLINGTON, VT., _Aug. 2, 1896_.

...I have seen more women and less beauty, heard more voices and less sweetness, perceived more earnestness and less triumph than I ever supposed possible. Most of the American nation (and probably all nations) is white-trash,--but Tolstoy has borne me up--and I say unto _you_: "_Smooth out your voices_ if you want to be saved"!!...

_To Charles Renouvier._

BURLINGTON, VT., _Aug. 4, 1896_.

DEAR MR. RENOUVIER,--My wife announces to me from Cambridge the reception of two immense volumes from you on the Philosophy of History.

I thank you most heartily for the gift, and am more and more amazed at your intellectual and moral power--physical power, too, for the nervous energy required for your work has to be extremely great.

My own nervous energy is a small teacup-full, and is more than consumed by my duties of teaching, so that almost none is left over for writing.

I sent you a "New World" the other day, however, with an article in it called "The Will to Believe," in which (if you took the trouble to glance at it) you probably recognized how completely I am still your disciple. In this point perhaps more fully than in any other; and this point is central!

I have to lecture on general "psychology" and "morbid psychology," "the philosophy of nature" and the "philosophy of Kant," thirteen lectures a week for half the year and eight for the rest. Our University moreover inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort,[10] so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all--reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month.

During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels, which, strange to say, I had never attacked before. I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children.

All this proves that I shall be slow in attaining to the reading of your book. I have not yet read Pillon's last _Annee_ except some of the book notices and Danriac's article. How admirably clear P. is in style, and what a power of reading he possesses.

I hope, dear Mr. Renouvier, that the years are not weighing heavily upon you, and that this letter will find you well in body and in mind. Yours gratefully and faithfully,

Wm. James.

_To Theodore Flournoy._

LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, _Aug. 30, 1896_.

MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--You see the electric current of sympathy that binds the world together--I turn towards you, and the place I write from repeats the name of your Lake Leman. I was informed yesterday, however, that the lake here was named after Lake Geneva _in the State of New York_! and _that_ Lake only has Leman for its G.o.dmother. Still you see how dependent, whether immediately or remotely, America is on Europe. I was at Niagara some three weeks ago, and bought a photograph as souvenir and addressed it to you after getting back to Cambridge. Possibly Madame Flournoy will deign to accept it. I have thought of you a great deal without writing, for truly, my dear Flournoy, there is hardly a human being with whom I feel as much sympathy of aims and character, or feel as much "at home," as I do with you. It is as if we were of the same stock, and I often mentally turn and make a remark to you, which the pressure of life's occupations prevents from ever finding its way to paper.

I am hoping that you may have figured, or at any rate _been_, at the Munich "Congress"--that apparently stupendous affair. If they keep growing at this rate, the next Paris one will be altogether too heavy. I have heard no details of the meeting as yet. But whether you have been at Munich or not, I trust that you have been having a salubrious and happy vacation so far, and that Mrs. Flournoy and the young people are all well. I will venture to suppose that your illness of last year has left no bad effects whatever behind. I myself have had a rather busy and instructive, though possibly not very hygienic summer, making money (in moderate amounts) by lecturing on psychology to teachers at different "summer schools" in this land. There is a great fermentation in "paedagogy" at present in the U.S., and my wares come in for their share of patronage. But although I learn a good deal and become a better American for having all the travel and social experience, it has ended by being too tiresome; and when I give the lectures at Chicago, which I begin tomorrow, I shall have them stenographed and very likely published in a very small volume, and so remove from myself the temptation ever to give them again.

Last year was a year of hard work, and before the end of the term came, I was in a state of bad neurasthenic fatigue, but I got through outwardly all right. I have definitely given up the laboratory, for which I am more and more unfit, and shall probably devote what little ability I may hereafter have to purely "speculative" work. My inability to read troubles me a good deal: I am in arrears of several years with psychological literature, which, to tell the truth, does grow now at a pace too rapid for anyone to follow. I was engaged to review Stout's new book (which I fancy is very good) for "Mind," and after keeping it two months had to back out, from sheer inability to read it, and to ask permission to hand it over to my colleague Royce. Have you seen the colossal Renouvier's two vast volumes on the philosophy of history?--that will be another thing worth reading no doubt, yet very difficult to read. I give a course in Kant for the first time in my life (!) next year, and at present and for many months to come shall have to put most of my reading to the service of that overgrown subject....

Of course you have read Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." I never had that exquisite felicity before this summer, and now I feel as if I knew _perfection_ in the representation of human life. Life indeed seems less real than his tale of it. Such infallible veracity! The impression haunts me as nothing literary ever haunted me before.

I imagine you lounging on some steep mountainside, with those demoiselles all grown too tall and beautiful and proud to think otherwise than with disdain of their elderly _commensal_ who spoke such difficult French when he took walks with them at Vers-chez-les-Blanc.

But I hope that they are happy as they were then. Cannot we all pa.s.s some summer near each other again, and can't it next time be in Tyrol rather than in Switzerland, for the purpose of increasing in all of us that "knowledge of the world" which is so desirable? I think it would be a splendid plan. At any rate, wherever you are, take my most affectionate regards for yourself and Madame Flournoy and all of yours, and believe me ever sincerely your friend,

Wm. James.

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

LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, _Aug. 30, 1896_.

DEAR MILLER,--Your letter from Halle of June 22nd came duly, but treating of things eternal as it did, I thought it called for no reply till I should have caught up with more temporal matters, of which there has been no lack to press on my attention. To tell the truth, regarding you as my most penetrating critic and intimate enemy, I was greatly relieved to find that you had nothing worse to say about "The Will to Believe." You say you are no "rationalist," and yet you speak of the "sharp" distinction between beliefs based on "inner evidence" and beliefs based on "craving." I can find _nothing_ sharp (or susceptible of schoolmaster's codification) in the different degrees of "liveliness"

in hypotheses concerning the universe, or distinguish _a priori_ between legitimate and illegitimate cravings. And when an hypothesis _is_ once a live one, one _risks_ something in one's practical relations towards truth and error, _whichever_ of the three positions (affirmation, doubt, or negation) one may take up towards it. _The individual himself is the only rightful chooser of his risk._ Hence respectful toleration, as the only law that logic can lay down.

You don't say a word against my _logic_, which seems to me to cover your cases entirely in its compartments. I cla.s.s you as one to whom the religious hypothesis is _von vornherein_ so dead, that the risk of error in espousing it now far outweighs for you the chance of truth, so you simply stake your money on the field as against it. If you _say_ this, of course I can, as logician, have no quarrel with you, even though my own choice of risk (determined by the irrational impressions, suspicions, cravings, senses of direction in nature, or what not, that make religion for me a more live hypothesis than for you) leads me to an opposite methodical decision.

Of course if any one comes along and says that men at large don't need to have facility of faith in their inner convictions preached to them, [that] they have only too much readiness in that way already, and the one thing needful to preach is that they should hesitate with their convictions, and take their faiths out for an airing into the howling wilderness of nature, I should also agree. But my paper wasn't addressed to mankind at large but to a limited set of studious persons, badly under the ban just now of certain authorities whose simple-minded faith in "naturalism" also is sorely in need of an airing--and an airing, as it seems to me, of the sort I tried to give.

But all this is unimportant; and I still await criticism of my _Auseinandersetzung_ of the _logical situation_ of man's mind _gegenuber_ the Universe, in respect to the risks it runs.

I wish I could have been with you at Munich and heard the deep-lunged Germans roar at each other. I care not for the matters uttered, if I only could hear the voice. I hope you met [Henry] Sidgwick there. I sent him the American Hallucination-Census results, after considerable toil over them, but S. never acknowledges or answers anything, so I'll have to wait to hear from someone else whether he "got them off." I have had a somewhat unwholesome summer. Much lecturing to teachers and sitting up to talk with strangers. But it is instructive and makes one patriotic, and in six days I shall have finished the Chicago lectures, which begin tomorrow, and get straight to Keene Valley for the rest of September. My conditions just now are materially splendid, as I am the guest of a charming elderly lady, Mrs. Wilmarth, here at her country house, and in town at the finest hotel of the place. The political campaign is a bully one. Everyone outdoing himself in sweet reasonableness and persuasive argument--hardly an undignified note anywhere. It shows the deepening and elevating influence of a big topic of debate. It is difficult to doubt of a people part of whose life such an experience is. But imagine the country being saved by a McKinley! If only Reed had been the candidate! There have been some really splendid speeches and doc.u.ments....

Ever thine, W. J.

_To Henry James._

BURLINGTON, VT., _Sept. 28, 1896_.