The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 18

I think I understand the main lines of your system very well at present--though of course I can't yet trace its proper relations to the aspects of experience of which you do not treat. It needs much building out in the direction of Ethics, Cosmology and Cosmogony, Psychogenesis, etc., before one can apprehend it fully. That I should take it in so much more easily than I did four years ago shows that even at the age of sixty one's mind can grow--a pleasant thought.

It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley's "Principles" or Kant's "Critique" did, and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of philosophical discussion. It fills _my_ mind with all sorts of new questions and hypotheses and brings the old into a most agreeable liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The _Hauptpunkt_ acquired for me is your conclusive demolition of the dualism of object and subject in perception. I believe that the "transcendency" of the object will not recover from your treatment, and as I myself have been working for many years past on the same line, only with other general conceptions than yours, I find myself most agreeably corroborated. My health is so poor now that work goes on very slowly; but I am going, if I live, to write a general system of metaphysics which, in many of its fundamental ideas, agrees closely with what you have set forth and the agreement inspires and encourages me more than you can well imagine. It would take far too many words to attempt any detail, but some day I hope to send you the book.[42]

How good it is sometimes simply to _break away_ from all old categories, deny old worn-out beliefs, and restate things _ab initio_, making the lines of division fall into entirely new places!

I send you a little popular lecture of mine on immortality,[43]--no positive theory but merely an _argumentum ad hominem_ for the ordinary cerebralistic objection,--in which it may amuse you to see a formulation like your own that the brain is an organ of _filtration_ for spiritual life.

I also send you my last book, the "Varieties of Religious Experience,"

which may some time beguile an hour. Believe, dear Professor Bergson, the high admiration and regard with which I remain, always sincerely yours,

Wm. James.

_To Mrs. Louis Aga.s.siz._

Cambridge, _Dec. 15, 1902_.

DEAR MRS. AGa.s.sIZ,--I never dreamed of your replying to that note of mine (of Dec. 5th). If you are replying to all the notes you received on that eventful day, it seems to me a rather heavy penalty for becoming an octogenarian.[44] But glad I am that you replied to mine, and so beautifully. Indeed I do remember the meeting of those two canoes, and the dance, over the river from Manaos; and many another incident and hour of that wonderful voyage.[45] I remember your freshness of interest, and readiness to take hold of everything, and what a blessing to me it was to have one civilized lady in sight, to keep the memory of cultivated conversation from growing extinct. I remember my own folly in wishing to return home after I came out of the hospital at Rio; and my general greenness and incapacity as a naturalist afterwards, with my eyes gone to pieces. It was all because my destiny was to be a "philosopher"--a fact which then I didn't know, but which only means, I think, that, if a man is good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy. But I'm going to write one book worthy of you, dear Mrs.

Aga.s.siz, and of the Thayer expedition, if I am spared a couple of years longer.

I hope you were not displeased at the _applause_ the other night, as you went out. _I_ started it; if I hadn't, someone else would a moment later, for the tension had grown intolerable.

How delightful about the Radcliffe building!

Well, once more, dear Mrs. Aga.s.siz, we both thank you for this beautiful and truly affectionate letter. Your affectionate,

Wm. James.

E. L. G.o.dkin had recently died, and at the date of the next letter a movement was on foot to raise money for a memorial in commemoration of his public services. The money was soon subscribed and the Memorial took shape in the endowment of the G.o.dkin Lectureship at Harvard. James had started discussion of the project at a meeting of the dinner Club and Henry L. Higginson had continued it in a letter to which the following replied.

_To Henry L. Higginson._

Cambridge, _Feb. 8, 1903_.

DEAR HENRY,--I am sorry to have given a wrong impression, and made you take the trouble of writing--nutritious though your letters be to receive. My motive in mentioning the G.o.dkin testimonial was pure curiosity, and not desire to promote it. We were ten "liberals"

together, and I wanted to learn how many of us had been alienated from G.o.dkin by his temper in spite of having been influenced by his writing.

I found that it was just about half and half. I never said--Heaven bear me witness--that I had learned more from G. than from anyone. I said I had got more _political_ education from him. You see the "Nation" took me at the age of 22--you were already older and wickeder. If you follow my advice now, you don't subscribe a cent to this memorial. _I_ shall subscribe $100, for mixed reasons. G.o.dkin's "home life" was very different from his life against the world. When a man differed in type from him, and consequently reacted differently on public matters; he thought him a preposterous monster, pure and simple, and so treated him.

He couldn't imagine a different kind of creature from himself in politics. But in private relations he was simplicity and sociability and affectionateness incarnate, and playful as a young opossum. I never knew his first wife well, but I admire the pluck and fidelity of the second, and I note your chivalrous remarks about the s.e.x, including Mrs. W. J., to whom report has been made of them, making her blush with pleasure.

Don't subscribe, dear Henry. I am not trying to raise subscriptions. You left too early Friday eve. Ever affectionately yours,

W. J.

James's college cla.s.s finished its work at the end of the first half of the academic year, and in early February he turned for a few days to the thought of a Mediterranean voyage, as a vacation and a means of escape from Cambridge during the bad weather of March. While considering this plan, he cabled M. Bergson to inquire as to the possibility of a meeting in Paris or elsewhere.

_To Henri Bergson._

Cambridge, _Feb. 25, 1903_.

DEAR PROFESSOR BERGSON,--Your most obliging cablegram (with 8 words instead of four!) arrived duly a week ago, and now I am repenting that I ever asked you to send it, for I have been feeling so much less fatigued than I did a month ago, that I have given up my pa.s.sage to the Mediterranean, and am seriously doubting whether it will be necessary to leave home at all. I _ought_ not to, on many grounds, unless my health imperatively requires it. Pardon me for having so frivolously stirred you up, and permit me at least to pay the cost (as far as I can ascertain it) of the despatch which you were so liberal as to send.

There is still a bare possibility (for I am so strongly tempted) that I may, after the middle of March, take a cheaper vessel direct to England or to France, and spend ten days or so in Paris and return almost immediately. In that case, we could still have our interview. I think there must be great portions of your philosophy which you have not yet published, and I want to see how well they combine with mine. _Writing_ is too long and laborious a process, and I would not inflict on you the task of answering my questions by letter, so I will still wait in the hope of a personal interview some time.

I am convinced that a philosophy of _pure experience_, such as I conceive yours to be, can be made to work, and will reconcile many of the old inveterate oppositions of the schools. I think that your radical denial (the manner of it at any rate) of the notion that the brain can be in any way the _causa fiendi_ of consciousness, has introduced a very sudden clearness, and eliminated a part of the idealistic paradox. But your unconscious or subconscious permanence of memories is in its turn a notion that offers difficulties, seeming in fact to be the equivalent of the "soul" in another shape, and the manner in which these memories "insert" themselves into the brain action, and in fact the whole conception of the difference between the outer and inner worlds in your philosophy, still need to me a great deal of elucidation. But behold me challenging you to answer me _par ecrit_!

I have read with great delight your article in the "Revue de Metaphysique" for January, agree thoroughly with all its critical part, and wish that I might see in your _intuition metaphysique_ the full equivalent for a philosophy of concepts. _Neither_ seems to be a full equivalent for the other, unless indeed the intuition becomes completely mystical (and that I am willing to believe), but I don't think that that is just what _you_ mean. The _Syllabus_[46] which I sent you the other day is (I fear), from its great abbreviation, somewhat unintelligible, but it will show you the sort of lines upon which I have been working. I think that a normal philosophy, like a science, must live by hypotheses--I think that the indispensable hypothesis in a philosophy of pure experience is that of many kinds of other experience than ours,

{ co-consciousness } that the question of { } (its conditions, etc.) { conscious synthesis }

becomes a most urgent question, as does also the question of the relations of what is possible only to what is actual, what is past or future to what is present. These are all urgent matters in your philosophy also, I imagine. How exquisitely you do _write_! Believe me, with renewed thanks for the telegram, yours most sincerely,

Wm. James.

_To Theodore Flournoy._

Cambridge, _Apr. 30, 1903_.

MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--I forget whether I wrote you my applause or not, on reading your chapter on religious psychology in the "Archives." I thought it a splendid thing, and well adapted to set the subject in the proper light before students. Abauzit has written to me for authorization to translate my book, and both he and W. J., Junior, have quoted you as a.s.sured of his competency. I myself feel confident of it, and have given him the authorization required. Possibly you may supply him with as much of your own translation as you have executed, so that the time you have spent on the latter may not be absolutely lost.

"Billy" also says that you have executed a review of Myers's book,[47]

finding it a more difficult task than you had antic.i.p.ated. I am highly curious to see what you have found to say. I, also, wrote a notice of the volumes, and found it exceeding difficult to know how to go at the job. At last I decided just to skeletonize the points of his reasoning, but on correcting the proof just now, what I have written seems deadly flat and unprofitable and makes me wish that I had stuck to my original intention of refusing to review the book at all. The fact is, such a book need not be _criticized_ at all at present. It is obviously too soon for it to be either refuted or established by mere criticism. It is a hypothetical construction of genius which must be kept hanging up, as it were, for new observations to be referred to. As the years acc.u.mulate these in a more favorable or in a more unfavorable sense, it will tend to stand or to fall. I confess that reading the volumes has given me a higher opinion than ever of Myers's constructive gifts, but on the whole a lower opinion of the objective solidity of the system. So many of the facts which form its pillars are still dubious.[48]

Bill says that you were again convinced by Eusapia,[49] but that the conditions were not satisfactory enough (so I understood) to make the experiments likely to convince absent hearers. Forever baffling is all this subject, and I confess that I begin to lose my interest. Believe me, in whatever difficulties your review of Myers may have occasioned you, you have my fullest sympathy!

Bill has had a perfectly splendid winter in Geneva, thanks almost entirely to your introductions, and to the generous manner in which you took him into your own family. I wish we could ever requite you by similar treatment of Henri, or of _ces demoiselles_. He seems to labor under an apprehension of not being able to make you all believe how appreciative and grateful he is, and he urges me to "Make you understand it" when I write. I imagine that you understand it anyhow, so far as he is concerned, so I simply a.s.sure you that _our_ grat.i.tude here is of the strongest and sincerest kind. I imagine that this has been by far the most profitable and educative winter of his life, and I rejoice exceedingly that he has obtained in so short a time so complete a sense of being at home in, and so lively an affection for, the Swiss people and country. (As for _your_ family he has written more than once that the Flournoy family seems to be "the finest family" he has ever seen in his life.)

His experience is a good measure of the improvement in the world's conditions. Thirty years ago _I_ spent nine months in Geneva--but in how inferior an "Academy," and with what inferior privileges and experiences! Never inside a private house, and only after three months or more familiar enough with other students to be admitted to Zofingue.[50] Ignorant of 1000 things which have come to my son and yours in the course of education. It _is_ a more evolved world, and no mistake.

I find myself very tired and unable to work this spring, but I think it will depart when I get to the country, as we soon shall. I am neither writing nor lecturing, and reading nothing heavy, only Emerson's works again (divine things, some of them!) in order to make a fifteen-minute address about him on his centennial birthday. What I want to get at, and let no interruptions interfere, is (at last) my _system of tychistic and pluralistic philosophy of pure experience_.

I wish, and even more ardently does Alice wish, that you and Mrs.

Flournoy, and all the children, or any of them, might pay us a visit. I don't _urge_ you, for there is so little in America that pays one to come, except sociological observation. But in the big slow steamers, the voyage is always interesting--and once here, how happy we should be to harbor you. In any case, perhaps Henri and one of his sisters will come and spend a year. From the point of view of education, Cambridge is first-rate. Love to you all from us both.