The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 20

I shall get at Shields some day--but I'm slow in getting round! Yours ever faithfully,

Wm. James.

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

Cambridge, _Aug. 18, 1903_.

DEAR M.,-- ...I am in good condition, but in somewhat of a funk about my lectures,[53] now that the audience draws near. I have got my mind working on the infernal old problem of mind and brain, and how to construct the world out of pure experiences, and feel foiled again and inwardly sick with the fever. But I verily believe that it is only work that makes one sick in that way that has any chance of breaking old sh.e.l.ls and getting a step ahead. It is a sort of madness however when it is on you. The total result is to make me admire "Common Sense" as having done by far the biggest stroke of genius ever made in philosophy when it reduced the chaos of crude experience to order by its luminous _Denkmittel_ of the stable "thing," and its dualism of thought and matter.

I find Strong's book charming and a wonderful piece of clear and thorough work--quite cla.s.sical in fact, and surely destined to renown.

The Clifford-Prince-Strong theory has now full rights to citizenship.

Nevertheless, in spite of his so carefully blocking every avenue which leads sideways from his conclusion, he has not convinced me yet. But I can[not] say briefly why.... Yours in haste,

W. J.

_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._

HOTEL ----, PORT HENRY, N.Y., _Aug. 22, 1903_.

DEAR FRIEND,--Obliged to "stop over" for the night at this loathsome spot, for lack of train connexion, what is more natural than that I should seek to escape the odious actual by turning to the distant Ideal--by which term you will easily recognize _Yourself_. I didn't write the conventional letter to you after leaving your house in June, preferring to wait till the tension should acc.u.mulate, and knowing your indulgence of my unfashionable ways. I haven't heard a word about you since that day, but I hope that the times have treated you kindly, and that you have not been "overdoing" in your usual naughty way. I, with the exception of six days lately with the Merrimans, have been sitting solidly at home, and have found myself in much better condition than I was in last summer, and consequently better than for several years. It is pleasant to find that one's organism has such reparative capacities even after sixty years have been told out. But I feel as if the remainder couldn't be very long, at least for "creative" purposes, and I find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book, which shall be _epoch-machend_ at last, and a t.i.tle of honor to my children! Childish idiot--as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!--I am on my way from Ashfield, where I was a guest at the annual dinner, to _feu_ Davidson's "school" at Glenmore, where, in a sanguine hour, I agreed to give five discourses.

Apparently they are having a good season there. Mrs. Booker Washington was the hero of the Ashfield occasion--a big hearty handsome natural creature, quite worthy to be her husband's mate. Fred Pollock made a tip-top speech.... Charles Norton appeared to great advantage as a benignant patriarch, and the place was very pretty. Have you read Loti's "Inde sans les Anglais"? If not, then begin. I seem to myself to have been doing some pretty good reading this summer, but when I try to recall it, nothing but philosophic works come up. Good-bye! and Heaven keep you! Yours affectionately,

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

CHOCORUA, _Sept. 24, 1903_.

DEAREST f.a.n.n.y,--It is so long since we have held communion that I think it is time to recommence. Our summer is ending quietly enough, not only you, but Theodora and Mary Tappan, having all together conspired to leave us in September solitude, and some young fellows, companions of Harry and Billy, having just gone down. The cook goes tomorrow for a fortnight of vacation, but Alice and I, and probably both the older boys, hope to stay up here more or less until the middle of October. My "seminary" begins on Friday, October 2nd, and for the rest of the year Friday is my only day with a college exercise in it--an arrangement which leaves me extraordinarily free, and of which I intend to take advantage by making excursions. Hitherto, during the entire 30 years of my College service, I have had a midday exercise every day in the week.

This has always kept me tied too tight to Cambridge. I am _vastly_ better in nervous tone than I was a year ago, my work is simplified down to the exact thing I want to do, and I ought to be happy in spite of the lopping off of so many faculties of activity. The only thing to do, as with the process of the suns one finds one's faculties dropping away one by one, is to be good-natured about it, remember that the next generation is as young as ever, and try to live and have a sympathetic share in their activities. I spent three days lately (only three, alas!) at the "Shanty" [in Keene Valley], and was moved to admiration at the foundation for a consciousness that was being laid in the children by the bare-headed and bare-legged existence "close to nature" of which the memory was being stored up in them in these years. They lay around the camp-fire at night at the feet of their elders, in every att.i.tude of soft rec.u.mbency, heads on stomachs and legs mixed up, happy and dreamy, just like the young of some prolific carnivorous species. The coming generation ought to reap the benefit of all this healthy animality. What wouldn't I give to have been educated in it!...

_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._

Cambridge, _Oct. 29, 1903_.

MY DEAR "S. W.,"--On inquiry at your studio last Monday I was told that you would be in the country for ten days or a fortnight more. I confess that this pleased me much for it showed you both happy and prudent.

Surely the winter is long enough, however much we cut off of this end--the city winter I mean; and the country this month has been little short of divine.

We came down on the 16th, and I have to get mine (my country, I mean) from the "Norton Woods." But they are very good indeed,--indeed, indeed!

I am better, both physically and morally, than for years past. The whole James family thrives; and were it not for one's "duties" one could be happy. But that things should give pain proves that something is being _effected_, so I take that consolation. I have the duty on Monday of reporting at a "Philosophical Conference" on the Chicago School of Thought. Chicago University has during the past six months given birth to the fruit of its ten years of gestation under John Dewey. The result is wonderful--a _real school_, and _real Thought_. Important thought, too! Did you ever hear of such a city or such a University? Here we have thought, but no school. At Yale a school, but no thought. Chicago has both.... But this, dear Madam, is not intended as a letter--only a word of greeting and congratulation at your absence. I don't know why it makes me so happy to hear of anyone being in the country. I suppose _they_ must be happy.

Your last letter went to the right spot--but I don't expect to hear from you now until I see you. Ever affectionately yours,

W. J.

_To Henry James._

NEWPORT, _Jan. 20, 1904_.

...I came down here the night before last, to see if a change of air might loosen the grip of my influenza, now in its sixth week and me still weak as a baby, almost, from its virulent effects.... Yesterday A.M. the thermometer fell to 4 below zero. I walked as far as Tweedy's (I am staying at a boarding-house, Mrs. Robinson's, Catherine St., close to Touro Avenue, Daisy Waring being the only other boarder)--the snow loudly creaking under foot and under teams however distant, the sky luminously white and dazzling, no distance, everything equally near to the eye, and the architecture in the town more huddled, discordant, cheap, ugly and contemptible than I had ever seen it. It brought back old times so vividly. So it did in the evening, when I went after sunset down Kay Street to the termination. That low West that I've so often fed on, with a sombre but intense crimson vestige smouldering close to the horizon-line, economical but profound, and the western well of sky shading upward from it through infinite shades of transparent luminosity in darkness to the deep blue darkness overhead. It was purely American.

You never see that western sky anywhere else. Solemn and wonderful. I should think you'd like to see it again, if only for the sake of shuddering at it!...

_To Francois Pillon._

Cambridge, _June 12, 1904_.

DEAR PILLON,--Once more I get your faithful and indefatigable "Annee"

and feel almost ashamed of receiving it thus from you, year after year, when I make nothing of a return! So you are 75 years old--I had no idea of it, but thought that you were much younger. I am only(!) 62, and wish that I could expect another 13 years of such activity as you have shown.

I fear I cannot. My arteries are senile, and none of my ancestors, so far as I know of them, have lived past 72, many of them dying much earlier. This is my last day in Cambridge; tomorrow I get away into the country, where "the family" already is, for my vacation. I shall take your "Annee" with me, and shall be greatly interested in both Danriac's article and yours. What a mercy it is that your eyes, in spite of cataract-operations, are still good for reading. I have had a very bad winter for work--two attacks of influenza, one very long and bad, three of gout, one of erysipelas, etc., etc. I expected to have written at least 400 or 500 pages of my magnum opus,--a general treatise on philosophy which has been slowly maturing in my mind,--but I have written only 32 pages! That tells the whole story. I resigned from my professorship, but they would not accept my resignation, and owing to certain peculiarities in the financial situation of our University just now, I felt myself obliged in honor to remain.

My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a "tychism," which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making. It is theistic, but not _essentially_ so. It rejects all doctrines of the Absolute. It is finitist; but it does not attribute to the question of the Infinite the great methodological importance which you and Renouvier attribute to it. I fear that you may find my system too _bottomless_ and romantic. I am sure that, be it in the end judged true or false, it is essential to the evolution of clearness in philosophic thought that _someone_ should defend a pluralistic empiricism radically. And all that I fear is that, with the impairment of my working powers from which I suffer, the Angel of Death may overtake me before I can get my thoughts on to paper. Life here in the University consists altogether of _interruptions_.

I thought much of you at the time of Renouvier's death, and I wanted to write; but I let that go, with a thousand other things that had to go.

What a life! and what touching and memorable last words were those which M. Pratt published in the "Revue de Metaphysique"--memorable, I mean from the mere fact that the old man could dictate them at all. I have left unread his last publications, except for some parts of the "Monadologie" and the "Personalisme." He will remain a great figure in philosophic history; and the sense of his absence must make a great difference to your consciousness and to that of Madame Pillon. My own wife and children are well.... Ever affectionately yours,

Wm. James.

_To Henry James._