The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 28

Hubert's end is, I verily believe, one of the most beautiful things in this beautiful world--too dissimilar to anything in Europe to be compared therewith, and consequently able to stand on its merits all alone. But the great [forest] fire of four years ago came to the very edge of wiping it out! And any year it may go.

I also had a delightful week all alone on the Maine Coast, among the islands.

Back here, one is oppressed by sadness at the amount of work waiting to be done on the place and no one to be hired to do it. The entire meaning and essence of "land" is something to be worked over--even if it be only a wood-lot, it must be kept trimmed and cleaned. And for one who _can_ work and who _likes_ work with his arms and hands, there is nothing so delightful as a piece of land to work over--it responds to every hour you give it, and smiles with the "improvement" year by year. I neither can work now, nor do I like it, so an irremediable bad conscience afflicts my ownership of this place. With Cambridge as headquarters for August, and a little lot of land there, I think I could almost be ready to give up this place, and trust to the luck of hotels, and other opportunities of rustication without responsibility. But perhaps we can get this place [taken care of?] some day!

I don't know how much you read. I've taken great pleasure this summer in Bielshowski's "Life of Goethe" (a wonderful piece of art) and in Birukoff's "Life of Tolstoy."

Alice is very well and happy in the stillness here. Elly Hunter is coming this evening, tomorrow the Merrimans for a day, and then Mrs.

Hodder till the end of the month.

Faithful love from both of us, dear Theodora. Your affectionate

W. J.

_To his Daughter._

Cambridge, _Jan. 20, 1907_, 6.15 P.M.

SWEET PEGLEIN,--Just before tea! and your Grandam, Mar, and I going to hear the Revd. Percy Grant in the College chapel just after. We are getting to be great church-goers. 'T will have to be Crothers next. He, sweet man, is staying with the Brookses. After him, the Christian Science Church, and after that the deluge!

I have spent all day preparing next Tuesday's lecture, which is my last before a cla.s.s in Harvard University, so help me G.o.d amen! I am almost _afraid_ at so much freedom. Three quarters of an hour ago Aleck and I went for a walk in Somerville; warm, young moon, bare trees, clearing in the west, stars out, old-fashioned streets, not sordid--a beautiful walk. Last night to Bernard Shaw's ex-_quis_-ite play of "Caesar and Cleopatra"--exquisitely acted too, by F. Robertson and Maxine Elliot's sister Gert. Your Mar will have told you that, after these weeks of persistent labor, culminating in New York, I am going to take sanctuary on Sat.u.r.day the 2nd of Feb. in your arms at Bryn Mawr. I do not want, wish, or desire to "talk" to the crowd, but your mother pushing so, if you and the philosophy club also pull, I mean pull _hard_, Jimmy[68]

will try to articulate something not too technical. But it will have to be, if ever, on that Sat.u.r.day night. It will also have to be very short; and the less of a "reception," the better, after it.

Your two last letters were tiptop. I never seen such _growth_!

I go to N. Y., to be at the Harvard Club, on Monday the 28th. Kuhnemann left yesterday. A most dear man. Your loving

DAD.

_To Henry James and William James, Jr._

Cambridge, _Feb. 14, 1907_.

DEAR BROTHER AND SON,--I dare say that you will be together in Paris when you get this, but I address it to Lamb House all the same. You twain are more "blessed" than I, in the way of correspondence this winter, for you give more than you receive, Bill's letters being as remarkable for wit and humor as Henry's are for copiousness, considering that the market value of what he either writes or types is so many shillings a word. When _I_ write other things, I find it almost impossible to write letters. I've been at it _stiddy_, however, for three days, since my return from New York, finding, as I did, a great stack of correspondence to attend to. The first impression of New York, if you stay there not more than 36 hours, which has been my limit for twenty years past, is one of repulsion at the clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions. But this time, installed as I was at the Harvard Club (44th St.) in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated _mit_, and found it simply magnificent. I'm surprised at you, Henry, not having been more enthusiastic, but perhaps that superbly powerful and beautiful subway was not opened when you were there. It is an _entirely_ new New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the _lightness_ withal, as if there was nothing that was not easy, and the great pulses and bounds of progress, so many in directions all simultaneous that the coordination is indefinitely future, give a kind of _drumming background_ of life that I never felt before. I'm sure that once _in_ that movement, and at home, all other places would seem insipid. I observe that your book,--"The American Scene,"--dear H., is just out. I must get it and devour again the chapters relative to New York. On my last night, I dined with Norman Hapgood, along with men who were successfully and happily in the vibration. H. and his most winning-faced young partner, Collier, Jerome, Peter Dunne, F. M. Colby, and Mark Twain. (The latter, poor man, is only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he's a dear little genius all the same.) I got such an impression of easy efficiency in the midst of their bewildering conditions of speed and complexity of adjustment.

Jerome, particularly, with the world's eyes on his court-room, in the very crux of the Thaw trial, as if he had nothing serious to do. Balzac ought to come to life again. His Rastignac imagination sketched the possibility of it long ago. I lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted, out, every day of my stay, vibrated between 44th St., seldom going lower, and 149th, with Columbia University at 116th as my chief relay station, the magnificent s.p.a.ce-devouring Subway roaring me back and forth, lecturing to a thousand daily,[69] and having four separate dinners at the Columbia Faculty Club, where colleagues severally compa.s.sed me about, many of them being old students of mine, wagged their tongues at me and made me explain.[70] It was certainly the high tide of my existence, so far as _energizing_ and being "recognized" were concerned, but I took it all very "easy" and am hardly a bit tired.

Total abstinence from every stimulant whatever is the one condition of living at a rapid pace. I am now going whack at the writing of the rest of the lectures, which will be more original and (I believe) important than my previous works....

_To Moorfield Storey._

Cambridge, _Feb._ 21, 1907.

DEAR MOORFIELD,--Your letter of three weeks ago has inadvertently lain unnoticed--not because it didn't do me good, but because I went to New York for a fortnight, and since coming home have been too druv to pay any tributes to friendship. I haven't got many letters either of condolence or congratulation on my retirement,--which, by the way, doesn't take place till the end of the year,--the papers have railroaded me out too soon.[71] But I confess that the thought is sweet to me of being able to hear the College bell ring without any tendency to "move"

in consequence, and of seeing the last Thursday in September go by, and remaining in the country careless of what becomes of its youth. It's the _harness_ and the _hours_ that are so galling! I expect to shed truths in dazzling profusion on the world for many years.

As for you, retire too! Let you, Eliot, Roosevelt and me, first relax; then take to landscape painting, which has a very soothing effect; then write out all the truths which a long life of intimacy with mankind has recommended to each of us as most useful. I think we can use the ebb tide of our energies best in that way. I'm sure that _your_ contributions would be the most useful of all. Affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To Theodore Flournoy._

Cambridge, _Mar._ 26, 1907.

DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me really _happy_ for at least twenty-four hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves--you write about _me_. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about _himself_, when you want to talk about _yourself_." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagne." It is absolutely the only philosophy with _no_ humbug in it, and I am certain that it is _your_ philosophy. Have you read Papini's article in the February "Leonardo"?

That seems to me really splendid. You say that my ideas have formed the real _centre de ralliment_ of the pragmatist tendencies. To me it is the youthful and _empanache_ Papini who has best put himself at the centre of equilibrium whence all the motor tendencies start. He (and Schiller) has given me great confidence and courage. I shall dedicate my book, however, to the memory of J. S. Mill.

I hope that you are careful to distinguish in my own work between the pragmatism and the "radical empiricism" (Conception de Conscience,[72]

etc.) which to my own mind have no necessary connexion with each other.

My first proofs came in this morning, along with your letter, and the little book ought to be out by the first of June. You shall have a very early copy. It is exceedingly untechnical, and I can't help suspecting that it will make a real impression. Munsterberg, who hitherto has been rather pooh-poohing my thought, now, after reading the lecture on truth which I sent you a while ago, says I seem to be ignorant that Kant ever wrote, Kant having already said all that I say. I regard this as a very good symptom. The third stage of opinion about a new idea, already arrived: _1st_: absurd! _2nd_: trivial! _3rd_: _we_ discovered it! I don't suppose you mean to print these lectures of yours, but I wish you would. If you would translate my lectures, what could make me happier?

But, as I said apropos of the "Varieties," I hate to think of you doing that drudgery when you might be formulating your own ideas. But, in one way or the other, I hope you will join in the great strategic combination against the forces of rationalism and bad abstractionism! A good _coup de collier_ all round, and I verily believe that a new philosophic movement will begin....

I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The _1st_ function is the essential one, officially considered. The _2nd_ is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes!

But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only _meant_ to write a line! Love to you all from

W. J.

_To Charles A. Strong._

Cambridge, _Apr._ 9, 1907.

DEAR STRONG,--Your tightly woven little letter reached me this A.M., just as I was about writing to you to find out how you are. Your long silence had made me apprehensive about your condition, and this news cheers me up very much. Rome is great; and I like to think of you there; if I spend another winter in Europe, it shall be mainly in Rome. You don't say where you're staying, however, so my imagination is at fault, I hope it may be at the _Russie_, that most delightful of hotels. I am overwhelmed with duties, so I must be very brief _in re religionis_.

Your warnings against my superst.i.tious tendencies, for such I suppose they are,--this is the second heavy one I remember,--touch me, but not in the prophetic way, for they don't weaken my trust in the healthiness of my own att.i.tude, which in part (I fancy) is less remote from your own than you suppose. For instance, my "G.o.d of things as they are," being part of a pluralistic system, is responsible for only such of them as he knows enough and has enough power to have accomplished. For the rest he is identical with your "ideal" G.o.d. The "omniscient" and "omnipotent"

G.o.d of theology I regard as a disease of the philosophy-shop. But, having thrown away so much of the philosophy-shop, you may ask me why I don't throw away the whole? That would mean too strong a negative will-to-believe for me. It would mean a dogmatic disbelief in any extant consciousness higher than that of the "normal" human mind; and this in the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce with something ideal that _feels as if it_ were also actual (I have no such commerce--I wish I had, but I can't close my eyes to its vitality in others); and in the teeth of such a.n.a.logies as Fechner uses to show that there may be other-consciousness than man's. If other, then why not higher and bigger? Why _may_ we not be in the universe as our dogs and cats are in our drawing-rooms and libraries? It's a will-to-believe on both sides: I am perfectly willing that others should disbelieve: why should you not be tolerantly interested in the spectacle of my belief?

What harm does the little residuum or germ of actuality that I leave in G.o.d do? If ideal, why (except on epiphenomenist principles) may he not have got himself at least partly real by this time? I do not believe it to be healthy-minded to nurse the notion that ideals are self-sufficient and require no actualization to make us content. It is a quite unnecessarily heroic form of resignation and sour grapes. Ideals ought to aim at the _transformation of reality_--no less! When you defer to what you suppose a certain authority in scientists as confirming these negations, I am surprised. Of all insufficient authorities as to the total nature of reality, give me the "scientists," from Munsterberg up, or down. Their interests are most incomplete and their professional conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored, and their splendid achievement there. Their only authority _at large_ is for _method_--and the pragmatic method completes and enlarges them there. When you shall have read my whole set of lectures (now with the printer, to be out by June 1st) I doubt whether you will find any great harm in the G.o.d I patronize--the poor thing is so largely an ideal possibility. Meanwhile I take delight, or _shall_ take delight, in any efforts you may make to negate all superhuman consciousness, for only by these counter-attempts can a finally satisfactory modus vivendi be reached. I don't feel sure that I know just what you mean by "freedom,"--but no matter. Have you read in Schiller's new Studies in Humanism what seem to me two excellent chapters, one on "Freedom," and the other on the "making of reality"?...

_To F. C. S. Schiller._