The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 38

_Bad-Nauheim_, _May 29, 1910_.

BELOVED PeGUY,--The very _fust_ thing I want you to do is to look in the drawer marked "Blood" in my tall filing case in the library closet, and find the _date_ of a number of the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy"

there that contains an article called "Philosophic Reveries." Send this _date_ (not the article) to the Revd. Prof. L. P. Jacks, 28 Holywell, Oxford, if you find it, _immediately_. He will understand what to do with it. If you don't find the article, do nothing! Jacks is notified. I have just corrected the proofs of an article on Blood for the "Hibbert Journal," which, I think, will make people sit up and rub their eyes at the apparition of a new great writer of English. I want Blood himself to get it as a surprise.

_I_ got as a surprise your finely typed copy of the rest of my MS., the other day. I thank you for it; also for your delightful letters. The type-writing seems to set free both your and Aleck's genius more than the pen. (If you need a new ribbon it must be got from the agency in Milk St. just above Devonshire--but you'll find it hard work to get it into its place.) You seem to be leading a very handsome and domestic life, avoiding social excitements, and hearing of them only from the brethren. It is good sometimes to face the naked ribs of reality as it reveals itself in homes. I face them _here_ with no one but the blackbirds and the trees for my companions, save some rather odd Americans at the _Mittagstisch_ and _Abendessen_, and the good smiling _Dienstmadchen_ who brings me my breakfast in the morning.... I went to my bath at 6 o'clock this morning, and had the Park all to the blackbirds and myself. This was because I am expecting a certain Prof.

Goldstein from Darmstadt to come to see me this morning, and I had to get the bath out of the way. He is a powerful young writer, and is translating my "Pluralistic Universe." But the weather has grown so threatening that I hope now that he won't come till next Sunday. It is a shame to converse here and not be in the open air. I would to Heaven _thou_ wert _mit_--I think thou wouldst enjoy it very much for a week or more. The German civilization is _good_! Only this place would give a very false impression of our wicked earth to a Mars-_Bewohner_ who should descend and leave and see nothing else. Not a dark spot (save what the patients' hearts individually conceal), no poverty, no vice, nothing but prettiness and simplicity of life. I snip out a concert-program (the afternoon one unusually good) which I find lying on my table. The like is given free in the open air every day. The baths weaken one so that I have little brain for reading, and must write letters to all kinds of people every day. A big quarrel is on in Paris between my would-be translators and publishers. I wish translators would let my books alone--they are written for my own people exclusively! You will have received Hewlett's delightful "Halfway House," sent to our steamer by Pauline Goldmark, I think. I have been reading a charmingly discreet life of Nietzsche by D. Halevy, and have invested in a couple more of his (N.'s) books, but haven't yet begun to read them. I am half through "Waffen-nieder!" a _first-rate_ anti-war novel by Baroness von Suttner. It has been translated, and I recommend it as in many ways instructive. How are Rebecca and Maggie [the cook and house-maid]? You don't say how you enjoy ordering the bill of fare every day. You can't vary it properly unless you make a _list_ and keep it. A good sweet dish is _rothe Grutze_, a form of fine sago consolidated by currant-jelly juice, and sauced with custard, or, I suppose, cream.

Well! no more today! Give no end of love to the good boys, and to your Grandam, and believe me, ever thy affectionate,

W. J.

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 4, 1910_.

DEAREST HEINRICH,--The envelope in which this letter goes was addrest in Cambridge, Ma.s.s., and expected to go towards you with a letter in it, long before now. But better late than never, so here goes! I came over, as you may remember, for the double purpose of seeing my brother Henry, who had been having a sort of nervous breakdown, and of getting my heart, if possible, tuned up by foreign experts. I stayed upwards of a month with Henry, and then came hither _uber_ Paris, where I stayed ten days. I have been here two and a half weeks, taking the baths, and enjoying the feeling of the strong, calm, successful, new German civilization all about me. Germany is _great_, and no mistake! But what a contrast, in the well-set-up, well-groomed, smart-looking German man of today, and his rather clumsily drest, dingy, and unworldly-looking father of forty years ago! But something of the old _Gemuthlichkeit_ remains, the friendly manners, and the disposition to talk with you and take you seriously and to respect the serious side of whatever comes along. But I can write you more interestingly of physiology than I can of sociology.... The baths may or may not arrest for a while the downward tendency which has been so marked in the past year--but at any rate it is a comfort to know that my sufferings have a respectable organic basis, and are not, as so many of my friends tell me, due to pure "nervousness." Dear Henry, you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle, of senile degeneration! I admit that the form of your tragedy beats that of that of most of us; but youth's a stuff that won't endure, in any one, and to have had it, as you and I have had it, is a good deal gained anyhow, while to see the daylight still under _any_ conditions is perhaps also better than nothing, and meanwhile the good months are sure to bring the final relief after which, "when you and I behind the veil are pa.s.sed, Oh, but the long, long time the world shall last!" etc., etc. Rather gloomy moralizing, this, to end an affectionate family letter with; but the circ.u.mstances seem to justify it, and I know that you won't take it amiss.

Alice is staying with Henry, but they will both be here in a fortnight or less. I find it pretty lonely all by myself, and the German language doesn't run as trippingly off the tongue as it did forty years ago.

Pa.s.sage back is taken for August 12th....

Well, I must stop! Pray give my love to Selma, the faithful one. Also to f.a.n.n.y, Harold, and Friedel. With Harold's engagement you are more and more of a patriarch. Heaven keep you, dear Henry.

Believe me, ever your affectionately sympathetic old friend,

Wm. James.

_To Francois Pillon._

BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 8, 1910_.

MY DEAR PILLON,--I have your good letter of the 4th--which I finally had to take a magnifying-gla.s.s to read (!)--and remained full of admiration for the nervous centres which, after 80 years of work, could still guide the fingers to execute, without slipping or trembling, that masterpiece of microscopic calligraphy! Truly your nervous centres are "well preserved"--the optical ones also, in spite of the cataracts and loss of accommodation! How proud I should be if now, at the comparatively youthful age of 68, I could flatter _myself_ with the hope of doing what you have done, and living down victoriously twelve more devouring enemies of years! With a fresh volume produced, to mark each year by! I give you leave, as a garland and reward, to misinterpret my doctrine of truth _ad libitum_ and to your heart's content, in all your future writings. I will never think the worse of you for it.

What you say of dear Madame Pillon awakens in me very different feelings. She has led, indeed, a life of suffering for many years, and it seems to me a real tragedy that she should now be confined to the house so absolutely. If only you might inhabit the country, where, on fine days, with no stairs to mount or descend, she could sit with flowers and trees around her! The city is not good when one is confined to one's apartment. Pray give Madame Pillon my sincerest love--I never think of her without affection--I am almost ashamed to accept year after year your "Annee Philosophique," and to give you so little in return for it. I am expecting my wife and brother to arrive here from England this afternoon, and we shall _probably_ all return together through Paris, by the middle of July. I will then come and see you, with the wife, so please keep the "Annee" till then, and put it into my hands. I can read nothing serious here--the baths destroy one's strength so. Whether they will do any good to my circulatory organs remains to be seen--there is no good effect perceptible so far. Believe me, dear old friend, with every message of affection to you both, yours ever faithfully,

Wm. James.

The letters which follow concern Henry Adams's "Letter to American Teachers," originally printed for private circulation, but recently published, with a preface by Mr. Brooks Adams, under the t.i.tle: "The Degradation of Democratic Dogma."

_To Henry Adams._

BAD-NAUHEIM, _June 17, 1910_.

DEAR HENRY ADAMS,--I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your "letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No, sir, you can't do it, can't impress G.o.d in that way. So far as our scientific conceptions go, it may be admitted that your Creator (and mine) started the universe with a certain amount of "energy" latent in it, and decreed that everything that should happen thereafter should be a result of parts of that energy falling to lower levels; raising other parts higher, to be sure, in so doing, but never in equivalent amount, owing to the constant radiation of unrecoverable warmth incidental to the process. It is customary for gentlemen to pretend to believe one another, and until some one hits upon a newer revolutionary concept (which may be tomorrow) all physicists must play the game by holding religiously to the above doctrine. It involves of course the ultimate cessation of all perceptible happening, and the end of human history.

With this general conception as _surrounding_ everything you say in your "letter," no one can find any fault--in the present stage of scientific conventions and fashions. But I protest against your interpretation of some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of the original high-level energy. If, instead of criticizing what you seem to me to say, I express my own interpretation dogmatically, and leave you to make the comparison, it will doubtless conduce to brevity and economize recrimination.

To begin with, the _amount_ of cosmic energy it costs to buy a certain distribution of fact which humanly we regard as precious, seems to me to be an altogether secondary matter as regards the question of history and progress. Certain arrangements of matter _on the same energy-level_ are, from the point of view of man's appreciation, superior, while others are inferior. Physically a dinosaur's brain may show as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man's, but it can do infinitely fewer things, because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur's muscles, while the man's brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral, etc., and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise--in short, _make_ history. Therefore the man's brain and muscles are, from the point of view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange, small as this may be when measured in absolute physical units.

The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"--save that it sets a terminus--for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of _which_ rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity"

factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human inst.i.tutions--their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget--being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the _ultimate_ state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium--in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully _ca.n.a.lises_ that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik"

to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quant.i.ty and distribution of energy as if they formed one question.

There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths--so I won't write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably won't jaw back.--It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar energy. Yours ever truly,

Wm. James.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Facsimile of Post-card addressed to Henry Adams.]

[Post-card]

NAUHEIM, _June 19, 1910_.

P. S. Another ill.u.s.tration of my meaning: The clock of the universe is running down, and by so doing makes the hands move. The energy absorbed by the hands and the _mechanical_ work they do is the same day after day, no matter how far the weights have descended from the position they were originally wound up to. The _history_ which the hands perpetrate has nothing to do with the _quant.i.ty_ of this work, but follows the _significance_ of the figures which they cover on the dial. If they move from O to XII, there is "progress," if from XII to O, there is "decay,"

etc. etc.

W. J.

_To Henry Adams._

[Post-card]

CONSTANCE, _June 26, [1910]_.

Yours of the 20th, just arriving, pleases me by its docility of spirit and pa.s.sive subjection to philosophic opinion. Never, never pretend to an opinion of your own! that way lies every annoyance and madness! You tempt me to offer you another ill.u.s.tration--that of the _hydraulic ram_ (thrown back to me in an exam, as a "hydraulic goat" by an insufficiently intelligent student). Let this arrangement of metal, placed in the course of a brook, symbolize the machine of human life. It works, clap, clap, clap, day and night, so long as the brook runs _at all_, and no matter how full the brook (which symbolizes the descending cosmic energy) may be, it works always to the same effect, of raising so many kilogrammeters of water. What the _value_ of this work as history may be, depends on the uses to which the water is put in the house which the ram serves.

W. J.