The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 39

_To Benjamin Paul Blood._

CONSTANCE, _June 25, 1910_.

MY DEAR BLOOD,--About the time you will receive this, you will also be surprised by receiving the "Hibbert Journal" for July, with an article signed by me, but written mainly by yourself.[88] Tired of waiting for your final synthetic p.r.o.nunciamento, and fearing I might be cut off ere it came, I took time by the forelock, and at the risk of making ducks and drakes of your thoughts, I resolved to save at any rate some of your rhetoric, and the result is what you see. Forgive! forgive! forgive! It will at any rate have made you famous, for the circulation of the H. J.

is choice, as well as large (12,000 or more, I'm told), and the print and paper the best ever yet, I seem to have lost the editor's letter, or I would send it to you. He wrote, in accepting the article in May, "I have already 40 articles accepted, and some of the writers threaten lawsuits for non-publication, yet such was the exquisite refreshment Blood's writing gave me, under the cataract of sawdust in which editorially I live, that I have this day sent the article to the printer. Actions speak louder than words! Blood is simply _great_, and you are to be thanked for having dug him out. L. P. JACKS." Of course I've used you for my own purposes, and probably misused you; but I'm sure you will feel more pleasure than pain, and perhaps write again in the "Hibbert" to set yourself right. You're sure of being printed, whatever you may send. How I wish that I too could write poetry, for pluralism is in its _Sturm und Drang_ period, and verse is the only way to express certain things, I've just been taking the "cure" at Nauheim for my unlucky heart--no results so far!

Sail for home again on August 12th. Address always Cambridge, Ma.s.s.; things are forwarded. Warm regards, fellow pluralist. Yours ever,

Wm. James.

_To Theodore Flournoy._

GENEVA, _July 9, 1910_.

DEAREST FLOURNOY,--Your two letters, of yesterday, and of July 4th sent to Nauheim, came this morning. I am sorry that the Nauheim one was not written earlier, since you had the trouble of writing it at all. I thank you for all the considerateness you show--you understand entirely my situation. My dyspnoea gets worse at an accelerated rate, and all I care for now is to get home--doing _nothing_ on the way. It is partly a spasmodic phenomenon I am sure, for the aeration of my tissues, judging by the color of my lips, seems to be sufficient. I will leave Geneva now without seeing you again--better not come, unless just to shake hands with my wife! Through all these years I have wished I might live nearer to you and see more of you and exchange more ideas, for we seem two men particularly well _faits pour nous comprendre_. Particularly, now, as my own intellectual house-keeping has seemed on the point of working out some good results, would it have been good to work out the less unworthy parts of it in your company. But that is impossible!--I doubt if I ever do any more writing of a serious sort; and as I am able to look upon my life rather lightly, I can truly say that "I don't care"--don't care in the least pathetically or tragically, at any rate.--I hope that Ragacz will be a success, or at any rate a wholesome way of pa.s.sing the month, and that little by little you will reach your new equilibrium. Those dear daughters, at any rate, are something to live for--to show them Italy should be rejuvenating. I can write no more, my very dear old friend, but only ask you to think of me as ever lovingly yours,

W. J.

After leaving Geneva James rested at Lamb House for a few days before going to Liverpool to embark. Walking, talking and writing had all become impossible or painful. The short northern route to Quebec was chosen for the home voyage. When he and Mrs. James and his brother Henry landed there, they went straight to Chocorua. The afternoon light was fading from the familiar hills on August 19th, when the motor brought them to the little house, and James sank into a chair beside the fire, and sobbed, "It's so good to get home!"

A change for the worse occurred within forty-eight hours and the true situation became apparent. The effort by which he had kept up a certain interest in what was going on about him during the last weeks of his journey, and a certain semblance of strength, had spent itself. He had been clinging to life only in order to get home.

Death occurred without pain in the early afternoon of August 26th.

His body was taken to Cambridge, where there was a funeral service in the College Chapel. After cremation, his ashes were placed beside the graves of his parents in the Cambridge Cemetery.

THE END

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX I

THREE CRITICISMS FOR STUDENTS

In his smaller cla.s.ses, made up of advanced students, James found it possible to comment in detail on the work of individuals. Three letters have come into the hands of the editor, from which extracts may be taken to ill.u.s.trate such comments. They were written for persons with whom he could communicate only by letter, and are extended enough to suggest the _viva voce_ comments which many a student recalls, but of which there is no record. The first is from a letter to a former pupil and refers to work of Bertrand Russell and others which the pupil was studying at the time. The second and third comment on ma.n.u.scripts that had been prepared as "theses" and had been submitted to James for unofficial criticism.

They exhibit him, characteristically, as encouraging the student to formulate something more positive.

_Jan. 26, 1908._

Those propositions or supposals which [Russell, Moore and Meinong] make the exclusive vehicles of truth are mongrel curs that have no real place between realities on the one hand and beliefs on the other. The negative, disjunctive and hypothetic truths which they so conveniently express can all, perfectly well (so far as I see), be translated into relations between beliefs and positive realities. "Propositions" are expressly devised for quibbling between realities and beliefs. They seem to have the objectivity of the one and the subjectivity of the other, and he who uses them can straddle as he likes, owing to the ambiguity of the word _that_, which is essential to them. "_That_ Caesar existed" is "true," sometimes means the _fact that_ be existed is real, sometimes the _belief that_ he existed is true. You can get no honest discussion out of such terms....

_Aug. 15, 1908._

Dear K----, ...[I have] read your thesis once through. I only finished it yesterday. It is a big effort, hard to grasp at a single reading, and I'm too lazy to go over it a second time in its present physically inconvenient shape. It is obvious that parts of it have been written rapidly and not boiled down; and my impression is that you have left over in it too much of the complication of form in which our ideas, our critical ideas especially, first come to us, and which has, with much rewriting, to be straightened out. You were dealing with dialecticians and logic-choppers, and you have met them on their own ground with a logic-chopping even more diseased than theirs. So far as I can see, you _have_ met them, though your own expressions are often far from lucid (--result of haste?); but in some cases I doubt whether they themselves would think that they were met at all. I fear a little that both Bradley and Royce will think that your _reductiones ad absurdum_ are too fine spun and ingenious to have real force. Too complicated, too complicated!

is the verdict of my horse-like mind on much of this thesis. Your defense will be, of course, that it is a thesis, and as such, expected to be barbaric. But then I point to the careless, hasty writing of much of it. You _must_ simplify yourself, if you hope to have any influence in print.

The writing becomes more careful and the style clearer, the moment you tackle Russell in the 6th part. And when you come to your own dogmatic statement of your vision of things in the last 30 pages or so, I think the thesis splendid, prophetic in tone and _very_ felicitous, often, in expression. This is indeed the _philosophie de l'avenir_, and a dogmatic expression of it will be far more effective than critical demolition of its alternatives. It will render that unnecessary if able enough. One will simply _feel_ them to be diseased. My total impression is that the critter K---- has a _really magnificent vision_ of the lay of the land in philosophy,--of the land of bondage, as well as of that of promise,--but that he has a tremendous lot of work to do yet in the way of getting himself into straight and effective literary shape. He has _elements_ of extraordinary literary power, but they are buried in much sand and shingle....

_May. 26, 1900._

Dear Miss S----, I am a caitiff! I have left your essay on my poor self unanswered.... It is a great compliment to me to be taken so philologically and importantly; and I must say that from the technical point of view you may be proud of your production. I like greatly the objective and dispa.s.sionate key in which you keep everything, and the number of subdivisions and articulations which you make gives me vertiginous admiration. Nevertheless, the tragic fact remains that I don't feel wounded at all by all that output of ability, and for reasons which I think I can set down briefly enough. It all comes, in my eyes, from too much philological method--as a Ph.D. thesis your essay is supreme, but why don't you go farther? You take utterances of mine written at different dates, for different audiences belonging to different universes of discourse, and string them together as the abstract elements of a total philosophy which you then show to be inwardly incoherent. This is splendid philology, but is it live criticism of anyone's _Weltanschauung_? Your use of the method only strengthens the impression I have got from reading criticisms of my "pragmatic" account of "truth," that the whole Ph.D. industry of building up an author's meaning out of separate texts leads nowhere, unless you have first grasped his centre of vision, by an act of imagination. That, it seems to me, you lack in my case.

For instance: [Seven examples are next dealt with in two and a half pages of type-writing. These pages are omitted.]

...I have been unpardonably long; and if you were a man, I should a.s.suredly not expect to influence you a jot by what I write. Being a woman, there may be yet a gleam of hope!--which may serve as the excuse for my prolixity. (It is not for the likes of _you_, however, to hurl accusations of prolixity!) Now if I may presume to give a word of advice to one so much more accomplished than myself in dialectic technique, may I urge, since you have shown what a superb mistress you are in that difficult art of discriminating abstractions and opposing them to each other one by one, since in short there is no university extant that wouldn't give you its _summa c.u.m laude_,--I should certainly so reward your thesis at Harvard,--may I urge, I say, that you should now turn your back upon that academic sort of artificiality altogether, and devote your great talents to the study of reality in its concreteness?

In other words, do some _positive_ work at the problem of what truth signifies, subst.i.tute a definitive alternative for the humanism which I present, as the latter's subst.i.tute. Not by proving their inward incoherence does one refute philosophies--every human being is incoherent--but only by superseding them by other philosophies more satisfactory. Your wonderful technical skill ought to serve you in good stead if you would exchange the philological kind of criticism for constructive work. I fear however that you won't--the iron may have bitten too deeply into your soul!!

Have you seen Knox's paper on pragmatism in the "Quarterly Review" for April--perhaps the deepest-cutting thing yet written on the pragmatist side? On the other side read Bertrand Russell's paper in the "Edinburgh Review" just out. A thing after your own heart, but ruined in my eyes by the same kind of vicious abstractionism which your thesis shows. It is amusing to see the critics of the will to believe furnish such exquisite instances of it in their own persons. _E.g._, Russell's own splendid atheistic-t.i.tanic confession of faith in that volume of essays on "Ideals of Science and of Faith" edited by one Hand. X----, whom you quote, has recently worked himself up to the pa.s.s of being ordained in the Episcopal church.... I justify them both; for only by such experiments on the part of individuals will social man gain the evidence required. They meanwhile seem to think that the only "true" position to hold is that everything not imposed upon a will-less and non-cooperant intellect must count as false--a preposterous principle which no human being follows in real life.

Well! There! that is all! But, dear Madam, I should like to know where you come from, who you are, what your present "situation" is, etc., etc.--It is natural to have some personal curiosity about a lady who has taken such an extraordinary amount of pains for me!

Believe me, dear Miss S----, with renewed apologies for the extreme tardiness of this acknowledgment, yours with mingled admiration and abhorrence,

WM. JAMES.

APPENDIX II

BOOKS BY WILLIAM JAMES

The following chronological list includes books only, but it gives the essays and chapters contained in each.

Professor R. B. Perry's "Bibliography" (see below) lists a great number of contributions to periodicals, which have never been reprinted, and includes notes indicative of the matter of each.

(No attempt has been made to compile a list of references to literature about William James, but the following may be mentioned as easily obtainable: _William James_, by eMILE BOUTROUX. Paris, 1911.

Translation: Longmans, Green & Co., New York and London, 1912. _La Philosophie de William James_, by THEODORE FLOURNOY. St. Blaise, 1911.

Translation: _The Philosophy of William James._ Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1917.)

_Literary Remains of Henry James, Sr._, with an Introduction by WILLIAM JAMES. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884.