book I

might be reading ... he would invariably say, 'I glanced into that book yesterday and read that.'"[44]

He had already formed the habit of making marginal notes, of writing down summaries of his reading, and of formulating his ideas on paper--the admirable practice, in short, of confiding in note-books and addressing himself freely to the waste-basket. For instance: "In 1869, when still a medical student, he began to write an essay showing how almost everyone who speculated about brain processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his 'Time and Space'), Maudsley, Lockhart, Clarke, Bain, Dr. Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the confusion. The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its reality."[45]

He kept some of his memoranda in a series of the alphabetized blank-books which used to be sold under the name of "Todd's Index Rerum" during the sixties, and which were devised to facilitate indexing and reference. He continued to make entries in these books until 1890, and perhaps later. He also filled copy-books and pocket note-books, of which a few mutilated but interesting fragments remain. In these he sometimes copied out quotations, sometimes noted comments on his reading, sometimes tried to clothe an idea of his own in precise words. Occasionally he made diary-like entries that show how familiar a companion he was making of the note-book. He was already at his ease in the practice of the Baconian maxim that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

A few book-notices or reviews did reach the public. Seven are listed under the years 1868 to 1872 in Professor R. B. Perry's "List of Published Writings." Although the matter of these reviews is seldom of present-day interest, the curious reader will find sentences and paragraphs in them that are prophetic of passages in James's later writings, and will observe that he already commanded a style that expressed the color and quality of his thought.[46]

* * * * *

Considering that James, while still in his twenties, had found such resources within himself, and had learned how to occupy himself in ways so appropriate to the development of his best faculties, it would seem that he need not have labored under any sense of frustration and impotence. But such a feeling undoubtedly did weigh heavily upon him during more or less of the whole period between his winter in Berlin and 1872. And it was indeed due in great part to something else than the mere fact that he could not yet feel the rungs of the ladder of any

## particular career under his feet. No reader of the "Varieties of

Religious Experience" can have doubted that he had known religious despondency himself as well as observed the distress of it in others. The problem of the moral constitution of things, the question of man's relation to the Universe,--whether significant or impotent and meaningless,--these had clearly come home to him as more than questions of metaphysical discourse. It was during this period that such doubts invaded his consciousness in a way that was personal and intimate and, for the time being, oppressive. He was tormented by misgivings which almost paralyzed his naturally buoyant spirit. Bad health, a feeling of the purposelessness of his own particular existence, his philosophic doubts and his constant preoccupation with them, all these combined to plunge him into a state of morbid depression. He seems to have hidden the depth of it from those who were about him. He even had an experience of that kind of melancholy "which takes the form of panic fear." When he wrote the chapter on the "sick soul" thirty years later, he put into it an account of this experience. He still disguised it as the report of an anonymous "French correspondent." Subsequently he admitted to M. Abauzit that the passage was really the story of his own case,[47] and it may be repeated here, for the words of the fictitious French correspondent, who was really James, are the most authentic statement that could be given. They will be found at page 160 of the "Varieties of Religious Experience."

"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight, to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them, inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.

"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.... I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that, if I had not clung to scripture-texts like _The eternal God is my refuge_, etc., _Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden_, etc., _I am the Resurrection and the Life_, etc., I think I should have grown really insane."

The date of this experience cannot and need not be fixed exactly. It was undoubtedly later than the Berlin winter and after the return to Cambridge. Perhaps it was during the winter of 1869-70, for one of the note-books contains an entry dated April 30, 1870, in which James's resolution and self-confidence appear to be reasserting themselves. This entry must be quoted too. It is not only illuminating with respect to 1870, but suggests parts of the "Psychology" and of the philosophic essays that later gave comfort and courage to unnumbered readers.

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will--"the sustaining of a thought _because I choose to_ when I might have other thoughts"--need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present--until next year--that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative _Grüblei_[48] in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the _form_ of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action--and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. _Principiis obsta_--Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in _Anschauungen_,[49] but in accumulated _acts_ of thought lies salvation. _Passer outre._ Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, _can't_ be optimistic--but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing _resistance_ of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in][50] doing and suffering and creating."

* * * * *

The next letter was written from Cambridge during the winter following the return from Germany, and while James was completing the work necessary to entitle him to a medical degree.[51] The reader will recognize "the firm of B & J" as the medical partnership proposed to Bowditch in the letter of December 12, 1867.

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 24, 1869_.

MY DEAR HENRY,--I am in receipt of two letters from yez (dates forgotten) wherein you speak of having received my money and paid my bills and of Fleury's book. You're a gentleman in all respects. You said nothing about whether the pounds when reduced back to francs and Thalers made exactly the original sum from which the pounds were calculated. If it was but five centimes under and you have concealed it, I shall brand you as a villain where'er I go. So out with the truth. Do I still owe you anything?...

I have just been quit by Chas. S. Peirce, with whom I have been talking about a couple of articles in the St. Louis "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" by him, which I have just read. They are exceedingly bold, subtle and incomprehensible, and I can't say that his vocal elucidations helped me a great deal to their understanding, but they nevertheless interest me strangely. The poor cuss sees no chance of getting a professorship anywhere, and is likely to go into the observatory for good. It seems a great pity that as original a man as he is, who is willing and able to devote the powers of his life to logic and metaphysics, should be starved out of a career, when there are lots of professorships of the sort to be given in the country to "safe," orthodox men. He has had good reason, I know, to feel a little discouraged about the prospect, but I think he ought to hang on, as a German would do, till he grows gray....

I saw Wyman a few weeks ago. He said his Indian collecting, etc., took up all his working time now. Do you keep your room above the freezing point or can't the thing be done? Have you made any bosom friends among French students, or do you find the superficial accidents of language and breeding to hold you wider apart than the deep force of your common humanity can draw you together? It's deuced discouraging to find how this is almost certain to be the case.

The older I grow, the more important does it seem to me for the interest of science and of the sick, and of the firm of B. & J., that you should take charge of a big state lunatic asylum. Think of the interesting cases, and of the autopsies! And if you once took firm root, say at Somerville, I should feel assured of a refuge in my old and destitute days, for you certainly would not be treacherous enough to spurn me from the door when I presented myself--on the pretext that I was only shamming dementia. Think of the matter seriously.

I read a little while ago Chambers's "Clinical Lectures," which are exceedingly interesting and able. The lectures on indigestion in the volume are worth, in quality, ten such books as that Guipon I left in Paris, though more limited in subject. I have been trying to get "Hilton on Rest and Pain," which you recommended, from the Athenæum, but, _more librorum_, when you want 'em, it keeps "out." ...

I hope this letter is _décousue_ enough for you. What is a man to write when a reef is being taken in his existence, and absence from thought and life is all he aspires to. Better times will come, though, and with them better letters. Good-bye! Ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr._

[_Winter of 1868-69._]

Gents!--entry-thieves--chevaliers d'industrie--well-dressed swindlers--confidence men--wolves in sheep's clothing--asses in lion's skin--gentlemanly pickpockets--beware! The hand of the law is already on your throats and waits but a wink to be tightened. All the resources of the immensely powerful Corporation of Harvard University have been set in motion, and concealment of your miserable selves or of the almost equally miserable (though not _as such_ miserable) goloshes which you stole from our entry on Sunday night is as impossible as would be the concealment of the State House. The motive of your precipitate departure from the house became immediately evident to the remaining guests. But they resolved to _ignore_ the matter provided the overshoes were replaced within a week; if not, no _considerations whatever_ will prevent Messrs. Gurney & Perry[52] from proceeding to treat you with the utmost severity of the law. It is high time that some of these genteel adventurers should be made an example of, and your offence just comes in time to make the cup of public and private forbearance overflow. My father and self have pledged our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to see the thing through with Gurney and Perry, as the credit of our house is involved and we might ourselves have been losers, not only from you but from the aforesaid G. & P., who have been heard to go about openly declaring that "if they had known the party was going to be _that_ kind of an affair, d--d if they would not have started off earlier themselves with some of those aristocratic James overcoats, hats, gloves and canes!"

So let me as a friend advise you to send the swag back. No questions will be asked--Mum's the word.

WM. JAMES.

_To Thomas W. Ward._

_March_ [?], 1869.

...I had great movings of my bowels toward thee lately--the distant, cynical isolation in which we live with our heart's best brothers sometimes comes over me with a deep bitterness, and I had a little while ago an experience of life which woke up the spiritual monad within me as has not happened more than once or twice before in my life. "Malgré la vue des misères où nous vivons et qui nous tiennent par la gorge," there is an inextinguishable spark which will, when we least expect it, flash out and reveal the existence, at least, of something real--of reason at the bottom of things. I can't tell you how it was now. I'm swamped in an empirical philosophy.[53] I feel that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws; and yet, notwithstanding, we are _en rapport_ with reason.--How to conceive it? Who knows? I'm convinced that the defensive tactics of the French "spiritualists" fighting a steady retreat before materialism will never do anything.--It is not that we are all nature _but_ some point which is reason, but that all is nature _and_ all is reason too. We shall see, damn it, we shall see!...

[W. J.]

* * * * *

"The Bootts," with whom "architect Ware" reported the Reverend Mr. Foote to be hand in glove in Italy in 1867, reappear in the following letter. Francis Boott (Harvard 1832) had early been left a widower, and had just returned from a long European residence which he had devoted to the education of his charming and gifted daughter "Lizzie," later to become the wife of Frank Duveneck of Cincinnati, the painter and sculptor. Boott was about the age of Henry James, Senior, but the intimacy which began at Pomfret during the summer of 1869 ripened into one of those whole-family friendships which obliterate differences of age. Later, although both the elder Jameses and young Mrs. Duveneck had died, William and Boott saw each other frequently in Cambridge. The beautiful little commemorative address which James delivered after Boott's death has been included in the volume of "Memories and Studies."

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

POMFRET, CONN., _Aug. 12, 1869_.

...I have been at this place since July 1st with my family. There are a few farmhouses close together on the same road, which take boarders. We are in the best of them, and very pleasant it is. The country is beautifully hilly and fertile, and the climate deliciously windy and cool. I came here resolved to lead the life of an absolute caterpillar, and have succeeded very well so far, spending most of my time swinging in a hammock under the pine trees in front of the house, and having hardly read fifty pages of anything in the whole six weeks. It has told on me most advantageously. I am far better every way than when I came, and am beginning to walk about quite actively. Maybe it's the beginning of a final rise to health, but I'm so sick of prophesying that I won't say anything about it till it gets more confirmed. One thing is sure, however, that I've given the policy of "rest" a fair trial and shall consider myself justified next winter in going about visiting and to concerts, etc., regardless of the fatigue.

I am forgetting all this while to tell you that I passed my examination with no difficulty and am entitled to write myself M.D., if I choose. Buckingham's midwifery gave me some embarrassment, but the rest was trifling enough. So there is one epoch of my life closed, and a pretty important one, I feel it, both in its scientific "yield" and in its general educational value as enabling me to see a little the inside workings of an important profession and to learn from it, as an average example, how all the work of human society is performed. I feel a good deal of intellectual hunger nowadays, and if my health would allow, I think there is little doubt that I should make a creditable use of my freedom, in pretty hard study. I hope, even as it is, not to have to remain absolutely idle--and shall try to make whatever reading I can do bear on psychological subjects....

Wendell Holmes and John Gray were on here last Saturday and Sunday, and seemed in very jolly spirits at being turned out to pasture from their Boston pen. I should think Wendell worked too hard. Gray is going to Lenox for a fortnight, but W. is to take no vacation.

During the month of July we had the good fortune to have as fellow boarders Mr. Boott and his daughter from Boston. Miss B., although not overpoweringly beautiful, is one of the very best members of her sex I ever met. She spent the first eighteen years of her life in Europe, and has of course Italian, French and German at her fingers' ends, and I never realized before how much a good education (I mean in its common sense of a wide information) added to the charms of a woman. She has a great talent for drawing, and was very busy painting here, which, as she is in just about the same helpless state in which I was when I abandoned the art, made her particularly interesting to me. You had better come home soon and make her acquaintance--for you know these first-class young spinsters do not _always_ keep for ever, although on the whole they tend to, in Boston.

The successors to the Bootts in this house are Gen. Casey (of "Infantry Tactics" notoriety) and spouse. He is an amiable but mildish old gentleman, and about thirty years older than his wife. I'm glad, on the whole, that General Grant, and not he, was our commander in the late war.

If you want some good light German reading, let me advise you to try at least the first half of Jung-Stilling's autobiography. He was a pious German who lived through the latter half of the last century, and wrote with the utmost vividness and naïveté all his experiences, that the glory of God's Providence might be increased. I read it with great delight a few weeks since; it merits the adjective _fresh_ as well as most books.

I saw Jeffries Wyman a short time before leaving. He said he had heard from you. I'd give much to hear from your lips an account of your plans, hopes and so forth, as well as the _Ergebnisse_ of the past year. I was truly glad to hear of your determination to stick to physiology. However discouraging the work of each day may seem, stick at it long enough, and you'll wake up some morning--a physiologist--just as the man who takes a daily drink finds himself unexpectedly a drunkard. I wish I'd asked you sooner to send me a photograph of Bernard and Vulpian--or any other Parisian medical men worth having--is it too late now?--and too late for Pflüger? I address this still to Bonn, supposing they'll send it after you if you've gone.

Write soon to yours affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

_To Miss Mary Tappan._

_Sunday, April 26_ [1870?].

MY DEAR MARY,--Mother says she met you in town this morning, looking more lovely than ever, but--_with your bonnet on the back of your head!_

I hope that this is a mistake. Mother's eyesight is growing fallacious and frequently leads her to see what she would like to see. I cannot think that you would submit to be swayed in your own views of right bonnet-wearing by the mere vociferation of persons like her and Alice, especially when you had heard _me_ expressly say I agreed with you that the forehead is the truly ladylike place for a bonnet. Enough!---- I waded out to Cambridge from your party. If you enjoyed yourselves as much as I did (but I'm afraid you didn't) you will keep on giving them. Somehow your part of the town is very inaccessible to me or I should frequently bore you. Hoping, in spite of this fearful mother story today, that you are still unsophisticated, I am always yours affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

You need not answer this.

[_Across top of first page_]

Written two days ago--kept back from diffidence--sent now because anything is better than this dead silence between us!

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _May 7, 1870_.

DEAR HARRY,--'Tis Saturday evening, ten minutes past six of the clock and a cold and rainy day (Indian winter, as T. S. P. calls such). I had a fire lighted in my grate this afternoon. There is nevertheless a broken blue spot in the eastern clouds as I look out, and the grass and buds have started visibly since the morning. The trees are half-way out--you of course have long had them in full leaf--and the early green is like a bath to the eyes. Father is gone to Newport for a day, and is expected back within the hour. My jaw is aching badly in consequence of a tooth I had out two days ago, the which refused to be pulled, was broken, but finally extracted, and has left its neighbors prone to ache since. I hope it won't last much longer. I spent the morning, part of it at least, in fishing the "Revues Germaniques" up from [the] cellar, looking over their contents, and placing them volumewise, and flat, in the two top shelves of the big library bookcase _vice_ Thies's good old books just removed, the shelves being too low to take any of our books upright. I feel melancholy as a whip-poor-will and took up pen and paper to sigh melodiously to you. But sighs are hard to express in words. We have been three weeks now without hearing from you, and if a letter does not come tomorrow or Monday, I don't know what'll become of us. Howells brought, a week ago, a long letter you had written to him on the eve of leaving Malvern, so our next will be from London....

My! how I long to see you, and feel of you, and talk things over. I have at last, I think, begun to rise out of the sloughs of the past three months.... What a blessing this change of seasons is, as you used to say, especially in the spring. The winter is man's enemy, he must exert himself against it to live, or it will squeeze him in one night out of existence. So it is hateful to a sick man, and all the greater is the peace of the latter when it yields to a time when nature seems to coöperate with life and float one passively on. But I hear Father arriving and I must go down to hear his usual _compte rendu_.[54]

* * * * *

_Sunday_, 3 P.M.

No letter from you this morning.... It seems to me that all a man has to depend on in this world, is, in the last resort, mere brute power of resistance. I can't bring myself, as so many men seem able to, to blink the evil out of sight, and gloss it over. It's as real as the good, and if it is denied, good must be denied too. It must be accepted and hated, and resisted while there's breath in our bodies....

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 29, 1870_.

MY DEAR HENRY,--Your letter written from Leipzig just before the declaration of war reached me in the country. I have thought of you and of answering you, abundantly, ever since; but have mostly been prevented by sheer physical _imbecillitas_. Now I am ashamed of such a state, and shall write you a page or so a day till the letter is finished. I have had no idea all this time where or what you have been, traveler, student, or medical army officer. You may imagine how excited I was at the beginning of the war. I had not dared to hope for such a complete triumph of poetic justice as occurred. Now I feel much less interested in the success of the Germans, first because I think it's time that the principle of territorial conquest were abolished, second because success will redound to the credit of autocratic government there, and good as that may happen to be in the particular junctures, it's unsafe and pernicious in the long run. Moreover, if France succeeds in beating off the Germans now, I should think there would be some chance of the peace being kept between them hereafter--the French will have gained an insight they never had of the horrors of a war of conquest, and some degree of loathing for it in the abstract; and they will not have to fight to regain their honor. Moreover, I should like to see the republic succeed. But if Alsace and Lorraine be taken, there _must_ be another war, for them and for honor. On the other hand, justice seems to demand a permanent penalty for the political immorality of France. So that there will be enough good to console one for the bad, whichever way it turns out....

* * * * *

31st.

As I said, I have no idea of how the war may have affected your movements and occupations. It did my heart good to hear of the solid and businesslike way in which you were working at Leipzig, and I should think [that], with Ludwig and the laboratory, you would feel like giving it another winter--though the other attractions of Berlin and Vienna must pull you rather strongly away. I heard a rumor the other day that Lombard's place was being kept for you here. I hope it's true, for your sake and that of Boston. Thank you very much for the photographs of Ludwig and Fechner. I have enjoyed Ludwig's face very much, he must be a good fellow; and Fechner, down to below the orbits, has a strange resemblance to Jeffries Wyman. I have quite a decent nucleus of a physiognomical collection now, and any further contributions it may please you to make to it will be most thankfully received.

J. Wyman I have not seen since his return. Such is the state of brutal social isolation which characterizes this community! Partly sickness,

## partly a morbid shrinking from the society of anyone who is alive

intellectually are to blame, however, in my case. I, as I wrote, am long since dead and buried in that respect. I fill my belly for about four hours daily with husks,--newspapers, novels and biographies, but thought is tabooed,--and you can imagine that conversation with Wyman should only intensify the sense of my degradation.

* * * * *

_Jan. 23, 1871._

Since my last date I have been unable to write until today, and now, I think, to make sure of the letter going at all, I had better cut it short and send it off to your father to direct. I have indeed nothing

## particular to communicate, and only want to give you assurance of my

undying affection. This morning 4 degrees below zero, and N.W. wind. Don't you wish you were here to enjoy the sunshine of it? A batch of telegrams in the "Advertiser," showing that France must soon throw up the sponge. Faidherbe licked at St. Quentin, Bourbaki pursued, Chanzy almost disintegrated, and Paris frozen and starved out. Well, so be it! only the German liberals will have the harder battle to fight at home for the next twenty years. I suspect that England, irresolute and unhandsome as is the figure she makes externally, is today in a healthier state than any country in Europe. She is renovating herself socially, and although she may be eclipsed during these days of "militarismus," yet when they depart, as surely they must some time, from sheer exhaustion, she will be ready to take the lead by influence. I know of no news here to tell you. I suppose you get the "Nation," which keeps up well, notwithstanding its monotony. I shall be expecting to fold you to my bosom some time next summer. Heaven speed the day! Write me as soon as you get this. You haven't the same excuse for silence that I have. Speak of your work, your plans and the war. Good bye, old fellow, and believe me, ever your friend,

WM. JAMES.

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 8, 1871_.

...So the gallant Gauls are shooting each other again! I wish we knew what it all meant. From the apparent generality of the movement in Paris, it seems as if it must be something more dignified than it at first appeared. But can anything great be expected now from a nation between the two factions of which there is such hopeless enmity and mistrust as between the religious and the revolutionary parties in France? No mediation is possible between them. In England, America and Germany, a regular advance is possible, because each man confides in his brothers. However great the superficial differences of opinion, there is at bottom a trust in the power of the deep forces of human nature to work out their salvation, and the minority is contented to bide its time. But in France, nothing of the sort; no one feels secure against what he considers evil, by any guaranty but force; and if his opponents get uppermost, he thinks all is forever lost. How much Catholic education is to answer for this and how much national idiosyncrasy, it is hard to say. But I am inclined to think the latter is a large factor. The want of true sympathy in the French character, their love of external mechanical order, their satisfaction in police-regulation, their everlasting cry of "traitor," all point to it. But, on the other hand, protestantism would seem to have a good deal to do with the fundamental cohesiveness of society in the countries of Germanic blood. For what may be called the revolutionary party there has _developed_ through insensible grades of rationalism out of the old orthodox conceptions, religious and social. The process has been a continuous modification of positive belief, and the extremes, even if they had no respect for each other and no desire for mutual accommodation (which I think at bottom they have), would yet be kept from cutting each other's throats by the intermediate links. But in France Belief and Denial are separated by a chasm. The step once made, "écrasez l'infâme" is the only watchword on each side. How any order is possible except by a Cæsar to hold the balance, it is hard to see. But I don't want to dose you with my crude speculations. This difference was brought home vividly to me by reading yesterday in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" for last December a splendid little story, "Histoire d'un Sous-Maître," by Erckmann-Chatrian, and what was uppermost in my mind came out easiest in writing.

I shall be overjoyed to see you in September, but expect to hear from you many a time ere then. I see little medical society, none in fact; but hope to begin again soon. [R. H.] Fitz, I believe, is showing great powers in "Pathology" since his return. And I hear a place in the school is being kept warm for you on your return. Count me for an auditor. I invested yesterday in a ticket for a course of "University" lectures on "Optical Phenomena and the Eye," by B. Joy Jeffries, to be begun out here tomorrow. It's the first mingling in the business of life which I have done since my return home. Wyman is in Florida till May. He has an obstinate cough and seems anxious about his lungs. I hope he'll be spared, though, many a long year.

Ever yours truly, WM. JAMES.

_To Charles Renouvier._

CAMBRIDGE, _Nov. 2, 1872_.

MONSIEUR,--Je viens d'apprendre par votre "Science de la Morale," que l'ouvrage de M. Lequier, auquel vous faites renvoi dans votre deuxième Essai de Critique, n'a jamais été mis en vente. Ceci explique l'insuccès avec lequel j'ai pendant longtemps tâché de me le procurer par la voie de la librairie.

Serait-ce trop vous demander, s'il vous restait encore des exemplaires, de m'en envoyer un, que je présenterais, après l'avoir lu, en votre nom, à la bibliothèque Universitaire de cette ville?

Si l'édition est déjà épuisée, ne vous mettez pas en peine de me répondre, et que le vif intérêt que je prends à vos idées serve d'excuse à ma demande. Je ne peux pas laisser échapper cette occasion de vous dire toute l'admiration et la reconnaissance que m'ont inspirée la lecture de vos Essais (sauf le 3me, que je n'ai pas encore lu). Grâce à vous, je possède pour la première fois une conception intelligible et raisonnable de la Liberté. Je m'y suis rangé à peu près. Sur d'autres points de votre philosophie il me reste encore des doutes, mais je puis dire que par elle je commence à renaître à la vie morale; et croyez, monsieur, que ce n'est pas une petite chose!

Chez nous, c'est la philosophie de Mill, Bain, et Spencer qui emporte tout à présent devant lui. Elle fait d'excellents travaux en psychologie, mais au point de vue pratique elle est déterministe et matérialiste, et déjà je crois aperçevoir en Angleterre les symptomes d'une renaissance de la pensée religieuse. Votre philosophie par son côté phénoméniste semble très propre à frapper les ésprits élevés dans l'école empirique anglaise, et je ne doute pas dès qu'elle sera un peu mieux connue en Angleterre et dans ce pays, qu'elle n'ait un assez grand retentissement. Elle paraît faire son chemin lentement; mais je suis convaincu que chaque année nous rapprochera du jour où elle sera reconnue de tous comme étant la plus forte tentative philosophique que le siècle ait vue naître en France, et qu'elle comptera toujours comme un des grands jalons dans l'histoire de la speculation. Dès que ma santé (depuis quelques années très mauvaise) me permet un travail intellectuel un peu sérieux, je me propose d'en faire une étude plus approfondie et plus critique, et d'en donner un compte-rendu dans une de nos revues. Si donc, monsieur, il se trouve un exemplaire encore disponible de la "Rech[erche] d'une première Verité," j'oserai vous prier de l'envoyer à l'adresse de la libraire ci-incluse, en écrivant mon nom sur la couverture. M. Galette soldera tous les frais, s'il s'en trouve.

Veuillez encore une fois, cher monsieur, croire aux sentiments d'admiration et de haut respect avec lesquels je suis votre très obéissant serviteur,

WILLIAM JAMES.

VII

1872-1878

_First Years of Teaching_

IN 1872 President Eliot wished to provide instruction in physiology and hygiene for the Harvard undergraduates, and looked about him for instructors. He had formed an impression of James ten years before which, as he said, "was later to become useful to Harvard University," and in the interval he had known him as a Cambridge neighbor and had been aware of the direction his interests had taken. He proposed that James and Dr. Thomas Dwight--a young anatomist who was also to become an eminent teacher--should share in the new undertaking. In August, 1872, the College appointed James "Instructor in Physiology," to conduct three exercises a week "during half of the ensuing academic year." Thus began a service in the University which was to be almost continuously active and engrossing until 1907.

The fact that James began by teaching anatomy and physiology, passed thence to psychology, and last to philosophy, has been wrongly cited as if his interest in each successive subject of his college work had been the fruit of his experience in teaching the preceding subject. This inference from the mere sequence of events will appear strange to attentive readers of what has gone before. Indeed, if the fact that James devoted a good share of his time to physiology in the seventies calls for remark at all, it should be noted that his subject, from soon after the beginning, was really physiological psychology, and that--more interesting than anything else in this connection--one may discern a patient surrender to limitations imposed by the state of his health on the one hand, and on the other a sound sense of the value of physiology to psychological investigations and so to philosophy, as both underlying the sequence of events in his teaching. Whatever may have been the succession of his college "courses," psychology and philosophy were never divorced from each other in his thought or in his writings. Thus it is interesting to find, that at the very moment of his engagement to teach physiology,--at a date intermediate between the appointment and the commencement of the course in fact,--he wrote to his brother, "If I were well enough, now would be my chance to strike at Harvard College, for Peterson has just resigned his sub-professorship of philosophy, and I know of no very formidable opponent. But it's impossible. I keep up a small daily pegging at my physiology, whose duties don't begin till January, and which I shall find easy, I think."

He had needed definite duties and responsibilities and more or less recognized his need; so he undertook to teach a subject which, though congenial and interesting, lay distinctly off the path of his deepest inclination.

The first three fragments that follow refer to his preparation for the plunge into teaching. The course on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology was given by Dwight and James under the general head of Natural History and was an "elective" open to Juniors and Seniors. "As the course was experimental and a part of the new expansion of the Elective System," writes President Eliot, "the President and the Faculty were interested in the fact that the new course under these two young instructors attracted 28 Juniors and 25 Seniors."

_To Henry James._

SCARBORO, _Aug. 24, 1872_.

...The appointment to teach physiology is a perfect God-send to me just now, an external motive to work, which yet does not strain me--a dealing with men instead of my own mind, and a diversion from those introspective studies which had bred a sort of philosophical hypochondria in me of late and which it will certainly do me good to drop for a year....

* * * * *

CAMBRIDGE, _Nov. 24, 1872_.

...I go into the Medical School nearly every morning to hear Bowditch lecture, or paddle round in his laboratory. It is a noble thing for one's spirits to have some responsible work to do. I enjoy my revived physiological reading greatly, and have in a corporeal sense been better for the past four or five weeks than I have been at all since you left....

* * * * *

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 13, 1873_.

...This morning arose, went to Brewer's to get two partridges to garnish our cod-fish dinner. Bought at Richardson's an "Appleton's Journal" containing part of "Bressant," a novel by Julian Hawthorne, to send Bob Temple. At 10.30 arrived your letter of January 26th, which was a very pleasant continuation of your _Aufenthalt_ in Rome. At 12.30, after reading an hour in Flint's "Physiology," I went to town, paid a bill of Randidge's, looked into the Athenæum reading-room, got one dozen raw oysters at Higgins's saloon in Court Street, came out again, thermometer having risen to near thawing point, dozed half an hour before the fire, and am now writing this to you.

I am enjoying a two weeks' respite from tuition, the boys being condemned to pass examinations, in which I luckily take no part at present. I find the work very interesting and stimulating. It presents two problems, the intellectual one--how best to state your matter to them; and the practical one--how to govern them, stir them up, not bore them, yet make them work, etc. I should think it not unpleasant as a permanent thing. The authority is at first rather flattering to one. So far, I seem to have succeeded in interesting them, for they are admirably attentive, and I hear expressions of satisfaction on their part. Whether it will go on next year can't at this hour, for many reasons, be decided. I have done almost absolutely no visiting this winter, and seen hardly anyone or heard anything till last week, when a sort of frenzy took possession of me and I went to a symphony concert and thrice to the theatre. A most lovely English actress, young, innocent, refined, has been playing Juliet, which play I enjoyed most intensely, though it was at the Boston Theatre and her support almost as poor as it could have been. Neilson is she hight. I ne'er heard of her before. A rival American beauty has been playing a stinking thing of Sardou's ("Agnes") at the Globe, which disgusted me with cleverness. Her name is Miss Ethel, and she is a ladylike but depressing phenomenon, all made up of nerves and American insubstantiality. I have read hardly anything of late, some of the immortal Wordsworth's "Excursion" having been the best. I have simply shaken hands with Gray since his engagement, and have only seen Holmes twice this winter. I fear he is at last feeling the effects of his overwork....

* * * * *

CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 6, 1873_.

...I have been cut out all this winter from the men with whom I used to gossip on generalities, Holmes, Putnam, Peirce, Shaler, John Gray and, last not least, yourself. I rather hanker after it, Bowditch being almost the only man I have seen anything of this winter, and that at his laboratory.... Child and I have struck up quite an intimacy.... T. S. Perry is my only surviving crony. He dines pretty regular once a week here.... Ever your affectionate

W. J.

* * * * *

The next letter, although not from William James, will help to fill out the picture.

_Henry James, Senior, to Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 18, 1873_.

... [William] gets on greatly with his teaching; his students--fifty-seven of them--are elated with their luck in having him, and I feel sure he will have next year a still larger number by his fame. He came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and after walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out: "Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriacal"--he used that word, though perhaps less in substance than form--"and now with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the difference between death and life."

He had a great effusion. I was afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier (particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but more than anything else, his having given up the notion that all mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of the fact of the change, I never had been more delighted than by hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips. He has been shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I have known him before....

* * * * *

James's first Harvard appointment had been for one year only. In the spring of 1873 the question of its renewal on somewhat different terms came up. President Eliot informed him that the College wished some one man to give the instruction which he and Dr. Dwight had shared between them, and offered him the whole course, including the anatomy.

It cost him "some perplexity to make the decision." He thought he saw that such an instructorship "might easily grow into a permanent biological appointment, to succeed Wyman, perhaps." At first he resolved "to fight it out on the line of mental science," feeling that "with such arrears of lost time behind [him] and such curtailed power of work," he could no longer "afford to make so considerable an expedition into the field of anatomy." But when he then considered himself as a possible future teacher of philosophy, he was overwhelmed by a feeling which he recorded on a page of his diary: "Philosophical activity _as a business_ is not normal for most men, and not for me.... To make the _form_ of all possible thought the prevailing _matter_ of one's thought breeds hypochondria. Of course my deepest interest will, as ever, lie with the most general problems. But ... my strongest moral and intellectual craving is for some stable reality to lean upon.... That gets reality for us in which we place our responsibility, and the concrete facts in which a biologist's responsibilities lie form a fixed basis from which to aspire as much as he pleases to the mastery of universal questions when the gallant mood is on him; and a basis too upon which he can passively float and tide over times of weakness and depression, trusting all the while blindly in the beneficence of nature's forces, and the return of higher opportunities." Accordingly he determined to give himself to biology, reporting to his brother Henry, who was at that time in Europe, "I am not a strong enough man to choose the other and nobler lot in life, but I can in a less penetrating way work out a philosophy in the midst of the other duties...."

* * * * *

As the summer went on, he still had misgivings that he would not be strong enough to prepare and conduct the laboratory demonstrations necessary for a large class in comparative anatomy and physiology. He saw that his first year of teaching had been "of great moral service to him," but thought that in other ways the strain and fatigue had been a brake upon the rate of his wished-for improvement. He therefore made up his mind to postpone the instructorship for a year and go abroad once more.

These hesitations, and a few months in Europe, marked the end of the period of morbid depression through which the reader has been following him. He returned to America eager for work.

Meanwhile parts of four letters written while he was abroad may be given.

_To his Family._

ON BOARD S.S. SPAIN, _Oct. 17, 1873_.

DEAREST FAMILY,--I begin my Queenstown letter now because the first section of the voyage seems to be closing. The delicious warm stern wind, cloudy sky and smooth sea which we have had, unlike anything I remember on the Atlantic, threatens to change into something less agreeable, for the wind is fresh ahead, and the waves all capped with white and the vessel begins to roll more and more. Hitherto she has not rolled an inch, and all our days have been spent on deck, and I have enjoyed less sickness than ever before; though I must say I loathe the element. I am confirmed in my preference for big boats, and shall probably try one of the Inman line when I return, as this, sweet Alice, is rather Cunardy as to its table and sitting accommodations. Miss K---- and her two friends sit opposite me at meals and seem to ply a good knife and fork. The other passengers are inoffensive and quiet, with the exception of my roommate, who is a fine fellow, and a lovely young missionary going to the Gabun coast to convert the niggers--a fearful waste of herself, one is tempted to think. There are eleven missionaries on board, and a young lady who is traveling with a party of them and confided to me yesterday that she dreaded it was her doom to become one too. My chum is a graduate of Bowdoin College, going to study two years in Europe on money which he made during his vacations by peddling quack medicines of his own concoction, and cutting corns. He has supported himself four years in this way, and _abgesehen_ from the swindle of his life in vacation time, is an honor to his native land, without prejudices and full of animal spirits, wit and intelligence. We wash in the same basin. He has never tasted spirituous liquor. I am also intimate with a French commercial traveler, incredibly ignorant, but extremely good-natured and gentlemanly. I have now determined to stick to the missionary as close as possible. She is twenty-four years old and very beautiful. I finished the "Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" yesterday. A perfectly beautiful book, beside which "Good-bye, Sweetheart," which I have begun, tastes coarse.

Good-bye. I hope a storm won't arise, but if it does, I'm glad enough to be in such an extraordinarily steady ship. I pity you at home without me, and long to pat the rich, creamy throat of little sister. (Expression derived from "Goodbye, Sweetheart.")

* * * * *

_Friday Morn._

Ach! I thought yesterday was Friday, but found in the evening that it was only Thursday. No matter, six days are now past. As I predicted, the sea grew pretty big before sundown and the ship has been skipping about all night like a lively kitten. But her motion is delightfully easy, and no one, so far as I can see, has been sick. I never was better in my life than yesterday made me. Nevertheless, little Sister, in looking at the black waves with their skin of silver lace I have regretted saying that safety was a minor consideration with me. I doubt in my heart that even comfort is to be preferred to danger. The sea looks too indigestible--the all-digesting sea! I threw away "Goodbye, Sweetheart" at the 40th page and have begun the "Tour of the World in Eighty Days," a much better book. I am sorry that the little beauty's care for her Bro.'s comfort did not go so far as to provide him with a needle-and-thread-book, etc. _True_ sympathy divines wants; and a sister who could not foresee that in three days her bro. should be driven to borrowing Miss K----'s needle-book to sew on his buttons cannot be said to be in very close magnetic relations with him. I lurched about the deck arm in arm with the young missionary yestreen. I told her that, if I were a missionary, instead of going to the most unhealthy part of Africa, I would choose, say, Paris for a field. She, all unconscious of the subtle humor of my remark, said, "Oh, yes! there are fearful numbers of heathen there!" I have just rolled out of bed and into my clothes, and write this in my stateroom, but can stand no longer its aromatic air and hasten to say good-bye and mount to the deck.... Good-bye, good-bye. Ever your loving

W. J.

* * * * *

On landing, James proceeded to Florence, to join his brother Henry for a winter in Italy.

_To his Sister._

FLORENCE, _Oct. 29_ [1873]. 12 midnight.

BELOVED SWEETLINGTON,--At this solemn hour I can't go to sleep without remembering thee and thy beauty. I have just arrived from an eleven-hours ride from Turin, pouring rain all the way. Ditto yesterday during my twenty-two-hours ride from Paris. The Angel sleeps in number 39 hard by, all unwitting that I, the Demon (or perhaps you have already begun in your talks to distinguish me from him as the Archangel), am here at last. I wouldn't for worlds disturb this his last independent slumber.

Not having seen the sun but for three days (on board ship) since the eleventh, the natural gloom of my disposition and circumstances has been much aggravated. And I had in London and Paris a pretty melancholy time. I stayed but two days and one night in the latter place, which, according to the law of opposition that rules your opinions and mine, seemed to me a very tedious place. Its Haussmanization has produced a terribly monotonous-looking city--no expression of having _grown_, in any of the quarters I visited, and I did not have time to bring to the surface what power I may possess of sympathizing with the French way of being and doing. The awful thin and slow dinner in the tremendously imperial dining-room of the Hôtel du Louvre, the exaggerated neatness and order and reglementation of everything visible, contrasted with the volcanic situation of things at the present moment, all a-kinder turned my plain Yankee stomach, which has not yet recovered from the simpler lessons of joy it learnt at Scarboro and Magnolia last summer. I went to the Théâtre Français and heard a play in verse of Ponsard, thin stuff splendidly represented. Altogether I don't care if I never go to Paris again. London "impressed" me twelve times as much. Today in Italy my spirits have riz. The draggle-tailed physiognomy of the railway stations on the way here, the beautifully good-natured easy-going expression on the faces of the railway officials, the charming dialogue I have just had with the aged but angelic chambermaid whose phrases I managed to understand the sense of as a whole without recognizing any particular words--together with the consciousness of having for a time come to my journey's end and of the certainty of breakfasting tomorrow with the Angel, all let me go to bed with a light heart; hoping that yours is as much so, beloved Alice and all....

_To his Sister._

FLORENCE, _Nov. 23, 1873_.

BELOVED SISTERKIN,--Your "nice long letter," as you call it, of Oct. 26 reached me five days ago, Mother's of November 4th yesterday, and with it one from Father to Harry. Though you will probably disbelieve me, I cannot help stating how agreeable it is to me to be once more in regular communication with that which, in spite of all shortcomings, is all that has ever been vouchsafed to me in the way of a "home" (and a mother). The hotel in which we live here is anything but home-like. In fact, when the heart aches for cosiness, etc., all it can do is to turn out into the street.

I begin to feel, too, strongly that at my time of life, with such a set of desultory years behind, what a man most wants is to be settled and concentrated, to cultivate a patch of ground which may be humble but still is his own. Here all this dead civilization crowding in upon one's consciousness forces the mind open again even as the knife the unwilling oyster--and what my mind wants most now is practical tasks, not the theoretical digestion of additional masses of what to me are raw and disconnected empirical materials. I feel like one still obliged to eat more and more grapes and pears and pineapples, when the state of the system imperiously demands a fat Irish stew, or something of that sort. I knew it all before I came, however; and I hope in a fortnight to be able comparatively to disregard what lies about me and get interested in the physiological books I brought. So far I find the pictures, etc., drive my thoughts far away. I have just been reading a big German octavo, Burkhardt's "Renaissance in Italy," with the title of which you may enrich your historical consciousness, though I hardly think you need read the book. This is the place for history. I don't see how, if one lived here, historical problems could help being the most urgent ones for the mind. It would suit you admirably. Even art comes before one here much more as a problem--how to account for its development and decline--than as a refreshment and an edification. I really think that end is better served by the stray photographs which enter our houses at home, finding us in the midst of our work and surprising us.

But here I am pouring out this one-sided splenetic humor upon you without having the least intended it when I sat down. Your pen accidentally slips into a certain vein and you must go on till you get it out clearly. If you had heard me telling Harry two or three times lately that I feared the fatal fascination of this place,--that I began to feel it taking little stitches in my soul,--you would have a different impression of my state than my above written words have left upon you.... I went out intending to stroll in the Boboli Garden, a wonderful old piece of last-century stateliness, but found it shut till twelve. So I returned to Harry's room, where I sit by the pungent wood fire writing this letter which I did not expect to begin till the afternoon, while he, just at this moment rising from the table where his quill has been busily scratching away at the last pages of his Turguenieff article, comes to warm his legs and puts on another log....

Good-bye beloved Sister, and Father and Mother.... Write repeatedly such nice long letters, and make glad the heart of both the Angel and the other brother,

W. J.

_To his Sister._

ROME, _Dec. 17, 1873_.

BELOVED BEAUTLINGTON,--I cannot retire to rest on this eve of a well-filled day without imparting to thy noble nature a tithe of the enjoyment and happiness with which I am filled, and wishing you was here to take your share in it.... The barbarian mind stretches little by little to take in Rome, but I doubt if I shall ever call it the "city of my soul," or "my country." Strange to say, my very enjoyment of what here belongs to hoary eld has done more to reconcile me to what belongs to the present hour, business, factories, etc., etc., than anything I ever experienced. Every day I sally out into the sunshine and plod my way o'er steps of broken thrones and temples until one o'clock, when I repair to a certain café in the Corso, begin to eat and read "Galignani" and the "Débats," until Harry comes in with the flush of successful literary effort fading off his cheek. (It may interest the sympathetic soul of Mother to know that my diet until that hour consists of a roll, which a waiter in wedding costume brings up to my room when I rise, and three sous' worth of big roasted chestnuts, which I buy, on going out, from an old crone a few doors from the hotel. In this respect I am economical. Likewise in my total abstinence from spirituous liquors, to which Harry, I regret to say, has become an utter slave, spending a large part of his earnings in Bass's Ale and wine, and trembling with anger if there is any delay in their being brought to him.) After feeding, the Angel in his old and rather shabby striped overcoat, and I in my usual neat attire, proceed to walk together either to the big Pincian terrace which overhangs the city, and where on certain days everyone resorts, or to different churches and spots of note. I always dine at the table-d'hôte here; Harry sometimes, his indisposition lately (better the past two days) having made him prefer a solitary gorge at the restaurant.

The people in the house are hardly instructive or exciting, but at dinner and for an hour after in the dining-room they very pleasantly kill time. I am become so far Anglicized that I find myself quite fearful of speaking too much to a family of three "cads" who sit opposite me at the table-d'hôte, and of whom the young lady (though rather greasy about the face) is very handsome and intelligent. In the evening I usually light my fire and read some local book....

I got a note from Hillebrand saying Schiff would gladly let me work in his laboratory if I liked. I suppose I ought if I can, but I hanker after home even at the price of a February voyage, and I hate to spend so much money here on my mere gizzard and cheeks.--There, my sweet sister, I hope that is a sufficiently spirited epistle for 10.30 P.M. When, oh, when, will you write me another like the solitary one I got from you in Florence? Seven weeks and one letter! C'est très caractéristique de vous! I wrote two days ago to Annie Ashburner. Tell the adorable Sara Sedgwick [Mrs. W. E. Darwin] that I can't possibly refrain much longer--in spite of my just resentment--from writing to her. Love to all.... Your

W. J.

* * * * *

After his return his college duties proved both absorbing and stimulating. Beginning, as the reader has seen, as an instructor in the Department of Natural History, charged with teaching the comparative anatomy and physiology of vertebrates, he added a course on physiological psychology in 1876, and organized the beginnings of the psychological laboratory.[55] The next year this course was transferred to the Department of Philosophy and given under the title "Psychology." He contributed numerous reviews of scientific and philosophic literature, along with a few anonymous articles, to the columns of the "Atlantic Monthly" and the "Nation," and in 1878 appeared in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" and the "Critique Philosophique," with three important papers entitled "Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence," "Brute and Human Intellect," and "Quelques Considérations sur la Méthode Subjective."

Meanwhile his correspondence diminished to its minimum. When his brother Henry also came home to America in 1874, it ceased almost entirely. It did not begin to flow freely again, at least so far as letters are now recoverable, until after 1878.

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _June 25, 1874_.

A few days ago came your letter from Florence of June 3, speaking of the glare on the _piazza_ and the coolness and space of your rooms, of your late dinners and your solitude, and of the progress of your novel, and, finally, of your expected departure about the 20th; so that I suppose you are today percolating the cool arcades of Bologna or the faded beauties of Verona, or haply [are] at Venice.... As the weeks glide by, my present life and my last year's life at home seem to glide together across the five months breach that Italy made in them, and to become continuous; while those months step out of the line and become a sort of side-decoration or picture hanging vaguely in my memory. As this happens more and more, I take the greater pleasure in it. Especially does the utter friendliness of Florence, Rome, etc., grow dear to me, and get strangely mixed up with still earlier and more faded impressions, derived I know not whence, which infused into the places when I first saw them that strange thread of familiarity. The thought of the Florentine places you name in your letters like "leiser Nachhall längst verklungner Lieder, zieht mit Errinnerungsschauer durch die Brust." I hope you'll pass through Dresden if you sail from Germany. I forgot to say that the Eagle line from Hamburg has now the largest and finest ships and the newest....

* * * * *

Miss Theodora Sedgwick, to whom the next letter is addressed, was a member of the Stockbridge and New York family of that name, and a sister of Mrs. Charles Eliot Norton and Mrs. William Darwin, to whom reference has already been made. At this time she was living with two maiden aunts named Ashburner, friends of James's parents, in a house on Kirkland Street, Cambridge, not far from Mr. Norton's "Shady Hill." The letter of November 14, 1866, contained an allusion to this household, and others will occur as the letters proceed.

_To Miss Theodora Sedgwick._

CAMBRIDGE, _Aug. 8, 1874_.

MISS THEODORA SEDGWICK

to WILLIAM JAMES, Dr.

Aug. 6, to 1 Orchestra Seat in Hippodrome [Barnum's Circus] $1.00 " " " 2 carriage fares at 50c. $1.00 " " " 1 glass vanilla cream sodawater $ .10 " " " 1 plate of soup lost $ .25 " " " 4 hours time at 12-1/2 cents $ .50 " " " Sundries $ .05 ----- Total $2.90

Rec'd on account. $2.00

WM. JAMES

HONORED MISS,--I hope you will find the aforesaid charges moderate. When you transmit me the 90 cents still due, please send back at the same time whatever letters of mine you may still have in your possession, and the diamonds, silks, etc., which you may have at different times been glad to receive from me. Likewise both pieces of the collar stud I so recently lavished upon you. We can then remain as strangers.

I come of a race sensitive in the extreme; more accustomed to treat than to be treated, especially in this manner; and caring for its money as little as for its life. What wonder then that the mercenary conduct of One whom I have ever fostered without hope of pecuniary reward should work like madness in my brain?

On the point of closing I see with rapture that a way of accommodation is still open! O joy! The salmon, blackberries, etc., I consumed, had a market value. By charging me for the tea 90 cents, you will make the thing reciprocal, and I will call the account square. Perhaps even then the dreadful feeling of wounded pride and Barnum-born resentment may with time fade away. Amen. Respectfully yours,

W. J.

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _Jan._ [2], 1876.

...Your letter No. 2 speaking of your visit to Turguenieff was received by me duly and greatly enjoyed. I never heard you speak so enthusiastically of any human being. It is too bad he is to leave Paris; but if he gives you the "run" of Flaubert and eke George Sand, it will be so much gained. I don't think you know Miss A----, but if you did, you would thank me for pointing out to you the parallelism between her and George Sand which overwhelmed me the other day when I was calling on her, and she (who has just lost her sister B---- and had her father go through an attack of insanity) was snuggling down so hyper-comfortably into garrulity about B----, and her poor dead T---- and her dead mother, that I was fairly suffocated, just as I am by the _comfort_ George Sand takes in telling you of the loves of servant men for ladies, and other things _contra naturam_.

Christmas passed off here in a rather wan and sallow manner. I got a gold scarf-ring from Mother and a gold watch-chain from Aunt Kate. Let me, by the way, advise you to get a scarf-ring; 't is one of the greatest inventions of modern times, in saving labor, silk and shirt fronts. Alice got a desk, and from me a Scotch terrier pup only seven weeks old, whom we call Bunch, who has almost doubled his size in a week, who is a perfect lion in determination and courage, and who don't seem to care a jot for any human society but that of Jane in the kitchen, whose person is, I suppose, pervaded by a greasy and smoky smell agreeable to his nostrils. He has a perfect passion for the dining-room; whenever he is left to himself, he travels thither and lies down under the table and takes no notice of you when you go to call him. He does not sleep half as much as Dido, never utters a sound when shut up for the night in the kitchen, and altogether fills us with a sort of awe for the Roman firmness and independence of his character. He is "animated" by a colliquative diarrhoea or cholera, which keeps us all sponging over his tracks, but which don't affect his strength or spirits a bit. He is in short a very queer substitute for poor, dear Dido....

_To Henry James._

NEWPORT, _June 3, 1876_.

MY DEAR H.,--I write you after [a] considerable interval filled with too much work and weariness to make letter-writing convenient.... I ran away three days ago, the recitations being over for the year, in order to break from the studious associations of home. I have been staying at the Tweedies with Mrs. Chapman, and James Sturgis and his wife, and enjoying extremely, not the conversation indoors, but the lonely lying on the grass on the cliffs at Lyly Pond, and four or five hours yesterday at the Dumplings, feeling the moving air and the gentle living sea. There is a purity and mildness about the elements here which purges the soul of one. And I have been as if I had taken opium, not wanting to do anything else than the particular thing I happened to be doing at the moment, and feeling equally good whether I stood or walked or lay, or spoke or was silent. It's a splendid relief from the overstrain and stimulus of the past few scholastic months. I go the day after tomorrow (Monday) with the Tweedies to New York, assist at Henrietta Temple's wedding on Tuesday, and then pass on to the Centennial for a couple of days. I suppose it will be pretty tiresome, but I want to see the English pictures, which they say are a good show.... I fancy my vacationizing will be confined to visits of a week at a time to different points, perhaps the pleasantest way after all of spending it. Newport as to its villas, and all that, is most repulsive to me. I really didn't know how little charm and how much shabbiness there was about the place. There are not more than three or four houses out of the whole lot that are not offensive, in some way, externally. But the mild nature grows on one every day. This afternoon, God willing, I shall spend on Paradise.[56]

The Tweedies keep no horses, which makes one walk more or pay more than one would wish. The younger Seabury told me yesterday that he was just reading your "Roderick Hudson," but offered no [comment]. Colonel Waring said of your "American" to me: "I'm not a blind admirer of H. James, Jr., but I said to my wife after reading that first number, 'By Jove, I think he's hit it this time!'" I think myself the thing opens very well indeed, you have a first-rate datum to work up, and I hope you'll do it well.

Your last few letters home have breathed a tone of contentment and domestication in Paris which was very agreeable to get.... Your accounts of Ivan Sergeitch are delightful, and I envy you the possession of the young painter's intimacy. Give my best love to Ivan. I read his book which you sent home (foreign books sent by mail pay duty now, though; so send none but good ones), and although the vein of "morbidness" was so pronounced in the stories, yet the mysterious depths which his plummet sounds atone for all. It is the amount of life which a man feels that makes you value his mind, and Turguenieff has a sense of worlds within worlds whose existence is unsuspected by the vulgar. It amuses me to recommend his books to people who mention them as they would the novels of Wilkie Collins. You say we don't notice "Daniel Deronda." I find it extremely interesting. Gwendolen and her spouse are masterpieces of conception and delineation. Her ideal figures are much vaguer and thinner. But her "sapience," as you excellently call it, passes all decent bounds. There is something essentially womanish in the irrepressible garrulity of her moral reflections. Why is it that it makes women feel so good to moralize? Man philosophizes as a matter of business, because he must,--he does it to a purpose and then lets it rest; but women don't seem to get over being tickled at the discovery that they have the faculty; hence the tedious iteration and restlessness of George Eliot's commentary on life. The La Farges are absent. Yours always,

W. J.

* * * * *

Under the title "Bain and Renouvier," James contributed a review containing a brief discussion of free will and determinism to the "Nation" of June 8, 1876. He of course sent a copy to Renouvier. The following letter begins with a reference to Renouvier's acknowledgment. James had been acquainted with Renouvier's work since 1868, when, as the reader will recall, he read a number of the "Année Philosophique," Renouvier's annual survey of contemporary philosophy, for the first time. The diary entry already quoted from the year 1870 has shown what effect Renouvier's essays then had on his mind. His admiration for the elder philosopher was great and he cherished it loyally for the rest of his life. Indeed, in the unfinished manuscript, which was published posthumously as "Some Problems of Philosophy," James looked back at the formative period of his own philosophical thinking and wrote: "Renouvier was one of the greatest of philosophic characters, and but for the decisive impression made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up." In time he made Renouvier's acquaintance in France and wrote to him often. He examined and discussed his writings with college classes. Occasionally he reported these discussions and read Renouvier's answers to the students. On the other side, Renouvier paid James the compliment of printing or translating several of his papers in the "Critique Philosophique," and thus brought him early to the notice of French readers.

_To Charles Renouvier._

CAMBRIDGE, _July 29, 1876_.

MY DEAR SIR,--I am quite overcome by your appreciation of my poor little article in the "Nation." It gratifies me extremely to hear from your own lips that my apprehension of your thoughts is accurate. In so despicably brief a space as that which a newspaper affords, I could hardly hope to attain any other quality than that, and perhaps clearness. I had written another paragraph of pure eulogy of your powers, which the editor suppressed, to my great regret, for want of room. I need not repeat to you again how grateful I feel to you for all I have learned from your admirable writings. I do what lies in my feeble power to assist the propagation of your works here, but _students_ of philosophy are rare here as everywhere. It astonishes me, nevertheless, that you have had to wait so long for general recognition. Only a few months ago I had the pleasure of introducing to your "Essais" two _professors_ of philosophy, able and learned men, who hardly knew your name!! But I am perfectly convinced that it is a mere affair of time, and that you will take your place in the general History of Speculation as the classical and finished representative of the tendency which was begun by Hume, and to which writers before you had made only fragmentary contributions, whilst you have fused the whole matter into a solid, elegant and definitive system, perfectly consistent, and capable, by reason of its moral vitality, of becoming popular, so far as that is permitted to philosophic systems. After your Essays, it seems to me that the only important question is the deepest one of all, the one between the principle of contradiction, and the _Sein und Nichts_.[57] You have brought it to that clear issue; and extremely as I value your logical attitude, it would be uncandid of me (after what I have said) not to confess that there are certain psychological and moral facts, which make me, as I stand today, unable wholly to commit myself to your position, to burn my ships behind me, and proclaim the belief in the _one_ and the many to be the Original Sin of the mind. I long for leisure to study up these questions. I have been teaching anatomy and physiology in Harvard College here. Next year, I add a course of physiological psychology, using, for certain practical reasons, Spencer's "Psychology" as a textbook. My health is not strong; I find that laboratory work and study, too, are more than I can attend to. It is therefore not impossible that I may in 1877-8 be transferred to the philosophical department, in which there is likely to be a vacancy. If so, you may depend upon it that the name of Renouvier will be as familiar as that of Descartes to the Bachelors of Arts who leave these walls. Believe me with the greatest respect and gratitude, faithfully yours,

WM. JAMES.

...I must add a _vivat_ to your "Critique Philosophique," which keeps up so ably and bravely! And although it is probably an entirely superfluous recommendation, I cannot refrain from calling your attention to the most robust of English philosophic writers, [Shadworth] Hodgson, whose "Time and Space" was published in 1865 by Longmans, and whose "Theory of Practice," in two volumes, followed it in 1870.

* * * * *

In connection with the allusion to two professors of philosophy who hardly knew Renouvier's name, it would be fair to say that James was acutely conscious of the prevailing academic conditions. He was, in fact, one among a few younger men who were already rejuvenating the teaching of philosophy in American colleges. They began their work under difficult conditions.

Dr. G. Stanley Hall wrote an open letter to the "Nation" in 1876, in which he said:--

"I have often wished that the 'Nation' would devote some space to the condition of philosophy in American colleges. Within the last few years I have visited the class-rooms of many of our best institutions, and believe that there are few if any branches which are so inadequately taught as those generally roughly classed as philosophy. Deductive logic, or the syllogism, is the most thoroughly dwelt upon, while induction, æsthetic and psychological and ethical studies, and especially the history of the leading systems of philosophy, ancient and modern, and the marvellous new developments in England and Germany, are almost entirely ignored. The persistent use of Hamilton, Butler's 'Analogy' and a score of treatises on 'moral science,' which deduce all the ground of obligation from theological considerations, as text-books, is largely responsible for the supposed unpopularity of the studies.... I think the success which has attended the recent lecture courses at Cambridge on modern systems of philosophy, and on æsthetic studies of literature and the fine arts, shows plainly how much might be accomplished in this direction by the proper method of instruction."

James's comment on this, printed anonymously in the "Nation" for September 21, 1876, expressed his view of the situation more fully:--

"The philosophical teaching, as a rule, in our higher seminaries is in the hands of the president, who is usually a minister of the Gospel, and, as he more often owes his position to general excellence of character and administrative faculty than to any speculative gifts or propensities, it usually follows that 'safeness' becomes the main characteristic of his tuition; that his classes are edified rather than awakened, and leave college with the generous youthful impulse, to reflect on the world and our position in it, rather dampened and discouraged than stimulated by the lifeless discussions and flabby formulas they have had to commit to memory....

"Let it not be supposed that we are prejudging the question whether the final results of speculation will be friendly or hostile to the formulas of Christian thought. All we contend for is that we, like the Greeks and the Germans, should now attack things as if there were no official answer preoccupying the field. At present we are bribed beforehand by our reverence or dislike for the official answer; and the free-thinking tendency which the 'Popular Science Monthly,' for example, represents, is condemned to an even more dismal shallowness than the spiritualistic systems of our text-books of 'Mental Science.' We work with one eye on our problem, and with the other on the consequences to our enemy or to our lawgiver, as the case may be; the result in both cases is mediocrity.

"If the best use of our colleges is to give young men a wider openness of mind and a more flexible way of thinking than special technical training can generate, then we hold that philosophy (taken in the broad sense in which our correspondent uses the word) is the most important of all college studies. However skeptical one may be of the attainment of universal truths (and to make our position more emphatic, we are willing here to concede the extreme Positivistic position), one can never deny that philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind. In a word, it means the possession of mental perspective. Touchstone's question, 'Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?' will never cease to be one of the tests of a wellborn nature. It says, Is there space and air in your mind, or must your companions gasp for breath whenever they talk with you? And if our colleges are to make men, and not machines, they should look, above all things, to this aspect of their influence....

"As for philosophy, technically so called, or the reflection of man on his relations with the universe, its educational essence lies in the quickening of the spirit to its _problems_. What doctrines students take from their teachers are of little consequence provided they catch from them the living, philosophic attitude of mind, the independent, personal look at all the data of life, and the eagerness to harmonize them....

"In short, philosophy, like Molière, claims her own where she finds it. She finds much of it today in physics and natural history, and must and will educate herself accordingly.... Meanwhile, when we find announced that the students in Harvard College next year may study any or all of the following works under the guidance of different professors,--Locke's 'Essay,' Kant's 'Kritik,' Schopenhauer and Hartmann, Hodgson's 'Theory of Practice,' and Spencer's 'Psychology,'--we need not complain of universal academic stagnation, even today."

VIII

1878-1883

_Marriage--Contract for the Psychology--European Colleagues--Death of his Parents_

EARLY in 1876 James had been introduced by their common friend Thomas Davidson (that ardent and lovable man whom he sketched with incomparable strokes in "A Knight Errant of the Intellectual Life") to Miss Alice H. Gibbens, and the next day he wrote to his brother Wilky that he had met "the future Mrs. W. J." Miss Gibbens had grown up in Weymouth, a pleasant little Massachusetts town in which several generations of her ancestors had lived comfortably and which was then still untouched by the "development" that later converted it and its neighbour, Quincy, into unseemly stone-quarriers' suburbs. In 1876 she had just returned, with her widowed mother and two younger sisters, from a five-years' residence in Europe and was teaching in a school for girls in Boston. On July 10, 1878, after a short engagement, he and Miss Gibbens were married by the Reverend Rufus Ellis at the house of the bride's grandmother in Boston.

It must be left to a later day and a less intimate and partial hand to do adequate justice to a marriage which was happy in the rarest and fullest sense, and which was soon to work an abiding transformation in James's health and spirits. No mere devotion could have achieved the skill and care with which his wife understood and helped him. Family duties and responsibilities, often grave and worrisome enough, weighed lightly in the balance against the tranquillity and confidence that his new domesticity soon brought him. During the twenty-one years that immediately followed his marriage he accomplished an amount of teaching, college committee-service and administration, friendly and helpful personal intercourse with his students, reading and book-writing, original research, not to speak of his initial excursions into the field of psychical research, and a good deal of popular lecturing to eke out his income, that would have astonished anyone who had known him only during the early seventies, and that would have honored the capacity and endurance of any man. The serener tone of his letters soon contrasts itself with much that has gone before. The occasional references to fatigue, insomnia, and eye-strain, which still occur in his correspondence are explained by the amount of work he imposed upon himself rather than by the lack of strength with which he met his tasks.

Meanwhile his wife, who entered into all his plans and undertakings with unfailing understanding and high spirit, stood guard over his library door, protected him from interruptions and distractions, managed the household and the children and the family business, helped him to order his day and to see and entertain his friends at convenient times, sped him off on occasional much-needed vacations, and encouraged him to all his major undertakings, with a sustaining skill and cheer which need not be described to anyone who knew his household. To the importance of her companionship it is still, happily, impossible to do justice. If consulted, she would not tolerate even this allusion; yet to gloss over her sustaining influence entirely would be to do injustice to James himself.

* * * * *

The summer of 1878 was momentous in James's life for another reason. In June, one month before his marriage, he contracted with Messrs. Henry Holt & Company to write a volume on Psychology for the "American Science Series" that they were beginning to publish. He was asked by Mr. Holt, in the course of preliminary correspondence, whether he could deliver the manuscript in a year's time. James replied (June, 1878): "My other engagements and my health both forbid the attempt to execute the work rapidly. Its quality too might then suffer. I don't think I could finish it inside of two years--say the fall of 1880." Thus he proposed to throw the book off rapidly. He doubtless conceived of it in the beginning as a more or less literary survey of the subject as it was then known, and he certainly did not foresee that he was going to devote twelve years of critical study and original research to its preparation.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, immediately after their marriage, James took his wife to the upper end of Keene Valley in the Adirondacks for the rest of the summer. They both knew and loved the region already. Indeed, although there has been no occasion to mention it before, Keene Valley had already become for James the playground toward which he turned most eagerly when summer came. It never lost its charm for him; he managed to spend a week or two of almost every year there or nearby; and allusions to the region will appear in a number of later letters.

At the head of these valleys, in the basin of the Ausable Lakes and on the surrounding slopes of the most interesting group of mountains in the Adirondacks, a great tract of forest has been preserved. Giant, Noonmark, Colvin, and the Gothics raise their splendid ridges and summits to the enclosing horizon, and Dix, Haystack, and Marcy, the last the highest mountain of the Adirondack range, are within a day's walk of the little community that used to be known as "Beede's." Where the Ausable Club's picturesque golf-course is now laid out, the fields of Smith Beede's farm then surrounded his primitive, white-painted hotel. Half a mile to the eastward, in a patch of rocky pasture beside Giant Brook, stood the original Beede farm-house, and this Henry P. Bowditch, Charles and James Putnam, and William James had bought for a few hundred dollars (subject to Beede's cautious proviso in the deed that "the purchasers are to keep no boarders"). They had adapted the little story-and-a-half dwelling to their own purposes and converted its surrounding sheds and pens into habitable shanties of the simplest kind. So they established a sort of camp, with the mountains for their climbing, the brook to bathe in, and the primeval forest fragrant about them.

With a friend or native guide,--or often alone, with a book and lunch in his light rücksack,--James would go off for a long day's walk on one of the mountain trails. He liked to start early and to spend several hours at mid-day stretched out on the sheltered side of an open ridge or summit. In this way he would combine a day of outdoor exercise with fifty to eighty pages of professional reading, the daily stint to which he often held himself in his holidays.

In the summer of seventy-eight he planned to combine this sort of refreshment with work on the "Psychology." The plan seemed a little innocent to at least one friend,--Francis J. Child,--who said in a letter to James Russell Lowell: "William has already begun a Manual of Psychology--in the honeymoon;--but they are both writing it."

_To Francis J. Child._

[Dictated to Mrs. James]

KEENE VALLEY, _Aug. 16_ [1878].

CARISSIMO,--Daily since the first instant have we trembled with joyous expectancy of your holiday face arriving at our door. Daily have we dashed the teardrop of disappointment from our common eye! And now to get a letter instead of your revered form! It is shameful. We are dying with the tedium of each other's society and you would make the wheels of life go round again. Your excursion to Scarborough is simply criminal under the circumstances. You know we longed to see you. It is not too late to repair your fault, for although we shall not outstay the 1st of September, you would find the Putnams and the best thirty-five-year-old medical society in Boston to keep you company after we go. You had better come from Scarborough through Portland direct to Burlington by the White Mt. R.R. From Burlington take boat to Westport, whence stage to Beede's and our beating heart. But such is the crassitude of your malignity that after this we hardly dare expect you. Seriously, how could you be so insane?

As for the remaining matter of your somewhat illegible letter, what is this mythological and poetical talk about psychology and Psyche and keeping back a manuscript composed during a honeymoon? The only Psyche now recognized by science is a decapitated frog whose writhings express deeper truths than your weakminded poets ever dreamed. _She_ (not Psyche but the bride) loves all these doctrines which are quite novel to her mind, hitherto accustomed to all sorts of mysticism and superstitions. She swears entirely by reflex action now, and believes in universal _Nothwendigkeit_. Hope not with your ballad-mongering ever to gain an influence.

We have spent, however, a ballad-like summer in this delicious cot among the hills. We only needed crooks and a flock of sheep. I need not say that our psychic reaction has been one of content--perhaps as great as ever enjoyed by man.

So farewell, false friend, till such near time as your ehrwürdig person decorate our hearth at Mrs. Hanks's in Harvard St.

Communicate our hearty love to Mrs. Child and believe us your always doting

(W. and A.) J.

And for Heaven's sake _come_ while yet there is time!

WM.

* * * * *

When the College opened in the autumn of seventy-eight James and his wife returned to Cambridge and lived for a few months in lodgings at 387 Harvard Street. The next letter begins a series from which a number of later letters will be given. One of the warmest of James's lifelong friendships was with Miss Frances R. Morse of Boston. The "exquisite Mary" referred to near the end is her sister, later Mrs. John W. Elliot.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

[Dictated to Mrs. James]

CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 26, 1878_.

_Our_ DEAR FANNY,--I (W.) shield myself under my wife's handwriting to drop that formal style of address which has so long cast its cold shadow over our intercourse, and for which, now that I have become an old fogy whilst you still remain a blooming child, there seems no further good reason. Are you willing that henceforward we should call each other by our first names? If so, respond in kind. I have got into the habit of dictating to _her_ all that I write, in order to save my eyes. This letter is from both of us.

Your letter from Brighton of Oct. 15th was duly and gladly received. You have since then seen a great many things, and we have heard of you occasionally, latest of your ascent of the Nile with the Longfellows. They will be pleasant companions and I hope the long rest, delicious climate and beautiful outlook of that voyage will do ---- a world of good. It is too pitiful to think of her breaking down just at a time when one's active faculties have so much incitement to exert themselves. I am glad your mother is so much better. And how you will enjoy the sights of the winter! Don't you wish you had taken history instead of English literature!

We are very happily "boarding" on the corner of Harvard and Ware Street, next door to old Mrs. Cary's, where the Tappans used to live. We have absolutely no housekeeping trouble; we live surrounded by our wedding presents, and can devote all our energies to studying our lessons, dining with our respective mothers-in-law, receiving and repaying our "calls," which average one a day, and anxiously keeping our accounts in a little book so as to see where the trouble is if both ends don't meet.

We meant to have sent you this letter on Christmas day, but it was crowded out by many interruptions. We had, considering the age of the world and the hard times, quite a show of Xmas gifts and mild festivities.

...I suppose you get your "Nation" regularly on the Nile, so I make no comments on public affairs. We all feel sorry for poor old England just now. It really seems as if with us things were settling down upon a solid and orderly basis of general frugality. Keen cold weather, bare ground, and clear sky, west wind filling the air with clouds of frozen dust, and an engagement at the dentist's in an hour from this will seem to you on the Nile like tales told by an idiot. Still they are true for me. Pray write again and let us hear that you are all well, especially the exquisite Mary, to whom give lots of love, and with plenty to your parents and self, believe me, yours faithfully,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

The passage which follows is taken from a letter to Mrs. James, of about this time. It is so unusual a bit of self-analysis that it is included here. James himself never failed to recognize that every man's thought is biased by his temperament as well as guided by purely rational considerations.

_To Mrs. James._

...I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "_This_ is the real me!" And afterwards, considering the circumstances in which the man is placed, and noting how some of them are fitted to evoke this attitude, whilst others do not call for it, an outside observer may be able to prophesy where the man may fail, where succeed, where be happy and where miserable. Now as well as I can describe it, this characteristic attitude in me always involves an element of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any _guaranty_ that they will. Make it a guaranty--and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am _überhaupt_ in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself physically by a kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone (don't smile at this--it is to me an essential element of the whole thing!), and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all

## active and theoretic determination which I possess....

W. J.

* * * * *

The next letter contains the first reference to work on the "Psychology." It also introduces into this volume the name and personality of a colleague-to-be with whom James's relations were destined to be close and permanent.

Josiah Royce was then a young man "from the intellectual barrens of California" whose brilliant work was still to be done, and whose philosophic genius had not yet been disclosed to the public, although it may fairly be said to have been announced by every line of his engagingly Socrates-like face and figure. He had been born and brought up among the most primitive surroundings in Grass Valley, California, and won his way to a brief period of study in Germany and to a degree at Johns Hopkins in 1878. While yet a student there, he paid a visit to Cambridge, and he has left his own quotable record of the meeting which resulted, and of what followed.

"My real acquaintance with [James] began one summer-day in 1877, when I first visited him in [his father's] house on Quincy Street, and was permitted to pour out my soul to somebody who really seemed to believe that a young man might rightfully devote his life to philosophy if he chose. I was then a student at the Johns Hopkins University. The opportunities for a life-work in philosophy in this country were few. Most of my friends and advisers had long been telling me to let the subject alone. Perhaps, so far as I was concerned, their advice was sound; but in any case I was, so far, incapable of accepting that advice. Yet if somebody had not been ready to tell me that I had a right to work for truth in my own way, I should ere long have been quite discouraged. I do not know what I then could have done. James found me at once--made out what my essential interests were at our first interview, accepted me with all my imperfections, as one of those many souls who ought to be able to find themselves in their own way, gave a patient and willing ear to just my variety of philosophical experience, and used his influence from that time on, not to win me as a follower, but to give me my chance. It was upon his responsibility that I was later led to get my first opportunities here at Harvard."[58]

The opportunities did not ripen until 1882-83, however; and in the meanwhile Royce returned to the young University of California as an instructor in logic and rhetoric. Letters written to him there will show how cordially James continued to sympathize with the aspirations of his young friend, and how eagerly he fostered the possibility of an appointment to the Harvard philosophical department. When the opportunity arose, James seized it. Thereafter he and Royce saw each other so constantly in Cambridge that there were not many occasions for either to write letters to the other. Instead, allusions to Royce appear frequently in the letters to other people.

The philosophical club which is alluded to at the end of the letter was presided over by Dr. W. T. Harris and held informal meetings in Boston during this one winter. Its purpose was to read and discuss Hegel. Dr. C. C. Everett, Prof. G. H. Palmer, and Thomas Davidson were among the members.

_To Josiah Royce._

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 16_ [1879].

MY DEAR ROYCE,--Your letter was most welcome. I had often found myself wondering how you were getting on, and your wail as the solitary philosopher between Behrings' Strait and Tierra del Fuego has a grand, lonesome picturesqueness about it. I am sorry your surroundings are not more mentally congenial. But recollect your extreme youth and the fact that you are making a living and practising yourself in the pedagogic art, _überhaupt_. You might be forced to do something much farther away from your chosen line, and even then not make a living. I think you are a lucky youth even as matters stand. Unexpected chances are always turning up. A fortnight ago President Eliot was asked to recommend some one for a $5000 professorship of philosophy in the New York City College. One Griffin of Amherst was finally appointed. I imagine that Gilman [of Johns Hopkins] is keeping his eye on you and only waiting for the disgrace of youth to fade from your person.

I liked your article on Schiller very much, and hope you will send more to Harris. That most villainous of editors, as I am told, has himself been to Baltimore lately as an office-seeker. But the rumor may be false. In some respects he might be a useful man for the Johns Hopkins University, but I would give no more for his judgment than for that of a Digger Indian. I hope you will write something about Hodgson. He is quite as worthy as Kant of supporting any number of parasites and

## partial assimilators of his substance. My sentence, I perceive, has a

rather uncomplimentary sound. I meant only to say that you should not be deterred from treating him in your own way from fear of inadequacy. All his commentators must undoubtedly be inadequate for some time to come; but they will all help each other out. He seems to me the wealthiest mine of thought I ever met with.

With me, save for my eyes, things are jogging along smoothly. I am writing (very slowly) what may become a text-book of psychology. A proposal from Gilman to teach in Baltimore three months yearly for the next three years had to be declined as incompatible with work here. I will send you a corrected copy of Harris's journal with my article on Space, which was printed without my seeing the proof.

I suppose you subscribe to "Mind." The only decent thing I have ever written will, I hope, appear in the July number of that sheet.[59] The delays of publication are fearful. Most of this was written in 1877. If it ever sees the light, I hope you will let me know what you think of it, and how it tallies with your own theory of the Concept, which latter I would fain swallow and digest. I wish you belonged to our philosophic club here. It is very helpful to the uprooting of weeds from one's own mind as well as the detection of beams in one's neighbor's eyes. Write often and believe me faithfully yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To Josiah Royce._

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 3, 1880_.

BELOVED ROYCE!--So far was I from having forgotten you that I had been revolving in my mind, on the very day when your letter came, the rhetorical formulas of objurgation with which I was to begin a page of inquiries of you: whether you were dead and buried or had become an idiot or were sick or blind or what, that you sent no word of yourself. _I_ am blind as ever, which may excuse my silence.

First of all _Glückwünsche_ as to your _Verlobung_! which, like the true philosopher that you are, you mention parenthetically and without names, dates, numbers of dollars, etc., etc. I think it shows great sense in her, and no small amount of it in you, whoe'er she be. I have found in marriage a calm and repose I never knew before, and only wish I had done the thing ten years earlier. I think the lateness of our usual marriages is a bad thing, and hope your engagement will not last very long.

It is refreshing to hear your account of philosophic work.... I'm sorry you've given up your article on Hodgson. He _is_ obscure enough, and makes me sometimes wonder whether the _ignotum_ does not pass itself off for the _magnifico_ in his pages. I enclose his photograph as a loan, trusting you will return it soon. I will never write again for Harris's journal. He refused an article of mine a year ago "for lack of room," and has postponed the printing of two admirable original articles by T. Davidson and Elliot Cabot for the last ten months or more, in order to accommodate Mrs. Channing's verses and Miss----'s drivel about the school of Athens, etc., etc. It is too loathsome. Harris has resigned his school position in St. Louis and will, I am told, come East to live. I know not whether he means to lay siege to the Johns Hopkins professorship. My ignorant prejudice against all Hegelians, except Hegel himself, grows wusser and wusser. Their sacerdotal airs! and their sterility! Contemplating their navels and the syllable _oum_! My dear friend Palmer, assistant professor of philosophy here, is already one of the white-winged band, having been made captive by Caird in two summers of vacation in Scotland.... The ineffectiveness and impotence of the ending of [Caird's] work on Kant seem to me simply scandalous, after its pretentious (and able) beginning. What do you think of Carveth [Reid]'s Essay on Shadworth [Hodgson]? I haven't read it. Our Philosophic Club here is given up this year--I think we're all rather sick of each other's voices. My teaching is small in numbers, though my men are good. I've tried Renouvier as a text-book--for the last time! His exposition offers too many difficulties. I enjoyed your Rhapsody on Space, and hereby pledge myself to buy two copies of your work ten years hence, and to devote the rest of my life to the propagation of its doctrines. I despise my own article,[60] which was dashed off for a momentary purpose and published for another. But I don't see why its main doctrine, from a psychologic and sublunary point of view, is not sound; and I think I can, if my psychology ever gets writ, set it down in decently clear and orderly form. All _deducers_ of space are, I am sure, mythologists. You are, after all, not so very much isolated in California. We are all isolated--"columns left alone of a temple once complete," etc. Books are our companions more than men. But I wish nevertheless, and firmly expect, that somehow or other you will get a call East, and within my humble sphere of power I will do what I can to further that end. My accursed eye-sight balks me always about study and production. _Ora pro me!_ With most respectful and devout regards to the fair Object, believe me always your

WM. JAMES.

_To Charles Renouvier._

CAMBRIDGE, _June 1, 1880_.

MY DEAR MONSIEUR RENOUVIER,--My last lesson in the course on your "Essais" took place today. The final examination occurs this week. The students have been profoundly interested, though their reactions on your teaching seem as diverse as their personalities; one (the maturest of all) being yours body and soul, another turning out a strongly materialistic fatalist! and the rest occupying positions of mixed doubt and assent; all however (but one) being convinced by your treatment of freedom and certitude.

As for myself, I must frankly confess to you that I am more unsettled than I have been for years. I have read several times over your reply to Lotze, and your reply to my letter. The latter was fully discussed in the class. The former seems to me a perfectly masterly expression of a certain intellectual position, and with the latter, I think it makes it perfectly clear to me where our divergence lies. I can formulate all your reasonings for myself, but--dare I say it?--they fail to awaken conviction. It seems as if, the simpler the point, the more hopeless the disagreement in philosophy. But I will enter into no further discussion now. I think it will be profitable for me, for some time to come, inwardly to digest the matters in question and your utterances before trying to articulate any more opinions.

I am overwhelmed with duties at present, and shall very shortly sail for England to pass part of the vacation; maybe I shall get to the Continent and see you. If we meet, I hope you will treat my heresies on the question of the Infinite with the indulgence and magnanimity which your doctrine of freedom in theoretic affirmations exacts!! I will send you in a day or two an essay which develops your psychology of the voluntary process, and which I hope will give you pleasure.

Pray excuse the haste and superficiality of this note, which is only meant to explain why I do not write at greater length and to announce my hope of soon grasping you by the hand and assuring you in person of my devotion and indebtedness. Always yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

James sailed in June a good deal fagged by his year's work, and got back by the first week of September, having spent most of the interval seeking solitude and refreshment in the Alps and Northern Italy. On his way home he paid his respects to Renouvier at Avignon, but otherwise made no effort to meet his European colleagues.

_To Charles Renouvier._

CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 27, 1880_.

MY DEAR MONSIEUR RENOUVIER,--Your note and the conclusion of my article in the "Critique" came together this morning. It gives me almost a feeling of pain that you, at your age and with your achievements, should be spending your time in translating my feeble words, when by every principle of right I should be engaged in turning your invaluable writings into English. The state of my eyes is, as you know, my excuse for this as for all other shortcomings. I have not even read the whole of your translation of [my] "Feeling of Effort," though the passages I have perused have seemed to me excellently well done. My exposition strikes me as rather complicated now. It was written in great haste and, were I to rewrite it, it should be simpler. The omissions of which you speak are of no importance whatever.

I have read your discussion with Lotze in the "Revue Philosophique" and agree with Hodgson that you carry off there the honors of the battle. _Quant au fond de la question_, however, I am still in doubt and wait for the light of further reflexion to settle my opinion. The matter in my mind complicates itself with the question of a universal ego. If time and space are not _in se_, do we not need an enveloping ego to make continuous the times and spaces, not necessarily coincident, of the

## partial egos? On this question, as I told you, I will not fail to write

again when I get new light, which I trust may decide me in your favor.

My principal amusement this winter has been resisting the inroads of Hegelism in our University. My colleague Palmer, a recent convert and a man of much ability, has been making an active propaganda among the more advanced students. It is a strange thing, this resurrection of Hegel in England and here, after his burial in Germany. I think his philosophy will probably have an important influence on the development of our liberal form of Christianity. It gives a quasi-metaphysic backbone which this theology has always been in need of, but it is too fundamentally rotten and charlatanish to last long. As a reaction against materialistic evolutionism it has its use, only this evolutionism is fertile while Hegelism is absolutely sterile.

I think often of the too-short hours I spent with you and Monsieur Pillon and wish they might return. Believe me with the warmest thanks and regards, yours faithfully,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

In August of 1882 James arranged with the College for a year's leave of absence, and sailed for Europe again, this time with the double purpose of giving himself a vacation and of meeting some of the European investigators who were working on the problems in which he had become absorbed.

He landed in England, and paused there just long enough to throw his brother Henry into the state of half-resentful bewilderment that invariably resulted from their first European reunions. Henry, to whom Europe, and England in particular, had already become an absorbing passion and for whom American reactions upon Europe were still an unexhausted theme, greeted every arriving American with eager curiosity and a confident expectation that the stranger would "register" impressions of the most charming enchantment and pleasure for his edification. William, on the other hand, was always most under the European spell when in America; and--whether moved by the constitutional restlessness that seized him so soon as ever he began to travel, or by the perversity that was a fascinating trait in his character and was usually provoked by his younger brother's admiring neighborhood--he was always most ardently American when on European soil. Thus his first words of greeting to Henry on stepping out of the steamer-train were: "My!--how cramped and inferior England seems! After all, it's poor old Europe, just as it used to be in our dreary boyhood! America may be raw and shrill, but I could never live with this as you do! I'm going to hurry down to Switzerland [or wherever] and then home again as soon as may be. It was a mistake to come over! I thought it would do me good. Hereafter I'll stay at home. You'll have to come to America if you want to see the family."

The effect on Henry can better be imagined than described. Time never accustomed him to these collisions, even though he learned to expect them. England inferior! A mistake to come abroad! Horror and consternation are weak terms by which to describe his feelings; and nothing but a devotion seldom existing between brothers, and a lively interest in the astonishing phenomenon of such a reaction, ever carried him through the hour. He usually ended by hurrying William onward--anywhere--within the day if possible--and remained alone to ejaculate, to exclaim and to expatiate for weeks on the rude and exciting cyclone that had burst upon him and passed by.

On this occasion it took only two days for William to start on from London for the Rhine, Nüremburg, and Vienna; then to Venice, where he idled for the first half of October. After this short pause he returned to Prague; and then, working northward, consumed the autumn in visiting the universities of Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Liège and Paris. Intimate letters to his wife, who had remained in Cambridge with their two little boys, are almost the only ones that survive. A few passages from these will therefore be included.

_To Mrs. James._

VIENNA, _Sept. 24, 1882_.

...I wish you could have been with me yesterday to see some French pictures at the "Internationale Kunst Ausstellung"; they gave an idea of the vigor of France in that way just now. One, a peasant woman, in all her brutish loutishness sitting staring before her at noonday on the grass she's been cutting, while the man lies flat on his back with straw hat over face. She with such a look of infinite unawakenedness, such childlike virginity under her shapeless body and in her face, as to make it a poem.[61] Dear, perhaps the deepest impression I've got since I've been in Germany is that made on me by the indefatigable beavers of old wrinkled peasant women, striding like men through the streets, dragging their carts or lugging their baskets, minding their business, seeming to notice nothing, in the stream of luxury and vice, but belonging far away, to something better and purer. Their poor, old, ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls make me weep. "They are our conscripts." They are the venerable ones whom we should reverence. All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being--the Mothers! the Mothers! Ye are all one! Yes, Alice dear, what I love in you is only what these blessed old creatures have; and I'm glad and proud, when I think of my own dear Mother with tears running down my face, to know that she is one with these.[62] Good-night, good-night!...

_To Mrs. James._

AUSSIG, BOHEMIA, _Nov. 2, 1882_.

...As for Prague, _veni, vidi, vici_. I went there with much trepidation to do my social-scientific duty. The mighty Hering in especial intimidated me beforehand; but having taken the plunge, the cutaneous glow and "euphoria" (_vide_ dictionary) succeeded, and I have rarely enjoyed a forty-eight hours better, in spite of the fact that the good and sharp-nosed Stumpf (whose book "Über die Raumvorstellungen" I verily believe thou art capable of never having noticed the cover of!) insisted on trotting me about, day and night, over the whole length and breadth of Prague, and that [Ernst] Mach (Professor of Physics), genius of all trades, simply took Stumpf's place to do the same. I heard [Ewald] Hering give a very poor physiology lecture and Mach a beautiful physical one. I presented them with my visiting card, saying that I was with their "Schriften sehr vertraut und wollte nicht eher Prague verlassen als bis ich wenigstens ein Paar Worte mit ihnen umtauschte," etc.[63] They received me with open arms. I had an hour and a half's talk with Hering, which cleared up some things for me. He asked me to come to his house that evening, but I gave an evasive reply, being fearful of boring him. Meanwhile Mach came to my hotel and I spent four hours walking and supping with him at his club, an unforgettable conversation. I don't think anyone ever gave me so strong an impression of pure intellectual genius. He apparently has read everything and thought about everything, and has an absolute simplicity of manner and winningness of smile when his face lights up, that are charming.

With Stumpf I spent five hours on Monday evening (this is Thursday), three on Wednesday morning and four in the afternoon; so I feel rather intimate. A clear-headed and just-minded, though pale and anxious-looking man in poor health. He had another philosopher named Marty [?] to dine with me yesterday--jolly young fellow. My native _Geschwätzigkeit_[64] triumphed over even the difficulties of the German tongue; I careered over the field, taking the pitfalls and breastworks at full run, and was fairly astounded myself at coming in alive. I learned a good many things from them, both in the way of theory and fact, and shall probably keep up a correspondence with Stumpf. They are not so different from us as we think. Their greater thoroughness is largely the result of circumstances. I found that I had a more _cosmopolitan_ knowledge of modern philosophic literature than any of them, and shall on the whole feel much less intimidated by the thought of their like than hitherto.

My letters will hereafter, I feel sure, have a more jocund tone. Damn Italy! It isn't a good thing to stay with one's inferiors. With the nourishing breath of the German air, and the sort of smoky and leathery German smell, vigor and good spirits have set in. I have walked well and slept well and eaten well and read well, and in short begin to feel as I expected I should when I decided upon this arduous pilgrimage. Prague is a ---- city--the adjective is hard to find; not magnificent, but everything is too honest and homely,--we have in fact no English word for the peculiar quality that good German things have, of depth, solidity, picturesqueness, magnitude and homely goodness combined. They have worked out a really great civilization. "Dienst ist Dienst"![65] said the gateman of a certain garden yesterday afternoon whom Stumpf was trying to persuade to let me in, as an American, to see the view five minutes after the closing hour had struck. _Dienst ist Dienst._ That is really the German motto everywhere--and I should like to know what American would ever think of justifying himself by just that formula. I say German of Prague, for it seems to me, in spite of the feverish nationalism of the natives, to be outwardly a pure German city....

* * * * *

BERLIN, _Nov. 9, 1882_.

...Yesterday I went to the veterinary school to see H. Munk, the great brain vivisector. He was very cordial and poured out a torrent of talk for one and a half hours, though he could show me no animals. He gave me one of his new publications and introduced me to Dr. Baginsky (Professor Samuel Porter's favorite authority on the semicircular canals, whose work I treated superciliously in my article). So we opened on the semicircular canals, and Baginsky's torrent of words was even more overwhelming than Munk's. I never felt quite so helpless and small-boyish before, and am to this hour dizzy from the onslaught. In the evening at the house of Gizycki (a Docent on Ethics), to a "privatissimum" with a supper after it. Good, square, deep-chested talk again, which I couldn't help contrasting with the whining tones of our students and of some of the members of the Hegel Club--I hate to leave the wholesome, tonic atmosphere, the land where one talks best when he talks manliest--slowest, distinctest, with most deliberate emphasis and strong voice....

* * * * *

LEIPZIG, _Nov. 11, 1882_.

...Jones spoilt my incipient nap this afternoon and I adjourned to his room to meet Smith and Brown[66] again, with another American wild-cat reformer. Jones is too many for me--I'm glad I'm to get far off. Religion is well, moral regeneration is well, so is improvement of society, so are the courage, disinterestedness, ideality of all sorts, these men show in their lives; but I verily believe that the condition of being a man of the world, a gentleman, etc., carries something with it, an atmosphere, an outlook, a play, that all these things together fail to carry, and that is worth them all. I got so suffocated with their everlasting spiritual gossip! The falsest views and tastes somehow in a man of fashion are truer than the truest in a plebeian cad. And when I told the new man there that a "materialist" would have no difficulty in keeping his place in Harvard College provided he was well-bred, I said what was really the highest test of the College excellence. I suppose he thought it sounded cynical. _Their_ sphere is with the masses struggling into light, not with us at Harvard; though I'm glad I can meet them cordially for a while now and then. Thou see'est I have some "spleen" on me today....

* * * * *

LEIPZIG, _Nov. 13, 1882_.

...Yesterday was a splendid day within and without.... The old town delightful in its blackness and plainness. I heard several lecturers. Old Ludwig's lecture in the afternoon was memorable for the extraordinary impression of character he made on me. The traditional German professor in its highest sense. A rusty brown wig and broad-skirted brown coat, a voluminous black neckcloth, an absolute unexcitability of manner, a clean-shaven face so plebeian and at the same time so grandly carved, with its hooked nose and gentle kindly mouth and inexhaustible patience of expression, that I never saw the like. Then to Wundt, who has a more refined elocution than any one I've yet heard in Germany. He received me very kindly after the lecture in his laboratory, dimly trying to remember my writings, and I stay over today, against my intention, to go to his _psychologische Gesellschaft_ tonight. Have been writing psychology most all day....

* * * * *

In train for LIÈGE, _Nov. 18, 1882_.

...I believe I didn't tell you, in the bustle of traveling, much about Wundt. He made a very pleasant and personal impression on me, with his agreeable voice and ready, tooth-showing smile. His lecture also was very able, and my opinion of him is higher than before seeing him. But he seemed very busy and showed no desire to see more of me than the present interview either time. The _psychologische Gesellschaft_ I stayed over to see was postponed, but he did not propose to me to do anything else--to the gain of my ease, but to the loss of my vanity. Dear old Stumpf has been the friendliest of these fellows. With him I shall correspond....

* * * * *

LIÈGE, _Nov. 20, 1882_.

...I am still at Delboeuf's, aching in every joint and muscle, weary in every nerve-cell, but unable to get away till tomorrow noon. I was to have started today.... The total lesson of what I have done in the past month is to make me quieter with my home-lot and readier to believe that it is one of the chosen places of the Earth. Certainly the instruction and facilities at our university are on the whole superior to anything I have seen; the rawnesses we mention with such affliction at home belong rather to the century than to us (witness the houses here); we are not a whit more isolated than they are here. In all Belgium there seem to be but two genuine philosophers; in Berlin they have little to do with each other, and I really believe that in my way I have a wider view of the field than anyone I've seen (I count out, of course, my ignorance of ancient authors). We are a sound country and my opinion of our essential worth has risen and not fallen. We only lack abdominal depth of temperament and the power to sit for an hour over a single pot of beer without being able to tell at the end of it what we've been thinking about. Also to reform our altogether abominable, infamous and infra-human voices and way of talking. (What _further_ fatal defects hang together with that I don't know--it seems as if it must carry something very bad with it.) The first thing to do is to establish in Cambridge a genuine German plebeian Kneipe club, to which all instructors and picked students shall be admitted. If that succeeds, we shall be perfect, especially if we talk therein with deeper voices....

_To Henry James._

PARIS, _Nov. 22, 1882_.

DEAR H.,--Found at Hottinguer's this A.M. your letter with all the enclosures--and a wail you had sent to Berlin. Also six letters from my wife and seven or eight others, not counting papers and magazines. I will mail back yours and father's letter to me. Alice [Mrs. W. J.] speaks of father's indubitable improvement in strength, but our sister Alice apparently is somewhat run down.--Paris looks delicious--I shall try to get settled as soon as possible and meanwhile feel as if the confusion of life was recommencing. I saw in Germany all the men I cared to see and talked with most of them. With three or four I had a really nutritious time. The trip has amply paid for itself. I found third-class _Nichtraucher_ almost always empty and perfectly comfortable. The great use of such experiences is less the definite information you gain from anyone, than a sort of solidification of your own foothold on life. Nowhere did I see a university which seems to do for _all_ its students anything like what Harvard does. Our methods throughout are better. It is only in the select "Seminaria" (private classes) that a few German students making researches with the professor gain something from him personally which his genius alone can give. I certainly got a most distinct impression of my own _information_ in regard to _modern_ philosophic matters being broader than that of any one I met, and our Harvard post of observation being more cosmopolitan. Delboeuf in Liège was an angel and much the best teacher I've seen....[67] "The Century," with your very good portrait, etc., was at Hottinguer's this A.M., sent by my wife. I shall read it presently. I'm off now to see if I can get your leather trunk, sent from London, arrested by inundations, and ordered to be returned to Paris. I never needed its contents a second. And in your little American valise and my flabby black hand-bag and shawl-straps and a small satchel, I carried not only everything I used, but collected a whole library of books in Leipsig, some pieces of Venetian glass in their balky bolsters of seaweed, a quart bottle of eau de Cologne, and a lot of other acquisitions. I feel remarkably tough now, and fairly ravenous for my psychologic work. Address Hottinguer's.

W. J.

* * * * *

James's mother had died during the preceding winter. Now, just after his arrival in Paris, he received news that his father was dangerously ill.

He went to London immediately, with the intention of getting home as soon as possible. On arriving at his brother Henry's lodgings, he found that Henry had already sailed. He also received a despatch advising him that the danger was not immediate and that he should wait. He remained, but with misgivings which the next news intensified.

_To his Father._

BOLTON ST., LONDON, _Dec. 14, 1882_.

DARLING OLD FATHER,--Two letters, one from my Alice last night, and one from Aunt Kate to Harry just now, have somewhat dispelled the mystery in which the telegrams left your condition; and although their news is several days earlier than the telegrams, I am free to suppose that the latter report only an aggravation of the symptoms the letters describe. It is far more agreeable to think of this than of some dreadful unknown and sudden malady.

We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you've given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten; you are here left alone, and on the other side, let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for you to join her. If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing. Only, if you are still in possession of your normal consciousness, I should like to see you once again before we part. I stayed here only in obedience to the last telegram, and am waiting now for Harry--who knows the exact state of my mind, and who will know yours--to telegraph again what I shall do. Meanwhile, my blessed old Father, I scribble this line (which may reach you though I should come too late), just to tell you how full of the tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last few days been filled. In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the present soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I'm sure there's a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating,--so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence. You need be in no anxiety about your literary remains. I will see them well taken care of, and that your words shall not suffer for being concealed. At Paris I heard that Milsand, whose name you may remember in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" and elsewhere, was an admirer of the "Secret of Swedenborg," and Hodgson told me your last book had deeply impressed him. So will it be; especially, I think, if a collection of _extracts_ from your various writings were published, after the manner of the extracts from Carlyle, Ruskin, & Co. I have long thought such a volume would be the best monument to you.--As for us; we shall live on each in his way,--feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory. We will stand by each other and by Alice, try to transmit the torch in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as you. As for myself, I know what trouble I've given you at various times through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up, I shall learn more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in superintending the development of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show how my _sympathy_ with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to fade--and not for the sake of regrets.--As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I _can't_ say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that _were_ true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don't see you again--Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your

WILLIAM.

* * * * *

The elder Henry James died on the nineteenth of December. A cablegram was sent to London; and on learning of his father's death, James wrote a letter to his wife from which the following extract is taken.

_To Mrs. James._

...Father's boyhood up in Albany, Grandmother's house, the father and brothers and sister, with their passions and turbulent histories, his burning, amputation and sickness, his college days and ramblings, his theological throes, his engagement and marriage and fatherhood, his finding more and more of the truths he finally settled down in, his travels in Europe, the days of the old house in New York and all the men I used to see there, at last his quieter motion down the later years of life in Newport, Boston and Cambridge, with his friends and correspondents about him, and his books more and more easily brought forth--how long, how long all these things were in the living, but how short their memory now is! What remains is a few printed pages, us and our children and some incalculable modifications of other people's lives, influenced this day or that by what he said or did. For me, the humor, the good spirits, the humanity, the faith in the divine, and the sense of his right to have a say about the deepest reasons of the universe, are what will stay by me. I wish I could believe I should transmit some of them to our babes. We all of us have some of his virtues and some of his shortcomings. Unlike the cool, dry thin-edged men who now abound, he was full of the fumes of the _ur-sprünglich_ human nature; things turbid, more than he could formulate, wrought within him and made his judgments of rejection of so much of what was brought [before him] seem like revelations as well as knock-down blows.... I hope that rich soil of human nature will not become more rare!...

* * * * *

Two months later James said in a letter to Mrs. Gibbens: "It is singular how I'm learning every day now how the thought of his comment on my experiences has hitherto formed an integral part of my daily consciousness, without my having realized it at all. I interrupt myself incessantly now in the old habit of imagining what he will say when I tell him this or that thing I have seen or heard."

* * * * *

James remained in London until mid-February of 1883, and took advantage of the opportunity to see more of certain men there--among them Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, Croom Robertson, Frederick Pollock, Leslie Stephen, Carveth Reid, and Francis Galton. His eyes were troubling him again, but he did some writing on psychology. After paying another short visit to Paris, he sailed for home in March.

IX

1883-1890

_Writing the "Principles of Psychology"--Psychical Research--The Place at Chocorua--The Irving Street House--The Paris Psychological Congress of 1889_

JAMES had now found his feet, professionally, as well as in other ways. He strode ahead on the next stage of his journey with a firmness of which he would have been incapable in the seventies, and carried a heavy burden of work forward, with never a long halt and without ever setting it down, until he had finished the two large volumes of the "Principles of Psychology" in 1890. The previous decade had counted steadily for inward clarification, for health and for confidence. He was no longer harassed by serious illnesses and pursued by the spectre of possible invalidism. Marriage, parenthood--these immense events in a man's spiritual journey--had happened for him within the last four years and had brought him new loves and ambitions. He was no longer perplexed by misgivings about his aims and abilities, but had arrived at the conception of his treatise on psychology and had begun to formulate its chapters. He had become a very successful teacher, and might fairly have suspected himself of being an inspiring one. His work was beginning to be well known outside the halls of his own University.

It is not the purpose of this book to trace the origin of his ideas or their influence on contemporary discussion. But any reader who will glance at Professor Perry's annotated "List" of his published work may see that he had written important papers by 1883, and that most of what was original in his psychology must by then have been present to his mind. During the visit he had just made to Europe, he had got a personal impression of the transatlantic colleagues whose writings had interested him especially, and had spent many hours in the company of certain among them with whom he found himself to be particularly in sympathy. Thus he had gained a bracing sense of comradeship with the men who were collaborating in his field. Last of all, he had brought home with him a happy conviction that the most propitious place for him to teach and write his book in was the philosophical department of his own University.

So far as the "textbook on Psychology" was concerned, however, he still underestimated the amount of original investigation and thought which his instinct for "concrete" reality was to exact of him. Perhaps also he made too little allowance for the inadequacies of current laboratory methods and of the existing literature of the subject. Helmholtz and Wundt had already published important reports from their laboratories in Germany; but psychology was still generally considered to be an inductive science, which achieved its purposes by introspection and description, and which had no very broad connection with physiology nor many laboratory methods of its own. James had still to help make a modern science of it by his own immense effort. He may perhaps be said to have set to work when he offered the course on "The Relation between Physiology and Psychology" to graduate students in 1875, and made the class take part in experiments which he arranged in a room in the Lawrence Scientific School building.[68]

Thus with teaching, experimenting, and occasionally writing out his conclusions as he went along, he ploughed his way through his subject. The triple process is familiar enough today to most men of science. But James and the majority of his contemporaries had been trained differently or not at all; and their generation, following a few great leaders like Pasteur, Darwin and Helmholtz, had to establish new standards of criticism and new methods of inquiry in every department of science. When the "Psychology" was drawing to its completion, James wrote two sentences about his difficulties to his brother Henry. They might equally well have been written at any other time during the eighties. "I have," he said, "to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. It is like walking through the densest brush-wood."

* * * * *

There was one peculiarly stubborn and irreducible class of facts which he took up and gave much thought to during this period.

As early as 1869 he had recognized the desirability of examining the class of phenomena that are popularly called psychic[69] in a critical and modern spirit. This was not because he was in the least impressed by the lucubrations of the kind of mind which can be well described, in Macaulay's phrase, as "utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition." But an instinctive "love of sportsmanlike fair play" was stirred in him by the indifference with which men who professed to be students of nature,[70] and particularly scientists whose prime concern was with our mental life, usually declined to examine phenomena which have occurred in every known human race and generation. He was in cordial sympathy with the announced intention of the Society for Psychical Research to investigate the abnormal and "supernormal" occurrences. He referred aptly to such occurrences as "wild facts," having as yet no scientific "stall or pigeon-hole."[71] Above all, he was conscious, from the beginning, of the proximity and possible relevance to his psychological and philosophical problems of this large body of unanalyzed material.

Most people cannot approach such matters without emotional bias. The atmosphere in which the public discussion of them goes on is still poisoned by superstition and clouded by prejudice. No scientific man involves himself in such inquiries, even now, without the certitude that his statements will be misconstrued by some of his professional brethren, and that his name will be taken in vain by newspapers and charlatans. James recognized all this, but saw in it no excuse for avoiding the subject; rather, a reason for examining it in an unprejudiced spirit and for avowing his conclusions openly.

The English Society for Psychical Research had been founded in 1882. In 1884 James became a corresponding member and concerned himself actively in organizing an American society of the same name in Boston. He made contributions to the "Proceedings" of this society during the six years of its existence; and, when it amalgamated with the English Society in 1890, he became a Vice-President of the latter. With the exception of a term during which he served as its President (in 1894-95), he continued to be a Vice-President of the S. P. R. until his death, and occasionally published through its "Proceedings."

In the eighties he took up his share of the drudgery which was involved in investigating alleged cases of apparition, thought-transference, and mediumship. For one entire winter he and Professor G. H. Palmer attended "cabinet séances" every Saturday without discovering anything that they could report as other than fraudulent. But in the following year he got upon the track of the now famous Mrs. Piper, and he made his first report on her trance-state to the S. P. R. in 1886. After many tests and trials he was unable to "resist the conviction that knowledge appeared in her trances which she had never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, ears and wits." Withholding his acceptance from the spirit-message hypothesis, he added: "What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not a glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape."[72] He continued to find time for the investigation of other cases, and could sometimes console himself by laughing over expeditions which were quite fruitless of interesting result. A few sentences from letters addressed to Mrs. James in 1888, reporting an adventure with Richard Hodgson in New York, will serve as illustration:--

"[Apr. 6.] Hodgson and I started after our baggage arrived, to find Mr. B----, who, you may have seen by the papers, is making a scandal by having given himself over (hand and foot) to a medium, 'Madam D----,' who does most extraordinarily described physical performances. We found the old girl herself, a type for Alexandre Dumas, obese, wicked, jolly, intellectual, with no end of go and animal spirits, who entertained us for an hour, gave us an appointment for a sitting on Monday, and asked us to come and see Mr. B. tonight. What will come of it all I don't know. It will be baffling, I suppose, like everything else of that kind."

"[Apr. 7.] Mr. B. and Mrs. D. were 'too tired' to see us last night! I suspect that will be the case next Monday. It is the knowing thing to do under the circumstances. But that woman is one with whom one would fall _wildly_ in love, if in love at all--she is such a fat, _fat_ old villain...."

"[Apr. 24th.] In bed at 11.30, after the most hideously inept psychical night, in Charleston, over a much-praised female medium who fraudulently played on the guitar. A plague take all white-livered, anæmic, flaccid, weak-voiced Yankee frauds! Give me a full blooded red-lipped villain like dear old D.--when shall I look upon her like again?"

In 1889 James undertook the labor of conducting the "Census of Hallucinations" in America. The census sought to discover, from lists of people selected at random, how many of them, when in good health and awake, had ever heard a voice, seen a form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for. James received about seven thousand answers to the inquiries that were sent out in America; and after he had digested and reported them, the results turned out to be in remarkable conformity with the returns from other parts of the world. Some of James's own deductions from the returns will be found in the essay, "What Psychical Research has Accomplished."[73] Among other things, the census showed apparitions corresponding with a distant event as occurring more than four hundred times oftener than could be expected from a calculation of chances.

After this task had been completed, he usually avoided spending time in personal investigations.

_To Charles Renouvier._

KEENE VALLEY, _Aug. 5, 1883_ ADIRONDACKS.

MY DEAR MONSIEUR RENOUVIER,--My silence has been so protracted that I fear you must have wondered what its reasons could be. Only the old ones!--much to do, and little power to do it, obliging procrastination. You will doubtless have heard from the Pillons of my safe return home. I have spent the interval in the house of my mother-in-law in Cambridge, trying to do some work in the way of psychologic writing before the fatal day should arrive when the College bell, summoning _me_ as well as my colleagues to the lecture-room, should make literary work almost impossible. Although my bodily condition, thanks to my winter abroad, has been better than in many years at a corresponding period, what I succeeded in accomplishing was well-nigh zero. I floundered round in the morasses of the theory of cognition,--the Object and the Ego,--tore up almost each day what I had written the day before, and although I am inwardly, of course, more aware than I was before of where the difficulties of the subject lie, outwardly I have hardly any manuscript to show for my pains. Your unparalleled literary fecundity is a perfect wonder to me. You should return pious thanks to the one or many gods who had a hand in your production, not only for endowing you with so clear a head, but for giving you so admirable a working temperament. The most rapid piece of literary work I ever did was completed ten days ago, and sent to "Mind," where it will doubtless soon appear. I had promised to give three lectures at a rather absurd little "Summer School of Philosophy," which has flourished for four or five years past in the little town of Concord near Boston, and which has an audience of from twenty to fifty persons, including the lecturers themselves; and, finding at the last moment that I could do nothing with my much meditated subject of the Object and the Ego, I turned round and lectured "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,"[74] and wrote the substance of the lectures out immediately after giving them--the whole occupying six days. I hope you may read the paper some time and approve it--though it is out of the current of your own favorite topics and consequently hardly a proper candidate for the honours of translation in the "Critique."

I understand now why no really good classic manual of psychology exists; why all that do exist only treat of particular points and chapters with any thoroughness. It is impossible to write one at present, so infinitely more numerous are the difficulties of the task than the means of their solution. Every chapter bristles with obstructions that refer one to the next ten years of work for their mitigation.

With all this I have done very little consecutive reading. I have not yet got at your historic survey in the "Critique Religieuse," for which my brain nevertheless itches. But I have read your articles apropos of Fouillée, and found them--the latest one especially--admirable for clearness and completeness of statement. Surely nothing like them has ever been written--no such stripping of the question down to its naked essentials. Those who, like Fouillée, have the intuition of the Absolute Unity, will of course not profit by them or anything else. Why can all others view their own beliefs as _possibly_ only hypotheses--_they_ only not? Why does the Absolute Unity make its votaries so much more _conceited_ at having attained it, than any other supposed truth does? This inner sense of superiority to all antagonists gives Fouillée his _fougue_ and adds to his cleverness, and no doubt increases immensely the effectiveness of his writing over the average reader's mind. But it also makes him careless and liable to overshoot the mark.

I have just been interrupted by a visit from Noah Porter, D.D., President of Yale College, whose bulky work on "The Human Intellect" you may have in your library, possibly. An American college president is a very peculiar type of character, partly man of business, partly diplomatist, partly clergyman, and partly professor of metaphysics, armed with great authority and influence if his college is an important one--which Yale is; and Porter is the paragon of the type--_bonhomme et rusé_, learned and simple, kindhearted and sociable, yet possessed of great decision and obstinacy. He is over seventy, but comes every summer here to the woods to refresh himself by long mountain walks and life in "camp," sleeping on a bed of green boughs before a great fire in the open air. He looks like a farmer or a fisherman, and there is no sort of human being who does not immediately feel himself entirely at home in his company.

I have been here myself just a week. The virgin forest comes close to our house, and the diversity of walks through it, the brooks and the ascensions of hilltops are infinite. I doubt if there be anything like it in Europe. Your mountains are grander, but you have nowhere this carpet of absolutely primitive forest, with its indescribably sweet exhalations, spreading in every direction unbroken. I shall stay here doing hardly any work till late in September. I need to lead a purely animal life for at least two months to carry me through the teaching year. My wife and two children are here, all well. I would send you her photograph and mine, save that hers--the only one I have--is too bad to send to anyone, and my own are for the moment exhausted. I find myself counting the years till my next visit to Europe becomes possible. Then it shall occur under more cheerful circumstances, if possible; and I shall stay the full fifteen months instead of only six. As I look back now upon the winter, I find the strongest impression I received was that of the singularly artificial, yet deeply vital and soundly healthy, character of the English social and political system as it now exists. It is one of the most _bizarre_ outbirths of time, one of the most abnormal, in certain ways, and yet one of the most successful. I know nothing that so much confirms your philosophy as this spectacle of an accumulation of individual initiatives _all preserved_. I hope both you and the Pillons are well. I shall never forget their friendliness, nor the spirit of human kindness that filled their household. I am ashamed to ask for letters from you, when after so long a silence I can myself give you so little that is of philosophic interest. But we must take long views; and, if life be granted, I shall do something yet, both in the way of reading and writing. Ever truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

At about this time Major Henry L. Higginson, then the junior partner in the banking house of Lee, Higginson & Company and soon to be widely known as the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, undertook to look after the small patrimony which James had inherited. He tactfully assumed the initiative respecting whatever had to be done, and continued to render this friendly service as long as James lived. On his side James, who knew nothing about investments and was incapable of considering them without involving himself in excessive and unprofitable worry, was delighted to leave decisions to his friend's wiser judgment. Occasional jocose communications like the following came to be almost his only incursions into his own "affairs."

_To Henry L. Higginson._

_Oct. 14_ [1883?].

MY DEAR HENRY,--I receive today from your office two documents, one containing some unintelligible hieroglyphics, "C. B.& Q., 138" etc., etc.; the other winding up with a statement that I owe you $12,674.97!!

The latter explains your mysterious interest in my affairs. I feared as much! Go on, Shylock, go on! you have me in your power. The peculiar combination of ignorance and poverty which I present makes me an easy victim. And I confess that as a psychologist I am curious to see how far your instincts of cupidity will carry you. I await eagerly the ulterior developments. Yours, etc.,

WM. JAMES.

[_Enclosed with the foregoing_]

Extract from a biographic sketch of W. J. soon to be published in the "Harvard Register":--

"He now fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint, and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; converses rationally, reads the newspapers, where every talk of distress attracts his notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that he has earned the right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the table; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old friends, he is quite conscious of his real position; but the conviction is so exquisitely painful that he will not let himself believe it."

_To H. P. Bowditch._

[Post-card]

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., _Jan. 31_ [1884].

Heute den 31ten Januar wurde mir vor 2 Stunden in rascher Aufeinander-folge _ein_ (1) wunderschöner jüdischaussehender, kräftiger und munterer Knabe geboren. Alles geht nach Wunsch, und bittet um stiller Theilnahme der glückliche Vater.

W. J.

[_Translation._]

Today the 31st of January, two hours since, there was born to me in rapid succession _one_ (I) wonderfully beautiful, Jewish-looking, sturdy and lively boy. Everything is going as one would wish, and the happy father craves your hushed sympathy.

W. J.

_To Thomas Davidson._

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 30, 1884_.

MY DEAR DAVIDSON,--I am in receipt of two letters from you since my last, the latest one of them from Capri. I am very sorry to hear of your continued bad physical condition. You have a queer constitution,--with such an unusual amount of strength in most ways,--to be a constant prey to ailment. I have long ago come to think that the right measure of a man's health is not how much comfort or discomfort he feels in the year, but how much work, through thick and thin, he manages to get through. Judged by that standard, you doubtless score an unusually high number. But when I hear you talking about Texas, I confess I really begin to feel alarmed. From Rome to Austin! How can you think of such a thing? Are you sure M---- is not playing the part of the tailless fox in the fable? I know not a living soul in Texas, and if I did I should have moral scruples about becoming an accomplice in any plot for transporting you there. Why is it that everything in this world is offered us on no medium terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for a professorship. I pine for your leisure to write and study. Teaching duties have really devoured the whole of my time this winter, and with hardly any intellectual profit whatever. I have read nothing, and written nothing save one lecture on the freedom of the will. How it is going to end, I don't well see. The four months of non-lecturing study I had at home last year, when I slept well and led a really intellectual life, seem like a sort of lost paradise. However, vacations make amends. This summer I am to edit my poor father's literary remains, "with a sketch of his writings" which will largely consist of extracts and no doubt help to the making him better known.

You ask why I don't write oftener. If you could see the arrears of work under which my table groans, and the number of semi-business letters and notes I now have to write with my infernal eyesight, you would ask no longer. In fact I am beginning to ask whether it be not my bounden duty to stop corresponding with my friends altogether. Only at that price does there seem to be any prospect of doing any reading at all.

I had neither seen your article in the Unitarian Review[75] nor heard of it, but ran for it as soon as I got your announcement of its existence. I know not what to think of it practically; though I confess the idea of engrafting the bloodless pallor of Boston Unitarianism on the Roman temperament strikes one at first sight as rather queer. Unitarianism seems to have a sort of moribund vitality here, because it is a branch of protestantism and the tree keeps the branch sticking out. But whether it could be grafted on a catholic trunk seems to me problematic. I confess I rather despair of any popular religion of a philosophic character; and I sometimes find myself wondering whether there can be any popular religion raised on the ruins of the old Christianity without the presence of that element which in the past has presided over the origin of all religions, namely, a belief in new _physical_ facts and possibilities. Abstract considerations about the soul and the reality of a moral order will not do in a year what the glimpse into a world of new phenomenal possibilities enveloping those of the present life, afforded by an extension of our insight into the order of nature, would do in an instant. Are the much despised "Spiritualism" and the "Society for Psychical Research" to be the chosen instruments for a new era of faith? It would surely be strange if they were; but if they are not, I see no other agency that can do the work.

I like your formula that in consciousness there must be two irreducibles, "being and feeling," and nothing else. But I can't put philosophy into letters. When is our long-postponed talk to take place? _Aufgeschoben_ for another summer, and I fear another winter too, from what you write. It is too bad!

We have a week's recess in a couple of days and I start to look up summer lodgings. Alice and the two-month-old baby are very well and send you love. Always truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To G. H. Howison._

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1885_.

MY DEAR HOWISON,--I've just reread (for the fourth time, I believe) your letter of the 30th November. I need not say how tickled I am at your too generous words about my Divinity school address on Determinism.[76] Sweet are the praises of an enemy. There is, thank Heaven! a plane below all formulas and below enmities due to formulas, where men occasionally meet each other moving, and recognize each other as brothers inhabiting the _same depths_. Such is this depth of the _problem_ of determinism--howe'er we solve it, we are brothers if we know it to be a _problem_. No man on either side awakens any sense of intellectual respect in me who regards the solution as a cock-sure and immediately given thing, and wonders that any one should hesitate to choose his party. You find fault with my deterministic disjunction, "pessimism or subjectivism," and ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral

## activity," etc. (You probably remember.) I didn't forget it. It entered

for me into pessimism, for, since such activity has failed to be universally realized, it was (deterministically) _impossible from eternity_, and the Universe in so far forth not an object of pure worship, not an Absolute. My trouble, you see, lies with monism. Determinism = monism; and a monism like this world can't be an object of pure optimistic contemplation. By pessimism I simply mean _ultimate_ non-optimism. The Ideal is only a part of this world. Make the world a Pluralism, and you forthwith have an object to worship. Make it a Unit, on the other hand, and worship and abhorrence are equally one-sided and equally legitimate reactions. _Indifferentism_ is the true condition of such a world, and turn the matter how you will, I don't see how any philosophy of the Absolute can ever escape from that capricious alternation of mysticism and satanism in the treatment of its great Idol, which history has always shown. Reverence is an accidental personal mood in such a philosophy, and has naught to do with the essentials of the system. At least, so it seems to me; and in view of that, I prefer to stick in the wooden finitude of an ultimate pluralism, because that at least gives me something definite to worship and fight for.

However, I know I haven't exhausted all wisdom, and am too well aware that this position, like everything else, is a _parti pris_ and a _pis aller_,--_faute de mieux_,--to continue the Gallic idiom. Your predecessor Royce thinks he's got the thing at last. It is too soon for me to criticize his book; but I must say it seems to me one of the very freshest, profoundest, solidest, most human bits of philosophical work I've seen in a long time. In fact, it makes one think of Royce as a man from whom nothing is too great to expect.

Your list of thirty lectures makes one bow down in reverence before you. I should be afraid you were over-working. Your Hume-Kant circular shall be diligently scanned when my Hume lectures come off, in about six weeks. I am better as to the eyes, which gives me much hope. Am, however, "maturing" building plans for a house, which is bad for sleep. I do hope and trust there will be no "Enttäuschung" about Berkeley,[77] and that not only the work, but the place and the climate, may prove well adapted to both you and Mrs. Howison. Ever truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

The next letters relate to the "Literary Remains of Henry James," which had just been published, and in which William James had collected a number of his father's papers and edited them with an introductory essay on their author's philosophy. Needless to say, the two letters to Godkin have not been included among these with any thought of the unfortunate review to which they refer. They furnish too good an illustration of James's loyalty and magnanimity to be omitted. If more critics, and more of the criticized, were to cultivate the manliness and generosity with which James always entered discussion, there would be less reviewers "never-quite-forgiven," and less feuds in the world of science.

_To E. L. Godkin._

CAMBRIDGE, [_Feb._] 16, 1885.

MY DEAR GODKIN,--Doesn't the impartiality which I suppose is striven for in the "Nation," sometimes overshoot the mark "and fall on t'other side"? Poor Harry's books seem always given out to critics with antipathy to his literary temperament; and now for this only and last review of my father--a writer exclusively religious--a personage seems to have been selected for whom the religious life is complete _terra incognita_. A severe review by one interested in the subject is one thing; a contemptuous review by one with the subject out of his sight is another.

Make no reply to this! One must disgorge his bile.

I was taken ill in Philadelphia the day after seeing you, and had to return home after some days without stopping in N.Y. I _may_ get there the week after next, and if so shall claim _one_ dinner, over which I trust no cloud will be cast by the beginning of this note! With best respects to Mrs. Godkin, always truly yours

WM. JAMES.

_To E. L. Godkin._

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 19, 1885_.

MY DEAR GODKIN,--Your cry of remorse or regret is so "whole-souled" and complete that I should not be human were I not melted almost to tears by it, and sorry I "ever spoke to you as I did." I felt pretty sure that you had no positive oversight of the thing in this case, but I addressed you as the official head. And my _emotion_ was less that of filial injury than of irritation at what seemed to me editorial stupidity in giving out the book to the wrong _sort_ of person altogether--a Theist of some sort being the only proper reviewer. I am heartily sorry that the thing should have distressed you so much more than it did me. You can take your consolation in the fact that it has now afforded you an opportunity for the display of those admirable qualities of the heart which your friends know, but which the ordinary readers of the "Nation" probably do not suspect to slumber beneath the gory surface of that savage sheet.

I hear that you are soon coming to give us some political economy. I am very glad on every account, and suppose Mrs. Godkin will come _mit_. Always truly yours

WM. JAMES.

_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._

CAMBRIDGE, _20 Feb., 1885_.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--Your letter of the 7th was most welcome. Anything responsive about my poor old father's writing falls most gratefully upon my heart. For I fear he found _me_ pretty unresponsive during his lifetime; and that through my means any post-mortem response should come seems a sort of atonement. You would have enjoyed knowing him. I know of no one except Carlyle who had such a smiting _Ursprünglichkeit_ of intuition, and such a deep sort of humor where human nature was concerned. He bowled one over in such a careless way. He was like Carlyle in being no _reasoner_ at all, in the sense in which philosophers are reasoners. Reasoning was only an unfortunate necessity of exposition for them both. His _ideas_, however, were the exact inversion of Carlyle's; and he had nothing to correspond to Carlyle's insatiable learning of historic facts and memory. As you say, the world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him. _Those_ elements were very deep ones, and had theological names. Under "Man" he would willingly have included all flesh, even that resident in Sirius or ethereal worlds. But he felt no need of positively looking so far. He was the humanest and most genial being in his impulses whom I have ever personally known, and had a bigness and power of nature that everybody felt. I thank you heartily for your interest. I wish that somebody could _take up_ something from his system into a system more articulately scientific. As it is, most people will feel the _presence_ of something real and true for the while they read, and go away and presently, unable to dovetail [it] into their own framework, forget it altogether.

I am hoping to write you a letter ere long, a letter philosophical. I am going over Idealism again, and mean to review your utterances on the subject. You know that, to quote what Gurney said one evening, to attain to assimilating your thought is the chief purpose of one's life. But you know also how hard it is for the likes of me to write, and how much that is felt is unthought, and that as thought [it] goes and must go unspoken. Brother Royce tells me he has sent you his "Religious Aspect of Philosophy." He is a wonderfully powerful fellow, not yet thirty, and this book seems to me to have a real fresh smell of the Earth about it. You will enjoy it, I know. I am very curious to hear what you think of his brand-new argument for Absolute Idealism.

I and mine are well. But the precious time as usual slips away with little work done. Happy you, whose time is all your own!

WM. JAMES

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 1, 1885_.

...I am running along quite smoothly, and my eyes,--you never knew such an improvement! It has continued gradually, so that practically I can use them all I will. It saves my life. _Why_ it should come now, when, bully them as I would, it wouldn't come in the past few years, is one of the secrets of the nervous system which the last trump, but nothing earlier, may reveal. A week's recess begins today, and the day after tomorrow I shall start for the South Shore to look up summer quarters. I want to try how sailing suits me as a summer kill-time. The walking in Keene Valley suits me not, and driving is too "cost-playful." I have made a start with my psychology which I shall work at, temperately, through the vacation and hope to get finished a year from next fall, _sans faute_. Then shall the star of your romances be eclipst!...

_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._

NEWPORT, _Dec. 30, 1885_.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--I have just read your "Philosophy and Experience" address, and re-read with much care your "Dialogue on Free Will" in the last "Mind." I thank you kindly for the address. But isn't philosophy a sad mistress, estranging the more intimately those who in all other respects are most intimately united,--although 'tis true she unites them afresh by their very estrangement! I feel for the first time now, after these readings, as if I might be catching sight of your foundations. Always hitherto has there been something elusive, a sense that what I caught could not be _all_. Now I feel as if it might be all, and yet for me 'tis not enough.

Your "method" (which surely after _this_ needs no additional expository touch) I seem at last to understand, but it shrinks in the understanding. For what is your famous "two aspects" principle more than the postulate that the world is thoroughly _intelligible_ in nature? And what the practical outcome of the distinction between _whatness_ and _thatness_ save the sending us to experience to ascertain the connections among things, and the declaration that no amount of insight into their intrinsic qualities will account for their existence? I can now get no more than that out of the method, which seems in truth to me an over-subtle way of getting at and expressing pretty simple truths, which others share who know nothing of your formulations. In fact your wondrously delicate retouchings and discriminations appear rather to darken the matter from the point of view of teaching. One gains much by the way, of course, that he would have lost by a shorter path, but one risks losing the end altogether. (I reserve what you say at the end of both articles about Conscience, etc.--which is original and beautiful and which I feel I have not yet assimilated. I will only ask whether all you say about the decisions of conscience implying a future verification does not hold of scientific decisions as well, so that _all_ reflective _cognitive_ judgments, as well as practical judgments, project themselves ideally into eternity?)

As for the Free Will article, I have very little to say, for it leaves entirely untouched what seems to me the only living issue involved. The paper is an exquisite piece of literary goldsmith's work,--nothing like it in that respect since Berkeley,--but it hangs in the air of speculation and touches not the earth of life, and the beautiful distinctions it keeps making gratify only the understanding which has no end in view but to exercise its eyes by the way. The distinctions between _vis impressa_ and _vis insita_, and compulsion and "reaction" _mean_ nothing in a monistic world; and any world is a monism in which the parts to come are, as they are in your world, absolutely involved and presupposed in the parts that are already given. Were such a monism a palpable optimism, no man would be so foolish as to care whether it was predetermined or not, or to ask whether he was or was not what you call a "real agent." He would acquiesce in the flow and drift of things, of which he found himself a part, and rejoice that it was such a whole. The question of free will owes its entire being to a difficulty you disdain to notice, namely that we _cannot_ rejoice in such a whole, for it is _not_ a palpable optimism, and yet, if it be predetermined, we _must treat_ it as a whole. Indeterminism is the only way to _break_ the world into good parts and into bad, and to stand by the former as against the latter.

I can understand the determinism of the mere mechanical intellect which will not hear of a moral dimension to existence. I can understand that of mystical monism shutting its eyes on the concretes of life, for the sake of its abstract rapture. I can understand that of mental defeat and despair saying, "it's all a muddle, and here I go, along with it." I can _not_ understand a determinism like yours, which rejoices in clearness and distinctions, and which is at the same time alive to moral ones--unless it be that the latter are purely speculative for it, and have little to do with its real feeling of the way life _is_ made up.

For life _is_ evil. Two souls are in my breast; I see the better, and in the very act of seeing it I do the worse. To say that the molecules of the nebula implied this and _shall have implied it_ to all eternity, so often as it recurs, is to condemn me to that "dilemma" of pessimism or subjectivism of which I once wrote, and which seems to have so little urgency to you, and to which all talk about abstractions erected into entities; and compulsion _vs._ "freedom" are simply irrelevant. What living man cares for such niceties, when the real problem stares him in the face of how practically to meet a world foredone, with no possibilities left in it?

What a mockery then seems your distinction between determination and compulsion, between passivity and an "activity" every minutest feature of which is preappointed, both as to its _whatness_ and as to its _thatness_, by what went before! What an insignificant difference then the difference between "impediments from within" and "impediments from without"!--between being fated to do the thing _willingly_ or not! The point is not as to how it is done, but as to its being done at all. It seems a wrong complement to the rest of life, which rest of life (according to your precious "free-will determinism," as to any other fatalism), whilst shrieking aloud at its _whatness_, nevertheless exacts rigorously its _thatness_ then and there. Is that a reasonable world from the moral point of view? And is it made more reasonable by the fact that when I brought about the _thatness_ of the evil _whatness_ decreed to come by the _thatness_ of all else beside, I did so consentingly and aware of no "impediments outside of my own nature"? With what can I _side_ in such a world as this? this monstrous indifferentism which brings forth everything _eodem jure_? Our nature demands something _objective_ to take sides with. If the world is a Unit of this sort there _are_ no sides--there's the moral rub! And you don't see it!

Ah, Hodgson! Hodgson _mio!_ from whom I hoped so much! Most spirited, most clean, most thoroughbred of philosophers! _Perchè di tanto inganni i figli tuoi?_[78] If you want to reconcile us rationally to Determinism, write a Theodicy, reconcile us to _Evil_, but don't talk of the distinction between impediments from within and without when the within and the without of which you speak are both within that _Whole_ which is the only real agent in your philosophy. There is no such superstition as the idolatry of the _Whole_.

I originally finished this letter on sheet number one--but it occurred to me afterwards that the end was too short, so I scratched out the first lines of the crossed writing, and refer you now to what follows them.--[_Lines from sheet number I._] It makes me sick at heart, this discord among the only men who ought to agree. I am the more sick this moment as I must write to your ancient foe (at least the stimulus to an old "Mind" article of yours), one F. E. Abbot who recently gave me his little book "Scientific Theism"--the burden of his life--which makes me groan that I cannot digest a word of it. Farewell! Heaven bless you all the same--and enable you to forgive me. We are well and I hope you are the same. Ever faithfully yours,

W. J.

[_From the final sheet._] Let me add a wish for a happy New Year and the expression of my undying regard. You are tenfold more precious to me now that I have braved you thus! Adieu!

_To Carl Stumpf._

CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 1, 1886_.

MY DEAR STUMPF,--...Let me tell you of my own fate since I wrote you last. It has been an eventful and in some respects a sad year. We lost our youngest child in the summer--the flower of the flock, 18 months old--with a painful and lingering whooping-cough complicated with pneumonia. My wife has borne it like an angel, however, which is something to be thankful for. Her mother, close to whom we have always lived, has had a severe pulmonary illness, which has obliged her to repair to Italy for health. She is now on the Ocean, with her youngest and only unmarried daughter, the second one having only a month ago become the wife of that [W. M.] Salter whose essays on ethics have lately been translated by von Gizycki in Berlin. So I have gained him as a brother-in-law, and regard it as a real gain. I have also gained a full Professorship with an increase of pay, and have moved into a larger and more commodious house.[79] My eyes, too, are much better than they were a year ago, and I am able to do more work, so there is plenty of sweet as well as bitter in the cup.

I don't know whether you have heard of the London "Society for Psychical Research," which is seriously and laboriously investigating all sorts of "supernatural" matters, clairvoyance, apparitions, etc. I don't know what you think of such work; but I think that the present condition of opinion regarding it is scandalous, there being a mass of testimony, or apparent testimony, about such things, at which the only men capable of a critical judgment--men of scientific education--will not even look. We have founded a similar society here within the year,--some of us thought that the publications of the London society deserved at least to be treated as if worthy of experimental disproof,--and although work advances very slowly owing to the small amount of disposable time on the part of the members, who are all very busy men, we have already stumbled on some rather inexplicable facts out of which something may come. It is a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are _impossible_.

My teaching is much the same as it was--a little better in quality, I hope. I enjoy very much a new philosophic colleague, Josiah Royce, from California, who is just thirty years old and a perfect little Socrates for wisdom and humor. I still try to write a little psychology, but it is exceedingly slow work. No sooner do I get interested than bang! goes my sleep, and I have to stop a week or ten days, during which my ideas get all cold again. Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.... I try to spend two hours a day in a laboratory for psycho-physics which I started last year, but of which I fear the _fruits_ will be slow in ripening, as my experimental aptitude is but small. But I am convinced that one must guard in some such way as that against the growing tendency to _subjectivism_ in one's thinking, as life goes on. I am hypnotizing, on a large scale, the students, and have hit one or two rather pretty unpublished things of which some day I hope I may send you an account.... Ever faithfully yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

When the American Society for Psychical Research was organized in Boston in the autumn of 1884, Thomas Davidson wrote to comment on its apparent anti-spiritual bias. In the following reply, dated February 1, 1885, but more easily understood if inserted here out of its chronological place, James defined the society's conception of its function. In so doing he described his own attitude toward psychical research quite exactly:--

"As for any 'antispiritual bias' of our Society, no theoretic basis, or _bias_ of any sort whatever, so far as I can make out, exists in it. The one thing that has struck me all along in the men who have had to do with it is their complete colorlessness philosophically. They seem to have no preferences for any general _ism_ whatever. I doubt if this could be matched in Europe. Anyhow, it would make no difference in the important work to be done, what theoretic bias the members had. For I take it the urgent thing, to rescue us from the present disgraceful condition, is to ascertain in a manner so thorough as to constitute _evidence_ that will be accepted by outsiders, just what the _phenomenal conditions of certain_ concrete phenomenal occurrences are. Not till that is done, can spiritualistic or anti-spiritualistic theories be even mooted. I'm sure that the more we can steer clear of theories at first, the better. The choice of officers was largely dictated by motives of policy. Not that scientific men are necessarily better judges of all truth than others, but that their adhesion would popularly seem better _evidence_ than the adhesion of others, in the matter. And what we want is not only truth, but evidence. We shall be lucky if our scientific names don't grow discredited the instant they subscribe to any 'spiritual' manifestations. But how much easier to discredit literary men, philosophers or clergymen! I think Newcomb, for President, was an uncommon hit--if he believes, he will probably carry others. You'd better chip in, and not complicate matters by talking either of spiritualism or anti-spiritualism. '_Facts_' are what are wanted."

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _May 9, 1886_.

MY DEAR HARRY,--I seize my pen the first leisure moment I have had for a week to tell you that I have read "The Bostonians" in the full flamingness of its bulk, and consider it an exquisite production. My growling letter was written to you before the end of