Chapter IX (1)

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 Book I had appeared in the "Atlantic"; and the suspense of narrative in that region, to let the relation of Olive and Verena grow, was enlarged by the vacant months between the numbers of the magazine, so that it seemed to me so slow a thing had ne'er been writ. Never again shall I attack one of your novels in the magazine. I've only read one number of the "Princess Casamassima"--though I hear all the people about me saying it is the best thing you've done yet. To return to "The Bostonians"; the two last books are simply sweet. There isn't a hair wrong in Verena, you've made her neither too little nor too much--but absolutely _liebenswürdig_. It would have been so easy to spoil her picture by some little excess or false note. Her moral situation, between Woman's rights and Ransom, is of course deep, and her discovery of the truth on the Central Park day, etc., inimitably given. Ransom's character, which at first did not become alive to me, does so, handsomely, at last. In Washington, Hay told me that Secretary Lamar was delighted with it; Hay himself ditto, but especially with "Casamassima." I enclose a sheet from a letter of Gurney's but just received. You see how seriously he takes it. And I suppose he's right from a profoundly serious point of view,--_i.e._, he would be right if the characters were real,--but as the story stands, I don't feel his objection. The _fancy_ is more tickled by R.'s victory being complete. I hear very little said of the book, and I imagine it is being less read than its predecessors. The truth about it, combining what I said in my previous letter with what I have just written, seems to be this, that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that method of doing such a thing at all. Really the _datum_ seems to me to belong rather to the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and made into a bright, short, sparkling thing of a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute success. But you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into near 500--charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work--but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter and less art. I can truly say, however, that as I have lain on my back after dinner each day for ten days past reading it to myself, my enjoyment has been complete. I imagine that inhabitants of other parts of the country have read it more than natives of these parts. They have bought it for the sake of the information. The way you have touched off the bits of American nature, Central Park, the Cape, etc., is exquisitely true and calls up just the feeling. Knowing you had done such a good thing makes the meekness of your reply to me last summer all the more wonderful.

I cannot write more--being much overloaded and in bad condition. The spring is opening deliciously--all the trees half out, and the white, bright, afternoon east winds beginning. Our household is well....

Don't be alarmed about the labor troubles here. I am quite sure they are a most healthy phase of evolution, a little costly, but normal, and sure to do lots of good to all hands in the end. I don't speak of the senseless "anarchist" riot in Chicago, which has nothing to do with "Knights of Labor," but is the work of a lot of pathological Germans and Poles. I'm amused at the anti-Gladstonian capital which the English papers are telegraphed to be making of it. All the Irish names are among the killed and wounded policemen. Almost every anarchist name is Continental. Affectly.,

W. J.

* * * * *

James read "The Bostonians," and wrote to his brother about it, with that special shade of detachment which is peculiar to fraternal judgments. He was less careful to measure his praise when he wrote to other authors about their novels.

_To W. D. Howells._

JAFFREY, N.H., _July 21, 1886_.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I "snatch" a moment from the limitless vacation peace and leisure in which I lie embedded and which doesn't leave me "time" for anything, to tell you that I have been reading your "Indian Summer," and that it has given me about as exquisite a kind of delight as anything I ever read in my life, in the line to which it belongs. How you tread the narrow line of nature's truth so infallibly is more than I can understand. Then the profanity, the humor, the humanity, the morality--the everything! In short, 'tis cubical, and set it up any way you please 'twill stand. That blessed young female made me squeal at every page. How _can_ you have got back to the conversations of your prime?

But I won't discriminate or analyze. This is only meant for an inarticulate cry of _viva Howells_. I repeat it: long live Howells! God grant you may do as good things again! I don't believe you can do better.