cord. I no longer doubt what I always suspected, her penchant for me, and I don't blame her for it. Elly Temple stayed here two days, too. She scratched, smote, beat, and kicked me so that I shall dread to meet her again. What an awful time Bob & Co. must have had at sea! and how anxious you must have been about them! With best love to Aunt Kate and yourself, believe me Your af. bro. WM. JAMES. To O. W. Holmes, Jr. MY DEAR WENDLE, Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin, to-night. The ghosts of the past all start from their unquiet graves and keep dancing a senseless whirligig around me, so that, after trying in vain to read three books, to sleep or to think, I clutch the pen and ink and resolve to work off the fit by a few lines to one of the most obtrusive ghosts of all namely the tall and lank one of Charles Street. Good golly! how I would prefer to have about twenty-four hours talk with you up in that whitely lit-up room - without the sun rising or the firmament revolving so as to put the gas out, without sleep, food, clothing or shelter except your whiskey bottle of which or the like of which I have not partaken since I have been in these longitudes! I should like to have you opposite me in any mood, whether the facetiously excursive, the metaphysically discursive, the personally confidential, or the jadedly cursive and argumentative - so that the oyster-shells which enclose my being might slowly turn open on their rigid hinges under the radiation, and the critter within loll out his dried-up gills into the circumfused ichor of life, till they grow so fat as not to know themselves again. I feel as if a talk with you of any kind could not fail to set me on my legs again for three weeks at least. I have been chewing on two or three dried-up old cuds of ideas I brought from America with me, till they have disappeared, and the nudity of the cosmos has got beyond anything I have as yet experienced. I have not succeeded in finding any companion yet and I feel the want of some outward stimulus to my Soul. There is a man named Grimm 1 here, whom my soul loves, but in the way Emerson speaks of, i.e., like those people we meet on staircases, etc., and who always ignore our feelings towards them. I don't think we shall ever be able to establish a straight line of communication between us. I don't know how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter. I marked out a number of books when I first came here, to finish. What with their heaviness, and the damnable slowness with which the Dutch still goes, they weigh on me like a haystack. I loathe the thought of them; and yet they have poisoned my slave of a conscience so that I can't enjoy anything else. I have reached an age when practical work of some kind clamors to be done - and I must still wait! There! Having worked off that pentup gall of six weeks' accumulation I feel more genial. I wish I could have some news of you now that the postage is lowered to such a ridiculous figure (and no letter is double) there remains no shadow of an excuse for not writing but still I don't expect anything from you. I suppose you are sinking ever deeper into the sloughs of the law yet I ween the Eternal Mystery still from time to time gives her goad an 1 Hermann Grimm, a son of the younger of the universally beloved brothers of the Fairy Tales, a philologist and Professor of the History of Art in Berlin. 25 وکر other turn in the raw she once estab- That is, after all, all I wanted to write you and it may float the rest of the letter. Pray give my warm regards to your father, mother and sister; and my love to the honest Gray and to Jim Higginson. [Written on the outside of the envelope.] Jan. 4. By a strange coincidence, after writing this last night, I received yours this morning. Not to sacrifice the postage-stamps which are already on the envelope (Economical W.!) I don't reopen it. But I will write you again soon. Meanwhile, bless your heart! thank you! Vide Shakespeare: sonnet XXLX. [Winter of 1868-69.] The German character is without mountains or valleys; its favorite food is roast veal; and in other lines it prefers whatever may be the analogue To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and J. C. Gray, Jr. thereof all which gives life here a certain flatness to the high-tuned American taste. I don't think any one need care much about coming here unless he wants to dig very deeply into some exclusive specialty. I have been reading nothing of any interest but some chapters of physiology. There has a good deal been doing here of late on the physiology of the senses, overlapping perception, and consequently, in a measure, the psychological field. I am wading my way towards it, and if in course of time I strike on anything exhilarating, I'll let you know. I'll now pull up. I don't know whether you take it as a compliment that I should only write to you when in the dismalest of dumps- perhaps you ought to you, the one emergent peak to which I cling when all the rest of the world has sunk beneath the wave. Believe me, my Wendly boy, what poor possibility of friendship abides in the crazy frame of W. J. meanders about thy neighborhood. Good-bye! Keep the same bold front as ever to the Common Enemy and don't forget your ally. - W. J. Gents! entry-thieves chevaliers d'industrie — well-dressed swindlers confidence men wolves in sheep's clothing-asses in lions' 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 1 from proceeding to treat you with the utmost severity of the law. It is high time that some of these genteel ad1 Ephraim W. Gurney and T. S. Perry. venturers should be made an example of, and your offense 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. and 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, dd 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. [The next four letters may be taken from the late 'seventies and early 'eighties after James had become absorbed in teaching and while he was at work upon his Psychology and upon his first philosophic papers. It should be explained with reference to two of them, that he then considered Charles Renouvier and Shadworth Hodgson to be the most important contributors to contemporary philosophic discussion. They were both somewhat older men than himself, Renouvier being, in fact, twenty-seven years older, and Hodgson his senior by ten years. He had exchanged letters with Renouvier as early as 1872. In 1881-82 he met and became warmly attached to both men during a winter that he then spent in visiting European universities and in making the acquaintance of a number of the British and Continental colleagues whose writings had interested him. Before he made this particular European trip James had undoubtedly been in a very modest frame of mind about his own equipment for teaching philosophy and psychology, and had also been uncomfortably conscious of the inadequate way in which those subjects were then dealt with in most American colleges. But closer contact with men and methods on the other side of the Atlantic, far from discouraging him or confirming his misgivings, led him, as will appear in the next letter but one, to certain comforting conclusions and confirmed him in his fondness for the liberal atmosphere of Cambridge, and for his place in the brilliant little group who were then building up the Harvard philosophical department.] 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 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. 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 to-day, 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, 1 Being and non-being. 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, Hodgson, whose Time and Space was published in 1865 by Longmans, and whose Theory of Practice in two volumes followed it in 1870. 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 you back yours and Father's letter to me. Alice 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 3rd class 'Nichtraucher' almost always empty and perfectly comfortable. The great use of such experiences is less the definite information you gain from any one, 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 of our Harvard post of observation being more cosmopolitan. Delbœuf in Liége was an angel and much the best teacher I've seen. 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. To Shadworth Hodgson W. J. 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 is n't philosophy a sad mistress, estranging the more intimately those who in all other respects are most intimately united although 't is 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 't is 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. 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 say |