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THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ALICE BoUOHTON, NEW YORK , FE BRUARY 9, 1907
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
EDITED BY HIS SON
HENRY JAMES
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME I
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
s
1*5
V-
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HENRY JAMES
939065
To my Mother,
gallant and devoted ally
of my Father s most arduous
and happy years,
this collection of his letters
is dedicated.
PREFACE
WHETHER William James was compressing his corre
spondence into brief messages, or allowing it to expand into
copious letters, he could not write a page that was not free,
animated, and characteristic. Many of his correspondents
preserved his letters, and examination of them soon showed
that it would be possible to make a selection which should
not only contain certain letters that clearly deserved to be
published because of their readable quality alone, but should
also include letters that were biographical in the best sense.
For in the case of a man like James the biographical question
to be answered is not, as with a man of affairs: How can his
actions be explained? but rather: What manner of being was
he? What were his background and education? and, above
all, What were his temperament and the bias of his mind?
What native instincts, preferences, and limitations of view
did he bring with him to his business of reading the riddle
of the Universe? His own informal utterances throw the
strongest light on such questions.
In these volumes I have attempted to make such a selec
tion. The task has been simplified by the nature of the
material, in which the most interesting letters were often
found, naturally enough, to include the most vivid elements
of which a picture could be composed. I have added such
notes as seemed necessary in the interest of clearness; but
I have tried to leave the reader to his own conclusions.
The work was begun in 1913, but had to be laid aside; and
I should regret the delay in completing it even more than I
do if it were not that very interesting letters have come to
light during the last three years.
Vlll
PREFACE
James was a great reader of biographies himself, and
pointed again and again to the folly of judging a man s ideas
by minute logical and textual examinations, without appre
hending his mental attitude sympathetically. He was well
aware that every man s philosophy is biased by his feelings,
and is not due to purely rational processes. He was quite
incapable himself of the cool kind of abstraction that comes
from indifference about the issue. Life spoke to him in
even more ways than to most men, and he responded to its
superabundant confusion with passion and insatiable curi
osity. His spiritual development was a matter of intense
personal experience.
So students of his books may even find that this collection
of informal and intimate utterances helps them to under
stand James as a philosopher and psychologist.
I have not included letters that are wholly technical or
polemic. Such documents belong in a study of James s
philosophy, or in a history of its origin and influence. How
ever interesting they might be to certain readers, their ap
propriate place is not here.
A good deal of biographical information about William
James, his brother Henry, and their father has already been
given to the public; but unfortunately it is scattered, and
much of it is cast in a form which calls for interpretation or
amendment. The elder Henry James left an autobiograph
ical fragment which was published in a volume of his " Lit
erary Remains," but it was composed purely as a religious
record. He wrote it in the third person, as if it were the
life of one "Stephen Dewhurst," and did not try to give a
circumstantial report of his youth or ancestry. Later, his
son Henry wrote two volumes of early reminiscences in his
turn. In "A Small Boy and Others" and "Notes of a Son
and Brother" he reproduced the atmosphere of a household
PREFACE
IX
of which he was the last survivor, and adumbrated the fig
ures of Henry James, Senior, and of certain other members
of his family with infinite subtlety at every turn of the page.
But he too wrote without much attention to particular facts
or the sequence of events, and his two volumes were in
complete and occasionally inaccurate with respect to such
details.
Accordingly I have thought it advisable to restate parts
of the family record, even though the restatement involves
some repetition.
Finally, I should explain that the letters have been repro
duced verbatim, though not literatim, except for superscrip
tions, which have often been simplified. As respects spell
ing and punctuation, the manuscripts are not consistent.
James wrote rapidly, used abbreviations, occasionally "sim
plified" his spelling, and was inclined to use capital letters
only for emphasis. Thus he often followed the French cus
tom of writing adjectives derived from proper names with
small letters e.g. french literature, european affairs. But
when he wrote for publication he was too considerate of
his reader s attention to distract it with such petty irregu
larities; therefore unimportant peculiarities of orthography
have generally not been reproduced in this book. On the
other hand, the phraseology of the manuscripts, even where
grammatically incomplete, has been kept. Verbal changes
have not been made except where it was clear that there had
been a slip of the pen, and clear what had been intended.
It is obvious that rhetorical laxities are to be expected in
letters written as these were. No editor who has attempted
to "improve away" such defects has ever deserved to be
thanked.
Acknowledgments are due, first of all, to the correspond
ents who have generously supplied letters. Several who
x PREFACE
were most generous and to whom I am most indebted have,
alas! passed beyond the reach of thanks. I wish particu
larly to record my gratitude here to correspondents too
numerous to be named who have furnished letters that are
not included. Such material, though omitted from the
book, has been informing and helpful to the Editor. One
example may be cited the copious correspondence with
Mrs. James which covers the period of every briefest separa
tion; but extracts from this have been used only when other
letters failed. From Dr. Dickinson S. Miller, from Professor
R. B. Perry, from my mother, from my brother William, and
from my wife, all of whom have seen the material at different
stages of its preparation, I have received many helpful sug
gestions, and I gratefully acknowledge my special debt to
them. President Eliot, Dr. Miller, and Professor G. H.
Palmer were, each, so kind as to send me memoranda of their
impressions and recollections. I have embodied parts of
the memoranda of the first two in my notes; and have quoted
from Professor Palmer s minute about to appear in the
" Harvard Graduates Magazine." For all information about
William James s Barber ancestry I am indebted to the genea
logical investigations of Mrs. Russell Hastings. Special
acknowledgments are due to Mr. George B. Ives, who has
prepared the topical index.
Finally, I shall be grateful to anyone who will, at any
time, advise me of the whereabouts of any letters which I
have not already had an opportunity to examine.
H. J.
August, 1920.
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION 1-30
Ancestry Henry James, Senior Youth Ed
ucation Certain Personal Traits.
II. 1861-1864 31-52
Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Law
rence Scientific School.
LETTERS:
To his Family 33
To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Em
met) . . 37
To his Family 40
To Katharine James Prince ..... 43
To his Mother 45
To his Sister 49
III. 1864-1866 . . 53-70
The Harvard Medical School With Louis Agas-
siz to the Amazon.
LETTERS:
To his Mother 56
To his Parents 57
To his Father 60
To his Father 64
To his Parents 67
iv. 1866-1867 71-83
Medical Studies at Harvard.
LETTERS :
To Thomas W. Ward ... 73
rii CONTENTS
To Thomas W. Ward . . . . j6
To his Sister . . - 79
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. . . 82
V. 1867-1868 . . . 84-139
Eighteen Months in Germany.
LETTERS :
To his Parents ... 86
To his Mother . . 9 2
To his Father . 95
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. . . 98
To Henry James . . 103
To his Sister .... 108
To his Sister 115
To Thomas W. Ward . 118
To Thomas W. Ward 119
To Henry P. Bowditch 120
To O. W. Holmes, Jr 124
To Thomas W. Ward 127
To his Father 133
To Henry James 136
To his Father . ...... 137
VI. 1869-1872 140-164
Invalidism in Cambridge.
LETTERS:
To Henry P. Bowditch 149
To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr. . 151
To Thomas W. Ward 152
To Henry P. Bowditch 153
To Miss Mary Tappan 156
To Henry James . 157
To Henry P. Bowditch . .... 158
CONTENTS xiii
To Henry P. Bowditch 161
* To Charles Renouvier 163
VII. 1872-1878 165-191
First Years of Teaching.
LETTERS:
To Henry James .... 167
[Henry James, Senior, to Henry James] . 169
To his Family i? 2
To his Sister i?4
To his Sister . . i?5
To his Sister i?7
To Henry James 180
To Miss Theodora Sedgwick . . . . 181
To Henry James ... 182
To Henry James .... 183
To Charles Renouvier . 186
VIII. 1878-1883 192-222
Marriage Contract for the Psychology Euro
pean Colleagues Death of his Parents.
LETTERS:
To Francis J. Child . 196
To Miss Frances R. Morse . . 19?
To Mrs. James ... 199
To Josiah Royce .... .202
To Josiah Royce .... .204
To Charles Renouvier ... .206
To Charles Renouvier ... .207
To Mrs. James ... .210
To Mrs. James 2I1
To Henry James
To his Father . .218
To Mrs. James 221
XVI
CONTENTS
To James J. Putnam 3 26
To Miss Grace Ashburner . . 3 28
To Josiah Royce . 33 1
To Miss Grace Norton . 335
To Miss Margaret Gibbens 33 8
To Francis Boott ... 34
To Henry James . 34 2
To Francois Pillon ... -343
To Shadworth H. Hodgson . . 343
To Dickinson S. Miller . . . -344
To Henry James 34 6
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
William James ...... Frontispiece
Henry James, Sr., and his Wife .... 8
William James at eighteen ..... 20
Pencil Sketch : A Sleeping Dog . . . . 52
Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book : A Turtle 66
Pencil Sketch: Retreating Figure of a Man . . 83
William James at twenty-five . . 86
Pencil Sketches from a Pocket Note-Book . . 108
Pencil Sketch: An Elephant . . . . 139
Francis James Child . . . . . . 291
DATES AND FAMILY NAMES
1842. January n. Born in New York.
1 857-58. At School in Boulogne.
1859-60. In Geneva.
1 860-61 . Studied painting under William M. Hunt in Newport.
1861. Entered the Lawrence Scientific School.
1863. Entered the Harvard Medical School.
1865-66. Assistant under Louis Agassiz on the Amazon.
1867-68. Studied medicine in Germany.
1869. M.D. Harvard.
1873-76. Instructor in Anatomy and Physiology in Harvard
College.
1875. Began to give instruction in Psychology.
1876. Assistant Professor of Physiology.
1878. Married. Undertook to write a treatise on Psy
chology.
1880. Assistant Professor of Philosophy.
1882-83. Spent several months visiting European universi
ties and colleagues.
1885. Professor of Philosophy. (Between 1889 and 1897
his title was Professor of Psychology.)
1890. "Principles of Psychology" appeared.
1892-93. European travel.
1897. Published "The Will to Believe and other Essays
on Popular Philosophy."
1899. Published "Talks to Teachers," etc.
1899-1902. Broke down in health. Two years in Europe.
1901-1902. Gifford Lectures. "The Varieties of Religious Ex
perience."
1906. Acting Professor for half-term at Stanford Univer
sity. (Interrupted by San Francisco earthquake.)
XX
DATES AND FAMILY NAMES
1906. Lowell Institute lectures, subsequently published as
"Pragmatism."
1907. Resigned all active duties at Harvard.
1908. Hibbert lectures at Manchester College, Oxford;
subsequently published as "A Pluralistic Universe."
1910. August 26. Died at Chocorua, N.H.
(See Appendix in volume II for a full list of books by William James, with their
dates.)
William James was the eldest of five children. His brothers
and sister, with their dates, were: Henry (referred to as "Harry"),
1843-1916; Garth Wilkinson (referred to as "Wilky"), 1845-
1883; Robertson (referred to as "Bob" and "Bobby"), 1846-
1910; Alice, 1848-1892.
He had five children. Their dates and the names by which
they are referred to in the letters are: Henry ("Harry"), 1879;
William ("Billy"), 1882; Hermann, 1884-1885; Margaret Mary
("Peggy," "Peg"), 1887; Alexander Robertson ("Tweedie,"
"Francois"), 1890.
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
I
INTRODUCTION
Ancestry Henry James ^ Senior Youth Education
Certain Personal Traits
THE ancestors of William James, with the possible ex
ception of one pair of great-great-grandparents, all came to
America from Scotland or Ireland during the eighteenth
century, and settled in the eastern part of New York State
or in New Jersey. One Irish forefather is known to have
been descended from Englishmen who had crossed the Irish
Channel in the time of William of Orange, or thereabouts;
but whether the others who came from Ireland were more
English or Celtic is not clear. In America all his ancestors
were Protestant, and they appear, without exception, to
have been people of education and character. In the several
communities in which they settled they prospered above the
average. They became farmers, traders, and merchants,
and, so far as has yet been discovered, there were only two
lawyers, and no doctors or ministers, among them. They
seem to have been reckoned as pious people, and several
of their number are known to have been generous sup
porters of the churches in which they worshiped; but,
if one may judge by the scanty records which remain, there
2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
is no one among them to whom one can point as foreshadow
ing the inclination to letters and religious speculation that
manifested itself strongly in William James and his father.
They were mainly concerned to establish themselves in a
new country. Inasmuch as they succeeded, lived well,
and were respected, it is likely that they possessed a fair
endowment of both the imagination and the solid qualities
that one thinks of as appropriately combined in the colonists
who crossed the ocean in the eighteenth century and did
well in the new country. But, as to many of them, it is
impossible to do more than presume this, and impossible to
carry presumption any farther.
The last ancestor to arrive in America was William
James s paternal grandfather. This grandfather, whose
name was also William James, came from Bally-James-
Duff, County Cavan, in the year 1789. He was then
eighteen years old. He may have left home because his
family tried to force him into the ministry, for there is a
story to that effect, or he may have had more adventurous
reasons. But in any case he arrived in a manner which
tradition has cherished as wholly becoming to a first Amer
ican ancestor with a very small sum of money, a Latin
grammar in which he had already made some progress at
home, and a desire to visit the -field of one of the revolu
tionary battles. He promptly disposed of his money in
making this visit. Then, finding himself penniless in
Albany, he took employment as clerk in a store. He worked
his way up rapidly; traded on his own account, kept a store,
traveled and bought land to the westward, engaged as time
went on in many enterprises, among them being the salt
industry of Syracuse (where the principal residential street
bears his name), prospered exceedingly, and amassed a
fortune so large, that after his death it provided a liberal
INTRODUCTION 3
independence for his widow and each of his eleven children.
The imagination and sagacity which enabled him to do this
inevitably involved him in the public affairs of the com
munity in which he lived, although he seems never to have
held political office. Thus his name appears early in the
history of the Erie Canal project; and, when that great
undertaking was completed and the opening of the water
way was celebrated in 1823, he delivered the "oration"
of the day at Albany. It may be found in Munsell s Albany
Collections, and considering what were the fashions of the
time in such matters, ought to be esteemed by a modern
reader for containing more sense and information than
"oratory." He was one of the organizers and the first
Vice-President of the Albany Savings Bank, founded in 1820,
and of the Albany Chamber of Commerce, the President,
in both instances, being Stephen Van Rensselaer. When he
died, in 1832, the New York "Evening Post" said of him:
"He has done more to build up the city [of Albany] than
any other individual."
Two portraits of the first William James have survived,
and present him as a man of medium height, rather portly,
clean-shaven, hearty, friendly, confident, and distinctly Irish.
Unrecorded anecdotes about him are not to be taken
literally, but may be presumed to be indicative. It is told
of him, for instance, that one afternoon shortly after he had
married for the third time, he saw a lady coming up the
steps of his house, rose from the table at which he was
absorbed in work, went to the door and said "he was sorry
Mrs. James was not in." But the poor lady was herself
his newly married wife, and cried out to him not to be "so
absent-minded." He discovered one day that a man with
whom he had gone into partnership was cheating, and im
mediately seized him by the collar and marched him through
4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
the streets to a justice. "When old Billy James came to
Syracuse," said a citizen who could remember his visits,
"things went as he wished."
In his comfortable brick residence on North Pearl Street
he kept open house and gave a special welcome to members
of the Presbyterian ministry. One of his sons said of him:
"He was certainly a very easy parent weakly, nay pain
fully sensitive to his children s claims upon his sympathy."
"The law of the house, within the limits of religious decency,
was freedom itself." 1 Indeed, there appears to have been
only one matter in which he was rigorous with his family:
his Presbyterianism was of the stiffest kind, and in his old
age he sacrificed even his affections for what he considered
the true faith. Theological differences estranged him from
two of his sons, William and Henry, and though the old
man became reconciled to one of them a few days before
his death, he left a will which would have cut them both
off with small annuities if its elaborate provisions had been
sustained by the Court.
In 1803 William James married (his third wife) Catherine
Barber, 2 a daughter of John Barber, of Montgomery, Orange
County, New York. The Barbers had been active people
in the affairs of their day. Catherine s grandfather had
been a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and her father
1 Literary Remains of Henry James, p. 151.
1 Henry James (in A Small Boy and Others, p. 5) says of Catherine Barber; "She
represented for us in our generation the only English blood that of both her own
parents flowing in our veins." She may well have seemed to her grandson to
be of a different type from other members of the family, who were more recently,
and doubtless obviously, Irish or Scotch; but the statement is incorrect. John
Barber was the son of Patrick Barber, who came from Longford County, Ireland,
about 1750 and settled at Neelytown near Newburgh (after having lived in New
York City and Princeton) about 1764, and of Jannet Rhea (or Rea) whose parents
were well-to-do people in old Shawangunk in 1790. Whatever may have been the
previous history of the Rhea family, their name does not suggest an English origin.
Both Patrick Barber and Matthew Rhea were pillars of Goodwill Presbyterian
Church in Montgomery,
INTRODUCTION 5
and her two uncles were all officers in the Revolutionary
Army. One of the uncles, Francis Barber, had previously
graduated from Princeton and had conducted a boarding-
school for boys at "Elizabethtown," New Jersey, at which
Alexander Hamilton prepared for college. During the war
he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, was detailed by
Washington to be one of Steuben s four aides, and performed
other staff-duties. John, Catherine s father, returned to
Montgomery after the Revolution, was one of the founders
of Montgomery Academy, an associate judge of the County
Court, a member of the state legislature, and a church elder
for fifty years. In Henry James, Senior s, reminiscences
there is a passage which describes him as an old man, much
addicted to the reading of military history, and which con
trasts his stoicism with his wife s warm and spontaneous
temperament and her exceptional gift of interesting her
grandchildren in conversation. 1
In the same reminiscences Catherine Barber herself is
described as having been "a good wife and mother, nothing
else save, to be sure, a kindly friend and neighbor" and
" the most democratic person by temperament I ever knew." a
She adopted the three children of her husband s prior mar
riages and, by their own account, treated them no differently
1 See Literary Remains, p. 149.
3 If the reader were familiar, as he cannot be presumed to have been, with the
elder Henry James or his writings, he would be in no danger of rinding anything
cold or qualifying in these words, but would discern a true adoration expressing
itself in a way that was peculiarly characteristic of their writer. For Henry James,
Senior, a spiritual democracy deeper than that of our political jargon was not a
mere conception: it was an unquestioned reality. The outer wrappings in which
people swathed their souls excited him to anger and ridicule more often than praise;
but when men or women seemed to him beautiful or adorable he thought it was
because they betrayed more naturally than others the inward possession of that
humble "social" spirit which he wanted to think of as truly a common possession
God s equal gift to each and all. To say of his mother that that could be felt
in her, that she was merely that, was his purest praise. The reader may find this
habit of his thought expressing itself anew in William James by turning to a letter
on page 210 below. That letter might have been written by Henry James, Senior.
6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
from the five sons and three daughters whom she herself
bore and brought up. She managed her husband s large
house during his lifetime, and for twenty-seven years after
his death kept it open as a home for children, and grand
children, and cousins as well. This "dear gentle lady of
many cares" must have been a woman of sound judgment
in addition to being an embodiment of kindness and generos
ity in all things; for admiration as well as affection and grat
itude still attend her memory after the lapse of sixty years.
The next generation, eleven in number as has already
been said, 1 may well have given their widowed mother
"many cares." It had been the purpose of the first William
James to provide that his children (several of whom were
under age when he died) should qualify themselves by in
dustry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony which
he expected to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left
a will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and
instructions. He showed thereby how great were both his
confidence in his own judgment and his solicitude for the
moral welfare of his descendants. But he accomplished
nothing more, for the courts declared the will to be invalid;
and his children became financially independent as fast as
they came of age. Most of them were blessed with a liberal
allowance of that combination of gayety, volubility, and
waywardness which is popularly conceded to the Irish;
but these qualities, which made them "charming" and
"interesting" to their contemporaries, did not keep them
from dissipating both respectable talents and unusual op
portunities. Two of the men William, namely, who
became an eccentric but highly respected figure in the Pres
byterian ministry, and Henry of whom more will be said
1 The places of two of the eleven who died early were taken by their orphaned
children.
INTRODUCTION 7
shortly possessed an ardor of intellect that neither dis
aster nor good fortune could corrupt. But on the whole
the personalities and histories of that generation were such
as to have impressed the boyish mind of the writer of the
following letters and of his younger brother like a richly
colored social kaleidoscope, dashed, as the patterns changed
and disintegrated, with amusing flashes of light and occa
sional dark moments of tragedy. After they were all dead
and gone, the memory of them certainly prompted the
author of "The Wings of a Dove" when he described Minny
Theale s New York forebears as "an extravagant, unregu
lated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead
cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all
busts and curls," to have known whom and to have be
longed to whom "was to have had one s small world-space
both crowded and enlarged."
It is unnecessary, however, to pause over any but one
member of that generation.
Henry James, the second son of William and Catherine,
was born in 1811. He was apparently a boy of unusual
activity and animal spirits, but at the age of thirteen he
met with an accident which maimed him for life. He was,
at the time, a schoolboy at the Albany Academy, and one
of his fellow students, Mr. Woolsey Rogers Hopkins, wrote
the following account of what happened. (The Professor
Henry referred to was Joseph Henry, later the head of the
Smithsonian Institute.)
"On a summer afternoon, the older students would meet
Professor Henry in the Park, in front of the Academy, where
amusements and instruction would be given in balloon-
flying, the motive power being heated air supplied from a
tow ball saturated with spirits of turpentine. When one
8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
of these air-ships took fire, the ball would be dropt for the
boys, when it was kicked here and there, a roll of fire. [One
day when] young James had a sprinkling of this [turpentine]
on his pantaloons, one of these balls was sent into the open
window of Mrs. Gilchrist s stable. [James], thinking only
of conflagration, rushed to the hayloft and stamped out the
flame, but burned his leg."
The boy was confined to his bed for the next two years,
and one leg was twice amputated above the knee. He
was robust enough to survive this long and dire experience
of the surgery of the eighteen-twenties, and to establish
right relations with the world again; but thereafter he could
live conveniently only in towns where smooth footways and
ample facilities for transportation were to be had.
In 1830 he graduated from Union College, Schenectady,
and in 1835 entered the Princeton Theological Seminary
with the class of 39. By the time he had completed two
years of his Seminary course, his discontent with the ortho
dox dispensation was no longer to be doubted. He left
Princeton, and the truth seems to be that he had already con
ceived some measure of the antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms
which he expressed with abounding scorn and irony through
out all his later years.
In 1840 he married Mary Walsh, the sister of a fellow
student at Princeton, who had shared his religious doubts
and had, with him, turned his back on the ministry and left
the Seminary. She was the daughter of James and Mary
(Robertson) Walsh of New York City, and was thus de
scended from Hugh Walsh, an Irishman of English extrac
tion who came from Killingsley, 1 County Down, in 1764,
and settled himself finally near Newburgh, and from Alex-
1 According to the Rev. Hugh Walsh of Newburgh, who has worked out the
Walsh genealogy. A Small Boy and Others (page 6) says " Killyleagh."
INTRODUCTION 9
ander Robertson, a Scotchman who came to America not
long before the Revolution and whose name is borne by the
school of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York
City. Mary Walsh was a gentle lady, who accommodated
her life to all her husband s vagaries and presided with cheer
ful indulgence over the development of her five children s
divergent and uncompromising personalities. She lived
entirely for her husband and children, and they, joking her
and teasing her and adoring her, were devoted to her in
return. Several contemporaries left accounts of their im
pressions of her husband without saying much about her;
and this was natural, for she was not self-assertive and was
inevitably eclipsed by his richly interesting presence. But
it is all the more unfortunate that her son Henry, who might
have done justice, as no one else could, to her good sense
and to the grace of her mind and character, could not bring
himself to include an adequate account of her in the " Small
Boy and Others." To a reader who ventured to regret the
omission, he replied sadly, "Oh! my dear Boy that
memory is too sacred!" William James spoke of her very
seldom after her death, but then always with a sort of tender
reverence that he vouchsafed to no one else. She supplied
an element of serenity and discretion to the councils of the
family of which they were often in need; and it would not
be a mistake to look to her in trying to account for the
unusual receptivity of mind and aesthetic sensibility that
marked her two elder sons.
During the three or four years that followed his marriage
Henry James, Senior, appears to have spent his time in
Albany and New York. In the latter city, in the old, or
then new, Astor House, his eldest son was born on the
eleventh of January, 1842. He named the boy William,
and a few days later brought his friend R. W. Emerson to
io LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
admire and give his blessing to the little philosopher-to-be. 1
Shortly afterwards the family moved into a house at No. 2
Washington Place, and there, on April 15, 1843, the second
son, Henry, came into the world. There was thus a dif
ference of fifteen months in the ages of W 7 illiam and the
younger brother, who was also to become famous and who
figures largely in the correspondence that follows.
William James derived so much from his father and
resembled him so strikingly in many ways that it is worth
while to dwell a little longer on the character, manners, and
beliefs of the elder Henry James. He was not only an
impressive and all-pervading presence in the early lives of
his children, but always continued to be for them the most
vivid and interesting personality who had crossed the
horizon of their experience. He was their constant com
panion, and entered into their interests and poured out his
own ideas and emotions before them in a way that would
not have been possible to a nature less spontaneous and
affectionate.
His books, written in a style which "to its great dignity
of cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort
of inward palpitating human quality, gracious and tender,
precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by turns, recalling the
rich vascular temperament of the old English masters
rather than that of an American of today," 2 reveal him
richly to anyone who has a taste for theological reading.
His philosophy is summarized in the introduction to "The
Literary Remains," and his own personality and the very
atmosphere of his household are reproduced in "A Small
Boy and Others," and "Notes of a Son and Brother."
Thus what it is appropriate to say about him in this place
1 A Small Boy and Others, p. 8.
3 Literary Remains of Henry James, Introduction, p. 9.
INTRODUCTION n
can be given largely in either his own words or those of one
or the other of his two elder sons.
The intellectual quandary in which Henry James, Senior,
found himself in early manhood was well described in let
ters to Emerson in 1842 and 1843. "Here I am," he wrote,
"these thirty-two years in life, ignorant in all outward
science, but having patient habits of meditation, which
never know disgust or weariness, and feeling a force of
impulsive love toward all humanity which will not let me
rest wholly mute, a force which grows against all resistance
that I can muster against it. What shall I do? Shall I
get me a little nook in the country and communicate with
my living kind not my talking kind by life only; a
word perhaps of that communication, a fit word once a
year? Or shall I follow some commoner method learn
science and bring myself first into man s respect, that I
may thus the better speak to him? I confess this last
theory seems rank with earthliness to belong to days
forever past. ... I am led, quite without any conscious
wilfulness either, to seek the laws of these appearances
that swim round us in God s great museum to get hold
of some central facts which may make all other facts prop
erly circumferential, and orderly so and you continually
dishearten me by your apparent indifference to such law
and central facts, by the dishonor you seem to cast on our
intelligence, as if it stood much in our way. Now my con
viction is that my intelligence is the necessary digestive
apparatus for my life; that there is nihil in vita worth
anything, that is quod non prius in intellectu. . . . Oh,
you man without a handle! Shall one never be able to
help himself out of you, according to his needs, and be de
pendent only upon your fitful tippings-up?" x
1 See, further, Notes of a Son and Brother, pp. 1 8 1 et seq .
12 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
To a modern ear these words confess not only the mental
isolation and bewilderment of their author, but also the
rarity of the atmosphere in which his philosophic impulse
was struggling to draw breath. Like many other strug
gling spirits of his time, he fell into a void between two
epochs. He was a theologian too late to repose on the dog
mas and beliefs that were accepted by the preceding gen
eration and by the less critical multitude of his own con
temporaries. He was, in youth, a skeptic too early to
avail himself of the methods, discoveries, and perspectives
which a generation of scientific inquiry conferred upon his
children. The situation was one which usually resolved it
self either into permanent skepticism or a more or less un
reasoning conformity. In the case of Henry James there
happened ere long one of those typical spiritual crises in
which "man s original optimism and self-satisfaction get
leveled with the dust." x
While he was still struggling out of his melancholy state
a friend introduced him to the works of Swedenborg. By
their help he found the relief he needed, and a faith that
possessed him ever after with the intensity of revelation.
"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." So wrote his son after he
had died. 2 He never achieved a truly philosophic for
mulation of his religious position, and Mr. Howells once
complained that he had written a book about the "Secret
of Swedenborg" and had kept it. He concerned himself
with but one question, conveyed but one message; and
the only business of his later life was the formulation and
l Society of the Redeemed Form of Man, quoted in the Introduction to Literary
Remains, p. 57, et seq.
3 Letter to Shadworth H. Hodgson, p. 241 infra.
INTRODUCTION 13
serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and per
sonal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of
man s proper relation to him. "The usual problem is
given the creation to find the Creator. To Mr. James it
[was] given the Creator to find the creation. God is; of
His being there is no doubt; but who and what are we?"
So said a critic quoted in the Introduction to the "Literary
Remains," and William James s own estimate may be
quoted from the same place (page 12). "I have often," he
wrote "tried to imagine what sort of a figure my father
might have made, had he been born in a genuinely theo
logical age, with the best minds about him fermenting with
the mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions
and theories and counter-theories, and strenuous reasoning
and contentions, about God s relation to mankind. Floated
on such a congenial tide, furthered by sympathetic com
rades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by pas
sionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have
developed his resources in many ways which, as it was, he
never tried; and he would have played a prominent, per
haps a momentous and critical, part in the struggles of his
time, for he was a religious prophet and genius, if ever
prophet and genius there were. He published an intensely
positive, radical, and fresh conception of God, and an
intensely vital view of our connection with him. And
nothing shows better the altogether lifeless and unintel-
lectual character of the professional theism of our time,
than the fact that this view, this conception, so vigorously
thrown down, should not have stirred the faintest tremula-
tion on its stagnant pool."
The reader will readily infer that there was nothing con
ventional, prim, or parson-like about this man. The fact
is that the devoutly religious mind is often quite anarchic
i 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
in its disregard of all those worldly institutions and con
ventions which do not express human dependence on the
Creator. Henry James, Senior, dealt with such things in
the most allusive and paradoxical terms. " I would rather,"
he once ejaculated, "have a son of mine corroded with all
the sins of the Decalogue than have him perfect!" His
prime horror, writes Henry James, was of prigs; "he only
cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself;
and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality
than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversa
tion, of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest
reaction from the literal. The literal played in our educa
tion as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we
wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank
contradictions. . . . The moral of all was that we need
never fear not to be good enough if we were only social
enough; a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the
latter term. Thus we had ever the amusement, since I
can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or mor-
alism, as it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in
the very interest of character and conduct; these things
suffering much, it seemed, by their association with con
science the very home of the literal, the haunt of so many
pedantries." z
The erroneous statement that has become current, and
that describes Henry James, Senior, as a Swedenborgian
minister, is a rich absurdity to anyone who knew him or his
writings. Not only had the churches in general sold them
selves to the devil, in his view, but the arch-sinners in this
respect were the Swedenborgian congregations, for they, if
any, might be expected to know better. A letter which he
wrote to the editor of the "New Jerusalem Messenger,"
1 A Small Boy and Others, p. 216.
INTRODUCTION 15
in 1863, illustrates this and tells more about him than could
ten pages of description:
DEAR SIR, You were good enough, when I called on
you at Mr. Appleton s request in New York, to say among
other friendly things that you would send me your paper;
and I have regularly received it ever since. I thank you
for your kindness, but my conscience refuses any longer to
sanction its taxation in this way, as I have never been abk
to read the paper with any pleasure, nor therefore of course
with any profit. I presume its editorials are by you, and
while I willingly seized upon every evidence they display
of an enlarged spirit, I yet find the general drift of the
paper so very poverty-stricken in a spiritual regard, as to
make it absolutely the least nutritive reading I know.
The old sects are notoriously bad enough, but your sect
compares with these very much as a heap of dried cod on
Long Wharf in Boston compares with the same fish while
still enjoying the freedom of the Atlantic Ocean. I remem
ber well the manly strain of your conversation with me in
New York, and I know therefore how you must suffer from
the control of persons so unworthy as those who have the
property of your paper. Why don t you cut the whole
concern at once, as a rank offence to every human hope
and aspiration? The intercourse I had some years since
with the leaders of the sect, on a visit to Boston, made me
fully aware of their deplorable want of manhood; but
judging from your paper, the whole sect seems spiritually
benumbed. Your mature men have an air of childishness
and your young men have the aspect of old women. I
find it hard above all to imagine the existence of a living
woman in the bounds of your sect, whose breasts flow with
milk instead of hardening with pedantry. I know such
16 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
things are of course, but I tell you frankly that these are
the sort of questions your paper forces on the unsophisti
cated mind. I really know nothing so sad and spectral in
the shape of literature. It seems composed by skeletons
and intended for readers who are content to disown their
good flesh and blood, and be moved by some ghastly mech
anism. It cannot but prove very unwholesome to you
spiritually, to be so nearly connected with all that sadness
and silence, where nothing more musical is heard than the
occasional jostling of bone by bone. Do come out of it
before you wither as an autumn leaf, which no longer rustles
in full- veined life on the pliant bough, but rattles instead
with emptiness upon the frozen melancholy earth.
Pardon my freedom; I was impressed by your friendli
ness towards me, and speak to you therefore in return with
all the frankness of friendship.
Consider me as having any manner and measure of dis
respect for your ecclesiastical pretensions, but as being
personally, yours cordially, H T AMES r
A diary entry made by his daughter Alice has fortunately
been preserved. "A week before Father died," says this
entry, " I asked him one day whether he had thought what
he should like to have done about his funeral. He was
immediately very much interested, not having apparently
thought of it before; he reflected for some time, and then
said with the greatest solemnity and looking so majestic:
Tell him to say only this: "Here lies a man, who has
thought all his life that the ceremonies attending birth,
marriage and death were all damned non-sense." Don t
let him say a word more!"
Henry James, Senior, lived entirely with his books, his
1 Vide also a passage in the Literary Remains > at p. 104.
INTRODUCTION 17
pen, his family, and his friends. The first three he could
carry about with him, and did carry along on numerous
restless and extended journeys. From friends, even when
he left them on the opposite side of the ocean, he was never
quite separated, for he always maintained a wide corre
spondence, partly theological, partly playful and friendly.
He was so sociable and so independent and lively a talker,
that he entered into hearty relations with interesting people
wherever he went. Thackeray was a familiar visitor at
his apartment in Paris when his older children were just old
enough to remember, and his recollections of Carlyle and
Emerson will reward any reader whose appetite does not
carry him as far as the theological disquisitions. "I sup
pose there was not in his day," said E. L. Godkin, "a more
formidable master of English style." x In his conversation
the winning impulsiveness of both his humor and his indig
nation appeared more clearly even than in his writing. He
loved to talk, not for the sake of oppressing his hearer by
an exposition of his own views, but in order to stir him up
and rouse him to discussion and rejoinder. At home he
was not above espousing the queerest of opinions, if by so
doing he could excite his children to gallop after him and
ride him down. "Meal-times in that pleasant home were
exciting. The adipose and affectionate Wilky, as his
father called him, would say something and be instantly
corrected or disputed by the little cock-sparrow Bob, the
youngest, but good-naturedly defend his statement, and
then Henry (Junior) would emerge from his silence in de
fence of Wilky. Then Bob would be more impertinently
insistent, and Mr. James would advance as Moderator, and
William, the eldest, join in. The voice of the Moderator
presently would be drowned by the combatants and he
*Lifc of E. L. Godkin, vol. n, p. 218. New York, 1907.
1 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
soon came down vigorously into the arena, and when, in the
excited argument, the dinner-knives might not be absent
from eagerly gesticulating hands, dear Mrs. James, more
conventional, but bright as well as motherly, would look at
me, laughingly reassuring, saying, Don t be disturbed;
they won t stab each other. This is usual when the boys
come home. And the quiet little sister ate her dinner,
smiling, close to the combatants. Mr. James considered
this debate, within bounds, excellent for the boys. In their
speech singularly mature and picturesque, as well as vehe
ment, the Gaelic (Irish) element in their descent always
showed. Even if they blundered, they saved themselves
by wit." J It was certainly to their father s talk, to the
influence of his "full and homely" idiom, and to the atten
tion-arresting whimsicality and humor with which he per
verted the whole vocabulary of theology and philosophy,
that both William and Henry owed much of their own
wealth of resource in ordinary speech. They used often to
exaggerate their father s tricks of utterance, for he would
have been the last man to refuse himself as a whetstone for
his children s wit, and the business of outdoing the head of
the family in the matter of language was an exercise familiar
to all his sons. 2 Whoever knew them will remember that
their everyday diction displayed a natural command of such
1 Early Years of the Saturday Club; E. W. Emerson s chapter on Henry James,
Senior, p. 328. There follows a delightful account of a "Conversation" at R. W.
Emerson s house in Concord, at which Henry James, Senior, upset a prepared dis
course of Alcott s and launched himself into an attack on "Morality." Whereupon
Miss Mary Moody Emerson, "eighty-four years old and dressed underneath with
out doubt, in her shroud," seized him by the shoulders and shook him and rebuked
him. "Mr. James beamed with delight and spoke with most chivalrous courtesy
to this Deborah bending over him."
2 Some passages in William James s early letters to his family might seem
labored. They should be read with this in mind. An especially high-sounding
phrase or a flight into a grand style was understood as a signal meaning "fun,"
and such passages are never to be taken as serious.
INTRODUCTION 19
words and figures as most men cannot use gracefully except
when composing with pen in hand.
Finally, with respect to the constancy of Henry James,
Senior s, presence in the lives of his children, it should be
made clear that he never had any "business" or profession
to interfere with "his almost eccentrically home-loving
habit." During the years of moving about Europe, during
the quiet years in Newport, the family was thrown upon
its inner social resources. The children were constantly
with their parents and with each other, and they continued
all their lives to be united by much stronger attachments
than usually exist between members of one family.
William James never acknowledged himself as feeling
particularly indebted to any of the numerous schools and
tutors to whom his father s oscillations between New York,
Europe, and Newport confided him. He was sent first to
private schools in New York City; but they seem to have
been considered inadequate to his needs, for he was not
allowed to remain long in any one. Nor were the changes
any less frequent after the family moved to Europe (for
the second time since his birth) in 1855. He was then
thirteen years old. The exact sequence of events during
the next five years of restless movement cannot be deter
mined now, but the important points are clear. The
family, including by this time three younger brothers and
a younger sister as well as a devoted maternal aunt, re
mained abroad from 1855 to 1858. London, Paris, Bou-
logne-sur-Mer, and Geneva harbored them for differing
periods. In London and Paris governesses, tutors, and a
private school of the sort that admits the irregularly educated
children of strangers visiting the Continent, administered
what must have been a completely discontinuous instruc-
20 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
tion. In Boulogne, William and his younger brother Henry
attended the College through the winter of 1857-58. This
term at the College de Boulogne, during which he passed his
sixteenth birthday, was his earliest experience of thorough
teaching, and he once said that it gave him his first concep
tion of earnest work. Then, after a year at Newport, there
was another European migration this time to Geneva for
the winter of 1859-60. There William was entered at the
"Academy," as the present University was still called. He
subsequently described himself as having reached Geneva
" a miserable, home-bred, obscure little ignoramus." During
the following summer he was sent for a while to Bonn-am-
Rhein, to learn German. Some Latin, mathematics to the
extent of the usual school algebra and trigonometry, a
smattering of German and an excellent familiarity with
French such, in conventional terms, was the net result
of his education in 1859. He tried to make up for the de-
ficiences in his schooling, and as occasion offered he picked
up a few words of Greek, attained to a moderate reading
knowledge of Italian, and a quite complete command of
German. But these came later.
He seldom referred to his schooling with anything but
contempt, and usually dismissed all reference to it by say
ing that he "never had any." But, as is often the case with
even those boys who follow a regular curriculum, his amuse
ments and excursions beyond the bounds of his prescribed
studies did more to develop him appropriately than did any
of his schoolmasters. An interest in exact knowledge
showed itself early. He once recalled a trivial incident
which illustrates this, though he apparently remembered it
because he realized, young as he was when it occurred, that
it grew out of a real difference between the cast of his mind
and the cast of Henry s. As readers of the "Small Boy"
William James at eighteen.
From a Daguerreotype.
INTRODUCTION 21
will remember, Henry, at the ordinarily "tough" age of
ten, was already animated by a secret passion for author
ship, and used to confide his literary efforts to folio sheets,
which he stored in a copy-book and which he tried to con
ceal from his tormenting brother. But William came upon
them, and discovered that on one page Henry had made a
drawing to represent a mother and child clinging to a rock
in the midst of a stormy ocean and that he had inscribed
under it: "The thunder roared and the lightning followed!"
William saw the meteorological blunder immediately; he
fairly pounced upon it, and he tormented the sensitive
romancer about it so unmercifully that the occasion had to
be marked by punishments and the inauguration of a ma
ternal protectorate over the copy-book. About four years
later, when he was fifteen years old, his father bought a
microscope to give him at Christmas. William happened
upon the bill for it in advance, and was hardly able to con
tain his excitement until Christmas day, so portentous
seemed the impending event. Apparently no similar ex
perience ever equalled the intensity of this one. He doubt
less made as good use of the instrument as an unguided boy
could. But though his proclivities were generously indulged,
they were never trained. At Geneva he began to study anat
omy, but there was no regular instruction in osteology; so
he borrowed a copy of Sappey s "Anatomic" and got per
mission to visit the Museum and there examine the human
skeleton by himself.
Clearly, there was profit for him also in the restlessness
which governed his father s movements and which threw
the boy into quickening collision with places, people, and
ideas at a rate at which such contacts are not vouchsafed
to many schoolboys. From so far back as his nineteenth
year (there is no evidence to go by before that) William was
22 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
blessed with an effortless and confirmed cosmopolitanism
of consciousness; and he had attained to an acquaintance
with English and French reviews, books, paintings, and
public affairs which was remarkable not only for its happy
ease, but, in one so young, for its wide range. The letters
which follow show clearly with what expert observation
he responded, all his life, to changes of scene and to the
differences between peoples and environments. The fas
cination of these differences never failed for him when he
traveled, and his letters from abroad give such voluminous
proof of his own addiction to what he somewhat harshly
called "the most barren of exercises, the making of inter
national comparisons," that the problem of the editor is to
control rather than to emphasize the evidence. He began
young to be a wide reader; soon he became a wide reader
in three languages. Above all, he was encouraged early to
trust his own impulse and pursue his own bent. Probably
his active and inquiring intelligence could not have been
permanently cribbed and confined by any schooling, no
matter how narrow and rigorous. But, as nothing was to
be more remarkable about him in his maturity than the easy
assurance with which he passed from one field of inquiry
to another, ignoring conventional bounds and precincts,
never losing his freshness of tone, shedding new light and
encouragement everywhere, so it is impossible not to believe
that the influences and circumstances which combined in his
youth fostered and corroborated his native mobility and de
tachment of mind.
Meanwhile he had one occupation to which no reference
has yet been made, but to which he thought, for a while, of
devoting himself wholly, namely, painting. He began to
draw before he had reached his teens. Henry James said:
"As I catch W. J. s image, from far back, at its most charac-
INTRODUCTION 23
teristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, es
pecially under the lamp-light of the Fourteenth Street back
parlor; and not as with a plodding patience, which I think
would less have affected me, but easily, freely, and, as who
should say, infallibly: always at the stage of finishing off,
his head dropped from side to side and his tongue rubbing
his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him
at all was so to see him the other flights and faculties re
moved him from my view. " x What was an idle amusement
in New York became, when the boy was transferred to
foreign places and cut off from other amusements, a sharp
ener of observation and a resource for otherwise vacant
hours. For when the family of young Americans reached
St. John s Wood, London, and then moved to the Continent,
the two elder boys found little to do at first except to wander
about "in a state of the direst propriety," staring at street
scenes, shop-windows, and such "sights" as they were old
enough to enjoy, and then to buy "water-colors and brushes
with which to bedaub eternal drawing blocks." In Paris
William had better lessons in drawing than he had ever had
elsewhere, and it seems fair to say that he made good use
of his opportunity to educate his eye; saw good pictures;
sketched and copied with zest; and began to show great
aptitude in his own "daubings." From Bonn, later still,
he wrote to his Genevese fellow student Charles Ritter:
" Je me suis pleinement decide a essayer le metier de peintre.
En un an ou deux je saurais si j y suis propre ou non. Si
c est non, il sera facile de reculer. II n y a pas sur la terre
un objet plus deplorable qu un mediant artiste."
He applied himself with energy to art for the following
1 A Small Boy and Others, p. 207.
2 " I have fully decided to try being a painter. I shall know in a year or two
whether I am made to be one. If not, it will be easy to retreat. There s nothing
in the world so despicable as a bad artist." (1860.)
24 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
year at Newport, working daily in the studio of William
Hunt, along with his stimulating young friend, John La
Farge. To what good purpose he had drawn and painted
from boyhood, and to what point he trained his gift that
winter, cannot now be measured and defined in words.
Paper and canvas are the proof of such things, which must
be seen rather than described; and unfortunately only one
canvas and very few drawings have been preserved. In the
"Notes of a Son and Brother," several random sketches are
reproduced which will say much to the discerning critic.
The one canvas that at all indicates the climax of his artistic
effort, the beautiful and simple portrait of his cousin Kath
arine Temple, is also reproduced in the "Notes"; but a
small half-tone gives, alas! only an inadequate impression
of the quality of the painting. The sketches which are
included in the following pages will give an idea of the felicity
of his hand, and of his talent for seeing the living line when
ever he made sketches or notes from life. He threw these
scraps off so easily, valuing them not at all, that few were
kept. Then, before a year had passed (that is to say, in
1861), he had decided not to be a painter after all. There
after what was remarkable was just that he let so genuine a
talent remain completely neglected. Except to record an
observation in the laboratory, to explain the object under
discussion to a student, or to amuse his children, he soon
left pencil and brush quite untouched.
The photographs of James reproduced in this book are
all excellent "likenesses," and one, with his colleague, Royce,
caught an attitude which suggests the alertness that marked
his bearing. He was of medium height (about five feet
eight and one-half inches), and though he was muscular and
compact, his frame was slight and he appeared to be slender
INTRODUCTION 25
in youth, spare in his last years. His carnage was erect
and his tread was firm to the end. Until he was over fifty
he used to take the stairs of his own house two, or even
three, steps at a bound. He moved rapidly, not to say im
patiently, but with an assurance that invested his figure
with an informal sort of dignity. After he strained his heart
in the Adirondacks in 1899 he had to habituate himself to a
moderate pace in walking, but he never learned to make
short movements and movements of unpremeditated re
sponse in a deliberate way. When he drove about the hilly
roads of the Adirondacks or New Hampshire, he was forever
springing in and out of the carriage to ease the horses where
the way was steep. (Indeed it was so intolerable to him to
sit in a carriage while straining beasts pulled it up grade,
that he lost much of his enjoyment of driving when he could
no longer walk up the hills.) Great was his brother Henry s
astonishment at Chocorua, in 1904, to see that he still got
out of a "democrat wagon" by springing lightly from the top
of the wheel. His doctors had cautioned him against such
sudden exertions; but he usually jumped without thinking.
In talking he gesticulated very little, but his face and
voice were unusually expressive. His eyes were of that
not very dark shade whose depth and color changes with
alterations of mood. Mrs. Henry Whitman, who knew
him well and painted his portrait, called them "irascible
blue eyes/ He talked in a voice that was low-pitched
rather than deep an unforgettably agreeable voice, that
was admirable for conversation or a small lecture-room,
although in a very large hall it vibrated and lacked reso
nance. His speech was full of earnest, humorous and tender
cadences.
James was always as informal in his dress as the occasion
permitted. The Norfolk jacket in which he used to lecture
26 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
to his classes invariably figured in college caricatures as
did also his festive neckties. But there was nothing that
disgusted him more than a "loutish" carelessness about
appearances. A friend of old days, describing a first meet
ing with him in the late sixties ejaculated, "He was the
cleanest-looking chap!" There seemed to be no flabby or
unvitalized fibre in him.
People and conversation excited him if too many, or
too long-continued, to the point of irritation and exhaus
tion. If, as was sometimes the case, he was moody and
silent in a small company, it was a sign that he was over
worked and tired out. But when he was roused to vivacity
and floated on the current of congenial discussion, his enun
ciation was rapid, with occasional pauses while he searched
for the right word or figure and pursed his lips as though
helping the word to come. Then he talked spontaneously,
humorously, and often extravagantly, just as he will appear
to have written to his correspondents. Sometimes he was
vehement, but never ponderous; and he never made any
one, no matter how humble, feel that he was trying to
"impress." Men and women of all sorts felt at ease with
him, and anybody who, in Touchstone s phrase, 1 had any
philosophy in him, was soon expounding his private hopes,
faiths, and skepticisms to James with gusto. He was, dis
tinctly, not a man who required a submissive audience to
put him in the vein. A kind of admiring attention that
made him self-conscious was as certain to reduce him to
silence as a manly give and take was sure to bring him out.
It never seemed to occur to him to debate or talk for victory.
In Faculty meetings he spoke seldom, and he spent very
little time on his feet except as called upon when pro
fessional congresses or conferences were thrown open to dis-
1 For James s use of Touchstone s question, see p. 190 infra.
INTRODUCTION 27
cussion. Similarly, he was seldom at his best at large din
ners or formal occasions. His best talk might have been
described by a phrase which he used about his father. It
was pat and intuitive and had a " smiting" quality. He
was never guilty of abusing anecdote, that frequent in
strument of social oppression, but he loved and told a
good story when it would help the discussion along, and
showed a fair gift of mimicry in relating one. 1
Once, in the early days of their acquaintance, Frangois
Pillon, who knew how affectionately James was attached to
Harvard University and Cambridge and who assumed that
he was a New Englander, asked him about the Puritans.
James launched upon a vivacious sketch of their sombre
community, and when he had finished Pillon ejaculated
with mingled solicitude and astonishment: "Alors! pas un
seul bon-vivant parmi vos ancetres!" The story of the
solemn-minded student who stemmed the full tide of a
lecture one day by exclaiming, "But, Doctor, Doctor! to
be serious for a moment ," is already well known.
But what counted for the charm and effect of James s con
versation more than all else was his lively interest in his in
terlocutor and in every fresh idea that developed in talk with
him. He made the other man feel that he had no desire to
pigeon-hole him and dismiss him from further consideration,
but that he rejoiced in him as a fellow creature, unique like
himself and forever fascinating. "How delicious," he cried,
"is the fact that you can t cram individuals under cut-and-
dried heads of classification!" He fell instinctively into the
other man s mental stride while he drew him out about his
.age, occupation, history, family circumstances, theories, prej
udices, and peculiarities. He abounded in sympathy and
1 Cf. Henry James s Life of W. W. Story, vol. n, p. 204, where there is a passage
which sounds reminiscent of the author s father and brother.
28 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
even enthusiasm for the other s personal aims and peculiar
ideals.
His first reaction to a new scene or to fresh contact with
a foreign people was apt to be one of admiration. "How
jolly it looks!" he would exclaim, "and how superior in
such and such ways to that last!" "How good they seem!"
"How sound and worthy to be given its chance to develop
is such a civilization!" Restlessness, discriminating moods,
and a longing for the "simplifications" of home soon fol
lowed; but even when restlessness and homesickness be
came acute, their effect was not permanent. He was no
sooner back in his own home than the peculiar virtues of
the place and people from whom he had fled shone again
as unique and precious to the universe. It was good that
there should be one Oxford, and that it should cling to
every ancient peculiarity without surrendering to the spirit
of the age and good too that there should be one Chau-
tauqua!
For James was perennially "keen" about new things and
future things, about beginnings and promises. His mind
looked forward eagerly. Youth never bored him. Any
thing spontaneous, young, or original was likely to excite
him. And then he would pour out expressions of approval
and acclaim. Brilliant students and young authors were
often "little genuises"; he guessed that they would "pro
duce something very big before long"; they had already
arrived at "an important vision," or had "driven their
spear into the Universe where its ribs are short"; they were
going to make "perhaps the most original contribution to
philosophy that anyone had made for a generation."
It must be admitted that his recognition would occa
sionally have had a happier effect had it been less encour
aging. But he enjoyed being generous and hated to spoil
INTRODUCTION 29
a gift of praise by "stingy" qualifications. He might
have said that the great point was not to let any unique
virtue in a man evaporate or be wasted. At any rate, he
said, that should be seen to in a university. He was quite
unconventional in recognizing originality, and preferred all
the risks involved in hailing potentialities that might never
come to fruition, to a policy of playing safe in his estimates.
Yet on the whole he very seldom "fooled himself." Few
men who have possessed a comparable gift of discovering
special virtues in different individuals have combined with
it so just a sense of what could not be expected of those
same individuals in the way of other virtues.
But there would be danger of misunderstanding if this
trait were mentioned without an important qualification.
The reader will do well, in interpreting any judgment of
James s to consider whether the book, or theory, or man
under consideration was new and unrecognized, or was
already established and secure of a place in men s esteem.
In the former case, especially if there was anything in the
situation to appeal to James s natural "inclination to suc
cor the under-dog," his praise was likely to be extrava
gantly expressed and his reservations were apt to be with
held. In the latter case he was no less certain to give free
rein to his critical discernment. Men who knew him as a
teacher are likely to remember how he encouraged them
in their efforts on the one hand, and on the other how stimu
lating to them and enlarging to their mental horizons were
his free and often destructive comments upon famous books
and illustrious men.
As a teacher at Harvard for thirty-five years, he influ
enced the lives and thoughts of more than a generation of
students who sat in his classes. To many of them he was
an adviser as well as a teacher, and to some he was a life-
jo LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
long friend. Such was the character of his books and
public discourses that people of all sorts and conditions
from outside the University came to him or wrote to him
for encouragement and counsel. The burden of his message
to all was the bracing text which he himself loved and lived
by "Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak
unto thee." He never tried to win disciples, to compel
allegiance to his own doctrines, or to found a school. But
he taught countless young men to love philosophy, and
helped many a troubled soul besides to face the problems of
the universe in an independent and gallant spirit. He helped
them by example as well as by precept, for it was plain to
everyone who knew him or read him that his genius was
ardently adventurous and humane.
II
1861-1864
Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the
Lawrence Scientific School
IN the autumn of 1861 James turned to scientific work,
and began what was to become a lifelong connection with
Cambridge and Harvard University by registering for the
study of chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School.
Among the students who were in the School in his time were
several who were to be his friends and colleagues in later
years Nathaniel S. Shaler, later Professor of Geology
and Dean of the Scientific School, Alexander Agassiz, engi
neer, captain of industry, eminent biologist, and organizer
of the museum that his father had founded, the entomolo
gist Samuel H. Scudder, F. W. Putnam, who afterwards be
came Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and
Anthropology, and Alpheus Hyatt, the palaeontologist, who
was Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at
Harvard for many years before his death in 1902. The
chemical laboratory of the school had just been placed under
the charge of Charles W. Eliot, in 1869 to become Presi
dent Eliot, who writes: "I first came in contact with
William James in the academic year 1861-62. As I was
young and inexperienced, it was fortunate for me that there
were but fifteen students of chemistry in the Scientific
School that year, and that I was therefore able to devote
a good deal of attention to the laboratory work of each
student. The instruction was given chiefly in the labora
tory and was therefore individual. James was a very inter
esting and agreeable pupil, but was not wholly devoted to
32 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1861
the study of Chemistry. During the two years in which
he was registered as a student in Chemistry, his work was
much interfered with by ill-health, or rather by something
which I imagined to be a delicacy of nervous constitution.
His excursions into other sciences and realms of thought
were not infrequent; his mind was excursive, and he liked
experimenting, particularly novel experimenting. ... I re
ceived a distinct impression that he possessed unusual
mental powers, remarkable spirituality, and great personal
charm. 1 This impression became later useful to Harvard
University."
Henry James published many of the few still existing
letters which William wrote during this time in his " Notes
of a Son and Brother." Three of them are among the first
six selected for inclusion here. The fun and extravagance
of these early letters is so full of an intimate raillery that
they should be read in their context in that book, where the
whole family has been made to live again. The first of the
letters that follow was written a few weeks after the opening
of the autumn term in which James began his course in
chemistry. The son of Professor Benjamin Peirce (the
? The following entries occur among some "notes on his students" which Presi
dent Eliot made at the time
"First term, 61 "62, James, W., entered this term, passed examination on
qualitative analysis well."
"Second term, 61-62, James, W., studied quantitative analysis. Irregular
in attendance at laboratory, passed examination on Fownes s Organic Chemistry,
mark 85."
"First term, 6a- 63, James, W., studied quantitative analysis and was toler
ably punctual at recitations till Thanksgiving, when he began an investigation of
the effects of different bread-raising materials on the urine. He worked steadily
on this until the end of the term, mastering the processes, and studying the effect
of yeast on bicarbonate of sodium and bitartrate of potash." The investigation
referred to consisted of experiments of which he himself was the subject.
There is no record for the second term of 1862-63.
President Eliot has generously supplied the Editor with a memorandum on
William James s connection with the College, from which these, and several state
ments below, have been drawn.
Act. 79] TO HIS FAMILY 33
mathematician) of whom it makes mention was the brilliant
but erratic Charles S. Peirce, to whom other references
appear in later letters, and whose name James subsequently
associated with his pragmatism. "Harry," "Wilky" and
"Bobby" will be recognized as William s younger brothers.
Wilky was at the Sanborn School in Concord, thirteen miles
away. Bobby was in Newport, under the parental roof at
13 Kay Street. The Emerson referred to was R. W. Emer
son s son, Edward W. Emerson, and "Tom" Ward, the
Thomas W. Ward of a lifelong friendship and of several
later letters and allusions.
To his Family.
CAMBRIDGE, Sunday Afternoon, Sept. 16, 1861.
DEAREST FAMILY, This morning, as I was busy over the
tenth page of a letter to Wilky, in he popped and made my
labor of no account. I had intended to go and see him
yesterday, but concluded to delay as I had plenty of work
to do and did not wish to take the relish off the visits by
making them frequent when I was not home-sick. More
over, Emerson and Tom Ward were going on, and I thought
he would have too much of a good thing. But he walked
over this morning with, or rather without them, for he went
astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath
and took him to dinner and he is now gone to see [Andrew?]
Robeson and Emerson. His plump corpusculus looks as
always. He says it is pretty lonely at Concord and he
misses Bob s lively and sportive wiles very much in the long
and lone and dreary evenings, tho he consoles himself by
thinking he will have a great time at study. I have at last
got to feel quite settled and homelike. I write in my new
parlor whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what
an improvement it is on the old affair, worth double the
34 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1861
price, and the little bedroom under the roof is perfectly
delicious, with a charming outlook upon little backyards
with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is upon
this room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon a
capital thing in winter.
I like Mrs. Upham s very much. Dark, aristocratic
dining-room, with royal cheer "fish, roast-beef, veal-
cutlets or pigeons?" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking,
white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit
down. And for dessert, a choice of three, three of the most
succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine
a celestial unction without the oil) pie-ey confections,
always two plates full my eye! She has an admirable
chemical, not mechanical, combination of jam and cake
and cream, which I recommend to mother if she is ever at
a loss; though she has no well-stored pantry like that of
good old 13 Kay Street; or if she has, it exists not for miser
able me. I get up at six, breakfast and study till nine,
when I go to school till one, when dinner, a short loaf and
work again till five, then gymnasium or walk till tea, and
after that, visit, work, literature, correspondence, etc., etc.,
till ten, when I "divest myself of my wardrobe" and lay
my weary head upon my downy pillow and dreamily think
of dear old home and Father and Mother and brothers and
sister and aunt and cousins and all that the good old New
port sun shines upon, until consciousness is lost. My time
last week was fully occupied, and I suspect will be so all
winter I hope so.
This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I
am entirely "muddled and beat" and have to employ most
all my time reading up. Agassiz gives now a course of
J The expression was undoubtedly recognized in Kay Street as borrowed from
the Lincolnshire boor, in Fitzjames Stephen s Essay on Spirit-Rapping, who
Act. TO] TO HIS FAMILY
35
lectures in Boston, to which I have been. He is evidently
a great favorite with his audience and feels so himself. But
he is an admirable, earnest lecturer, clear as day, and his
accent is most fascinating. I should like to study under
him. Prof. Wyman s lectures on [the] Comp[arative] ana
tomy of vert[ebrates] promise to be very good; prosy per
haps a little and monotonous, but plain and packed full
and well arranged (nourris). Eliot I have not seen much of;
I don t believe he is a very accomplished chemist, but can t
tell yet. Young [Charles] Atkinson, nephew of Miss Staigg s
friend, is a very nice boy. I walked over to Brookline
yesterday afternoon with him to see his aunt, who received
me very cordially. There is something extremely good
about her. The rest of this year s class is nothing wonder
ful. In last year s there is a son of Prof. Peirce, whom I sus
pect to be a very "smart" fellow with a great deal of char
acter, pretty independent and violent though. [Storrow]
Higginson I like very well. [John] Ropes is always out, so
I have not seen him again.
We are only about twelve in the laboratory, so that we
have a very cosy time. I expect to have a winter of
"crowded" life. I can be as independent as I please, and
want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of every
one. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and
I know too that the "native hue of resolution" has never
been of very great shade in me hitherto. But I am sure
that that feeling is a right one, and I mean to live accord
ing to it if I can. If I do, I think I shall turn out all right.
I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilk the rosy-
gilled and Higginson came in. I now resume it after tea
by the light of a taper and that of the moon. This room
ended his life with the words, "What with faith, and what with the earth a-turning
round the sun, and what with the railroads a-fuzzing and a-whizzing, I m clean
stonied, muddled and beat."
36 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1861
is without gas and I must get some of the jovial Harry s
abhorred kerosene tomorrow. Wilk read Harry s letter
and amused me "metch" by his naive interpretation of
mother s most rational request " that I should keep a mem
orandum of all monies I receive from Father." He thought
it was that she might know exactly what sums the prodigal
philosopher really gave out, and that mistrust of his gener
osity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way,
as Harry framed it, I confess. . . .
"Kitty" Temple, next addressed, was the eldest of four
Temple cousins, who were daughters of Henry James,
Senior s, favorite sister. Having lost both their parents
the Temple children had come to live in Newport under the
care of their paternal aunt, Mrs. Edmund Tweedie. The
fast friendship between the elder Jameses and the Tweedies,
the relationship between the two groups of children and the
parity of their ages resulted in the Jameses, Temples and
Tweedies all living almost as one family. "Minny,"
Kitty s younger sister, was about seventeen years old and
was the enchanting and most adored of all the charming
and freely circulating young relatives with whom William
had more or less grown up. Henry James drew two of his
most appealing heroines from her image, Minny Theale
in the "Wings of the Dove" and Isabel Archer in "The
Portrait of a Lady," and she is still more authentically
revealed by references that recur in "Notes of a Son and
Brother" and in the bundle of her own letters with which
that volume beautifully closes. In a long-after year Will
iam, who was fondly devoted to her, received an early letter
of hers containing an affectionate reference to himself and
wrote to the friend who had sent it: "I am deeply thankful
to you for sending me this letter, which revives all sorts
Act. 19} TO MISS KATHARINE TEMPLE 37
of poignant memories and makes her live again in all her
lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free
than hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know
me as I am now. As for knowing her as she is now??!! I
find that she means as much in the way of human character
for me now as she ever did, being unique and with no ana
logue in all my subsequent experience of people. Thank
you once more for what you have done." At the time of
the next letter, "Minny" had just cut her hair short, and
a photograph of her new aspect was the occasion of the badi
nage about her madness. "Dr. Prince" was an alienist to
whom another James cousin had lately been married.
To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet).
CAMBRIDGE, [Sept. 1861].
MY DEAR KITTY, Imagine if you can with what palpi
tations I tore open the rude outer envelope of your precious,
long-looked-for missive. I read it by the glimmer of the
solitary lamp which at eventide lights up the gloom of the
dark and humid den called Post Office. And as I read on
unconscious of the emotion I was betraying, a vast crowd
collected. Profs. Agassiz and Wyman ran with their note
books and proceeded to take observations of the greatest
scientific import. I with difficulty reached my lodgings.
When thereout fell the Photograph. Wheeeew! oohoo!
aha! la-la! [Marks representing musical flourish} boister-
oso triumphissimmo, chassez to the right, cross over, for
ward two, hornpipe and turn summerset! Up came the
fire engines; but I proudly waved them aside and plunged
bareheaded into the chill and gloomy bowels of the night,
to recover by violent exercise the use of my reasoning fac
ulties, which had almost been annihilated by the shock
of happiness. As I stalked along, an understanding of
38 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1861
the words in your letter grew upon me, and then I felt,
my sober senses returning, that I ought not to be so elate.
For you certainly bring me bad news enough. Elly s arm
broken and Minny gone mad should make me rather drop
a tear than laugh.
But leaving poor Elly s case for the present, let s speak
of Minny and her fearful catastrophe. Do you know,
Kitty, now that it s all over, I don t see why I should
not tell you, I have often had flashes of horrid doubts
about that girl. Occasionally I have caught a glance
from her furtive eye, a glance so wild, so weird, so strange,
that it has frozen the innermost marrow in my bones;
and again the most sickening feeling has come over me as
I have noticed fleeting shades of expression on her face,
so short, but ah! so piercingly pregnant of the mysteries
of mania unhuman^ ghoul-like, fiendish-cunning! Ah
me! ah me! Now that my worst suspicions have proved
true, I feel sad indeed. The well-known, how-often fondly-
contemplated features tell the whole story in the photo
graph taken, as you say, a few days before the crisis. Mad
ness is plainly lurking in that lurid eye, stamps indelibly
the arch of the nostril and the curve of the lip, and in
ambush along the soft curve of the cheek it lies ready to
burst forth in consuming fire. But oh! still is it not pity
to think that that fair frame, whilom the chosen fane of
intellect and heart, clear and white as noonday s beams,
should now be a vast desert through whose lurid and murky
glooms glare but the fitful forked lightnings of fuliginous
insanity! Well, Kitty, after all, it is but an organic lesion
of the gray cortical substance which forms the pia mater of
the brain, which is very consoling to us all. Was she all
alone when she did it? Could no one wrest the shears from
her vandal hand? I declare I fear to return home, but of
Aet. 19} TO MISS KATHARINE TEMPLE 39
course Dr. Prince has her by this time. I shall weep as
soon as I have finished this letter.
But now, to speak seriously, I am really shocked and
grieved at hearing of poor little Elly s accident and of her
suffering. I suppose she bears it though like one of the
Amazons of old. I suppose the proper thing for me to do
would be to tell her how naughty and careless she was to
go and risk her bones in that unprincipled way, and how
it will be a good lesson to her for the future about climbing
into swings, etc., etc., ad libitum; but I will leave that to
you, as her elder sister (I have no doubt you Ve dosed her
already), and convey to her only the expression of my
warmest condolence and sympathy. I hope to see her
getting on finely when I come home, which will be shortly.
After all it will soon be over, and then her arm will be better
than ever, twice as strong, and who of us are exempt from
pain? Take me, for example: you might weep tears of
blood to see me day after day forced to hold ignited crucibles
in my naked hands till the eyes of my neighbors water and
their throats choke with the dense fumes of the burning
leather. Yet I ask for no commiseration. - Nevertheless I
bestow it upon poor Elly, to whom give my best love and
say I look forward to seeing her soon.
And Henrietta the ablebodied and strongminded your
report of her constancy touched me more than anything
has for a long while. Tell her to stick it out for a few days
longer and she will be richly rewarded by an apple and a
chestnut from Massachusetts. As for yourself and sister in
the affair of the wings, t is but what I expected, I am too
old now to expect much from human nature, yet after
such length of striving to please, so many months of in
cessant devotion, one must feel a slight twinge. If your
sister can still understand, let her know that I thank her
4 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1861
for her photograph. Too bad, too bad! With her long
locks she would still be winning, outwardly, spite of the
howling fiends within; but they gone, like Samson, she has
nothing left. But now, my dear Kitty, I must put an end
to my scribbling. This writing in the middle of the week
is an unheard-of license, for I must work, work, work.
Relentless Chemistry claims its hapless victim. Excuse all
faults of grammar, punctuation, spelling and sense on the
score of telegraphic haste. Love to all and to yourself.
Please "remember me" to your aunt Charlotte, and believe
[me] yours affectionately,
W.J.
To his Family.
CAMBRIDGE,
Sunday afternoon [Early Nov., 1861].
DEARLY BELOVED FAMILY, Wilky and I have just re
turned from dinner, and having completed a concert for
the benefit of the inmates of Pasco Hall and the Hall next
door, turn ourselves, I to writing a word home, he to digest
ing in a "lobbing" position on the sofa. Wilky wrote you
a complete account of our transactions in Boston yesterday
much better than I could have done. I suppose you will
ratify our action as it seemed the only one possible to us.
The radiance of Harry s visit x has not faded yet, and I
come upon gleams of it three or four times a day in my
farings to and fro; but it has never a bit diminished the
lustre of far-off shining Newport all silver and blue and this
heavenly group below 2 (all being more or less failures, es
pecially the two outside ones), the more so as the above-
1 A diary of Mr. T. S. Perry s has fixed the date of this visit as Oct. 31 -Nov. 4.
2 W. J. could make much better drawings than the ones which he enclosed in
this letter.
Act. 19} TO HIS FAMILY 4 i
mentioned Harry could in no wise satisfy my cravings to
know of the family and friends, as he did not seem to have
been on speaking terms with any of them for some time
past and could tell me nothing of what they did, said, or
thought about any given subject. Never did I see a so
much uninterested creature in the affairs of those about him.
He is a good soul though in his way, too much more so
than the light fantastic Wilky, who has been doing nothing
but disaster since he has been here, breaking down my good
resolutions about eating, keeping me from any intellectual
exercise, ruining my best hat wearing it while dressing,
while in his night-gown, wishing to wash his face with it
on, insisting on sleeping in my bed, inflicting on me thereby
the pains of crucifixion, and hardly to be prevented from
taking the said hat to bed with him. The odious creature
occupied my comfortable armchair all the morning in the
position represented in the fine plate which accompanies
this letter. But one more night though and he shall be gone
and no thorn shall be in the side of the serene and hallowed
felicity of expectation in which I shall revel until the time
comes for going home, home, home to the hearts of my
infancy and budding youth.
It is not homesickness I have, if by that term be meant
a sickness of heart and loathing of my present surroundings,
but a sentiment far transcending this, that makes my hair
curl for joy whenever I think of home, by which home comes
to me as hope, not as regret, and which puts roses long faded
thence in my old mother s cheeks, mildness in my father s
voice, flowing graces into my Aunt Kate s movements,
babbling confidingness into Harry s talk, a straight parting
into Robby s hair and a heavenly tone into the lovely babe s
temper, the elastic graces of a kitten into Moses s z rusty
1 A horse.
4 2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1861
and rheumatic joints. Aha! Aha! The time will come -
Thanksgiving in less than two weeks and then, oh, then ! -
probably a cold reception, half repellent, no fatted calf, no
fresh-baked loaf of spicy bread, but I dare not think of
that side of the picture. I will ever hope and trust and my
faith shall be justified.
As Wilky has submitted to you a resume of his future
history for the next few years, so will I, hoping it will meet
your approval. Thus: one year study chemistry, then
spend one term at home, then one year with Wyman,
then a medical education, then five or six years with Agassiz,
then probably death, death, death with inflation and pleth
ora of knowledge. This you had better seriously consider.
This is a glorious day and I think I must close and take a
walk. So farewell, farewell until a quarter to nine Sunday
evening soon! Your bold, your beautiful,
Your Blossom!!
Dedicated to Miss Kitty, oh! I beg pardon, to Miss Temple.
The following curious facts were discovered by the
Chemist James in some of his recent investigations:
At Pensacola, Fla., there is a navy yard, and consequently
many officers of the U. S. A.
In Pensacola there is a larger proportional number of old
maids than in any city of the Union.
The ladies of Pensacola, instead of seeking an eligible
partner in the middle ranks of society, spend their lives in a
vain attempt to entrap the officers who flirt with them and
then leave Pensacola. The moral lesson is evident.
The "Kitty" to whom James addressed the next letter
was another cousin, the daughter of one of his father s
elder brothers. Her husband was the alienist to whom
Act. 21} TO MRS. KATHARINE JAMES PRINCE 43
the reader will remember that the mad Minny was con
signed in a previous letter. It should also be explained
that James s two youngest brothers had now entered the
Union army, and that one of them, Wilky, adjutant of
the first colored regiment, had been wounded in the charge
on Fort Wagner in which Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was
killed.
To Mrs. Katharine James (Mrs. William H.) Prince.
CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 12, 1863.
MY DEAR COUSIN KITTY, I was very agreeably sur
prised at getting your letter a few days after arriving here,
and am heartily glad to find that you still remember me
and think sometimes of the visit you paid us that happy
summer. I often think of you, and at such times feel very
much like renewing our delightful converse. Several times
I have been on the uttermost brink of writing to you, but
somehow or other I have always quailed at plunging over.
Nature makes us so awkward. I again felt several times
like going to pay you a short visit, last winter and this
spring, I remember, but hesitated, never having been
invited, and being entirely ignorant how you would receive
me, whether you would chain me up in your asylum and
scourge me, or what tho I believe those good old days
are over.
When you were at our house, I recollect I was in the first
flush of my chemical enthusiasm. A year and a half of
hard work at it here has somewhat dulled my ardor; and
after half a year s vegetation at home, I am back here again,
studying this time Comparative Anatomy. I am obliged
before the ith of January to make finally and irrevocably
"the choice of a profession." I suppose your sex, which
has, or should have, its bread brought to it, instead of having
44 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1863
to go in search of it, has no idea of the awful responsibility
of such a choice. I have four alternatives: Natural History,
Medicine, Printing, Beggary. Much may be said in favor
of each. I have named them in the ascending order of
their pecuniary invitingness. After all, the great problem
of life seems to be how to keep body and soul together, and
I have to consider lucre. To study natural science, I know
I should like, but the prospect of supporting a family on
$600 a year is not one of those rosy dreams of the future
with which the young are said to be haunted. Medicine
would pay, and I should still be dealing with subjects which
interest me but how much drudgery and of what an un
pleasant kind is there! Of all departments of Medicine,
that to which Dr. Prince devotes himself is, I should think,
the most interesting. And I should like to see him and his
patients at Northampton very much before coming to a
decision.
The worst of this matter is that everyone must more or
less act with insufficient knowledge "go it blind," as they
say. Few can afford the time to try what suits them.
However, a few months will show. I shall be most happy
some day to avail myself of your very cordial invitation.
I have heard so much of the beauty of Northampton that
I want very much to see the place too.
I heard from home day before yesterday that "Wilky was
improving daily." I hope he is, poor fellow. His wound
is a very large and bad one and he will be confined to his
bed a long while. He bears it like a man. He is the best
abolitionist you ever saw, and makes a common one, as
we are, feel very small and shabby. Poor little Bob is
before Charleston, too. We have not heard from him in a
very long while. He made an excellent officer in camp here,
every one said, and was promoted.
Aet. 21} TO HIS MOTHER
45
But I must stop. I hope, now that the ice is broken, you
will soon feel like writing again. And, if you please, eschew
all formality in addressing me by dropping the title of our
relationship before my name. As for you, the case is
different. My senior, a grave matron, quasi-mother of I
know not how many scores, not of children, but of live
lunatics, which is far more exceptional and awe-inspiring,
I tremble to think I have shown too much levity and
familiarity already. Are you very different from what you
were two years ago? As no word has passed between us
since then, I suppose I should have begun by congratulating
you first on your engagement, which is I believe the fashion
able thing, then on your marriage, tho I don t rightly
know whether that is fashionable or not. At any rate I
now end. Yours most sincerely,
WM. JAMES.
To his Mother.
CAMBRIDGE, [circa Sept., 1863].
MY DEAREST MOTHER, . . . To answer the weighty
questions which you propound: I am glad to leave New
port because I am tired of the place itself, and because of
the reason which you have very well expressed in your
letter, the necessity of the whole family being near the arena
of the future activity of us young men. I recommend Cam
bridge on account of its own pleasantness (though I don t
wish to be invidious towards Brookline, Longwood, and
other places) and because of its economy if I or Harry
continue to study here much longer. . . .
I feel very much the importance of making soon a final
choice of my business in life. I stand now at the place
where the road forks. One branch leads to material com
fort, the flesh-pots; but it seems a kind of selling of one s
4 6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1863
soul. The other to mental dignity and independence;
combined, however, with physical penury. If I myself
were the only one concerned I should not hesitate an instant
in my choice. But it seems hard on Mrs. W. J., "that not
impossible she," to ask her to share an empty purse and a
cold hearth. On one side is science, upon the other business
(the honorable, honored and productive business of printing
seems most attractive), with medicine, which partakes of
[the] advantages of both, between them, but which has
drawbacks of its own. I confess I hesitate. 1 fancy there
is a fond maternal cowardice which would make you and
every other mother contemplate with complacency the
worldly fatness of a son, even if obtained by some sacrifice
of his "higher nature." But I fear there might be some an
guish in looking back from the pinnacle of prosperity (neces
sarily reached, if not by eating dirt, at least by renouncing
some divine ambrosia) over the life you might have led in the
pure pursuit of truth. It seems as if one could not afford
to give that up for any bribe, however great. Still, I am
undecided. The medical term opens tomorrow and be
tween this and the end of the term here, I shall have an
opportunity of seeing a little into medical business. I shall
confer with Wyman about the prospects of a naturalist
and finally decide. I want you to become familiar with
the notion that I may stick to science, however, and drain
away at your property for a few years more. If I can get
into Agassiz s museum I think it not improbable I may
receive a salary of $400 to $500 in a couple of years. I
know some stupider than I who have done so. You see
in that case how desirable it would be to have a home in
Cambridge. Anyhow, I am convinced that somewhere in
this neighborhood is the place for us to rest. These matters
have been a good deal on my mind lately, and I am very
Act. 21} LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 47
glad to get this chance of pouring them into yours. As for
the other boys, I don t know. And that idle and useless
young female, Alice, too, whom we shall have to feed and
clothe! . . . Cambridge is all right for business in Boston.
Living in Boston or Brookline, etc., would be as expensive
as Newport if Harry or I stayed here, for we could not
easily go home every day.
Give my warmest love to Aunt Kate, Father, who I hope
will not tumble again, and all of them over the way. Re
cess in three weeks; till then, my dearest and best of old
mothers, good-bye! Your loving son,
W. J.
[P.S.] Give my best love to Kitty and give cette -petite
humbug of a Minny a hint about writing to me. I hope
you liked your shawl.
The physical and nervous frailty, which President Eliot
had noticed in James during the first winter at the Scientific
School, and which later manifested itself so seriously as to
interfere with his studies, kept him from enlisting in the
Federal armies during the Civil War. The case was too
clear to occasion discussion in his letters. He continued
as a student at the School and, at about the time the fore
going letter was written, transferred himself from the
Chemical Department to the Department of Comparative
Anatomy and Physiology, in which Professor Jeffries Wyman
was teaching. It was in these two subjects that he himself
was to begin teaching ten years later. The next year
(1864-65), when he entered the Medical School, Professor
Wyman was again his instructor.
Jeffries Wyman (1814-1874) was a less widely effective
man than Agassiz, but his influence counted more in James s
student years than did that of any other teacher. "All the
4 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1863
young men who worked under him," says President Eliot,
"took him as the type of scientific zeal, disinterestedness
and candor." N. S. Shaler, an admirable judge of men,
has recorded his opinion of Wyman in his autobiography,
saying: "In some ways he was the most perfect naturalist
I have ever known . . . within the limits of his powers he
had the best-balanced mind it has been my good fortune to
come into contact with. . . . Though he published but little,
his store of knowledge of the whole field of natural history
was surprisingly great, and, as I came to find, it greatly
exceeded that of my master Agassiz in its range and
accuracy." *
James, who was Wyman s pupil during two critical years,
held him in particular reverence and affection, and said of
him: "Those who year by year received part or all of their
first year s course of medical instruction from him always
speak with a sort of worship of their preceptor. His ex
traordinary effect on all who knew him is to be accounted
for by the one word, character. Never was a man so abso
lutely without detractors. The quality which every one
first thinks of in him is his extraordinary modesty, of which
his unfailing geniality and serviceableness, his readiness to
confer with and listen to younger men how often did his
unmagisterial manner lead them unawares into taking dog
matic liberties, which soon resulted in ignominious collapse
before his quiet wisdom! were kindred manifestations.
Next were his integrity, and his complete and simple devo
tion to objective truth. These qualities were what gave
him such incomparable fairness of judgment in both scien
tific and worldly matters, and made his opinions so weighty
even when they were unaccompanied by reasons. . . . An
accomplished draughtsman, his love and understanding of
1 N. S. Shaler, Autobiography, pp.
Aet. 21} TO HIS SISTER 49
art were great. . . . He had if anything too little of the ego
in his composition, and all his faults were excesses of virtue.
A little more restlessness of ambition, and a little more
willingness to use other people for his purposes, would easily
have made him more abundantly productive, and would
have greatly increased the sphere of his effectiveness and
fame. But his example on us younger men, who had the
never-to-be-forgotten advantage of working by his side,
would then have been, if not less potent, at least different
from what we now remember it; and we prefer to think of
him forever as the paragon that he was of goodness, disin
terestedness, and single-minded love of the truth." z
The stream of James s correspondence still flowed entirely
for his family at this time, and his letters were often face
tious accounts of his way of life and occupations.
To his Sister (age 15).
CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 13, 1863.
CHERIE CHARMANTE DE BAL, Notwithstanding the
abuse we poured on each other before parting and the (on
my part) feigned expressions of joy at not meeting you
again for so many months, it was with the liveliest regret
that I left Newport before your return. But I was obliged
in order to get a room here drove, literally drove to it.
That you should not have written to me for so long grieves
me more than words can tell you who have nothing to
do besides. It shows you to have little affection and that
of a poor quality. I have, however, heard from others who
tell me that Wilky is doing well, "improving daily," which
I am very glad indeed to hear. I am glad you had such a
pleasant summer. I am nicely established in a cosy little
room, with a large recess with a window in it, containing bed
1 Harvard Advocate, Oct. i, 1874.
50 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1863
and washstand, separated from the main apartment by a
rich green silken curtain and a large gilt cornice. This
gives the whole establishment a splendid look.
I found when I got here that Miss Upham had changed
her price to $5.00. Great efforts were made by two of us
to raise a club, but little enthusiasm was shown by anyone
else and it fell through. I then, with that fine economical
instinct which distinguishes me, resolved to take a tea and
breakfast of bread and milk in my room and only pay Miss
Upham for dinners. Miss U. is at Swampscott. So I
asked to see [her sister] Mrs. Wood, to learn the cost of
seven dinners. She, with true motherly instinct, said that
I should only make a slop in my room, and that she would
rather let me keep on for $4.50, seeing it was me. I said
she must first consult Miss Upham. She returned from
Swampscott saying that Miss U. had sworn she would
rather pay me a dollar a week than have me go away. Ablaze
with economic passion, I cried "Done!" trying to make it
appear as if she had made a formal offer to that effect. But
she would not admit it, and after much recrimination we
were separated, it being agreed that I should come for $4.50,
but tell no-one. (Mind you don t either.) I now lay my
hand on my heart, and confidently look towards my mother
for that glance of approbation which she must bestow.
Have I not redeemed any weaknesses of the past? Though
part of my conception failed, yet it was boldly planned and
would have been a noble stroke.
I have been pretty busy this week. I have a filial feeling
towards Wyman already. I work in a vast museum, at a
table all alone, surrounded by skeletons of mastodons,
crocodiles, and the like, with the walls hung about with
monsters and horrors enough to freeze the blood. But I
have no fear, as most of them are tightly bottled up. Occa-
Act. 21} TO HIS SISTER 51
sionally solemn men and women come in to see the museum,
and sometimes timid little girls (reminding me of thee,
beloved, only they are less fashionably dressed) who whisper:
"Is folks allowed here?" It pains me to remark, however,
that not all the little girls are of this pleasing type, most
being boldfaced jigs. How does Wilky get on? Is May-
berry gone? How is he nursed? Who holds his foot for
the doctor? Tell me all about him. Everyone here asks
about him, and all without exception seem enthusiastic
about the darkeys. How has Aunt Kate s knee been since her
return? Sorry indeed was I to leave without seeing her.
Give her my best love. Is Kitty Temple as angelic as ever?
Give my best love to her and Minny and the little ones.
(My little friend Elly, how often I think of her!) Have your
lessons with Bradford (the brandy-witness) begun? You
may well blush. Tell Harry Mr. [Francis J.] Child is here,
just as usual; Mrs. C. at Swampscott. [C. C] Salter back,
but morose. One or two new students, and Prof. [W. W.]
Goodwin, who is a very agreeable man. Among other
students, a son of Ed. Everett [William Everett], very
intelligent and a capital scholar, studying law. He took
honors at Cambridge, England. Tucks, mere & fille away,
fils here. . . .
I send a photograph of Gen. Sickles for yours and Wilky s
amusement. It is a part of a great anthropomorphological
collection * which I am going to make. So take care of it,
as well as of all the photographs you will find in the table
drawer in my room. But isn t he a bully boy? Harry s
J The "great anthropomorphological collection" consisted of photographs of
authors, scientists, public characters, and also people whose only claim upon his
attention was that their physiognomies were in some way typical or striking.
James never arranged the collection or preserved it carefully, but he filled at least
one album in early days, and he almost always kept some drawer or box at hand and
dropped into it portraits cut from magazines or obtained in other ways. He
seemed to crave a visual image of everybody who interested him at all.
LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
[1863
handwriting much better. Desecrate my room as little as
possible. Good-bye, much love to Wilky and all. If he
wants nursing send for me without hesitation. Love to the
Tweedies. Have n t you heard yet from Bobby?
Your aff. bro.,
WM.
Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.
Ill
1864-1866
The Harvard Medical School With Louis Agassiz to
the Amazon
IN 1864 the family moved from Newport to Boston,
where Henry James, Senior, took a house on Ashburton
Place (No. 13) for two years, and there was no more occa
sion for family letters. Although James began the regular
course at the Medical School, he had arrived at no clear
professional purpose and no selection of any particular
field of study. The School afforded him some measure of
preparation for natural science as well as for practice.
Philosophy had undoubtedly begun to beckon him,
although its appealing gesture lacked authority and did
not enlist him in any regular course of philosophic studies.
In sixty-five he wrote to his brother Henry from Brazil
saying, "When I get home, I m going to study philosophy
all my days." But in many respects his character and
tastes matured slowly. The instruction offered by Pro
fessor Francis Bowen in Harvard College does not appear
to have excited his interest at all. It cannot have failed to
excite the irony of his father, as did everything of the
sort that was academic and orthodox, and James would
have been aware of this and might have been influenced.
On the other hand, it was obvious that, in the case of his
father, who had no connection with church, college or school,
the consideration and expression of theories and beliefs
had always been a totally unremunerative occupation; and
54 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1864-66
James had to consider how to earn a living. His prospec
tive share of the property that had sufficed for his parents
was clearly not going to be enough to support him in inde
pendent leisure. In the way of bread and butter, biology
and medicine offered more than metaphysical speculation.
Last and most important, the tide of contemporary inquiry,
driven forward by the storm of the Darwinian controversy,
was setting strongly toward a fresh examination of nature.
Philosophy must embrace the new reality. Everything that
was stimulating in contemporary thought urged men to
the scrutiny of the phenomenal world. "Natural History,"
which has since diversified and amplified itself beyond
the use of that appellation, was almost romantically "hav
ing its day."
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und griin des Lebens goldener Baum. 1
Thus Goethe, and Louis Agassiz, whose lectures James had
already followed, and with the abundance of whose inspiring
activity no other scientific energizing could then compare,
was fond of quoting the lines.
Under such circumstances it was not strange that James
should interrupt his medical studies in order to join the
expedition which Agassiz was preparing to lead to the
Amazon.
No richer or more instructive experience could well have
offered itself to him at twenty-three than this journey to
Brazil seemed to promise. He was no sooner on the Ama
zon, however, than it became clear to him that he was not
intended to be a field-naturalist; and he pictured the stages
of this self-discovery in long, diary-like letters which he
1 All theory is gray, dear friend,
But the golden tree of life is green.
1864-66] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 55
sent home to his family. On arriving at Rio he was forced
to consider the question of his going on or coming home,
by an illness that kept him quarantined for several uncom
fortable weeks, and left him depressed and unable to use
his eyes during several weeks more. Although he decided
in favor of continuing with Agassiz, he revealed more and
more clearly in his letters that he was seeing Brazil with
the eye of an adventurer and lover of landscape rather than
of a geologist or collector, and that the months spent in
fishing and pickling specimens were to count most for
him by teaching him what his vocation was not. He
found that he was essentially indifferent to the classification
of birds, beasts, and fishes, and that he was not made to
deal with the riddle of the universe from the only angle of
approach that was possible in Agassiz s company.
It would be a mistake, however, to let it appear that
nine months of collecting with Louis Agassiz were nine
months wasted. There are some men whom it is an educa
tion to work under, even though the affair in hand be foreign
to one s ultimate concern. Agassiz was such an one,
"recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the un
limited sense, one of those folio-copies of mankind, like
Linnaeus and Cuvier." Thirty years after, James could
still say of him: "Since Benjamin Franklin we had never
had among us a person of more popularly impressive type.
. . . He was so commanding a presence, so curious and
enquiring, so responsive and expansive, and so generous
and reckless of himself and his own, that everyone said
immediately, Here is no musty savant, but a man, a great
man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice
and sin." 1 "To see facts and not to argue or raisonniren
was what life meant for Agassiz," and James, who was
1 See Memories and Studies, pp. 6, 8, and 9; and the address on Agassiz, passim.
56 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
already incorrigibly interested in the causes, values and
purposes of things, and whose education had been most
unsystematic, profited by his corrective influence. "James/
said Agassiz at this time, "some people perhaps consider
you a bright young man; but when you are fifty years old,
if they ever speak of you then, what they will say will be
this: That James oh, yes, I know him; he used to be a
very bright young man!" Such "cold-water therapeutics"
were gratefully accepted from one who was not only a
teacher but a kind friend; and James remembered them,
and recorded later that "the hours he spent with Agassiz
so taught him the difference between all possible abstrac
tionists and all livers in the light of the world s concrete
fullness, that he was never able to forget it." Considering
with what passionate fidelity his own abstractions always
face the concrete, this is perhaps more of an acknowledg
ment than at first sight appears.
The Thayer Expedition set sail from New York April i,
1865. The next letter was written from ship-board, still
in New York Harbor. The "Professor" will be recognized
as Louis Agassiz.
To his Mother.
[Mar. 30?], 1865.
. . . We have been detained 48 hours on this steamer in
port on account of different accidents. ... A dense fog is
raging which will prevent our going outside as long as it
lasts. Sapristi! c est embetant. . . .
The Professor has just been expatiating over the map of
South America and making projects as if he had Sherman s
army at his disposal instead of the ten novices he really
has. He may get some students at Rio to accompany the
Aet. 23} TO HIS PARENTS 57
different parties, which will let them be more numerous.
I m sure I hope he will, on account of the language. If
each of us has a Portuguese companion, he can do things
twice as easily. The Prof, now sits opposite me with his
face all aglow, holding forth to the Captain s wife about
the imperfect education of the American people. He has
talked uninterruptedly for a quarter of an hour at least. I
know not how she reacts; I presume she feels somewhat
flattered by the attention, however. This morning he
made a characteristic speech to Mr. Billings, Mr. Watson s
friend. Mr. B. had offered to lend him some books.
Agassiz: "May I enter your state-room and take them
when I shall want them, sir?" Billings, extending his arm
said genially, "Sir, all that I have is yours!" To which,
Agassiz, far from being overcome, replied, shaking a moni
tory finger at the foolishly generous wight, "Look out, sir,
dat I take not your skin!" That expresses very well the
man. Offering your services to Agassiz is as absurd as it
would be for a South Carolinian to invite General Sherman s
soldiers to partake of some refreshment when they called
at his house. . . .
At this moment Prof, passes behind me and says, "Now
today I am going to show you a little what I will have you
do." Hurray! I have not been able to get a word out of
the old animal yet about my fate. I m only sorry I can t
tell you. . . .
To his Parents.
Rio, BRAZIL, Apr. 21, 1865.
MY DEAREST PARENTS, Every one is writing home to
catch the steamer which leaves Rio on Monday. I do
likewise, although, so far, I have very little to say to you.
You cannot conceive how pleasant it is to feel that tomor-
58 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
row we shall lie in smooth water at Rio and the horrors of
this voyage will be over. O the vile Sea! the damned Deep!
No one has a right to write about the "nature of Evil,"
or to have any opinion about evil, who has not been at sea.
The awful slough of despond into which you are there
plunged furnishes too profound an experience not to be a
fruitful one. I cannot yet say what the fruit is in my
case, but I am sure some day of an accession of wisdom
from it. My sickness did not take an actively nauseous
form after the first night and second morning; but for
twelve mortal days I was, body and soul, in a more in
describably hopeless, homeless and friendless state than I
ever want to be in again. We had a head wind and toler
ably rough sea all that time. The trade winds, which I
thought were gentle zephyrs, are hideous moist gales that
whiten all the waves with foam. . . .
Sunday Evening. Yesterday morning at ten o clock we
came to anchor in this harbor, sailing right up without a
pilot. No words of mine, or of any man short of William
the divine, can give any idea of the magnificence of this
harbor and its approaches. The boldest, grandest moun
tains, far and near. The palms and other trees of such
vivid green as I never saw anywhere else. The town
"realizes" my idea of an African town in its architecture
and effect. Almost everyone is a negro or a negress, which
words I perceive we don t know the meaning of with us;
a great many of them are native Africans and tattooed.
The men have white linen drawers and short shirts of the
same kind over them; the women wear huge turbans, and
have a peculiar rolling gait that I have never seen any
approach to elsewhere. Their attitudes as they sleep and
lie about the streets are picturesque to the last degree.
Yesterday was, I think, the day of my life on which I
Act. 23} TO HIS PARENTS
59
had the most outward enjoyment. Nine of us took a boat
at about noon and went on shore. The strange sights, the
pleasure of walking on terra firma, the delicious smell of
land, compared with the hell of the last three weeks, were
perfectly intoxicating. Our Portuguese went beautifully,
every visage relaxed at the sight of us and grinned from ear
to ear. The amount of fraternal love that was expressed
by bowing and gesture was tremendous. We had the best
dinner I ever eat. Guess how much it cost. 140,000 reis
literal fact. Paid for by the rich man of the party. The
Brazilians are of a pale Indian color, without a particle of
red and with a very aged expression. They are very polite
and obliging. All wear black beaver hats and glossy black
frock coats, which makes them look like des epiciers endi-
manches. We all returned in good order to the ship at
1 1 P.M., and I lay awake most of the night on deck listen
ing to the soft notes of the vampire outside of the awning.
(Not knowing what it was, we ll call it the vampire.) This
morning Tom Ward and I took another cruise on shore,
which was equally new and strange. The weather is like
Newport. I have not seen the thermometer. . . .
Agassiz just in, delighted with the Emperor s simplicity
and the precision of his information; but apparently they
did not touch upon our material prospects. He goes to see
the Emperor again tomorrow. Agassiz is one of the most
fascinating men personally that I ever saw. I could listen
to him talk by the hour. He is so childlike. Bishop Potter,
who is sitting opposite me writing, asks me to give his best
regards to father. I am in such a state of abdominal tume
faction from having eaten bananas all day that I can hardly
sit down to write. The bananas here are no whit better
than at home, but so cheap and so filling at the price. My
fellow "savans" are a very uninteresting crew. Except
60 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
Tom Ward I don t care if I never see one of em again. I
like Dr. Cotting very much and Mrs. Agassiz too. I could
babble on all night, but must stop somewhere.
Dear old Father, Mother, Aunt Kate, Harry and Alice!
You little know what thoughts I have had of you since I
have been gone. And I have felt more sympathy with Bob
and Wilk than ever, from the fact of my isolated circum
stances being more like theirs than the life I have led hith
erto. Please send them this letter. It is written as much
for them as for anyone. I hope Harry is rising like a
phoenix from his ashes, under the new regime. Bless him.
I wish he or some person I could talk to were along. Thank
Aunt Kate once more. Kiss Alice to death. I think
Father is the wisest of all men whom I know. Give my love
to the girls, especially the Hoopers. Tell Harry to remem
ber me to T. S. P[erry] and to Holmes. Adieu.
Your loving
W.J.
Give my love to Washburn.
To his Father.
Rio, June 3, 1865.
MY DEAREST OLD FATHER AND MY DEAREST OLD EVERY
BODY AT HOME, I ve got so much to say that I don t well
know where to begin. I sent a letter home, I think about
a fortnight ago, telling you about my small-pox, etc., but
as it went by a sailing vessel it is quite likely that this may
reach you first. That was written from the maison de sante
where I was lying in the embrace of the loathsome goddess,
and from whose hard straw bed, eternal chicken and rice,
and extortionate prices I was released yesterday. The dis
ease is over, and granting the necessity of having it, I have
reason to think myself most lucky. My face will not be
Aet. 23} TO HIS FATHER 61
marked at all, although at present it presents the appear
ance of an immense ripe raspberry. . . . My sickness began
four weeks ago today. You have no idea of the state of
bliss into which I have been plunged in the last twenty-four
hours by the first draughts of my newly gained freedom.
To be dressed, to walk about, to see my friends and the
public, to go into the dining-room and order my own dinner,
to feel myself growing strong and smooth-skinned again,
make a very considerable reaction. Now that I know I
am no longer an object of infection, I am perfectly cynical
as to my appearance and go into the dining-room here when
it is at its fullest, having been invited and authorized thereto
by the good people of the hotel. I shall stay here for a
week before returning to my quarters, although it is very
expensive. But I need a soft bed instead of a hammock,
and an arm-chair instead of a trunk to sit upon for some days
yet
In my last letter, I said something about coming home
sooner than I expected. Since then, I have thought the
matter over seriously and conscientiously every day, and it
has resulted in my determining so to do. My coming was
a mistake, a mistake as regards what I anticipated, and a
pretty expensive one both for you, dear old Father, and for
the dear generous old Aunt Kate. I find that by staying
I shall learn next to nothing of natural history as I care
about learning it. My whole work will be mechanical, find
ing objects and packing them, and working so hard at that
and in traveling that no time at all will be found for study
ing their structure. The affair reduces itself thus to so
many months spent in physical exercise. Can I afford this?
First, pecuniarily? No! Instead of costing the $600 or
$700 Agassiz told me twelve months of it would cost, the
expense will be nearer to triple that amount. . . .
62 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
Secondly , I can t afford the excursion mentally (though
that is not exactly the adjective to use). I said to myself
before I came away: "W. J-, in this excursion you will learn
to know yourself and your resources somewhat more inti
mately than you do now, and will come back with your
character considerably evolved and established." This has
come true sooner, and in a somewhat different way, than I
expected. I am now certain that my forte is not to go on
exploring expeditions. I have no inward spur goading me
forwards on that line, as I have on several speculative lines.
I am convinced now, for good, that I am cut out for a spec
ulative rather than an active life, I speak now only of
my quality; as for my quantity, I became "Convinced some
time ago and reconciled to the notion, that I was one of
the very lightest of featherweights. Now why not be recon
ciled with my deficiencies? By accepting them your actions
cease to be at cross-purposes with your faculties, and you
are so much nearer to peace of mind. On the steamer I
began to read Humboldt s Travels. Hardly had I opened the
book when I seemed to become illuminated. " Good Heavens,
when such men are provided to do the work of traveling,
exploring, and observing for humanity, men who gravitate
into their work as the air does into our lungs, what need,
what business have we outsiders to pant after them and
toilsomely try to serve as their substitutes? There are men
to do all the work which the world requires without the
talent of any one being strained." Men s activities are
occupied in two ways: in grappling with external circum
stances, and in striving to set things at one in their own
topsy-turvy mind.
You must know, dear Father, what I mean, tho I can t
must[er] strength of brain enough now to express myself
with precision. The grit and energy of some men are called
Aet. 23} TO HIS FATHER 63
forth by the resistance of the world. But as for myself, I
seem to have no spirit whatever of that kind, no pride which
makes me ashamed to say, "I can t do that." But I have
a mental pride and shame which, although they seem more
egotistical than the other kind, are still the only things that
can stir my blood. These lines seem to satisfy me, although
to many they would appear the height of indolence and
contemptibleness: "Ne for^ons point notre talent, Nous
ne ferions rien avec grace, Jamais un lourdaud, quoi-
qu il fasse, Ne deviendra un galant. " Now all the time
I should be gone on this expedition I should have a pining
after books and study as I have had hitherto, and a feeling
that this work was not in my path and was so much waste
of life. I had misgivings to this effect before starting; but
I was so rilled with enthusiasm, and the romance of the
thing seemed so great, that I stifled them. Here on the
ground the romance vanishes and the misgivings float up.
I have determined to listen to them this time. I said that
my act was an expensive mistake as regards what I antici
pated, but I have got this other edification from it. It has
to be got some time, and perhaps only through some great
mistake; for there are some familiar axioms which the indi
vidual only seems able to learn the meaning of through his
individual experience. I don t know whether I have ex
pressed myself so as to let you understand exactly how I
feel. O my dear, affectionate, wise old Father, how I longed
to see you while I lay there with the small-pox, 1 first revolv
ing these things over! and how I longed to confer with you
in a more confiding way than I often do at home! When
1 The case of small-pox left no scar whatever. Indeed James afterward re
garded it as having been perhaps no small-pox at all, but only varioloid, and by
October he described himself as being in better health than ever before. During
several weeks of convalescence that followed his distressing experience in quarantine
he was, however, quite naturally, " blue and despondent."
64 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
I get there I can explain the gaps. As this letter does not
sail till next Saturday (this is Sunday), I will stop for the
present, as I feel quite tired out. . . .
It was not feasible for James to leave the expedition and
return home immediately, and soon after the last letter
was written, his returning health and eyesight brought with
them a more cheerful mood. He determined to stay in
Brazil for a few months longer.
To his Father.
RIVER SOLIMOES (AMAZON),
Sept. 12-15, J 865.
MY DEAREST DADDY, Great was my joy the other
evening, on arriving at Manaos, to get a batch of letters
from you. ... I could do no more then than merely "accuse"
the reception. Now I can manage to sweat out a few lines
of reply. It is noon and the heat is frightful. We have all
come to the conclusion that, for us at least, there will be no
hell hereafter. We have all become regular alembics, and
the heat grows upon you, I find. Nevertheless it is not the
dead, sickening heat of home. It is more like a lively
baking, and the nights remain cool. We are just entering on
the mosquito country, and I suspect our suffering will be
great from them and the flies. While the steamboat is in
motion we don t have them, but when she stops you can
hardly open your mouth without getting it full of them.
Poor Mr. Bourkhardt is awfully poisoned and swollen up
by bites he got ten days ago on a bayou. At the same time
with the mosquitoes, the other living things seem to increase;
so it has its good side. The river is much narrower about
two miles wide perhaps or three (I m no judge) very
darkly muddy and swirling rapidly down past the beautiful
Aet. 23} TO HIS FATHER 65
woods and islands. We are all going up as far as Tabatinga,
when the Professor and Madam, with some others, go into
Peru to the Mountains, while Bourget and I will get a canoe
and some men and spend a month on the river between
Tabatinga and Ega. Bourget is a very dog, yapping and
yelping at every one, but a very hard-working collector,
and I can get along very well with him. We shall have a
very gypsy-like, if a very uncomfortable time. The best
of this river is that you can t bathe in it on account of the
numerous anthropophagous fishes who bite mouthfuls out
of you. Tom Ward may possibly be out and at Manaos
by the time we get back there at the end of October. Heaven
grant he may, poor fellow! I d rather see him than any
one on this continent. Agassiz is perfectly delighted with
him, his intelligence and his energy, thinks him in fact
much the best man of the expedition.
I see no reason to regret my determination to stay. "On
contrary," as Agassiz says, as I begin to use my eyes a little
every day, I feel like an entirely new being. Everything
revives within and without, and I now feel sure that I
shall learn. I have profited a great deal by hearing Agassiz
talk, not so much by what he says, for never did a man
utter a greater amount of humbug, but by learning the
way of feeling of such a vast practical engine as he is. No
one sees farther into a generalization than his own knowl
edge of details extends, and you have a greater feeling of
weight and solidity about the movement of Agassiz s mind,
owing to the continual presence of this great background of
special facts, than about the mind of any other man I
know. He has a great personal tact too, and I see that in
all his talks with me he is pitching into my loose and super
ficial way of thinking. . . . Now that I am become more
intimate with him, and can talk more freely to him, I delight
66 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
to be with him. I only saw his defects at first, but now his
wonderful qualities throw them quite in the background.
I am convinced that he is the man to do me good. He will
certainly have earned a holiday when he gets home. I
never saw a man work so hard. Physically, intellectually
and socially he has done the work of ten different men
since he has been in Brazil; the only danger is of his over
doing it. ...
I am beginning to get impatient with the Brazilian
sleepiness and ignorance. These Indians are particularly
exasperating by their laziness and stolidity. It would be
amusing if it were not so infuriating to see how impossible
it is to make one hurry, no matter how imminent the
emergency. How queer and how exhilarating all those
home letters were, with their accounts of what every one
was doing, doing, doing. To me, just awakening from my
life of forced idleness and from an atmosphere of Brazilian
inanity, it seemed as if a little window had been opened
and a life-giving blast of one of our October nor westers
had blown into my lungs for half an hour. I had no idea
before of the real greatness of American energy. They
wood up the steamer here for instance at the rate (accurately
counted) of eight to twelve logs a minute. It takes them
two and one-half hours to put in as much wood as would go
in at home in less than fifteen minutes.
Every note from home makes me proud of our country.
... I have not been able to look at the papers, but I have
heard a good deal. I do hope our people will not be such
fools as to hang Jeff. Davis for treason. Can any one believe
in revenge now? And if not for that, for what else should
we hang the poor wretch? Lincoln s violent death did
more to endear him to those indifferent and unfriendly to
him than the whole prosperous remainder of his life could
Act. 23} TO HIS PARENTS 67
have done; and so will Jeff s if he is hung. Poor old Abe!
What is it that moves you so about his simple, unprejudiced,
unpretending, honest career? I can t tell why, but albeit
unused to the melting mood, I can hardly ever think of
Abraham Lincoln without feeling on the point of blubbering.
Is it that he seems the representative of pure simple human
nature against all conventional additions? . . .
To his Parents.
TEFFE (AMAZON), Oct. 21, 1865.
... I left the party up at Sao Paulo the 2oth of last
month and got here the i6th of this, having gone up two
rivers, the lea and Jutay, and made collections of fishes
which were very satisfactory to the Prof, as they contained
almost one hundred new species. On the whole it was a
most original month, and one which from its strangeness I
shall remember to my dying day; much discomfort from
insects and rain, much ecstasy from the lovely landscape,
much hard work and heat, a very disagreeable companion,
J [added to the party in Brazil], the very best of fare,
turtle and fresh fish every day, and running through all a
delightful savor of freedom and gypsy-hood which sweetened
all that might have been unpleasant. We slept on the
beaches every night and fraternized with the Indians, who
are socially very agreeable, but mentally a most barren
people. I suppose they are the most exclusively practical
race in the world. When I get home I shall bore you with
all kinds of stories about them. I found the rest of the
party at this most beautiful little place in a wonderful pic
turesque house. It was right pleasant to meet them again.
The Prof, has been working himself out and is thin and
nervous. That good woman, Mrs. Agassiz, is perfectly well.
The boys, poor fellows, have all their legs in an awful con-
68 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
dition from a kind of mite called "muguim" which gets
under the skin and makes dreadful sores. You can t walk
in the woods without getting them on you, and poor Hunney
[Hunnewell] is ulcerated very badly. They have no mos
quitoes though here.
Since last night we have had everything packed our
packing-work, its volume, its dirtyness, and its misery is
wonderful. Twenty-nine full barrels of specimens from
here, and hardly one tight barrel among them. The burly
execrations of the burly Dexter when at the cooper s work
would make your hair shiver. But when a good barrel
presents itself, then the calm joy almost makes amends for
the past. Dexter says he has the same feeling for a decent
barrel that he has for a beautiful woman. When the
steamer comes we are going down to Manaos, where we
expect the gunboat which the government has promised
the Prof. Dexter and Tal go up the Rio Negro for a month.
The rest of us are going to the Madeira River in the steamer.
I don t know what I shall do exactly, but there will probably
be some canoeing to be done, in which case I m ready; tho*
the rainy season is beginning, which makes canoe traveling
very uncomfortable. We shall be at Para by the middle
of December certainly. I am very anxious to learn whether
the New York and Brazilian steamers are to run. We
may learn at Manaos, where there is also a chance for letters
for us, and American papers. Why can t you send the
"North American," with Father s and Harry s articles? It
would be worth any price to me.
iind Oct.
On board the old homestead, viz., Steamer Icamiaba.
The only haven of rest we have in this country, and then
only when she is in motion; for when we stop at a place,
the Prof, is sure to come around and say how very desirable
Aet.23\ TO HIS PARENTS 69
it would be to get a large number of fishes from this place,
and willy-nilly you must trudge. I wrote in my last letter
something about the possibility of my wishing to go down
South again with the Professor. I don t think there is any
more probability of it than of my wishing to explore Central
Africa. If there is anything I hate, it is collecting. I
don t think it is suited to my genius at all; but for that
very reason this little exercise in it I am having here is the
better for me. I am getting to be very practical, orderly,
and businesslike. That fine disorder which used to prevail
in my precincts, and which used to make Mother heave a
beautiful sigh when she entered my room, is treated by the
people with whom I am here as a heinous crime, and I feel
very sensitive and ashamed about it. The 22nd of October!
- what glorious weather you are having at home now, and
how we should all like to be wound up by one day of it! I
have often longed for a good, black, sour, sleety, sloshy
winter s day in Washington Street. Oh, the bliss of stand
ing on such a day half way between Roxbury and Boston
and having all the horse-cars pass you full! It will be
splendid to get home in mid-winter and revel in the cold.
I am delighted to hear how well Wilky is, and to hear from
him. I wish Bob would write me a line and only one
letter from Alice in all this time shame! Oh, the lovely
white child! How the red man of the forest would like to
hug her to his bosom once more ! I proposed, beloved Alice,
to write thee a long letter by this steamer describing my
wonderful adventures with the wild Indians, and the tiger
[jaguar ?], and various details which interest thy lovely
female mind; but I feel so darned heavy and seedy this
morning that I cannot pump up the flow of words, and the
letter goes on with the steamer from Manaos this evening.
This expedition has been far less adventurous and far more
70 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1865
picturesque than I expected. I have not yet seen a single
snake wild here. The adventure with the tiger consisted
in his approaching to within 30 paces of our mosquito net,
and roaring so as to wake us, and then keeping us awake
most of the rest of the night by roaring far and near. I
confess I felt some skeert, on being suddenly awoke by him,
tho when I had laid me down I had mocked the apprehen
sions of Tal about tigers. The adventure with the wild
Indians consisted in our seeing two of them naked at a dis
tance on the edge of the forest. On shouting to them in
Lingoa Geral they ran away. It gave me a very peculiar
and unexpected thrilling sensation to come thus suddenly
upon these children of Nature. But I now tell you in con
fidence, my beloved white child, what you must not tell any
of the rest of the family (for it would spoil the adventure),
that we discovered a few hours later that these wild Indians
were a couple of mulattoes belonging to another canoe, who
had been in bathing.
I shall have to stop now. Do you still go to school at
Miss Clapp s? For Heaven s sake write to me, Ball Tell
Harry if he sees [John] Bancroft to tell him Bourkhardt is
much better, having found an Indian remedy of great effi
cacy. Please give my best love to the Tweedies, Temples,
Washburns, La Farges, Paine, Childs, Elly Van Buren and
in fact everybody who is in any way connected with me.
Best of love to Aunt Kate, Wilk and Bob, Harry and all
the family. I pine for Harry s literary efforts and to see a
number or so of the "Nation." You can t send too many
magazines or papers Care of James B. Bond, Para.
W. J.
IV
1866-1867
Medical Studies at Harvard
JAMES returned from Brazil in March, 1866, and imme
diately entered the Massachusetts General Hospital for a
summer s service as undergraduate interne. In the au
tumn he left the Hospital and resumed his studies in the
Harvard Medical School.
The Faculty of the School then included Dr. 0. W.
Holmes and Professor Jeffries Wyman. Charles Ed.
Brown-Sequard was lecturing on the pathology of the
nervous system. During the years of James s interrupted
course a number of men attended the school who were to
be his friends and colleagues for many years thereafter
among them William G. Farlow, subsequently Professor of
Cryptogamic Botany and a Cambridge neighbor for forty
years, and Charles P. Putnam and James J. Putnam two
brothers in whose company he was later to spend many
Adirondack vacations and to whom he became warmly
attached. Henry P. Bowditch, whose instinct for physi
ological inquiry was already vigorous, and who was des
tined to become a leader of research in America, and the
teacher and inspirer of a generation of younger investiga
tors, was another Medical School contemporary with whom
he formed an enduring friendship.
The instruction given in the Harvard Medical School in
the sixties was as good as any obtainable in America, but
it fell short of what is nowadays reckoned as essential for
a medical education to an extent that none but a modern
student of medicine can understand. The emphasis was
72 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1866
still on lectures, demonstrations and reading, and the pupil s
role was an almost completely passive one. James, accord
ing to the testimony of one of his classmates, made a soli
tary exception to the practice of the class by attempting
to keep a graphic record of his microscopic studies in his
tology and pathology. When questioned about this long
after, he admitted that he believed himself to have been
the only student of his time in the Medical School who took
the trouble to make drawings from the microscopic field
with regularity.
The teaching of Pasteur and Lister had not then revolu
tionized medicine. Modern bacteriology and the possi
bilities of aseptic surgery were yet to be understood. Sur
geons who operated in the amphitheatre of the Massachu
setts General Hospital could still take pride in appearing in
blood-soiled gowns, much as a fisherman scorns a brand-
new outfit and sports his weather-rusted old clothes. The
demonstrations of even Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, a skillful oper
ator who was then a leader in his profession, filled James
with a horror which he never forgot.
On the other hand, the discovery of anesthesia, which
made possible an enlarged and humane use of animals for
experimental inquiry, and such illuminating reports and
investigations as those of Claude Bernard, Helmholtz, Vir-
chow and Ludwig were giving a great impetus to the inves
tigation of bodily processes and functions, and a study of
these was a possible next step in James s evolution. He
had already been unusually well grounded in comparative
anatomy by Agassiz and Jeffries Wyman. He was gravi
tating surely, even if he did not yet realize it clearly, toward
philosophy. Whenever he more or less consciously projected
himself forward, it must have seemed to him that the exami
nation of processes in the living body, for which he was al-
Aet. 24} TO THOMAS W. WARD 73
ready prepared, might be related, in an enlightening way, to
the philosophic pursuits that were beginning to invite him.
Physiology therefore commanded both his respect and his
curiosity, and he turned in that direction rather than toward
what he then saw surgery and the practice of internal med
icine to be.
During the winter of 1866-67 he lived with his parents
in the house x in Quincy Street, Cambridge, in which they
had settled themselves, and worked regularly at the Medical
School. He had come back from the year of mere animal
existence on the Amazon in excellent physical condition.
Of the four letters which follow, two were written to
Thomas W. Ward, who, it will be remembered, had been a
member of the Amazon Expedition, and who, after getting
back to New York, had entered the great Baring banking
house of which his father, Samuel Ward, was the American
partner. O. W. Holmes, Jr., will be recognized as the
present Associate Justice of the United States Supreme
Court. In no one did James find more sympathetic philo
sophic companionship at this period.
To Thomas W. Ward.
BOSTON, Mar. 27, 1866.
MEG CARO COMPADRE, I have been intending to write
you every night for the last month, but the strange epis
tolary inertia which always weighs down upon me has kept
me from it until now. I have had news of you two or three
times from my father having met yours, and from Dexter,
who said he had met you in New York. I am very curious
to know how you find your occupation to suit you, and if
you find the dust of daily drudgery to obscure at all the
visions of your far-off- future power. From what Dexter
1 This house has since been enlarged and converted into the Colonial Club.
74 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1866
said I am afraid they do a little. We had given up Allen x
as gone to the fishes; but the poor Devil arrived last week
after a 98-days passage!!! I never felt gladder for any
thing in my life. He had a horrible time at sea, being within
1 60 miles of New York and then blown back as far as St.
Thomas. He says most of his collections arrived at Bahia
spoiled by the sun. He was sixteen days crossing a lime
stone desert on which nothing grew but cacti; so there
was no shade at noon, and the thermometer at 98. His
health has been improved by the voyage, however, and
he thinks it is better now than when he left for Brazil.
Nevertheless he is going to give up natural history for the
present and adopt some out-of-door life till he gets decidedly
better, which he says he has been slowly but steadily doing
for some years past. Poor Allen! None of us have been
sold as badly as he. If I had not been to Brazil, I would go
again to do what I have done, knowing beforehand what it
would be. Allen says he would not, on any account.
I have been studying now for about two weeks, and think
I shall be much more interested in it than before. It was
some time before I could get settled down to reading. But
now I do it quite naturally, and even thinking is beginning
not to feel like a wholly abnormal process; all which, as
you may imagine, is very agreeable altho I confess that
as yet the philosophical rouages of my mind have not at
tained even to the degree of lubrication they had before I
left. I shan t apologize for the egotistical pronoun, for I
suppose, my dear old Thomas, that you will be interested
to compare my experience since my return with yours, and
learn something from it if possible even as I would with
yours. I spent the first month of my return in nothing but
"social intercourse," having the two Temple girls and Elly
1 John A. Allen, another of the Brazilian party.
Act. 24} TO THOMAS W. WARD 75
Van Buren in the house for a fortnight, and being obliged
to escort them about to parties, etc., nearly every night.
The consequences were a falling in love with every girl I met
succeeded now by a reaction which makes me, and will
make me for a long time, decline every invitation. I feel
now somehow as if I had settled down upon a steady track
that I shall not have much temptation to slip off of, for a
good many months at any rate. I am conscious of a desire
I never had before so strongly or so permanently, of nar
rowing and deepening the channel of my intellectual activ
ity, of economizing my feeble energies and consequently
treating with more respect the few things I shall devote
them to. This temper may be a transient one; mais pour
peu qu il dure un an ou deux, to fix the shorter term ! I m
sure it will give a tone to my mind it lacked before. As for
the disrespect with which you treat the worthy problems
that you turn your back upon, I don t see now exactly how
you get over that; but something tells me that, practically,
my salvation depends for the present on following some such
plan. And, I am sure that, in the majority of men at any
rate, the process of growing into a calm mental state is not
one of leveling, but of going around, difficulties. The prob
lem they solve is not one of being, but of method. They
reach a point from which the view within certain limits is
harmonious, and they keep within those limits; they find
as it were a centre of oscillation in which they may be at
rest. Now whether any other kind of solution is possible,
I don t know. Many men will say not; but I feel somehow,
now, as if I had no right to an opinion on any subject, no
right to open my mouth before others until I know some
one thing as thoroughly as it can be known, no matter how
insignificant it may be. After that I shall perhaps be able
to think on general subjects. The only fellow here I care
7 6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1866
anything about is Holmes, who is on the whole a first-rate
article, and one which improves by wear. He is perhaps
too exclusively intellectual, but sees things so easily and
clearly and talks so admirably that it s a treat to be with
him. T. S. Perry is also flourishing in health and spirits.
Ed[ward] Emerson I have not yet seen. I made the ac
quaintance the other day of Miss Fanny Dixwell of Cam
bridge (the eldest), do you know her? She is decidedly Ai,
and (so far) the best girl I have known. I should like if
possible to confine my whole life to her, Ellen Hooper, Sara
Sedgwick, 1 Holmes, Harry, and the Medical School, for an
indefinite period, letting no breath of extraneous air enter.
There, I hope that s a confession of faith. I wish you
would write me a similar or even more "developed" one, for
I really want to know how the building up into flesh and
blood of the wide-sweeping plans that the solitudes of
Brazil gave birth to seems to alter them. Write soon, and
I ll answer soon; for I think, Cheri de Thomas, que ce doux
commerce que nous avons mene tant d annees ought not
all of a sudden to die out. I d give a great deal to see you,
but see no prospect of getting to New York for a long time.
Our family spends six months at Swampscott from the first
of May. I shall have a room in town. What chance is
there of your being able to pay us a visit at Swampscott in
my vacation (from July 15 to Sept. 15)? Ever your friend
WM. JAMES.
To Thomas W. Ward.
BOSTON, June 8, 1866.
CHERI DE THOMAS, I cannot exactly say I hasten to
reply to your letter. I have thought of you about every
1 Miss Dixwell became Mrs. O. W. Holmes; the other two, Mrs. E. W. Gurney
and Mrs. William E. Darwin respectively.
Aet. 24} TO THOMAS W. WARD 77
day since I received it, and given you a Brazilian hug
therewith, and wanted to write to you; but having been in
a pretty unsettled theoretical condition myself, from which
I hoped some positive conclusions might emerge worthy
to be presented to you as the last word on the Kosmos and
the human soul, I deferred writing from day to day, think
ing that better than to offer you the crude and premature
spawning of my intelligence. In vain! the conclusions
never have emerged, and I see that, if I am ever to write
you, I must do it on the spur of the moment, with all my
dullness thick upon me.
I have just read your letter over again, and am grieved
afresh at your melancholy tone about yourself. You ask
why I am quiet, while you are so restless. Partly from the
original constitution of things, I suppose; partly because
I am less quiet than you suppose; only I once heard a
proverb about a man consuming his own smoke, and I
do so particularly in your presence because you, being so
much more turbid, produce a reaction in me; partly because
I am a few years older than you, and have not solved,
but grown callous (I hear your sneer) to, many of the prob
lems that now torture you. The chief reason is the original
constitution of things, which generated me with fewer sym
pathies and wants than you, and also perhaps with a cer
tain tranquil confidence in the right ordering of the Whole,
which makes me indifferent in some circumstances where
you would fret. Yours the nobler, mine the happier part!
I think, too, that much of your uneasiness comes from
that to which you allude in your letter your oscillatori-
ness, and your regarding each oscillation as something final
as long as it lasts. There is nothing more certain than
that every man s life (except perhaps Harry Quincy s) is a
line that continuously oscillates on every side of its direc-
7 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1866
tion; and if you would be more confident that any state of
tension you may at any time find yourself in will inevitably
relieve itself, sooner or later, you would spare yourself
much anxiety. I myself have felt in the last six months
more and more certain that each man s constitution limits
him to a certain amount of emotion and action, and that,
if he insists on going under a higher pressure than normal
for three months, for instance, he will pay for it by passing
the next three months below par. So the best way is to
keep moving steadily and regularly, as your mind becomes
thus deliciously appeased (as you imagine mine to be; ah!
Tom, what damned fools we are!). If you feel below par
now, don t think your life is deserting you forever. You
are just as sure to be up again as you are, when elated,
sure to be down again. Six months, or any given cycle of
time, is sure to see you produce a certain amount, and your
fretful anxiety when in a stagnant mood is frivolous. The
good time will come again, as it has come; and go too. I
think we ought to be independent of our moods, look on
them as external, for they come to us unbidden, and feel
if possible neither elated nor depressed, but keep our eyes
upon our work and, if we have done the best we could in
that given condition, be satisfied.
I don t know whether all this solemn wisdom of mine seems
to you anything better than conceited irrelevance. I be
gan the other day to read the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius,
translated by Long, published by Ticknor, which, if you
have not read, I advise you to read, slowly. I only read
two or three pages a day, and am only half through the book.
He certainly had an invincible soul; and it seems to me that
any man who can, like him, grasp the love of a "life
according to nature," i.e., a life in which your individual will
becomes so harmonized to nature s will as cheerfully to
Act. 24} TO HIS SISTER 79
acquiesce in whatever she assigns to you, knowing that you
serve some purpose in her vast machinery which will never
be revealed to you any man who can do this will, I say,
be a pleasing spectacle, no matter what his lot in life. I
think old Mark s perpetual yearnings for patience and
equanimity and kindliness would do your heart good. I
have come to feel lately, more and more (I can t tell though
whether it will be permanent) like paying my footing in
the world in a very humble way, (driving my physicking
trade like any other tenth-rate man), and then living my
free life in my leisure hours entirely within my own breast
as a thing the world has nothing to do with; and living it eas
ily and patiently, without feeling responsible for its future.
I will now, my dear old Tom, stop my crudities. Although
these notions and others have of late led me to a pretty
practical contentment, I cannot help feeling as if I were
insulting Heaven by offering them about as if they had an
absolute worth. Still, as I am willing to take them all back
whenever it seems right, you will excuse my apparent con
ceit. Besides, they may suggest some practical point of view
to you.
The family is at Swampscott. I have a room in Bow-
doin Street for the secular part of the week. We have a
very nice house in Swampscott. ... I am anxiously wait
ing your arrival on Class Day. I expect you to spend all
your time with me either here or in Swampscott, when we
shall, I trust, patch up the Kosmos satisfactorily and rescue
it from its present fragmentary condition. . . .
To his Sister.
CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 14, 1866.
CHERIE DE JEUNE BALLE, I am just in from town in
the keen, cold and eke beauteous moonlight, which by the
80 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1866
above qualities makes me think of thee, to whom, nor to
whose aunt, have I (not) yet written. (I don t understand
the grammar of the not.)
Your first question is, "where have I been?" "To C. S.
Peirce s lecture, which I could not understand a word of,
but rather enjoyed the sensation of listening to for an hour."
I then turned to O. W. Holmes s and wrangled with him for
another hour.
You may thank your stars that you are not in a place
where you have to ride in such full horse-cars as these. I
rode half way out with my "form" entirely out of the car
overhanging the road, my feet alone being on the same ver
tical line as any part of the car, there being just room
for them on the step. Aunt Kate may, and probably will,
have shoot through her prolific mind the supposish: "How
wrong in him to do sich! for if, while in that posish, he should
have a sudden stroke of paralysis, or faint, his nerveless
fingers relaxing their grasp of the rail, he would fall prostrate
to the ground and bust." To which I reply that, when I go
so far as to have a stroke of paralysis, I shall not mind go
ing a step farther and getting bruised.
Your next question probably is "how are and where are
father and mother?". . . I think father seems more lively
for a few days past and cracks jokes with Harry, etc. Mother
is recovering from one of her indispositions, which she bears
like an angel, doing any amount of work at the same time,
putting up cornices and raking out the garret-room like a
little buffalo.
Your next question is "wherever is Harry?" I answer:
"He is to Ashburner s, to a tea-squall in favor of Miss
Haggerty. " I declined. He is well. We have had nothing
but invitations (6) in 3 or 4 days. One, a painted one,
from "Mrs. L ," whoever she may be. I replied that
Aet.2 4 \ TO HIS SISTER 81
domestic affliction prevented me from going, but I would
take a pecuniary equivalent instead, viz: To I oyster
stew 30 cts., i chicken salad 0.50, i roll 0.02, 3 ice creams at
20 cts. 0.60, 6 small cakes at 0.05, 0.30, I pear $1.50, i Ib.
confectionery 0/50.
6 glasses hock at 0.50 $3.00
3 glasses sherry at 30 0.90
Salad spilt on floor 5.0x3
Dish of do., broken 3.00
Damage to carpet & Miss L s dress frm. do 75-oo
3 glasses broken 1.20
Curtains set fire to in dressing-room 40.00
Other injury frm. fire in room 250.00
Injury to house frm. water pumped upon it by
steam fire-engine come to put out fire 5000.00
Miscellaneous 0.35
5300.00
I expect momentarily her reply with a check, and when it
comes will take you and Aunt Kate on a tour in Europe
and have you examined by the leading physicians and
surgeons of that country. M - L - came out here
and dined with us yesterday of her own accord. I no
longer doubt what I always suspected, her penchant for
me, and I don t blame her for it. Elly Temple staid 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.
82 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1866
To 0. W. Holmes, Jr.
[A pencil memorandum, Winter of 1866-67?]
Why I m blest if I m a Materialist:
The materialist posits an X for his ultimate principle.
Were he satisfied to inhabit this vacuous X, I should not
at present try to disturb him.
But that atmosphere is too rare; so he spends all his time
on the road between it and sensible realities, engaged in
the laudable pursuit of degrading every (sensibly) higher
thing into a (sensibly) lower. He thus accomplishes an
immensely great positively conceived and felt result, and
it availeth little to naturalize the sensible impression of
this that he should at the end put in his little caveat that,
after all, the low denomination is as unreal as the unreduced
higher ones were. In the confession of ignorance is nothing
which the mind can close upon and clutch it s a vanish
ing negation; while the pretension of knowledge is full of
positive, massively-felt contents. The former kicks the
beam. What balm is it, when instead of my High you
have given me a Low, to tell me that the Low is good for
nothing?
If you take my $1000 gold and give me greenbacks, I
feel unreconciled still, even when you have assured me that
the greenbacks are counterfeit. Or what comfort is it to
me now to be told that a billion years hence greenbacks
and gold will have the same value? especially when that
\ is explained to be zero? How anyone can say that this
pennyworth of negation can so balance these tons of affirma
tion as to make the naturalist feel like anyone else I
confess it s a mystery to me.
But as a man s happiness depends on his feeling, I think
materialism inconsistent with a high degree thereof, and
in this sense maintained that a materialist should not be
Act. 24}
TO O. W. HOLMES, JR.
an optimist, using the latter word to signify one whose
philosophy authenticates, by guaranteeing the objective
significance of, his most pleasurable feelings.
You have transferred the question of optimism to a wider
field, where I can t well follow it now. The term would
have to be defined first, and then I think it would take me
ten or twelve years of hard study to form any opinion as
to the truth of your second premise. I send the above
remarks on "materialism," because they were what I was
groping for the other evening, but could not say till you
were gone and I in bed. To conclude:
Corruptio optimistorum pessima I
Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.
V
1867-1868
Eighteen Months in Germany
IN the spring of 1867 James interrupted his course at the
Medical School again. He was impelled to do this, partly
by the pressure of a conviction that his health required him
to stop work or continue elsewhere under different condi
tions, and partly by a desire to learn German and study
physiology in the German laboratories. He knew a little
German already, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that
if he went abroad immediately he would have time to famil
iarize himself with the language during a pleasant and
restful summer and would be ready to enter one of the uni
versities in the autumn. He sailed in April and spent the
summer in Dresden and Bohemia. But his health became
worse instead of better.
It is unnecessary to detail the record of a long illness by
selecting for this book the passages of his correspondence
in which James sooner or later revealed what his condition
was. It would also be idle to inquire closely about the
causes of his illness, considering that, for one reason, James
was completely puzzled and baffled himself. Insomnia, di
gestive disorders, eye-troubles, weakness of the back, and
sometimes deep depression of spirits followed each other or
afflicted him simultaneously. If his trouble was in part
nervous, it was a reality none the less. A photograph that
was taken of him at about this period recorded the as
pect of a very ill man. If, his introspective genius made
things worse for him for a while, it probably did more to
i86 7 -68] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 85
pull him through in the end than the to our present-day
understanding harsh and unnecessary treatments, regi
mens, water-cures, courses of exercise, galvanisms, and blis
tering to which he subjected himself.
On the other hand, the illness which began in 1867, and
which limited James s activities and occupations for several
years, had another effect. It overtook him when he was
only twenty-five years old, and threw him heavily upon his
inner moral and intellectual resources. It caught him
alone and among strangers, more or less prostrated him,
and defeated his plans just at a time of life when he was
beginning, with the eagerness of youth and philosophic
genius combined, to reckon over each fresh experience into
the terms of a possible answer to the riddles of life and
death, predestination, freedom, and responsibility. It gave
a personal intimacy and intensity to the deepest problems
that philosophy and religion can present to man s under
standing. This illness may perhaps have prevented James
from becoming a physiological investigator. But clearly it
developed and deepened the bed in which the stream of his
philosophic life was to flow.
He sailed for Europe in April, and went almost directly
to Dresden, where he found quarters in a pension presided
over by an amiable Frau Spannenberg. He spent his
mornings, and often his evenings, reading and studying
German. He made an excursion to Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia,
but the "cure" there did not greatly relieve his back, and
the baths made him feel "as if his brain had been boiled," 1
so he returned to Frau Spannenberg s. In the early au
tumn he moved to Berlin, attended a few lectures at the
University there, and read a good deal on the physiology of
1 Miss Kate Havens of Stamford, Conn., a fellow pensionnaire at Frau Span
nenberg s, has kindly supplied a helpful memorandum.
86 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
the nervous system; but he was unable to work in the lab
oratories, and found it expedient to return to Teplitz at
the end of January (1868). What he did thereafter will
appear as the letters proceed.
To his Parents.
DRESDEN, May 27, 1867.
. . . Though I have been just a little over two weeks settled
in Dresden, I hardly know anything about it or about Ger
many yet. Nothing but confused, vague and probably erro
neous impressions of the people, owing chiefly to my imper
fect knowledge of the language. In the first place there is
not the slightest touch of the romantic, picturesque, or even
foreign about living here. I think there is very little abso
lutely in the place to give such impressions, and I think I
have outgrown my old susceptibility to them. Whereas in
old times I used to notice every window, door-handle and
smell as having a peculiar and exotic charm, every old street
and house as filled with historic life and mystery, they are
now to me streets and houses and nothing more. The hey
day of youth is o er! Alack the day! My traveling has
been accompanied with hardly more astonishment or excite
ment than would accompany a journey to Chicago. . . .
The place which has most invited me to live in it is Stras-
burg. The people all speak both French and German, each
with the other s accent, and the environs are ravishing.
The Saxons are a very short and ill-favored race, both sexes,
not light-haired as the Rhinelanders, and most eccentrically
toothed. Many of the young officers, however, are very
good-looking fellows. The poor people wear old greasy
caps and black coats, and no collars, but black cravats as
in England, and look very ugly. The great number of old
men and women here has struck me very much. Can it
William James at twenty-five.
From a Photograph
Act. 25 ] TO HIS PARENTS 87
be that we have so few at home? or do we keep them in
doors? Or do the Germans show their age so much sooner?
I know not. The Americans I have met have been a poor
crowd. The English I have seen have been distinguished
by their pure and clean appearance, and by an awkwardness
which in a certain way appeals to your sympathies. They
have the faculty of blushing which is denied to the French
and comparatively to the Germans, and in spite of all my
prejudices I feel more akin to them than to the others.
I have, since I wrote my last letter, led a perfectly monot
onous life. Read all the morning, go out for a walk and
a lounge in a concert garden in the afternoon, and read
after tea. I am quite well satisfied with my progress in the
noble German tongue, which has been steady, although,
since the first day I wrote to you about [it], not brilliant.
Its difficulties are I think quite unjustifiably great for a
modern language it is in fact without any of the mod
ern improvements. I read the little newspapers, which
Dr. Semler takes, carefully from beginning to end; and
what with the other newspapers I see at a reading-room, the
talk I hear, and a little other reading, I have a quite vague
and confused but very wonderful impression of the strange
difference between the whole German way of thinking and
ours; and in my as yet crude fancy it seems to be con
nected with the grammatical structure of the sentences and
the endless power of making new words by combination.
I have just been reading Hegel s chapter on epic poetry in
his "Aesthetik," and [the] truly monstrous sentences therein
were quite a revelation to me. It seems to me that the
expression corresponds much more closely to the sponta
neous and impromptu mode of thought than in our Latin
ized tongues that the language allows and invites specu
lation and expatiation without limit. As soon as the first
88 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
glimmering of an idea has dawned upon you, there is no
reason why you should not begin to inscribe, for you can
wallow round and round as you proceed, affixing limita
tions, lugging in definitions and explanations as fast as they
suggest each other, and need never go back to reshape your
beginning. While with us you will, as a rule, come to grief
if you begin your sentence without a pretty distinct idea of
what the whole is going to be. Then the endless power of
word-multiplication by composition, and of making adjec
tives of whole phrases must allow you to^, and to fix in a
most homely, pregnant form, a host of evanescent shades of
meaning (most of which would with us be lost), as fast as they
flash upon the mind. And from these successive approx
imations the final form of the thought may be more easily
and surely distilled than if it had to be all formed in one s
head before it could get even an approximate expression.
However, I don t pretend to say that these hasty impres
sions are correct. They may be the mere creations of a dis
tempered fancy. At any rate, I am sure that German is
the native tongue of all Wilky-isms, and that in Germany
[Wilky] would be one of the first authors of the age for
style. The mischief of it is that, instead of using these
approximations as such, the people let them stand perma
nently, and as they can make them with so little trouble,
there arises in literature and talk an entangled mass of
crudity and barbarism that spoils everything. They get
accustomed to such elephantine ways of saying things that
they don t mind it at all, and I have had more amusement
out of the newspaper than I ever derived from the text of
"Punch." I wish I could remember some of the expres
sions. Yesterday, for instance, the paper said the Emperor
of Austria s message was more atomistisch than dynamisch
this, in a peppery little political article, shows what schol-
Aet. 25} TO HIS PARENTS 89
astic expressions the people are accustomed to. The con
text gave no explanation. Then, a couple of days ago, in
a review of some histories of German literature, the surpris
ing depth of one author was praised, altho it was granted
"that here and there he had not succeeded in lighting up the
ultimate life-spring (Lebensgrund) of the phenomena." Of
another that "without entirely losing sight of what was human
(menschlich) in the phenomena, he had accomplished a
work of extraordinarily logical development and luminous
procedure (Gang)." Imagine entirely leaving out the human
in a history of literature! . . .
May 30.
The pleasant spinster from Hamburg I mentioned in my
last letter as being so well read, has, I find, "drawn the
line" of her information at geography and physical science.
She comes out strong in Sanscrit and Greek literature
(which she knows of course by translations), and in church
history, but she drives me frantic by her endless talking
about America, in the course of which she continually
leaps without any warning from New York to Rio de Janeiro
and thence to Valparaiso. She has friends in each of these
localities, and it is apparently a fixed conviction of hers that
they take tea together every evening. At first I tried to
show her that these places were all far apart and that the
ways of one were not those of the others, and from her
apparent comprehension and submission I used to fancy I
had succeeded; but it was only the elastic and transient
bowing of the reed before the gale. A rather amusing inci
dent occurred the other evening. I was speaking of the dif
ferent classes of people that made up our population, and
endeavoring to give a keen analysis of the Irish character,
when she asked me to tell her something about a people we
had with us called "Yankees," about whom she had heard
9 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
such strange stories, and who seemed to be, if report were
true, of all the peoples in the world the very worst (das
allerschlimmste] . What was their genesis and what were
they? Imagine the feelings of the poor old lady, who had
asked the question merely from a wish to please me by her
intelligent interest in our affairs, when the truth was told
her. . . .
The other afternoon I fell into conversation with a tall
and rather aristocratic-looking old gentleman with a gray
moustache, who spoke very good French, at a beer garden,
and found out afterwards that he was no less a person than
the illustrious Kaulbach. Strangely enough, we quite acci
dentally got on the subject of the Gallery. He spoke of
several of the pictures, but said nothing that was not com
monplace. I have as yet only had a mere glimpse at the
Gallery, but will do it thoroughly before I leave. I d give
anything if Harry could see some of the Venetian things
there, and the Shepherds Adoration of Correggio, which
he probably knows, or rather meconnait, by prints which
give nought but the rather unpleasant and, unless you are
let into the secret, motivelessly eccentric drawing. But it
would take Victor Hugo to find the proper antithetic epi
thets to describe the combined gladness and solemnity of
the painting, its innocence and its depth. I have always
had, I don t know why, a prejudice against Correggio; but
I never saw a painting before that breathed out so easily
such a moral poetry. It seems to me to kill Rafael s cele
brated Madonna right out. Although that too is a good
"piece." I find myself in the Gallery much too disposed
to exalt one thing at the expense of its neighbors, which is
very unjust to them; but by taking it easily and letting
the pictures do their own work I think it will all come right.
Mr. Paul Veronese had eyes, anyhow. I am sure it would
ACL 25} TO HIS PARENTS 9 i
be the making of John La Farge to come abroad, alone, if
no other way. Dis lui, Henry, que je lui ecrirai tan tot a ce
sujet.
I have been having a literary debauch to start in the
language with, but am getting down again to medicine.
The enthusiastic, oratorical and eloquent Schiller, the wise
and exquisite Goethe, and the virile and human Lessing
have in turn held me entranced by their Drama!. Je te
recommande, Henry, "Emilia Galotti" comme etude.
C est serre comme du chene, rapide comme 1 avalanche,
toute la retenue et la vigueur de Merimee, et au fond un
gros cceur dont la tendresse comprimee n echappe que par
des phrases dont la sobriete meme dechire, ou bien par du
bitter irony. Lessing seems to have a religious feeling that
people miss in Goethe, and seems to be a great deal deeper
than Schiller, though, of course, he is a far more home
spun character. I have been reading Goethe s "Italienische
Reise." It is perfectly fascinating; but you can read very
little of it at a time, it is so damnably tedious, and you can t
bear to skip. Paradoxical as it may appear, there is a deal
of naivete in the old cuss. Attends done un peu que mon
grand article sur Goethe apparaisse dans "L Americain
du Nord!"
I expect T. S. Perry here in a fortnight on his way from
Venice. You may imagine with what joy. I have just
been interrupted by the supper, which takes place at nine
P.M. and consists of beer, eggs, herrings, ham, and bread and
butter, and is not displeasing to the carnal man. I have
been writing a most infernally long letter, for which I
apologize. It will be the last time. The fact is I have so
few resources here that I am driven to write. Tell Alice
that there are two Miss Twomblys from Boylston Street
living here, one exceedingly pretty. She doubtless, by her
92 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
feminine system of espionage, knows who they are, though
I know none of their friends and they none of mine. I
got mother s letter and the " Nation" with great joy soon
after my arrival. I read Father s article, but with much
the old result. I am desirious of reading his article in the
N. A. R. and hope he will not delay to send it when it
appears. Heaps of love all round.
To his Mother.
DRESDEN, June 12, 1867.
DEAREST MOTHER, I have been reading a considerable
deal of German, and in a very desultory way, as I want to
get accustomed to a variety of styles, so as to be able to
read any book at sight, skipping the useless; and I may say
that I now begin to have that power whenever the book is
writ in a style at all adapted to the requirements of the
human, as distinguished from the German, mind. The
profounder and more philosophical German requires, how
ever, that you should bring all the resources of your nature,
of every kind, to a focus, and hurl them again and again on
the sentence, till at last you feel something give way, as it
were, and the Idea begins to unravel itself. As for speaking,
that is a very different matter and advances much more
slowly. . . .
Life is so monotonous in this place that unless I make
some philosophical discoveries, or unless something hap
pens, my letters will have to be both few and short. I get
up and have breakfast, which means a big cup of cocoa and
some bread and butter with an egg, if I want it, at eight.
I read till half-past one, when dinner, which is generally
quite a decent meal; after dinner a nap, more Germanorum
and more read till the sun gets low enough to go out, when
out I go generally to the Grosser Garten, a lovely park
Act. 25} TO HIS MOTHER 93
outside the town where the sun slants over the greenest
meadows and sends his shafts between the great trees in
a most wholesome manner. There are some spots where
the trees are close together, and in their classic gloom you
find mossy statues, so that you feel as if you belonged to
the last century. Often I go and sit on a terrace which
overlooks the Elbe and, with my eyes bent upon the lordly
cliffs far down the river on the other side, with strains of
the sweetest music in my ear, and with pint after pint of
beer successively finding their way into the fastnesses of
my interior, I enjoy most delightful reveries, au nombre
desquels those concerning my home and my sister are not
the least frequent.
In the house (which stands on a corner) my great resource
when time hangs heavy on my hands is to sit in the window
and examine my neighbors. The houses are all four stories
high and composed of separate flats, as in Paris. I live in
the jme. Diagonally opposite is a young ladies boarding-
school where the young ladies, very young they are, are
wont to relax from their studies by kissing their hands,
etc., etc., etc., to a young English lout, who has been here in
the house, and myself. Said lout left for England yester
day, for which I heartily thank him, and I shall now
monopolize the attention of the school. We rather had
them, for we had a telescope to observe them by. Not one
was good-looking. There has, however, lately arisen in
the Christian Strasse, just under my window, a most
ravishing apparition, and I begin to think my heart will
not wither wholly away. About eighteen, hair like night,
and such eyes! Their mute-appealing, love-lorn look goes
through and through me. Every day for the last week,
after dinner, have I sat in my window and she in hers. I
with the telescope! she with those eyes! and we communing
94 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
with each other!! I will try to make a likeness of her and
send with this letter, but I may not succeed. 1 She has only
one defect, which is the length of her nose. If that were
only an inch and a half shorter, I should propose at once to
her Mother for it; but religious difference might intervene,
so it is better as it is.
I am expecting T. S. Perry any day now, you may imagine
how impatiently. . . . Tell Harry I have been reading some
essays by Fr. Theod. Vischer, the bedeutende Esthetiker, on
Strauss, on Goethe s " Faust" and its critics, etc., etc.,
which have much interested me. He is a splendid writer
for style and matter as brilliant as any of the non-
absolutely-harlequin Frenchmen. The foundation of the
thought is, or at least appears to be to my untutored mind,
Hegelian; but they were published in 1844 an d he may have
changed. His "Aesthetik" henceforward appears in the
list of "books which I must some day read." Some of the
commentaries there quoted on "Faust" are incredibly
monstrous for ponderous imbecility and seeing everything
in the universe and out of it, except the point. I read this
morning an Essay of Kuno Fischer s on Lessing s "Nathan"
one of the parasitic and analytic sort on the whole, but
/still very readable. The way these cusses slip so fluently
| off in to the "Ideal," the"Jenseitige," the "Inner," etc., etc.,
I and undertake to give a logical explanation of everything
which is so palpably trumped up after the facts, and the
reasoning of which is so grotesquely incapable of going an
inch into the future, is both disgusting and disheartening.
You never saw such a mania for going deep into the bowels
of truth, with such an absolute lack of intuition and percep
tion of the skin thereof. To hear the grass grow from morn
1 An accompanying drawing presented a telescopic exaggeration of features,
which are hardly appropriate to the Christian Strasse.
Aet. 25} TO HIS FATHER
95
till night is their happy occupation. There is something
that strikes me as corrupt, immodest in this incessant taste
for explaining things in this mechanical way; but the era
of it may be past now I don t know. I speak only of
aesthetic matters, of course. The political moment both
here and in Austria is extremely interesting to one who has
a political sense, and even I am beginning to have an
opinion and one all in favor of Prussia s victory and
supremacy as a great practical stride towards civilization.
I think the French tone in the last quarrel deserved a de
grading and stinging humiliation as much as anything in
history ever did, and I m very sorry they did not get it.
Of course there s no end of bunkum and inflation here,
too, but it is practically a healthy thing. . . .
To his Father.
BERLIN, Sept. 5, 1867.
MY BELOVED OLD DAD, ... I think it will be just as
well for you not to say anything to any of the others about
what I shall tell you of my condition hitherto, as it will
only give them useless pain, and poor Harry especially (who
evidently from his letters runs much into that utterly use
less emotion, sympathy, with me) had better remain igno
rant. . . . My confinement to my room and inability to
indulge in any social intercourse drove me necessarily into
reading a great deal, which in my half-starved and weak
condition was very bad for me, making me irritable and
tremulous in a way I have never before experienced. Two
evenings which I spent out, one at Gerlach s, the other at
Thies s, aggravated my dorsal symptoms very much, and
as I still clung to the hope of amelioration from repose, I
avoided going out to the houses where it was possible.
Although I cannot exactly say that I got low-spirited, yet
9 6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
thoughts of the pistol, the dagger and the bowl began to
usurp an unduly large part of my attention, and I began
to think that some change, even if a hazardous one, was
necessary. It was at that time that Dr. Cams advised
Teplitz. While there, owing to the weakening effects of
the baths, both back and stomach got worse if anything;
but the beautiful country and a number of drives which I
thought myself justified in taking made me happy as a
king. ... I have purposely hitherto written fallacious
accounts of my state home, to produce a pleasant impres
sion on you all but you may rely on the present one as
literally certain, and as it makes the others after all only
premature, I don t see what will be the use of impairing the
family confidence in my letters by saying anything about
it to them. I have no doubt that you will consider the
Teplitz expenditure justified, as I do. My sickness has
added some other items in the way of medicine and cab
hire to the expenses of my life in Dresden, but nothing very
considerable. So much for biz.
I have read your article, which I got in Teplitz, several
times carefully. I must confess that the darkness which
to me has always hung over what you have written on these
subjects is hardly at all cleared up. Every sentence seems
written from a point of view which I nowhere get within
range of, and on the other hand ignores all sorts of questions
which are visible from my present view. My questions, I
know, belong to the Understanding, and I suppose deal
entirely with the "natural constitution" of things; but I
find it impossible to step out from them into relation with
"spiritual" facts, and the very language you use ontolog-
ically is also so extensively rooted in the finite and phe
nomenal that I cannot avoid accepting it as it were in its
mechanical sense, when it becomes to me devoid of sig-
Aet. 25} TO HIS FATHER 97
nificance. I feel myself in fact more and more drifting
towards the sensationalism closed in by skepticism but
the skepticism will keep bursting out in the very midst of
it, too, from time to time; so that I cannot help thinking
I may one day get a glimpse of things through the onto-
logical window. At present it is walled up. I can under
stand now no more than ever the world-wide gulf you put
between "Head" and "Heart"; to me they are inextricably
entangled together, and seem to grow from a common
stem and no theory of creation seems to me to make
things clearer. I cannot logically understand your theory.
You posit first a phenomenal Nature in which the aliena
tion is produced (but phenomenal to what? to the already
unconsciously existing creature?), and from this effected
alienation a real movement of return follows. But how
can the real movement have its rise in the phenomenal?
And if it does not, it seems to me the creation is the very
arbitrary one you inveigh against; and the whole process
is a mere circle of the creator described within his own being
and returning to the starting-point. I cannot understand
what you mean by the descent of the creator into nature;
you don t explain it, and it seems to be the kernel of the
whole.
You speak sometimes of our natural life as our whole
conscious life; sometimes of our consciousness as composed
of both elements, finite and infinite. If our real life is
unconscious, I don t see how you can occupy in the final
result a different place from the Stoics, for instance. These
are points on which I have never understood your position,
and they will doubtless make you smile at my stupidity;
but I cannot help it. I ought not to write about them in
such a hurry, for I have been expecting every moment to
see Tom Dwight come in, with whom I promised to go to
9 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
the theatre. I arrived here late last night. My back will
prevent my studying physiology this winter at Leipsig,
which I rather hoped to do. I shall stay here if I can. If
unable to live here and cultivate the society of the natives
without a greater moral and dorsal effort than my shattered
frame will admit, I will retreat to Vienna where, knowing
so many Americans, I shall find social relaxation without
much expense of strength. Dwight has come. Much love
from your affectionate,
WM. JAMES.
To 0. W. Holmes, Jr.
BERLIN, Sept. 17, 1867.
MY DEAR WENDLE, I was put in the possession, this
morning, by a graceful and unusual attention on the part
of the postman, of a letter from home containing, amongst
other valuable matter, a precious specimen of manuscript
signed "O. W. H. Jr." covering just one page of small note
paper belonging to a letter written by Minny Temple!!!!!
Now I myself am not proud, poverty, misery and philos
ophy have together brought me to a pass where there are
few actions so shabby that I would not commit them if
thereby I could relieve in any measure my estate, or lighten
the trouble of living, but, by Jove, Sir! there is a point,
sunt certi denique fines, down to which it seems to me hardly
worth while to condescend better give up altogether.
I do not intend any personal application. Men differ,
thank Heaven ! and there may be some constituted in such
a fearful and wonderful manner, that to write to a friend
after six months, in another person s letter, hail him as
"one of the pillars on which life rests," and after twelve
lines stop short, seems to them an action replete with beauty
and credit. To me it is otherwise. And if perchance, O
Act. 25} TO O. W. HOLMES, JR.
99
Wendy boy, there lurked in any cranny of thy breast a
spark of consciousness, a germ of shame at the paltriness
of thy procedure as thou inditedst that pitiful apology
for a letter, I would fain fan it, nourish it, till thy whole
being should become one incarnate blush, one crater of
humiliation. Mind, I should not have found fault with
you if you had not written at all. There would have been
a fine brutality about that which would have commanded
respect rather than otherwise- certainly not pity. Tis
that, writing THAT should be the result. Bah!
But I will change the subject, as I do not wish to pro
voke you to recrimination in your next letter. Let it be
as substantial and succulent as the last, with its hollow
hyperbolic expression of esteem, was the opposite, and I
assure you that the past shall be forgotten. I am, as
you have probably been made aware, "a mere wreck,"
bodily. I left home without telling anyone about it, be
cause, hoping I might get well, I wanted to keep it a se
cret from Alice and the boys till it was over. I thought of
telling you "in confidence/ but refrained, partly because
walls have ears, partly from a morbid pride, mostly because
of the habit of secrecy that had grown on me in six months.
I dare say Harry has kept you supplied with information
respecting my history up to the present time, and perhaps
read you portions of my letters. My history, internal and
external, since I have been in Germany, has been totally
uneventful. The external, with the exception of three
R. R. voyages (to and from Teplitz and to Berlin), resembles
that of a sea anemone; and the internal, notwithstanding
the stimulus of a new language and country, has contracted
the same hue of stagnation. A tedious egotism seems to
be the only mental plant that flourishes in sickness and
solitude; and when the bodily condition is such that mus-
ioo LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
cular and cerebral activity not only remain unexcited, but
are solicited, by an idiotic hope of recovery, to crass in
dolence, the "elasticity" of one s spirits can t be expected
to be very great. Since I have been here I have admired
Harry s pluck more and more. Pain, however intense, is
light and life, compared to a condition where hibernation
would be the ideal of conduct, and where your "conscience,"
in the form of an aspiration towards recovery, rebukes
every tendency towards motion, excitement or life as a
culpable excess. The deadness of spirit thereby produced
"must be felt to be appreciated."
I have been in this city ten days and hope to stay all
winter. I have got a comfortable room near the Uni
versity and will attempt to follow some of the lectures. My
wish was to study physiology practically, but I shall not
be able. The number of subjects and fractions of subjects
on which courses of lectures are given here and at the other
universities would make you stare. Berlin is a "live"
place, with a fine, tall, intelligent-looking population, in
finitely better-looking than that of Dresden. I like the
Germans very much, so far (which is not far at all) as I
have got to know them. The apophthegm, "a fat man
consequently a good man," has much of truth in it. The
Germans come out strong on their abdomens, even when
these are not vast in capacity, one feels that they are of
mighty powerful construction, and play a much weightier
part in the economy of the man than with us, affording
a massive, immovable background to the consciousness,
over which, as on the surface of a deep and tranquil sea,
the motley images contributed by the other senses to life s
drama glide and play without raising more than a pleasant
ripple, while with us, who have no such voluminous back
ground, they forever touch bottom, or come out on the
Aet. 25} TO O. W. HOLMES, JR. 101
other side, or kick up such a tempest and fury that we
enjoy no repose. The Germans have leisure, kindness to
strangers, a sort of square honesty, and an absence of false
shame and damned pecuniary pretension that makes in
tercourse with them very agreeable. The language is
infernal; and I seem to be making no progress beyond the
stage in which one just begins to misunderstand and to
make one s self misunderstood. The scientific literature is
even richer than I thought. In literature proper, Goethe s
"Faust" seems to me almost worth learning the language
for.
I wish I could communicate to you some startling discov
eries regarding our dilapidated old friend the Kosmos, made
since I have been here. But I actually have n t had a
fresh idea. And my reading until six weeks ago, having
been all in German, covered very little ground. For the
past six weeks I have, by medical order, been relaxing my
brain on French fiction, and am just returning to the real
ities of life, German and Science. If you want to be con
soled, refreshed, and reconciled to the Kosmos, the whole
from a strictly abdominal point of view, read "L Ami
Fritz," and "Les Confessions d un Joueur de Clarinette,"
etc., by Erckmann-Chatrian. They are books of gold, so
don t read them till you are just in the mood and all other
wisdom is of no avail. Then they will open the skies to
you.
On looking back over this letter I perceive I have unwit
tingly been betrayed into a more gloomy tone than I in
tended, and than would convey a faithful impression of my
usual mental condition in which occur moments of keen
enjoyment. The contemplation of my letter of credit alone
makes me chuckle for hours. If I ever have leisure I will
write an additional Bridgewater, illustrating the Beneficence
io2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
and Ingenuity, etc., in providing me with a letter of credit
when so many poor devils have none. There, I have again
unintentionally fallen into a vein of irony I do not mean
it. I am full of hope in the future.
My back, etc., are far better since I have been in Teplitz;
in fact I feel like a new man. I have several excellent let
ters to people here, and when they return from the country,
when T. S. Perry arrives for the winter, when the lectures
get a-going, and I get thinking again, when long letters from
you and the rest of my "friends" (ha! ha!) arrive regularly
at short intervals I shall mock the state of kings. You
had better believe I have thought of you with affection at
intervals since I have been away, and prized your qualities
of head, heart, and person, and my priceless luck in possess
ing your confidence and friendship in a way I never did at
home; and cursed myself that I did n t make more of you
when I was by you, but, like the base Indian, threw even
ing after evening away which I might have spent in your
bosom, sitting in your whitely-lit-up room, drinking in your
profound wisdom, your golden jibes, your costly imagery,
listening to your shuddering laughter, baptizing myself
afresh, in short, in your friendship the thought of all
this makes me even now forget your epistolary peculiarities.
But pray, my dear old Wendell, let me have one letter from
you tell me how your law business gets on, of your ad
ventures, thoughts, discoveries (even though but of mares*
nests, they will be interesting to your Williams) ; books read,
good stories heard, girls fallen in love with nothing can
fail to please me, except your failing to write. Please give
my love to John Gray, Jim Higginson and Henry Bowditch.
Tell H. B. I will write to him very soon; but that is no rea
son why he should not write to me without waiting, and
tell me about himself and medicine in Boston. Give my
Aet. 25} TO HENRY JAMES 103
very best regards also to your father, mother and sister.
And believe me ever your friend,
WM. JAMES.
P. S. Why can t you write me the result of your study
of the vis viva question? I have not thought of it since I
left. I wish very much you would, if the trouble be not too
great. Anyhow you could write the central formulas without
explication, and oblige yours. Excuse the scrawliness of
this too hurriedly written letter.
To Henry James.
BERLIN, Sept. 26, 1867.
BELOVED ARRY, I hope you will not be severely disap
pointed on opening this fat envelope to find it is not all
letter. I will first explain to you the nature of the enclosed
document and then proceed to personal matters. The
other day, as I was sitting alone with my deeply breached
letter of credit, beweeping my outcast state, and wondering
what I could possibly do for a living, it flashed across me
that I might write a "notice" of H. Grimm s novel which
I had just been reading. To conceive with me is to exe
cute, as you well know. And after sweating fearfully for
three days, erasing, tearing my hair, copying, recopying,
etc., etc., I have just succeeded in finishing the enclosed.
I want you to read it, and if, after correcting the style and
thoughts, with the aid of Mother, Alice and Father, and
rewriting it if possible, you judge it to be capable of inter
esting in any degree anyone in the world but H. Grimm,
himself, to send it to the "Nation" or the "Round Table."
I feel that a living is hardly worth being gained at this
price. Style is not my forte, and to strike the mean be
tween pomposity and vulgar familiarity is indeed difficult.
Still, an the rich guerdon accrue, an but ten beauteous dol-
io 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
lars lie down on their green and glossy backs within the
family treasury in consequence of my exertions, I shall feel
glad that I have made them. I have not seen Grimm yet
as he is in Switzerland. In his writings he is possessed of
real imagination and eloquence, chiefly in an ethical line,
and the novel is really distingue, somewhat as Cherbuliez s
are, only with rather a deficiency on the physical and ani
mal side. He is, to my taste, too idealistic, and Father
would scout him for his arrant moralism. Goethe seems
to have mainly suckled him, and the manner of this book is
precisely that of "Wilhelm Meister" or "Elective Affinities."
There is something not exactly robust about him, but, per
contra, great delicacy and an extreme belief in the exist
ence and worth of truth and desire to attain it justly and
impartially. In short, a rather painstaking liberality and
want of careless animal spirits which, by the bye, seem
to be rather characteristics of the rising generation. But
enough of him. The notice was mere taskwork. I could
not get up a spark of interest in it, and I should not think
it would be d actualite for the "Nation." Still, I could think
of nothing else to do, and was bound to do something. 1 . . .
I am a new man since I have been here, both from the
ruddy hues of health which mantle on my back, and from
the influence of this live city on my spirits. Dresden was
a place in which it always seemed afternoon; and as I used
to sit in my cool and darksome room, and see through the
ancient window the long dusty sunbeams slanting past the
roof angles opposite down into the deep well of a street, and
hear the distant droning of the market and think of no reason
why it should not thus continue in secula seculorum, I used
to have the same sort of feeling as that which now comes
1 The notice of Grimm s Uniiberwindliche Mdchte appeared under the title
"A German-American Novel" in the Nation, 1867; vol. v, p. 432.
Aet. 25} TO HENRY JAMES 105
over me when I remember days passed in Grandma s old
house in Albany. Here, on the other hand, it is just like
home. Berlin, I suppose, is the most American-looking
city in Europe. In the quarter which I inhabit, the streets
are all at right angles, very broad, with dusty trees grow
ing in them, houses all new and flat-roofed, covered with
stucco, and of every imaginable irregularity in height, bleak,
ugly, unsettled-looking werdend. Germany is, I find, as
a whole (I hardly think more experience will change my
opinion), very nearly related to our country, and the Ger
man nature and ours so akin in fundamental qualities, that
to come here is not much of an experience. There is a
general colorlessness and bleakness about the outside look
of life, and in artistic matters a wide-spread manifestation
of the very same creative spirit that designs our kerosene-
lamp models, for instance, at home. Nothing in short that
is worth making a pilgrimage to see. To travel in Italy,
in Egypt, or in the Tropics, may make creation widen to
one s view; but to one of our race all that is peculiar in
Germany is mental, and that Germany can be brought
to us. ...
(After dinner.} I have just been out to dine. I am
gradually getting acquainted with all the different restau
rants in the neighborhood, of which there are an endless
number, and will presently choose one for good, certainly
not the one where I went today, where I paid 25 Groschen
for a soup, chicken and potatoes, and was almost prevented
from breathing by the damned condescension of the waiters.
I fairly sigh for a home table. I used to find a rather pleas
ant excitement in dining "round," that is long since played
out. Could I but find some of the honest, florid and ornate
ministers that wait on you at the Parker House, here, I
would stick to their establishment, no matter what the fare.
io6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
These indifferent reptiles here, dressed in cast-off wedding-
suits, insolent and disobliging and always trying to cheat
you in the change, are the plague of my life. After dinner
I took quite a long walk under the Linden and round by
the Palace and Museum. There are great numbers of
statues (a great many of them "equestrian") here, and you
have no idea how they light up the place. What you say
about the change of the seasons wakens an echo in my soul.
Today is really a harbinger of winter, and felt like an Octo
ber day at home, with a northwest wind, cold and crisp with
a white light, and the red leaves falling and blowing every
where. I expect T. S. Perry in a week. We shall have a
very good large parlor and bedroom, together, in this house,
and steer off in fine style right into the bowels of the winter.
I expect it to be a stiff one, as everyone speaks of it here
with a certain solemnity. . . .
I wish you would articulately display to me in your future
letters the names of all the books you have been reading.
"A great many books, none but good ones," is provokingly
vague. On looking back at what / have read since I left
home, it shows exceeding small, owing in great part I sup
pose to its being in German. I have just got settled down
again after a nearly-two-months debauch on French
fiction, during which time Mrs. Sand, the fresh, the bright,
the free; the somewhat shrill but doughty Balzac, who
has risen considerably in my esteem or rather in my affec
tion; Theophile Gautier the good, the golden-mouthed, in
turn captivated my attention; not to speak of the peerless
Erckmann-Chatrian, who renews one s belief in the succu
lent harmonies of creation and a host of others. I lately
read Diderot, "(Euvres Choisies," 2 vols., which are enter
taining to the utmost from their animal spirits and the comic
modes of thinking, speaking and behaving of the time.
Aet. 2 5 ] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 107
Think of meeting continually such delicious sentences as this,
-he is speaking of the educability of beasts, "Et peut
on savoir jusqu ou Fusage des mains porterait les singes
s ils avaient le loisir comme la faculte d inventer, et si la
frayeur continuelle que leur inspirent les hommes ne les re-
tenait dans 1 abrutissement "!!! But I must pull up, as I
have to write to Father still. . . .
Adieu, lots of love from your aff.
WlLHELM.
The preceding letter shows James as but recently arrived
in Berlin and as arranging himself there for a winter of
physiology at the University. He was soon joined by his
young compatriot Thomas Sergeant Perry, an intimate
friend of earlier Newport days and of the subsequent Boston
and Cambridge years, and the two young Americans set
up joint lodgings at Number 12 in the Mittelstrasse. Al
though James s main purpose was to work at the University,
he was luckily not without social resources. George Ban
croft, the historian and former Secretary of the Navy and
Minister to England, was at this time representing the
United States in Berlin and was an old family acquaintance.
His and another hospitable family, the Louis Thieses, who
had been Cambridge neighbors and whose house in Quincy
Street the James parents had acquired upon Mr. Thies s
return to his native land, were a link with home, and at
the same time rendered hospitable services to James by
helping him to a few German acquaintances. By far the
most congenial and interesting of these was Herman
Grimm, the son of the younger of the universally beloved
brothers of the Fairy Tales. Herman Grimm had married
Gisela von Arnim, the daughter of Goethe s Bettina, and
was at this time a man of just past forty years. Professor
io8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
of the History of Art in the University of Berlin, essayist,
author of "The Life of Michael Angelo" and of Lectures on
Goethe as well as of several works of fiction, Grimm was a
versatile and charming specimen of that "learned" Ger
many which we now think of as flourishing most amiably
during the generation that preceded the Franco-Prussian
War. The easy and cordial way in which his household
accepted James appears, as in the next letter, to have
been richly appreciated.
To his Sister.
BERLIN, Oct. 17, 1867.
Your excellent long letter of September 5 reached me in
due time. If about that time you felt yourself strongly
hugged by some invisible spiritual agency, you may now
know that it was me. What would not I give if you could
pay me a visit here! Since I last wrote home the lingual
Rubicon has been passed, and I find to my surprise that I
can speak German certainly not in an ornamental man
ner, but there is hardly anything which I would not dare to
attempt to begin to say and be pretty sure that a kind
providence would pull me through, somehow or other. I
made the discovery at my first visit to Grimm a fortnight
ago, and have confirmed it several times since. I can
likewise understand educated people perfectly. I feel my
German as old Moses used to feel his oats, and for ten
days past have walked along the street dandling my head
in a fatuous manner that rivets the attention of the
public. The University lectures were to have begun this
week, but the lazy professors have put it off to the last of
the month.
I will describe to you the manner in which I spent yester
day. Ex uno disce omnes (a German proverb). I awoke
Aet. 25} TO HIS SISTER 109
at half-past eight at the manly voice of T. S. Perry caroling
his morning hymn from his neighboring bed if the instru
ment of torture the Germans sleep in be worthy of that
name. After some preliminary conversation we arose,
performed our washing, each in a couple of tumblers full
of water in a little basin of this shape [sketch], donned our
clothes, and stepped into our SALON into which the morning
sun was streaming and adding its genial warmth to that
of the great porcelain stove, into which the maid had put
the handful of fuel (which, when ignited, makes the stove
radiate heat for twelve hours) the while we slumbered.
T. S. P. found on the table a letter from [Moorfield] Storey,
which the same vigilant maid had placed there, and I the
morning paper, full of excitement about the Italian affairs
and the diabolical designs of Napoleon on Germany. After
a breakfast of cocoa, eggs and excellent rolls, I finished the
paper, and took up my regular reading, while T. S. P.
worked at his German lesson. I finished the chapter in a
treatise on Galvanism which bears the neat and concise title
of [not de cipher ed\.
By 10 o clock T. S. P. had gone to his German lesson, and
it was about time for me to rig up to go to Grimm s to dine,
having received a kind invitation the day before. As I
passed through the pleasant wood called the "Thiergarten,"
which was filled with gay civil and military cavaliers, I
looked hard for the imposing equestrian figure of the Hon.
Geo. Bancroft; but he was not to be seen. I got safely to
Grimm s, and in a moment the other guest arrived. Herr
Professor , whose name I could not catch, 1 a man of a
type I have never met before. He is writing now a life of
Schleiermacher of which one volume is published. A soft
fat man with black hair (somewhat the type of the photo-
1 The Herr Professor was later identified as W. Dilthey.
i io LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
graphs of Renan), of a totally uncertain age between 25 and
40, with little bits of green eyes swimming in their fat-filled
orbits, and the rest of his face quite "realizing one s idea"
of the infant Bacchus. I, with my usual want of enter
prise, have neglected hitherto to provide myself with a
swallow-tailed coat; but I had a resplendent fresh-biled
shirt and collar, while the Professor, who wore the " obliga
tory coat," etc., had an exceedingly grimy shirt and collar
and a rusty old rag of a cravat. Which of us most violated
the proprieties I know not, but your feminine nature will
decide. Grimm wore a yellowish, greenish, brownish coat
whose big collar and cuffs and enormous flaps made me
strongly suspect it had been the property of the brothers
Grimm, who had worn it on state occasions, and dying,
bequeathed it to Herman. The dinner was very good.
The Prof, was overflowing with information with regard
to everything knowable and unknowable. He is the first
man I have ever met of a class, which must be common
here, of men to whom learning has become as natural as
breathing. A learned man at home is in a measure isolated;
his study is carried on in private, at reserved hours. To
the public he appears as a citizen and neighbor, etc., and
they know at most about him that he is addicted to this or
that study; his intellectual occupation always has something
of a put-on character, and remains external at least to some
part of his being. W T hereas this cuss seemed to me to be
nothing if not a professor . . . [line not deciphered] as if he
were able to stand towards the rest of society merely in the
relation of a man learned in this or that branch and never
for a moment forget the interests or put off the instincts of
his specialty. If he should meet people or circumstances
that could in no measure be dealt with on that ground, he
would pass on and ignore them, instead of being obliged, like
Aet.2 5 \ TO HIS SISTER m
an American, to sink for the time the specialty. He talked
and laughed incessantly at table, related the whole history
of Buddhism to Mrs. Grimm, and I know not what other
points of religious history. After dinner Mrs. Grimm went,
at the suggestion of her husband, to take a nap . . . [line not
deciphered] while G. and the Professor engaged in a hot con
troversy about the natural primitive forms of religion, Grimm
inclining to the view that the historically first form must
have been monotheistic. I noticed the Professor s replies
grow rather languid, when suddenly his fat head dropped
forward, and G. cried out that he had better take a good
square nap in the arm-chair. He eagerly snatched at the
proposal. Grimm got him a clean handkerchief, which he
threw over his face, and presently he seemed to slumber.
Grimm woke him in ten minutes to take some coffee. He
rose, refreshed like a giant, and proceeded to fight with
Grimm about the identity of Homer. Grimm has just
been studying the question and thinks that the poems of
Homer must: have been composed in a written language.
From there through a discussion about the madness of
Hamlet G. being convinced that Shakespeare meant to
mystify the reader, and intentionally constructed a riddle.
The sun waned low and I took my leave in company with
the Prof. We parted at the corner, without the Prof, tell
ing me (as an honest, hospitable American would have
done) that he would be happy to see me at his domicile,
so that I know not whether I shall be able to continue
acquainted with a man I would fain know more of.
I got into a droschke and, coming home, found T. S. P.
in the room, and while telling him of the events of the dinner
was interrupted by the entrance of the Rev. H. W. Foote of
Stone Chapel. . . . The excellent little man had presented
himself a few evenings before, bringing me from Dresden
ii2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
a very characteristic note from Elizabeth Peabody (in
which among other things she says she is "on the wing for
Italy" she is as folatre a creature as your friend Mrs.
W ), and we have dined together every day since, and
had agreed to go to hear "Fidelio" together at the Opera
that evening. Foote is really a good man and I shall
prosecute his friendship every moment of his stay here;
seems to have his mind open to every interest, and has a
sweet modesty that endears him to the heart. He goes
home next month. I advise Harry to call and see him;
I know he will sympathize with him. T. S. P. never grows
weary of repeating a pun of Ware s about him in Italy, who,
when asked what had become of Foote (they traveled for a
time together), replied: "I left him at the Hotel, hand in
glove with the Bootts."
"Fidelio" was truly musical. After it, I went to Zennig s
restaurant (it was over by quarter before nine), where I
had made a rendez-vous with a young Doctor to whom Mr.
Thies had given me a letter. Having been away from Berlin,
I had seen him for the first time the day before yesterday.
He is a very swell young Jew with a gorgeous cravat, blue-
black whiskers and oily ringlets, not prepossessing; and
we had made this appointment. I waited half an hour and,
the faithless Israelite not appearing, came home, and after
reading a few hours went to bed.
Two hours later. I have just come in from dinner, a
ceremony which I perform at the aforesaid Zennig s, Unter
den Linden. (By the bye, you must not be led by that
name to imagine, as I always used to, an avenue over
shadowed by patriarchal lime trees, whose branches form
a long arch. The "Linden" are two rows of small, scrubby,
abortive horse-chestnuts, beeches, limes and others, planted
like the trees in Commonwealth Avenue.) Zennig s is a
Aet. 25 \ TO HIS SISTER n 3
table-d hote, so-called notwithstanding the unities of hour
and table are violated. You have soup, three courses, and
dessert or coffee and cheese for I2>^ Groschen if you buy
14 tickets, and I shall probably dine there all winter. We
dined with Foote today, who spoke among other things of
a new English novel whose heroine "had the bust and arms
of the Venus of Milo." T. S. P. remarked that her having
the arms might account for the Venus herself being with
out them.
I enclose you the photograph of an actress here with
whom I am in love. A neat coiffure, is it not? I also send
you a couple more of my own precious portraits. I got
them taken to fulfill a promise I had made to a young
Bohemian lady at Teplitz, the niece of the landlady. Sweet
Anna Adamowiz! (pronounce vitcti), which means de
scendant of Adam. She belongs consequently to one of
the very first families in Bohemia. I used to drive dull
care away by writing her short notes in the Bohemian
tongue such as; " Navzdy budes v me mysli Irohm pamat-
kou," i.e., forever bloomest thou in my memory; "dej
mne tooji bodo biznu," give me your photograph; and
isolated phrases as "Mlaxik, Dicka, pritel, pritelkyne,"
i.e., Jungling, Madchen, Freund, Freundinn; "mi luja,"
I love, etc. These were carried to her by the chamber
maid, and the style, a little more florid than was absolutely
required by mere courtesy, was excused by her on the ground
of my limited acquaintance with the subtleties of the
language. Besides, the sentiments were on the whole good
and the error, if any, in the right direction. When she
gave me her photograph (which I regret to say she spelt
"fotokraft "!!!!) she made me promise to send her mine.
Hence mine.
I have been this afternoon to get a dress-coat measured,
ii 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
which will doubtless be a comfort to you to know. I must
now stop. G
I had got as far as the above G when the faithless Israelite
of yesterday evening came in. He gave a satisfactory ex
planation of his absence and has been making a very pleas
ant visit. He is coming back at nine o clock to take us
(after the German mode of exercising hospitality) to a
tavern to meet some of his boon companions. I reckon
he is a better fellow than he seemed at first sight. I will
leave this letter open till tomorrow to let you know what
happens at the tavern, and whether the boon companions
are old-clothes men, or Christian gentlemen. Good-night,
my darling sister! Sei tausend mal von mir gekiisst. 1
Give my best love to Father, Mother, Aunt Kate, the boys
and everyone. Ever yr. loving bro.,
WM. JAMES.
ii P.M. Decidedly the Jew rises in my estimation. He
treated us in the German fashion to a veal cutlet and a
glass of beer which we paid for ourselves. His boon com
panions were apparently Christians of a half-baked sort.
One who sat next to me was half drunk [and] insisted on
talking the most hideous English. T. S. P., who neces
sarily took small part in the conversation, endeavored to
explain to Selberg that he was a "skeleton at the banquet,"
but could not get through. I came to his assistance, but
forgot, of course, the word "Skelett," and found nothing
better to say than that he was a vertebral column at their
banquet, which classical allusion I do not think was under
stood by the Jew. The young men did not behave with
the politeness and attention to us which would have been
shown to two Germans by a similar crowd at home. Sel-
1 1 send you a thousand kisses.
Aet.2 5 \ TO HIS SISTER 115
berg himself however improved every minute, and I have
no doubt will turn out a capital fellow. Excuse these
scraps of paper,
W. J. Good night.
To his Sister.
BERLIN, Nov. 19, 1867.
Suss BALCHEN! I stump wearily up the three flights
of stairs after my dinner to this lone room where no human
company but a ghastly lithograph of Johannes Miiller and
a grinning skull are to cheer me. Out in the street the slaw
and fine rain is falling as if it would never stop the sky
is low and murky, and the streets filled with water and that
finely worked-up paste of mud which never is seen on our
continent. For some time past I have thought with longing
of the brightness and freshness of my home in New England
of the extraordinary, and in ordinary moments little ap
preciated, but sometimes-coming-across-you-and-striking-
you-with-an-unexpected-sense-of-rich-privilege blessings of
a mother s love (excuse my somewhat German style) -
of the advantage of having a youthful-hearted though bald-
headed father who looks at the Kosmos as if it had some
life in it of the delicious and respectable meals in the
family circle with the aforesaid father telling touching
horse-car anecdotes, 1 and the serene Harry dealing his
snubs around with a clean female handmaiden to wait,
and an open fire to toast one s self at afterwards instead
of one of these pallid porcelain monuments here, with a
whole country around you full of friends and acquaintances
in whose company you can refresh your social nature, a
library of books in the house and a still bigger one over the
1 "When in his grotesque moods [the elder Henry James] maintained that, to a
right-minded man, a crowded Cambridge horse-car was the nearest approach to-
Heaven upon earth." E. L. Godkin, Life, vol. n, p. 117.
ii6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
way, and all the rest of it. The longer I live, the more
inclined am I to value the domestic affections and to be
satisfied with the domestic and citizenly virtues (probably
only for the reason that I am temporarily debarred from
exercising any of them, I blush to think). At any rate I
feel now and here the absence of any object with which to
start up some sympathy, and the feeling is real and un
pleasant while it lasts.
I ought not, I confess, to sing in this tune today , for
before dinner I made a call on a young lady here (named
Frl. Bornemann) whom I had met at Mrs. Grimm s and
whom Mrs. G. had advised me to go and see. She lives
with her brother, an Advocat. They are rich orflings, and
I had really a friendly visit there and hope it may ripen into
familiarity. I got on tolerably well with the German -
only making one laughable mistake, viz. in talking of the
shower of meteors, Stern-schnuppen, the other night to speak
of the "Stern-schnupfen" (Schnupfen = snuffles, catarrh).
And this visit is the occasion of my writing this week to
you. Frl. B. is intimate with Miss Thies, and hearing that
we lived in their house, she was seized with an extremely
German desire to have some ivy leaves or other leaves from
the garden to surprise Miss Thies with on Christmas. Your
young female heart will probably beat responsive to the pro
ject and infallibly by return mail send the leaves. She
only wants one or two. You might also send a board from
the flooring, some old grass and bits of hay from the front
"lawn," or cut out an eye from the "gal" who is so much
"struck with them babies" 1 in the parlor. They would
all awaken tender memories, I have no doubt. Now do
not delay even for one day to execute this, Alice! but set
An allusion to a picture in the parlor which had formerly belonged to the
Thieses.
Aet. 25 \ TO HIS SISTER u 7
about it now with this letter in your hand. You see there
is no time to lose, and I am very anxious not to disappoint
the excellent young lady.
The few commissions and questions I have sent home
have been so unnoticed and disregarded that I hardly hope
for success this time. It has always been the way with me,
however, from birth upwards, and Heaven forbid that I
should now begin to complain! But lo! I here send an
other commission. I definitely appoint by name my father
H. James, Senior, author of Substance & Shadder, etc., to
perform it; and solemnly charge all the rest of you to be
as lions in his path, as thorns upon his side, as lumps in
his mashed potatoes, until he do it or write me Nay. Tis
to send by post Cousin s lectures on Kant, and that other
French translation of a German introduction to Kant,
which he bought last winter! By return of mail! And if
not convenient to send the books, to write me the name of
the author of the last-mentioned one, which I have for
gotten. It behooves me to learn something of the "Philos
opher of Konigsberg," and I want these to ease the way.
I sincerely hope that these words may not be utterly thrown
away.
I got a letter from Mother the day after I wrote last week
to Harry, without date, but written after the Tweedies
visit. I got this morning a "Nation" and the "advertise
ment" to Father s Essay on Swedenborg. In the latter the
old lyre is twanged with a greater freshness and force than
ever, so that even T. S. Perry was made to vibrate in unison
with it. I wrote to Father three weeks ago respecting his
former article. I hope the letter is by this time in his
hands. I am very sorry the fat one went astray. It con
tained, inter alia, an account of my expenditure up to its time
of writing. I would give a good deal to be able to enjoy
ii8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
as you are all doing the society of Venerable Brother Rob
ertson. It is a great pity that we should get so estranged
by separation from each other. I wish, now he s at home,
he would once write to me. I have got tolerably well to
work, and enjoy my lectures at the University intensely.
Are the "Rainbows for Children" I see noticed in the
"Nation" that old book by Mrs. Tappan? I hope Harry
is not the person therein mentioned as having palmed off
on Godkin a translation from the German as an original
article on Thorwaldsen. You have not told me a word
about the Tappans since I quit. I am very glad to hear
of Aunt Kate s leg being so much better and staying so.
Tell her I hope it has not been improving at the expense of
her heart, as her long silence sometimes makes me shudder-
ingly fear.
Adieu. 1000 kisses to all, not forgetting Ellen. 1
Ever your Bruder, W. J.
To Thomas W. Ward.
[Fragment of a letter from Berlin,
circa Nov. 1867?]
... I have begun going to the physiological lectures at
the University. There are in all seven courses and four
lectures. I take five courses and three lectures. There is
a bully physiological laboratory, the sight of which, inacces
sible as it is to me in my present condition, gave me a sharp
pang. I have blocked out some reading in physiology and
psychology which I hope to execute this winter though
reading German is still disgustingly slow. ... It seems to
me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin
to be a science some measurements have already been
made in the region lying between the physical changes in
1 A devoted family servant.
Aet. 25} TO THOMAS W. WARD n 9
the nerves and the appearance of consciousness-at (in the
shape of sense perceptions), and more may come of it. I
am going on to study what is already known, and perhaps
may be able to do some work at it. Helmhojtz and a man
named Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it, and I hope
I live through this winter to go to them in the summer.
From all this talk you probably think I am working straight
ahead towards a definite aim. Alas, no! I finger book-
covers as ineffectually as ever. The fact is, this sickness
takes all the spring, physical and mental, out of a man. . . .
To Thomas W. Ward.
BERLIN, Nov. 7, 1867.
... If six years ago I could have felt the same satisfied
belief in the worthiness of a life devoted to simple, patient,
monotonous, scientific labor day after day (without refer
ence to its results) and at the same time have had some
inkling of the importance and nature of education (i.e., get
ting orderly habits of thought, and by intense exercise in
a variety of different subjects, getting the mind supple and
delicate and firm), I might be now on the path to accom
plishing something some day, even if my health had turned
out no better than it is. But my habits of mind have been
so bad that I feel as if the greater part of the last ten years
had been worse than wasted, and now have so little surplus
of physical vigor as to shrink from trying to retrieve them.
Too late! too late! If I had been drilled further in mathe
matics, physics, chemistry, logic, and the history of meta
physics, and had established, even if only in my memory,
a firm and thoroughly familiar basis of knowledge in all
these sciences (like the basis of human anatomy one gets in
studying medicine), to which I should involuntarily refer
all subsequently acquired facts and thoughts, instead of
120 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
having now to keep going back and picking up loose ends
of these elements, and wasting whole hours in looking to
see how the new facts are related to them, or whether they
are related to them at all, I might be steadily advancing.
-But enough! Excuse the damned whine of this letter;
I had no idea whatever of writing it when I sat down, but
I am in a mood of indigestion and blueness. I would not
send you the letter at all, were it not that I thought it
might tempt you soon to write to me. You have no idea,
my dear old Tom, how I long to hear a word about you. . . .
To Henry P. Eowditch.
BERLIN, Dec. 12, 1867.
BESTER HEINRICH, I have arrived safely on this side
of the ocean and hasten to inform you of the fact. What
a fine pair of young men we are to write so punctually and
constantly to each other! I will not gall you by any
sarcasms, however (I naturally think you are more to blame
than myself), because (as you naturally are of a similar way
of thinking) you might recriminate at great length in your
next and much other to-me-more-agreeable matter be
crowded out of your letter. Suffice [it] to say that I have
thought of you continually, and with undiminished affec
tion, since that bright April morn when we parted; but I
am of such an invincibly inert nature as regards letter-
writing that it takes a combination of outward and inward
circumstances and motives that hardly ever happens, to
start me. I wrote you a letter last summer, but destroyed
it because I was in such doleful dumps while writing it that
it would have given you too unpleasant an impression. . . .
I live near the University, and attend all the lectures on
physiology that are given there, but am unable to do any
thing in the Laboratory, or to attend the cliniques or
Aet. 25} TO HENRY P. BOWDITCH 121
Virchow s lectures and demonstrations, etc. Du Bois-
Raymond, an irascible man of about forty-five, gives a
very good and clear, yea, brilliant, series of five lectures a
week, and two ambitious young Jews give six more between
them which are almost as instructive. The opportunities
for study here are superb, it seems to me. Whatever they
may be in Paris, they cannot be better. The physiological
laboratory, with its endless array of machinery, frogs, dogs,
etc., etc., almost "bursts my gizzard," when I go by it,
with vexation. The German language is not child s play.
I have lately begun to understand almost everything I
hear said around me; but I still speak "with a slight foreign
accent," as you may suppose and, with all my practice
in reading, do not think I can read more than half as fast
as in English. It is very discouraging to get over so little
ground. But a steady boring away is bound to fetch it, I
suppose; and it seems to me it is worth the trouble.
The general level of thoroughness and exactness in
scientific work here is beyond praise; and the abundance
of books on every division of every subject something we
English have no idea of. It all comes from the thorough
mode of educating the people from childhood up. The
Staats Examina, before passing which no doctor can prac
tise here in Prussia, exact an amount of physiological, and
what we at home call "merely theoretical" knowledge of
the candidate, which a young doctor at home would claim
and receive especial distinction for having made himself
master of. But the men here think it but fair; gird about
their loins and set about working their way through. The
general impression the Germans make on me is not at all
that of a remarkably intellectually gifted people; and if
they are not so, their eminence must come solely from their
habits of conscientious and plodding work. It may be
122 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1867
that their expressionless faces do their minds injustice. I
don t know enough of them to decide. But I know the
work is a large factor in the result. It makes one repine
at the way he has been brought up, to come here. Un
happily most of us come too late to profit by what we see.
Bad habits are formed, and life hurries us on too much to
stop and drill. But it seems to me that the fact of so many
American students being here of late years (they outnumber
greatly all other foreign students) ought to have a good
influence on the training of the succeeding generation with
us. Tuck, Dwight, Dick Derby, Quincy, Townsend, and
Heaven knows how many more are in Vienna. Tuck and
Dwight write me that they are getting on remarkably well.
I saw them both here in September and think T. D. improves
a good deal as he grows older.
Berlin is a bleak and unfriendly place. The inhabitants
are rude and graceless, but must conceal a solid worth
beneath it. I only know seven of them, and they are of
the elite. It is very hard getting acquainted with them,
as you have to make all the advances yourself; and your
antagonist shifts so between friendliness and a drill ser
geant s formal politeness that you never know exactly on
what footing you stand with him. These Prussians bow
in the most amusing way you ever saw, as if an invisible
hand suddenly punched them in the abdomen and an equally
invisible foot forthwith kicked them in the rear, one time
and two motions, and they do it 100 times a day.
But enough of national gossip let us return to that
about individuals. Oh! that I could see thy prominent
nose and thy sagacious eyes at this moment relieved against
the back of that empty arm-chair that stands opposite this
table. Oh! that we might once again sit apart from the
fretful and insipid herd of our congeners, and take counsel
Act. 25} TO HENRY P. BOWDITCH 123
together concerning the world and life our lives in par
ticular, and all life in general. How the shy goddess would
tremble in her hiding-places at the sound of our unerringly
approaching voices. And how you would pour into my
astonished ear all that is new and wonderful about pathol
ogy and microscopical research, all that is sound and neat
about operative surgery, while I would recite the most
thrilling chapters of Kolliker s "Entwickelungs-geschichte,"
or Helmholtz s "Innervationsfortpflanzungsgeschwindig-
keitsbestimmungen"! I suppose you have been rolling on
like a great growing snowball through the vast fields of
medical knowledge and are fairly out of the long tunnel of
low spirits that leads there by this time. It is only three
months since I have taken up medical reading, as I made all
sorts of excursions into the language when I came here, and,
owing to the slowness of progression I spoke of above, I
have not got over much ground. Of course I can never
hope to practise; but I shall graduate on my return, and
perhaps pick up a precarious and needy living by doing
work for medical periodicals or something of that kind
though I hate writing as I do the foul fiend. But I don t
want to break off connexion with biological science. I can t
be a teacher of physiology, pathology, or anatomy; for I
can t do laboratory work, much less microscopical or ana
tomical. I may get better, but hardly before it will be too
late for me to begin school again.
I 11 tell you what let s do ! Set up a partnership, you to
run around and attend to the patients while I will stay at
home and, reading everything imaginable in English, Ger
man, and French, distil it in a concentrated form into your
mind. This division of labor will give the firm an im
mense advantage over all of our wooden-headed contempo
raries. For, in your person, it will have more experience
i2 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1868
than any one else has time to acquire; and in mine, more
learning. We will divide the profits equally, of course; and
he who survives the other (you, probably) will inherit the
whole. Does not the idea tempt you? If you don t like
it, I ll go you halves in the profits in any other feasible
way. Seriously, you see I have no very definite plans for
the future; but I have enough to keep body and soul to
gether for some years to come, and I see no need of provid
ing for more. This talk of course is only for your "private
ear." I want you to write immediately on receipt of this,
for if you don t then, you never will, and tell me all about
what you ve been doing and learning and what your future
plans are. Also, gossip about the School and Hospital. I
have not had a chance to talk medicine with any one but
Dwight and Tuck (for a week), and hunger thereafter. . . .
Believe me, ever til deth, your friend
WM. JAMES.
T. S. Perry of 66, who lives with me here, reminds me of a
story to tell you. He lived with Architect Ware in Paris,
and Ware received a visit from Dr. Bowditch and Mr. Dix-
well last summer. The concierge woman was terribly im
pressed by the personal majesty of your uncles, particularly
of Dr. Bowditch, of whom she said: "II a le grand air, tout
a fait comme Christophe Colomb!" It would be curious
to understand exactly who and what she thought C. C. was,
or whether she would have thought Mr. Dixwell like Ameri-
cus Vespucius if she had known him.
To 0. W. Holmes, Jr.
BERLIN, Jan. 3, 1868.
MY DEAR WENDLE, Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten,
dass ich so traurig bin, tonight. The ghosts of the past all
start from their unquiet graves and keep dancing a senseless
Aet. 25} TO O. W. HOLMES, JR. 125
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 re
volving so as to put the gas out, without sleep, food, cloth
ing 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 grew 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
Kosmos 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 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 heavi-
126 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1868
ness 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 con
science 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 pent-up 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 ex
pect 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 another turn
in the raw she once established between your ribs. Don t
let it heal over yet. When I get home let s establish a
philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss
none but the very tallest and broadest questions to be
composed of none but the very topmost cream of Boston
manhood. It will give each one a chance to air his own
opinion in a grammatical form, and to sneer and chuckle
when he goes home at what damned fools all the other mem
bers are and may grow into something very important
after a sufficient number of years.
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 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 un
less he wants to dig very deeply into some exclusive specialty.
I have been reading nothing of any interest but some chap
ters of physiology. There has a good deal been doing
here of late on the physiology of the senses, overlapping
Aet. 26] TO THOMAS W. WARD 127
perception, and consequently, in a measure, the psycho
logical field. I am wading my way towards it, and if in
course of time I strike on anything exhilarating, I 11 let you
know.
I 11 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.
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 (Eco
nomical W!) I don t reopen it. But I will write you again
soon. Meanwhile, bless your heart! thank you! Vide
Shakespeare: sonnet XXLX.
To Thomas W. Ward.
BERLIN, Jan., 1868.
... It made me feel quite sad to hear you talk about
the inward deadness and listlessness into which you had
again fallen in New York. Bate not a jot of heart nor
hope, but steer right onward. Take for granted that you Ve
got a temperament from which you must make up your mind
128 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1868
to expect twenty times as much anguish as other people
need to get along with. Regard it as something as external
to you as possible, like the curl of your hair. Remember
when old December s darkness is everywhere about you,
that the world is really in every minutest point as full of
life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through;
that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing,
and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon,
for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation;
and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a
new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one
can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the
power of one s evil moods over one s way of looking at the
Kosmos.
I am very glad that you think the methodical habits
you must stick to in book-keeping are going to be good dis
cipline to you. I confess to having had a little feeling of
spite when I heard you had gone back on science; for I had
always thought you would one day emerge into deep and
clear water there by keeping on long enough. But I
really don t think it so ^//-important what our occupation
is, so long as we do respectably and keep a clean bosom.
Whatever we are not doing is pretty sure to come to us at
intervals, in the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent re
grets that it is lost to us. I have felt so about zoology when
ever I was not studying it, about anthropology when study
ing physiology, about practical medicine lately, now that
I am cut off from it, etc., etc., etc.; and I conclude that that
sort of nostalgia is a necessary incident of our having imagi
nations, and we must expect it more or less whatever we are
about. I don t mean to say that in some occupations we
should not have less of it though.
My dear old Thomas, you have always sardonically
Act. 2 6\ TO THOMAS W. WARD 129
greeted me as the man of calm and clockwork feelings. The
reason is that your own vehemence and irregularity was
so much greater, that it involuntarily, no matter what my
private mood might have been, threw me into an outwardly
antagonistic one in which I endeavored to be a clog to your
mobility, as it were. So I fancy you have always given me
credit for less sympathy with you and understanding of
your feelings than I really have had. All last winter, for
instance, when I was on the continual verge of suicide, it
used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal content
ment. The appearance of it arose from my reaction against
what seemed to me your unduly noisy and demonstrative
despair. The fact is, I think, that we have both gone through
a good deal of similar trouble; we resemble each other in
being both persons of rather wide sympathies, not particu
larly logical in the processes of our minds, and of mobile
temperament; though your physical temperament being so
much more tremendous than mine makes a great quantita
tive difference both in your favor, and against you, as the
case may be.
, Well, neither of us wishes to be a mere loafer; each wishes
I a work which shall by its mere exercise interest him and at
the same time allow him to feel that through it he takes
hold of the reality of things whatever that may be in
, some measure. Now the first requisite is hard for us to
fill, by reason of our wide sympathy and mobility; we can
only choose a business in which the evil of feeling restless
shall be at a minimum, and then go ahead and make the
best of it. That minimum will grow less every year. In
this connection I will again refer to a poem you probably
know: "A Grammarian s Funeral," by R. Browning, in
"Men and Women." It always strengthens my backbone
to read it, and I think the feeling it expresses of throwing
i 3 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1868
upon eternity the responsibility of making good your one-
sidedness somehow or other ("Leave now for dogs and apes,
Man has forever") is a gallant one, and fit to be trusted if
one-sided activity is in itself at all respectable.
The other requirement is hard theoretically, though prac
tically not so hard as the first. All I can tell you is the
thought that with me outlasts all others, and onto which,
like a rock, I find myself washed up when the waves of
doubt are weltering over all the rest of the world; and that
is the thought of my having a will, and of my belonging to
a brotherhood of men possessed of a capacity for pleasure
and pain of different kinds. For even at one s lowest ebb
of belief, the fact remains empirically certain (and by our
will we can, if not absolutely refrain from looking beyond
that empirical fact, at least practically and on the whole
accept it and let it suffice us) that men suffer and enjoy.
And if we have to give up all hope of seeing into the pur
poses of God, or to give up theoretically the idea of final
causes, and of God anyhow as vain and leading to nothing
for us, we can, by our will, make the enjoyment of our
brothers stand us in the stead of a final cause; and through
a knowledge of the fact that that enjoyment on the whole
depends on what individuals accomplish, lead a life so ac
tive, and so sustained by a clean conscience as not to need
to fret much. Individuals can add to the welfare of the
race in a variety of ways. You may delight its senses or
"taste" by some production of luxury or art, comfort it
by discovering some moral truth, relieve its pain by con
cocting a new patent medicine, save its labor by a bit of
machinery, or by some new application of a natural product.
You may open a road, help start some social or business
institution, contribute your mite in any way to the mass of
the work which each generation subtracts from the task of
Aet. 26} TO THOMAS W. WARD I3I
the next; and you will come into real relations with your
brothers with some of them at least.
I know that in a certain point of view, and the most
popular one, this seems a cold activity for our affections, a
stone instead of bread. We long for sympathy, for a purely
personal communication, first with the soul of the world,
and then with the soul of our fellows. And happy are they
who think, or know, that they have got them! But to
those who must confess with bitter anguish that they are
perfectly isolated from the soul of the world, and that the
closest human love incloses a potential germ of estrangement
or hatred, that all personal relation is finite, conditional,
mixed (vide in Dana s "Household Book of Poetry," stanzas
by C. P. Cranch, "Thought is deeper than speech," etc.,
etc.), it may not prove such an unfruitful substitute. At
least, when you have added to the property of the race,
even if no one knows your name, yet it is certain that, with
out what you have done, some individuals must needs be
acting now in a somewhat different manner. You have
modified their life; you are in real relation with them;
you have in so far forth entered into their being. And is
that such an unworthy stake to set up for our good, after
all? Who are these men anyhow? Our predecessors, even
apart from the physical link of generation, have made us
what we are. Every thought you now have and every act
and intention owes its complexion to the acts of your dead
and living brothers. Everything we know and are is through
men. We have no revelation but through man. Every
sentiment that warms your gizzard, every brave act that
ever made your pulse bound and your nostril open to a
confident breath was a man s act. However mean a man
may be, man is the best we know; and your loathing as you
turn from what you probably call the vulgarity of human life
132 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1868
- your homesick yearning for a Better, somewhere is
furnished by your manhood; your ideal is made up of traits
suggested by past men s words and actions. Your man
hood shuts you in forever, bounds all your thoughts like an
overarching sky and all the Good and True and High
and Dear that you know by virtue of your sharing in it.
They are the Natural Product of our Race. So that it
seems to me that a sympathy with men as such, and a
desire to contribute to the weal of a species, which, what
ever may be said of it, contains All that we acknowledge as
good, may very well form an external interest sufficient to
keep one s moral pot boiling in a very lively manner to a
good old age. The idea, in short, of becoming an accom
plice in a sort of "Mankind its own God or Providence"
scheme is a practical one.
I don t mean, by any means, to affirm that we must come
to that, I only say it is a mode of envisaging life; which is
capable of affording moral support and may at any rate
help to bridge over the despair of skeptical intervals. I
confess that, in the lonesome gloom which beset me for a
couple of months last summer, the only feeling that kept
me from giving up was that by waiting and living, by hook
or crook, long enough, I might make my nick., however
small a one, in the raw stuff the race has got to shape, and
so assert my reality. The stoic feeling of being a sentinel
obeying orders without knowing the general s plans is a
noble one. And so is the divine enthusiasm of moral cul
ture (Channing, etc.), and I think that, successively, they
may all help to ballast the same man.
What a preacher I m getting to be! I had no idea when
I sat down to begin this long letter that I was going to be
carried away so far. I feel like a humbug whenever I
endeavor to enunciate moral truths, because I am at bottom
Act. 26} TO HIS FATHER i 33
so skeptical. But I resolved to throw off "views" to you,
because I know how stimulated you are likely to be by any
accidental point of view or formula which you may not
exactly have struck on before (e.g., what you write me of
the effect of that sentence of your mother s about marrying).
I had no idea this morning that I had so many of the ele
ments of a Pascal in me. Excuse the presumption. But
to go back. I think that in business as well as in science
one can have this philanthropic aspiration satisfied. I
have been growing lately to feel that a great mistake of
my past life which has been prejudicial to my education,
and by telling me which, and by making me understand it
some years ago, some one might have conferred a great
benefit on me is an impatience of results. Inexperience
of life is the cause of it, and I imagine it is generally an
American characteristic. I think you suffer from it. Re
sults should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily
thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord,
from a long enough daily work at a given matter; and I
think the work as a mere occupation ought to be the pri
mary interest with us. At least, I am sure this is so in the
intellectual realm, and I strongly suspect it is the secret
of German prowess therein. Have confidence, even when
you seem to yourself to be making no progress, that, if you
but go on in your own uninteresting way, they must bloom
out in their good time. Ouf, my dear old Tom! I think
I must pull up. I have no time or energy left to gossip
to thee of our life here. . . .
To his Father.
TEPLITZ, Jan. 22, 1868.
MY DEAR DAD, Don t allow yourself to be shocked with
surprise on reading the above date till you hear the reasons
134 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1868
which have brought me here at this singular season. They
are grounded in the increasing wear and tear of my life in
Berlin, and in my growing impatience to get well enough
to be able to do some work in the summer. ... I find my
self getting more interested in physiology and nourishing
a hope that I may be able to make its study (and perhaps its
teaching) my profession; and, joining the thought that if
I came to Teplitz now for three weeks I could have still
another turn at it, if necessary, in April, before the
summer semester at Heidelberg began, to the conscious
ness that in my present condition I was doing worse than
wasting time at Berlin, I took advantage of a fine sunshiny
morning four days ago, packed my trunk, said good-bye to
T. S. Perry, and took the railroad for this place. I hope
you won t think from seeing me back here that my loudly
trumpeted improvement in the autumn was fallacious. On
the contrary, I feel more than ever, now that I am back in
presence of my old measures of strength (distances, etc.),
how substantial that improvement was only it has not
yet bridged the way up to complete soundness.
I have been feeling for a month past that I ought to come
here, but an effeminate shrinking from loneliness and so
forth, and the inhuman blackness of the weather kept me
from it. Now that I am here, I am only sorry I deferred
it so long. I found the Furstenbad open, and with four
other "cure-guests" in it. All its varletry, male and female,
fat as wood-chucks from their winter s repose; a theatre (!)
going in town three times a week; the head waiter of the
restaurant where in the summer I used, for the price of a
glass of milk, to read the "Times" and the "Independence
Beige," no longer wearing the pallid look of stern and desper
ate business with which he used to scud around among the
crowded tables, and which used to make me stand in mortal
Act. 26] TO HIS FATHER 135
fear of him, but appearing as a comfortable and red-cheeked
human being with even greater conversational gifts than
usual; every one moreover glad to see me, etc., etc. The
veil of winter has been lifted for a week and the buried
spring [has] peeped out and taken a-breathing before her
time. Today everything is a-dripping, the earth has a mov
ing smell, and the sky is full of spots of melting blue. If such
weather but lasts, the time will pass here very quickly. I
have brought a lot of good books, and if their interest wanes
have the whole circulating library to fall back on. So
much for Teplitz.
Sunday before last Mrs. Bancroft told me that the most
beautiful woman in Berlin had asked after me with affec
tion and expressed a desire to see me. After making me
guess in vain she told me that it was Mrs. Lieutenant Pertz,
nee Emma Wilkinson. 1 I went to see her and found her
looking hardly a day older or different, and certainly very
good-looking, though probably Mrs. B. s description was
exaggerated. She had the sweetest and simplest of manners
and asked all about the family, to whom she sends her love.
She told me nothing particular about her own family which
we did not know, except that Jamie had an aquiline nose.
She has three fine children, much more of the British than
the German type, and it was right pleasant to see her. She
has very handsome brown eyes. Nice manners are a very
charming thing, and some of the ladies here might set a
good example to some other young ladies I might mention
(who do not live 100 miles from Quincy Street); Fraulein
Borneman, for example. Let Alice cultivate a manner
clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential; let
1 A daughter of Henry James, Senior s, English friend J. J. Garth Wilkinson.
"Wilky" James had been nahned after Mr. Wilkinson. See Notes of a Son and
Brother, p. 196.
136 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [i86&
her face beam with serious beauty, and glow with quiet
delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short
glimpses of a soul with wings, as it were (but very short
ones); let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice
full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace,
and you have no idea how lovely she will become. ... I am
sorry Wilky has had a relapse of his fever. He and Bob are
still the working ones of the family (Harry too, though!),
but I hope my day will yet come. Give him and Bob a
great deal of love for me. Life in Teplitz is favorable to
letter-writing and I will write to Bob next week. Love to
every one else, from yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
To Henry James.
FURSTENBAD, TEPLITZ, Mar. 4, 1868.
... I have been admitted to the intimacy of a family
here named G - , who keep a hotel and restaurant.
Immense, bulky, garrulous, kind-hearted woman, father with
thick red face, little eyes and snow-white hair, two daugh
ters of about twenty. The whole conversation and tea-
taking there reminded me so exactly of Erckmann-Chatrian s
stories that I wanted to get a stenographer and a photog
rapher to take them down. The great, thick remarks, all
about housekeeping and domestic economy of some sort or
other; the jokes; the masses of eatables, from the awful
swine soup (tasting of nothing I could think of but the
perspiration of the animal and which the terrible mother
forced me to gulp down by accusing me, whenever I grew
pale and faltered, of not relishing their food), through the
sausages (liver sausages, blood sausages, and more), to the
beer and wine; then the masses of odoriferous cheese, which
I refused in spite of all attacks, entreaties and accusations,
Act. 26} TO HIS FATHER 137
and then heard, oh, horrors! with somewhat the feeling I
suppose with which a criminal hears the judge pass sentence
of death upon him, then heard an order given for some
more sausages to be brought in to me instead; the air of
religious earnestness with which the eating of the father
was talked about, how the mother told the daughter not to
give him so much wine, because he never enjoyed his beer
so much after it, while he with his silver spectacles and
pointing with his pudgy forefinger to the lines, read out of
the newspaper half aloud to himself; the immense long room
with walls of dark wood, the big old-fashioned china stove
at each end of it, etc., etc., all brought up the Taverne du
Jambon de Mayence into my mind. . . .
[W. J.]
The water-cure at Teplitz worked no cure; but James
repaired to Heidelberg in the spring, to hear Helmholtz
lecture and with the hope of following the medical courses
during the summer semester. Once more he had to stop
work, and for a while he returned to Berlin. From there
he traveled by way of Geneva, stopping characteristically
for only the very briefest of glances at the familiar scenes
of his school-days, and hurrying on to spend the latter part
of the summer at another watering-place, Divonne in Sa
voy. The following brief letter seems to have been written
there, and is interesting as a first reference to Charles
Renouvier, a French philosopher who later exercised an im
portant influence on James s thinking.
To his Father.
[DlVONNE?], Oct. 5, 1868.
DEAR FATHER, ... I have not been doing much
studying lately, nor indeed for some time past, though I
i 3 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1868
manage to keep something dribbling all the while. I began
the other day Kant s "Kritik," which is written crabbedly
enough, but which strikes me so far as almost the sturdiest
and honestest piece of work I ever saw. Whether right or
wrong (and it is pretty clearly wrong in a great many details
of its Analytik part, however the rest may be), there it stands
like a great snag or mark to which everything metaphysical
or psychological must be referred. I wish I had read it
earlier. It is very slow reading and I shall only give it a
couple of hours daily.
I got a little book by a number of authors, "L Annee 1867
Philosophique," which may interest you if you have not
got it already. The introduction, a review of the state of
philosophy in France for some years back, is by one Charles
Renouvier, of whom I never heard before but who, for vigor
of style and compression, going to the core of half a dozen
things in a single sentence, so different from the namby-
pamby diffusiveness of most Frenchmen, is unequaled by
anyone. He takes his stand on Kant. I have not read the
rest of the book.
Here I stop and take my douche. I will be as economical
as I can this winter in details, and next summer will see us
together. I wish I had the inclination to write, or anything
to write about, as Harry has. I feel ashamed of fattening on
the common purse when all the other boys are working,
but writing seems for me next to impossible. Lots of love
to all. Yours,
W. J.
The "cure" at Divonne was as profitless as had been the
similar experiments at Teplitz. So instead of staying abroad
for the winter, James turned his face homeward almost im
mediately. After a fortnight s companionship with H. P.
Aet. 26} LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES i 39
Bowditch in Paris, he embarked on November 7 for Amer
ica, disappointed in the chief hopes with which he had landed
in Europe eighteen months before, but much matured in
character and thought, and resolved to seek his health and
his career at home.
Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.
VI
1869-1872
Invalidism in Cambridge
THE return to Cambridge from Germany in November,
1868, marked the beginning of four outwardly uneventful
years. James spent them under his father s roof. His
family and intimate friends were usually close at hand; the
stream of his correspondence shrank to almost nothing.
The few letters that have been preserved do incomplete
justice to this period, but can, fortunately, be supplemented
by other documents.
James obtained his medical degree easily enough in June,
1869; but he had no thought of engaging in the practice of
medicine. He wanted to go on with physiology; but he
was not strong enough to work in a laboratory. Condemned
to sedentary occupations, and without any definite respon
sibilities, he seemed, to his own jaundiced vision, to be de
clining into a desultory and profitless idleness.
In this he was hardly fair to himself or to the conditions.
It is true that he had no remunerative occupation, and
that he could look forward to no well-defined professional
career for which he could be preparing and training himself.
He was, also, handicapped by the fact that sometimes he
could not use his eyes for more than two hours a day. On
the other hand, he would probably not have been happy
in any professional harness into which he could then have
fitted, and was really more fortunate in having leisure to
read and discuss and fill note-books forced upon him be-
1869-72] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 141
tween his twenty-seventh and thirty-first years. Such lei
sure has been the unattained goal of many another man
with a mind not one tenth so curious and speculative as
his; and few men who have attained it have made as good
use of their free time as James made of the years 1869 to
1872.
His eyes were weak, to be sure, and his letters usually
bewail his inability to use them more. But, skipping as he
had trained himself to, and snatching at every opportunity,
he somehow got over a great deal of reading in neurology,
physiology of the nervous system, and psychology. He was
not confined to the books that were on the shelves of the
Quincy Street house, but could borrow from the excellent
Harvard and Boston libraries without inconvenience. At
times, when he was able to read for several hours a day, he
used, as he put it, " to keep himself from using his mind too
much" by turning to non-professional literature in Ger
man, French, and English. One letter to his brother (June
i, 1869) affords material for reflection upon the range and
power of assimilation of a mind which could seek such relax
ation. "I have," he writes in this letter, "been reading for
recreation, since you left, a good many German books:
Steffens and C. P. Moritz s autobiographies, some lyric
poetry, W. Humboldt s letters, Schmidt s history of German
literature, etc., which have brought to a head the slowly
maturing feeling of German culture. . . . Reading of the
revival, or rather the birth, of German literature Kant,
Schiller, Goethe, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, [the] Schlegels,
Tieck, Richter, Herder, Steffens, W. Humboldt, and a num
ber of others puts one into a real classical period. These
men were all interesting as men, each standing as a type
or representative of a certain way of taking life, and begin
ning at the bottom taking nothing for granted. In Eng~
i 4 2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1869-72
land, the only parallel I can think of is Coleridge, and in
France, Rousseau and Diderot. If the heroes and heroines
of all of Ste.-Beuve s gossip had had a tenth part of the
significance of these and their male and female friends, bad
readers like myself would never think of growing impatient
with him as an old debauchee." A diary entry made by
his sister Alice, a few years later says: "In old days, when
[William s] eyes were bad, and I used to begin to tell him
something which I thought of interest from whatever book
I might be reading ... he would invariably say, I glanced
into that book yesterday and read that. " x
He had already formed the habit of making marginal
A note-book in which there are many pages of titles, under dates be
tween 1867 and 1872, appears to have been a record of reading; it was not kept sys
tematically and is incomplete. The following entries were made between
the date "June 21, 69 M.D." the date of graduation from the Medical
School and the end of the year 1869. It will be understood that "R 2 M " sig
nified the Revue des deux Mondes. The original entries stand in a column, with
out punctuation, and occupy two and a half pages. Amplifications are added in
brackets:
"A. Dumas, fils; Pe*re prod[igue], $4 Monde; Fils naturel, Question D Argent.
/Jung; Stilling s Leben. [5 vols. 1806]. / J. S. Mill; Subjection of Women
[1869!. /H[oracel Bushnell; Woman suffrage, etc. [1869]. / Balzac; Le cur6
de Tours. / Browning; The Ring and the Book. / Ravaison [Mollien]; Rapport
s. 1. Philosophic [La philosophic en France au xix e Sie"cle. Paris, 1868]. / Goethe;
Aus meinem Leben. / Coquerel fils; [Perhaps Athanase Josu6 Coquerel, 1820-
1875, author of "Libres Etudes" (1867)]. / Em. Burnouf; [La] Sc[ience] des
Religions, vi. Les orthodoxies, comment elles se forment et declinent] R.2M.
July i, 69. / Leblais; Materialisme and Sp[iri]t[ua]l[i]sme. [Paris, 1865]. / Littr6;
Paroles de [la] Philos[ophie] positive, 1859]. / Caro; le Mat[erialis]me and la
Science [1868]. / Comte and Littr6; principes de Phil. pos. [Comte, Auguste.
Cours de philosophic positive, 6 vols., 2nd ed. with preface by Littre. Paris,
1864]. / Littre, Bridges; replies to Mill. [Bridges, John Henry. Unity of Comte s
life and doctrine; a reply to strictures on Comte s later writings, addressed to
J. S. Mill. London, 1866]. / H. Spencer; Reasons for dissenting from Comte.
/ Secre"tan; Preface to Phil, de la Liberte" [1848]. / Schopenhauer; das Metaph.
Bediirfniss. / H[enry] James [sen.]; Moralism and Christianity [N.Y. 1850].
/ Jouffroy ; Dist. ent. Psych, and Phys. [Part of the " Melanges Philosophiques " ?].
/ Benedikt; Electrotherap[ie], first 100 pp. / Lecky; History of Morals [2 vols.
1869]. / Froude; Short Studies, etc. (skimmed). / Duke of Argyle; Primeval
Man [1869]. / Turgeneff; Nouvelles Moscovites. / Lewes: [Biographical] Hist,
of Phil., Prolegomena, Kant, Comte. / Geo. Sand; Constance Verrier. / Merimee;
Lokis. R2M. 15 Sept, 69, / J, Grote; Exploratio philosophica, [1865], / H[enryJ
1869-72] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES i 43
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. Spen
cer, Hodgson (in his Time and Space*), Maudsley, Lock-
hart, 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 concep
tion, with no proofs to be adduced of its reality." x
He kept some of his memoranda in a series of the alpha
betized 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 con
tinued to make entries in these books until 1890, and per
haps 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,
James [Sen.]; Lectures and Miscellanies. [1852]. / [K. J?] Simrock. / C. Reade;
Griffith Gaunt. / G. Droz; Autour d une Source. / O. Feuillet. / D. F, Strauss:
Christian] Marklin. Mannheim. 1851. / M. Miiller; Chips [from a German
workshop] vol. i and vol. u partly. / Lis [Elisa?] Maier; W. Humboldt s Leben
[1865]. /Lis Maier; Geo. Forster s [Leben, 1856]. / Schleiermacher; Corres-
pondenz. vol. I. / Reville; Israelitic monotheism, RsM, i er Sept. 69. [La religion
primitive d Israel et le developpement du monotheisme]. / Deutsch; Islam.
Quarterly Rev. Oct. 69. / Fichte; Best[immung] des Gelehrten. i and ii Vorle-
sungen. / Ste.-Beuve; Art[icle on] Leopardi, [in] Portraits] cont[emporains] iiL
/ Westminster]: Rev[iew] Art. on Lecky. Oct. 69. / [T. G. von] Hippel; Selbst-
leben. / Vita de Leopardi. / Fichte; Bestim[mung] des Menschen. / Gwinner;
Schopenhauer. / "
Thanks are due to Mr. E. F. Walbridge, Librarian of the New York Har
vard Club, for identifying a number of abbreviated titles.
1 Psychology, vol. i, p. 130, note. The quotation is literal. The subject of
the foot-note in the Psychology is " the author. "
144 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1869-72
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 com
panion he was making of the note-book. He was already
at his ease in the practice of the Baconian maxim that read
ing 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 ob
serve that he already commanded a style that expressed the
color and quality of his thought. 1
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 develop
ment 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
1 See, for example, the use made of Touchstone s question, in the Nation in
1876 (quoted on page 190 infra). James was certainly unconscious of the repeti
tion when he wrote page 7 of Some Problems of Philosophy. Consider also, a few
sentences from a notice of Morley s Voltaire {Atlantic Monthly , 1872, vol. xxx,
p. 624). "As the opinions of average men are swayed more by examples and
types than by mere reasons, so a personality so accomplished as Mr. Morley s
cannot fail by its mere attractiveness to influence all who come within its reach
and inspire them with a certain friendliness toward the faith that animates it.
The standard example, Goethe, is ever at hand. But to be thus widely effective,
a man must not be a specialist. Mr. John Mill, weighty and many-sided as he is
by nature and culture, is yet deficient in the aesthetic direction; and the same
is true of M. Littre in France. Their lances lack that final tipping with light
that made Voltaire s so irresistible. What Henry IV s soldiers followed was his
white plume; and that imponderable superfluity, grace, in some shape, seems
one factor without which no awakening of men s sympathies on a large scale can
take place."
1869-72] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 145
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 mis
givings 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 ad
mitted to M. Abauzit that the passage was really the story
of his own case, 1 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
1 William James, by Theodore Flournoy (Geneva, 1911), p. 149 note.
146 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1869-72
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 al
though 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 un
able to go out into the dark alone.
" In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember won
dering how other people could live, how I myself had ever
lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the
1869-72] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES i 47
surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful per
son, 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 scrip
ture-texts like The eternal God is my refuge, etc.. Come unto
me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, etc., / am the Resur
rection 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 rea
son 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
I rate, I will assume for the present until next year that
j 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 Grublei x in
I which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily culti
vate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favor-
I
1 Grubbing among subtleties.
i 4 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1869
able to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January,
my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps re
turn 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 conse
quently 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 fur
nished 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 Anschauungenf 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 con
templation 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, cant be optimistic /
but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing I
resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in] 2 f
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. 3 The reader will recognize "the firm of
1 Regardings, or contemplative views. a MS. doubtful.
3 " I made a discovery in sending in my credentials to the Dean which gratified
me. It was that, adding in conscientiously every week in which I have had any
thing to do with medicine, I can t sum up more than three years and two or three
months. Three years is the minimum with which one can go up for examination;
Aet. 27] TO HENRY P. BOWDITCH i 49
B & J" as the medical partnership proposed to Bowditch
in the letter of December I2 3 186*7.
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 cal
culated. 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 incompre
hensible, and I can t say that his vocal elucidations helped
me a great deal to their understanding, but they neverthe
less 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 professor
ships of the sort to be given in the country to "safe," ortho
dox 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. . . .
but as I began away back in 63, I have been considering myself as having studied
about five years, and have felt much humiliated by the greater readiness of so
many younger men to answer questions and understand cases." To Henry James,
June 12, 1869.
1 50 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1869
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 lan
guage 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 autop
sies! 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 Athenaeum, but,
more librorum, when you want em, it keeps "out." . . .
I hope this letter is decousue 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.
Act. 27} TO HOLMES AND GRAY 151
To 0. 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 depart
ure from the house became immediately evident to the re
maining 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 z from proceeding to treat you with the utmost severity
of the law. It is high time that some of these genteel ad
venturers 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!"
1 Ephraim W. Gurney and T. S. Perry.
1 52 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1869
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 t he 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.
"Malgre la vue des miseres ou nous vivons et qui nous tien-
nent par la gorge," there is an inextinguishable spark which
will, when we least expect it, flash out and reveal the exist
ence, 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. 1 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
1 It ought perhaps to be noted, even if only to dismiss the subject and prevent
misapprehension, that at about this time a man whose philosophic ability was
great and whose thought was vigorously materialistic was often at the house
in Quincy Street. This was Chauncey Wright. He was twelve years James s
senior; a man whose best work was done in conversation who wrote little,
and whose talents are now to be measured chiefly by the strong impression that
he made on some of his contemporaries. "Of the two motives to which philo
sophic systems owe their being, the craving for consistency or unity in thought,
and the desire for a solid outward warrant for our emotional ends, his mind was
dominated only by the former. Never in a human head was contemplation more
separated from desire." (Vide James s obituary notice of Wright, contributed to
the Nation for Sept. 23, 1875.) It has been suggested that Wright influenced
James s thinking. If so, his influence was not lasting and, in the opinion of the
editor, can easily be overstated. James was not limited to any one philosophic
companionship even at this time; and if he felt Wright s influence, it is remark
able that there should be no mention of him in any of the letters or memo
randa that have survived and that there was never any acknowledgment in
James s subsequent writings. He was ever inclined to make acknowledgment,
even to his opponents.
Act. 27} TO HENRY P. BOWDITCH 153
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. JJ
"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 com
memorative 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 ist 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
i 54 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1869
hilly and fertile, and the climate deliciously windy and cool.
I came here resolved to lead the life of an absolute cater
pillar, 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 impor
tant 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 Satur
day and Sunday, and seemed in very jolly spirits at being
turned out to pasture from their Boston pen. I should
Aet. 27} TO HENRY P. BOWDITCH 155
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 draw
ing, 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 ut
most vividness and naivete 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
i 5 6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1870
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. How
ever discouraging the work of each day may seem, stick at
it long enough, and you 11 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 Vul-
pian or any other Parisian medical men worth having
is it too late now? and too late for Pfliiger? I address
this still to Bonn, supposing they 11 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 grow
ing 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, espe
cially when you had heard me expressly say I agreed with
you that the forehead is the truly ladylike place for a bonnet.
Enough ! - 1 waded out to Cambridge from your party.
If you enjoyed yourselves as much as I did (but I m afraid
you did n t) you will keep on giving them. Somehow your
part of the town is very inaccessible to me or I should fre-
Aet. 28} TO HENRY JAMES i 57
quently 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 be
tween us!
To Henry James.
CAMBRIDGE, May 7, 1870.
DEAR HARRY, T is 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 Ger-
maniques" 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
1 58 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1870
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 11 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 cooperate with life and float one
passively on. But I hear Father arriving and I must go
down to hear his usual compte rendu. 1
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 my
self, 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,
1 Cf. the description of Henry James, Senior s, home-comings in A Small Boy
and Others, p. 72.
Act. 28} TO HENRY P. BOWDITCH i 59
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 suc
ceeds 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. . . .
3 1 st.
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
160 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1871
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 bio
graphies, 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 affec
tion. 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 disin
tegrated, and Paris frozen and starved out. Well, so be it!
only the German liberals will have the harder battle to
Act. 29} TO HENRY P. BOWDITCH 161
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
have n 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. Eowditch.
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 pos
sible, 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
1 62 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1871
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, protestant
ism would seem to have a good deal to do with the funda
mental 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, "ecrasez 1 infame" is the only watch
word on each side. How any order is possible except by a
Caesar to hold the balance, it is hard to see. But I don t
want to dose you with my crude speculations. This differ
ence 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-Mai tre," 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"
Aet. 3 o\ TO CHARLES RENOUVIER 163
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 11 be spared, though, many a long year.
Ever yours truly,
WM. JAMES.
To Charles Renoumer.
CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 2, 1872.
MONSIEUR, Je viens d apprendre par votre "Science
de la Morale," que 1 ouvrage de M. Lequier, auquel vous
faites renvoi dans votre deuxieme Essai de Critique, n a
jamais ete mis en vente. Ceci explique Tinsucces avec
lequel j ai pendant longtemps tache 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 envoy er un, que je presenterais,
apres 1 avoir lu, en votre nom, a la bibliotheque Universitaire
de cette ville?
Si 1 edition est deja epuisee, ne vous mettez pas en peine
de me repondre, et que le vif interet que je prends a vos
idees serve d excuse a ma demande. Je ne peux pas laisser
echapper cette occasion de vous dire toute I admiration et
la reconnaissance que m ont inspiree la lecture de vos
Essais (sauf le 3me, que je n ai pas encore lu). Grace a
vous, je possede pour la premiere fois une conception intel
ligible et raisonnable de la Liberte. Je m y suis range a
peu pres. Sur d autres points de votre philosophic il me
164 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1872
reste encore des doutes, mais je puis dire que par elle je
commence a renaitre a la vie morale; et croyez, monsieur,
que ce n est pas une petite chose!
Chez nous, c est la philosophic de Mill, Bain, et Spencer
qui emporte tout a present devant lui. Elle fait d excellents
travaux en psychologic, mais au point de vue pratique elle
est deterministe et materialists, et deja je crois aper Devoir
en Angleterre les symptomes d une renaissance de la pensee
religieuse. Votre philosophic par son cote phenomeniste
semble tres propre a frapper les esprits eleves dans 1 ecole
empirique anglaise, et je ne doute pas des qu elle sera un
peu mieux connue en Angleterre et dans ce pays, qu elle
n ait un assez grand retentissement. Elle parait faire son
chemin lentement; mais je suis convaincu que chaque
annee nous rapprochera du jour ou elle sera reconnue de
tous comme etant la plus forte tentative philosophique
que le siecle ait vue naitre en France, et qu elle comptera
toujours comme un des grands jalons dans 1 histoire de la
speculation. Des que ma sante (depuis quelques annees
tres mauvaise) me permet un travail intellectuel un peu
serieux, je me propose d en faire une etude plus appro fondie
et plus critique, et d en donner un compte-rendu dans une
de nos revues. Si done, monsieur, il se trouve un ex-
emplaire encore disponible de la "Rech[erche] d une pre
miere Verite," j oserai vous prier de 1 envoyer a 1 adresse
de la libraire ci-incluse, en ecrivant mon nom sur la couver-
ture. M. Galette soldera tous les frais, s il s en trouve.
Veuillez encore une fois, cher monsieur, croire aux senti
ments d admiration et de haut respect avec lesquels je suis
votre tres obeissant 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 en
suing academic year." Thus began a service in the Uni
versity 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 philos
ophy, 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. In
deed, 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 begin
ning, was really physiological psychology, and that more
1 66 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1872
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 investiga
tions 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 philos
ophy 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 dis
tinctly off the path of his deepest inclination.
The first three fragments that follow refer to his prepara
tion for the plunge into teaching. The course on Com
parative 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 Pres
ident and the Faculty were interested in the fact that the
new course under these two young instructors attracted 28
Juniors and 25 Seniors."
Act. 3 o\ TO HENRY JAMES 167
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 labora
tory. It is a noble thing for one s spirits to have some re
sponsible 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 " Physi
ology," I went to town, paid a bill of Randidge s, looked
into the Athenaeum reading-room, got one dozen raw oysters
at Higgins s saloon in Court Street, came out again, ther
mometer 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
i68 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1873
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 suc
ceeded 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 rea
sons, be decided. I have done almost absolutely no visit
ing 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,
Aet. 3 i\ TO HENRY JAMES 169
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 stu
dents 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 after
noon 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 espe
cially 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
1 70 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1873
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 t^ e 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 consider
able 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
Act. 3 i} LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 171
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 gal
lant mood is on him; and a basis too upon which he can
passively float and tide over times of weakness and depres
sion, 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, report
ing 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.
i 7 2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1873
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 room
mate, 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 vaca
tion 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,
Aet. 3 A TO HIS FAMILY i 73
incredibly ignorant, but extremely good-natured and gentle
manly. 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. Neverthe
less, 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 4Oth 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 mag
netic relations with him. I lurched about the deck arm in
i 74 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1873
arm with the young missionary yestreen. I told her that,
if I were a missionary, instead of going to the most un
healthy part of Africa, I would choose, say, Paris for a
field. She, all unconscious of the subtle humor of my re
mark, 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, pour
ing 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 would n 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 disposi
tion 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 Hauss-
Aet. 3 i\ TO HIS SISTER 175
manization 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 Hotel du
Louvre, the exaggerated neatness and order and reglemen-
tation 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 re
covered from the simpler lessons of joy it learnt at Scarboro
and Magnolia last summer. I went to the Theatre Fran-
gais and heard a play in verse of Ponsard, thin stuff splen
didly 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
i 7 6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [187.3
help stating how agreeable it is to me to be once more in
regular communication with that which, in spite of all short
comings, 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 conscious
ness forces the mind open again even as the knife the un
willing 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 Ger
man 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, histor
ical problems could help being the most urgent ones for the
mind. It would suit you admirably. Even art comes be
fore 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
Aet. 3 i\ TO HIS SISTER
177
the stray photographs which enter our houses at home,
rinding 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 enjoy-
178 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1873
ment 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 cafe in the Corso, begin to eat and
read "Galignani" and the "Debats," 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 hote 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 hote, and of whom the young lady (though rather greasy
about the face) is very handsome and intelligent. In the
Aet.3i\ LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES i 79
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 tres caracteristique 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. 1 The next year this course was transferred to
the Department of Philosophy and given under the title
"Psychology." He contributed numerous reviews of scien-
1 The early history of experimental psychology in America once occasioned
discussion. But the discussion seems to have arisen from its being assumed that
some particular formality or event should be recognized as marking the coming
into being, or the coming of age, of a "Department" or a "Laboratory." James
has stated the facts as to the history of the Harvard Laboratory in his own words:
"I, myself, founded the instruction in experimental psychology at Harvard in
1874-5, or I 8y6, I forget which. For a long series of years the laboratory was in
two rooms of the Scientific School building, which at last became choked with
apparatus, so that a change was necessary. I then, in 1890, resolved on an alto
gether new departure, raised several thousand dollars, fitted up Dane Hall, and
introduced laboratory exercises as a regular part of the undergraduate psychology
course." Vide Science, (N. S.) vol. n, pp. 626, 735. Also, p. 301 infra.
180 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1874
tific 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 Considerations sur la Methode Subjective."
Meanwhile his correspondence diminished to its mini
mum. 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 ex
pected departure about the 2oth; 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
Aet. 3 2\ TO MISS THEODORA SEDGWICK 181
Florentine places you name in your letters like "leiser
Nachhall langst verklungner Lieder, zieht mit Errinnerungs-
schauer 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 i Orchestra Seat in Hippodrome [Bar-
num s Circus] $1.00
" 2 carriage fares at 5oc. $1.00
* I glass vanilla cream sodawater $ .10
i plate of soup lost $ .25
" 4 hours time at 12^" 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
1 82 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1876
still due, please send back at the same time whatever letters
of mine you may still have in your possession, and the dia
monds, 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 ac
customed 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 re
ward 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, black
berries, 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 resent
ment 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 be
tween 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
Ae.t. 34} TO HENRY JAMES 183
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.
- f 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 deter
mination 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 char
acter. 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
184 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1876
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 in
doors, 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 did n 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. 1
The Tweedies keep no horses, which makes one walk
more or pay more than one would wish. The younger Sea-
bury told me yesterday that he was just reading your "Rod
erick Hudson," but offered no [comment]. Colonel Waring
1 The name of a rocky promontory near Newport.
Aet. 3 4\ TO HENRY JAMES 185
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 11 do it well.
Your last few letters home have breathed a tone of con
tentment and domestication in Paris which was very agree
able 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 unsus
pected 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 De-
ronda." 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 phi
losophizes 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 restless
ness of George Eliot s commentary on life. The La Farges
are absent. Yours always,
W.J.
1 86 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1876
Under the title "Bain and Renouvier," James contributed
a review containing a brief discussion of free will and deter
minism 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 "Annee
Philosophique," Renouvier s annual survey of contempo
rary philosophy, for the first time. The diary entry already
quoted from the year 1870 has shown what effect Renou
vier 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 manu
script, which was published posthumously as "Some
Problems of Philosophy," James looked back at the forma
tive 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 sev
enties 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 acquaint
ance 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 apprecia
tion of my poor little article in the "Nation." It gratifies
Aet. 3 4\ TO CHARLES RENOUVIER 187
me extremely to hear from your own lips that my appre
hension 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 repre
sentative 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* 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,
1 Being and Non-Being.
1 88 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1876
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 labora
tory work and study, too, are more than I can attend to.
It is therefore not impossible that I may in 1877-8 be trans
ferred 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 Eng
lish 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 pre
vailing academic conditions. He was, in fact, one among a
few younger men who were already rejuvenating the teach
ing 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
Aet.34} LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 189
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 inade
quately taught as those generally roughly classed as phi
losophy. Deductive logic, or the syllogism, is the most
thoroughly dwelt upon, while induction, aesthetic and psy
chological 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 aesthetic 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 administra
tive faculty than to any speculative gifts or propensities,
it usually follows that safeness becomes the main char
acteristic 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
190 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1876
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 at
tainment 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 convention
alities 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 well
born nature. It says, Is there space and air in your mind,
or must your companions gasp for breath whenever they
Aet. 3 4\ LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 191
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 reflec
tion 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 liv
ing, philosophic attitude of mind, the independent, personal
look at all the data of life, and the eagerness to harmonize
them. . . .
" In short, philosophy, like Moliere, claims her own where
she finds it. She finds much of it today in physics and
natural history, and must and will educate herself accord
ingly. . . . 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, Schopen
hauer 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 com
mon 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 com
fortably and which was then still untouched by the "de
velopment" 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 worri
some enough, weighed lightly in the balance against the
1878-83] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 193
tranquillity and confidence that his new domesticity soon
brought him. During the twenty-one years that immedi
ately 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 in
terruptions 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 en
couraged him to all his major undertakings, with a sustain
ing skill and cheer which need not be described to anyone
who knew his household. To the importance of her com
panionship 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
i 94 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1878-83
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 correspond
ence, whether he could deliver the manuscript in a year s
time. James replied (June, 1878): "My other engage
ments 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 Adiron-
dacks 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
1878-83] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 195
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 pic
turesque 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 rucksack, 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 hol
idays.
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 Rus
sell Lowell: "William has already begun a Manual of Psy
chologyin the honeymoon; but they are both writ
ing it."
196 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1878
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 cir
cumstances. You know we longed to see you. It is not
too late to repair your fault, for although we shall not out
stay the ist 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 wri things
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 ac
customed 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.
Aet.36\ TO MISS FRANCES R. MORSE 197
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
ehrwiirdig 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
i 9 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1878
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. I5th 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 incite
ment 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. Gary s, where the
Tappans used to live. We have absolutely no housekeep
ing 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 anx
iously 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
Aet. 3 6\ TO MRS. JAMES
199
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 con
siderations.
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
200 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1878
away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am iiberhaupt
in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of
bitter willingness to do and suffer anything, which trans
lates 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 intellec
tual 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 Soc
rates-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 re
sulted, 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
Aet. 3 6\ LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 201
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 some
body 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 in
terests 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 re
sponsibility that I was later led to get my first opportuni
ties here at Harvard." J
The opportunities did not ripen until 1882-83, however;
and in the meanwhile Royce returned to the young Uni
versity 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.
1 Harvard Graduates Magazine, vol. xvm, p. 631 (June, 1910).
202 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1879
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 Beh-
rings 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 ex
treme youth and the fact that you are making a living and
practising yourself in the pedagogic art, uberhaupt. 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 Presi
dent 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
Aet.37\ TO JOSIAH ROYCE 203
substance. My sentence, I perceive, has a rather uncom
plimentary 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 un
doubtedly be inadequate for some time to come; but they
will all help each other out. He seems to me the wealth
iest 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 Oilman 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. 1 The delays of publication are fear
ful. 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.
1<c The only decent thing I have ever written" appeared in Mind under the
title "The Sentiment of Rationality." A footnote (p. 346) ran as follows:
"This article is the first chapter of a psychological work on the motives which
lead men to philosophize. It deals with the purely theoretic or logical impulse.
Other chapters treat of practical and emotional motives, and in the conclusion
an attempt is made to use the motives as tests of the soundness of different philos
ophies."
204 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1880
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 objurga
tion 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. / am blind as ever, which may excuse my silence.
First of all Gluckwunsche as to your Verlobung! which,
like the true philosopher that you are, you mention paren
thetically 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 mar
riage 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 engage
ment 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 magnif-
ico in his pages. I enclose his photograph as a loan, trust
ing 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 accom
modate 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.
Aet.3S\ TO JOSIAH ROYCE 205
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 Phil
osophic 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 Re-
nouvier 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, 1
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 ac
cursed eye-sight balks me always about study and pro-
1 " The Spatial Quale," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1879, vol. xin, p. 64.
206 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1880
duction. Ora pro me! With most respectful and devout
regards to the fair Object, believe me always your
WM. JAMES.
To Charles Renouvier.
CAMBRIDGE, June i, 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 teach
ing 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 posi
tions 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
Aet. 3 8\ TO CHARLES RENOUVIER 207
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 indebted
ness. 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 refresh
ment 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 prin
ciple of right / 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,
208 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1880
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 ad
vanced 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 Chris
tianity. It gives a quasi-metaphysic backbone which this
theology has always been in need of, but it is too funda
mentally 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
Aet. 3 8\ LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 209
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 en
chantment 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 constitu
tional 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 de
scribed. Time never accustomed him to these collisions,
210 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1882
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, Nuremburg, 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, Liege
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. 1
1 Bastien-Lepage s Les Foins (The Hay-Makers).
Aet.4o\ TO MRS. JAMES 211
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. 1 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 "eu
phoria" (vide dictionary) succeeded, and I have rarely en
joyed a forty-eight hours better, in spite of the fact that
the good and sharp-nosed Stumpf (whose book "Uber 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
1 Vide Introduction, p. 9 supra.
212 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1882
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. 1 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 every
thing, and has an absolute simplicity of manner and win-
ningness 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 na
tive Geschw dtzigkeit 2 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 thor
oughness is largely the result of circumstances. I found
1 That I was intimate with their writings and did not wish to leave Prague
without exchanging a few words with them.
3 Loquacity.
Act. 40} TO MRS. JAMES 213
that I had a more cosmopolitan knowledge of modern phil
osophic 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 is n 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 ad
jective 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"! 1 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,
1 Service is service.
2i 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1882
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 semi
circular 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 Decent on Ethics),
to a " privatissimum " with a supper after it. Good, square,
deep-chested talk again, which I could n 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 whole
some, tonic atmosphere, the land where one talks best when
he talks manliest slowest, distinctest, with most delib
erate emphasis and strong voice. . . .
LEIPZIG, Nov. n, 1882.
. . . Jones spoilt my incipient nap this afternoon and I
adjourned to his room to meet Smith and Brown x 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"
1 The true names of three compatriots, who may be living, are not given.
Aet.4o\ TO MRS. JAMES 215
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 LIEGE, Nov. 18, 1882.
... I believe I did n 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
2i 6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1882
he seemed very busy and showed no desire to see more of
me than the present interview either time. The psycho-
logische 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. . . .
LIEGE, 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 men
tion with such affliction at home belong rather to the cen
tury 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
Aet. 40} TO HENRY JAMES 217
to do is to establish in Cambridge a genuine German ple
beian 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 mean
while 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 com
fortable. 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 any
thing 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 cos
mopolitan. Delboeuf in Liege was an angel and much the
2i 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1882
best teacher I ve seen. 1 . . "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 sea
weed, a quart bottle of eau de Cologne, and a lot of other
acquisitions. I feel remarkably tough now, and fairly rav
enous 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
1 "My tour in Germany was pleasant, and from the pedagogic point of view
instructive; although its chief result was to make me more satisfied than ever with
our Harvard College methods of teaching } and to make me feel that in America
we have perhaps a more cosmopolitan post of observation than is elsewhere to be
found." To Renouvier, Dec. 18, 1882.
Act. 40} TO HIS FATHER. 219
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 in
harmonious 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 rilled. In that mys
terious 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 intellectuaUlife 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 anx
iety about your literary remains. I will see them well
220 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1882
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 monu
ment 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 peculiar
ities; and as my own boys grow up, I shall learn more
and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in su
perintending 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 cant 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 ex
presses 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.
Act. 40} TO MRS. JAMES 221
The elder Henry James died on the nineteenth of De
cember. A cablegram was sent to London; and on learn
ing 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 sick
ness, his college days and ramblings, his theological throes,
his engagement and marriage and fatherhood, his rinding
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-sprunglich 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
222 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1882
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, Les
lie Stephen, Carveth Reid, and Francis Galton. His eyes
were troubling him again, but he did some writing on psy
chology. After paying another short visit to Paris, he sailed
for home in March.
IX
1883-1890
Writing the "Principles of Psychology"- Psychical Re
search The Place at Choc or ua The Irving Street
House The Paris Psychological Congress 0/1889
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 in
capable 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 ill
nesses 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
224 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1883-90
"List" of his published work may see that he had written
important papers by 1883, and that most of what was orig
inal 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 col
leagues 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 sym
pathy. Thus he had gained a bracing sense of comrade
ship 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. Helm-
holtz 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 Psy
chology" to graduate students in 1875, an d made the class
take part in experiments which he arranged in a room in the
Lawrence Scientific School building. 1
1 See p. 179 supra, and note.
1883-90] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 225
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 x 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 Ma-
caulay s phrase, as "utterly wanting in the faculty by which
a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible sup
position." But an instinctive "love of sportsmanlike fair
play" was stirred in him by the indifference with which men
1 See an unsigned review of Epes Sargent s "Planchette," in the Boston Adver
tiser of March 10, 1869. "The present attitude of society on this whole question
is as extraordinary and anomalous as it is discreditable to the pretension of an age
which prides itself on enlightenment and the diffusion of knowledge. . . . The
phenomena seem, in their present state, to pertain more to the sphere of the dis
interested student of nature than to that of the ordinary layman." The review
was reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews,
226 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1883-90
who professed to be students of nature/ 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." 2 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 dis
cussion 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
1 As an example of this James once quoted Huxley. "I take no interest in the
subject. The only case of Spiritualism I have had the opportunity of examining
into for myself was as gross an imposture as ever came under my notice. But
supposing the phenomena to be genuine they do not interest me. If anybody
would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and
curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better
things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and
sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category.
The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of Spiritualism
is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-
sweeper, than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea
a seance." Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 452 (New York, 1900).
James s comment should be added: "Obviously the mind of the excellent Huxley
has here but two whole-souled categories, namely, revelation or imposture, to
apperceive the case by. Sentimental reasons bar revelation out, for the messages,
he thinks, are not romantic enough for that; fraud exists anyhow; therefore the
whole thing is nothing but imposture. The odd point is that so few of those who
talk in this way realize that they and the spiritists are using the same major premise
and differing only in the minor. The major premise is: Any spirit-revelation
must be romantic. The minor of the spiritist is: This is romantic ; that of
the Huxleyan is: This is dingy twaddle whence their opposite conclusions!"
(Memories and Studies , pp. 185, 186.)
The mil to Believe, etc,, p. 302.
1883-90] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 227
statements will be misconstrued by some of his professional
brethren, and that his name will be taken in vain by news
papers 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-Presi
dent 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
seances" every Saturday without discovering anything that
they could report as other than fraudulent. But in the fol
lowing 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
228 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1883
can see no escape." z He continued to find time for the
investigation of other cases, and could sometimes console
himself by laughing over expeditions which were quite fruit
less of interesting result. A few sentences from letters ad
dressed 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,/#/ 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, anaemic, 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,
1 Cf. The Will to Believe, etc., p. 319.
Aet. 41} TO CHARLES RENOUVIER 229
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." 1 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
ADIRONDACK^.
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
1 It is not the province of this book to estimate the importance of the work done
by James and the other men Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Sir
Oliver Lodge, and Richet, to go no further who supported and guided the
S. P. R. It must be traced in the literature of automatisms, hypnosis, divided
personality, and the "subliminal." In James s own writings the reader may be
referred to the above named chapter of The Will to Believe, etc., two papers included
in Memories and Studies, and a review of Myers s Human Personality in Proc. of
the (Eng.) 5. P, R., vol. xvm, p. 22 (1903). See also p. 306 infra, and note.
2 3 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1883
the College bell, summoning me as well as my colleagues
to the lecture-room, should make literary work almost im
possible. 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, out
wardly 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 en
dowing you with so clear a head, but for giving you so ad
mirable 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 Psy
chology," x and wrote the substance of the lectures out im
mediately after giving them the whole occupying six
days. I hope you may read the paper some time and ap
prove it though it is out of the current of your own fa
vorite topics and consequently hardly a proper candidate
for the honours of translation in the "Critique."
*Mind y 1884, vol. ix, pp. 1-26.
Act. 41} TO CHARLES RENOUVIER 231
I understand now why no really good classic manual of
psychology exists; why all that do exist only treat of par
ticular points and chapters with any thoroughness. It is im
possible to write one at present, so infinitely more numer
ous 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 Fouillee, 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 Fouillee,
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 Fouillee his fougue and adds to his
cleverness, and no doubt increases immensely the effective
ness 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 diplo
matist, partly clergyman, and partly professor of meta
physics, armed with great authority and influence if his
college is an important one which Yale is; and Porter
232 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1883
is the paragon of the type bonhomme et ruse, 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 moun
tains 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 photo
graph 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 re
ceived 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 cer
tain ways, and yet one of the most successful. I know noth
ing that so much confirms your philosophy as this spectacle
A*. 41} TO HENRY L. HIGGINSON 233
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 tact
fully 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 with
out involving himself in excessive and unprofitable worry,
was delighted to leave decisions to his friend s wiser judg
ment. 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 hiero
glyphics, "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, Shy lock, go on! you have me
in your power. The peculiar combination of ignorance
234 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1884
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 ex
quisitely painful that he will not let himself believe it."
To H. P. Bowditch.
[Post-card]
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., Jan. 31 [1884].
Heute den 31 ten Januar wurde mir vor i Stunden in
rascher Aufeinander-folge ein(i) wunderschoner jiidisch-
aussehender, kraftiger und munterer Knabe geboren. Alles
geht nach Wunsch, und bittet um stiller Theilnahme der
gliickliche Vater. W. J.
[Translation.]
Today the 3ist of January, two hours since, there was
born to me in rapid succession one (i) wonderfully beautiful,
Act. 42} TO THOMAS DAVIDSON 235
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
236 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1884
and led a really intellectual life, seem like a sort of lost
paradise. However, vacations make amends. This sum
mer I am to edit my poor father s literary remains, "with
a sketch of his writings" which will largely consist of ex
tracts 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 x
nor heard of it, but ran for it as soon as I got your announce
ment of its existence. I know not what to think of it prac
tically; 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 considera
tions 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
1 Unitarian Review ,j Dec., 1883; vol. xx, p. 481.
Act. 4*\ TO G. H. HOWISON 237
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-post
poned 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 joth November. I need
not say how tickled I am at your too generous words about
my Divinity school address on Determinism. 1 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 recog
nize 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
"The Dilemma of Determinism." Unitarian Review, Sept., 1884. Repub-
lished in The Will to Believe and Other Essays.
238 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1885
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 de
terministic disjunction, "pessimism or subjectivism," and
ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral ac
tivity," etc. (You probably remember.) I did n t forget it.
It entered for me into pessimism, for, since such activity
has failed to be universally realized, it was (deterministi-
cally) 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 his
tory has always shown. Reverence is an accidental per
sonal 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 .have n 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 y to con
tinue the Gallic idiom. Your predecessor Royce thinks
he s got the thing at last. It is too soon for me to criticize
Act. 43\ LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 239
his book; but I must say it seems to me one of the very
freshest, profoundest, solidest, most human bits of phil
osophical 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 rev
erence 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 "Enttauschung" about Berkeley, 1 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 re
viewers "never-quite-forgiven," and less feuds in the world
of science.
1 Professor Howison had accepted an appointment at the University of Cali
fornia (Berkeley).
2 4 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1885
To E. L. Godkin.
CAMBRIDGE, [Feb.] 16, 1885.
MY DEAR GODKIN, Does n t the impartiality which
I suppose is striven for in the "Nation," sometimes over
shoot 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 relig
ious 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
Act. 43} TO SHADWORTH H. HODGSON 241
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 yth was most
welcome. Anything responsive about my poor old father s
writing falls most gratefully upon my heart. F6r 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 Ursprunglichkeit 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 un
fortunate 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 theo
logical names. Under "Man" he would willingly have
included all flesh, even that resident in Sirius or ethereal
242 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1885
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 phil
osophical. 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 as
similating 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. i, 1885.
... I am running along quite smoothly, and my eyes,
you never knew such an improvement! It has continued
Act. 43\ TO SHADWORTH H. HODGSON 243
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 would n 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 walk
ing 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 is n t philosophy a sad mistress,
estranging the more intimately those who in all other re
spects 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 addi
tional 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
244 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1885
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 discrimi
nations 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 them
selves 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 com
pulsion 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 pre
supposed in the parts that are already given. Were such
Aet. 43} TO SHADWORTH H. HODGSON 245
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 exist
ence. 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 con
demn 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 sim
ply 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?
246 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1885
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 differ
ence between "impediments from within" and "impedi
ments 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^ neverthe
less 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 miol from whom I hoped so
much! Most spirited, most clean, most thoroughbred of
philosophers! Perche di tanto inganni i figli tuoi? 1 If
you want to reconcile us rationally to Determinism, write
a Theodicy, reconcile us to Evil, but don t talk of the dis
tinction 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
1 " Why so heartlessly deceive your sons?"
LEOPARDI, To Sylvia.
Aet. 43} TO CARL STUMPF 247
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 /.] 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,
WJ.
[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. i, 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
248 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1886
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. 1 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 phenom
enon are impossible.
1 From 15 Appian Way to 18 Garden Street.
Act. 43} LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 249
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 hypno
tizing, 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 David
son wrote to comment on its apparent anti-spiritual bias.
In the following reply, dated February i, 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 color-
lessness philosophically. They seem to have no preferences
2 5 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1886
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 mo
ment 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
Aet. 44} TO HENRY JAMES 251
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 re
turn to "The Bostonians"; the two last books are simply
sweet. There is n t a hair wrong in Verena, you Ve made
her neither too little nor too much but absolutely liebens-
wurdig. 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 Gur-
ney 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, com
bining 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
252 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1886
of a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute
success. But you have worked it up by dint of descrip
tions 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 enjoy
ment 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 exqui
sitely 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 "anar
chist" 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 Con
tinental. Affectly.,
W.J.
Aet. 44} TO W. D. HOWELLS 253
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 be
longs. How you tread the narrow line of nature s truth
so infallibly is more than I can understand. Then the pro
fanity, the humor, the humanity, the morality the every
thing! In short, t is cubical, and set it up any way you
please t will 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 Howe/Is. I repeat it: long
live Howells ! God grant you may do as good things again !
I don t believe you can do better.
With warmest congratulations to Mrs. Howells that you
and she were born, I am ever yours 3
WM. JAMES.
Mr. Howells called such letters "whoops of blessing."
When a new book pleased James particularly, he was apt
to send a "whoop" to its author.
254 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1886
With respect to the next letter, it will be recalled that
Croom Robertson was the Editor of "Mind." Richard
Hodgson was later for many years the Secretary of the
American Branch of the Society for Psychical Research, in
Boston. He became a warm friend. Other allusions to
him occur later.
To G. Croom Robertson.
Aug. 13, 1886.
MY DEAR ROBERTSON, ... I have just been reading
the last number of "Mind," and find it rather below par.
R. Hodgson muddled, clotted, dusky and ineffectual, save
for a gleam or two of light in as many separate points.
How can an adult man spend his time in trying to torture
an accurate meaning into Spencer s incoherent accident-
alities? It is so much more easy to do the work over for
oneself. I rubbed my eyes at the Macdonald paper, as a
dim sense came over me that it might be a Divinity student
who "sat under" me for a part of last year. I ween it is.
Little did I know the viper I was nourishing. Why don t
you have a special " Neo-Hegelian Department" in "Mind,"
like the "Children s Department" or the "Agricultural
Department" in our newspapers which educated readers
skip? W 7 ith Montgomery s paper I am for the most part
in warm sympathy, though he might make a discrimination
or two more. I m sorry I Ve not yet read his first number.
His non-empirical style, so different from that of the Brit
ish school, will stand in the way of his views deglutition
by the ordinary reader. I ve got the same stuff all neatly
down in black and white, in a very empirical style, which
alas! must wait perhaps years till the other chapters are
finished. However, in these matters, no matter how much
Aet. 44] TO G. CROOM ROBERTSON 255
different men strike the same vein, they do it in such dif
ferent ways, that no one of them absolutely supersedes the
need of the others.
Davidson I saw the other day in Cambridge. He was
fresh from the Concord School, where they had been be
laboring Goethe as their piece de resistance and topping
off with pantheism as dessert. He had read aloud a paper
of Montgomery s against pantheism, as well as one of his
own on Goethe s Titanism. Montgomery s is shortly to
appear in a journal here. I am rather curious to read it.
To go on with "Mind," Hull s paper (Donaldson s) is
refreshing. X - is a little stub-and- twist fellow who also
sat under me last year, and now has a fellowship for next
year. He is a silent, mannerless little cub, but has first-
rate stuff in him, I think, as an original worker; theological
training. Have you had time yet to look into Royce s
book? Royce seems to me to be a man of the greatest
promise, performance too, in that book. I wish you would
have it worthily reviewed.
Here I have run on about the accidents of the hour, in
stead of the eternal things of the soul. No matter; all is
a symbol, and these words will probably waft my presence
somehow into yours. . . .
Pray drop me even a short line soon, to let me know
about you and Mrs. Robertson. I ve heard nothing of
you, even, for many months. Have n t you a brother, or
something, to send over here, since there seems no hope
of having you yourself? Gurney wrote the other day that
he was about to send his brother.
Farewell! I think of you both often, and am with heart
iest affection, Yours always,
WM. JAMES.
256 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1886
To Shadworth H. Hodgson.
JAFFREY, N.H., Sept. 12, 1886.
MY DEAR HODGSON, I ought long ere this to have
written you a genuine letter in reply to your two of Feb. 3,
respective March 6. (The latter by the way came to me
many weeks too late, all blurred and water-stained, with a
notice gummed on it telling as how it had been rescued from
the Oregon sunken on the bottom of the Ocean. This
makes it ex- as well as in-trinsically interesting, and does
honor to our nineteenth-century post-office perfection.)
I suppose one reason for my procrastination has been the
shrinking-back of the fleshly man from another gnashing
of the teeth over the free-will business. I have just been
reading your letters again, and beautiful letters they are
also your pregnant little paper on Monism. But I m blest
if they make me budge an inch from my inveterate way of
looking at the question. I hate to think that controversy
should be useless, and arguments of no avail, but the history
of opinion on this problem is ominous; so I will be very short,
hardly more than "yea, yea! nay, nay!"
The subject of my concern seems entirely different from
yours. I care absolutely nothing whether there be "agents"
or no agents, or whether man s actions be really "his" or
not.
What I care for is that my moral reactions should find a
real outward application. All those who, like you, hold
that the world is a system of "uniform law" which repels
all variation as so much "chaos," oblige, it seems to me, the
world to be judged integrally. Now the only integral
emotional reaction which can be called forth by such a world
as this of our experience, is that of dramatic^or melodramatic
interest romanticism which is the emotional reaction
upon it of all intellects who are neither religious nor moral.
Aet. 44} TO SHADWORTH H. HODGSON 257
The moment you seek to go deeper, you must break the
world into parts, the parts that seem good and those that
seem bad. Whatever Indian mystics may say about over
coming the bonds of good and evil, for us there is no higher
synthesis in which their contradiction merges, no one way
of judging that world which holds them both. Either
close your eyes and adopt an optimism or a pessimism
equally daft; or exclude moral categories altogether from
a place in the world s definition, which leaves the world
unheimlich, reptilian, and foreign to man; or else, sticking
to it that the moral judgment is applicable, give up the
hope of applying it to the whole, and admit that, whilst
some parts are good, others are bad, and being bad, ought
not to have been, "argal," possibly might not have been.
In short, be an indeterminist on moral grounds with which
the differences between compulsory or spontaneous uni
formity and perceptive and conceptive order have absolutely
nothing to do.
But enough! I am far beyond the yea and nay I prom
ised, and feel more like gossiping with you as a friend than
wrangling with you as a foe. I hope things are going well
with you in these months and that politics have not exasper
ated you beyond the possibility of philosophizing. ... I got
successfully through the academic year, in spite of the fact
that I wasted a great deal of time on "psychical research"
and had other interruptions from work which I would fain
have done. I intend per fas aut nefas to make more time
for myself next year. The family is very well; and with
the exception of an attack of illness of a couple of weeks,
the vacation has been a delightful and beneficial one. I
wish I could live in the country all the year round, or rather
nine months of it. When I retire from the harness, if that
ever happens, I probably shall.
258 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1886
I have just been on a little trip to the White Moun
tains and may possibly buy a small farm which I saw in a
convenient and romantic neighborhood. New England
farms are now dirt cheap the natives going West, the
Irish coming in and making a better living than the Yankees
could. Here were seventy-five acres of land, two thirds of
it oak and pine timber, one third hay, a splendid spring of
water, fair little house and large barn, close to a beautiful
lake and under a mountain 3500 feet high, four and a half
hours from Boston, for 900 dollars! A rivulet of great
beauty runs through it. I am only waiting to see if I can
get the strip between it and the lake shore to buy. . . .
I have just read, with infinite zest and stimulation,
Bradley s "Logic." I suppose you have read it. It is
surely "epoch-making" in English philosophy. Both em
piricists and pan-rationalists must settle their accounts with
it. It breaks up all the traditional lines. And what a
fighter the cuss is! Do you know him? What is he per
sonally? Whether churlish and sour, or simply redundantly
ironical and irrepressible, I can t make out from his polemic
tone; but should apprehend the former. It will be long
ere I settle my accounts with his book.
Well ! adieu and good luck to you, in spite of your vicious-
ness in the matter of determinism ! Send me all you write
and believe me as ever, Always most affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
With respect to the next letter, and others to James s
sister, which follow, it should now be explained that Miss
Alice James had gone abroad in 1885. The illness which
was the cause of her journey developed more and more
serious complications. Being near her brother Henry in
England, she stayed on there during the remaining six years
Aet. 45 \ TO HIS SISTER
259
of her life. In spite of much suffering, she never let herself
adopt an invalidish tone, 1 but kept her attention turned
toward things outside her sick-room, and was apt to greet
expressions of commiseration in a way to discourage their
repetition as the following letter testifies. "K. P. L."
was a devoted friend, Miss Katharine P. Loring of Boston;
"A. K." was the Aunt Kate mentioned in early letters.
To his Sister.
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 5, 1887.
DEAREST ALICE, Your card and, a day or two later,
K. P. L. s letter to A. K., have made us acquainted with
your sad tumble-down, for which I am sorrier than I can
express, and can only take refuge in the hope, incessantly
1 "It s amusing to see how, even upon my microscopic field, minute events are
perpetually taking place illustrative of the broadest facts of human nature.
Yesterday Nurse and I had a good laugh, but I must allow that decidedly she
had me. I was thinking of something that interested me very much, and my
mind was suddenly flooded by one of those luminous waves that sweep out of
consciousness all but the living sense, and overpower one with joy in the rich,
throbbing complexity of life, when suddenly I looked up at Nurse, who was dressing
me, and saw her primitive, rudimentary expression (so common here), as of no
inherited quarrel with her destiny of putting petticoats over my head; the poverty
and deadness of it, contrasted to the tide of speculation that was coursing through
my brain, made me exclaim, Oh, Nurse, don t you wish you were inside of me?
Her look of dismay, and vehement disclaimer Inside of you, Miss, when you
have just had a sick-headache for five days! gave a greater blow to my vanity
than that much-battered article has ever received. The headache had gone off
in the night and I had clean forgotten it when the little wretch confronted me with
it, at this sublime moment, when I was feeling within me the potency of a Bismarck,
and left me powerless before the immutable law that, however great we may seem
to our own consciousness, no human being would exchange his for ours, and before
the fact that my glorious role was to stand for sick-headache to mankind! What a
grotesque being I am, to be sure, lying in this room, with the resistance of a thistle
down, having illusory moments of throbbing with the pulse of the race, the mystery
to be solved at the next breath, and the fountain of all happiness within me the
sense of vitality, in short, simply proportionate to the excess of weakness. To
sit by and watch these absurdities is amusing in its way, and reminds me of how I
used to listen to my company manners in the days when I had em, and how
ridiculous they sounded.
"Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they
unhappy, by the way ? " [From a diary of Alice James s.]
2 6o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [18*7
springing up again from its ashes, that you will "recuperate"
more promptly than of late has been the case. I m glad,
at any rate, that it has got you into Harry s lodgings for
a while, and hope your next permanent arrangement will
prove better than the last. When, as occasionally happens,
I have a day of headache, or of real sickness like that of
last summer at Mrs. Dorr s, I think of you whose whole
life is woven of that kind of experience, and my heart sinks
at the horizon that opens, and wells over with pity. But
when all is over, the longest life appears short; and we had
better drink the cup, whatever it contains, for it is life.
But I will not moralize or sympathize, for fear of awaken
ing more "screams of laughter" similar to those which you
wrote of as greeting my former attempts.
We have had but one letter from Harry soon after his
arrival at Florence. I hope he has continued to get pleasure
and profit from his outing. I have n t written to him since
he left London, nor do I now write him a special letter, but
the rest of this is meant for him as well as you, and if he is
still to be away, you will forward it to him. We are getting
along very well, on the whole, I keeping very continuously
occupied, but not seeming to get ahead much, for the days
grow so short with each advancing year. A day is now
about a minute hardly time to turn round in. Mrs.
Gibbens arrived from Chicago last night, and in ten days
she and Margaret will start, with our little Billy, for Aiken,
S.C., to be gone till May. B. is asthmatic, she is glad to
go south for her own sake, and the open-air life all day
long will be much better for him than our arduous winter
and spring. He is the most utterly charming little piece of
human nature you ever saw, so packed with life, impatience,
and feeling, that I think Father must have been just like
him at his age. . . .
Act. 45\ TO HIS SISTER 261
I have been paying ten or eleven visits to a mind-cure
doctress, a sterling creature, resembling the "Venus of
Medicine," Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham, 1 made solid and vera
cious-looking. I sit down beside her and presently drop
asleep, whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my mind.
She says she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated,
so restless, etc. She said my eyes, mentally speaking, kept
revolving like wheels in front of each other and in front of
my face, and it was four or five sittings ere she could get
them fixed. I am now, unconsciously to myself, much bet
ter than when I first went, etc. I thought it might please
you to hear an opinion of my mind so similar to your
own. Meanwhile what boots it to be made unconsciously
better, yet all the while consciously to lie awake o nights,
as I still do?
Lectures are temporarily stopped and examinations begun.
I seized the opportunity to go to my Chocorua place and
see just what was needed to make it habitable for the sum
mer. It is a goodly little spot, but we may not, after all,
fit up the buildings till we have spent a summer in the place
and "studied" the problem a little more closely. The snow
was between two and three feet deep on a level, in spite of
the recent thaws. The day after I arrived was one of the
most crystalline purity, and the mountain simply exquisite
in gradations of tint. I have a tenant in the house, one
Sanborn, who owes me a dollar and a half a month, but
can t pay it, being of a poetic and contemplative rather
than of an active nature, and consequently excessively poor.
He has a sign out "Attorney and Pension Agent," and
writes and talks like one of the greatest of men. He was
working the sewing machine when I was there, and talking
1 Whose picture used to adorn the numerous advertisements of a patent medi
cine called "Mrs. Pinkham s Vegetable Compound."
262 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1887
of his share in the war, and why he did n t go to live in
Boston, etc. (namely that he was n t known), and my heart
was heavy in my breast that so rich a nature, fitted to in
habit a tropical dreamland, should have nothing but that
furnitureless cabin within and snow and sky without, to
live upon. For, however spotlessly pure and dazzlingly
lustrous snow may be, pure snow, always snow, and naught
but snow, for four months on end, is, it must be confessed,
a rather lean diet for the human soul deficient in variety,
chiaroscuro, and oleaginous and medieval elements. I felt
as I was returning home that some intellectual inferiority
ought to accrue to all populations whose environment for
many months in the year consisted of pure snow. You are
better off, better off than you know, in that great black-
earthed dunghill of an England. I say naught of politics,
war, strikes, railroad accidents or public events, unless the
departure of C. W. Eliot and his wife for a year in Europe
be a public event. . . .
Well, dear old Alice, I hope and pray for you. Lots of
love to Harry, and if Katharine is with you, to her. Yours
ever,
W. J.
To Carl Stumpf.
CAMBRIDGE, 6 Feb., 1887.
MY DEAR STUMPF, Your two letters from Riigen of Sept.
8th, and from Halle of Jan. 2 came duly, and I can assure
you that their contents was most heartily appreciated, and
not by me alone. I fairly squealed with pleasure over the
first one and its rich combination of good counsel and humor
ous commentary, and read the greater part of it to my friend
Royce, assistant professor of philosophy here, who enjoyed
it almost as much as I. There is a heartiness and solidity
Aet. 45} TO CARL STUMPF 263
about your letters which is truly German, and makes them
as nutritious as they are refreshing to receive. Your
Kater-Gefuhl? however, in your second letter, about your
Auslassungen 2 on the subject of Wundt, amused me by its
speedy evolution into Auslassungen more animated still.
I can well understand why Wundt should make his com
patriots impatient. Foreigners can afford to be indifferent
for he does n t crowd them so much. He aims at being a
sort of Napoleon of the intellectual world. Unfortunately
he will never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without
genius and with no central idea which, if defeated, brings
down the whole fabric in ruin. You remember what Victor
Hugo says of Napoleon in the Miserables "II genait
Dieu"; Wundt only geners his confreres; and whilst they
make mincemeat of some one of his views by their criti
cism, he is meanwhile writing a book on an entirely different
subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment
crawls; there is no nceud vital in his mental medulla oblon-
gata, so that you can t kill him all at once.
But surely you must admit that, since there must be
professors in the world, Wundt is the most praiseworthy
and never-too-much-to-be-respected type of the species.
He is n t a genius, he is a professor a being whose duty is
to know everything, and have his own opinion about every
thing, connected with his Fach. Wundt has the most
prodigious faculty of appropriating and preserving knowl
edge, and as for opinions, he takes au grand serieux his
duties there. He says of each possible subject, "Here I
must have an opinion. Let s see! What shall it be?
How many possible opinions are there? three? four? Yes!
1 The state of self-reproachful irritation described by Kater-Gefiihl cannot be
justly rendered by any English word.
2 Outbursts.
264 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1887
just four! Shall I take one of these? It will seem more
original to take a higher position, a sort of Vermittelungs-
ansicht 1 - between them all. That I will do, etc., etc."
So he acquires a complete assortment of opinions of his own;
and, as his memory is so good, he seldom forgets which
they are! But this is not reprehensible; it is admirable
from the professorial point of view. To be sure, one gets
tired of that point of view after a while. But was there
ever, since Christian Wolff s time, such a model of the
German Professor? He has utilized to the uttermost
fibre every gift that Heaven endowed him with at his birth,
and made of it all that mortal pertinacity could make.
He is the finished example of how much mere education
can do for a man. Beside him, Spencer is an ignoramus
as well as a charlatan. I admit that Spencer is occasionally
more amusing than Wundt. His "Data of Ethics" seems
to me incomparably his best book, because it is a more or
less frank expression of the man s personal ideal of living
which has of course little to do with science, and which, in
Spencer s case, is full of definiteness and vigor. Wundt s
"Ethics" I have not yet seen, and probably shall not
"tackle" it for a good while to come.
I was much entertained by your account of F , of
whom you have seen much more than I have. I am eager
to see him, to hear about his visit to Halle, and to get
his account of you. But [F. s place of abode] and Boston
are ten hours asunder by rail, and I never go there and he
never comes here. He seems a very promising fellow, with
a good deal of independence of character; and if you knew
the conditions of education in this country, and of the
preparation to fill chairs of philosophy in colleges, you
would not express any surprise at his, or mine, or any other
1 Mediatory attitude (view).
Act. 45} TO CARL STUMPF 265
American s small amount of "Information iiber die philo-
sophische Literatur." Times are mending, however, and
within the past six or eight years it has been possible, in
three or four of our colleges, to get really educated for
philosophy as a profession. The most promising man we
have in this country is, in my opinion, the above-mentioned
Royce, a young Californian of thirty, who is really built for
a metaphysician, and who is, besides that, a very complete
human being, alive at every point. He wrote a novel last
summer, which is now going through the press, and which
I am very curious to see. He has just been in here, inter
rupting this letter, and I have told him he must send a copy
of his book, the "Religious Aspect of Philosophy," to you,
promising to urge you to read it when you had time. The
first half is ethical, and very readable and full of profound
and witty details, but to my mind not of vast importance
philosophically. The second half is a new argument for
monistic idealism, an argument based on the possibility of
truth and error in knowledge, subtle in itself, and rather
lengthily expounded, but seeming to me to be one of the
few big original suggestions of recent philosophical writing.
I have vainly tried to escape from it. I still suspect it of
inconclusiveness, but I frankly confess that I am unable
to overthrow it. Since you too are an anti-idealist, I wish
very much you would try your critical teeth upon it. I
can assure you that, if you come to close quarters with it,
you will say its author belongs to the genuine philosophic
breed.
I am myself doing very well this year, rather light work,
etc., but still troubled with bad sleep so as to advance very
slowly with private study and writing. However, few days
without a line at least. I found to my surprise and pleas
ure that Robertson was willing to print my chapter on Space
266 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1887
in "Mind," even though it should run through all four
numbers of the year. 1 So I sent it to him. Most of it was
written six or even seven years ago. To tell the truth, I
am off of Space now, and can probably carry my little private
ingenuity concerning it no farther than I have already done
in this essay; and fearing that some evil fiend might put
it into Helmholtz s mind to correct all his errors and tell
the full truth in the new edition of his "Optics," I felt it
was high time that what I had written should see the light
and not be lost. It is dry stuff to read, and I hardly dare
to recommend it to you; but if you do read it, there is no
one whose favorable opinion I should more rejoice to hear;
for, as you know, you seem to me, of all writers on Space,
the one who, on the whole, has thought out the subject
most philosophically. Of course, the experimental patience,
and skill and freshness of observation of the Helmholtzes
and Herings are altogether admirable, and perhaps at bot
tom worth more than philosophic ability. Space is really a
direfully difficult subject! The third dimension bothers me
very much still.
I have this very day corrected the proofs of an essay on
the Perception of Time, 2 which I will send you when it
shall appear in the "Journal of Speculative Philsophy" for
October last. (The number of "July, 1886" is not yet out!)
I rather enjoyed the writing of it. I have just begun a chap
ter on "Discrimination and Comparison," subjects which
have been long stumbling-blocks in my path. Yesterday
it seemed to me that I could perhaps do nothing better than
just translate 6 and 7 of the first Abschnitt of your "Ton-
psychologie," which is worth more than everything else
1 "The Perception of Space." Mind, 1887; vol. xn, pp. 1-30, 183-21 1, 321-353,
516-548.
a Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1886, vol. xx, p. 374.
Act. 45} TO HENRY JAMES 267
put together which has been written on the subject. But
I will stumble on and try to give it a more personal form. I
shall, however, borrow largely from you. . . .
Have you seen [Edmund] Gurney s two bulky tomes,
"Phantasms of the Living," an amazingly patient and
thorough piece of work? I should not at all wonder if it
were the beginning of a new department of natural history.
But even if not, it is an important chapter in the statistics
of Volkerpsychologie, and I think Gurney worthy of the
highest praise for his devotion to this unfashionable work.
He is not the kind of stuff which the ordinary pachyderma
tous fanatic and mystic is made of. ...
To Henry P. Bowditch.
[Post-card]
CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 16 [1887].
My live-stock is increased by a Tochterchen y modest,
tactful, unselfish, quite different from a boy, and in fact
a really epochmachendes Erzeugniss* I shall begin to save
for her dowry and perhaps your Harold will marry her.
Their ages are suitable.
Griisse an die gnadige Frau.
W. J.
To Henry James.
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 12, 1887.
MY DEAR HARRY, ... I got back yesterday from five
days spent at my sylvan home at Lake Chocorua, whither
I had gone to see about getting the buildings in order for
the summer. The winter has been an exceptionally snowy
one back of the coast, and I found, when I arrived, four
feet of snow on a level and eight feet where it had drifted.
1 Epochmaking manifestation.
268 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1887
The day before yesterday the heat became summer-like,
and I took a long walk in my shirt-sleeves, going through
the snow the whole length of my leg when the crust broke.
It was a queer combination not exactly agreeable. The
snow-blanket keeps the ground from freezing deep; so that
very few days after the snow is gone the soil is dry, and
spring begins in good earnest. I tried snow-shoes but found
them clumsy. They were making the maple-sugar in the
woods; I had excellent comfort at the hotel hard by; with
whose good landlord and still better landlady I am good
friends; I rested off the fumes of my lore-crammed brain,
and altogether I smile at the pride of Greece and Rome
from the height of my New Hampshire home. I m afraid
it will cost nearer $2000 than $800 to finish all the work.
But we shall have ten large rooms (two of them 24 x 24),
and three small ones not counting kitchen, pantries, etc.,
and if you want some real, roomy, rustic happiness, you
had better come over and spend all your summers with us.
I can see that the thought makes you sick, so I ll say no
more about it, but my permanent vision of your future is
that your pen will fail you as a means of support, and,
having laid up no income, you will return like the prodigal
son to my roof. You will then find that, with a wood-pile
as large as an ordinary house, a hearth four feet wide, and
the American sun flooding the floor, even a New Hampshire
winter is not so bad a thing. With house provided, two or
three hundred dollars a year will support a man comfort
ably enough at Tamworth Iron Works, which is the name
of our township. But, enough! My vulgarity makes you
shudder. . . .
College begins tomorrow, and there are seven weeks more
of lectures. I never did my work so easily as this year, and
hope to write two more chapters of psychology ere the
Act. 45 \ TO HIS SISTER 269
vacation. That immortal work is now more than two
thirds done. To you, who throw off two volumes a year,
I must seem despicable for my slowness. But the truth is
that (leaving other impediments out of account) the "sci
ence" is in such a confused and imperfect state that every
paragraph presents some unforeseen snag, and I often spend
many weeks on a point that I did n t foresee as a difficulty
at all. American scholarship is looking up in that line.
Three first-class works, in point both of originality and of
learning, have appeared here within four months. Stanley
Hall s and mine will make five. Meanwhile in England they
are doing little or nothing. The "psychical researchers"
seem to be the only active investigators. . . .
To his Sister.
CHOCORUA, N.H., July 2, 1887.
DEAREST SISTER, It is an unconscionable time since I
have written either to you or to Harry. Too little eyesight,
and too much use thereof, is the reason. I thought I should
go wild during the examination period. I have now got
some presbyopic spectacles and hope for an improvement.
I think I ve been straining my eyes for three or four months
past by not having them on.
A short dictated letter from you came the other day,
and has been sent back to Alice in Cambridge, so I cannot
give its date. I am grieved in the extreme to hear of
another breakdown in your health. . . . But I make no
sympathetic comment, as you would probably "roar" over
it. There is this to be said, that it is probably less tragic
to be sick all the time than to be sometimes well and
incessantly tumbling down again.
I thought of the difference in our lots yesterday as I was
driving home in the evening with a wagon in tow, which I
2 7 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1887
had started at six-thirty to get at a place called Fryeburg,
19 miles away. All day in the open air, talking with the
country people, trying horses which they had to swap,
but concluding to stick to my own a most blessed feel
ing of freedom, and change from Cambridge life. I never
knew before how much freedom came with having a horse
of one s own. I am becoming quite an expert jockey,
having examined and tried at least two dozen horses in the
last six weeks; and I don t know a more fascinating oc
cupation. The day before yesterday, I spent most of
both forenoon and afternoon in the field under the blazing
sun, sprinkling my potato plants with Paris green. The
house comes on slowly, but in a fortnight we shall surely
be inside of the larger half of it, and the rest can then drag
on. Three or four men can t get ahead very fast. It has
some delightful rooms, and, I have no doubt, will make us
all happy for several years to come. Not for eternity, for
everything fades, and I can see that some day we shall be
glad to sell out and move on, to something grander, per
haps. For simple harmonious loveliness, however, this
can t be beat. . . .
What a grotesque sort of time you have been having with
your Queen s jubilee! What a chance for a woman to give
some human shove to things, by the smallest real word or
act, and what incapacity to guess its existence or to profit
by it! One can see the ground for Bonaparte-worship,
when one contemplates the results of the orthodox and
conservative crowned-head education. He, at least, could
have dropped an unconventional word, done something to
pierce the cuticle. But the density of British unintel-
lectuality is a spectacle for gods. One can t imagine it or
describe it. One can only see it. ...
W. J.
Act. 45 \ LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 271
Such enterprises as the horse-swapping just alluded to
were not always conducted with that circumspection which
marks your true horse-trader. The companion of one
search for a horse reported James as accosting a man whom
he met driving along the road and asking, "Do you know
anyone who wants to sell a horse?" At Chocorua everyone
was willing to sell a horse, and accordingly the man an
swered that he "didn t know as he did," but what might
James be ready to pay? James replied that he was looking
for a horse "for about $150, but might pay $175." There
was a pause before the man spoke: "I ve got a horse in my
barn that would be just what you want for one hundred
and seventy five."
The buyer was ready enough to laugh over such an inci
dent; but he could not mend his trustful ways. The great
thing was to have the fun of poking about the country-side
and of talking business, or anything else, with its people
whenever occasion offered; and, after all, the horses James
bought usually turned out to be sound and serviceable
enough. Perhaps it was because he looked at every living
creature with a discriminating eye, and had not been a com
parative anatomist for nothing. In the end, too, he was
suited by any horse that pulled willingly and was safe for
man, woman, and child to drive. There were no motor-cars
then, and few other summer residents or visitors at Cho
corua. James s two-seated "democrat" wagon, full of family
and guests, and often followed by a child on the pony and
by one or two other riders, used to travel quietly along
the secluded and hilly roads for many hours a day.
During this summer, and yearly during the next four,
James found real rest and refreshment on his Chocorua
farm. The conditions were simple and the place yielded
him all the joys of proprietorship without involving him
272 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1887
in responsibilities to cattle and fields. Anyone who knows
central New Hampshire will realize how rudimentary "farm
ing" in one of the most barren parts of rocky New England
necessarily was. The glacial soil produced nothing nat
urally except woods and apple trees. But the country
was very beautiful, and on his own acres James was lord
of part of the Earth. Clearing away bushes and stones
from one of the little fields near the house; causing some
thing to be planted which, during those first years, always
seemed as if it must be responsive enough to grow; cutting
out trees to improve the look of the woods or to open an
interesting view; dragging stones out of the bathing-hole
in the brook; buying a horse or two and a cow on some lonely
roadside at the beginning of each summer these were
fascinating adventures.
James was an insatiable lover of landscape, and partic
ularly of wide "views." His inclination was to "open" the
view, to cut down obstructing trees, even at the expense of
the foreground. In drives and walks about Chocorua he
usually made for some high hill that commanded the Ossi-
pee Valley or the peaks of the Sandwich Range and White
Mountains. Most hills in the neighborhood were topped by
granite ledges and deserted pastures, and each commanded
a different prospect. So the expedition often took the form
of a picnic on one of these ledges. Axes were taken along;
permission was sometimes obtained to cut down any worth
less tree that had sprung up to shut off the horizon.
Before the end of such an afternoon James was more
than likely to have fallen in love with the spot and to be
talking of buying it. Indeed he was forever playing with
projects for buying this or that hill- top or high farm and
establishing a new dwelling-place of some sort on it. He
was usually restrained by the price or by remembering the
Aet. 45\ TO HENRY JAMES 273
housekeeping cares with which his wife was already over
burdened. But he actually did buy two one near Cho-
corua and one on a shoulder of Mt. Hurricane in the Adi-
rondacks; and about the Chocorua region there is hardly a
high-perched pasture which he did not at some time nourish
the hope of possessing.
Another consideration that usually deterred him from
buying was the difficulty of combining hill-tops with brooks.
He used often to bewail this dispensation of nature; for a
vacation without a brook or a pond to bathe in was as
unthinkable as a summer dwelling-place that did not com
mand a splendid view was "inferior." The little house at
Chocorua stood at no great elevation, but it was near the
Lake, and the place bo-asted its own brook, with a little
pool, overhung by trees, into which the cold water splashed
noisily over a natural dam. Thither, rain or shine, James
used to walk across the meadow for an early morning dip;
and after a walk or a drive or a couple of hours of chopping,
or a warm half-day with a book in the woods, he used to
plunge into it again.
A few lines, through which breathes the happiest Cho
corua mood, may be added here, although they were written
during a later summer.
To Henry James.
CHOCORUA, July 10.
... I have been up here for ten days reveling in the
deliciousness of the country, dressed in a single layer of
flannel, shirt, breeches and long stockings, exercising my
arms as well as my legs several hours a day, and already
feeling that bodily and spiritual freshness that comes of
health, and of which no other good on earth is worthy to
unlatch the shoe.
274 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1887
The next letter also rejoices over Chocorua, although it
turns first to academic amenities. The correspondent ad
dressed, now Sir Charles Walston, and Henry Jackson, both
of the English Cambridge, had sent James two cases of
audit ale.
To Charles Waldstein.
CAMBRIDGE, July 20, 1887.
MY DEAR WALDSTEIN, It never rains but it pours.
The case of beer from you also came duly. Day after day
I wondered about its -provenance, but your letter dispels the
mystery. I had begun to believe that all the colleges of
Cambridge and Oxford were going to vie with each other
in wooing my appreciation of their respective brews. The
dream is shattered but the reality remains. Five dozen
is enough for me to fall back upon in the immediate
present, at all events.
As for that unknown but thrice-blest Jackson, Henry
Jackson of Trinity (dulcissimum mundl nomen) is that
the way he always acts, or is he only so towards me? I
thank him from the bottom of my heart, and swear an
eternal friendship with him. If ever he is in need of meat,,
drink, advice or defence, let him henceforth know to whom
to apply purse, house, life, all shall be at his disposal.
Such a magnanimous heart as his was ne er known before.
I wish I knew his Fach! But my ignorance is too en
cyclopedic. He must be a very great philosopher. God-
dard shall have some of the stuff. Of course you mean
George Goddard I know him well.
This has been written in the midst of interruptions. I
am back in Cambridge for only a couple of days, to send
furniture up to my New Hampshire farmlet. You may
play the swell, but I play the yeoman. W 7 hich is the better
Act. 46\ TO HIS SON 275
and more godly life? Surely the latter. The mother earth
is in my finger-nails and my back is aching and my skin
sweating with the ache and sweat of Father Adam and all
his normal descendants. No matter! Swells and artists
have their place too. Farewell! I am called off again by
the furniture. Remember me! And as for the divine
Henry Jackson, thank him again and again. His ale is
royal stuff. I will make no comparisons between his and
yours. Ever affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
In explanation of the next letters, it should be said that
in 1888 it seemed advisable to get the children into a warmer
winter climate than that of Cambridge. Accordingly Mrs.
James carried the three ("Harry," "Billy," and "Margaret
Mary," aged respectively eight, five, and two years), and
a German governess off to Aiken, South Carolina, for three
months. James was thus left in the Garden Street house
with no other member of the family except for he counted
as one a small pug-dog named Jap. Dr. Hildreth, who
is referred to, was a next-door neighbor, whose children were
somewhat older than the James children.
To his Son Henry (age 8).
CAMBRIDGE, Mar. i, 1888.
BELOVED HEINRICH, You lazy old scoundrel, why
don t you write a letter to your old Dad? Tell me how you
enjoy your riding on horseback, what Billy does for a living,
and which things you like best of all the new kinds of things
you have to do with in Aiken. How do you like the darkeys
being so numerous ? Everything goes on quietly here. The
house so still that you can hear a pin drop, and so clean
that everything makes a mark on it. All because there are
276 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1888
no brats and kids around. Jap is my only companion,
and he sneezes all over me whenever I pick him up. Mrs.
Hildreth and the children are gone to Florida. The Em
mets seem very happy. I will close with a fable. A donkey
felt badly because he was not so great a favorite as a lap-
dog. He said, I must act like the lap-dog, and then my
mistress will like me. So he came into the house and began
to lick his mistress, and put his paws on her, and tried to
get into her lap. Instead of kissing him for this, she
screamed for the servants, who beat him and put him out
of the house. Moral: It s no use to try to be anything
but a donkey if you are one. But neither you nor Billy
are one.
Good-night! you blessed boy. Stick to your three R s
and your riding, so as to get on fast. The ancient Persians
only taught their boys to ride, to shoot the bow and to tell
the truth. Good-night!
Kiss your dear old Mammy and that belly-ache of a
Billy, and little Margaret Mary for her Dad. Good-night.
Your FATHER.
To his Son Henry.
CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 27 [i888l.
BELOVED HEINRICH, Your long letter came yester
day P.M. Much the best you ever writ, and the address on
the envelope so well written that I wondered whose hand it
was, and never thought it might be yours. Your tooth also
was a precious memorial I hope you 11 get a better one
in its place. Send me the other as soon as it is tookin out.
They ought to go into the Peabody Museum. If any of
George Washington s baby-teeth had been kept till now,
they would be put somewhere in a public museum for the
world to wonder at. I will keep this tooth, so that, if you
Act. 46} TO HIS SON 277
grow up to be a second Geo. Washington, I may sell it to a
Museum. When Washington was only eight years old his
mother did n t know he was going to be Washington. But
he did be it, when the time came.
I will now tell you about what Dr. Hildreth is doing.
The family is in Florida, and he is building himself a new
house. They are just starting the foundation. The fence
is taken down between our yard and his, by the stable,
and teams are driving through with lumber. Our back
yard is filled with lumber for the frame of the house. It
is to be cut, squared, mortised, etc., in our yard and then
carried through to his.
I dined last night at the Dibblees . The boys had been
to dancing-school. I like their looks. All the boys and
girls together kept up such a talking that I seemed to be in
a boiler factory where they bang the iron with the hammers
so. It s just so with them every day. But they re very
good-natured, even if they don t let the old ones speak.
Say to Fraulein that "ich lasse Sie griissen von Herzens-
grund!" 1
Thump Bill for me and ask him if he likes it so nicely.
Jap s nose is all dry and brown with holding it so ever
lastingly towards the fire.
We are having ice-cream and the Rev. George A. Gordon
to lunch today. The ice-cream is left over from the Philo
sophical Club last night.
Now pray, old Harry, stick to your books and let me
see you do sums and read/^J/ when you get back.
The best of all of us is your mother, though.
Good-bye !
Your loving Dad.
W. J.
1 1 send her heartiest greetings.
27 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1888
To his Son William.
1 8 GARDEN STREET, Apr. 29, 1888.
9:30 A.M.
BELOVED WILLIAMSON, This is Sunday, the sabbath of
the Lord, and it has been very hot for two days. I think of
you and Harry with such longing, and of that infant whom
I know so little, that I cannot help writing you some words.
Your Mammy writes me that she can t get you to work much,
though Harry works. You must work a little this summer in
our own place. How nice it will be! I have wished that
both you and Harry were by my side in some amusements
which I have had lately. First, the learned seals in a big
tank of water in Boston. The loveliest beasts, with big
black eyes, poking their heads up and down in the water, and
then scrambling out on their bellies like boys tied up in bags.
They play the guitar and banjo and organ, and one of them
saves the life of a child who tumbles in the water, catching
him by the collar with its teeth, and swimming him ashore.
They are both, child and seal, trained to do it. When they
have done well, their master gives them a lot of fish. They
eat an awful lot, scales, and fins, and bones and all, without
chewing. That is the worst thing about them. He says
he never beats them. They are full of curiosity more so
than a dog for far-ofF things; for when a man went round
the room with a pole pulling down the windows at the top,
all their heads bobbed out of the water and followed him
about with their eyes aus lauter^ curiosity. Dogs would
hardly have noticed him, I think. Now, speaking of dogs,
Jap was nauseated two days ago. I thought, from his
licking his nose, that he was going to be sick, and got him
out of doors just in time. He vomited most awfully on
the grass. He then acted as if he thought I was going to
1 From pure.
Act. 46] TO HENRY JAMES 279
punish him, poor thing. He can t discriminate between
sickness and sin. He leads a dull life, without you and
Margaret Mary. I tell him if it lasts much longer, he 11
grow into a common beast; he hates to be a beast, but
unless he has human companionship, he will sink to the
level of one. So you must hasten back and make much of
him.
I also went to the panorama of the battle of Bunker Hill,
which is as good as that of Gettysburg. I wished Harry
had been there, because he knows the story of it. You
and he shall go soon after your return. It makes you feel
just as if you lived there.
Well, I will now stop. On Monday morning the i4th
or Sunday night the ijth of May, I will take you into
my arms; that is, I will meet you with a carriage on the
wharf, when the boat comes in. And I tell you I shall be
glad to see the whole lot of you come roaring home. Give
my love to your Mammy, to Aunt Margaret, to Fraulein,
to Harry, to Margaret Mary, and to yourself. Your lov
ing Dad,
WM. JAMES.
To Henry James.
CHOCORUA, N.H., July n, 1888.
MY DEAR HARRY, Your note announcing Edmund
Gurney s death came yesterday, and was a most shocking
surprise. It seems one of Death s stupidest strokes, for
I know of no one whose life-task was begun on a more
far-reaching scale, or from whom one expected with greater
certainty richer fruit in the ripeness of time. I pity his
lovely wife, to whom I wrote a note yesterday; and also a
brief notice for the "Nation." 1 To me it will be a cruel
1 If it was printed, this notice has escaped identification.
280 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1888
loss; . for he recognized me more than anyone, and in all
my thoughts of returning to England he was the English
man from whom I awaited the most nourishing communion.
We ran along on very similar lines of interest. He was
very profound, subtle, and voluminous, and bound for an
intellectual synthesis of things much solider and completer
than anyone I know, except perhaps Royce. Well! such is
life! all these deaths make what remains here seem strangely
insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things, as
well as the numbers, was all on the other side. 1
I have to thank you for a previous letter three or four
weeks old, which, having sent to Aunt Kate, I cannot now
date. I must also thank for "Partial Portraits" and "The
Reverberator." The former, I of course knew (except the
peculiarly happy Woolson one), but have read several of
em again with keen pleasure, especially the Turguenieff.
"The Reverberator" is masterly and exquisite. I quite
squealed through it, and all the household has amazingly
enjoyed it. It shows the technical ease you have attained,
that you can handle so delicate and difficult a fancy so
lightly. It is simply delicious. I hope your other magazine
things, which I am following your advice and not reading
[in magazine form], are only half as good. How you can
keep up such a productivity and live, I don t see. All
your time is your own, however, barring dinner-parties,
and that makes a great difference.
Most of my time seems to disappear in college duties,
not to speak of domestic interruptions. Our summer starts
promisingly. How with my lazy temperament I managed
1 "How I shall miss that man s presence in the world! . . . Our problems were
the same and for the most part our solutions."
"He is a terrible loss to me. I did n t know till the news came how much I
mentally referred to him as a critic and sympathizer, or how much I counted on
seeing more of him hereafter." (From letters to G. Croom Robertson.)
Vide, also, The Will to Believe, etc., pp. 306-7.
Act. 46} TO HENRY JAMES
281
to start all the things we put through last summer, now
makes me wonder. The place has yet a good deal to be
done with it, but it can be taken slowly, and Alice is a most
vai/Ianfe partner. We have a trump of a hired man.
Some day I ll send you a photograph of the little place.
Please send this to Alice, for whose letters I m duly grateful.
I only hope she 11 keep decently well for a little while. Yours
ever,
W. J.
P. S. I have just been downstairs to get an envelope, and
there on the lawn saw a part of the family which I will
describe, for you to insert in one of your novels as a picture
of domestic happiness. On the newly made lawn in the
angle of the house and kitchen ell, in the shadow of the hot
afternoon sun, lies a mattress taken out of our spare-room
for an airing against Richard Hodgson s arrival tomorrow.
On it the madonna and child the former sewing in a nice
blue point dress, and smiling at the latter (named Peggy),
immensely big and fat for her years, and who, with quite
a vocabulary of adjectives, proper names, and a mouthful
of teeth, shows as yet, although in her sixteenth month,
no disposition to walk. She is rolling and prattling to her
self, now on mattress and now on grass, and is an exceed
ingly good-natured, happy, and intelligent child. It con
duces to her happiness to have a hard cracker in her fist,
at which she mumbles more or less all day, and of which
she is never known to let go, even taking it into her bath
with her and holding it immersed till that ceremony is
o er. A man is papering and painting one of our parlors,
a carpenter putting up a mantelpiece in another. Margaret
and Harry s tutor are off on the backs of the two horses
to the village seven miles off, to have em shod. I, with
naught on but gray flannel shirt, breeches, belt, stockings
282 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1888
and shoes, shall now proceed across the Lake in the boat
and up the hill, to get and carry the mail. Harry will
probably ride along the shore on the pony which Aunt
Kate has given him, and where Billy and Fraulein are,
Heaven only knows. Returning, I shall have a bath either
in lake or brook doesn t it sound nice? On the whole
it is nice, but very hot.
To Miss Grace Norton.
[Post-card]
[CHOCORUA,] Aug. 12, 1888.
It would take G[uy] de M[aupassant] himself to just fill
a post-card chock-full and yet leave naught to be desired,
with an account of Pierre et Jean." It is a little cube of
bronze; or like the body of the Capitaine Beausire, "plein
comme un oeuf, dur comme une balle" dur surtout!
Fifteen years ago, I might have been enthused by such art;
but I m growing weak-minded, and the charm of this
admirable precision and adequacy of art to subject leaves
me too cold. It is like these modern tools and instruments,
so admirably compact, and strong, and reduced to their
fighting weight. One of those little metallic pumps, e.g.,
so oily and powerful, with a handle about two feet long,
which will throw a column of water about four inches thick
100 feet. Unfortunately, G. de M. s pump only throws
dirty water and I am beginning to be old fogy eno to
like even an old shackly wooden pump-handle, if the water
it fetches only carries all the sweetness of the mountain
side. Yrs. ever,
W. J.
The dying fish on p[in]s stick most in my memory. Is
that right in a novel of human life?
Act. 46] TO E. L. GODKIN 283
To G. Croom Robertson.
Oct. 7, 1888.
... I am teaching ethics and the philosophy of religion
for the first time, with that dear old duffer Martineau s
works as a text. It gives me lots to do, as I only began my
systematic reading in that line three weeks ago, having
wasted the summer in farming (if such it can be called)
and philosophizing. My "Psychology" will therefore have
to be postponed until another year; for with as much col
lege work as I have this year, I can t expect to write a line
of it. ...
To Henry James.
Oct. 14, 1888.
. . . The Cambridge year begins with much vehemence
- 1 with a big class in ethics, and seven graduates from
other colleges in advanced psychology, giving me a good
deal of work. But I feel uncommonly hearty, and shall
no doubt come out of it all in good shape. ... I am to have
lots of reading and no writing to speak of this year and
expect to enjoy it hugely. It does one good to read classic
books. For a month past I Ve done nothing else, in behalf
of my ethics class Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Butler,
Paley, Spinoza, etc., etc. No book is celebrated without
deserving it for some quality, and recenter books, certain
never to be celebrated, have an awfully squashy texture. . . .
To E. L. Godkin.
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 15, 1889.
MY DEAR GODKIN, Harry s address is 34 De Vere
Gardens, W. I imagine that he will be there till midsummer.
I hope tis yourself that s going! You must need it
2 8 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1889
awfully. I fully meant to call on you when I was in N. Y.
a fortnight ago. But I was so dead tired that I slept on
my hotel bed all the only afternoon I had, went to Daly s
theatre in the evening and then had to come away. You
are the noblest Roman of them all; and what a man shall
do for a newspaper with sanity, intellect and backbone in
it, when your editorial pen has ceased to trickle, I don t
know. There must be plenty of morals in the world, plenty
of brains, plenty of education, plenty of literary skill, but
was there ever a time or country when they seemed less
to coalesce, in the field of journalism? In the earlier years
I may say that my whole political education was due to the
" Nation"; later came a time when I thought you looked
on the doings of Terence Powderly and Co. too much from
without and too little from within; now I turn to you again
as my only solace in a world where nothing stands straight.
You have the most curious way of always being right, so
I never dare to trust myself now when you re agin me. I
read my "Nation" rather quicker than I used, but I depend
on it perhaps more than ever, and cannot forbear seizing
this passing occasion to tell you so.
I hope, once more, that you re going abroad yourself.
It will do you no end of good to take in after your daily
giving out for so long. Harry will be delighted to see you.
Poor Alice is stranded at Leamington, unable to use her
legs or brain to any account, but never complaining, and
living apparently on the Irish question, being a violent
Parnellite. I settle the affairs of the Universe in my College
courses, and have got so far ahead as to be building a big
new house on that part of it known as the Norton estate. 1
A new street passes before your old house, now Grace Nor
ton s. I am a little north of it, facing it, and squatting
right across the old Norton Avenue. Four other houses are
1 Vide, pp. 290-91 infra.
Act. 47} TO HENRY JAMES 285
going up there immediately, two of em actually under way.
No answer to this is expected, from a man as busy as you.
Please give my best respects to Mrs. Godkin, and believe
me ever affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
To Henry James.
CAMBRIDGE, May 12, 1889.
MY DEAR HARRY, I have been feeling so dead-tired all
this spring that I believe a long break from my usual scenes
is necessary. It is like the fagged state that drove me
abroad the last two times. I have been pretty steadily
busy for six years and the result is n t wonderful, consider
ing what a miserable nervous system I have anyhow. The
upshot of it is that I have pretty much made up my mind
to invest $1000 (if necessary) of Aunt Kate s legacy in my
constitution, and spend the summer abroad. This will
give me the long-wished opportunity of seeing you and
Alice, and enable me to go to an international congress of
" physiological psychologists" which I have had the honor
of an invitation to attend in the capacity of "honorary
committee "-man for the U. S. It will be instructive and in
spiring, no doubt, and won t last long, and [will] give me an
opportunity to meet a number of eminent men. But for
these three reasons, I think I should start for the Pacific coast
as being more novel. I confess I find myself caring more for
landscapes than for men strange to say, and doubtless
shameful; so my stay in London will probably be short.
I learn from Godkin that he is to be with you about the
same time that I shall be in London. I don t suppose
you have room for both of us, but pray don t let that trouble
you. I can easily find a lodging somewhere for a few days,
which are all that I shall stay. I am heartily glad Godkin
is about to go abroad; I know of no one who so richly de-
286 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1889
serves a vacation. My heart is warming up again to the
"Nation," as it has n t for many years.
I long to have a good long talk with you about yourself,
Alice, and 10,000 old things. Alice used to be so perturbed
at expecting things that in my ignorance of her present
condition I don t venture to announce to her my arrival.
But do you use your discretion as to where and how she
shall be informed. Send her this, if it is the best way.
It s a bad summer for me to be gone, with the house
building here, the Chocorua place unfinished, and the crowds
set in motion by the Paris exhibition; and perhaps, if I
find myself unexpectedly hearty when lectures end two
weeks hence, I may not go after all. But I can t help feel
ing in my bones that I ought to go, so I probably shall. It
will then be the Cephalonia, sailing June 22, and I shall
get off at Queenstown, as I am on the whole more curious
to see the Emerald Isle than any other part of Europe,
except Scotland, which I probably shan t see at all. The
"Congress" in Paris begins Aug. 5.
How good it will be to see poor Alice again, and to hear
you discourse! Ever affectly, yours,
W. J.
In late June James did, in fact, sail on the Cephalonia
and disembark at Queenstown. Thence he proceeded via
Cork to Killarney and on to Dublin, where he spent a day
at Trinity College before going to Glasgow and Oban.
Having, in the briefest time and at first sight, fallen "dead
in love wi Scotland both land and people" he traveled on
via Edinburgh, and reached London by the iyth of July.
There he stayed with Henry James for ten days and saw
his sister. A letter from London to Mrs. James may be
included in part.
Aet. 47} TO MRS. JAMES 287
To Mrs. James.
34 DE VERE GARDENS, LONDON,
July 29, 1889.
. . . [After seeing Mrs. Gurney I went] to Brighton,
where I spent a night at Myers s lodgings, and the evening
with him and the Sidgwicks trying thought-transference
experiments which, however, on that occasion did not
succeed. . . . The best thing by far which I saw in Brighton,
and a thing the impression of which will perhaps outlast
everything else on this trip, was four cuttle-fish (octopus)
in the Aquarium. I wish we had one of them for a child
such flexible intensity of life in a form so inaccessible to our
sympathy. Next day to Haslemere to the Pearsall Smiths,
where I spent a really gemuthlich evening and morning.
Pearsall himself as engaging as of yore. The place and
country wonderfully rich and beautiful. Returning yester
day, went with H. to National Gallery in the afternoon,
and read Brownell on France in the P.M. Yesterday, Sun
day, Harry went to the country after breakfast, whilst I
wrote a lot of notes and read Zola s "Germinal," a story
of mines and miners, and a truly magnificent work, if suc
cessfully to reproduce the horror and pity of certain human
facts and make you see them as if real can make a book
magnificent.
Towards four o clock (the weather fine) I mounted the top
of a bus and went (with thousands of others similarly en
throned) to Hampton Court, through Kew, Richmond,
Bushey Park, etc.; about 30 miles there and back, all for
4^. 6d. I strolled for an hour or more in the Hampton
Court Gardens, and overlooked the Thames all bizarree
with row-boats and male and female rowers, and got back,
perdu dans la Joule , at 10 P.M. a most delightful and
interesting six hours, with but the usual drawback, that
288 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1889
you were not along. How you would have enjoyed every
bit of it, especially the glimpses, between Richmond and
Hampton, over the high brick walls and between the bars
of the iron gates, of these extraordinary English gardens
and larger grounds, all black with their tufted vegetation.
More different things can grow in a square foot here, if
they re taken care of, than I ve ever seen elsewhere, and
one of these high ivy-walled gardens is something the like
of which is altogether unknown to us. Like all human
things (except wives) they grow banal enough, if one stays
long in their company, but the first acquaintance between
Alice Gibbens and them is something which I would fain
see. The crowd was immense and the picturesqueness of
everything quite medieval, as were also the good manners
and the tendency to a certain hearty sociability, shown in
the chaffing from vehicle to vehicle along the road. I m
glad I had this sight of the greatness of the English people,
and glad I had no social duties to perform. . . .
Harry is as nice and simple and amiable as he can be.
He has covered himself, like some marine crustacean, with
all sorts of material growths, rich sea-weeds and rigid
barnacles and things, and lives hidden in the midst of his
strange heavy alien manners and customs; but these are
all but "protective resemblances," under which the same
dear old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-
feeling Harry remains, caring for little but his writing,
and full of dutifulness and affection for all gentle things. . . .
From London James crossed to Paris, to attend the
International Congress of Physiological Psychology which
had been arranged to coincide with the International
Exposition of that year. He found between 60 and 120
colleagues, most of them European, of course, in attendance
Act. 47} LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 289
at its sessions. This incident in his life may be summarized
in a few sentences from his own report of the Congress, in
"Mind ": "The most striking feature of the discussions was,
perhaps, their tendency to slope off to some one or other of
those shady horizons with which the name of "psychic-
research" is now associated. . . . The open results were,
however (as always happens at such gatherings), secondary
in real importance to the latent ones the friendships
made, the intimacies deepened, and the encouragement
and inspiration which came to everyone from seeing before
them in flesh and blood so large a portion of that little army
of fellow students from whom and for whom all contempo
rary psychology exists. The individual worker feels much
less isolated in the world after such an experience." To
Stumpf he wrote similarly (Aug. 15): "The sight of 120
men all actively interested in psychology has made me feel
much less lonely in the world, and ready to finish my book
this year with a great deal more entrain. A book hanging
so long on one s hands at last gets outgrown, and even
disgusting to one."
On his way home James went again to see his sister, and
her account of him is not to be omitted.
"William, instead of going to Switzerland, came sud
denly back from Paris and went home, having, as usual,
exhausted Europe in a few weeks, finding it stale, flat and
unprofitable. The only necessity being to get home, the
first letter after his arrival, was, of course, full of plans for
his return plus wife and infants; he is just like a blob of
mercury you can t put a mental finger upon him. H.
and I were laughing over him, and recalling Father, and
William s resemblance (in his ways) to him. Tho the
results are the same, they seem to come from such a different
nature in the two; in W., an entire inability or indifference
290 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1889
to * stick to a thing for the sake of sticking, as some one
said of him once; whilst Father, the delicious infant!
could n t submit even to the thralldom of his own whim;
and then the dear being was such a prey to the demon
homesickness. . . . But to return to our mutton, William:
he came with H. on August 14 on his way to Liverpool.
He told all about his Paris experience, where he was a dele
gate to the Psychological Congress, which was a most
brilliant success. The French most polite and hospitable.
They invited W. to open the Congress, and they always
had a foreigner in the Chair at the different meetings. I
extracted with great difficulty from him that Monsieur
Willyam James was frequently referred to by the speakers.
He liked the Henry Sidgwicks and Fred. Myers. Mrs.
Myers paid him the following enigmatic compliment:
We are so glad that you are as you are. "
On getting back to Cambridge in the autumn, James
moved his family into a house which he had just built in
Irving Street a street which had been newly opened
through what used to be called Norton s Woods. He had
planned this house with such eager interest in all its details
that he had even designed doors and windows and had
practically been his own architect with respect to every
thing except structural specifications. The result was a
detached wooden house of pleasantly square outer appear
ance, covered with shingles which soon weathered brown,
and having dark green trimmings. Inside there was one
room which deserves particular mention. James loved to
have "space" about him ? and he planned a library that
1 "I write every morning at one of the card tables in the parlor, all alone in a
room 120 feet long just about the right size for one man." (Letter from the
Hotel Del Monte, Sept. 8, 1898.)
Francis James Child.
Caricature from a Pocket Note-Book.
Act. 47} TO MISS GRACE NORTON 291
was the largest and sunniest room the house could provide.
It was about 22> feet wide and 27 feet long. The walls
were lined with book-shelves from floor to ceiling, except
where James hung a portrait of his father over the open
fireplace. On the southern side there was a triple window
whose total width was nearly half the length of the room,
and which let in a flood of sunlight. Through it one looked
out upon a small lawn overhung by a large elm, and upon
more grass and trees beyond. This was his study and
living-room for the rest of his life. Here most of the Cam
bridge letters that follow may be assumed to have been
written.
After James moved to 95 Irving Street, several people
referred to in the letters became his very near neighbors.
Josiah Royce, Francis J. Child, C. E. Norton, Miss Theo
dora Sedgwick were all within three minutes walk of his
door. Miss Grace Norton lived across the way.
To Miss Grace Norton.
CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 25, 1889.
DEAR Miss NORTON, Will you accept, as a Christmas
offering, the accompanying bottles of California Cham
pagne, extremely salubrious in its after-effects, quite as
intoxicating, almost as good-tasting and only half as " cost-
playful" as French Champagne in short, a beverage which
no household should be without.
I should gladly have sought out something more senti
mental, though after a bottle or so, this seems rosy with
sentiment, but I have no gifts of invention in the present
line, and took something useful, merely to testify to the
affection and admiration with which I am ever yours,
WM. JAMES.
2 9 2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1889
To Charles Eliot Norton.
Undated [1889].
MY DEAR MR. NORTON, This introduces to you Mr.
X , from South Abington, a workman in a tack factory
since boyhood, who has nevertheless gone quite deeply
into studies philosophic, mathematical and sociological. He
will tell you more about himself, and I wish if convenient
that you would "draw him out" I should like much to
hear your impression. I want, if possible, to help him to a
start in life here. Palmer has invited him to stay with him
for a week. And we are busy studying him and trying to
cast his horoscope, to feel whether we can conscientiously
recommend him to some millionaire to support in college
for a year (as unmatriculated), and so give him a chance
to make himself known and find some better avocation for
himself than the making of tacks ten hours a day. He
knows nothing of our plan, thinks this a mere spree, so
please don t let it out! Very truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
The workman from the tack factory, like more than one
other lame duck before and after him, had aroused what
Professor Palmer once aptly called James s "inclination
toward the under-dog and his insistence on keeping the
door open for every species of human experiment." It
made no difference what X s doctrines were, or whe
ther or not they were akin to James s way of thinking.
And if such a man was unfitted to arouse other people s
sympathies, James s own were the more readily challenged.
The erratics of the philosophical world were significant
phenomena, and sometimes interested him most just when
they were most "queer" when they were perhaps aber
rant to the point of being pathological specimens. It
Aet. 48] TO HENRY HOLT 293
mattered as little to James where such people sprang from,
or by what strange processes they had arrived at their
ideas, as it matters to a naturalist that beetles have to be
hunted for in all sorts of places. He filled the " Varieties of
Religious Experience" with the records of abnormal cases
and with accounts of the mental and emotional adventures
of people whom the everyday world called cranks and
fanatics. He was not only curious about such men, but
endlessly patient and helpful to them. To some indeed his
encouragement was more comforting than profitable, and
among them must be numbered the X - of this letter
an uncouth and helpless creature, who has since achieved
his only immortality in another sphere of being. The poor
man never got over this "spree," but withdrew from the
tack factory forever, spent many years in a Mills Hotel
working over an unsalable magnum opus, and every now
and then appealing for funds. A letter on a later page
recurs to this case.
In the spring of 1890 James finished the remaining chap
ters of the Psychology. The next letters were written
during the final weeks of work on the book.
To Henry Holt.
CAMBRIDGE, May 9, 1890.
MY DEAR HOLT, I was in hopes that you would propose
to break away from the famous "Series" and publish the
book independently, in two volumes. An abridgement
could then be prepared for the Series. If there be anything
which I loathe it is a mean overgrown page in small type,
and I think the author s feelings ought to go for a good
deal in the case of the enormous rat which his ten years
gestation has brought forth.
294 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1890
In any event, I dread the summer and next year, with
two new courses to teach, and, I fear, no vacation. What
I wrote you, if you remember, was to send you the "heft"
of the MS. by May ist, the rest to be done in the intervals
of proof-correcting. You however insisted on having the
entire MS. in your hands before anything should be done.
It seems to me that this delay is, now at any rate, absurd.
There is certainly less than two weeks work on the MS.
undone. And every day got behind us now means a day
of travel and vacation for me next September. I really
think, considering the sort of risk I am running by the delay,
that I must insist on getting to press now as soon as the
page is decided on.
No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of
the book. No subject is worth being treated of in 1000
pages! Had I ten years more, I could rewrite it in 500;
but as it stands it is this or nothing a loathsome, dis
tended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to
nothing but two facts: ist> that there is no such thing as a
science of psychology, and 2nd> that W. J. is an incapable.
Yours provided you hurry up things,
WM. JAMES.
When Mrs. James took the children to Chocorua for the
summer, James remained in Cambridge to finish the book.
To Mrs. James.
CAMBRIDGE, May 17, 7:50 P.M.
. . . Wrote hard pretty much all day, lectured on Ansel
Bourne, etc., had three students to lunch, Chubb being
gone to Milton. Visit this A.M. from Bishop Keane of the
New Catholic University at Washington, to get advice
about psycho-physic laboratory. Feel very well, though I
TO MRS. JAMES
295
drink coffee daily. "Psychology" will certainly be finished
by Sunday noon! . . .
Sunday, May [i8J, 9:50 P.M.
. . . The job is done! All but some paging and half a
dozen little footnotes, the work is completed, and as I see it
as a unit, I feel as if it might be rather a vigorous and richly
colored chunk for that kind of thing at least!
May 22, 5:45 P.M.
... I sot up till two last night putting the finishing
touches on the MS., which now goes to Holt in irreproach
able shape, woodcuts and all. I insured it for $1000.00 in
giving it to the express people this A.M. That will make
them extra careful at a cost of f 1.50. This morning a great
feeling of weariness came over me at 10 o clock, and I was
taking down a volume of Tennyson intending to doze off
in my chair, when X - arrived. . . .
May 24.
... I came home very weary, and lit a fire, and had a
delicious two hours all by myself, thinking of the big etape
of my life which now lay behind me (I mean that infernal
book done), and of the possibilities that the future yielded
of reading and living and loving out from the shadow of
that interminable black cloud. ... At any rate, it does
give me some comfort to think that I don t live wholly in
projects, aspirations and phrases, but now and then have
something done to show for all the fuss. The joke of it
is that I, who have always considered myself a thing of
glimpses, of discontinuity, of apergus^ with no power of
doing a big job, suddenly realize at the end of this task that
it is the biggest book on psychology in any language except
Wundt s, Rosmini s and Daniel Greenleaf Thompson s!
Still, if it burns up at the printing-office, I shan t much care,
for I shan t ever write it again!!
296 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1890
To Henry James.
CHOCORUA, June 4, 1890.
MY DEAR HARRY, . . . The great event for me is the
completion at last of my tedious book. I have been at
my desk with it every day since I got back from Europe,
and up at four in the morning with it for many a day of the
last month. I have written every page four or five times
ove r, and carried it "on my mind" for nine years past, so
you may imagine the relief. Besides, I am glad to appear
at last as a man who has done something more than make
phrases and projects. I will send you a copy, in the fall,
I trust, though [the printer] is so inert about starting the
proofs that we may not get through till midwinter or later.
As "Psychologies" go, it is a good one, but psychology is in
such an ante-scientific condition that the whole present
generation of them is predestined to become unreadable
old medieval lumber, as soon as the first genuine tracks of
insight are made. The sooner the better, for me! . . .
To Mrs. Henry Whitman.
CAMBRIDGE, July 24, 1890.
MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN, How good a way to begin
the day, with a letter from you, and a composition of yours
to correct!
To take the latter first, I trembled a little when, after
looking over the printed document, I found you beginning
so sympathetically to stroke down Mr. Jay; but you made
it all right ere the end. Since the movement is on foot,
it is time that rational people like yourself should get an
influence in it. I doubt whether the earth supports a
more genuine enemy of all that the Catholic Church in
wardly stands for than I do ecrasez Vinfame is the only
Act. 4 8\ TO MRS. HENRY WHITMAN 297
way I can feel about it. But the concrete Catholics, in
cluding the common priests in this country, are an entirely
different matter. Their wish to educate their own, and to
do what proselytizing they can, is natural enough; so is
their wish to get state money. "Destroying American
institutions" is a widely different matter; and instead of
this vague phrase, I should like to hear one specification
laid down of an "institution" which they are now threaten
ing. The only way to resist them is absolute firmness and
impartiality, and continuing in the line which you point
out, bless your art! Down with demagogism! this docu
ment is not quite free therefrom. . . .
As for the style, I see in it nothing but what is admirable.
A pedant might object (near the end) to a drop of (even
Huguenot) blood beating high; but how can I object to any
thing from your pen?
And now 10,000 thanks for your kind words about the
proofs. The pages I sent you are probably the most con
tinuously amusing in the book though occasionally there
is a passing gleam elsewhere. If there is aught of good in
the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Every
thing comes out wrong with me at first; but when once
objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and
scrape and pat it till it offends me no more. I take you at
your word and send you some more sheets only, to get
something pithy and real, I go back to some practical re
marks at the end of a chapter on Habit, composed with a
view of benefiting the young. May they accordingly be an
inspiration to you!
Most of the book is altogether unreadable from any
human point of view, as I feel only too well in my deluge
of proofs. My dear wife will come down next week (I
298 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1890
think) to help me through. Thank you once more, and
believe me, with warm regards to your husband,, Yours
always,
WM. JAMES.
To W. D. Howells.
CHOCORUA, Aug. 20, 1890.
MY DEAR HOWELLS, You ve done it this time and no
mistake! I Ve had a little leisure for reading this summer,
and have just read, first your "Shadow of a Dream," and
next your "Hazard of New Fortunes," and can hardly
recollect a novel that has taken hold of me like the latter.
Some compensations go with being a mature man, do they
not? You could n t possibly have done so solid a piece of
work as that ten years ago, could you? The steady un
flagging flow of it is something wonderful. Never a weak
note, the number of characters, each intensely individual,
the observation of detail, the everlasting wit and humor,
and beneath all the bass accompaniment of the human
problem, the entire Americanness of it, all make it a very
great book, and one which will last when we shall have
melted into the infinite azure. Ah! my dear Howells,
it s worth something to be able to write such a book, and
it is so peculiarly yours too, flavored with your idiosyncrasy.
(The book is so d d humane!) Congratulate your wife on
having brought up such a husband. My wife had been
raving about it ever since it came out, but I could n t read
it till I got the larger printed copy, and naturally could n t
credit all she said. But it makes one love as well as admire
you, and so o er-shadows the equally exquisite, though
slighter "Shadow of a Dream," that I have no adjectives
left for that. I hope the summer is speeding well with all
of you. I have been in Cambridge six weeks and corrected
Act. 48] TO W. D. HOWELLS 299
1400 pages of proof. The year which shall have witnessed
the apparition of your "Hazard of New Fortunes," of
Harry s "Tragic Muse/ and of my "Psychology" will
indeed be a memorable one in American Literature!! Be
lieve me, with warm regards to Mrs. Ho wells, yours ever
affectionately,
WM. JAMES.
The "Principles of Psychology" appeared in the early
autumn.
X
1890-1893
The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory A Sabbatical
Year in Europe
THE publication of the "Principles" may be treated as
making a date at any rate in the story of James s life.
Although conceived originally as a manual or textbook,
it had gone far beyond that mere summary of a subject
which it is the role of most textbooks to be, and had finally
assumed the form of a philosophic survey. "It was a
declaration of independence (defining the boundary lines
of a new science with unapproachable genius.)" 1 In the
scientific world it established James s already high reputa
tion and greatly extended his influence.
Beyond scientific circles the book s style, its colloquial
directness, its humor, and its moral depth and appeal,
won it an instantaneous popularity. Even before it ap
peared, the compositor at the printing-press was reported
as so enthralled by his "copy" that he was reading the man
uscript out of hours. Passages, among which the chapter on
Habit is the most widely known, "went home" with the force
of eloquent sermons. "I can t tell you what the book has
meant to me." Such was the burden of countless messages
that began to come in from non-professional readers. Dur
ing the course of the first winter after its appearance, it
became clear that the only obstacle to its almost universal
use in American colleges was its size. And so James spent
the summer of 1891 in making an abridgment which ap-
1 J. M. CattelL Address upon the 25 th Anniversary of the American Psycho
logical Association, Dec. 1916. Science (N. S.), voL XLV, p. 276.
1890-93] LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 301
peared that autumn under the tide "Briefer Course." In
one form or the other, either in the two- volume edition or
the one- volume abridgment, either in "James" or in
"Jimmy," as the two books were soon nicknamed, James s
"Psychology" was soon in use in most of the colleges.
During the thirty years that have passed since then, the
majority of the English-speaking students who have entered
the field of psychology have entered by the door which
James s pages threw wide to them.
But by this time the inclination of James s own mind was
more and more strongly toward philosophy, and the ex
perimental laboratory was becoming a burden to him. It
is true that the laboratory with which he had thus far done
his own work would not nowadays be reckoned as at all a
big affair. But owing to advances which had been made
in the science during the previous ten years, an enlarged
laboratory was a necessity for further progress and for right
teaching. It would then require more time and attention
from its director; James wished to give less time than
heretofore. "I naturally hate experimental work," he said,
"and all my circumstances conspired (during the important
years of my life) to prevent me from getting into a routine
of it, so that now it is always the duty that gets postponed.
There are plenty of others, to keep my time as fully em
ployed as my working powers permit." I There appeared
to be one solution for the difficulty, and in 1892 he set
about to arrange it. He raised enough money to establish
the Harvard Laboratory on such a basis that an able ex
perimenter could be invited to make its direction his chief
concern. He recommended the appointment of Hugo Miin-
sterberg to take charge for three years. He had been much
impressed by the originality and promise implied by some
To Hugo Miinsterberg, Aug. 22, 1890.
302 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1890
experimental work which Miinsterberg had already done at
Freiburg, and his conviction in respect to all academic
appointments was that youth and originality should be
sought rather than "safety"; that the way to organize a
strong philosophical department was to get men of different
schools into its faculty, and that they should expound dissim
ilar rather than harmonious points of view and doctrines.
When this appointment had been made, James saw his
way clear to taking the sabbatical year of absence from
college duties to which he was already more than entitled.
For nine years he had allowed himself only the briefest
interruptions of work, and by 1892 he was in a badly
fatigued condition. He sailed for Antwerp in May, and
took his family with him. He had no more definite purpose
than to escape all literary and academic obligations and
"lie fallow" in Europe for the next fifteen months. Letters
will show that he accomplished this with fair success.
Meanwhile, those which immediately follow were written
from Cambridge. The first of them was to a Boston neigh
bor and correspondent, one letter to whom has already been
given and to whom there will be a number more. Sarah
Whitman, who had lived in Baltimore before her marriage
to Henry Whitman of Boston made her a resident of that
city and of Beverly, was a person to whose charm and
talents and taste it would be impossible to do justice here.
She was a lover of every art, and worked, herself, at paint
ing, and with more success and great distinction in stained
glass. Eager and generous of spirit, she was constantly
confided in and consulted by a small host of friends. She
was, in an eminent degree, one of those happy mortals who
possess a native gift for friendship and hospitality. At
the date of the next letter she was, for a season, in England.
Aet. 48} TO MRS. HENRY WHITMAN 303
To Mrs. Henry Whitman.
CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 15, 1890.
MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN, It does me good to hear
from you, and to come in contact with the spirit with which
you "chuck" yourself at life. It is medicinal in a way
which it would probably both surprise and please you to
know, and helps to make me ashamed of those pusillanimi
ties and self-contempts which are the bane of my tempera
ment and against which I have to carry on my lifelong
struggle. Enough! As for you, beat Sargent, play round
Chamberlain, extract the goodness and wisdom of Bryce,
absorb the autumn colors of the land and sea, mix the
crimson and the opal fire in the glass, charm everyone you
come in contact with by your humanity and amiability;
in short, continue, and we shall have plenty to talk about at
the next (but for that, tedious) dinner at which it may be
my blessing to be placed by your side! Also enough!
You will probably erelong be receiving the stalwart
[Henry M.] Stanley and his accomplished bride. I am
reading with great delight his book. How delicious is the
fact that you can t cram individuals under cut and dried
heads of classification. Stanley is a genius all to himself,
and on the whole I like him right well, with his indescrib
able mixture of the battering ram and the orator, of hardness
and sentiment, egotism and justice, domineeringness and
democratic feeling, callousness to others insides, yet
kindliness, and all his other odd contradictions. He is
probably on the whole an innocent. At any rate, it does me
a lot of good to read about his heroic adventures.
As for "detail," of which you write, it is the ever-mounting
sea which is certain to engulf one, soul and body. You
have a genius to cope with it. But again, enough!
Naturally I "purr" like your cat at the handsome words
3 o 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1891
you let fall about the "Psychology." Goon! But remem
ber that you can do so just as well without reading it:
I shan t know the difference. Seriously, your determina
tion to read that fatal book is the one flaw in an otherwise
noble nature. I wish that I had never written it.
I hope to get my wife and the rest of the family down from
New Hampshire this week, though it does seem a sin to
abandon the feast of light, color, and purity, for the turbid
town.
Good-night! Yours faithfully,
WM. JAMES.
James was now beginning to prepare the condensed edi
tion of the "Principles of Psychology," which appeared the
next year as the "Briefer Course."
Professor Howison, who was informed of the project, had
uttered a protest against the irreverent irony with which
James treated the Hegelian dialectics in the "Principles," z
and had expressed a hope that such passages would be
omitted from the Briefer Course.
To G. H. Howison.
CAMBRIDGE, Jan. 20, 1891.
MY POOR DEAR DARLING HOWISON, Your letter is
received and wrings my heart with its friendliness and
1 E.g., Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 369. "One is almost tempted to believe
that the pantomime state of mind and that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotion
ally considered, one and the same thing. In the pantomime all common things
are represented to happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other s
throats, houses turn inside out, old women become young men, everything passes
into its opposite with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far from pro
ducing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder s mind. And so, in the Hegelian
logic, relations elsewhere recognized under the insipid name of distinctions (such
as that between knower and object, many and one) must first be translated into
impossibilities and contradictions, then transcended and identified by miracles,
ere the proper temper is induced for thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show."
Act. 49} TO F. W. H. MYERS 305
animosity combined. But don t think me more frivolous
than I am. "Those bagatelle diatribes about Hegelism," etc.,
are not reprinted in this book, not a single syllable of
them! I make some jokes about Caird on a certain page,
but Caird already forgives me, and writes that I am sophisti
cated by Hegel myself. If you carefully ponder the note
on that same page or the next one (Volume I, page 370),
you will see the real inwardness of my whole feeling about
the matter. I am not as low as I seem, and some day
(D. v.) may get out another and a more "metaphysical"
book, which will steal all your Hegelian thunder except
the dialectical method, and show me to be a true child of
the gospel. Heartily and everlastingly yours,
WM. JAMES.
To F. W. H. Myers.
NEWPORT, R.I., Jan. 30, 1891.
MY DEAR MYERS, Your letter of the I2th came duly,
but not till now have I had leisure to write you a line of
reply. Verily you are the stuff of which world-changers
are made! What a despot for Psychical Research! I
always feel guilty in your presence, and am, on the whole,
glad that the broad blue ocean rolls between us for most
of the days of the year; although I should be glad to have
it intermit occasionally, on days when I feel particularly
larky and indifferent, when I might meet you without being
bowed down with shame.
To speak seriously, however, I agree in what you say,
that the position I am now in (Professorship, book published
and all) does give me a very good pedestal for carrying on
psychical research effectively, or rather for disseminating
its results effectively. I find however that narratives are
a weariness, and I must confess that the reading of narra
tives for which I have no personal responsibility is almost
3 o6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1891
intolerable to me. Those that come to me at first-hand,
incidentally to the Census, I get interested in. Others
much less so; and I imagine my case is a very common case.
One page of experimental thought-transference work will
"carry" more than a hundred of "Phantasms of the Living."
I shall stick to my share of the latter, however; and expect
in the summer recess to work up the results already gained
in an article 1 for "Scribner s Magazine," which will be the
basis for more publicity and advertising and bring in another
bundle of Schedules to report on at the Congress. Of course
I wholly agree with you in regard to the ultimate future of
the business, and fame will be the portion of him who may
succeed in naturalizing it as a branch of legitimate science.
I think it quite on the cards that you, with your singular
tenacity of purpose, and wide look at all the intellectual
relations of the thing, may live to be the ultra-Darwin
yourself. Only the facts are so discontinuous so far that
possibly all our generation can do may be to get em called
facts. I m a bad fellow to investigate on account of my
bad memory for anecdotes and other disjointed details.
Teaching of students will have to fill most of my time, I
foresee; but of course my weather eye will remain open
upon the occult world.
Our "Branch," you see, has tided over its difficulties tem
porarily; and by raising its fee will enter upon the new year
with a certain momentum. You 11 have to bleed, though,
ere the end, devoted creatures that you are, over there!
I thank you most heartily for your kind words about my
book, and am touched by your faithful eye to the errata.
The volumes were run through the press in less than
seven weeks, and the proof-reading suffered. My friend
1 "What Psychical Research has Accomplished," was first published in The
Forum, 1892, vol. xni, p. 727.
Aet. 49} TO W. D. HOWELLS 307
G. Stanley Hall, leader of American Psychology, has writ
ten that the book is the most complete piece of self-eviscer
ation since Marie Bashkir tsefFs diary. Don t you think
that s rather unkind? But in this age of nerves all philoso
phizing is really something of that sort. I finished yester
day the writing of an address on Ethics which I have to
give at Yale College; and, on the way hither in the cars,
I read the last half of Rudyard Kipling s "The Light that
Failed" finding the latter indecently true to nature, but
recognizing after all that my ethics and his novel were the
same sort of thing. All literary men are sacrifices. "Les
festins humains qu ils servent a leurs fetes ressemblent la
plupart a ceux des pelicans," etc., etc. Enough! . . .
To W. D. Howells.
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 12, 1891.
MY DEAR HOWELLS, You made me what seemed at
the time a most reckless invitation at the Childs one day -
you probably remember it. It seemed to me improper
then to take it up. But it has lain rankling in my mind
ever since; and now, as the spring weather makes a young
man s fancy lightly turn away from the metaphysical husks
on which he has fed exclusively all winter to some more
human reading, I say to myself, Why shouldn t I have
copies, from the Author himself, of "Silas Lapham" and
of the "Minister s Charge" which by this time are almost
the only things of yours which I have never possessed?
Take this as thou wilt! . . .
To W. D. Howells.
CAMBRIDGE, June 12, 1891.
MY DEAR HOWELLS, You are a sublime and immortal
genius! I have just read "Silas Lapham" and "Lemuel
3 o8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1891
Barker" -strange that I should not have read them be
fore, after hearing my wife rave about them so and
of all the perfect works of fiction they are the perfectest.
The truth, in gross and in detail; the concreteness and
solidity; the geniality, humanity, and unflagging humor;
the steady way in which it keeps up without a dead para
graph; and especially the fidelity with which you stick
to the ways of human nature, with the ideal and the un-
ideal inseparably beaten up together so that you never give
them "clear" -all make them a feast of delight, which,
if I mistake not, will last for all future time, or as long as
novels can last. Silas is the bigger total success because
it deals with a more important story (I think you ought to
have made young Corey angrier about Irene s mistake and
its consequences); but the work on the much obstructed
Lemuel surely was never surpassed. I hope his later life
was happy!
Altogether you ought to be happy you can fold your
arms and write no more if you like. I ve just got your
"Criticism and Fiction," which shall speedily be read.
And whilst in the midst of this note have received from the
postman your clipping from Kate Field s "Washington,"
the author of which I can t divine, but she s a blessed
creature whoever she is. Yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
To Mrs. Henry Whitman.
CAMBRIDGE, June 20, 1891.
MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN, You are magnificent. Here
comes your letter at 6 o clock, just as I am looking wearily
out of the window for a change, and makes me feel like an
aspiring youth again. But I can t go to Beverly tomorrow,
nor indeed leave my room, I fear; for I ve had every kind
Aet. 49} TO HIS SISTER 309
of -itis that can afflict one s upper breathing channels, and
although convalescent, am as weak as a blade of grass, and
feel as antique as Methusalem. A fortnight hence I shall
be like a young puppy-dog again, however, and shall turn
up inevitably between two trains more than once ere the
summer is over.
I ve managed to get through Volume I of Scott s Journal
in the last two days. The dear old boy! But who would
not be "dear" who could have such a mass of doggerel run
ning in his head all the time, and make a hundred thousand
dollars a year just by letting his pen trickle? Bless his dear
old "unenlightened" soul all the same! The Scotch are
the finest race in the world except the Baltimoreans r
and Jews and I think I enjoyed my twenty-four hours of
Edinburgh two summers ago more than any twenty-four
hours a city ever gave me.
Good-bye! I m describing W. S. s character when I ought
to be describing yours but you never give me a chance.
When I get that task performed, we shall settle down to a
solid basis; though probably all that will be in "the dim
future." Meanwhile my love to all the Youth and Beauty
(including your own) and best wishes for their happiness
and freedom from influenzas of every description till the end
of time. Affectionately yours,
W.J.
To his Sister.
CHOCORUA, N.H., July 6, 1891.
DEAREST ALICE, ... Of course [this medical verdict
on your case may mean] as all men know, a finite length of
days; and then, good-bye to neurasthenia and neuralgia
1 It will be recalled that Mrs. Whitman had been a Baltimorean before she
came to live in Boston.
3 io LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1891
and headache, and weariness and palpitation and disgust
all at one stroke I should think you would be reconciled
to the prospect with all its pluses and minuses! I know
you Ve never cared for life, and to me, now at the age of
nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together
in all of us and life a mere farce of frustration in all,
so far as the realization of the innermost ideals go to which
we are made respectively capable of feeling an affinity and
responding. Your frustrations are only rather more flagrant
than the rule; and you Ve been saved many forms of self-
dissatisfaction and misery which appertain to such a multi
plication of responsible relations to different people as I,
for instance, have got into. Your fortitude, good spirits
and unsentimentality have been simply unexampled in the
midst of your physical woes; and when you re relieved
from your post, just that bright note will remain behind,
together with the inscrutable and mysterious character of
the doom of nervous weakness which has chained you down
for all these years. As for that, there s more in it than has
ever been told to so-called science. These inhibitions,
these split-up selves, all these new facts that are gradually
coming to light about our organization, these enlargements
of the self in trance, etc., are bringing me to turn for light
in the direction of all sorts of despised spiritualistic and
unscientific ideas. Father would find in me today a much
more receptive listener all that philosophy has got to be
brought in. And what a queer contradiction comes to
the ordinary scientific argument against immortality (based
on body being mind s condition and mind going out when
body is gone), when one must believe (as now, in these
neurotic cases) that some infernality in the body prevents
really existing parts of the mind from coming to their effec
tive rights at all, suppresses them, and blots them out from
Aet. 49} LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES 3 n
participation in this world s experiences, although they are
there all the time. When that which is you passes out of
the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liber
ated force and life till then eclipsed and kept down. I
can hardly imagine your transition without a great oscilla
tion of both "worlds" as they regain their new equilibrium
after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you
yourself will be more surprised than anybody else.
It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way
about your end; but, my dear little sister, if one has things
present to one s mind, and I know they are present enough
to your mind, why not speak them out? I am sure you
appreciate that best. How many times I have thought,
in the past year, when my days were so full of strong and
varied impression and activities, of the long unchanging
hours in bed which those days stood for with you, and
wondered how you bore the slow-paced monotony at all,
as you did! You can t tell how I Ve pitied you. But
you shall come to your rights erelong. Meanwhile take
things gently. Look for the little good in each day as if
life were to last a hundred years. Above all things, save
yourself from bodily pain, if it can be done. You Ve had
too much of that. Take all the morphia (or other forms of
opium if that disagrees) you want, and don t be afraid of
becoming an opium-drunkard. What was opium created
for except for such times as this? Beg the good Katharine
(to whom our debt can never be extinguished) to write me
a line every week, just to keep the currents flowing, and so
farewell until I write again. Your ever loving,
W. J.
The reader should not fail to realize, in reading the letter
which follows, that it was written, not only while Miinster-
3 i2 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1891
berg was still a remote young psychologist in Germany,
with no claim on James s consideration, but before there
was any question of calling him to Harvard.
To Hugo Munsterberg.
CHOCORUA, July 8, 1891.
DEAR DR. MUNSTERBERG, I have just read Prof. G. E.
Miiller s review of you in the G. G. H., and find it in many
respects so brutal that I am impelled to send you a word of
"consolation," if such a thing be possible. German polem
ics in general are not distinguished by mansuetude; but
there is something peculiarly hideous in the business when
an established authority like Miiller, instead of administer
ing fatherly and kindly admonition to a youngster like
yourself, shows a malign pleasure in knocking him down
and jumping up and down upon his body. All your merits
he passes by parenthetically as selbstvcrstandlich; your sins
he enlarges upon with unction. Don t mind it! Don t be
angry! Turn the other cheek! Make no ill-mannered re
ply! and great will be your credit and reward! Answer
by continuing your work and making it more and more
irreproachable.
I can t myself agree in some of your theories. A pri
ori , your muscular sense- theory of psychic measurements
seems to me incredible in many ways. Your general me
chanical Welt-anschauung is too abstract and simple for
my mind. But I find in you just what is lacking in this
critique of Miiller s a sense for the perspective and pro
portion of things (so that, for instance, you don t make ex
periments and quote figures to the icoth decimal, where
a coarse qualitative result is all that the question needs).
Whose theories in Psychology have any definitive value to-
Aet. 49} TO HUGO MUNSTERBERG 313
day? No one s! Their only use is to sharpen farther re
flexion and observation. The man who throws out most
new ideas and immediately seeks to subject them to ex
perimental control is the most useful psychologist, in the
present state of the science. No one has done this as yet
as well as you. If you are why flexible towards your theories,
and as ingenious in testing them hereafter as you have been
hitherto, I will back you to beat the whole army of your
critics before you are forty years old. Too much ambition
and too much rashness are marks of a certain type of genius
in its youth. The destiny of that genius depends on its
power or inability to assimilate and get good out of such
criticisms as Miiller s. Get the good! forget the bad!
and Miiller will live to feel ashamed of his tone.
I was very much grieved to learn from Delabarre lately
that the doctors had found some weakness in your heart!
What a wasteful thing is Nature, to produce a fellow like
you, and then play such a trick with him! Bah! But I
prefer to think that it will be no serious impediment, if you
only go plant piano. You will do the better work doubt
less for doing it a little more slowly. Not long ago I was
dining with some old gentlemen, and one of them asked,
"What is the best assurance a man can have of a long and
active life?" He was a doctor; and presently replied to
his own question: "To be entirely broken-down in health
before one is thirty-five!" -There is much truth in it;
and though it applies more to nervous than to other diseases,
we all can take our comfort in it. / was entirely broken-
down before I was thirty. Yours cordially,
WM. JAMES.
Delabarre and Mackaye wrote to me of you with great
admiration and gratitude for all they have gained.
314 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1891
To Henry Holt.
CHOCORUA, N.H., July 24, 1891.
MY DEAR HOLT, I expect to send you within ten days
the MS. of my "Briefer Course," boiled down to possibly
400 pages. By adding some twaddle about the senses, by
leaving out all polemics and history, all bibliography and
experimental details, all metaphysical subtleties and di
gressions, all quotations, all humor and pathos, all interest
in short, and by blackening the tops of all the paragraphs,
I think I have produced a tome of pedagogic classic which
will enrich both you and me, if not the student s mind.
The difficulty is about when to correct the proofs. I Ve
practically had no vacation so far, and won t touch them
during August. I can start them September first up here.
I can t rush them through in Cambridge as I did last year;
but must do them leisurely, to suit this northern mail and
its hours. I could have them done by another man in
Cambridge, if there were desperate hurry; but on the whole
I should prefer to do them myself.
Write and propose something! The larger book seems
to be a decided success especially from the literary point
of view. I begin to look down upon Mark Twain ! Yours
ever,
W T M. JAMES.
To Henry James.
ASHEVILLE, N.C., Aug. 2O, 1891.
MY DEAR HARRY, ... Of poor Lowell s death you
heard. I left Cambridge the evening of the funeral, for
which I had waited over, and meant to write to you about
it that very afternoon. But as it turned out, I did n t get
a moment of time. . . . He had never been ill in his life till
two years ago, and did n t seem to understand or realize
Act. 49} TO MISS GRACE ASHBURNER
315
the fact as most people do. I doubt if he dreamed that his
end was apporaching until it was close at hand. Few
images in my memory are more touching than the picture
of his attitude in the last visits I paid him. He was always
up and dressed, in his library, with his velvet coat and
tobacco pipes, and ready to talk and be talked to, alluding
to his illness with a sort of apologetic and whimsical plain-
tiveness that had no querulousness in it, though he coughed
incessantly, and the last time I was there (the last day of
June, I think) he was strongly narcotized by opium for a
sciatica which had lately supervened. Looking back at
him, what strikes one most was his singularly boyish cheer
fulness and robustness of temperament. He was a sort of
a boy to the end, and makes most others seem like pre
mature old men. . . , x
Miss Grace Ashburner, next addressed, and her sister
Miss Anne Ashburner, were two old ladies, friends of James s
parents, for whom he felt an especially affectionate regard.
They, and their niece Miss Theodora Sedgwick, lived in
Kirkland Street, next door to Professor Child and near the
Norton family. They had become near neighbors as well
as friends when James moved into his new house.
To Miss Grace Ashburner.
LINVILLE, N.C., Aug. 25, 1891.
MY DEAR Miss GRACE, The time has come for that
letter to be written! I have been thinking of you ever
since I left home; but every letter-writing moment so far
has been taken up by the information necessary to be im-
1 Aug. 14. "Lowell s funeral at mid-day. . . . Went to Child s to say good-bye,
and found Walcott, Howells, Cranch, etc. Poor dear old Child! We drank a
glass standing to the hope of seeing Lowell again."
3 i6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1891
parted to my faithful spouse about my whereabouts, ex
penses, health, longings for home and the children, etc.;
then a long-due letter to Harry had to be written, another
to Alice, and one to Katharine Loring; finally, one to my
Cousin Elly Emmet who is about to marry en secondes
noces a Scotchman, until at the last the moment is ripe for
the most ideal correspondent of all!
I have at last "struck it rich" here in North Carolina,
and am in the most peculiar, and one of the most poetic
places I have ever been in. Strange to say, it is on the
premises of a land speculation and would-be "boom." A
tract of twenty-five square miles of wilderness, 3800 feet
above the sea at its lowest part, has been bought; between
30 and 40 miles of the most admirable alpine, evenly-graded,
zigzagging roads built in various directions from the centre,
which is a smallish cleared plateau; an exquisite little hotel
built; nine cottages round about it; and that is all. Not
a loafer, not a fly, not a blot upon the scene! The serpent
has not yet made his appearance in this Eden, around which
stand the hills covered with primeval forest of the most
beautiful description, filled with rhododendrons, laurels,
and azaleas which, through the month of July, must make
it ablaze with glory.
I went this morning on horseback with the manager of
the concern, a really charming young North Carolinian
educated at our Institute of Technology, to the top of
"Grandfather Mountain" (close by, which the Company
owns) and which is only a couple of hundred feet lower
than Mt. Washington. The road, the forest, the view,
the crags were as good as such things can be. Apparently
the company had just planted a couple of hundred thou
sand dollars in pure esthetics a most high-toned proceed-
Aet. 49} TO HENRY JAMES 317
ing in this degenerate age. Later, doubtless, a railroad,
stores, and general sordidness with wealth will creep in.
Meanwhile let us enjoy things! There "does be" advan
tages in creation as opposed to evolution, in the railway, in
the telegraph and the electric light, and all that goes with
them. This peculiar combination of virgin wilderness with
perfectly planned roads, Queen Anne cottages, and a sweet
little modern hotel, has never been realized until our day.
But what am I doing? I always held a descriptive letter
in abhorrence: sentiment is the only thing that should be
allowed a place in a correspondence between two persons
of opposite genders. But to feel sentiment is one thing,
and to express it both forcibly and gracefully is another.
Had I but the pen of an F. J. Child, I might do something.
As it is, my dear, dear Miss Grace, I can only rather dumbly
say how everlastingly tender was, is and ever shall be the
emotion which accompanies my thoughts of you. Es
pecially in these days when your patience and good spirits
add such a halo to you and to your sister too. I am fast
overtaking you in age, and it gives the deepest sort of satis
faction to feel the process of growing together with one s
old friends as one does. "Thought is deeper than all
speech," so I will say no more. I shall hope to see you,
and see you feeling well, before the week is over. Mean
while, with heartiest affection to your dear sister, and to
Theodora as well as to yourself, I am always, your loving,
WM. JAMES.
To Henry James.
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. n, 1892.
MY DEAR HARRY,. . . I have been seething in a fever of
politics about the future of our philosophy department.
3 i8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
Harvard must lead in psychology; and I, having founded
her laboratory, am not the man to carry on the practical
work. I have almost succeeded, however, in clinching
a bargain whereby Miinsterberg, the ablest experimental
psychologist in Germany, allowance made for his being
only 28 years old, he is in fact the Rudyard Kipling of
psychology, is to come here. When he does he will scoop
out all the other universities as far as that line of work goes.
We have also had another scheme, at the various stages of
which you, Balzac or Howells ought to have been present,
to work up for a novel or the stage. There s a great
comedy yet to be made out of the University newly founded
by the American millionaire. In this case the millionaire
had announced his desire to found a professorship of psy
chology applied to education. The thing was to get it for
Harvard, which he mistrusted. I went at him tooth and
nail, trying to persuade him that Royce was the man.
Letters, pour-parlers, visits (he lives in N. Y.), finally a
two-days visit at this house, and a dinner for him. He is
a real Balzackian figure a regular porker, coarse, vulgar,
vain, cunning, mendacious, etc., etc. The worst of it is
that he will probably give us nothing, having got all the
attention and flattery from us at which he aimed, so that
we have our labor for our pains, and the gods laugh as they
say "served them right."
I have long been meaning to write of my intense enjoy
ment of Du Maurier s "Peter Ibbetson," which I verily
believe will be one of the classics of the English tongue.
The beauty of it goes beyond everything and the light
and happy touch the rapid style! Please tell him if
you see him that we are all on our knees. Your last book
fell into Margaret Gibbens s hands, and I have barely seen
it. I shan t have time to read it till the voyage. . . .
Act. so] TO MISS MARY TAPPAN 3 i 9
To Miss Mary Tappan.
CAMBRIDGE, April 29, 1892.
MY DEAR MARY, Your kind letter about poor Alice
came today, and makes me do what I have long been on the
point of doing write a friendly word to you. Yes, Alice s
death is a great release to her; she longed for it; and it is
in a sense a release to all of us. In spite of its terrific
frustrations her life was a triumph all the same, as I now see
it. Her particular burden was borne well. She never
whimpered or complained of her sickness, and never seemed
to turn her face towards it, but up to the very limit of her
allowance attended to outer things. When I went to
London in September to bid her good-bye, she altogether
refused to waste a minute in talking about her disease, and
conversed only of the English people and Harry s play. So
her soul was not subdued! I wish that mine might ever
be as little so! Poor Harry is left rather disconsolate. He
habitually stored up all sorts of things to tell her, and now
he has no ear into which to pour their like. He says her
talk was better than anyone s he knew in London. Strange
to say, altho practically bedridden for years, her mental
atmosphere, barring a little over-vehemence, was altogether
that of the grand monde, and the information about both
people and public affairs which she had the art of absorbing
from the air was astonishing.
We are probably all going to Europe on the 25th of May
- [SS.] Friesland [to] Antwerp. Both Alice and I need a
"year off," and I hope we shall get it. Our winter abode is
yet unknown. I wish you were going to stay and we could
be near you. I wish anyhow we might meet this summer and
talk things over. It does n t pay in this short life for good
old friends to be non-existent for each other; and how can
one write letters of friendship when letters of business fill
320 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
every chink of time? I do hope we shall meet, my dear
Mary. Both of us send you lots of love, and plenty to
Ellen too. Yours ever,
W. J.
James sailed for Antwerp with his family on May 25,
and escaped not only from college duties but from the post
man and from his writing-table. He spent the summer in
the Black Forest and Switzerland before moving down to
Florence in September. It happened that a few weeks were
passed in a pension at Vers-chez-les-Blanc above the Lake of
Geneva, in which Professor Theodore Flournoy of the Uni
versity of Geneva, to whom the next letter but one is ad
dressed, was also spending his vacation with his family.
Flournoy had reviewed the " Principles" in the "Journal de
Geneve," and there had already been some correspondence
between the two men. At Vers-chez-les-Blanc a real friend
ship sprang up quickly. It grew deeper and closer as the
years slipped by, for in temperament and mental outlook
the Swiss and the American were close kin.
To Miss Grace Ashburner.
GRYON, SWITZERLAND, July 13, 1892.
MY DEAR Miss GRACE, or rather, let me say, MY DEAR
GRACE, since what avails such long friendship and affec
tion, if not that privilege of familiarity? I have thought of
you often and of the quiet place that harbors you, but have
been too distracted as yet to write any letters but neces
sary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and
a half weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of
daylight on our path. How could Arthur, how could
Madame Lucy, 1 see us go off and not raise a more solemn
1 Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sedgwick. Mr. Sedgwick was Miss Ashburner s nephew.
Aet. 5 o\ TO MISS GRACE ASHBURNER 321
word of warning? It seems to me that the most solemn
duty / can have in what remains to me of life will be to
save my inexperienced fellow beings from ignorantly taking
their little ones abroad when they go for their own refresh
ment. To combine novel anxieties of the most agonizing
kind about your children s education, nocturnal and diurnal
contact of the most intimate sort with their shrieks, their
quarrels, their questions, their rollings-about and tears,
in short with all their emotional, intellectual and bodily
functions, in what practically in these close quarters amounts
to one room to combine these things (I say) with a
holiday for oneself is an idea worthy to emanate from a
lunatic asylum. The wear and tear of a professorship for
a year is not equal to one week of this sort of thing. But
let me not complain! Since I am responsible for their
being, I will launch them worthily upon life; and if a
foreign education is required, they shall have it. Only
why talk of "sabbatical" years? there is the hideous
mockery ! Alice, if she writes to you, will (after her feminine
fashion) gloze over this aspect of our existence, because
she has been more or less accustomed to it all these years
and on the whole does not dislike it (!!), but I for once will
speak frankly and not disguise my sufferings. Here in this
precipitous Alpine village we occupy rooms in an empty
house witha yellow-plastered front and an iron balcony above
the street. Up and down that street the cows, the goats,
the natives, and the tourists pass. The church-roof and
the pastor s house are across the way, dropped as it were
twenty feet down the slope. Close beside us are populous
houses either way, and others beside them. Yet on that
iron balcony all the innermost mysteries of the James
family are blazoned and bruited to the entire village.
Things are dried there, quarrels, screams and squeals rise
322 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
incessantly to Heaven, dressing and undressing are per
formed, punishments take place recriminations, argu
ments, execrations with a publicity after which, if there
were reporters, we should never be able to show our faces
again. And when I think of that cool, spacious and quiet
mansion lying untenanted in Irving Street, with a place in
it for everything, and everything in its place when we are
there, I could almost weep for "the pity of it." But we
may get used to this as other travelers do only Arthur
and Lucy ought to have dropped some word of warning ere
we came away!
Our destiny seems relentlessly driving us towards Paris,
which on the whole I rather hate than otherwise, only the
educational problem promises a better solution there. The
boys meanwhile have got started on French lessons here,
and though we must soon "move on" like a family of
wandering Jews, we shall probably leave one behind in
the pastor s family hard-by. The other boy we shall get
into a family somewhere else, and then have none but Peg
and the baby to cope with. Perhaps strength will be given
us for that.
Switzerland meanwhile is an unmitigated blessing, from
the mountains down to the bread and butter and the beds.
The people, the arrangements, the earth, the air and the
sky, are satisfactory to a degree hard to imagine before
hand. There is an extraordinary absence of feminine
beauty, but great kindliness, absolute honesty, fixed tariffs
and prices for everything, etc., etc., and of course absolutely
clean hotels at prices which, though not the "dirt cheap"
ones of former times, are yet very cheap compared with the
American standard. We stayed for ten days at a pension
on the Lake of Lucerne which was in all respects as beautiful
and ideal as any scene on the operatic stage, yet we paid
A*t.so\ TO THEODORE FLOURNOY 323
just about what the Childs pay at Nickerson s vile and
filthy hotel at Chocorua. Of course we made the acquaint
ance of Cambridge people there whose acquaintance we
had not made before I mean the family of Joseph Henry
Thayer of the Divinity School, whose daughter Miriam,
with her splendid playing and general grace and amiability,
was a proof of how much hidden wealth Cambridge contains.
But I have talked too much about ourselves and ought
to talk about you. What can I do, however, my dear
Grace, except express hopes? I know that you have had
a hot summer, but I know little else. Have you borne it
well ? Have you had any relief from your miserable suffer
ing state? or have you gone on as badly or worse than ever?
Of course you can t answer these questions, but some day
Theodora will. I devoutly trust that things have gone
well and that you may even have been able to see some
friends, and in that way get a little change. Your sister,
to whom pray give the best love of both of us, is I suppose
holding her own as bravely as ever; only I should like to
know the fact, and that too Theodora will doubtless ere
long acquaint us with. To that last-named exemplary
and delightful Being give also our best love; and with any
amount of it of the tenderest quality for yourself, believe
me, always your affectionate,
WM. JAMES.
Love to all the Childs, please, and all the Nortons who
may be within reach.
To Theodore Flournoy.
PENSIONS VILLA MAGGIORE
(PALLANZA), Sept. 19, 1892.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY, Your most agreeable letter -
one of those which one preserves to read in one s old age -
3 2 4 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
came yesterday. ... I am much obliged to you for the paper
by Secretan, and (unless you deny me the permission) I
propose to keep it, and let you get a new one, which you
can do more easily than I. It is much too oracular and
brief, but its pregnancy is a good example of what an intellect
gains by growing old: one says vast things simply. I
read it stretched on the grass of Monte Motterone, the
Rigi of this region, just across the Lake, with all the king
doms of the earth stretched before me, and I realized how
exactly a philosophic Weltansicht resembles that from the
top of a mountain. You are driven, as you ascend, into a
choice of fewer and fewer paths, and at last you end in two
or three simple attitudes from each of which we see a great
part of the Universe amazingly simplified and summarized,
but nowhere the entire view at once. I entirely agree that
Renouvier s system fails to satisfy, but it seems to me the
classical and consistent expression of one of the great atti
tudes: that of insisting on logically intelligible formulas.
If one goes beyond, one must abandon the hope of formulas
altogether, which is what all pious sentimentalists do;
and with them M. Secretan, since he fails to give any articu
late substitute for the "Criticism" he finds so unsatisfac
tory. Most philosophers give formulas, and inadmissible
ones, as when Secretan makes a memoire sans oubli = duratio
tota simul= eternity!
I have been reading with much interest the articles on
the will by Fouillee, in the "Revue Philosophique " for
June and August. There are admirable descriptive pages,
though the final philosophy fails to impress me much. I
am in good condition now, and must try to do a little
methodical work every day in Florence, in spite of the temp
tations to fldnerie of the sort of life.
I did hope to have spent a few days in Geneva before
Act. 50} TO THEODORE FLOURNOY 325
crossing the mountains! But perhaps, for the holidays, you
and Madame Flournoy will cross them to see us at Florence.
The Vers-chez-les-Blanc days are something that neither she
nor I will forget !
You and I are strangely contrasted as regards our pro
fessorial responsibilities: you are becoming entangled in
laboratory research and demonstration just as I am getting
emancipated. As regards demonstrations , I think you will
not find much difficulty in concocting a programme of
classical observations on the senses, etc., for students to
verify; it worked much more easily at Harvard than I
supposed it would when we applied it to the whole class,
and it improved the spirit of the work very much. As
regards research, I advise you not to take that duty too
conscientiously, if you find that ideas and projects do not
abound. As long as [a] man is working at anything, he must
give up other things at which he might be working, and the
best thing he can work at is usually the thing he does most
spontaneously. You philosophize, according to your own
account, more spontaneously than you work in the labora
tory. So do I, and I always felt that the occupation of
philosophizing was with me a valid excuse for neglecting
laboratory work, since there is not time for both. Your
work as a philosopher will be more irreplaceable than what
results you might get in the laboratory out of the same
number of hours. Some day, I feel sure, you will find your
self impelled to publish some of your reflections. Until
then, take notes and read, and feel that your true destiny
is on the way to its accomplishment! It seems to me that
a great thing would be to add a new course to your instruc
tion. Au revoir, my dear friend! My wife sends "a great
deal of love" to yours, and says she will write to her as soon
as we get settled. I also send my most cordial greetings to
326 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
Madame Flournoy. Remember me also affectionately to
those charming young demoiselles, who will, I am afraid,
incontinently proceed to forget me. Always affectionately
yours,
WM. JAMES.
To William M. Salter.
FLORENCE, Oct. 6, 1892.
... So the magician Renan is no more! I don t know
whether you were ever much subject to his spell. If so,
you have a fine subject for Sunday lectures! The queer
thing was that he so slowly worked his way to his natural
mental attitude of irony and persiflage, on a basis of moral
and religious material. He levitated at last to his true level
of superficiality, emancipating himself from layer after layer
of the inhibitions into which he was born, and finally using
the old moral and religious vocabulary to produce merely
musical and poetic effects. That moral and religious ideals,
seriously taken, involve certain refusals and renunciations
of freedom, Renan seemed at last entirely to forget. On
the whole, his sweetness and mere literary coquetry leave a
displeasing impression, and the only way to handle him is
not to take him heavily or seriously. The worst is, he was
a prig in his ideals. . . .
To James J. Putnam.
16 PIAZZA DELL INDIPENDENZA,
FLORENCE, Oct. 7, 1892.
MY DEAR JIM, We got your delightful letter ever so
long ago, and nothing but invincible lethargy on my part,
excusing itself to conscience by saying, "I mustn t write
till I have something definitive to announce," is responsible
for this delay. The lethargy was doubtless the healthy
Aet. 5 o\ TO JAMES J. PUTNAM 327
reversion of the nervous system to its normal equilibrium
again, so I let it work. And the conscientious sophism was
not so unreasonable after all. My brain has gradually got
working in a natural manner again, and we are definitively
settled for the winter, so the time for a line to you has come.
To begin with, your letter sounded delicious, and I like
to think of you as enjoying the neighborhood of our good
little [Chocorua] lake so much, and particularly as express
ing such satisfaction in the look of our little place. If it
hasn t "style," it has at least a harmonious domesticity
of appearance. A recent letter referred to "Dr. Putnam s"
place on the hill across the lake, as if you or Charlie might
have been buying over there too. Is this so? I shall be
very glad if it is so.
As for ourselves, coming abroad with a pack of children
is not the same thing in reality as it is on paper. A summer
full of passive enjoyment is one thing, a summer full of care
for the present and anxious schemes for the coming winter
is another. When you come abroad, come with Marian
for the summer only and leave the children at home. Of
course they have gained perception and intelligence, and
if this Florence school only turns out well, they will have a
good deal of French, and other experiences which will be
precious to them hereafter; so that on their [account] there
will be nothing to regret. But the parental organism in
sore need of recuperative vacation gets a great deal more of
it per dollar and per day if allowed to wander by itself.
Enough now of this philosophy! . . .
I am telling you nothing of our summer, most all of which
was passed in Switzerland. Germany is good, but Switzer
land is better. How good Switzerland is, is something that
can t be described in words. The healthiness of it passes
all utterance the air, the roads, the mountains, the
328 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
customs, the institutions, the people. Not a breath of
art, poetry, esthetics, morbidness, or "suggestions"! It
is all there, solid meat and drink for the sick body and
soul, ready to be turned to, and do you infallible good
when the nervous and gas-lit side of life has had too much
play. What a see-saw life is, between the elemental things
and the others! We must have both; but aspiration for
aspiration, I think that of the over-cultured and exquisite
person for the insipidity of health is the more pathetic.
After the suggestiveness, decay and over-refinement of
Florence this winter, I shall be hungry enough for the
eternal elements to be had in Schweiz. I did n t do any
high climbing, for which my legs and Schwindeligkeit both
unfit me, but any amount of solid moderate walking (say
four to six hours a day), which did me a lot of good. I
envy the climbers, though!
Now that my brain begins to work again, I have mapped
out a profitable course of winter reading, Natur philosophic
and Kunstgeschichte^ and, if the boys school is only as good
as it is cracked up to be, we shall have had a good year.
Alice is very well, and much refreshed in spite of maternal
cares and perplexities. . . . Love from both of us to both of
you, and wishes for a good winter. Love also to all your
family circle, especially Annie, and to Mrs. Wynne if she
be near.
W. J.
To Miss Grace Ashburner.
16 PIAZZA DELL INDIPENDENZA
FLORENCE, Oct. 19, 1892.
MY DEAR GRACE, It is needless to say that your long
and delightful reply written by Theodora s self-effacing
hand reached us duly, and that I have "been on the point"
Aet. so] TO MISS GRACE ASHBURNER 329
of writing to you again ever since. That "point" as you
well know, is one to which somehow one seems long to
cleave without jumping off. But at last here goes irrev
ocably! I did not expect that in your condition you would
be either so conscientious or so energetic as to send so imme
diate and full a return, and I must expressly stipulate, my
dear old friend, that the sole condition upon which I write
now is that you shall not feel that I expect a single word of
answer. (Needless to say, however, how much any in
fringement of this condition on your part will be enjoyed.)
Well! Cold and wet drove us out of Switzerland that
first week in September, though, as it turned out, we should
have had a fine rest of the month if we had stayed. We
crossed the Simplon to Pallanza on Lake Maggiore, where
we stayed ten days, till the bad fare made us sick; and then
came straight to Florence by the 2ist. As almost no
strangers had arrived, we had the pick of all the furnished
apartments, most of which threatened great bleakness or
gloominess for the winter, with their high ceilings, and some
rooms in all of them lit from court or well. Our family
seems to be of the maximum size for which apartments are
made! We found but this one into all the rooms of which
the sun can come either before- or after-noon. It is clean,
and abundantly furnished with sofas and chairs, but not a
"convenience for housekeeping" of any kind whatsoever.
No oven in which to make the macaroni au gratln^ no
place to keep more than a week s supply of charcoal, or I
fear more than three or four days supply of wood for the
fire when the cold weather comes, as come it will with a
vengeance, from all accounts. I hope our children won t
freeze !
Harry and Billy started school at last two days ago, and
glad I am to see them at it. In the immortal words of our
330 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
townsman Rindge in his monumental inscription, "every
man" (and "every" boy!) "should have an honest occu
pation." x What they need is comrades of their own age,
and competitive play and work, rather than monuments of
antiquity or landscape beauty. Animal, not vegetable or
mineral life is their element. The school is English, they 11
get no more French or German there than at Browne and
Nichols s [school at home] and they 11 have to begin Ital
ian, I m afraid, which will be pure interruption and leave
not a rack behind after they ve been home a year. Still
one must n t always grumble about one s children, and they
are getting an amount of perception over here, and a free
dom from prejudices about American things and ways,
which will certainly be of general service to their intelli
gence, and be worth more to them hereafter than their year
would have been if spent in drill for the Harvard exams
even if what they lose do amount to a whole year, which
I much doubt. But I think it may be called certain that
they shan t be kept abroad a second year!
For ourselves, Florence is delicious. I have a sort of
organic protestation against certain things here, the tone
less air in the streets, which feels like used-up indoor air, the
"general debility" which pervades all ways and institutions,
the worn-out faces, etc., etc. But the charming sunny
manners, the old-world picturesqueness wherever you cast
your eye, and above all, the magnificent remains of art,
redeem it all, and insidiously spin a charm round one which
might well end by turning one into one of these mere north
ern loungers here for the rest of one s days, recreant to all
one s native instincts. The stagnancy of the thermometer
is the great thing. Day after day a changeless air, some
times sun and sometimes shower, but no other difference
1 See vol. ii, p. 39 infra.
Act. 50} TO JOSIAH ROYCE 331
except possibly from week to week the faintest possible
progress in the direction of cold. It must be very good for
one s nerves after our acrobatic climate. We have an ex
cellent man-cook, the most faithful of beings, at two and
a half dollars a week. He never goes out except to market,
and understands, strange to say, the naked Latin roots
without terminations in which we hold wwsweet discourse
with him. But on Dante and Charles Norton s admirable
"pony" I am getting up the lingo fast!
All this time I am saying nothing about you or your
sister, or the dear Childs, or the Nortons, or anyone. Of
your own condition we have got very scanty news indeed
since your letter. . . . Perhaps Theodora will just sit down
and write two pages, not a letter, if she isn t ready;
but just two pages to give some authentic account of
how the fall finds you all, especially you. I hope the
opium business and all has not given you additional trouble,
and that the pain has not made worse havoc than before.
When one thinks of your patience and good cheer, my
dear, dear Grace, through all of life, one feels grateful to
the Higher Powers for the example. Please take the heart
felt love of both of us, give some to your dear sister and to
Theodora, and believe me ever your affectionate,
WM. JAMES.
Love too, to the Nortons, old and young, and to the
Childs.
To Josiah Royce.
FLORENCE, Dec. 18, 1892.
BELOVED JOSIAH, Your letter of Oct. 12, with "mis-
sent Indian mail" stamped upon its envelope in big letters,
was handed in only ten days ago, after I had long said in
my heart that you were no true friend to leave me thus
332 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
languishing so long in ignorance of all that was befalling
in Irving St. and the country round about. Its poetical
hyperboles about the way I was missed made amends for
everything, so I am not now writing to ask you for my
diamonds back, or to return my ringlet of your hair. It
was a beautiful and bully letter and filled the hearts of both
of us with exceeding joy. I have heard since then from the
Gibbenses that you are made Professor I fear at not
more than $3000. But still it is a step ahead and I congrat
ulate you most heartily thereupon.
What I most urgently wanted to hear from you was some
estimate of Munsterberg, and when you say, "he is an
immense success," you may imagine how I am pleased.
He has his foibles, as who has not; but I have a strong
impression that that youth will be a great man. Moreover,
his naivete and openness of nature make him very lovable.
I do hope that [his] English will go of course there can be
no question of the students liking him, when once he gets
his communications open. He has written me exhaustive
letters, and seems to be outdoing even you in the amount
of energizing which he puts forth. May God have him in
his holy keeping!
From the midst of my laziness here the news I get from
Cambridge makes it seem like a little seething Florence of
the XVth Century. Having all the time there is, to myself,
I of course find I have no time for doing any particular
duties, and the consequence is that the days go by without
anything very serious accomplished. But we live well and
are comfortable by means of sheet-iron stoves which the
clammy quality of the cold rather than its intensity seems
to necessitate, and Italianism is "striking in" to all of us
to various degrees of depth, shallowest of all I fear in Peg
and the baby. When Gemuthlichkcit is banished from the
Aet. 5 o\ TO JOSIAH ROYCE 333
world, it will still survive in this dear and shabby old
country; though I suppose the same sort of thing is really
to be found in the East even more than in Italy, and that
we shall seek it there when Italy has got as tram-roaded and
modernized all over as Berlin. It is a curious smell of
the past, that lingers over everything, speech and manners
as well as stone and stuffs!
I went to Padua last week to a Galileo anniversary. It
was splendidly carried out, and great fun; and they gave
all of us foreigners honorary degrees. I rather like being
a doctor of the University of Padua, and shall feel more at
home than hitherto in the "Merchant of Venice." I have
written a letter to the "Nation" about it, which I commend
to the attention of your gentle partner. 1 . . .
Mark Twain is here for the winter in a villa outside the
town, hard at work writing something or other. I have
seen him a couple of times a fine, soft-fibred little fellow
with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and
good. I should think that one might grow very fond of
him, and wish he d come and live in Cambridge.
I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental
palsy that has been over me for the past year, and to take
a little "notice" in matters philosophical. I am now read
ing Wundt s curiously long-winded "System," which, in
spite of his intolerable sleekness and way of soaping every
thing on to you by plausible transitions so as to make it
run continuous, has every now and then a compendiously
stated truth, or aper^u, which is nourishing and instructive.
Come March, I will send you proposals for my work next
year, to the "Cosmology" part of which I am just begin
ning to wake up. [A. W.] Benn, of the history of Greek
See "The Galileo Festival at Padua": Nation (New York), Jan. 5, 1893; a
four-column account of the Festival.
334 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
Philosophy, is here, a shy Irishman (I should judge) with a
queer manner, whom I have only seen a couple of times,
but with whom I shall probably later take some walks. He
seems a good and well-informed fellow, much devoted to
astronomy, and I have urged your works on his attention.
He lent me the "New World" with your article in it, which
I read with admiration. Would that belief would ensue!
Perhaps I shall get straight.
I have just been "penning" a notice of Renouvier s
"Principes de la Nature" for Schurman. 1 Renouvier can
not be true his world is so much dust. But that concep
tion is a zu uberwindendes Moment, and he has given it its
most energetic expression. There is a theodicy at the end,
a speculation about this being a world fallen, which ought
to interest you much from the point of view of your own
Cosmology.
Munsterberg wrote me, and I forgot to remark on it in
my reply, that Scripture wanted him to contribute to a new
Yale psychology review, but that he wished to publish in
a volume. I confess it disgusts me to hear of each of these
little separate college tin-trumpets. What I should really
like would be a philosophic monthly in America, which would
be all sufficing, as the "Revue Philosophique" is in France.
If it were a monthly, Munsterberg could find room for all
his contributions from the laboratory. But I don t suppose
that Scripture will combine with Schurman any more than
Hall would, or for the matter of that, I don t know whether
Schurman himself would wish it. ...
What are you working at? Is the Goethe work started?
Is music raging round you both as of yore? How are the
children? We heard last night the new opera by Mas-
cagni, "I Rantzau," which has made a. furore here and which
1 Philosophical Review (1893), vo ^ n > P- 2I 3-
Aet. 5 o\ TO MISS GRACE NORTON 335
I enjoyed hugely. How is Santayana, and what is he up
to? You can t tell how thick the atmosphere of Cam
bridge seems over here? " Surcharged with vitality," in
short. Write again whenever you can spare a fellow a half
hour, and believe me, with warmest regards from both of us
to both of you, yours always,
WM. JAMES.
Pray give love to Palmer, Nichols, Santayana, Miinster-
berg, and all.
To Miss Grace Norton.
FLORENCE, Dec. 28, 1892.
MY DEAR GRACE, I hope that my silence has not left
you to think that I have forgotten all the ties of friendship.
Far from it! but have you never felt the rapture of day
after day with no letter to write, nor the shrinking from
breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of
future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Re
mote, unwritten to and unheard from, you seem to me
something ideal, off there in your inaccessible Cambridge
palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light, occupying
your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary, incontam-
inate a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle
will instantly bring you down; for you will have been
imagining your poor correspondent in the same high and
abstract fashion until what he says breaks the charm (as
infallibly it must), and with the perception of his fmiteness
must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if you
were finite too for communications bring the communi
cants to a common level. All of which sounds, my dear
Grace, as if I were refraining from writing to you out of
my well-known habit of "metaphysical politeness"; or
trying to make you think so. But I think I can trust you
336 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1892
to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem imitated
from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have
flowed from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat
to my own surprise) are nothing but a shabby cloak under
which I am trying to hide my own palpable laziness a
laziness which even the higher affections can only render a
little restless and uncomfortable, but not dispel. How
ever, it is dispelled at last, is n t it? So let me begin.
You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time,
so I need give you no detailed account of our peregrinations
or decisions. We had a delicious summer in Switzerland,
that noble and medicinal country, and we have now got
into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a menace
of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that
wonderful and unexampled sense of peace. I have been
enjoying [myself] of late in sitting under the lamp until
midnight, secure against any possible interruption, and
reading what things I pleased. I believe that last year
in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could
sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that the days
have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter
appears looking through the future, I begin to count them
here as something unspeakably precious that may ne er
return.
The boys are at an English school which, though certainly
very good, gives them rather less French and German
than they would have at Browne and Nichols s. Peg is
having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of dancing,
gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort.
We have a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful,
ex-ballet dancer who brings a poor little, humble, peering-
eyed fiddler "Maestro" she calls him three times a
week to our big salon, and makes supple the limbs of Peg
Act. so] TO MISS GRACE NORTON 337
and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful
patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson.
When one thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cam
bridge get, and of the sort of price they pay, it makes one
feel that geography is a tremendous frustrator of the so-
called laws of demand and supply.
Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose
name you may remember some years ago in Cambridge.
He is devoted to the scientific study of pictures, and I hope
to gain some truth from him ere we leave. He is a dear
good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here I forget
whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheer
ful, nervous, intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that
he used to be, who also runs to pictures in his old age, after
the strictly entomological method, I fancy, this time; for
I doubt whether he cares near as much for the pictures
themselves as for the science of them. But you can t keep
science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead,
or at any rate seems weak and shallow wherever science
has taken possession. I am glad that, being incapable of
anything like scholarship in any line, I still can take some
pleasure from these pictures in the way of love; particularly
glad since some years ago I thought that my care for pic
tures had faded away with youth. But with better oppor
tunities it has revived. Loeser describes Bocher as bask
ing in the presence of pictures, as if it were an amusing way
of taking them, whereas it is the true way. Is Mr. Bocher
giving his lectures or talks again at your house?
Duveneck 1 is here, but I have seen very little of him. The
professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and meta
physical politeness has kept me from pressing him too much.
What an awful trade that of professor is paid to talk,
1 Mr. Frank Duveneck, painter and sculptor, now of Cincinnati.
338 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1893
talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst
I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved
them for not being able to love me any better. It would
be an awful universe if everything could be converted into
words, words, words.
I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of
so many of your family circle this summer. . . . Give my
love to your brother Charles, to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret
and all the dear creatures. Also to the other dears on both
sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust that
your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With
warm good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate
greetings from both of us, believe me always yours,
WM. JAMES.
It will be recalled that Miss Gibbens, to whom the next
letter was addressed, was Mrs. James s sister.
To Miss Margaret Gibbens (Mrs. L. R. Gregor).
FLORENCE, Jan. 3, 1893.
BELOVED MARGARET, A happy New Year to you all!
My immediate purpose in writing is to celebrate Alice s
social greatness, and to do humble penance for the obstacles
I have persistently thrown in her path. By which I mean
that the dinner which we gave on Sunday night, and which
she with great equanimity got up, was a perfect success.
She began, according to her wont, after we had been in the
apartment a fortnight, to say that we must give a dinner
to the Villaris, etc. If you could have seen the manner of
our menage at that time, you would have excused the terri
ble severity of the tones in which I rebuked her, and the
copious eloquence in which I described our past, present,
Aet. so] TO MISS MARGARET GIBBENS 339
and future life and circumstances and expressed my doubts
as to whether she ought not to inhabit an asylum rather
than an apartment. As time wore on we got a waitress,
and added dessert spoons, fruit knives, etc., etc., to our
dining-room resources; also got some silver polish, etc.; and
Alice would keep returning to the idea in a way which made
me, I confess, act like the madman with whose conversa
tion at such times (dictated I must say by the highest social
responsibility) you are acquainted. At last she invited the
Lorings, I. Ostensacken and Loeser for New Year s night;
I groaning, she smiling; I hopeless and abusive, she confi
dent and defensive, of our resources; I doing all I could to
add to her burden and make things impossible, she explaining
to Raffaello in her inimitable Italian, drilling the hand
maids, screening the direful lamp most successfully with
three Japanese umbrellas after I contended that it was
impossible to do so, procuring the only two little red petti
coats in the city to put on our two candles, making a bunch
of flowers, so small in the centre of a star of fern leaves
that I bitterly laughed at it, look exquisitely lovely and
then, with her beautiful countenance, which always becomes
transfigured in the presence of company, keeping the con
versation going till after eleven o clock. I humbly pros
trated myself before her after it was over, for the table
really looked sweet no human being would have believed
it beforehand, threw the wood-ashes on my head, and
swore that she should have the Villaris, and the King of
Italy if she wished and whenever she wished, and that I
would write to you in token of my shame. It will please
your mother to hear what a successful creature she is. Her
diet is still eccentric, flying from one extreme of absti
nence to another, and her sleep fitful and accidental in
34 o LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1893
its times and seasons. She sits up very late at night, and
slumbers publicly when afternoon visitors come in, upright
in her chair, with the lamp shining full on her beautiful
countenance from which all traces of struggle have disap
peared and [where] sleep reigns calmly victorious at
least she did this once lately. . . .
P. S. On reading this to Alice she says she does n t see
what call I had to write it, and that as for my obstructing
the dinner, I had n t made it more impossible than I always
make everything. This with a sweet ironical smile which
I can t give on paper. . . .
To Francis Boott.
FLORENCE, Jan. 30, 1893.
DEAR MR. BOOTT, Your letter of Dec. I5th was very
welcome, with its home gossip and its Florentine advice.
Our winter has worn away, as you see, with very little dis
comfort from cold. It is true that I have been irritated at
the immovable condition of my bed-room thermometer
which, for five weeks, has been at 40 F., not shifting in all
that time more than one degree either way, until I longed
for a change; but how much better such steadfastness than
the acrobatic performances of our American winter-ther
mometer. You and other sybarites scared us so, in the
fall, about the arctic cold we should have, that I used daily
to make vows to the Creator and the Saints that, if they
would only carry us safely to the first of February, I never
would ask them for another favor as long as I lived. With
the impending winter once overcome I thought life would be
one long vista of relief thenceforth. But practically there
has been nothing to overcome. I am glad, however, that
now that January disappears, we may have some warm
days, coming more and more frequently. The spring must
Aet. 5 i\ TO FRANCIS BOOTT 34 i
be really delicious. We are keeping as shy of "Society" as
we can, but still we see a good many people, and the inter
ruptions to study (from that, and the domestic causes which
abound in our narrow quarters narrow in winter-time,
broad enough when fires go out) are very great.
Duveneck x spent a most delightful evening here a while
ago, and left a big portfolio of photos of Bocklin s pictures
and a big bunch of cigars for me two days later. I wish I
did n t always feel like a phrase-monger with honest artists
like him. However there are some fellows who seem
phrase-mongers to me, X , e.g., so it s "square." . . . We
have a cook, Raffaello, the most modest and faithful of his
sex. Our manner of communication with him is awful;
but he finishes all our sentences for us, and, strange to say,
just as we would have finished them if we could. Alice
swears we must bring him home to America. Should you
think it safe? He seems to have no friends or diversions
here, and no love except for his saucepans. But I dread
the responsibility of being foster-father to him in our cold
and uncongenial land. It would be different if I spoke his
lingo. What do you think?
And what a pretty lingo it is! Italian and German seem
to me the languages. The mongrels French and English
might drop out!
Apropos to English, I return your slip [about the teaching
of English?] "as per request," having been amused at the
manifestation of the ruling passion in you. I don t care
how incorrect language may be if it only has fitness of
epithet, energy and clearness. But I do pity the poor
English Department. I see they are talking in England
of more study of their own tongue in the schools being
required. . . . Mark Twain dined with us last night, in
1 Mr. Duveneck was Mr. Boott s son-in-law. Vide page 153 supra.
342 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1893
company with the good Villari and the charming Mrs.
Villari; but there was no chance then to ask him to sing
Nora McCarty. He s a dear man, and there 11 be a chance
yet. He is in a delightful villa at Settignano, and says he
has written more in the past four months than he could
have done in two years at Hartford. Well! good-bye, dear
old friend. Yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
To Henry James.
FLORENCE, Mar. 17, 1893.
... I don t wonder that it seems strange to you that we
should be leaving here just in the glory of the year. Your
view of Italy is that of the tourist; and that is really the
only way to enjoy any place. Ours is that of the resident in
whom the sweet decay breathed in for six months has pro
duced a sort of physiological craving for a change to
robuster air. One ends by craving one s own more per
manent attitude, and a country whose language I can
speak and where I can settle into my own necessary work
(which has been awfully prevented here of late), without a
guilty sense that I am neglecting the claims of pictures
and monuments, is the better environment now. In short,
Italy has well served its purpose by us and we shall be
eternally grateful. But we have no farther use for it, and
the spring is also beautiful in lands that will [be] fresher to
our senses. There are moments when the Florentine de
bility becomes really hateful to one, and I don t see how the
Lorings and others can come and make their home with it.
You have done the best thing, in putting yourself in the
strongest milieu to be found on earth. But Italy is incom
parable as a refreshing refuge, and I am sorry that you
are likely to lose it this year. . . .
Aet. 5 i\ TO SHADWORTH H. HODGSON 343
To Francois Pillon.
[Post-card]
LONDON, June 17, 1893.
You can hardly imagine how strong my disappointment
was in losing you in Paris when we might have found you
by going to Alcan s on Monday, or by writing you before
we came. It seems now sheer folly! But I didn t think
of the possibility of your being gone so early in the summer.
Our three young children are all in Switzerland, the older
boy in Munich, and my wife and I are like middle-aged
omnibus-horses let loose in a pasture. The first time we
have had a holiday together for 15 years. I feel like a
barrel without hoops! We shall be here in England for a
month at least. After that everything is uncertain. I may
not even pass through Paris again.
W. J.
To Shadworth H. Hodgson.
LONDON, June 23, 1893.
MY DEAR HODGSON, I am more different kinds of an
ass, or rather I am (without ceasing to be different kinds)
the same kind more often than any other living man ! This
morning I knocked at your door, inwardly exultant with
the certainty that I should find you, and learned that you
had left for Saltburn just one hour ago! A week ago yester
day the same thing happened to me at Pillon s in Paris,
and because of the same reason, my having announced my
presence a day too late.
My wife and I have been here six days. As it was her
first visit to England and she had a lot of clothes to get,
having worn out her American supply in the past year, we
thought we had better remain incog, for a week, drinking in
London irresponsibly, and letting the dressmakers have
344 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1893
their will with her time. I early asked at your door whether
you were in town and visible, and received a reassuring
reply, so I felt quite safe and devoted myself to showing
my wife the sights, and enjoying her naif wonder as she
drank in Britain s greatness. Four nights ago at 9:30 P.M.
I pointed out to her (as possibly the climax of greatness)
your library windows with one of them open and bright with
the inner light. She said, "Let s ring and see him." My
heart palpitated to do so, but it was late and a hot night,
and I was afraid you might be in tropical costume, safe for
the night, and my hesitation lost us. We came home. It
is too, too bad! I wanted much to see you, for though,
my dear Hodgson, our correspondence has languished of
late (the effect of encroaching eld), my sentiments to you-
ward (as the apostle would say) are as lively as ever, and I
recognize in you always the friend as well as the master.
Are you likely to come back to London at all? Our plans
did n t exactly lie through Yorkshire, but they are vague
and may possibly be changed. But what I wanted my wife
to see was S. H. H. in his own golden-hued library with the
rumor of the cab-stand filling the air. . . . But write, you
noble old philosopher and dear young man, to yours always,
WM. JAMES.
To Dickinson S. Miller.
LONDON, July 8, 1893.
DARLING MILLER, I must still for a while call you
darling, in spite of your Toryism, ecclesiasticism, determin
ism, and general diabolism, which will probably result in
your ruthlessly destroying me both as a man and as a
philosopher some day. But sufficient unto that day will
be its evil, so let me take advantage of the hours before
"black-manhood comes" and still fondle you for a while
Aet. 5 i\ TO DICKINSON S. MILLER 345
upon my knee. And both you and Angell, being now
colleagues and not students, had better stop Mistering or
Professoring me, or I shall retaliate by beginning to "Mr."
and "Prof." you
What you say of Erdmann, Uphues and the atmosphere of
German academic life generally, is exceedingly interesting.
If we can only keep our own humaner tone in spite of the
growing complication of interests! I think we shall in
great measure, for there is nothing here in English academic
circles that corresponds to the German savagery. I do
hope we may meet in Switzerland shortly, and you can then
tell me what Erdmann s greatness consists in. ...
I have done hardly any reading since the beginning of
March. My genius for being frustrated and interrupted,
and our unsettled mode of life have played too well into
each other s hands. The consequence is that I rather long
for settlement, and the resumption of the harness. If I
only had working strength not to require these abominably
costly vacations! Make the most of these days, my dear
Miller. They will never exactly return, and will be looked
back to by you hereafter as quite ideal. I am glad you have
assimilated the German opportunities so well. Both Hod-
der and Angell have spoken with admiration of the method
ical way in which you have forged ahead. It is a pity you
have not had a chance at England, with which land you seem
to have so many inward affinities. If you are to come here
let me know, and I can give you introductions. Hodgson
is in Yorkshire and I Ve missed him. Myers sails for the
Chicago Psychic Congress, Aug. 2nd. Sidgwick may still
be had, perhaps, and Bryce, who will give you an order to
the Strangers Gallery. The House of Commons, cradle
of all free institutions, is really a wonderful and moving
sight, and at bottom here the people are more good-natured
34 6 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1893
on the Irish question than one would think to listen to their
strong words. The cheery, active English temperament
beats the world, I believe, the Deutschers included. But
so cartilaginous and unsentimental as to the Gemiith! The
girls like boys and the men like horses!
I shall be greatly interested in your article. As for
Uphues, I am duly uplifted that such a man should read me,
and am ashamed to say that amongst my pile of sins is that
of having carried about two of his books with me for three
or four years past, always meaning to read, and never
actually reading them. I only laid them out again yester
day to take back to Switzerland with me. Such things
make me despair. Paulsen s Einleitung is the greatest
treat I have enjoyed of late. His synthesis is to my mind
almost lamentably unsatisfactory, but the book makes a
station, an etape, in the expression of things. Good-bye
my wife comes in, ready to go out to lunch, and thereafter
to Haslemere for the night. She sends love, and so do I.
Address us when you get to Switzerland to M. Ceresole,
as above, "la Chiesaz sur Vevey (Vaud), and believe me
ever yours,
WM. JAMES.
To Henry James.
THE SALTERS HILL-TOP
[near CHOCORUA], Sept. 22, 1893.
... I am up here for a few days with Billy, to close our
house for the winter, and get a sniff of the place. The
Salters have a noble hill with such an outlook! and a very
decent little house and barn. But oh! the difference from
Switzerland, the thin grass and ragged waysides, the poverty-
stricken land, and sad American sunlight over all sad
because so empty. There is a strange thinness and fern-
Aet.si\ TO HENRY JAMES 347
ininity hovering over all America, so different from the
stoutness and masculinity of land and air and everything
in Switzerland and England, that the coming back makes
one feel strangely sad and hardens one in the resolution
never to go away again unless one can go to end one s days.
Such a divided soul is very bad. To you, who now have
real practical relations and a place in the old world, I should
think there was no necessity of ever coming back again.
But Europe has been made what it is by men staying in
their homes and fighting stubbornly generation after gener
ation for all the beauty, comfort and order that they have
got we must abide and do the same. 1 As England struck
me newly and differently last time, so America now force
and directness in the people, but a terrible grimness, more
ugliness than I ever realized in things, and a greater weak
ness in nature s beauty, such as it is. One must pitch one s
whole sensibility first in a different key then gradually
the quantum of personal happiness of which one is suscep
tible fills the cup but the moment of change of key is
lonesome. . . .
We had the great Helmholtz and his wife with us one
afternoon, gave them tea and invited some people to meet
them; she, a charming woman of the world, brought up by
her aunt, Madame Mohl, in Paris; he the most monu
mental example of benign calm and speechlessness that I
ever saw. He is growing old, and somewhat weary, I
think, and makes no effort beyond that of smiling and
inclining his head to remarks that are made. At least he
made no response to remarks of mine; but Royce, Charles
Norton, John Fiske, and Dr. Walcott, who surrounded
1 Jan. 24, 94. To Carl Stumpf. "One should not be a cosmopolitan, one s
soul becomes disintegrated, as Janet would say. Parts of it remain in different
places, and the whole of it is nowhere. One s native land seems foreign. It is
not wholly a good thing, and I think I suffer from it."
34 8 LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES [1893
him at a little table where he sat with tea and beer, said
that he spoke. Such power of calm is a great possession.
I have been twice to Mrs. Whitman s, once to a lunch
and reception to the Bourgets a fortnight ago. Mrs. G ,
it would seem, has kept them like caged birds (probably
because they wanted it so); Mrs. B. was charming and
easy, he ill at ease, refusing to try English unless compelled,
and turning to me at the table as a drowning man to a
" hencoop," as if there were safety in the presence of any
one connected with you. I could do nothing towards invit
ing them, in the existent state of our menage; but when,
later, they come back for a month in Boston, I shall be
glad to bring them into the house for a few days. I feel
quite a fellow feeling for him; he seems a very human crea
ture, and it was a real pleasure to me to see a Frenchman
of B. s celebrity look as ill at ease as I myself have often
felt in fashionable society. They are, I believe, in Canada,
and have only too much society.
I shan t go to Chicago, for economy s sake besides I
must get to work. But everyone says one ought to sell all
one has and mortgage one s soul to go there; it is esteemed
such a revelation of beauty. People cast away all sin and
baseness, burst into tears and grow religious, etc., under the
influence!! Some people evidently. . . .
The people about home are very pleasant to meet. . . .
Yours ever affectionately,
WM. JAMES.
END OF VOLUME I
MCGRATH-SHKRRILL PRESS
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James, William
945 The letters of William
J24M James
1920
v.l
