To Miss Frances R. Morse
CHOCORUA, Sept. 24, 1903.
Dearest Fanny,—It is so long since we have held communion that I think it is time to recommence. Our summer is ending quietly enough, not only you, but Theodora and Mary Tappan, having all together conspired to leave us in September solitude, and some young fellows, companions of Harry and Billy, having just gone down. The cook goes tomorrow for a fortnight of vacation, but Alice and I, and probably both the older boys, hope to stay up here more or less until the middle of October. My "seminary" begins on Friday, October 2nd, and for the rest of the year Friday is my only day with a college exercise in it—an arrangement which leaves me extraordinarily free, and of which I intend to take advantage by making excursions. Hitherto, during the entire 30 years of my College service, I have had a midday exercise every day in the week. This has always kept me tied too tight to Cambridge. I am vastly better in nervous tone than I was a year ago, my work is simplified down to the exact thing I want to do, and I ought to be happy in spite of the lopping off of so many faculties of activity. The only thing to do, as with the process of the suns one finds one's faculties dropping away one by one, is to be good-natured about it, remember that the next generation is as young as ever, and try to live and have a sympathetic share in their activities. I spent three days lately (only three, alas!) at the "Shanty" [in Keene Valley], and was moved to admiration at the foundation for a consciousness that was being laid in the children by the bare-headed and bare-legged existence "close to nature" of which the memory was being stored up in them in these years. They lay around the camp-fire at night at the feet of their elders, in every attitude of soft recumbency, heads on stomachs and legs mixed up, happy and dreamy, just like the young of some prolific carnivorous species. The coming generation ought to reap the benefit of all this healthy animality. What wouldn't I give to have been educated in it!…
To Mrs. Henry Whitman
CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 29, 1903.
My dear "S. W.,"—On inquiry at your studio last Monday I was told that you would be in the country for ten days or a fortnight more. I confess that this pleased me much for it showed you both happy and prudent. Surely the winter is long enough, however much we cut off of this end—the city winter I mean; and the country this month has been little short of divine.
We came down on the 16th, and I have to get mine (my country, I mean) from the "Norton Woods." But they are very good indeed,—indeed, indeed!
I am better, both physically and morally, than for years past. The whole James family thrives; and were it not for one's "duties" one could be happy. But that things should give pain proves that something is being effected, so I take that consolation. I have the duty on Monday of reporting at a "Philosophical Conference" on the Chicago School of Thought. Chicago University has during the past six months given birth to the fruit of its ten years of gestation under John Dewey. The result is wonderful—a real school, and real Thought. Important thought, too! Did you ever hear of such a city or such a University? Here we have thought, but no school. At Yale a school, but no thought. Chicago has both.... But this, dear Madam, is not intended as a letter—only a word of greeting and congratulation at your absence. I don't know why it makes me so happy to hear of anyone being in the country. I suppose they must be happy.
Your last letter went to the right spot—but I don't expect to hear from you now until I see you. Ever affectionately yours,
W. J.
To Henry James
Newport, Jan. 20, 1904.
I came down here the night before last, to see if a change of air might loosen the grip of my influenza, now in its sixth week and me still weak as a baby, almost, from its virulent effects.... Yesterday A.M. the thermometer fell to 4 below zero. I walked as far as Tweedy's (I am staying at a boarding-house, Mrs. Robinson's, Catherine St., close to Touro Avenue, Daisy Waring being the only other boarder)—the snow loudly creaking under foot and under teams however distant, the sky luminously white and dazzling, no distance, everything equally near to the eye, and the architecture in the town more huddled, discordant, cheap, ugly and contemptible than I had ever seen it. It brought back old times so vividly. So it did in the evening, when I went after sunset down Kay Street to the termination. That low West that I've so often fed on, with a sombre but intense crimson vestige smouldering close to the horizon-line, economical but profound, and the western well of sky shading upward from it through infinite shades of transparent luminosity in darkness to the deep blue darkness overhead. It was purely American. You never see that western sky anywhere else. Solemn and wonderful. I should think you'd like to see it again, if only for the sake of shuddering at it!…
To François Pillon
CAMBRIDGE, June 12, 1904.
Dear Pillon,—Once more I get your faithful and indefatigable "Année" and feel almost ashamed of receiving it thus from you, year after year, when I make nothing of a return! So you are 75 years old—I had no idea of it, but thought that you were much younger. I am only(!) 62, and wish that I could expect another 13 years of such activity as you have shown. I fear I cannot. My arteries are senile, and none of my ancestors, so far as I know of them, have lived past 72, many of them dying much earlier. This is my last day in Cambridge; tomorrow I get away into the country, where "the family" already is, for my vacation. I shall take your "Année" with me, and shall be greatly interested in both Danriac's article and yours. What a mercy it is that your eyes, in spite of cataract-operations, are still good for reading. I have had a very bad winter for work—two attacks of influenza, one very long and bad, three of gout, one of erysipelas, etc., etc. I expected to have written at least 400 or 500 pages of my magnum opus,—a general treatise on philosophy which has been slowly maturing in my mind,—but I have written only 32 pages! That tells the whole story. I resigned from my professorship, but they would not accept my resignation, and owing to certain peculiarities in the financial situation of our University just now, I felt myself obliged in honor to remain.
My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a "tychism," which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making. It is theistic, but not essentially so. It rejects all doctrines of the Absolute. It is finitist; but it does not attribute to the question of the Infinite the great methodological importance which you and Renouvier attribute to it. I fear that you may find my system too bottomless and romantic. I am sure that, be it in the end judged true or false, it is essential to the evolution of clearness in philosophic thought that someone should defend a pluralistic empiricism radically. And all that I fear is that, with the impairment of my working powers from which I suffer, the Angel of Death may overtake me before I can get my thoughts on to paper. Life here in the University consists altogether of interruptions.
I thought much of you at the time of Renouvier's death, and I wanted to write; but I let that go, with a thousand other things that had to go. What a life! and what touching and memorable last words were those which M. Pratt published in the "Revue de Métaphysique"—memorable, I mean from the mere fact that the old man could dictate them at all. I have left unread his last publications, except for some parts of the "Monadologie" and the "Personalisme." He will remain a great figure in philosophic history; and the sense of his absence must make a great difference to your consciousness and to that of Madame Pillon. My own wife and children are well.... Ever affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
To Henry James
CAMBRIDGE, June 28, 1904.
Dear H.,—I came down from Chocorua yesterday A.M. to go to—
Mrs. Whitman's funeral!
She had lost ground steadily during the winter. The last time I saw her was five weeks ago, when at noon I went up to her studio thinking she might be there.... She told me that she was to go on the following day to the Massachusetts General Hospital, for a cure of rest and seclusion. There she died last Friday evening, having improved in her cardiac symptoms, but pneumonia supervening a week ago. It's a great mercy that the end was so unexpectedly quick. What I had feared was a slow deterioration for a year or more to come, with all the nameless misery—peculiarly so in her case—of death by heart disease. As it was, she may be said to have died standing, a thing she always wished to do. She went to every dinner-party and evening party last winter, had an extension, a sort of ball-room, built to her Mount Vernon house, etc. The funeral was beautiful both in Trinity Church and at the grave in Mt. Auburn. I was one of the eight pall-bearers—the others of whom you would hardly know. The flowers and greenery had been arranged in absolutely Whitmanian style by Mrs. Jack Gardner, Mrs. Henry Parkman, and Sally Fairchild. The scene at the grave was beautiful. She had no blood relatives, and all Boston—I mean the few whom we know—had gone out, and seemed swayed by an overpowering emotion which abolished all estrangement and self-consciousness. It was the sort of ending that would please her, could she know of it. An extraordinary and indefinable creature! I used often to feel coldly towards her on account of her way of taking people as a great society "business" proceeding, but now that her agitated life of tip-toe reaching in so many directions, of genuinest amiability, is over, pure tenderness asserts its own. Against that dark background of natural annihilation she seems to have been a pathetic little slender worm, writhing and curving blindly through its little day, expending such intensities of consciousness to terminate in that small grave.
She was a most peculiar person. I wish that you had known her whole life here more intimately, and understood its significance. You might then write a worthy article about her. For me, it is impossible to define her. She leaves a dreadful vacuum in Boston. I have often wondered whether I should survive her—and here it has come in the night, without the sound of a footstep, and the same world is here—but without her as its witness....
To Charles Eliot Norton
CAMBRIDGE, June 30, 1904.
Dear Charles,—I have just read the July "Atlantic," and am so moved by your Ruskin letters that I can't refrain from overflowing. They seem to me immortal documents—as the clouds clear away he will surely take his stable place as one of the noblest of the sons of men. Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes. The chief "cloud" is the bulk of "Modern Painters" and the other artistic writings, which have made us take him primarily as an art-connoisseur and critic. Regard all that as inessential, and his inconsistencies and extravagances fall out of sight and leave the Great Heart alone visible.
Do you suppose that there are many other correspondents of R. who will yield up their treasures in our time to the light? I wish that your modesty had not suppressed certain passages which evidently expressed too much regard for yourself. The point should have been his expression of that sort of thing—no matter to whom addressed! I understand and sympathize fully with his attitude about our war. Granted him and his date, that is the way he ought to have felt, and I revere him perhaps the more for it....
S. W.'s sudden defection is a pathetic thing! It makes one feel like closing the ranks.
Affectionately—to all of you—including Theodora,
W. J.
To L. T. Hobhouse
CHOCORUA, Aug. 12, 1904.
Dear Brother Hobhouse,—Don't you think it a tant soit peu scurvy trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the informed reader the reference is transparent—I say nothing of poor Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104 ff.)55 a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title the Right to Believe) in the guise of an alternative and substitute for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your charmingly written essay, substitute a travesty for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals, because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely vetoed, as certain champions of "science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world. You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from my polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk.
Your essay, granting that emphasis and barring the injustice to me, seems to me exquisite, and, taking it as a unit, I subscribe unreservedly to almost every positive word.—I say "positive," for I doubt whether you have seen enough of the extraordinarily invigorating effect of mind-cum-philosophy on certain people to justify your somewhat negative treatment of that subject; and I say "almost" because your distinction between "spurious" and "genuine" courage (page 91) reminds me a bit too much of "true" and "false" freedom, and other sanctimonious come-offs.—Could you not have made an equally sympathetic reading of me?
I shouldn't have cared a copper for the misrepresentation were it not a "summation of stimuli" affair. I have just been reading Bradley on Schiller in the July "Mind," and A. E. Taylor on the Will to Believe in the "McGill Quarterly" of Montreal. Both are vastly worse than you; and I cry to Heaven to tell me of what insane root my "leading contemporaries" have eaten, that they are so smitten with blindness as to the meaning of printed texts. Or are we others absolutely incapable of making our meaning clear?
I imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object. Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation; and each, for his contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties.
In my essay the evil shape was a vision of "Science" in the form of abstraction, priggishness and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the sterilest scientific prig and cad you know, compare him with the richest religious intellect you know, and you would not, any more than I would, give the former the exclusive right of way. But up to page 104 of your essay he will deem you altogether on his side.
Pardon the familiarity of this epistle. I like and admire your theory of Knowledge so much, and you re-duplicate (I don't mean copy) my views so beautifully in this article, that I hate to let you go unchidden.
Believe me, with the highest esteem (plus some indignation, for you ought to know better!), Yours faithfully,
WM. JAMES.
To Edwin D. Starbuck
Salisbury, Conn. Aug, 24, 1904.
Dear Starbuck,– …Of the strictures you make [in your review of my "Varieties"], the first one (undue emphasis on extreme case) is, I find, almost universally made; so it must in some sense be correct. Yet it would never do to study the passion of love on examples of ordinary liking or friendly affection, or that of homicidal pugnacity on examples of our ordinary impatiences with our kind. So here it must be that the extreme examples let us more deeply into the secrets of the religious life, explain why the tamer ones value their religion so much, tame though it be, because it is so continuous with a so much acuter ideal. But I have long been conscious that there is on this matter something to be said which neither my critics have said, nor I can say, and which I must therefore commit to the future.
The second stricture (in your paragraph 4 on pages 104 ff.) is of course deeply important, if true. At present I can see but vaguely just what sort of outer relations our inner organism might respond to, which our feelings and intellect interpret by religious thought. You ought to work your program for all it is worth in the way of growth in definiteness. I look forward with great eagerness to your forthcoming book, and meanwhile urge strongly that you should publish the advance article you speak of in Hall's new Journal. I can't see any possible risk. It will objectify a part of your material for you, and possibly, by arousing criticism, enable you to strengthen your points.
Your third stricture, about Higher Powers, is also very important, and I am not at all sure that you may not be right. I have frankly to confess that my "Varieties" carried "theory" as far as I could then carry it, and that I can carry it no farther today. I can't see clearly over that edge. Yet I am sure that tracks have got to be made there—I think that the fixed point with me is the conviction that our "rational" consciousness touches but a portion of the real universe and that our life is fed by the "mystical" region as well. I have no mystical experience of my own, but just enough of the germ of mysticism in me to recognize the region from which their voice comes when I hear it.
I was much disappointed in Leuba's review of my book in the "International Journal of Ethics." … I confess that the way in which he stamps out all mysticism whatever, using the common pathological arguments, seemed to me unduly crude. I wrote him an expostulatory letter, which evidently made no impression at all, and which he possibly might send you if you had the curiosity to apply.
I am having a happy summer, feeling quite hearty again. I congratulate you on being settled, though I know nothing of the place. I congratulate you and Mrs. Starbuck also on airy fairy Lilian, who makes, I believe, the third. Long may they live and make their parents proud. With best regards to you both, I am yours ever truly,
WM. JAMES.
The "expostulatory" letter to Professor Leuba began with a series of objections to statements which he had made, and continued with the passage which follows.
To James Henry Leuba
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 17, 1904.
My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely. The Divine, for my active life, is limited to abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differences of intensity may make one's whole centre of energy shift. Now, although I am so devoid of Gottesbewustsein in the directer and stronger sense, yet there is something in me which makes response when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me, "thither lies truth"—and I am sure it is not old theistic habits and prejudices of infancy. Those are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical germ. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but interpretative criticism (not of the mere "hysteria" and "nerves" order) it can energetically combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure non possumus: "Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every particular, or nothing. Therefore they are nothing, for anyone else than their owner." Why may they not be something, although not everything?
Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germ in us, that, I believe, is where we all should unhesitatingly be today.
Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe that we are in my position. Of course the "subliminal" theory is an inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is equally inessential.
I am letting loose a deluge on you! Don't reply at length, or at all. I hate to reply to anybody, and will sympathize with your silence. But I had to restate my position more clearly. Yours truly,
WM. JAMES.
The following document is not a letter, but a series of answers to a questionnaire upon the subject of religious belief, which was sent out in 1904 by Professor James B. Pratt of Williams College, and to which James filled out a reply at an unascertained date in the autumn of that year.
QUESTIONNAIRE 56
It is being realized as never before that religion, as one of the most important things in the life both of the community and of the individual, deserves close and extended study. Such study can be of value only if based upon the personal experiences of many individuals. If you are in sympathy with such study and are willing to assist in it, will you kindly write out the answers to the following questions and return them with this questionnaire, as soon as you conveniently can, to James B. Pratt, 20 Shepard Street, Cambridge, Mass.
Please answer the questions at length and in detail. Do not give philosophical generalizations, but your own personal experience.
1. What does religion mean to you personally? Is it
(1) A belief that something exists? Yes.
(2) An emotional experience? Not powerfully so, yet a social reality.
(3) A general attitude of the will toward God or toward righteousness! It involves these.
(4) Or something else?
If it has several elements, which is for you the most important? The social appeal for corroboration, consolation, etc., when things are going wrong with my causes (my truth denied), etc.
2. What do you mean by God? A combination of Ideality and (final) efficacity.
(1) Is He a person—if so, what do you mean by His being a person? He must be cognizant and responsive in some way.
(2) Or is He only a Force? He must do.
(3) Or is God an attitude of the Universe toward you? Yes, but more conscious. "God" to me, is not the only spiritual reality to believe in. Religion means primarily a universe of spiritual relations surrounding the earthly practical ones, not merely relations of "value," but agencies and their activities. I suppose that the chief premise for my hospitality towards the religious testimony of others is my conviction that "normal" or "sane" consciousness is so small a part of actual experience. What e'er be true, it is not true exclusively, as philistine scientific opinion assumes. The other kinds of consciousness bear witness to a much wider universe of experiences, from which our belief selects and emphasizes such parts as best satisfy our needs.
3. Why do you believe in God? Is it
(1) From some argument? Emphatically, no.
Or (2) Because you have experienced His presence? No, but rather because I need it so that it "must" be true.
Or (3) From authority, such as that of the Bible or of some prophetic person? Only the whole tradition of religious people, to which something in me makes admiring response.
Or (4) From any other reason? Only for the social reasons.
If from several of these reasons, please indicate carefully the order of their importance.
4. Or do you not so much believe in God as want to use Him? I can't use him very definitely, yet I believe. Do you accept Him not so much as a real existent Being, but rather as an ideal to live by? More as a more powerful ally of my own ideals. If you should become thoroughly convinced that there was no God, would it make any great difference in your life—either in happiness, morality, or in other respects? Hard to say. It would surely make some difference.
5. Is God very real to you, as real as an earthly friend, though different? Dimly [real]; not [as an earthly friend].
Do you feel that you have experienced His presence? If so, please describe what you mean by such an experience. Never.
How vague or how distinct is it? How does it affect you mentally and physically?
If you have had no such experience, do you accept the testimony of others who claim to have felt God's presence directly? Please answer this question with special care and in as great detail as possible. Yes! The whole line of testimony on this point is so strong that I am unable to pooh-pooh it away. No doubt there is a germ in me of something similar that makes response.
6. Do you pray, and if so, why? That is, is it purely from habit, and social custom, or do you really believe that God hears your prayers? I can't possibly pray—I feel foolish and artificial.
Is prayer with you one-sided or two-sided—i.e., do you sometimes feel that in prayer you receive something—such as strength or the divine spirit—from God? Is it a real communion?
7. What do you mean by "spirituality"? Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of "other worldly" fancy. Otherwise you have mere morality, or "taste."
Describe a typical spiritual person. Phillips Brooks.
8. Do you believe in personal immortality? Never keenly; but more strongly as I grow older. If so, why? Because I am just getting fit to live.
9. Do you accept the Bible as authority in religious matters? Are your religious faith and your religious life based on it? If so, how would your belief in God and your life toward Him and your fellow men be affected by loss of faith in the authority of the Bible? No. No. No. It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authorship can survive the reading of it.
10. What do you mean by a "religious experience"? Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more "home" to one.