To Theodore Flournoy
Stanford University, Feb. 9, 1906.
Dear Flournoy.—Your post-card of Jan. 22nd arrives and reminds me how little I have communicated with you during the past twelve months....
Let me begin by congratulating Mlle. Alice, but more particularly Mr. Werner, on the engagement which you announce. Surely she is a splendid prize for anyone to capture. I hope that it has been a romantic love-affair, and will remain so to the end. May her paternal and maternal example be the model which their married life will follow! They could find no better model. You do not tell the day of the wedding—probably it is not yet appointed.
Yes! [Richard] Hodgson's death was ultra-sudden. He fell dead while playing a violent game of "hand-ball." He was tremendously athletic and had said to a friend only a week before that he thought he could reasonably count on twenty-five years more of life. None of his work was finished, vast materials amassed, which no one can ever get acquainted with as he had gradually got acquainted; so now good-bye forever to at least two unusually solid and instructive books which he would have soon begun to write on "psychic" subjects. As a man, Hodgson was splendid, a real man; as an investigator, it is my private impression that he lately got into a sort of obsession about Mrs. Piper, cared too little for other clues, and continued working with her when all the sides of her mediumship were amply exhibited. I suspect that our American Branch of the S.P.R. will have to dissolve this year, for lack of a competent secretary. Hodgson was our only worker, except Hyslop, and he is engaged in founding an "Institute" of his own, which will employ more popular methods. To tell the truth, I 'm rather glad of the prospect of the Branch ending, for the Piper-investigation—and nothing else—had begun to bore me to extinction....
To change the subject—you ought to see this extraordinary little University. It was founded only fourteen years ago in the absolute wilderness, by a pair of rich Californians named Stanford, as a memorial to their only child, a son who died at 16. Endowed with I know not how many square miles of land, which some day will come into the market and yield a big income, it has already funds that yield $750,000 yearly, and buildings, of really beautiful architecture, that have been paid for out of income, and have cost over $5,000,000. (I mention the cost to let you see that they must be solid.) There are now 1500 students of both sexes, who pay nothing for tuition, and a town of 15,000 inhabitants has grown up a mile away, beyond the gates. The landscape is exquisite and classical, San Francisco only an hour and a quarter away by train; the climate is one of the most perfect in the world, life is absolutely simple, no one being rich, servants almost unattainable (most of the house-work being done by students who come in at odd hours), many of them Japanese, and the professors' wives, I fear, having in great measure to do their own cooking. No social excesses or complications therefore. In fact, nothing but essentials, and all the essentials. Fine music, for example, every afternoon, in the Church of the University. There couldn't be imagined a better environment for an intellectual man to teach and work in, for eight or nine months in the year, if he were then free to spend three or four months in the crowded centres of civilization—for the social insipidity is great here, and the historic vacuum and silence appalling, and one ought to be free to change.
Unfortunately the authorities of the University seem not to be gifted with imagination enough to see its proper rôle. Its geographical environment and material basis being unique, they ought to aim at unique quality all through, and get sommités to come here to work and teach, by offering large stipends. They might, I think, thus easily build up something very distinguished. Instead of which, they pay small sums to young men who chafe at not being able to travel, and whose wives get worn out with domestic drudgery. The whole thing might be Utopian; it is only half-Utopian. A characteristic American affair! But the half-success is great enough to make one see the great advantages that come to this country from encouraging public-spirited millionaires to indulge their freaks, however eccentric. In what the Stanfords have already done, there is an assured potentiality of great things of some sort for all future time. My coming here is an exception. They have had psychology well represented from the first by Frank Angell and Miss Martin; but no philosophy except for a year at a time. I start a new régime—next year they will have two good professors.
I lecture three times a week to 400 listeners, printing a syllabus daily, and making them read Paulsen's textbook for examinations. I find it hard work,65 and only pray that I may have strength to run till June without collapsing. The students, though rustic, are very earnest and wholesome.
I am pleased, but also amused, by what you say of Woodbridge's Journal: "la palme est maintenant à l'Amérique." It is true that a lot of youngsters in that Journal are doing some real thinking, but of all the bad writing that the world has seen, I think that our American writing is getting to be the worst. X–'s ideas have unchained formlessness of expression that beats the bad writing of the Hegelian epoch in Germany. I can hardly believe you sincere when you praise that journal as you do. I am so busy teaching that I do no writing and but little reading this year. I have declined to go to Paris next year, and also declined an invitation to Berlin, as "International Exchange" [Professor]. The year after, if asked, I may go to Paris—but never to Berlin. We have had Ostwald, a most delightful human Erscheinung, as international exchange at Harvard this year. But I don't believe in the system....
To F. C. S. Schiller
Hotel Del Monte,Monterey, Cal., Apr. 7, 1906.
What I really want to write about is Papini, the concluding chapter of his "Crepuscolo dei Filosofi," and the February number of the "Leonardo." Likewise Dewey's "Beliefs and Realities," in the "Philosophical Review" for March. I must be very damp powder, slow to burn, and I must be terribly respectful of other people, for I confess that it is only after reading these things (in spite of all you have written to the same effect, and in spite of your tone of announcing judgment to a sinful world), that I seem to have grasped the full import for life and regeneration, the great perspective of the programme, and the renovating character for all things, of Humanism; and the outwornness as of a scarecrow's garments, simulating life by flapping in the wind of nightfall, of all intellectualism, and the blindness and deadness of all who worship intellectualist idols, the Royces and Taylors, and, worse than all, their followers, who, with no inward excuse of nature (being too unoriginal really to prefer anything), just blunder on to the wrong scent, when it is so easy to catch the right one, and then stick to it with the fidelity of inorganic matter. Ha! ha! would that I were young again with this inspiration! Papini is a jewel! To think of that little Dago putting himself ahead of every one of us (even of you, with his Uomo-Dio) at a single stride. And what a writer! and what fecundity! and what courage (careless of nicknames, for it is so easy to call him now the Cyrano de Bergerac of Philosophy)! and what humor and what truth! Dewey's powerful stuff seems also to ring the death-knell of a sentenced world. Yet none of them will see it—Taylor will still write his refutations, etc., etc., when the living world will all be drifting after us. It is queer to be assisting at the éclosion of a great new mental epoch, life, religion, and philosophy in one—I wish I didn't have to lecture, so that I might bear some part of the burden of writing it all out, as we must do, pushing it into all sort of details. But I must for one year longer. We don't get back till June, but pray tell Wells (whose address fehlt mir) to make our house his headquarters if he gets to Boston and finds it the least convenient to do so. Our boys will hug him to their bosoms. Ever thine,
W. J.
The San Francisco earthquake occurred at about five o'clock in the morning on April 18. Rumors of the destruction wrought in the city reached Stanford within a couple of hours and were easily credited, for buildings had been shaken down at Stanford. Miss L. J. Martin, a member of the philosophical department, was thrown into great anxiety about relatives of hers who were in the city, and James offered to accompany her in a search for them, and left Stanford with her by an early morning train. He also promised Mrs. Wm. F. Snow to try to get her news of her husband. Miss Martin found her relatives, and James met Dr. Snow early in the afternoon, and then spent several hours in wandering about the stricken city. He subsequently wrote an account of the disaster, which may be found in "Memories and Studies."66
To Miss Frances R. Morse
Stanford University, Apr. 22, 1906.
Dearest Fanny,—Three letters from you and nary one from us in all these weeks! Well, I have been heavily burdened, and although disposed to write, have kept postponing; and with Alice—cooking, washing dishes and doing housework, as well as keeping up a large social life—it has been very much the same. All is now over, since the earthquake; I mean that lectures and syllabuses are called off, and no more exams to be held ("ill-wind," etc.), so one can write. We shall get East again as soon as we can manage it, and tell you face to face. We can now pose as experts on Earthquakes—pardon the egotistic form of talking about the latter, but it makes it more real. The last thing Bakewell said to me, while I was leaving Cambridge, was: "I hope they'll treat you to a little bit of an earthquake while you're there. It's a pity you shouldn't have that local experience." Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was, "Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an entity that had been waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying, "Now, go it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by a will, so vicious was the temper displayed—everything down, in the room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the dreadful news from San Francisco.
I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that she must see what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service.
But you will know all these details by the papers better than I know them now, before this reaches you, and in three weeks we shall be back.
I am very glad that Jim's [Putnam] lectures went off so well. He wrote me himself a good letter—won't you, by the way, send him this one as a partial answer?—and his syllabus was first-rate and the stuff must have been helpful. It is jolly to think of both him and Marian really getting off together to enjoy themselves! But between Vesuvius and San Francisco enjoyment has small elbow-room. Love to your mother, dearest Fanny, to Mary and the men folks, from us both. Your ever affectionate,
W. J.
A few days after the earthquake, train-service from Stanford to the East was reëstablished and James and his wife returned to Cambridge. The reader will infer correctly from the next letter that Henry James (and William James, Jr., who was staying with him in Rye) had been in great anxiety and had been by no means reassured by the brief cablegram which was the only personal communication that it was possible to send them during the days immediately following the disaster.
To Henry James and William James, Jr
CAMBRIDGE, May 9, 1906.
Dearest Brother and Son,—Your cablegram of response was duly received, and we have been also "joyous" in the thought of your being together. I knew, of course, Henry, that you would be solicitous about us in the earthquake, but didn't reckon at all on the extremity of your anguish as evinced by your frequent cablegrams home, and finally by the letter to Harry which arrived a couple of days ago and told how you were unable to settle down to any other occupation, the thought of our mangled forms, hollow eyes, starving bodies, minds insane with fear, haunting you so. We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety on your part, I say, and so never thought of cabling you direct, as we might well have done from Oakland on the day we left, namely April 27th. I much regret this callousness on our part. For all the anguish was yours; and in general this experience only rubs in what I have always known, that in battles, sieges and other great calamities, the pathos and agony is in general solely felt by those at a distance; and although physical pain is suffered most by its immediate victims, those at the scene of action have no sentimental suffering whatever. Everyone at San Francisco seemed in a good hearty frame of mind; there was work for every moment of the day and a kind of uplift in the sense of a "common lot" that took away the sense of loneliness that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to the more usual kind of misfortune that may befall a man. But it was a queer sight, on our journey through the City on the 26th (eight days after the disaster), to see the inmates of the houses of the quarter left standing, all cooking their dinners at little brick camp-fires in the middle of the streets, the chimneys being condemned. If such a disaster had to happen, somehow it couldn't have chosen a better place than San Francisco (where everyone knew about camping, and was familiar with the creation of civilizations out of the bare ground), and at five-thirty in the morning, when few fires were lighted and everyone, after a good sleep, was in bed. Later, there would have been great loss of life in the streets, and the more numerous foci of conflagration would have burned the city in one day instead of four, and made things vastly worse.
In general you may be sure that when any disaster befalls our country it will be you only who are wringing of hands, and we who are smiling with "interest or laughing with gleeful excitement." I didn't hear one pathetic word uttered at the scene of disaster, though of course the crop of "nervous wrecks" is very likely to come in a month or so.
Although we have been home six days, such has been the stream of broken occupations, people to see, and small urgent jobs to attend to, that I have written no letter till now. Today, one sees more clearly and begins to rest. "Home" looks extraordinarily pleasant, and though damp and chilly, it is the divine budding moment of the year. Not, however, the lustrous light and sky of Stanford University....
I have just read your paper on Boston in the "North American Review." I am glad you threw away the scabbard and made your critical remarks so straight. What you say about "pay" here being the easily won "salve" for privations, in view of which we cease to "mind" them, is as true as it is strikingly pat. Les intellectuels, wedged between the millionaires and the handworkers, are the really pinched class here. They feel the frustrations and they can't get the salve. My attainment of so much pay in the past few years brings home to me what an all-benumbing salve it is. That whole article is of your best. We long to hear from W., Jr. No word yet. Your ever loving,
W. J.
In "The Energies of Men" there is a long quotation from an unnamed European correspondent who had been subjecting himself to Yoga disciplinary exercise. What follows is a comment written upon the first receipt of the report quoted in the "Energies."
To W. Lutoslawski
CAMBRIDGE, May 6, 1906.
Your long and beautiful letter about Yoga, etc., greets me on my return from California. It is a most precious human document, and some day, along with that sketch of your religious evolution and other shorter letters of yours, it must see the light of day. What strikes me first in it is the evidence of improved moral "tone"—a calm, firm, sustained joyousness, hard to describe, and striking a new note in your epistles—which is already a convincing argument of the genuineness of the improvement wrought in you by Yoga practices....
You are mistaken about my having tried Yoga discipline—I never meant to suggest that. I have read several books (A. B., by the way, used to be a student of mine, but in spite of many noble qualities, he always had an unbalanced mind—obsessed by certain morbid ideas, etc.), and in the slightest possible way tried breathing exercises. These go terribly against the grain with me, are extremely disagreeable, and, even when tried this winter (somewhat perseveringly), to put myself asleep, after lying awake at night, failed to have any soporific effect. What impresses me most in your narrative is the obstinate strength of will shown by yourself and your chela in your methodical abstentions and exercises. When could I hope for such will-power? I find, when my general energy is in Anspruch genommen by hard lecturing and other professional work, that then particularly what little ascetic energy I have has to be remitted, because the exertion of inhibitory and stimulative will required increases my general fatigue instead of "tonifying" me.
But your sober experience gives me new hopes. Your whole narrative suggests in me the wonder whether the Yoga discipline may not be, after all, in all its phases, simply a methodical way of waking up deeper levels of will-power than are habitually used, and thereby increasing the individual's vital tone and energy. I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed. Pierre Janet discussed lately some cases of pathological impulsion or obsession in what he has called the "psychasthenic" type of individual, bulimia, exaggerated walking, morbid love of feeling pain, and explains the phenomenon as based on the underlying sentiment d'incomplétude, as he calls it, or sentiment de l'irréel with which these patients are habitually afflicted, and which they find is abolished by the violent appeal to some exaggerated activity or other, discovered accidentally perhaps, and then used habitually. I was reminded of his article in reading your descriptions and prescriptions. May the Yoga practices not be, after all, methods of getting at our deeper functional levels? And thus only be substitutes for entirely different crises that may occur in other individuals, religious crises, indignation-crises, love-crises, etc.?
What you say of diet is in striking accordance with the views lately made popular by Horace Fletcher—I dare say you have heard of them. You see I am trying to generalize the Yoga idea, and redeem it from the pretension that, for example, there is something intrinsically holy in the various grotesque postures of Hatha Yoga. I have spoken with various Hindus, particularly with three last winter, one a Yogi and apostle of Vedanta; one a "Christian" of scientific training; one a Bramo-Somaj professor. The former made great claims of increase of "power," but admitted that those who had it could in no way demonstrate it ad oculos, to outsiders. The other two both said that Yoga was less and less frequently practised by the more intellectual, and that the old-fashioned Guru was becoming quite a rarity.
I believe with you, fully, that the so-called "normal man" of commerce, so to speak, the healthy philistine, is a mere extract from the potentially realizable individual whom he represents, and that we all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. The practical problem is "how to get at them." And the answer varies with the individual. Most of us never can, or never do get at them. You have indubitably got at your own deeper levels by the Yoga methods. I hope that what you have gained will never again be lost to you. You must keep there! My deeper levels seem very hard to find—I am so rebellious at all formal and prescriptive methods—a dry and bony individual, repelling fusion, and avoiding voluntary exertion. No matter, art is long! and qui vivra verra. I shall try fasting and again try breathing—discovering perhaps some individual rhythm that is more tolerable....