William James - The Letters of William James, Vol. 2

My dear Flournoy,—Your altogether precious and delightful letter reached me duly, and you see I am making a not altogether too dilatory reply. In the first place, we congratulate you upon the new-comer, and think if she only proves as satisfactory a damsel as her charming elder sisters, you will never have any occasion to regret that she is not a boy. I hope that Madame Flournoy is by this time thoroughly strong and well, and that everything is perfect with the baby. I should like to have been at Munich with you; I have heard a good many accounts of the jollity of the proceedings there, but on the whole I did a more wholesome thing to stay in my own country, of which the dangers and dark sides are singularly exaggerated in Europe.

Your lamentations on your cerebral state make me smile, knowing, as I do, under all your subjective feelings, how great your vigor is. Of course I sympathize with you about the laboratory, and advise you, since it seems to me you are in a position to make conditions rather than have them imposed on you, simply to drop it and teach what you prefer. Whatever the latter may be, it will be as good for the students as if they had something else from you in its place, and I see no need in this world, when there is someone provided somewhere to do everything, for anyone of us to do what he does least willingly and well.

I have got rid of the laboratory forever, and should resign my place immediately if they reimposed its duties upon me. The results that come from all this laboratory work seem to me to grow more and more disappointing and trivial. What is most needed is new ideas. For every man who has one of them one may find a hundred who are willing to drudge patiently at some unimportant experiment. The atmosphere of your mind is in an extraordinary degree sane and balanced on philosophical matters. That is where your forte lies, and where your University ought to see that its best interests lie in having you employed. Don't consider this advice impertinent. Your temperament is such that I think you need to be strengthened from without in asserting your right to carry out your true vocation.

Everything goes well with us here. The boys are developing finely; both of them taller than I am, and Peggy healthy and well. I have just been giving a course of public lectures of which I enclose you a ticket to amuse you. 12 12 Eight lectures on "Abnormal Mental States" were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, but were never published. Their several titles were "Dreams and Hypnotism," "Hysteria," "Automatisms," "Multiple Personality," "Demoniacal Possession," "Witchcraft," "Degeneration," "Genius." In a letter to Professor Howison (Apr. 5, 1897) James said, "In these lectures I did not go into psychical research so-called, and although the subjects were decidedly morbid, I tried to shape them towards optimistic and hygienic conclusions, and the audience regarded them as decidedly anti-morbid in their tone." The audience, a thousand in number, kept its numbers to the last. I was careful not to tread upon the domains of psychical research, although many of my hearers were eager that I should do so. I am teaching Kant for the first time in my life , and it gives me much satisfaction. I am also sending a collection of old essays through the press, of which I will send you a copy as soon as they appear; I am sure of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I am afraid that what you never will appreciate is their wonderful English style! Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison!

Our political crisis is over, but the hard times still endure. Lack of confidence is a disease from which convalescence is not quick. I doubt, notwithstanding certain appearances, whether the country was ever morally in as sound a state as it now is, after all this discussion. And the very silver men, who have been treated as a party of dishonesty, are anything but that. They very likely are victims of the economic delusion, but their intentions are just as good as those of the other side....

If you meet my friend Ritter, please give him my love. I shall write to you again ere long eigenhändig . Meanwhile believe me, with lots of love to you all, especially to ces demoiselles , and felicitations to their mother, Always yours,

My wife wishes to convey to Madame Flournoy her most loving regards and hopes for the little one.

James had already been invited to deliver a course of "Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion" at the University of Edinburgh. He had not yet accepted for a definite date; but he had begun to collect illustrative material for the proposed lectures. A large number of references to such material were supplied to him by Mr. Henry W. Rankin of East Northfield.

Dear Mr. Rankin,—A pause in lecturing, consequent upon our midyear examinations having begun, has given me a little respite, and I am paying a three-days' visit upon an old friend here, meaning to leave for New York tomorrow where I have a couple of lectures to give. It is an agreeable moment of quiet and enables me to write a letter or two which I have long postponed, and chiefly one to you, who have given me so much without asking anything in return.

One of my lectures in New York is at the Academy of Medicine before the Neurological Society, the subject being "Demoniacal Possession." I shall of course duly advertise the Nevius book. 13 13 Demon Possession and Allied Themes , by John C. Nevius. I am not as positive as you are in the belief that the obsessing agency is really demonic individuals. I am perfectly willing to adopt that theory if the facts lend themselves best to it; for who can trace limits to the hierarchies of personal existence in the world? But the lower stages of mere automatism shade off so continuously into the highest supernormal manifestations, through the intermediary ones of imitative hysteria and "suggestibility," that I feel as if no general theory as yet would cover all the facts. So that the most I shall plead for before the neurologists is the recognition of demon possession as a regular "morbid-entity" whose commonest homologue today is the "spirit-control" observed in test-mediumship, and which tends to become the more benignant and less alarming, the less pessimistically it is regarded. This last remark seems certainly to be true. Of course I shall not ignore the sporadic cases of old-fashioned malignant possession which still occur today. I am convinced that we stand with all these things at the threshold of a long inquiry, of which the end appears as yet to no one, least of all to myself. And I believe that the best theoretic work yet done in the subject is the beginning made by F. W. H. Myers in his papers in the S. P. R. Proceedings. The first thing is to start the medical profession out of its idiotically conceited ignorance of all such matters—matters which have everywhere and at all times played a vital part in human history.

You have written me at different times about conversion, and about miracles, getting as usual no reply, but not because I failed to heed your words, which come from a deep life-experience of your own evidently, and from a deep acquaintance with the experiences of others. In the matter of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks . But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict of two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion-crisis, the higher loves and powers come definitively to gain the upper-hand and expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down in the position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases psychologically , and leaves all the religious importance to the result which it has on any other theory.