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

Autographically written, and spelt spontaneously.

Dear Holt,—The Introduction to filosofy is what I ment—I dont no the other book.

I will try Nordau's Entartung this summer—as a rule however it duzn't profit me to read Jeremiads against evil—the example of a little good has more effect.

A propo of kitchen ranges, I wish you wood remoov your recommendation from that Boynton Furnace Company's affair. We have struggld with it for five years—lost 2 cooks in consequens—burnt countless tons of extra coal, never had anything decently baikt, and now, having got rid of it for 15 dollars, are having a happy kitchen for the 1st time in our experience—all through your unprinsipld recommendation! You ought to hear my wife sware when she hears your name!

I will try about a translator for Nordau—though the only man I can think of needs munny more than fame, and coodn't do the job for pure love of the publisher or author, or on an unsertainty.

Dear H.,—I have been here for three days at my co-psychologist Baldwin's house, presiding over a meeting of the American Association of Psychologists, which has proved a very solid and successful affair. 3 3 At this meeting he delivered a presidential address "On the Knowing of Things Together," a part of which is reprinted in The Meaning of Truth , p. 43, under the title, "The Tigers in India." Vide , also, Collected Essays and Reviews . Strange to say, we are getting to be veterans, and the brunt of the discussions was borne by former students of mine. It is a very healthy movement. Alice is with me, the weather is frosty clear and cold, touching zero this A.M. and the country robed in snow. Princeton is a beautiful place....

I have been reading Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" with immense gusto. It almost makes me a Liberal-Unionist! If I mistake not, it will have a profound effect eventually, and it is a pleasure to see old England coming to the fore every time with some big stroke. There is more real philosophy in such a book than in fifty German ones of which the eminence consists in heaping up subtleties and technicalities about the subject. The English genius makes the vitals plain by scuffing the technicalities away. B. is a great man....

My dear Friend,—About the 22nd! I will come if you command it; but reflect on my situation ere you do so. Just reviving from the addled and corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get there; just about to get a little health into me, a little simplification and solidification and purification and sanification—things which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken forest—oh, Madam, Madam! do you know what medicinal things you ask me to give up? Alas!

I aspire downwards, and really am nothing, not becoming a savage as I would be, and failing to be the civilizee that I really ought to be content with being! But I wish that you also aspired to the wilderness. There are some nooks and summits in that Adirondack region where one can really "recline on one's divine composure," and, as long as one stays up there, seem for a while to enjoy one's birth-right of freedom and relief from every fever and falsity. Stretched out on such a shelf,—with thee beside me singing in the wilderness,—what babblings might go on, what judgment-day discourse!

Command me to give it up and return, if you will, by telegram addressed "Adirondack Lodge, North Elba, N.Y." In any case I shall return before the end of the month, and later shall be hanging about Cambridge some time in July, giving lectures (for my sins) in the Summer School. I am staying now with a cousin on Otsego Lake, a dear old country-place that has been in their family for a century, and is rich and ample and reposeful. The Kipling visit went off splendidly—he's a regular little brick of a man; but it's strange that with so much sympathy with the insides of every living thing, brute or human, drunk or sober, he should have so little sympathy with those of a Yankee—who also is, in the last analysis, one of God's creatures. I have stopped at Williamstown, at Albany, at Amsterdam, at Utica, at Syracuse, and finally here, each time to visit human beings with whom I had business of some sort or other. The best was Benj. Paul Blood at Amsterdam, a son of the soil, but a man with extraordinary power over the English tongue, of whom I will tell you more some day. I will by the way enclose some clippings from his latest "effort." "Yes, Paul is quite a correspondent !" as a citizen remarked to me from whom I inquired the way to his dwelling. Don't you think "correspondent" rather a good generic term for "man of letters," from the point of view of the country-town newspaper reader?…

Now, dear, noble, incredibly perfect Madam, you won't take ill my reluctance about going to Beverly, even to your abode, so soon. I am a badly mixed critter, and I experience a certain organic need for simplification and solitude that is quite imperious, and so vital as actually to be respectable even by others. So be indulgent to your ever faithful and worshipful,

My dear Howison,—How you have misunderstood the application of my word "trivial" as being discriminatively applied to your pluralistic idealism! Quite the reverse—if there be a philosophy that I believe in, it's that. The word came out of one who is unfit to be a philosopher because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being. I am a victim of neurasthenia and of the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it. And philosophic literature will often seem to me the hollowest thing. My word trivial was a general reflection exhaling from this mood, vile indeed in a supposed professor. Where it will end with me, I do not know. I wish I could give it all up. But perhaps it is a grand climacteric and will pass away. At present I am philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next year, if I can do it at all. And I envy you your stalwart and steadfast enthusiasm and faith. Always devotedly yours,

My dear Flournoy,—Ever since last January an envelope addressed to you has been lying before my eyes on my library table. I mention this to assure you that you have not been absent from my thoughts; but I will waste no time or paper in making excuses. As the sage Emerson says, when you visit a man do not degrade the occasion with apologies for not having visited him before. Visit him now! Make him feel that the highest truth has come to see him in you its lowliest organ. I don't know about the highest truth transpiring through this letter, but I feel as if there were plenty of affection and personal gossip to express themselves. To begin with, your photograph and Mrs. Flournoy's were splendid. What we need now is the photographs of those fair demoiselles ! I may say that one reason of my long silence has been the hope that when I wrote I should have my wife's photograph to send you. But alas! it has not been taken yet. She is well, very well, and is now in our little New Hampshire country-place with the children, living very quietly and happily. We have had a rather large train de maison hitherto, and this summer we are shrunken to our bare essentials—a very pleasant change.