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

Чтение книги онлайн.

      I am so glad to hear that Bay is doing so well, and doubly glad (as Mrs. Dibblee tells me from Anita) that H. J. is going to sit to her for his portrait. I am a bit sorry that the youthful Harry didn't accept your invitation, but his time was after all so short that it has been perhaps good for him to get the massive English impression. What times we live in! Dreyfus, Cuba, and Khartoum!—I keep well, though fragile as a worker. You will have heard of my Edinburgh appointment and my election to the Institut de France as Correspondant. The latter is silly, but the former a serious scrape out of which I am praying all the gods to help me, as the time for preparation is so short. All Cambridge friends are well. You heard of dear Child's death, last summer, I suppose. Good-bye! Write to me, dear old Rosina. Kiss Bay and Leslie—even effleurez your own cheek, for me. Give my best love to your mother, and believe me always your affectionate

      To Dickinson S. Miller

      Illustrious friend and Joy of my Liver,—I am much pleased to hear from you, for I have wished to know of your destinies, and Bakewell couldn't give me a very precise account. I congratulate you on getting your review of me off your hands—you must experience a relief similar to that of Christian when he lost his bag of sin. I imagine your account of its unsatisfactoriness is a little hyperæsthetic, and that what you have brooded over so long will, in spite of anything in the accidents of its production, prove solid and deep, and reveal ex pede the Hercules. Of course, if you do not unconditionally subscribe to my "Will to Believe" essay, it shows that you still are groping in the darkness of misunderstanding either of my meaning or of the truth; for in spite of "the bludgeonings of fate," my head is "bloody but unbowed" as to the rightness of my contention there, in both its parts. But we shall see; and I hope you are now free for more distant flights.

      I am extremely sorry to hear you have been not well again, even though you say you are so much better now. You ought to be entirely well and every inch a king. Remember that, whenever you need a change, your bed is made in this house for as many weeks as you care to stay. I know there will come feelings of disconsolateness over you occasionally, from being so out of the academic swim. But that is nothing! And while this time is on, you should think exclusively of its unique characteristics of blessedness, which will be irrecoverable when you are in the harness again.

      I spent the first six weeks after term began in trying to clear my table of encumbering tasks, in order to get at my own reading for the Gifford lectures. In vain. Each day brought its cargo, and I never got at my own work, until a fortnight ago the brilliant resolve was communicated to me, by divine inspiration, of not doing anything for anybody else, not writing a letter or looking at a MS., on any day until I should have done at least one hour of work for myself. If you spend your time preparing to be ready, you never will be ready. Since that wonderful insight into the truth, despair has given way to happiness. I do my hour or hour and a half of free reading; and don't care what extraneous interest suffers.... Good-night, dear old Miller. Your ever loving,

      To Dickinson S. Miller

      Your account of Josiah Royce is adorable—we have both gloated over it all day. The best intellectual character-painting ever limned by an English pen! Since teaching the "Conception of God," I have come to perceive what I didn't trust myself to believe before, that looseness of thought is R.'s essential element. He wants it. There isn't a tight joint in his system; not one. And yet I thought that a mind that could talk me blind and black and numb on mathematics and logic, and whose favorite recreation is works on those subjects, must necessarily conceal closeness and exactitudes of ratiocination that I hadn't the wit to find out. But no! he is the Rubens of philosophy. Richness, abundance, boldness, color, but a sharp contour never, and never any perfection. But isn't fertility better than perfection? Deary me! Ever thine,

      To Henry Rutgers Marshall

      Dear Marshall,—I will hand your paper to Eliot, though I am sure that nothing will come of it in this University.

      Moreover, it strikes me that no good will ever come to Art as such from the analytic study of Æsthetics—harm rather, if the abstractions could in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things done on system with all the intangible personal je ne sçais quaw left out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition—it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind—yet what miles away in point of preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas are all that your aesthetics will give.

      Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's my sentiments.

      Thanks for the "cudgels" you are taking up for the "Will to Believe." Miller's article seems to be based solely on my little catchpenny title. Where would he have been if I had called my article "a critique of pure faith" or words to that effect? As it is, he doesn't touch a single one of my points, and slays a mere abstraction. I shall greedily read what you write.

      I have been too lazy and hard pressed to write to you about your "Instinct and Reason," which contains many good things in the way of psychology and morals, but which—I tremble to say it before you—on the whole does disappoint me. The religious part especially seems to me to rest on too narrow a phenomenal base, and the formula to be too simple and abstract. But it is a good contribution to American scholarship all the same, and I hope the Philippine Islanders will be forced to study it.

      Forgive my brevity and levity. Yours ever,

      To Henry Rutgers Marshall

      Dear Marshall,—Your invitation was perhaps the finest "tribute" the Jameses have ever received, but it is plumb impossible that either of us should accept. Pinned down, by ten thousand jobs and duties, like two Gullivers by the threads of the Lilliputians.

      I should "admire" to see the Kiplings again, but it is no go. Now that by his song-making power he is the mightiest force in the formation of the "Anglo-Saxon" character, I wish he would hearken a bit more to his deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal less of a "burden" to carry. We're the most loathsomely canting crew that God ever made. Kipling knows perfectly well that our camps in the tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should represent us to ourselves in that light. I wish he would try a bit interpreting the savage soul to us, as he could, instead of using such official and conventional phrases as "half-devil and half-child," which leaves the whole insides out.

      Heigh ho!

      I have only had time to glance at the first ½ of your paper on Miller. I am delighted you are thus going for him. His whole paper is an ignoratio elenchi, and he doesn't touch a single one of my positions.

      Believe me with great regrets and thanks, yours ever,

      To Mrs. Henry Whitman

      Dear Mrs. Whitman,—I got your penciled letter the day before leaving. The R.R. train СКАЧАТЬ