Part 34

The next letters relate to the "Literary Remains of Henry James," which had just been published, and in which William James had collected a number of his father's papers and edited them with an introductory essay on their author's philosophy. Needless to say, the two letters to Godkin have not been included among these with any thought of the unfortunate review to which they refer. They furnish too good an illustration of James's loyalty and magnanimity to be omitted. If more critics, and more of the criticized, were to cultivate the manliness and generosity with which James always entered discussion, there would be less reviewers "never-quite-forgiven," and less feuds in the world of science.

To E. L. Godkin.

CAMBRIDGE, [Feb.] 16, 1885.

MY DEAR GODKIN,--Doesn't the impartiality which I suppose is striven for in the "Nation," sometimes overshoot the mark "and fall on t'other side"? Poor Harry's books seem always given out to critics with antipathy to his literary temperament; and now for this only and last review of my father--a writer exclusively religious--a personage seems to have been selected for whom the religious life is complete terra incognita. A severe review by one interested in the subject is one thing; a contemptuous review by one with the subject out of his sight is another.

Make no reply to this! One must disgorge his bile.

I was taken ill in Philadelphia the day after seeing you, and had to return home after some days without stopping in N.Y. I may get there the week after next, and if so shall claim one dinner, over which I trust no cloud will be cast by the beginning of this note! With best respects to Mrs. Godkin, always truly yours

WM. JAMES.

To E. L. Godkin.

CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 19, 1885.

MY DEAR GODKIN,--Your cry of remorse or regret is so "whole-souled" and complete that I should not be human were I not melted almost to tears by it, and sorry I "ever spoke to you as I did." I felt pretty sure that you had no positive oversight of the thing in this case, but I addressed you as the official head. And my emotion was less that of filial injury than of irritation at what seemed to me editorial stupidity in giving out the book to the wrong sort of person altogether--a Theist of some sort being the only proper reviewer. I am heartily sorry that the thing should have distressed you so much more than it did me. You can take your consolation in the fact that it has now afforded you an opportunity for the display of those admirable qualities of the heart which your friends know, but which the ordinary readers of the "Nation" probably do not suspect to slumber beneath the gory surface of that savage sheet.

I hear that you are soon coming to give us some political economy. I am very glad on every account, and suppose Mrs. Godkin will come mit. Always truly yours

WM. JAMES.

To Shadworth H. Hodgson.

CAMBRIDGE, 20 Feb., 1885.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--Your letter of the 7th was most welcome. Anything responsive about my poor old father's writing falls most gratefully upon my heart. For I fear he found me pretty unresponsive during his lifetime; and that through my means any post-mortem response should come seems a sort of atonement. You would have enjoyed knowing him. I know of no one except Carlyle who had such a smiting Ursprünglichkeit of intuition, and such a deep sort of humor where human nature was concerned. He bowled one over in such a careless way. He was like Carlyle in being no reasoner at all, in the sense in which philosophers are reasoners. Reasoning was only an unfortunate necessity of exposition for them both. His ideas, however, were the exact inversion of Carlyle's; and he had nothing to correspond to Carlyle's insatiable learning of historic facts and memory. As you say, the world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him. Those elements were very deep ones, and had theological names. Under "Man" he would willingly have included all flesh, even that resident in Sirius or ethereal worlds. But he felt no need of positively looking so far. He was the humanest and most genial being in his impulses whom I have ever personally known, and had a bigness and power of nature that everybody felt. I thank you heartily for your interest. I wish that somebody could take up something from his system into a system more articulately scientific. As it is, most people will feel the presence of something real and true for the while they read, and go away and presently, unable to dovetail into their own framework, forget it altogether.

I am hoping to write you a letter ere long, a letter philosophical. I am going over Idealism again, and mean to review your utterances on the subject. You know that, to quote what Gurney said one evening, to attain to assimilating your thought is the chief purpose of one's life. But you know also how hard it is for the likes of me to write, and how much that is felt is unthought, and that as thought goes and must go unspoken. Brother Royce tells me he has sent you his "Religious Aspect of Philosophy." He is a wonderfully powerful fellow, not yet thirty, and this book seems to me to have a real fresh smell of the Earth about it. You will enjoy it, I know. I am very curious to hear what you think of his brand-new argument for Absolute Idealism.

I and mine are well. But the precious time as usual slips away with little work done. Happy you, whose time is all your own!

WM. JAMES

To Henry James.

CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 1, 1885.

...I am running along quite smoothly, and my eyes,--you never knew such an improvement! It has continued gradually, so that practically I can use them all I will. It saves my life. Why it should come now, when, bully them as I would, it wouldn't come in the past few years, is one of the secrets of the nervous system which the last trump, but nothing earlier, may reveal. A week's recess begins today, and the day after tomorrow I shall start for the South Shore to look up summer quarters. I want to try how sailing suits me as a summer kill-time. The walking in Keene Valley suits me not, and driving is too "cost-playful." I have made a start with my psychology which I shall work at, temperately, through the vacation and hope to get finished a year from next fall, sans faute. Then shall the star of your romances be eclipst!...

To Shadworth H. Hodgson.

NEWPORT, Dec. 30, 1885.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--I have just read your "Philosophy and Experience" address, and re-read with much care your "Dialogue on Free Will" in the last "Mind." I thank you kindly for the address. But isn't philosophy a sad mistress, estranging the more intimately those who in all other respects are most intimately united,--although 'tis true she unites them afresh by their very estrangement! I feel for the first time now, after these readings, as if I might be catching sight of your foundations. Always hitherto has there been something elusive, a sense that what I caught could not be all. Now I feel as if it might be all, and yet for me 'tis not enough.

Your "method" (which surely after this needs no additional expository touch) I seem at last to understand, but it shrinks in the understanding. For what is your famous "two aspects" principle more than the postulate that the world is thoroughly intelligible in nature? And what the practical outcome of the distinction between whatness and thatness save the sending us to experience to ascertain the connections among things, and the declaration that no amount of insight into their intrinsic qualities will account for their existence? I can now get no more than that out of the method, which seems in truth to me an over-subtle way of getting at and expressing pretty simple truths, which others share who know nothing of your formulations. In fact your wondrously delicate retouchings and discriminations appear rather to darken the matter from the point of view of teaching. One gains much by the way, of course, that he would have lost by a shorter path, but one risks losing the end altogether. (I reserve what you say at the end of both articles about Conscience, etc.--which is original and beautiful and which I feel I have not yet assimilated. I will only ask whether all you say about the decisions of conscience implying a future verification does not hold of scientific decisions as well, so that all reflective cognitive judgments, as well as practical judgments, project themselves ideally into eternity?)

As for the Free Will article, I have very little to say, for it leaves entirely untouched what seems to me the only living issue involved. The paper is an exquisite piece of literary goldsmith's work,--nothing like it in that respect since Berkeley,--but it hangs in the air of speculation and touches not the earth of life, and the beautiful distinctions it keeps making gratify only the understanding which has no end in view but to exercise its eyes by the way. The distinctions between vis impressa and vis insita, and compulsion and "reaction" mean nothing in a monistic world; and any world is a monism in which the parts to come are, as they are in your world, absolutely involved and presupposed in the parts that are already given. Were such a monism a palpable optimism, no man would be so foolish as to care whether it was predetermined or not, or to ask whether he was or was not what you call a "real agent." He would acquiesce in the flow and drift of things, of which he found himself a part, and rejoice that it was such a whole. The question of free will owes its entire being to a difficulty you disdain to notice, namely that we cannot rejoice in such a whole, for it is not a palpable optimism, and yet, if it be predetermined, we must treat it as a whole. Indeterminism is the only way to break the world into good parts and into bad, and to stand by the former as against the latter.

I can understand the determinism of the mere mechanical intellect which will not hear of a moral dimension to existence. I can understand that of mystical monism shutting its eyes on the concretes of life, for the sake of its abstract rapture. I can understand that of mental defeat and despair saying, "it's all a muddle, and here I go, along with it." I can not understand a determinism like yours, which rejoices in clearness and distinctions, and which is at the same time alive to moral ones--unless it be that the latter are purely speculative for it, and have little to do with its real feeling of the way life is made up.

For life is evil. Two souls are in my breast; I see the better, and in the very act of seeing it I do the worse. To say that the molecules of the nebula implied this and shall have implied it to all eternity, so often as it recurs, is to condemn me to that "dilemma" of pessimism or subjectivism of which I once wrote, and which seems to have so little urgency to you, and to which all talk about abstractions erected into entities; and compulsion vs. "freedom" are simply irrelevant. What living man cares for such niceties, when the real problem stares him in the face of how practically to meet a world foredone, with no possibilities left in it?