Part 37

Lectures are temporarily stopped and examinations begun. I seized the opportunity to go to my Chocorua place and see just what was needed to make it habitable for the summer. It is a goodly little spot, but we may not, after all, fit up the buildings till we have spent a summer in the place and "studied" the problem a little more closely. The snow was between two and three feet deep on a level, in spite of the recent thaws. The day after I arrived was one of the most crystalline purity, and the mountain simply exquisite in gradations of tint. I have a tenant in the house, one Sanborn, who owes me a dollar and a half a month, but can't pay it, being of a poetic and contemplative rather than of an active nature, and consequently excessively poor. He has a sign out "Attorney and Pension Agent," and writes and talks like one of the greatest of men. He was working the sewing machine when I was there, and talking of his share in the war, and why he didn't go to live in Boston, etc. (namely that he wasn't known), and my heart was heavy in my breast that so rich a nature, fitted to inhabit a tropical dreamland, should have nothing but that furnitureless cabin within and snow and sky without, to live upon. For, however spotlessly pure and dazzlingly lustrous snow may be, pure snow, always snow, and naught but snow, for four months on end, is, it must be confessed, a rather lean diet for the human soul--deficient in variety, chiaroscuro, and oleaginous and medieval elements. I felt as I was returning home that some intellectual inferiority ought to accrue to all populations whose environment for many months in the year consisted of pure snow.--You are better off, better off than you know, in that great black-earthed dunghill of an England. I say naught of politics, war, strikes, railroad accidents or public events, unless the departure of C. W. Eliot and his wife for a year in Europe be a public event....

Well, dear old Alice, I hope and pray for you. Lots of love to Harry, and if Katharine is with you, to her. Yours ever,

W. J.

To Carl Stumpf.

CAMBRIDGE, 6 Feb., 1887.

MY DEAR STUMPF,--Your two letters from Rügen of Sept. 8th, and from Halle of Jan. 2 came duly, and I can assure you that their contents was most heartily appreciated, and not by me alone. I fairly squealed with pleasure over the first one and its rich combination of good counsel and humorous commentary, and read the greater part of it to my friend Royce, assistant professor of philosophy here, who enjoyed it almost as much as I. There is a heartiness and solidity about your letters which is truly German, and makes them as nutritious as they are refreshing to receive. Your Kater-Gefühl, however, in your second letter, about your Auslassungen on the subject of Wundt, amused me by its speedy evolution into Auslassungen more animated still. I can well understand why Wundt should make his compatriots impatient. Foreigners can afford to be indifferent for he doesn't crowd them so much. He aims at being a sort of Napoleon of the intellectual world. Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without genius and with no central idea which, if defeated, brings down the whole fabric in ruin. You remember what Victor Hugo says of Napoleon in the Miserables--"Il gênait Dieu"; Wundt only gêners his confrères; and whilst they make mincemeat of some one of his views by their criticism, he is meanwhile writing a book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no noeud vital in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can't kill him all at once.

But surely you must admit that, since there must be professors in the world, Wundt is the most praiseworthy and never-too-much-to-be-respected type of the species. He isn't a genius, he is a professor--a being whose duty is to know everything, and have his own opinion about everything, connected with his Fach. Wundt has the most prodigious faculty of appropriating and preserving knowledge, and as for opinions, he takes au grand sérieux his duties there. He says of each possible subject, "Here I must have an opinion. Let's see! What shall it be? How many possible opinions are there? three? four? Yes! just four! Shall I take one of these? It will seem more original to take a higher position, a sort of Vermittelungsansicht between them all. That I will do, etc., etc." So he acquires a complete assortment of opinions of his own; and, as his memory is so good, he seldom forgets which they are! But this is not reprehensible; it is admirable--from the professorial point of view. To be sure, one gets tired of that point of view after a while. But was there ever, since Christian Wolff's time, such a model of the German Professor? He has utilized to the uttermost fibre every gift that Heaven endowed him with at his birth, and made of it all that mortal pertinacity could make. He is the finished example of how much mere education can do for a man. Beside him, Spencer is an ignoramus as well as a charlatan. I admit that Spencer is occasionally more amusing than Wundt. His "Data of Ethics" seems to me incomparably his best book, because it is a more or less frank expression of the man's personal ideal of living--which has of course little to do with science, and which, in Spencer's case, is full of definiteness and vigor. Wundt's "Ethics" I have not yet seen, and probably shall not "tackle" it for a good while to come.

I was much entertained by your account of F----, of whom you have seen much more than I have. I am eager to see him, to hear about his visit to Halle, and to get his account of you. But [F.'s place of abode] and Boston are ten hours asunder by rail, and I never go there and he never comes here. He seems a very promising fellow, with a good deal of independence of character; and if you knew the conditions of education in this country, and of the preparation to fill chairs of philosophy in colleges, you would not express any surprise at his, or mine, or any other American's small amount of "Information über die philosophische Literatur." Times are mending, however, and within the past six or eight years it has been possible, in three or four of our colleges, to get really educated for philosophy as a profession. The most promising man we have in this country is, in my opinion, the above-mentioned Royce, a young Californian of thirty, who is really built for a metaphysician, and who is, besides that, a very complete human being, alive at every point. He wrote a novel last summer, which is now going through the press, and which I am very curious to see. He has just been in here, interrupting this letter, and I have told him he must send a copy of his book, the "Religious Aspect of Philosophy," to you, promising to urge you to read it when you had time. The first half is ethical, and very readable and full of profound and witty details, but to my mind not of vast importance philosophically. The second half is a new argument for monistic idealism, an argument based on the possibility of truth and error in knowledge, subtle in itself, and rather lengthily expounded, but seeming to me to be one of the few big original suggestions of recent philosophical writing. I have vainly tried to escape from it. I still suspect it of inconclusiveness, but I frankly confess that I am unable to overthrow it. Since you too are an anti-idealist, I wish very much you would try your critical teeth upon it. I can assure you that, if you come to close quarters with it, you will say its author belongs to the genuine philosophic breed.

I am myself doing very well this year, rather light work, etc., but still troubled with bad sleep so as to advance very slowly with private study and writing. However, few days without a line at least. I found to my surprise and pleasure that Robertson was willing to print my chapter on Space in "Mind," even though it should run through all four numbers of the year. So I sent it to him. Most of it was written six or even seven years ago. To tell the truth, I am off of Space now, and can probably carry my little private ingenuity concerning it no farther than I have already done in this essay; and fearing that some evil fiend might put it into Helmholtz's mind to correct all his errors and tell the full truth in the new edition of his "Optics," I felt it was high time that what I had written should see the light and not be lost. It is dry stuff to read, and I hardly dare to recommend it to you; but if you do read it, there is no one whose favorable opinion I should more rejoice to hear; for, as you know, you seem to me, of all writers on Space, the one who, on the whole, has thought out the subject most philosophically. Of course, the experimental patience, and skill and freshness of observation of the Helmholtzes and Herings are altogether admirable, and perhaps at bottom worth more than philosophic ability. Space is really a direfully difficult subject! The third dimension bothers me very much still.

I have this very day corrected the proofs of an essay on the Perception of Time, which I will send you when it shall appear in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" for October last. (The number of "July, 1886" is not yet out!) I rather enjoyed the writing of it. I have just begun a chapter on "Discrimination and Comparison," subjects which have been long stumbling-blocks in my path. Yesterday it seemed to me that I could perhaps do nothing better than just translate 6 and 7 of the first Abschnitt of your "Tonpsychologie," which is worth more than everything else put together which has been written on the subject. But I will stumble on and try to give it a more personal form. I shall, however, borrow largely from you....

Have you seen [Edmund] Gurney's two bulky tomes, "Phantasms of the Living," an amazingly patient and thorough piece of work? I should not at all wonder if it were the beginning of a new department of natural history. But even if not, it is an important chapter in the statistics of Völkerpsychologie, and I think Gurney worthy of the highest praise for his devotion to this unfashionable work. He is not the kind of stuff which the ordinary pachydermatous fanatic and mystic is made of....

To Henry P. Bowditch.

CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 26 .

My live-stock is increased by a Töchterchen, modest, tactful, unselfish, quite different from a boy, and in fact a really epochmachendes Erzeugniss. I shall begin to save for her dowry and perhaps your Harold will marry her. Their ages are suitable.

Grüsse an die gnädige Frau.

W. J.

To Henry James.

CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 12, 1887.

MY DEAR HARRY,--...I got back yesterday from five days spent at my sylvan home at Lake Chocorua, whither I had gone to see about getting the buildings in order for the summer. The winter has been an exceptionally snowy one back of the coast, and I found, when I arrived, four feet of snow on a level and eight feet where it had drifted. The day before yesterday the heat became summer-like, and I took a long walk in my shirt-sleeves, going through the snow the whole length of my leg when the crust broke. It was a queer combination--not exactly agreeable. The snow-blanket keeps the ground from freezing deep; so that very few days after the snow is gone the soil is dry, and spring begins in good earnest. I tried snow-shoes but found them clumsy. They were making the maple-sugar in the woods; I had excellent comfort at the hotel hard by; with whose good landlord and still better landlady I am good friends; I rested off the fumes of my lore-crammed brain, and altogether I smile at the pride of Greece and Rome--from the height of my New Hampshire home. I'm afraid it will cost nearer $2000 than $800 to finish all the work. But we shall have ten large rooms (two of them 24 x 24), and three small ones--not counting kitchen, pantries, etc., and if you want some real, roomy, rustic happiness, you had better come over and spend all your summers with us. I can see that the thought makes you sick, so I'll say no more about it, but my permanent vision of your future is that your pen will fail you as a means of support, and, having laid up no income, you will return like the prodigal son to my roof. You will then find that, with a wood-pile as large as an ordinary house, a hearth four feet wide, and the American sun flooding the floor, even a New Hampshire winter is not so bad a thing. With house provided, two or three hundred dollars a year will support a man comfortably enough at Tamworth Iron Works, which is the name of our township. But, enough! My vulgarity makes you shudder....

College begins tomorrow, and there are seven weeks more of lectures. I never did my work so easily as this year, and hope to write two more chapters of psychology ere the vacation. That immortal work is now more than two thirds done. To you, who throw off two volumes a year, I must seem despicable for my slowness. But the truth is that (leaving other impediments out of account) the "science" is in such a confused and imperfect state that every paragraph presents some unforeseen snag, and I often spend many weeks on a point that I didn't foresee as a difficulty at all. American scholarship is looking up in that line. Three first-class works, in point both of originality and of learning, have appeared here within four months. Stanley Hall's and mine will make five. Meanwhile in England they are doing little or nothing. The "psychical researchers" seem to be the only active investigators....

To his Sister.

CHOCORUA, N.H., July 2, 1887.

DEAREST SISTER,--It is an unconscionable time since I have written either to you or to Harry. Too little eyesight, and too much use thereof, is the reason. I thought I should go wild during the examination period. I have now got some presbyopic spectacles and hope for an improvement. I think I've been straining my eyes for three or four months past by not having them on.

A short dictated letter from you came the other day, and has been sent back to Alice in Cambridge, so I cannot give its date. I am grieved in the extreme to hear of another breakdown in your health.... But I make no sympathetic comment, as you would probably "roar" over it. There is this to be said, that it is probably less tragic to be sick all the time than to be sometimes well and incessantly tumbling down again.

I thought of the difference in our lots yesterday as I was driving home in the evening with a wagon in tow, which I had started at six-thirty to get at a place called Fryeburg, 19 miles away. All day in the open air, talking with the country people, trying horses which they had to swap, but concluding to stick to my own--a most blessed feeling of freedom, and change from Cambridge life. I never knew before how much freedom came with having a horse of one's own. I am becoming quite an expert jockey, having examined and tried at least two dozen horses in the last six weeks; and I don't know a more fascinating occupation. The day before yesterday, I spent most of both forenoon and afternoon in the field under the blazing sun, sprinkling my potato plants with Paris green. The house comes on slowly, but in a fortnight we shall surely be inside of the larger half of it, and the rest can then drag on. Three or four men can't get ahead very fast. It has some delightful rooms, and, I have no doubt, will make us all happy for several years to come. Not for eternity, for everything fades, and I can see that some day we shall be glad to sell out and move on, to something grander, perhaps. For simple harmonious loveliness, however, this can't be beat....

What a grotesque sort of time you have been having with your Queen's jubilee! What a chance for a woman to give some human shove to things, by the smallest real word or act, and what incapacity to guess its existence or to profit by it! One can see the ground for Bonaparte-worship, when one contemplates the results of the orthodox and conservative crowned-head education. He, at least, could have dropped an unconventional word, done something to pierce the cuticle. But the density of British unintellectuality is a spectacle for gods. One can't imagine it or describe it. One can only see it....

W. J.

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