Volume I Part 20 (2/2)
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 _Ursprunglichkeit_ 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 [it] 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 a.s.similating 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 [it] 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 Sh.o.r.e 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. .h.i.therto 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 a.s.similated. 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.
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