Volume Ii Part 30 (1/2)
...One word about the said proof [of your article]. It convinces me that you ought to be an academic personage, a ”professor.” For thirty-five years I have been suffering from the exigencies of being one, the pretension and the duty, namely, of meeting the mental needs and difficulties of other persons, needs that I couldn't possibly imagine and difficulties that I couldn't possibly understand; and now that I have shuffled off the professorial coil, the sense of freedom that comes to me is as surprising as it is exquisite. I wake up every morning with it. What! not to have to accommodate myself to this ma.s.s of alien and recalcitrant humanity, not to think under resistance, not to have to square myself with others at every step I make--hurrah! it is too good to be true. To be alone with truth and G.o.d! _Es ist nicht zu glauben!_ What a future! What a vision of ease! But here you are loving it and courting it unnecessarily. You're fit to continue a professor in all your successive reincarnations, with never a release. It was so easy to let Bradley with his approximations and grumblings alone. So few people would find these last statements of his seductive enough to build them into their own thought. But you, for the pure pleasure of the operation, chase him up and down his windings, flog him into and out of his corners, stop him and cross-reference him and counter on him, as if required to do so by your office. It makes very difficult reading, it obliges one to re-read Bradley, and I don't believe there are three persons living who will take it in with the pains required to estimate its value. B. himself will very likely not read it with any care. It is subtle and clear, like everything you write, but it is too minute. And where a few broad comments would have sufficed, it is too complex, and too much like a criminal conviction in tone and temper. Leave him in his _dunklem Drange_--he is drifting in the right direction evidently, and when a certain amount of positive construction on our side has been added, he will say that that was what he had meant all along--and the world will be the better for containing so much difficult polemic reading the less.
I admit that your remarks are penetrating, and let air into the joints of the subject; but I respectfully submit that they are not _called for_ in the interests of the final triumph of truth. That will come by the way of displacement of error, quite effortlessly. I can't help suspecting that you unduly magnify the influence of Bradleyan Absolutism on the undergraduate mind. Taylor is the only fruit so far--at least within my purview. One practical point: I don't quite like your first paragraph, and wonder if it be too late to have the references to me at least expunged. I can't recognize the truth of the ten-years' change of opinion about my ”Will to Believe.” I don't find anyone--not even my dearest friends, as Miller and Strong--one whit persuaded. Taylor's and Hobhouse's attacks are of recent date, etc. Moreover, the reference to Bradley's relation to me in this article is too ironical not to seem a little ”nasty” to some readers; therefore out with it, if it be not too late.
See how different our methods are! All that Humanism needs now is to make applications of itself to special problems. Get a school of youngsters at work. Refutations of error should be left to the rationalists alone. They are a stock function of that school....
I'm fearfully _tired_, but expect the summer to get me right again.
Affectionately thine,
W. J.
XVI
1907-1909
_The Last Period (III)--Hibbert Lectures in Oxford--The Hodgson Report_
The story of the remaining years is written so fully in the letters themselves as to require little explanation.
Angina pectoris and such minor ailments as are only too likely to afflict a man of sixty-five years and impaired const.i.tution interrupted the progress of reading and writing more and more. Physical exertion, particularly that involved in talking long to many people, now brought on pain and difficulty in breathing. But James still carried himself erect, still walked with a light step, and until a few weeks before his death wore the appearance of a much younger and stronger man than he really was. None but those near to him realized how often he was in discomfort or pain, or how constantly he was using himself to the limit of his endurance. He bore his ills without complaint and ordinarily without mention; although he finally made up his mind to try to discourage the appeals and requests of all sorts that still hara.s.sed him, by proclaiming the fact that he was an invalid. As his power of work became more and more reduced, frustrations became harder to bear, and the sense that they were unavoidable oppressed him. When an invitation to deliver a course of lectures on the Hibbert Foundation at Manchester College, Oxford, arrived, he was torn between an impulse to clutch at this engagement as a means of hastening the writing-out of certain material that was in his mind, and the fear, only too reasonable, that the obligation to have the lectures ready by a certain date would strain him to the snapping point. After some hesitation he agreed, however, and the lectures were, ultimately, prepared and delivered successfully.
In proportion as the number of hours a day that he could spend on literary work and professional reading decreased, James's general reading increased again. He began for the first time to browse in military biographies, and commenced to collect material for a study which he sometimes spoke of as a ”Psychology of Jingoism,” sometimes as a ”Varieties of Military Experience.” What such a work would have been, had he ever completed it, it is impossible to tell. It was never more than a rather vague project, turned to occasionally as a diversion. But it is safe to reckon that two remarkable papers--the ”Energies of Men”
(written in 1906) and the ”Moral Equivalent of War” (written in 1909)--would have appeared to be related to this study. That it would not have been a utopian flight in the direction of pacifism need hardly be said. However he might have described it, James was not disposed to underestimate the ”fighting instinct.” He saw it as a persistent and highly irritable force, underlying the society of all the dominant races; and he advocated international courts, reduction of armaments, and any other measures that might prevent appeals to the war-waging pa.s.sion as commendable devices for getting along without arousing it.
”The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise.... All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-militarist party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline.... In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting, we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built--unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.”[76]
Any utterances about war, arbitration, and disarmament, are now likely to have their original meaning distorted by reason of what may justly be called the present fevered state of public opinion on such questions. It should be clear that the foregoing sentences were not directed to any particular question of domestic or foreign policy. They were part of a broad picture of the fighting instinct, and led up to a suggestion for diverting it into non-destructive channels. As to particular instances, circ.u.mstances were always to be reckoned with. James believed in organizing and strengthening the machinery of arbitration, but did not think that the day for universal arbitration had yet come. He saw a danger in military establishments, went so far--in the presence of the ”jingoism” aroused by Cleveland's Venezuela message--as to urge opposition to any increase of the American army and navy, encouraged peace-societies, and was willing to challenge attention by calling himself a pacifist.[77] ”The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not presume to interfere by violence with ours.”[78] Tolerance--social, religious, and political--was fundamental in his scheme of belief; but he took pains to make a proviso, and drew the line at tolerating interference or oppression. Where he recognized a military danger, there he would have had matters so governed as to meet it, not evade it. Writing of the British garrison in Halifax in 1897, he said: ”By Jove, if England should ever be licked by a Continental army, it would only be Divine justice upon her for keeping up the Tommy Atkins recruiting system when the others have compulsory service.”
In the case of one undertaking, which was much too troublesome to be reckoned as a diversion, he let himself be drawn away from his metaphysical work. He had taken no active part in the work of the Society for Psychical Research since 1896. In December, 1905, Richard Hodgson, the secretary of the American Branch, had died suddenly, and almost immediately thereafter Mrs. Piper, the medium whose trances Hodgson had spent years in studying, had purported to give communications from Hodgson's departed spirit. In 1909 James made a report to the S. P. R. on ”Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control.” The full report will be found in its Proceedings for 19O9,[79] and the concluding pages, in which James stated, more a.n.a.lytically than elsewhere, the hypotheses which the phenomena suggested to him, have been reprinted in the volume of ”Collected Essays and Reviews.” At the same time he wrote out a more popular statement, in a paper which will be found in ”Memories and Studies.” As to his final opinion of the spirit-theory, the following letter, given somewhat out of its chronological place, states what was still James's opinion in 1910.
_To Charles Lewis Slattery._
Cambridge, _Apr. 21, 1907_.
DEAR MR. SLATTERY,--My state of mind is this: Mrs. Piper has supernormal knowledge in her trances; but whether it comes from ”tapping the minds”
of living people, or from some common cosmic reservoir of memories, or from surviving ”spirits” of the departed, is a question impossible for _me_ to answer just now to my own satisfaction. The spirit-theory is undoubtedly not only the most natural, but the simplest, and I have great respect for Hodgson's and Hyslop's arguments when they adopt it.
At the same time the electric current called _belief_ has not yet closed in my mind.
Whatever the explanation be, trance-mediums.h.i.+p is an excessively complex phenomenon, in which many concurrent factors are engaged. That is why interpretation is so hard.