The Critical Game

by John Albert Macy

The letters of a philosopher usually have the primary, if not exclusive, interest of elucidating and extending in an informal way the ideas expounded in his professional writings. It is for this interest that one would turn to the letters of a thinker who was nothing but a thinker, such as Kant (if, indeed, there is a collection of Kant's letters), and to the correspondence of such a philosopher as Nietzsche, who, aside from his technical contributions to human wisdom, presents fascinating problems in human character, personality, biography. The letters of Williams James[ [1] have two distinct values. They appeared at the same moment with his "Collected Essays and Reviews"[ [2] and the two publications, taken together, complete the intellectual record of the man. Though master and man can not be separated, yet, as good disciples of James's pluralism, we may be permitted to divide an individual into two "aspects." First let us enjoy the letters, simply as the letters of a man who was, incidentally, a philosopher.

And what letters! The letters of Lamb, of Edward Fitzgerald, are not more delightful. The easiest and pleasantest way to prove that would be to fill the rest of this essay with quotations, and that way would be in consonance with the whimsical spirit of James, who wrote to his youngest son: "Your Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosofer like me and write books. It is easy enough, all but the writing. You just get it out of other books and write it down." To write a jolly letter to a child, to ridicule yourself and your profession and at the same time to defend an idea with vigor and determination, to poke fun at colleagues and heartily respect them, to be dignified in mental shirt sleeves, to wink one eye and keep two keen eyes on the page or the fact that has to be studied, to fling words with apparent carelessness and never for a moment to lose control of words or thought—all this means a great character and a fine literary artist.

James says of Duveneck, the painter: "I have seen very little of him. The professor is an oppressor of the artist, I fear." It may be that the professor, which James was and officially had to be, oppressed the artist in him. But the artist would not down. If all the philosophic work of James were wiped out by an act of God or by the arguments of philosophers, James, the man of letters, would still survive. I believe that part of the success of James as philosopher was due to his ability to say what he meant not only with logical clarity but with charm, with the skill of the literary artist. Technical Philosophy may immortalize or bury his work. The man, the startling, original person must be imperishable. No matter what subject he touches, his way of saying things is superb. He had an artist's interest in the art of writing. Of a volume of his essays he says: "I am sure of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I am afraid that what you will never appreciate is their wonderful English style! Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison!" The wise man has his tongue in his cheek, of course, but there is a serious idea behind the fooling. Of a correspondent's "strictures on my English" he writes: "I have a tendency towards too great colloquiality." What sort of laborious philosopher was it who worried James about his style, his fluent, accurate, imaginative vehicle of thought? It may be that some of James's philosophic ideas are quite wrong. But there is a presumption in favor of the truth of an idea which is well expressed.

James argues somewhere that a style as thick as Hegel's can not be the "authentic mother-tongue of reason." If that is unfair to Hegel, it is a fair revelation of the mind of James. He was an advocate and an exemplar of lucidity of expression, and was always putting to himself and other philosophers the plain question: "Just what do you mean?" But his sharpness of mind, though often aggressive, was never offensive. He seems at times to have dulled the edge of his wit in order not to hurt the other fellow. The editor of the letters has, perhaps wisely, "not included letters that are wholly technical or polemic." Probably the ideas expressed in the technical letters are repeated in James's books. But I should like to see the polemic letters. The editor himself in the act of withholding them has defined their merits: "He rejoiced openly in the controversies which he provoked and engaged in polemics with the good humor and vigor that were the essence of his genius." The touches of polemic writing which appear in the correspondence that is given us reveal this good humor and vigor and make one hungry for more. He was staunch and dexterous in argument and never yielded an inch, but he could stop and laugh at his opponent and at himself. He objected to Huxley's somewhat solemn devotion to "Truth," yet he had a kind of skill in argument that was not unlike Huxley's. He could give a man a smashing blow in the ribs, and even show a quite human irritation, but his exquisite courtesy never failed. His letters to Godkin, of the Nation, protesting against unfair criticism of the work of the elder Henry James, are a lesson for critics, and no doubt Godkin's reply was a model of magnanimous contrition.

James had an immense variety of interests outside philosophy, though perhaps it is unphilosophical to imply that anything can lie outside the range of a true philosopher's vision. His letters are written to many different kinds of persons; the best of them, naturally, are to philosophers and men of letters, who evoked from him an amazing multiplicity of ideas and to whom he let fly a delicious compound of sound reason and jocularity. In characterizing other men he characterized himself. For example, what he says about Royce embraces both men perfectly: "that unique mixture of erudition, originality, profundity and vastness, and human wit and leisureliness." He was fortunate in his human and intellectual contacts. An early and abidingly fortunate contact was that with his father, who was also a "filosofer." His last letter to his father is beautiful. It brings tears, of which the most stoical philosopher need not be ashamed; indeed, one might rather be ashamed if the tears did not come. No one outside the family and a few friends has a right to read that letter, but print has extended the privilege. If Mr. E. V. Lucas or any other anthologist makes a new collection of examples of "the gentlest art," the letter from James to his father should be included. In it two men are portrayed, father and son, both magnificently; if either man had been less than great the letter could not have been written.

James was born a philosopher; philosophy was in the blood and in the very air of the household. There is no better instance of the heredity of genius and of predestination to a career. Yet James did not find himself immediately; he floundered about in the world of thought long after the age at which most men have hung out shingles. He was thirty when he was appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard, and his tardiness in establishing himself as a bread-winning citizen fretted him. Lesser men who feel that the expression of their talents has been thwarted or postponed may take comfort from the fact that James's first printed book, the "Psychology," appeared in 1890, when he was forty-eight years old.

The fact that James was an intellectual roamer and did not proceed docilely from a doctor's degree to a position as teacher, in a groove forever, accounts, in part, for the flexibility and variety of his thought. His "dribbling," as he calls it, during years when he suffered from physical illness and a depressing sense of impotence, was not altogether bad for the man or for the philosopher. He wandered about Europe, became bilingual, if not trilingual (he was never quite happy in German speech or German philosophy). His learning was enriched with odds and ends of information such as belong rather to the man of the world than to the professor. If he had lived all his life in Königsberg or Cambridge he would have been neither Kant nor James. To him philosophy was never an affair of remote abstract heavens or of little dusty class rooms. He served academic interests faithfully and did more than any other man to make the department of philosophy at Harvard the finest thing in American university life. But he was in constant rebellion against the academic world and, indeed, against all institutionalism. He wrote to Thomas Davidson: "Why is it that everything in this world is offered to us on no medium terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for a professorship. I pine for your leisure to write and study." Yet he had more leisure and freedom than most men. He went abroad whenever he wanted to go, and never knew what it was to be down to his last dollar.

His lateness in finding himself professionally and philosophically is, perhaps, related to his perpetual youth, his eagerness for new ideas, his inability to be fixed and settled. He sometimes grasped at ideas too hastily and welcomed such new arrivals as Wells and Chesterton with a heartiness which, perhaps, they did not quite deserve. But that was the fault of his enthusiastic catholicity. He hated shut minds and shut doors of thought and feared nothing except that some possibly valuable inquiry might be hindered or stopped by stupidity and prejudice. His colleague, Professor Palmer, called him "the finest critical mind of our time." Let the philosophers decide whether that is excessive praise. We mere laymen can know him and enjoy him as he reveals himself in his letters, a vivacious, humorous, affectionate man.

II.

The supreme service of William James to philosophy is the restoration of philosophy to the uses of life. At least that is the tendency of his philosophy. Even though much wisdom still remains shut up in a tower, indifferent to life, and though life may often be ungrateful to and suspicious of such wisdom as is offered to it, nevertheless James's attempt to bring about a rapprochement was his finest contribution and is expressed in some of his most glowing pages. He came at the right time and illustrated in himself one of his hearty beliefs that Humanity will produce all the types of thinker that it needs. At the moment when he entered the realm of philosophy, the physical sciences had arrogantly assumed, if not all wisdom, the possession of the correct method of searching for wisdom. On the other hand, the transcendental philosophers held themselves aloof from the physical sciences and ignored psychology. This division of interest in a world which James himself tried to keep manageably split up and pluralistic, was his first philosophic perplexity and, in his treatment of the problem, he committed himself to inconsistencies and self-contradictions, which were partly inherent in the situation and partly due to his temperament.