[66] The true names of three compatriots, who may be living, are not given.
[67] "My tour in Germany was pleasant, and from the pedagogic point of view instructive; although its chief result was to make me more satisfied than ever with our Harvard College methods of teaching, and to make me feel that in America we have perhaps a more cosmopolitan post of observation than is elsewhere to be found." To Renouvier, Dec. 18, 1882.
[68] See p. 179 supra, and note.
[69] See an unsigned review of Epes Sargent's "Planchette," in the Boston Advertiser of March 10, 1869. "The present attitude of society on this whole question is as extraordinary and anomalous as it is discreditable to the pretension of an age which prides itself on enlightenment and the diffusion of knowledge.... The phenomena seem, in their present state, to pertain more to the sphere of the disinterested student of nature than to that of the ordinary layman." The review was reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews.
[70] As an example of this James once quoted Huxley: "I take no interest in the subject. The only case of 'Spiritualism' I have had the opportunity of examining into for myself was as gross an imposture as ever came under my notice. But supposing the phenomena to be genuine—they do not interest me. If anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of 'Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper, than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a séance." Life and Letters, vol. I, p. 452 (New York, 1900).
James's comment should be added: "Obviously the mind of the excellent Huxley has here but two whole-souled categories, namely, revelation or imposture, to apperceive the case by. Sentimental reasons bar revelation out, for the messages, he thinks, are not romantic enough for that; fraud exists anyhow; therefore the whole thing is nothing but imposture. The odd point is that so few of those who talk in this way realize that they and the spiritists are using the same major premise and differing only in the minor. The major premise is: 'Any spirit-revelation must be romantic.' The minor of the spiritist is: 'This is romantic'; that of the Huxleyan is: 'This is dingy twaddle'—whence their opposite conclusions!" (Memories and Studies, pp. 185, 186.)
[71] The Will to Believe, etc., p. 302.
[72] Cf. The Will to Believe, etc., p. 319.
[73] It is not the province of this book to estimate the importance of the work done by James and the other men—Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Richet, to go no further—who supported and guided the S. P. R. It must be traced in the literature of automatisms, hypnosis, divided personality, and the "subliminal." In James's own writings the reader may be referred to the above named chapter of The Will to Believe, etc., two papers included in Memories and Studies, and a review of Myers's Human Personality in Proc. of the (Eng.) S. P. R., vol. XVIII, p. 22 (1903). See also p. 306 infra, and note.
[74] Mind, 1884, vol. IX, pp. 1-26.