Ever your Bruder, W. J.
To Thomas W. Ward.
[Fragment of a letter from Berlin,
circa Nov. 1867?]
...I have begun going to the physiological lectures at the University. There are in all seven courses and four lectures. I take five courses and three lectures. There is a bully physiological laboratory, the sight of which, inaccessible as it is to me in my present condition, gave me a sharp pang. I have blocked out some reading in physiology and psychology which I hope to execute this winter—though reading German is still disgustingly slow.... It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science—some measurements have already been made in the region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness-at (in the shape of sense perceptions), and more may come of it. I am going on to study what is already known, and perhaps may be able to do some work at it. Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it, and I hope I live through this winter to go to them in the summer. From all this talk you probably think I am working straight ahead—towards a definite aim. Alas, no! I finger book-covers as ineffectually as ever. The fact is, this sickness takes all the spring, physical and mental, out of a man....
To Thomas W. Ward.
BERLIN, Nov. 7, 1867.
...If six years ago I could have felt the same satisfied belief in the worthiness of a life devoted to simple, patient, monotonous, scientific labor day after day (without reference to its results) and at the same time have had some inkling of the importance and nature of education (i.e., getting orderly habits of thought, and by intense exercise in a variety of different subjects, getting the mind supple and delicate and firm), I might be now on the path to accomplishing something some day, even if my health had turned out no better than it is. But my habits of mind have been so bad that I feel as if the greater part of the last ten years had been worse than wasted, and now have so little surplus of physical vigor as to shrink from trying to retrieve them. Too late! too late! If I had been drilled further in mathematics, physics, chemistry, logic, and the history of metaphysics, and had established, even if only in my memory, a firm and thoroughly familiar basis of knowledge in all these sciences (like the basis of human anatomy one gets in studying medicine), to which I should involuntarily refer all subsequently acquired facts and thoughts,—instead of having now to keep going back and picking up loose ends of these elements, and wasting whole hours in looking to see how the new facts are related to them, or whether they are related to them at all,—I might be steadily advancing.—But enough! Excuse the damned whine of this letter; I had no idea whatever of writing it when I sat down, but I am in a mood of indigestion and blueness. I would not send you the letter at all, were it not that I thought it might tempt you soon to write to me. You have no idea, my dear old Tom, how I long to hear a word about you....
To Henry P. Bowditch.
BERLIN, Dec. 12, 1867.
BESTER HEINRICH,—I have arrived safely on this side of the ocean and hasten to inform you of the fact.—What a fine pair of young men we are to write so punctually and constantly to each other!—I will not gall you by any sarcasms, however (I naturally think you are more to blame than myself), because (as you naturally are of a similar way of thinking) you might recriminate at great length in your next and much other to-me-more-agreeable matter be crowded out of your letter. Suffice [it] to say that I have thought of you continually, and with undiminished affection, since that bright April morn when we parted; but I am of such an invincibly inert nature as regards letter-writing that it takes a combination of outward and inward circumstances and motives that hardly ever happens, to start me. I wrote you a letter last summer, but destroyed it because I was in such doleful dumps while writing it that it would have given you too unpleasant an impression....