CAMBRIDGE, May 9, 1890.
My dear Holt,—I was in hopes that you would propose to break away from the famous "Series" and publish the book independently, in two volumes. An abridgement could then be prepared for the Series. If there be anything which I loathe it is a mean overgrown page in small type, and I think the author's feelings ought to go for a good deal in the case of the enormous rat which his ten years gestation has brought forth.
In any event, I dread the summer and next year, with two new courses to teach, and, I fear, no vacation. What I wrote you, if you remember, was to send you the "heft" of the MS. by May 1st, the rest to be done in the intervals of proof-correcting. You however insisted on having the entire MS. in your hands before anything should be done. It seems to me that this delay is, now at any rate, absurd. There is certainly less than two weeks' work on the MS. undone. And every day got behind us now means a day of travel and vacation for me next September. I really think, considering the sort of risk I am running by the delay, that I must insist on getting to press now as soon as the page is decided on.
No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. No subject is worth being treated of in 1000 pages! Had I ten years more, I could rewrite it in 500; but as it stands it is this or nothing—a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable.
Yours provided you hurry up things,
WM. JAMES.
When Mrs. James took the children to Chocorua for the summer, James remained in Cambridge to finish the book.
To Mrs. James.
CAMBRIDGE, May 17, 7:50 P.M.
...Wrote hard pretty much all day, lectured on Ansel Bourne, etc., had three students to lunch, Chubb being gone to Milton. Visit this A.M. from Bishop Keane of the New Catholic University at Washington, to get advice about psycho-physic laboratory. Feel very well, though I drink coffee daily. "Psychology" will certainly be finished by Sunday noon!...