CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 26, 1907.
Dear Flournoy,—Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me really happy for at least twenty-four hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves—you write about me. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about himself, when you want to talk about yourself." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagné." It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it, and I am certain that it is your philosophy. Have you read Papini's article in the February "Leonardo"? That seems to me really splendid. You say that my ideas have formed the real centre de ralliment of the pragmatist tendencies. To me it is the youthful and empanaché Papini who has best put himself at the centre of equilibrium whence all the motor tendencies start. He (and Schiller) has given me great confidence and courage. I shall dedicate my book, however, to the memory of J. S. Mill.
I hope that you are careful to distinguish in my own work between the pragmatism and the "radical empiricism" (Conception de Conscience,[72] etc.) which to my own mind have no necessary connexion with each other. My first proofs came in this morning, along with your letter, and the little book ought to be out by the first of June. You shall have a very early copy. It is exceedingly untechnical, and I can't help suspecting that it will make a real impression. Münsterberg, who hitherto has been rather pooh-poohing my thought, now, after reading the lecture on truth which I sent you a while ago, says I seem to be ignorant that Kant ever wrote, Kant having already said all that I say. I regard this as a very good symptom. The third stage of opinion about a new idea, already arrived: 1st: absurd! 2nd: trivial! 3rd: we discovered it! I don't suppose you mean to print these lectures of yours, but I wish you would. If you would translate my lectures, what could make me happier? But, as I said apropos of the "Varieties," I hate to think of you doing that drudgery when you might be formulating your own ideas. But, in one way or the other, I hope you will join in the great strategic combination against the forces of rationalism and bad abstractionism! A good coup de collier all round, and I verily believe that a new philosophic movement will begin....
I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The 1st function is the essential one, officially considered. The 2nd is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only meant to write a line! Love to you all from
W. J.
To Charles A. Strong.
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 9, 1907.
Dear Strong,—Your tightly woven little letter reached me this A.M., just as I was about writing to you to find out how you are. Your long silence had made me apprehensive about your condition, and this news cheers me up very much. Rome is great; and I like to think of you there; if I spend another winter in Europe, it shall be mainly in Rome. You don't say where you're staying, however, so my imagination is at fault, I hope it may be at the Russie, that most delightful of hotels. I am overwhelmed with duties, so I must be very brief in re religionis. Your warnings against my superstitious tendencies, for such I suppose they are,—this is the second heavy one I remember,—touch me, but not in the prophetic way, for they don't weaken my trust in the healthiness of my own attitude, which in part (I fancy) is less remote from your own than you suppose. For instance, my "God of things as they are," being part of a pluralistic system, is responsible for only such of them as he knows enough and has enough power to have accomplished. For the rest he is identical with your "ideal" God. The "omniscient" and "omnipotent" God of theology I regard as a disease of the philosophy-shop. But, having thrown away so much of the philosophy-shop, you may ask me why I don't throw away the whole? That would mean too strong a negative will-to-believe for me. It would mean a dogmatic disbelief in any extant consciousness higher than that of the "normal" human mind; and this in the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce with something ideal that feels as if it were also actual (I have no such commerce—I wish I had, but I can't close my eyes to its vitality in others); and in the teeth of such analogies as Fechner uses to show that there may be other-consciousness than man's. If other, then why not higher and bigger? Why may we not be in the universe as our dogs and cats are in our drawing-rooms and libraries? It's a will-to-believe on both sides: I am perfectly willing that others should disbelieve: why should you not be tolerantly interested in the spectacle of my belief? What harm does the little residuum or germ of actuality that I leave in God do? If ideal, why (except on epiphenomenist principles) may he not have got himself at least partly real by this time? I do not believe it to be healthy-minded to nurse the notion that ideals are self-sufficient and require no actualization to make us content. It is a quite unnecessarily heroic form of resignation and sour grapes. Ideals ought to aim at the transformation of reality—no less! When you defer to what you suppose a certain authority in scientists as confirming these negations, I am surprised. Of all insufficient authorities as to the total nature of reality, give me the "scientists," from Münsterberg up, or down. Their interests are most incomplete and their professional conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored, and their splendid achievement there. Their only authority at large is for method—and the pragmatic method completes and enlarges them there. When you shall have read my whole set of lectures (now with the printer, to be out by June 1st) I doubt whether you will find any great harm in the God I patronize—the poor thing is so largely an ideal possibility. Meanwhile I take delight, or shall take delight, in any efforts you may make to negate all superhuman consciousness, for only by these counter-attempts can a finally satisfactory modus vivendi be reached. I don't feel sure that I know just what you mean by "freedom,"—but no matter. Have you read in Schiller's new Studies in Humanism what seem to me two excellent chapters, one on "Freedom," and the other on the "making of reality"?...
To F. C. S. Schiller.
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 19, 1907.