[16] These words were not employed in public, but were once applied to a well-known professor in a private letter.
[17] A full report of the speech made at the Legislative hearing was printed in the Banner of Light, Mar. 12, 1898. The letter to the Boston Transcript in 1894 appeared in the issue of Mar. 24.
[18] James J. Putnam to William James
Boston, Mar. 9, 1898.
Dear William,—We have thought and talked a good deal about the subject of your speech in the course of the last week. I prepared with infinite labor a letter intended for the Transcript of last Saturday, but it was not a weighty contribution and I am rather glad it was too late to get in. I think it is generally felt among the best doctors that your position was the liberal one, and that it would be a mistake to try to exact an examination of the mind-healers and Christian Scientists. On the other hand, I am afraid most of the doctors, even including myself, do not have any great feeling of fondness for them, and we are more in the way of seeing the fanatical spirit in which they proceed and the harm that they sometimes do than you are. Of course they do also good things which would remain otherwise not done, and that is the important point, and sincere fanatics are almost always, and in this case I think certainly, of real value.
Always affectionately,
James J. P.
[19] That is, there was here no path to follow, only "blazes" on the trees.
[20] The housekeeper at the Putnam-Bowditch "shanty."
[21] Photograph of a boy and girl standing on a rock which hangs dizzily over a great precipice above the Yosemite Valley.
[22] G. E. Woodberry: The Heart of Man; 1899.