Now the doomful hour has struck. The altar is ready, and I take the victim by the ear. I choose you for a victim because you still have some undesiccated human feeling about you and can think in terms of pure charity—for the love of God, without ulterior hopes of returns from the investment.
The subject is a man of fifty who can be recommended to no other kind of a benefactor. His story is a long one, but it amounts to this, that Heaven made him with no other power than that of thinking and writing, and he has proved by this time a truly pathological inability to keep body and soul together. He is abstemious to an incredible degree, is the most innocent and harmless of human beings, isn't propagating his kind, has never had a dime to spend except for vital necessities, and never has had in his life an hour of what such as we call freedom from care or of "pleasure" in the ordinary exuberant sense of the term. He is refinement itself mentally and morally; and his writings have all been printed in first-rate periodicals, but are too scanty to "pay." There's no excuse for him, I admit. But God made him; and after kicking and cuffing and prodding him for twenty years, I have now come to believe that he ought to be treated in charity pure and simple (even though that be a vice) and I want to guarantee him $350 a year as a pension to be paid to the Mills Hotel in Bleecker Street, New York, for board and lodging and a few cents weekly over and above. I will put in $150. I have secured $100 more. Can I squeeze £50 a year out of you for such a non-public cause? If not, don't reply and forget this letter. If "ja" and you think you really can afford it, and it isn't wicked, let me know, and I will dun you regularly every year for the $50. Yours as ever,
WM. JAMES.
It is a great compliment that I address you. Most men say of such a case, "Is the man deserving?" Whereas the real point is, "Does he need us?" What is deserving nowadays?
The beneficiary of this appeal was that same unfulfilled promise of a metaphysician who appeared as "X" on page 292 of the first volume—a man upon whom, in Cicero's phrase, none but a philosopher could look without a groan. There were more parallels to X's case than it would be permissible to cite here. James did not often appeal to others to help such men with money, but he did things for them himself, even after it had become evident that they could give nothing to the world in return, and even when they had exhausted his patience. "Damn your half-successes, your imperfect geniuses!" he exclaimed of another who shall be called Z. "I'm tired of making allowances for them and propping them up.... Z has never constrained himself in his life. Selfish, conceited, affected, a monster of desultory intellect, he has become now a seedy, almost sordid, old man without even any intellectual residuum from his work that can be called a finished construction; only 'suggestions' and a begging old age." But Z, too, was helped to the end.
To Henri Bergson.
CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 14, 1902.
My dear Sir,—I read the copy of your "Matière et Mémoire" which you so kindly sent me, immediately on receiving it, four years ago or more. I saw its great originality, but found your ideas so new and vast that I could not be sure that I fully understood them, although the style, Heaven knows, was lucid enough. So I laid the book aside for a second reading, which I have just accomplished, slowly and carefully, along with that of the "Données Immédiates," etc.
I think I understand the main lines of your system very well at present—though of course I can't yet trace its proper relations to the aspects of experience of which you do not treat. It needs much building out in the direction of Ethics, Cosmology and Cosmogony, Psychogenesis, etc., before one can apprehend it fully. That I should take it in so much more easily than I did four years ago shows that even at the age of sixty one's mind can grow—a pleasant thought.