It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley's "Principles" or Kant's "Critique" did, and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of philosophical discussion. It fills my mind with all sorts of new questions and hypotheses and brings the old into a most agreeable liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
The Hauptpunkt acquired for me is your conclusive demolition of the dualism of object and subject in perception. I believe that the "transcendency" of the object will not recover from your treatment, and as I myself have been working for many years past on the same line, only with other general conceptions than yours, I find myself most agreeably corroborated. My health is so poor now that work goes on very slowly; but I am going, if I live, to write a general system of metaphysics which, in many of its fundamental ideas, agrees closely with what you have set forth and the agreement inspires and encourages me more than you can well imagine. It would take far too many words to attempt any detail, but some day I hope to send you the book.[42]
How good it is sometimes simply to break away from all old categories, deny old worn-out beliefs, and restate things ab initio, making the lines of division fall into entirely new places!
I send you a little popular lecture of mine on immortality,[43]—no positive theory but merely an argumentum ad hominem for the ordinary cerebralistic objection,—in which it may amuse you to see a formulation like your own that the brain is an organ of filtration for spiritual life.
I also send you my last book, the "Varieties of Religious Experience," which may some time beguile an hour. Believe, dear Professor Bergson, the high admiration and regard with which I remain, always sincerely yours,
WM. JAMES.
To Mrs. Louis Agassiz.
CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 15, 1902.
Dear Mrs. Agassiz,—I never dreamed of your replying to that note of mine (of Dec. 5th). If you are replying to all the notes you received on that eventful day, it seems to me a rather heavy penalty for becoming an octogenarian.[44] But glad I am that you replied to mine, and so beautifully. Indeed I do remember the meeting of those two canoes, and the dance, over the river from Manaos; and many another incident and hour of that wonderful voyage.[45] I remember your freshness of interest, and readiness to take hold of everything, and what a blessing to me it was to have one civilized lady in sight, to keep the memory of cultivated conversation from growing extinct. I remember my own folly in wishing to return home after I came out of the hospital at Rio; and my general greenness and incapacity as a naturalist afterwards, with my eyes gone to pieces. It was all because my destiny was to be a "philosopher"—a fact which then I didn't know, but which only means, I think, that, if a man is good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy. But I'm going to write one book worthy of you, dear Mrs. Agassiz, and of the Thayer expedition, if I am spared a couple of years longer.
I hope you were not displeased at the applause the other night, as you went out. I started it; if I hadn't, someone else would a moment later, for the tension had grown intolerable.