James's college class finished its work at the end of the first half of the academic year, and in early February he turned for a few days to the thought of a Mediterranean voyage, as a vacation and a means of escape from Cambridge during the bad weather of March. While considering this plan, he cabled M. Bergson to inquire as to the possibility of a meeting in Paris or elsewhere.
To Henri Bergson.
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 25, 1903.
Dear Professor Bergson,—Your most obliging cablegram (with 8 words instead of four!) arrived duly a week ago, and now I am repenting that I ever asked you to send it, for I have been feeling so much less fatigued than I did a month ago, that I have given up my passage to the Mediterranean, and am seriously doubting whether it will be necessary to leave home at all. I ought not to, on many grounds, unless my health imperatively requires it. Pardon me for having so frivolously stirred you up, and permit me at least to pay the cost (as far as I can ascertain it) of the despatch which you were so liberal as to send.
There is still a bare possibility (for I am so strongly tempted) that I may, after the middle of March, take a cheaper vessel direct to England or to France, and spend ten days or so in Paris and return almost immediately. In that case, we could still have our interview. I think there must be great portions of your philosophy which you have not yet published, and I want to see how well they combine with mine. Writing is too long and laborious a process, and I would not inflict on you the task of answering my questions by letter, so I will still wait in the hope of a personal interview some time.
I am convinced that a philosophy of pure experience, such as I conceive yours to be, can be made to work, and will reconcile many of the old inveterate oppositions of the schools. I think that your radical denial (the manner of it at any rate) of the notion that the brain can be in any way the causa fiendi of consciousness, has introduced a very sudden clearness, and eliminated a part of the idealistic paradox. But your unconscious or subconscious permanence of memories is in its turn a notion that offers difficulties, seeming in fact to be the equivalent of the "soul" in another shape, and the manner in which these memories "insert" themselves into the brain action, and in fact the whole conception of the difference between the outer and inner worlds in your philosophy, still need to me a great deal of elucidation. But behold me challenging you to answer me par écrit!
I have read with great delight your article in the "Revue de Métaphysique" for January, agree thoroughly with all its critical part, and wish that I might see in your intuition métaphysique the full equivalent for a philosophy of concepts. Neither seems to be a full equivalent for the other, unless indeed the intuition becomes completely mystical (and that I am willing to believe), but I don't think that that is just what you mean. The Syllabus[46] which I sent you the other day is (I fear), from its great abbreviation, somewhat unintelligible, but it will show you the sort of lines upon which I have been working. I think that a normal philosophy, like a science, must live by hypotheses—I think that the indispensable hypothesis in a philosophy of pure experience is that of many kinds of other experience than ours,
| that the question of- | co-consciousness conscious synthesis | -(its conditions, etc.) |
becomes a most urgent question, as does also the question of the relations of what is possible only to what is actual, what is past or future to what is present. These are all urgent matters in your philosophy also, I imagine. How exquisitely you do write! Believe me, with renewed thanks for the telegram, yours most sincerely,