Affectionately—to all of you—including Theodora,
W. J.
To L. T. Hobhouse.
CHOCORUA, Aug. 12, 1904.
Dear Brother Hobhouse,—Don't you think it a tant soit peu scurvy trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the informed reader the reference is transparent—I say nothing of poor Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104 ff.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title the Right to Believe) in the guise of an alternative and substitute for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your charmingly written essay, substitute a travesty for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals, because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely vetoed, as certain champions of "science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world. You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from my polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk.
Your essay, granting that emphasis and barring the injustice to me, seems to me exquisite, and, taking it as a unit, I subscribe unreservedly to almost every positive word.—I say "positive," for I doubt whether you have seen enough of the extraordinarily invigorating effect of mind-cum-philosophy on certain people to justify your somewhat negative treatment of that subject; and I say "almost" because your distinction between "spurious" and "genuine" courage (page 91) reminds me a bit too much of "true" and "false" freedom, and other sanctimonious come-offs.—Could you not have made an equally sympathetic reading of me?
I shouldn't have cared a copper for the misrepresentation were it not a "summation of stimuli" affair. I have just been reading Bradley on Schiller in the July "Mind," and A. E. Taylor on the Will to Believe in the "McGill Quarterly" of Montreal. Both are vastly worse than you; and I cry to Heaven to tell me of what insane root my "leading contemporaries" have eaten, that they are so smitten with blindness as to the meaning of printed texts. Or are we others absolutely incapable of making our meaning clear?
I imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object. Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation; and each, for his contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties.
In my essay the evil shape was a vision of "Science" in the form of abstraction, priggishness and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the sterilest scientific prig and cad you know, compare him with the richest religious intellect you know, and you would not, any more than I would, give the former the exclusive right of way. But up to page 104 of your essay he will deem you altogether on his side.
Pardon the familiarity of this epistle. I like and admire your theory of Knowledge so much, and you re-duplicate (I don't mean copy) my views so beautifully in this article, that I hate to let you go unchidden.