CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 26, 1904.
Dear Schiller,— ...Last night the Janets left us—a few days previous, Lloyd Morgan. I am glad to possess my soul for a while alone. Make much of dear old Höffding, who is a good pluralist and irrationalist. I took to him immensely and so did everybody. Lecturing to my class, he told against the Absolutists an anecdote of an "American" child who asked his mother if God made the world in six days. "Yes."—"The whole of it?"—"Yes."—"Then it is finished, all done?"—"Yes."—"Then in what business now is God?" If he tells it in Oxford you must reply: "Sitting for his portrait to Royce, Bradley, and Taylor."
Don't return the "McGill Quarterly"!—I have another copy. Good-bye!
W. J.
To F. J. E. Woodbridge.
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 6, 1905.
Dear Woodbridge,—I appear to be growing into a graphomaniac. Truth boils over from my organism as muddy water from a Yellowstone Geyser. Here is another contribution to my radical empiricism, which I send hot on the heels of the last one. I promise that, with the possible exception of one post-scriptual thing, not more than eight pages of MS. long, I shall do no more writing this academic year. So if you accept this,[56] you have not much more to fear.... I think, on the whole, that though the present article directly hitches on to the last words of my last article, "The Thing and Its Relations," the article called the "Essence of Humanism" had better appear before it.... Always truly yours
WM. JAMES.