I hope that life as a farmer agrees with you, and that your "womenkind" wish nothing better than to be farmers' wives, daughters or other relatives. Unluckily we let our farm this summer; so I am here in Cambridge with Alice, both of us a prey to as bad an attack of grippe as the winter solstice ever brought forth. Today, the 10th day, I am weaker than any kitten. Don't ever let your farm! Affectionately,

W. J.

To Dickinson S. Miller.

CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 10, 1905.

Dear Miller,—W. R. Warren has just been here and says he has just seen you; the which precipitates me into a letter to you which has long hung fire. I hope that all goes well. You must be in a rather cheerful quarter of the City. Do you go home Sundays, or not? I hope that the work is congenial. How do you like your students as compared with those here? I reckon you get more out of your colleagues than you did here—barring of course der Einzige. We are all such old stories to each other that we say nothing. Santayana is the only [one] about whom we had any curiosity, and he has now quenched that. Perry and Holt have some ideas in reserve.... The fact is that the classroom exhausts our powers of speech. Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all the stuff I wrote last year—to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to others, if he has read, it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel trenches and hardly show our heads.

Santayana's book[60] is a great one, if the inclusion of opposites is a measure of greatness. I think it will probably be reckoned great by posterity. It has no rational foundation, being merely one man's way of viewing things: so much of experience admitted and no more, so much criticism and questioning admitted and no more. He is a paragon of Emersonianism.—declare your intuitions, though no other man share them; and the integrity with which he does it is as fine as it is rare. And his naturalism, materialism, Platonism, and atheism form a combination of which the centre of gravity is, I think, very deep. But there is something profoundly alienating in his unsympathetic tone, his "preciousness" and superciliousness. The book is Emerson's first rival and successor, but how different the reader's feeling! The same things in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive, expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great indraught; S. as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling spray outward over the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an "atomizer." ... I fear that the real originality of the book will be lost on nineteen-twentieths of the members of the Philosophical and Psychological Association!! The enemies of Harvard will find lots of blasphemous texts in him to injure us withal. But it is a great feather in our cap to harbor such an absolutely free expresser of individual convictions. But enough!

"Phil. 9" is going well. I think I lecture better than I ever did; in fact I know I do. But this professional evolution goes with an involution of all miscellaneous faculty. I am well, and efficient enough, but purposely going slow so as to keep efficient into the Palo Alto summer, which means that I have written nothing. I am pestered by doubts as to whether to put my resignation through this year, in spite of opposition, or to drag along another year or two. I think it is inertia against energy, energy in my case meaning being my own man absolutely. American philosophers, young and old, seem scratching where the wool is short. Important things are being published; but all of them too technical. The thing will never clear up satisfactorily till someone writes out its resultant in decent English....

The reader will have understood "the Palo Alto summer" to refer to the lectures to be delivered at Stanford University during the coming spring. The Stanford engagement was again in James's mind when he spoke, in the next letter, of "dreading the prospect of lecturing till mid-May."

To Dickinson S. Miller.

CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 6, 1905.