Part 28

[67] "My tour in Germany was pleasant, and from the pedagogic point of view instructive; although its chief result was to make me more satisfied than ever with our Harvard College methods of teaching, and to make me feel that in America we have perhaps a more cosmopolitan post of observation than is elsewhere to be found." To Renouvier, Dec. 18, 1882.

[68] See p. 179 _supra_, and note.

[69] See an unsigned review of Epes Sargent's "Planchette," in the Boston _Advertiser_ of March 10, 1869. "The present attitude of society on this whole question is as extraordinary and anomalous as it is discreditable to the pretension of an age which prides itself on enlightenment and the diffusion of knowledge.... The phenomena seem, in their present state, to pertain more to the sphere of the disinterested student of nature than to that of the ordinary layman." The review was reprinted in _Collected Essays and Reviews_.

[70] As an example of this James once quoted Huxley: "I take no interest in the subject. The only case of 'Spiritualism' I have had the opportunity of examining into for myself was as gross an imposture as ever came under my notice. But supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me. If anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of 'Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper, than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a séance." _Life and Letters_, vol. I, p. 452 (New York, 1900).

James's comment should be added: "Obviously the mind of the excellent Huxley has here but two whole-souled categories, namely, revelation or imposture, to apperceive the case by. Sentimental reasons bar revelation out, for the messages, he thinks, are not romantic enough for that; fraud exists anyhow; therefore the whole thing is nothing but imposture. The odd point is that so few of those who talk in this way realize that they and the spiritists are using the same major premise and differing only in the minor. The major premise is: 'Any spirit-revelation must be romantic.' The minor of the spiritist is: 'This _is_ romantic'; that of the Huxleyan is: 'This is dingy twaddle'--whence their opposite conclusions!" (_Memories and Studies_, pp. 185, 186.)

[71] _The Will to Believe_, etc., p. 302.

[72] _Cf._ _The Will to Believe_, etc., p. 319.

[73] It is not the province of this book to estimate the importance of the work done by James and the other men--Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Richet, to go no further--who supported and guided the S. P. R. It must be traced in the literature of automatisms, hypnosis, divided personality, and the "subliminal." In James's own writings the reader may be referred to the above named chapter of _The Will to Believe_, etc., two papers included in _Memories and Studies_, and a review of Myers's _Human Personality_ in Proc. of the (Eng.) S. P. R., vol. XVIII, p. 22 (1903). See also p. 306 _infra_, and note.

[74] _Mind_, 1884, vol. IX, pp. 1-26.

[75] _Unitarian Review_, Dec., 1883; vol. XX, p. 481.

[76] "The Dilemma of Determinism." _Unitarian Review_, Sept., 1884. Republished in _The Will to Believe and Other Essays_.

[77] Professor Howison had accepted an appointment at the University of California (Berkeley).

[78]

"Why so heartlessly deceive your sons?"

LEOPARDI, _To Sylvia_.

[79] From 15 Appian Way to 18 Garden Street.

[80] "It's amusing to see how, even upon my microscopic field, minute events are perpetually taking place illustrative of the broadest facts of human nature. Yesterday Nurse and I had a good laugh, but I must allow that decidedly she 'had' me. I was thinking of something that interested me very much, and my mind was suddenly flooded by one of those luminous waves that sweep out of consciousness all but the living sense, and overpower one with joy in the rich, throbbing complexity of life, when suddenly I looked up at Nurse, who was dressing me, and saw her primitive, rudimentary expression (so common here), as of no inherited quarrel with her destiny of putting petticoats over my head; the poverty and deadness of it, contrasted to the tide of speculation that was coursing through my brain, made me exclaim, 'Oh, Nurse, don't you wish you were inside of _me_?' Her look of dismay, and vehement disclaimer--'Inside of you, Miss, when you have just had a sick-headache for five days!'--gave a greater blow to my vanity than that much-battered article has ever received. The headache had gone off in the night and I had clean forgotten it when the little wretch confronted me with it, at this sublime moment, when I was feeling within me the potency of a Bismarck, and left me powerless before the immutable law that, however great we may seem to our own consciousness, no human being would exchange his for ours, and before the fact that _my_ glorious rôle was to stand for _sick-headache_ to mankind! What a grotesque being I am, to be sure, lying in this room, with the resistance of a thistle-down, having illusory moments of throbbing with the pulse of the race, the mystery to be solved at the next breath, and the fountain of all happiness within me--the sense of vitality, in short, simply proportionate to the excess of weakness. To sit by and watch these absurdities is amusing in its way, and reminds me of how I used to _listen_ to my 'company manners' in the days when I had 'em, and how ridiculous they sounded.

"Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! _Are_ they unhappy, by the way?" [From a diary of Alice James's.]

[81] Whose picture used to adorn the numerous advertisements of a patent medicine called "Mrs. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound."

[82] The state of self-reproachful irritation described by _Kater-Gefühl_ cannot be justly rendered by any English word.

[83] Outbursts.

[84] Mediatory attitude (view).

[85] "The Perception of Space." _Mind_, 1887; vol. XII, pp. 1-30, 183-211, 321-353, 516-548.

[86] _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, 1886, vol. XX, p. 374.

[87] Epochmaking manifestation.

[88] I send her heartiest greetings.

[89] From pure.

[90] If it was printed, this notice has escaped identification.

[91] "How I shall miss that man's presence in the world!... Our problems were the same and for the most part our solutions."

"He is a terrible loss to me. I didn't know till the news came how much I mentally referred to him as a critic and sympathizer, or how much I counted on seeing more of him hereafter." (From letters to G. Croom Robertson.)

_Vide_, also, _The Will to Believe_, etc., pp. 306-7.

[92] _Vide_, pp. 290-91 _infra_.

[93] "I write every morning at one of the card tables in the parlor, all alone in a room 120 feet long--just about the right size for one man." (Letter from the Hotel Del Monte, Sept. 8, 1898.)

[94] J. M. Cattell. Address upon the 25th Anniversary of the American Psychological Association, Dec. 1916. _Science_ (N.S.), vol. XLV, p. 276.

[95] To Hugo Münsterberg, Aug. 22, 1890.

[96] _E.g._, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, p. 369. "One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomime state of mind and that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotionally considered, one and the same thing. In the pantomime all common things are represented to happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other's throats, houses turn inside out, old women become young men, everything 'passes into its opposite' with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far from producing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder's mind. And so, in the Hegelian logic, relations elsewhere recognized under the insipid name of distinctions (such as that between knower and object, many and one) must first be translated into impossibilities and contradictions, then 'transcended' and identified by miracles, ere the proper temper is induced for thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show."

[97] "What Psychical Research has Accomplished," was first published in _The Forum_, 1892, vol. XIII, p. 727.

[98] It will be recalled that Mrs. Whitman had been a Baltimorean before she came to live in Boston.

[99] _Aug. 14._ "Lowell's funeral at mid-day.... Went to Child's to say good-bye, and found Walcott, Howells, Cranch, etc. Poor dear old Child! We drank a glass standing to the hope of seeing Lowell again."

[100] Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sedgwick. Mr. Sedgwick was Miss Ashburner's nephew.

[101] See vol. II, p. 39 _infra_.

[102] See "The Galileo Festival at Padua": _Nation_ (New York), Jan. 5, 1893; a four-column account of the Festival.

[103] _Philosophical Review_ (1893), vol. II, p. 213

[104] Mr. Frank Duveneck, painter and sculptor, now of Cincinnati.

[105] Mr. Duveneck was Mr. Boott's son-in-law. _Vide_ page 153 _supra_.

[106] Jan. 24, '94. To Carl Stumpf. "One should not be a cosmopolitan, one's soul becomes 'disintegrated,' as Janet would say. Parts of it remain in different places, and the whole of it is nowhere. One's native land seems foreign. It is not wholly a good thing, and I think I suffer from it."