MY DEAR MR. NORTON,--This introduces to you Mr. X----, from South Abington, a workman in a tack factory since boyhood, who has nevertheless gone quite deeply into studies philosophic, mathematical and sociological. He will tell you more about himself, and I wish if convenient that you would "draw him out"--I should like much to hear your impression. I want, if possible, to help him to a start in life here. Palmer has invited him to stay with him for a week. And we are busy studying him and trying to cast his horoscope, to feel whether we can conscientiously recommend him to some millionaire to support in college for a year (as unmatriculated), and so give him a chance to make himself known and find some better avocation for himself than the making of tacks ten hours a day. He knows nothing of our plan, thinks this a mere spree, so please don't let it out! Very truly yours, WM. JAMES. * * * * * The workman from the tack factory, like more than one other lame duck before and after him, had aroused what Professor Palmer once aptly called James's "inclination toward the under-dog and his insistence on keeping the door open for every species of human experiment." It made no difference what X----'s doctrines were, or whether or not they were akin to James's way of thinking. And if such a man was unfitted to arouse other people's sympathies, James's own were the more readily challenged. The erratics of the philosophical world were significant phenomena, and sometimes interested him most just when they were most "queer"--when they were perhaps aberrant to the point of being pathological specimens. It mattered as little to James where such people sprang from, or by what strange processes they had arrived at their ideas, as it matters to a naturalist that beetles have to be hunted for in all sorts of places. He filled the "Varieties of Religious Experience" with the records of abnormal cases and with accounts of the mental and emotional adventures of people whom the everyday world called cranks and fanatics. He was not only curious about such men, but endlessly patient and helpful to them. To some indeed his encouragement was more comforting than profitable, and among them must be numbered the X---- of this letter--an uncouth and helpless creature, who has since achieved his only immortality in another sphere of being. The poor man never got over this "spree," but withdrew from the tack factory forever, spent many years in a Mills Hotel working over an unsalable _magnum opus_, and every now and then appealing for funds. A letter on a later page recurs to this case. * * * * * In the spring of 1890 James finished the remaining chapters of the "Psychology." The next letters were written during the final weeks of work on the book. _To Henry Holt._ CAMBRIDGE, _May 9, 1890_.