You will probably erelong be receiving the stalwart [Henry M.] Stanley and his accomplished bride. I am reading with great delight his book. How delicious is the fact that you can't cram individuals under cut and dried heads of classification. Stanley is a genius all to himself, and on the whole I like him right well, with his indescribable mixture of the battering ram and the orator, of hardness and sentiment, egotism and justice, domineeringness and democratic feeling, callousness to others' insides, yet kindliness, and all his other odd contradictions. He is probably on the whole an innocent. At any rate, it does me a lot of good to read about his heroic adventures. As for "detail," of which you write, it is the ever-mounting sea which is certain to engulf one, soul and body. You have a genius to cope with it.--But again, enough! Naturally I "purr" like your cat at the handsome words you let fall about the "Psychology." Go on! But remember that you can do so just as well without reading it: I shan't know the difference. Seriously, your determination to read that fatal book is the one flaw in an otherwise noble nature. I wish that I had never written it. I hope to get my wife and the rest of the family down from New Hampshire this week, though it does seem a sin to abandon the feast of light, color, and purity, for the turbid town. Good-night! Yours faithfully, WM. JAMES. * * * * * James was now beginning to prepare the condensed edition of the "Principles of Psychology," which appeared the next year as the "Briefer Course." Professor Howison, who was informed of the project, had uttered a protest against the irreverent irony with which James treated the Hegelian dialectics in the "Principles,"[96] and had expressed a hope that such passages would be omitted from the Briefer Course. _To G. H. Howison._ CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 20, 1891_. MY POOR DEAR DARLING HOWISON,--Your letter is received and wrings my heart with its friendliness and animosity combined. But don't think me more frivolous than I am. "Those bagatelle diatribes about Hegelism," etc., are not reprinted in this book, not a single syllable of them! I make some jokes about Caird on a certain page, but Caird already forgives me, and writes that I am sophisticated by Hegel myself. If you carefully ponder the _note_ on that same page or the next one (Volume I, page 370), you will see the real inwardness of my whole feeling about the matter. I am not as low as I seem, and some day (D. v.) may get out another and a more "metaphysical" book, which will steal all your Hegelian thunder except the dialectical method, and show me to be a true child of the gospel. Heartily and everlastingly yours, WM. JAMES. _To F. W. H. Myers._ NEWPORT, R.I., _Jan. 30, 1891_.