The Letters of William James, Vol. 1James, William
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The Letters of William James, Vol. 1
James, William
Intellectuals -- United States; James, William, 1842-1910; Philosophers -- United States; Psychologists -- United States
I have read your article, which I got in Teplitz, several times
carefully. I must confess that the darkness which to me has always hung
over what you have written on these subjects is hardly at all cleared
up. Every sentence seems written from a point of view which I nowhere
get within range of, and on the other hand ignores all sorts of
questions which are visible from my present view. My questions, I know,
belong to the Understanding, and I suppose deal entirely with the
"natural constitution" of things; but I find it impossible to step out
from them into relation with "spiritual" facts, and the very language
you use _ontologically_ is also so extensively rooted in the finite and
phenomenal that I cannot avoid accepting it as it were in its mechanical
sense, when it becomes to me devoid of significance. I feel myself in
fact more and more drifting towards the sensationalism closed in by
skepticism--but the skepticism will keep bursting out in the very midst
of it, too, from time to time; so that I cannot help thinking I may one
day get a glimpse of things through the ontological window. At present
it is walled up. I can understand now no more than ever the world-wide
gulf you put between "Head" and "Heart"; to me they are inextricably
entangled together, and seem to grow from a common stem--and _no_ theory
of creation seems to me to make things clearer. I cannot logically
understand _your_ theory. You posit first a phenomenal Nature in which
the _alienation_ is produced (but phenomenal to _what_? to the already
unconsciously existing creature?), and from this effected alienation a
_real_ movement of return follows. But how _can_ the real movement have
its rise in the phenomenal? And if it does not, it seems to me the
creation is the very arbitrary one you inveigh against; and the whole
process is a mere circle of the creator described within his own being
and returning to the starting-point. I cannot understand what you mean
by the descent of the creator into nature; you don't explain it, and it
seems to be the kernel of the whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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