I rejoice in the prospect of Booker W.'s[35] book, and thank your mother heartily. My mouth had been watering for just that volume. Autobiographies take the cake. I mean to read nothing else. Strange to say, I am now for the first time reading Marie Bashkirtseff. It takes hold of me tremenjus. I feel as if I had lived inside of her, and in spite of her hatefulness, esteem and even like her for her incorruptible way of telling the truth. I have not seen Huxley's life yet. It must be delightful, only I can't agree to what seems to be becoming the conventionally accepted view of him, that he possessed the exclusive specialty of living for the truth. A good deal of humbug about that!--at least when it becomes a professional and heroic attitude. Your base remark about Aguinaldo is clean forgotten, if ever heard. I know you wouldn't harm the poor man, who, unless Malay human nature is weaker than human nature elsewhere, has pretty surely some surprises up his sleeve for us yet. Best love to you all. Your affectionate Wm. James. _To Henry W. Rankin._ EDINBURGH, _June 16, 1901_. DEAR MR. RANKIN,--I have received all your letters and missives, inclusive of the letter which you think I must have lost, some months back. I professor-ed you because I had read your name printed with that title in a newspaper letter from East Northfield, and supposed that, by courtesy at any rate, that title was conferred on you by a public opinion to which I liked to conform. I have given nine of my lectures and am to give the tenth tomorrow. They have been a success, to judge by the numbers of the audience (300-odd) and their non-diminution towards the end. No previous "Giffords" have drawn near so many. It will please you to know that I am stronger and tougher than when I began, too; so a great load is off my mind. You have been so extraordinarily brotherly to me in writing of your convictions and in furnishing me ideas, that I feel ashamed of my churlish and chary replies. You, however, have forgiven me. Now, at the end of this first course, I feel my "matter" taking firmer shape, and it will please you less to hear me say that I believe myself to be (probably) permanently incapable of believing the Christian scheme of vicarious salvation, and wedded to a more continuously evolutionary mode of thought. The reasons you from time to time have given me, never better expressed than in your letter before the last, have somehow failed to convince. In these lectures the ground I am taking is this: The mother sea and fountain-head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed; and the experiences make such flexible combinations with the intellectual prepossessions of their subjects, that one may almost say that they have no proper _intellectual_ deliverance of their own, but