I suppose you are at Ashfield and I hope surrounded, or soon to be so, by more children than of late, and all well and happy. Don't feel too bad about the country. We've thrown away our old privileged and prerogative position among the nations, but it only showed we were less sincere about it than we supposed we were. The eternal fight of liberalism has now to be fought by us on much the same terms as in the older countries. We have still the better chance in our freedom from all the corrupting influences from on top from which they suffer.--Good-bye and love from both of us, to you all. Yours ever faithfully, Wm. James. _To Nathaniel S. Shaler._ [1901?] DEAR SHALER,--Being a man of methodical sequence in my reading, which in these days is anyhow rather slower than it used to be, I have only just got at your book.[37] Once begun, it slipped along "like a novel," and I must confess to you that it leaves a good taste behind; in fact a sort of _haunting_ flavor due to its individuality, which I find it hard to explain or define. To begin with, it doesn't seem exactly like you, but rather like some quiet and conscientious old passive contemplator of life, not bristling as you are with "points," and vivacity. Its light is dampened and suffused--and all the better perhaps for that. Then it is essentially a confession of faith and a religious attitude--which one doesn't get so much from you upon the street, although even there 'tis clear that you have that within which passeth show. The optimism and healthy-mindedness are yours through and through, so is the wide imagination. But the moderate and non-emphatic way of putting things is not; nor is the absence of any "American humor." So I don't know just when or where or how you wrote it. I can't place it in the Museum or University Hall. Probably it was in Quincy Street, and in a sort of Piperio-Armadan trance! Anyhow it is a sincere book, and tremendously impressive by the gravity and dignity and peacefulness with which it suggests rather than proclaims conclusions on these eternal themes. No more than you can I believe that death is due to selection; yet I wish you had framed some hypothesis as to the physico-chemical necessity thereof, or discussed such hypotheses as have been made. I think you deduce a little too easily from the facts the existence of a general guiding tendency toward ends like those which our mind sets. We never know what ends may have been kept from realization, for the dead tell no tales. The surviving witness would in any case, and whatever he were, draw the conclusion that the universe was planned to make him and the like of him succeed, for it actually did so. But your argument that it is millions to one that it didn't do so by chance doesn't apply. It would apply if the witness had preëxisted in an independent form and framed his scheme, and then the world had realized it. Such a coincidence would prove the world to have a kindred mind to his.