Your essay, granting that emphasis and barring the injustice to me, seems to me exquisite, and, taking it as a unit, I subscribe unreservedly to almost every positive word.--I say "positive," for I doubt whether you have seen enough of the extraordinarily invigorating effect of mind-_cum_-philosophy on certain people to justify your somewhat negative treatment of that subject; and I say "almost" because your distinction between "spurious" and "genuine" courage (page 91) reminds me a bit too much of "true" and "false" freedom, and other sanctimonious come-offs.--Could you not have made an equally sympathetic reading of _me_? I shouldn't have cared a copper for the misrepresentation were it not a "summation of stimuli" affair. I have just been reading Bradley on Schiller in the July "Mind," and A. E. Taylor on the Will to Believe in the "McGill Quarterly" of Montreal. Both are vastly worse than you; and I cry to Heaven to tell me of what insane root my "leading contemporaries" have eaten, that they are so smitten with blindness as to the meaning of printed texts. Or are we others absolutely incapable of making our meaning clear? I imagine that there is neither insane root nor unclear writing, but that in these matters each man writes from out of a field of consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object. Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation; and each, for his contrast-effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the enemy, regardless of exegetical proprieties. In my essay the evil shape was a vision of "Science" in the form of abstraction, priggishness and sawdust, lording it over all. Take the sterilest scientific prig and cad you know, compare him with the richest religious intellect you know, and you would not, any more than I would, give the former the exclusive right of way. But up to page 104 of your essay he will deem you altogether on his side. Pardon the familiarity of this epistle. I like and admire your theory of Knowledge so much, and you re-duplicate (I _don't_ mean _copy_) my views so beautifully in this article, that I hate to let you go unchidden. Believe me, with the highest esteem (plus some indignation, for you ought to know better!), Yours faithfully, Wm. James. _To Edwin D. Starbuck._ SALISBURY, CONN. _Aug, 24, 1904_.