The "expostulatory" letter to Professor Leuba began with a series of objections to statements which he had made, and continued with the passage which follows. _To James Henry Leuba._ Cambridge, _Apr. 17, 1904_. ...My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely. The Divine, for my _active_ life, is limited to abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differences of intensity may make one's whole centre of energy shift. Now, although I am so devoid of _Gottesbewustsein_ in the directer and stronger sense, yet there is _something in me_ which _makes response_ when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me, "_thither lies truth_"--and I am _sure_ it is not old theistic habits and prejudices of infancy. Those are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical _germ_. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so it will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but _interpretative_ criticism (not of the mere "hysteria" and "nerves" order) it can energetically combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure _non possumus_: "Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every particular, or nothing. Therefore they are _nothing_, for anyone else than their owner." Why may they not be _something_, although not everything? Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germ in us, that, I believe, is where we all should _unhesitatingly_ be today. Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe that we are in my position. Of course the "subliminal" theory is an inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is equally inessential. I am letting loose a deluge on you! Don't reply at length, or at all. _I_ hate to reply to anybody, and will sympathize with your silence. But I had to restate my position more clearly. Yours truly, Wm. James. The following document is not a letter, but a series of answers to a questionnaire upon the subject of religious belief, which was sent out in 1904 by Professor James B. Pratt of Williams College, and to which James filled out a reply at an unascertained date in the autumn of that year. QUESTIONNAIRE[55]