The Letters of William James, Vol. 2James, William
Philosophy
The Letters of William James, Vol. 2
James, William
Intellectuals -- United States; James, William, 1842-1910; Philosophers -- United States; Psychologists -- United States
DEAR MILLER,--W. R. Warren has just been here and says he has just seen
you; the which precipitates me into a letter to you which has long hung
fire. I hope that all goes well. You must be in a rather cheerful
quarter of the City. Do you go home Sundays, or not? I hope that the
work is congenial. How do you like your students as compared with those
here? I reckon you get more out of your colleagues than you did
here--barring of course _der Einzige_. We are all such old stories to
each other that we say nothing. Santayana is the only [one] about whom
we had any curiosity, and he has now quenched that. Perry and Holt have
some ideas in reserve.... The fact is that the classroom exhausts our
powers of speech. Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all
the stuff I wrote last year--to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to
others, if he has read, it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel
trenches and hardly show our heads.
Santayana's book[60] is a great one, if the inclusion of opposites is a
measure of greatness. I think it will probably be reckoned great by
posterity. It has no _rational_ foundation, being merely one man's way
of viewing things: so much of experience admitted and no more, so much
criticism and questioning admitted and no more. He is a paragon of
Emersonianism.--declare your intuitions, though no other man share them;
and the integrity with which he does it is as fine as it is rare. And
his naturalism, materialism, Platonism, and atheism form a combination
of which the centre of gravity is, I think, very deep. But there is
something profoundly alienating in his unsympathetic tone, his
"preciousness" and superciliousness. The book is Emerson's first rival
and successor, but how different the reader's feeling! The same things
in Emerson's mouth would sound entirely different. E. receptive,
expansive, as if handling life through a wide funnel with a great
indraught; S. as if through a pin-point orifice that emits his cooling
spray outward over the universe like a nose-disinfectant from an
"atomizer." ... I fear that the real originality of the book will be
lost on nineteen-twentieths of the members of the Philosophical and
Psychological Association!! The enemies of Harvard will find lots of
blasphemous texts in him to injure us withal. But it is a great feather
in our cap to harbor such an absolutely free expresser of individual
convictions. But enough!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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