I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The _1st_ function is the essential one, officially considered. The _2nd_ is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only _meant_ to write a line! Love to you all from W. J. _To Charles A. Strong._ Cambridge, _Apr._ 9, 1907. DEAR STRONG,--Your tightly woven little letter reached me this A.M., just as I was about writing to you to find out how you are. Your long silence had made me apprehensive about your condition, and this news cheers me up very much. Rome is great; and I like to think of you there; if I spend another winter in Europe, it shall be mainly in Rome. You don't say where you're staying, however, so my imagination is at fault, I hope it may be at the _Russie_, that most delightful of hotels. I am overwhelmed with duties, so I must be very brief _in re religionis_. Your warnings against my superstitious tendencies, for such I suppose they are,--this is the second heavy one I remember,--touch me, but not in the prophetic way, for they don't weaken my trust in the healthiness of my own attitude, which in part (I fancy) is less remote from your own than you suppose. For instance, my "God of things as they are," being part of a pluralistic system, is responsible for only such of them as he knows enough and has enough power to have accomplished. For the rest he is identical with your "ideal" God. The "omniscient" and "omnipotent" God of theology I regard as a disease of the philosophy-shop. But, having thrown away so much of the philosophy-shop, you may ask me why I don't throw away the whole? That would mean too strong a negative will-to-believe for me. It would mean a dogmatic disbelief in any extant consciousness higher than that of the "normal" human mind; and this in the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce with something ideal that _feels as if it_ were also actual (I have no such commerce--I wish I had, but I can't close my eyes to its vitality in others); and in the teeth of such analogies as Fechner uses to show that there may be other-consciousness than man's. If other, then why not higher and bigger? Why _may_ we not be in the universe as our dogs and cats are in our drawing-rooms and libraries? It's a will-to-believe on both sides: I am perfectly willing that others should disbelieve: why should you not be tolerantly interested in the spectacle of my belief? What harm does the little residuum or germ of actuality that I leave in God do? If ideal, why (except on epiphenomenist principles) may he not