I may tell you in confidence (I don't talk of it here because my damned arteries may in the end make me give it up--for a year past I have a sort of angina when I make efforts) that I have accepted an invitation to give eight public lectures at Oxford next May. I was ashamed to refuse; but the work of preparing them will be hard (the title is "The Present Situation in Philosophy"[84]) and they doom me to relapse into the "popular lecture" form just as I thought I had done with it forever. (What I wished to write this winter was something ultra dry in form, impersonal and exact.) I find that my free and easy and personal way of writing, especially in "Pragmatism," has made me an object of loathing to many respectable academic minds, and I am rather tired of awakening that feeling, which more popular lecturing on my part will probably destine me to increase. ...I have been with Strong, who goes to Rome this month. Good, truth-loving man! and a very penetrating mind. I think he will write a great book. We greatly enjoyed seeing your friend Schwarz, the teacher. A fine fellow who will, I hope, succeed. A happy New Year to you now, dear Flournoy, and loving regards from us all to you all. Yours as ever Wm. James. _To Norman Kemp Smith._ [Post-card] Cambridge, _Jan._ 31, 1908. I have only just "got round" to your singularly solid and compact study of Avenarius in "Mind." I find it clear and very clarifying, after the innumerable hours I have spent in trying to dishevel him. I have read the "Weltbegriff" three times, and have half expected to have to read both books over again to assimilate his immortal message to man, of which I have hitherto been able to make nothing. You set me free! I shall not re-read him! but leave him to his spiritual dryness and preposterous pedantry. His only really original idea seems to be that of the _Vitalreihe_, and that, so far as I can see, is quite false, certainly no improvement on the notion of adaptive reflex actions. Wm. James. _To his Daughter._ Cambridge, _Apr._ 2, 1908, DARLING PEG,--You must have wondered at my silence since your dear mother returned. I hoped to write to you each day, but the strict routine of my hours now crowded it out. I write on my Oxford job till one, then lunch, then nap, then to my ... doctor at four daily, and from then till dinner-time making calls, and keeping "out" as much as possible. To bed as soon after 8 as possible--all my odd reading done between 3 and 5 A.M., an hour not favorable for letter-writing--so that my necessary business notes have to get in just before dinner (as now) or after dinner, which I hate and try to avoid. I think I see my way clear to go [to Oxford] now, if I don't get more fatigued than at present. Four and a quarter lectures are fully written, and the rest are down-hill work, much raw material being ready now.... _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _April_ 15, 1908.