England has changed in many respects. The West End of London, which used at this season to be so impressive from its splendor, is now a mixed and mongrel horde of straw hats and cads of every description. Motor-buses of the most brutal sort have replaced the old carriages, Bond and Regent Streets are cheap-jack shows, everything is tumultuous and confused and has run down in quality. I have been "motoring" a good deal through this "Lake District," owing to the kindness of some excellent people in the hotel, dissenters who rejoice in the name of Squance and inhabit the neighborhood of Durham. It is wondrous fine, but especially adapted to trampers, which I no longer am. Altogether England seems to have got itself into a magnificently fine state of civilization, especially in regard to the cheery and wholesome tone of manners of the people, improved as it is getting to be by the greater infusion of the democratic temper. Everything here seems about twice as good as the corresponding thing with us. But I suspect we have the bigger eventual destiny after all; and give us a thousand years and we may catch up in many details. I think of you as still at Cambridge, and I do hope that physical ills are bearing on more gently. Lily, too, I hope is her well self again. You mustn't think of answering this, which is only an ejaculation of friendship--I shall be home almost before you can get an answer over. Love to all your circle, including Theodora, whom I miss greatly. Affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Henri Bergson._ LAMB HOUSE, _July 28, 1908_. DEAR BERGSON,--(can't we cease "Professor"-ing each other?--that title establishes a "disjunctive relation" between man and man, and our relation should be "endosmotic" socially as well as intellectually, I think),-- _Jacta est alea_, I am not to go to Switzerland! I find, after a week or more here, that the monotony and simplification is doing my nervous centres so much good, that my wife has decided to go off with our daughter to Geneva, and to leave me alone with my brother here, for repairs. It is a great disappointment in other ways than in not seeing you, but I know that it is best. Perhaps later in the season the _Zusammenkunft_ may take place, for nothing is decided beyond the next three weeks.