Your own contribution is to my mind the most _weighty_--unless perhaps Strong's should prove to be so. I rejoice exceedingly that you should have got it out. No one yet has succeeded, it seems to me, in jumping into the centre of your vision. Once there, all the perspectives are clear and open; and when you or some one else of us shall have spoken the exact word that opens the centre to everyone, mediating between it and the old categories and prejudices, people will wonder that there ever could have been any other philosophy. That it is the philosophy of the future, I'll bet my life. Admiringly and affectionately yours, Wm. James. _To Theodore Flournoy._ LAMB HOUSE, RYE, _Aug. 9, 1908_. DEAR FLOURNOY,--I can't make out from my wife's letters whether she has seen you face to face, or only heard accounts of you from Madame Flournoy. She reports you very tired from the "Congress"--but I don't know what Congress has been meeting at Geneva just now. I don't suppose that you will go to the philosophical congress at Heidelberg--I certainly shall not. I doubt whether philosophers will gain so much by talking with each other as other classes of _Gelehrten_ do. One needs to _frequenter_ a colleague daily for a month before one can begin to understand him. It seems to me that the collective life of philosophers is little more than an organization of misunderstandings. I gave eight lectures at Oxford, but besides Schiller and one other tutor, only two persons ever _mentioned_ them to me, and those were the two heads of Manchester College by whom I had been invited. Philosophical work it seems to me must go on in silence and in print exclusively. You will have heard (either directly or indirectly) from my wife of my reasons for not accompanying them to Geneva. I have been for more than three weeks now at my brother's, and am much better for the simplification. I am very sorry not to have met with you, but I think I took the prudent course in staying away. I have just read Miss Johnson's report in the last S. P. R. "Proceedings," and a good bit of the proofs of Piddington's on cross-correspondences between Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, and Mrs. Holland, which is to appear in the next number. You will be much interested, if you can gather the philosophical energy, to go through such an amount of tiresome detail. It seems to me that these reports open a new chapter in the history of automatism; and Piddington's and Johnson's ability is of the highest order. Evidently "automatism" is a word that covers an extraordinary variety of fact. I suppose that you have on the whole been gratified by the "vindication" of Eusapia [Paladino] at the hands of Morselli _et al._ in Italy. Physical phenomena also seem to be entering upon a new phase in their history.