We sail from Liverpool the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow will be a busy day winding up our affairs and making some last purchases of small things. Alice has an insatiable desire (as Mrs. Flournoy may have noticed at Geneva) to increase her possessions, whilst I, like an American Tolstoy, wish to diminish them. The most convenient arrangement for a Tolstoy is to have an anti-Tolstoyan wife to "run the house" for him. We have been for three days in Devonshire, and for four days at Oxford previous to that. Extraordinary warm summer weather, with exquisite atmospheric effects. I am extremely glad to leave England with my last optical images so beautiful. In any case the harmony and softness of the landscape of rural England probably excels everything in the world in that line. At Oxford I saw McDougall and Schiller quite intimately, also Schiller's friend, Capt. Knox, who, retired from the army, lives at Gründelwald, and is an extremely acute mind, and fine character, I should think. He is a militant "Pragmatist." Before that I spent three days at Cambridge, where again I saw James Ward intimately. I prophesy that if he gets his health again ... he will become also a militant pluralist of some sort. I think he has worked out his original monistic-theistic vein and is steering straight towards a "critical point" where the umbrella will turn inside out, and not go back. I hope so! I made the acquaintance of Boutroux here last week. He came to the "Moral Education Congress" where he made a very fine address. I find him very _simpatico_. [Illustration: William James and Henry Clement, at the "Putnam Shanty," in the Adirondacks (1907?).] But the best of all these meetings has been one of three hours this very morning with Bergson, who is here visiting his relatives. So modest and unpretending a man, but such a genius intellectually! We talked very easily together, or rather _he_ talked easily, for he talked much more than I did, and although I can't say that I follow the folds of his system much more clearly than I did before, he has made some points much plainer. I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning-point in the history of philosophy. So many things converge towards an anti-rationalistic crystallization. _Qui vivra verra!_ I am very glad indeed to go on board ship. For two months I have been more than ready to get back to my own habits, my own library and writing-table and bed.... I wish you, and all of you, a prosperous and healthy and resultful winter, and am, with old-time affection, your ever faithful friend, Wm. James. If the duty of writing weighs so heavily on you, why obey it? Why, for example, write any more reviews? I absolutely refuse to, and find that one great alleviation. _To Henri Bergson._ LONDON, _Oct. 4, 1908_.