I imagine you lounging on some steep mountainside, with those demoiselles all grown too tall and beautiful and proud to think otherwise than with disdain of their elderly _commensal_ who spoke such difficult French when he took walks with them at Vers-chez-les-Blanc. But I hope that they are happy as they were then. Cannot we all pass some summer near each other again, and can't it next time be in Tyrol rather than in Switzerland, for the purpose of increasing in all of us that "knowledge of the world" which is so desirable? I think it would be a splendid plan. At any rate, wherever you are, take my most affectionate regards for yourself and Madame Flournoy and all of yours, and believe me ever sincerely your friend, Wm. James. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, _Aug. 30, 1896_. DEAR MILLER,--Your letter from Halle of June 22nd came duly, but treating of things eternal as it did, I thought it called for no reply till I should have caught up with more temporal matters, of which there has been no lack to press on my attention. To tell the truth, regarding you as my most penetrating critic and intimate enemy, I was greatly relieved to find that you had nothing worse to say about "The Will to Believe." You say you are no "rationalist," and yet you speak of the "sharp" distinction between beliefs based on "inner evidence" and beliefs based on "craving." I can find _nothing_ sharp (or susceptible of schoolmaster's codification) in the different degrees of "liveliness" in hypotheses concerning the universe, or distinguish _a priori_ between legitimate and illegitimate cravings. And when an hypothesis _is_ once a live one, one _risks_ something in one's practical relations towards truth and error, _whichever_ of the three positions (affirmation, doubt, or negation) one may take up towards it. _The individual himself is the only rightful chooser of his risk._ Hence respectful toleration, as the only law that logic can lay down. You don't say a word against my _logic_, which seems to me to cover your cases entirely in its compartments. I class you as one to whom the religious hypothesis is _von vornherein_ so dead, that the risk of error in espousing it now far outweighs for you the chance of truth, so you simply stake your money on the field as against it. If you _say_ this, of course I can, as logician, have no quarrel with you, even though my own choice of risk (determined by the irrational impressions, suspicions, cravings, senses of direction in nature, or what not, that make religion for me a more live hypothesis than for you) leads me to an opposite methodical decision.