I spent the first six weeks after term began in trying to clear my table of encumbering tasks, in order to get at my own reading for the Gifford lectures. In vain. Each day brought its cargo, and I never got at my own work, until a fortnight ago the brilliant resolve was communicated to me, by divine inspiration, of not doing anything for anybody else, not writing a letter or looking at a MS., on any day until I should have done at least one hour of work for _myself_. If you spend your time preparing to be ready, you _never_ will be ready. Since that wonderful insight into the truth, despair has given way to happiness. I do my hour or hour and a half of free reading; and don't care what extraneous interest suffers.... Good-night, dear old Miller. Your ever loving, W. J. _To Dickinson S. Miller._ Cambridge, _Jan. 31, 1899_. ...Your account of Josiah Royce is adorable--we have both gloated over it all day. The best intellectual character-painting ever limned by an English pen! Since teaching the "Conception of God," I have come to perceive what I didn't trust myself to believe before, that looseness of thought is R.'s _essential_ element. He _wants_ it. There isn't a tight joint in his system; not one. And yet I thought that a mind that could talk me blind and black and numb on mathematics and logic, and whose favorite recreation is works on those subjects, must necessarily conceal closeness and exactitudes of ratiocination that I hadn't the wit to find out. But no! he is the Rubens of philosophy. Richness, abundance, boldness, color, but a sharp contour never, and never any _perfection_. But isn't fertility better than perfection? Deary me! Ever thine, W. J. _To Henry Rutgers Marshall._ Cambridge [_Feb. 7, 1899_?]. DEAR MARSHALL,--I will hand your paper to Eliot, though I am sure that nothing will come of it in _this_ University. Moreover, it strikes me that no good will ever come to Art as such from the analytic study of Æsthetics--harm rather, if the abstractions could in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things done on system with all the intangible personal _je ne sçais quaw_ left out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition--it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind--yet what miles away in point of preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas are all that your aesthetics will give. Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's my sentiments.