Читать книгу The Letters of William James, Vol. 2 - William James - Страница 17

Chatham, Mass., June 28, 1896.

My dear Blood,—Your letter was an "event," as anything always is from your pen—though of course I never expected any acknowledgment of my booklet. Fear of life in one form or other is the great thing to exorcise; but it isn't reason that will ever do it. Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide. Barely more than a year ago I was sitting at your table and dallying with the thought of publishing an anthology of your works. But, like many other projects, it has been postponed in indefinition. The hour never came last year, and pretty surely will not come next. Nevertheless I shall work for your fame some time! Count on W. J.8 I wound up my "seminary" in speculative psychology a month ago by reading some passages from the "Flaw in Supremacy"—"game flavored as a hawk's wing." "Ever not quite" covers a deal of truth—yet it seems a very simple thing to have said. "There is no Absolute" were my last words. Whereupon a number of students asked where they could get "that pamphlet" and I distributed nearly all the copies I had from you. I wish you would keep on writing, but I see you are a man of discontinuity and insights, and not a philosophic pack-horse, or pack-mule....

I rejoice that ten hours a day of toil makes you feel so hearty. Verily Mr. Rindge says truly. He is a Cambridge boy, who made a fortune in California, and then gave a lot of public buildings to his native town. Unfortunately he insisted on bedecking them with "mottoes" of his own composition, and over the Manual Training School near my house one reads: "Work is one of our greatest blessings. Every man should have an honest occupation"—which, if not lapidary in style, is at least what my father once said. Swedenborg's writings were, viz., "insipid with veracity," as your case now again demonstrates. Have you read Tolstoy's "War and Peace"? I am just about finishing it. It is undoubtedly the greatest novel ever written—also insipid with veracity. The man is infallible—and the anesthetic revelation9 plays a part as in no writer. You have very likely read it. If you haven't, sell all you have and buy the book, for I know it will speak to your very gizzard. Pray thank Mrs. Blood for her appreciation of my "booklet" (such things encourage a writer!), and believe me ever sincerely yours,

WM. JAMES.

In July, 1896, James delivered, in Buffalo and at the Chautauqua Assembly, the substance of the lectures that were later published as "Talks to Teachers." His impressions of Chautauqua were so characteristic and so lively that they must be included here, even though they duplicate in some measure a well-known passage in the essay called "A Certain Blindness in Human Beings."