Читать книгу The Letters of William James, Vol. 2 - William James - Страница 26

Newport, R.I., Feb. 1, 1897.

Dear Mr. Rankin,—A pause in lecturing, consequent upon our midyear examinations having begun, has given me a little respite, and I am paying a three-days' visit upon an old friend here, meaning to leave for New York tomorrow where I have a couple of lectures to give. It is an agreeable moment of quiet and enables me to write a letter or two which I have long postponed, and chiefly one to you, who have given me so much without asking anything in return.

One of my lectures in New York is at the Academy of Medicine before the Neurological Society, the subject being "Demoniacal Possession." I shall of course duly advertise the Nevius book.13 I am not as positive as you are in the belief that the obsessing agency is really demonic individuals. I am perfectly willing to adopt that theory if the facts lend themselves best to it; for who can trace limits to the hierarchies of personal existence in the world? But the lower stages of mere automatism shade off so continuously into the highest supernormal manifestations, through the intermediary ones of imitative hysteria and "suggestibility," that I feel as if no general theory as yet would cover all the facts. So that the most I shall plead for before the neurologists is the recognition of demon possession as a regular "morbid-entity" whose commonest homologue today is the "spirit-control" observed in test-mediumship, and which tends to become the more benignant and less alarming, the less pessimistically it is regarded. This last remark seems certainly to be true. Of course I shall not ignore the sporadic cases of old-fashioned malignant possession which still occur today. I am convinced that we stand with all these things at the threshold of a long inquiry, of which the end appears as yet to no one, least of all to myself. And I believe that the best theoretic work yet done in the subject is the beginning made by F. W. H. Myers in his papers in the S. P. R. Proceedings. The first thing is to start the medical profession out of its idiotically conceited ignorance of all such matters—matters which have everywhere and at all times played a vital part in human history.

You have written me at different times about conversion, and about miracles, getting as usual no reply, but not because I failed to heed your words, which come from a deep life-experience of your own evidently, and from a deep acquaintance with the experiences of others. In the matter of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks. But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict of two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion-crisis, the higher loves and powers come definitively to gain the upper-hand and expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down in the position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases psychologically, and leaves all the religious importance to the result which it has on any other theory.

As to true and false miracles, I don't know that I can follow you so well, for in any case the notion of a miracle as a mere attestation of superior power is one that I cannot espouse. A miracle must in any case be an expression of personal purpose, but the demon-purpose of antagonizing God and winning away his adherents has never yet taken hold of my imagination. I prefer an open mind of inquiry, first about the facts, in all these matters; and I believe that the S. P. R. methods, if pertinaciously stuck to, will eventually do much to clear things up.—You see that, although religion is the great interest of my life, I am rather hopelessly non-evangelical, and take the whole thing too impersonally.

But my College work is lightening in a way. Psychology is being handed over to others more and more, and I see a chance ahead for reading and study in other directions from those to which my very feeble powers in that line have hitherto been confined. I am going to give all the fragments of time I can get, after this year is over, to religious biography and philosophy. Shield's book, Steenstra's, Gratry's, and Harris's, I don't yet know, but can easily get at them.

I hope your health is better in this beautiful winter which we are having. I am very well, and so is all my family. Believe me, with affectionate regards, truly yours,

WM. JAMES.