← catalogue

Memories and Studies

by William James · English · Gutenberg #20768 · 406,957 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Memories and Studies
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Memories and Studies

Author: William James

Editor: Henry James


        
Release date: March 8, 2007 [eBook #20768]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20768

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMORIES AND STUDIES ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



MEMORIES AND STUDIES

by

WILLIAM JAMES







Longmans, Green, and Co.
Fourth Avenue and 30th Street, New York
London, Bombay, and Calcutta
1911

Copyright, 1911, by Henry James Jr.
All Rights Reserved




PREFATORY NOTE

Professor William James formed the intention
shortly before his death of republishing a number
of popular addresses and essays under the title
which this book now bears; but unfortunately he
found no opportunity to attend to any detail of the
book himself, or to leave definite instructions for
others.  I believe, however, that I have departed
in no substantial degree from my father's idea,
except perhaps by including two or three short
pieces which were first addressed to special
occasions or audiences and which now seem clearly
worthy of republication in their original form,
although he might not have been willing to reprint
them himself without the recastings to which he was
ever most attentive when preparing for new readers.
Everything in this volume has already appeared in
print in magazines or otherwise, and definite
acknowledgements are hereinafter made in the
appropriate places.  Comparison with the original texts
will disclose slight variations in a few passages, and
it is therefore proper to explain that in these
passages the present text follows emendations of the
original which have survived in the author's own
handwriting.

HENRY JAMES, JR.




CONTENTS


    I. LOUIS AGASSIZ
   II. ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD
  III. ROBERT GOULD SHAW
   IV. FRANCIS BOOTT
    V. THOMAS DAVIDSON: A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE
   VI. HERBERT SPENCER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
  VII. FREDERICK MYERS' SERVICES TO PSYCHOLOGY
 VIII. FINAL IMPRESSIONS OF A PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER
   IX. ON SOME MENTAL EFFECTS OF THE EARTHQUAKE
    X. THE ENERGIES OF MEN
   XI. THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR
  XII. REMARKS AT THE PEACE BANQUET
 XIII. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED
  XIV. THE UNIVERSITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
       THE PH. D. OCTOPUS
       THE TRUE HARVARD
       STANFORD'S IDEAL DESTINY
   XV. A PLURALISTIC MYSTIC




I

LOUIS AGASSIZ[1]

It would be unnatural to have such an assemblage as this meet in the
Museum and Faculty Room of this University and yet have no public word
spoken in honor of a name which must be silently present to the minds
of all our visitors.

At some near future day, it is to be hoped some one of you who is well
acquainted with Agassiz's scientific career will discourse here
concerning it,--I could not now, even if I would, speak to you of that
of which you have far more intimate knowledge than I.  On this social
occasion it has seemed that what Agassiz stood for in the way of
character and influence is the more fitting thing to commemorate, and
to that agreeable task I have been called.  He made an impression that
was unrivalled.  He left a sort of popular myth--the Agassiz legend, as
one might say--behind him in the air about us; and life comes kindlier
to all of us, we get more recognition from the world, because we call
ourselves naturalists,--and that was the class to which he also
belonged.

The secret of such an extraordinarily effective influence lay in the
equally extraordinary mixture of the animal and social gifts, the
intellectual powers, and the desires and passions of the man.  From his
boyhood, he looked on the world as if it and he were made for each
other, and on the vast diversity of living things as if he were there
with authority to take mental possession of them all.  His habit of
collecting began in childhood, and during his long life knew no bounds
save those that separate the things of Nature from those of human art.
Already in his student years, in spite of the most stringent poverty,
his whole scheme of existence was that of one predestined to greatness,
who takes that fact for granted, and stands forth immediately as a
scientific leader of men.

His passion for knowing living things was combined with a rapidity of
observation, and a capacity to recognize them again and remember
everything about them, which all his life it seemed an easy triumph and
delight for him to exercise, and which never allowed him to waste a
moment in doubts about the commensurability of his powers with his
tasks.  If ever a person lived by faith, he did.  When a boy of twenty,
with an allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars a year, he
maintained an artist attached to his employ, a custom which never
afterwards was departed from,--except when he maintained two or three.
He lectured from the very outset to all those who would hear him.  "I
feel within myself the strength of a whole generation," he wrote to his
father at that time, and launched himself upon the publication of his
costly "Poissons Fossiles" with no clear vision of the quarter from
whence the payment might be expected to come.

At Neuchatel (where between the ages of twenty-five and thirty he
enjoyed a stipend that varied from four hundred to six hundred dollars)
he organized a regular academy of natural history, with its museum,
managing by one expedient or another to employ artists, secretaries,
and assistants, and to keep a lithographic and printing establishment
of his own employed with the work that he put forth.  Fishes, fossil
and living, echinoderms and glaciers, transfigured themselves under his
hand, and at thirty he was already at the zenith of his reputation,
recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense,
one of those folio copies of mankind, like Linnaeus and Cuvier, who aim
at nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole of animated Nature.
His genius for classifying was simply marvellous; and, as his latest
biographer says, nowhere had a single person ever given so decisive an
impulse to natural history.

Such was the human being who on an October morning fifty years ago
disembarked at our port, bringing his hungry heart along with him, his
confidence in his destiny, and his imagination full of plans.  The only
particular resource he was assured of was one course of Lowell
Lectures.  But of one general resource he always was assured, having
always counted on it and never found it to fail,--and that was the good
will of every fellow-creature in whose presence he could find an
opportunity to describe his aims.  His belief in these was so intense
and unqualified that he could not conceive of others not feeling the
furtherance of them to be a duty binding also upon them.  _Velle non
discitur_, as Seneca says:--Strength of desire must be born with a man,
it can't be taught.  And Agassiz came before one with such enthusiasm
glowing in his countenance,--such a persuasion radiating from his
person that his projects were the sole things really fit to interest
man as man,--that he was absolutely irresistible.  He came, in Byron's
words, with victory beaming from his breast, and every one went down
before him, some yielding him money, some time, some specimens, and
some labor, but all contributing their applause and their godspeed.
And so, living among us from month to month and from year to year, with
no relation to prudence except his pertinacious violation of all her
usual laws, he on the whole achieved the compass of his desires,
studied the geology and fauna of a continent, trained a generation of
zoologists, founded one of the chief museums of the world, gave a new
impulse to scientific education in America, and died the idol of the
public, as well as of his circle of immediate pupils and friends.

The secret of it all was, that while his scientific ideals were an
integral part of his being, something that he never forgot or laid
aside, so that wherever he went he came forward as "the Professor," and
talked "shop" to every person, young or old, great or little, learned
or unlearned, with whom he was thrown, he was at the same time so
commanding a presence, so curious and inquiring, so responsive and
expansive, and so generous and reckless of himself and of his own, that
every one said immediately, "Here is no musty savant, but a man, a
great man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and
sin."  He elevated the popular notion of what a student of Nature could
be.  Since Benjamin Franklin, we had never had among us a person of
more popularly impressive type.  He did not wait for students to come
to him; he made inquiry for promising youthful collectors, and when he
heard of one, he wrote, inviting and urging him to come.  Thus there is
hardly one now of the American naturalists of my generation whom
Agassiz did not train.  Nay, more; he said to every one that a year or
two of natural history, studied as he understood it, would give the
best training for any kind of mental work.  Sometimes he was amusingly
_naïf_ in this regard, as when he offered to put his whole Museum at
the disposition of the Emperor of Brazil if he would but come and labor
there.  And I well remember how certain officials of the Brazilian
empire smiled at the cordiality with which he pressed upon them a
similar invitation.  But it had a great effect.  Natural history must
indeed be a godlike pursuit, if such a man as this can so adore it,
people said; and the very definition and meaning of the word naturalist
underwent a favorable alteration in the common mind.

Certain sayings of Agassiz's, as the famous one that he "had no time
for making money," and his habit of naming his occupation simply as
that of "teacher," have caught the public fancy, and are permanent
benefactions.  We all enjoy more consideration for the fact that he
manifested himself here thus before us in his day.

He was a splendid example of the temperament that looks forward and not
backward, and never wastes a moment in regrets for the irrevocable.  I
had the privilege of admission to his society during the Thayer
expedition to Brazil.  I well remember at night, as we all swung in our
hammocks in the fairy-like moonlight, on the deck of the steamer that
throbbed its way up the Amazon between the forests guarding the stream
on either side, how he turned and whispered, "James, are you awake?"
and continued, "_I_ cannot sleep; I am too happy; I keep thinking of
these glorious plans."  The plans contemplated following the Amazon to
its headwaters, and penetrating the Andes in Peru.  And yet, when he
arrived at the Peruvian frontier and learned that that country had
broken into revolution, that his letters to officials would be useless,
and that that part of the project must be given up, although he was
indeed bitterly chagrined and excited for part of an hour, when the
hour had passed over it seemed as if he had quite forgotten the
disappointment, so enthusiastically was he occupied already with the
new scheme substituted by his active mind.

Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching in our community was prompt
and decisive,--all the more so that it struck people's imagination by
its very excess.  The good old way of committing printed abstractions
to memory seems never to have received such a shock as it encountered
at his hands.  There is probably no public school teacher now in New
England who will not tell you how Agassiz used to lock a student up in
a room full of turtle shells, or lobster shells, or oyster shells,
without a book or word to help him, and not let him out till he had
discovered all the truths which the objects contained.  Some found the
truths after weeks and months of lonely sorrow; others never found
them.  Those who found them were already made into naturalists
thereby--the failures were blotted from the book of honor and of life.
"Go to Nature; take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for
yourself!"--these were the maxims which Agassiz preached wherever he
went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric.  The extreme rigor of
his devotion to this concrete method of learning was the natural
consequence of his own peculiar type of intellect, in which the
capacity for abstraction and causal reasoning and tracing chains of
consequences from hypotheses was so much less developed than the genius
for acquaintance with vast volumes of detail, and for seizing upon
analogies and relations of the more proximate and concrete kind.  While
on the Thayer expedition, I remember that I often put questions to him
about the facts of our new tropical habitat, but I doubt if he ever
answered one of these questions of mine outright.  He always said:
"There, you see you have a definite problem; go and look and find the
answer for yourself."  His severity in this line was a living rebuke to
all abstractionists and would-be biological philosophers.  More than
once have I heard him quote with deep feeling the lines from Faust:

  "Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie.
  Und grun des Lebens goldner Baum."

The only man he really loved and had use for was the man who could
bring him facts.  To see facts, not to argue or _raisonniren_, was what
life meant for him; and I think he often positively loathed the
ratiocinating type of mind.  "Mr. Blank, you are _totally_ uneducated!"
I heard him once say to a student who propounded to him some glittering
theoretic generality.  And on a similar occasion he gave an admonition
that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was
addressed.  "Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you a bright young
man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then,
what they will say will be this: 'That X,--oh, yes, I know him; he used
to be a very bright young man!'"  Happy is the conceited youth who at
the proper moment receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as
this from one who, in other respects, is a kind friend.  We cannot all
escape from being abstractionists.  I myself, for instance, have never
been able to escape; but the hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me
the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in
the light of the world's concrete fulness, that I have never been able
to forget it.  Both kinds of mind have their place in the infinite
design, but there can be no question as to which kind lies the nearer
to the divine type of thinking.

Agassiz's view of Nature was saturated with simple religious feeling,
and for this deep but unconventional religiosity he found at Harvard
the most sympathetic possible environment.  In the fifty years that
have sped since he arrived here our knowledge of Nature has penetrated
into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced.  The causal
elements and not the totals are what we are now most passionately
concerned to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the
stripped-out elements and forces occasionally appear to us to be.  But
the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day,
from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in
Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of all
our analytic investigations, will get round again to that higher and
simpler way of looking at Nature.  Meanwhile as we look back upon
Agassiz, there floats up a breath as of life's morning, that makes the
work seem young and fresh once more.  May we all, and especially may
those younger members of our association who never knew him, give a
grateful thought to his memory as we wander through that Museum which
he founded, and through this University whose ideals he did so much to
elevate and define.



[1] Words spoken at the reception of the American Society of
Naturalists by the President and Fellows of Harvard College at
Cambridge, December 30, 1896.  Printed in _Science_, N. S. V. 285.




II

ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD[1]

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are
ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy
in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so
slight a thing.  The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode
of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we
gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of
us.  It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into
the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase
suggestive of his singularity--happy are those whose singularity gives
a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a
diminution and abridgment.

An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's personality, hovers over all
Concord to-day, taking, in the minds of those of you who were his
neighbors and intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more
abstract in the younger generation, but bringing home to all of us the
notion of a spirit indescribably precious.  The form that so lately
moved upon these streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields
and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust; but the soul's note,
the spiritual voice, rises strong and clear above the uproar of the
times, and seems securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over
future generations.

What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's individuality was, even
more than his rich mental gifts, their singularly harmonious
combination.  Rarely has a man so accurately known the limits of his
genius or so unfailingly kept within them.  "Stand by your order," he
used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression
one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own personal type and
mission.  The type was that of what he liked to call the scholar, the
perceiver of pure truth; and the mission was that of the reporter in
worthy form of each perception.  The day is good, he said, in which we
have the most perceptions.  There are times when the cawing of a crow,
a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols
to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic
phenomena can open.  Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone,
consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning
for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good
Spirit will give me.

This was the first half of Emerson, but only half; for genius, as he
said, is insatiate for expression, and truth has to be clad in the
right verbal garment.  The form of the garment was so vital with
Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter.  They
form a chemical combination--thoughts which would be trivial expressed
otherwise, are important through the nouns and verbs to which he
married them.  The style is the man, it has been said; the man
Emerson's mission culminated in his style, and if we must define him in
one word, we have to call him Artist.  He was an artist whose medium
was verbal and who wrought in spiritual material.

This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting determined the whole tenor
of his life.  It was to shield this duty from invasion and distraction
that he dwelt in the country, that he consistently declined to entangle
himself with associations or to encumber himself with functions which,
however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and
not for him.  Even the care of his garden, "with its stoopings and
fingerings in a few yards of space," he found "narrowing and
poisoning," and took to long free walks and saunterings instead,
without apology.  "Causes" innumerable sought to enlist him as their
"worker"--all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped
him into service.  The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it
appealed to him, found him firm: "God must govern his own world, and
knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which
has none to guard it but me.  I have quite other slaves to face than
those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of
man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me."  This in
reply to the possible questions of his own conscience.  To hot-blooded
moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidelity to the
limits of his genius must often have made him seem provokingly remote
and unavailable; but we, who can see things in more liberal
perspective, must unqualifiably approve the results.  The faultless
tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly
asserted himself within them, is an example fitted to give heart to
other theorists and artists the world over.

The insight and creed from which Emerson's life followed can be best
summed up in his own verses:

  "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
  So near is God to man!"

Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of
the Universal Reason.  The great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses
itself in mortal men and passing hours.  Each of us is an angle of its
eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal
to ourselves.  "O rich and various Man!" he cries, "thou palace of
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and
the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God;
in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong."

If the individual open thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that
there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought
not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand.  "If
John was perfect, why are you and I alive?" Emerson writes; "As long as
any man exists there is some need of him; let him fight for his own."
This faith that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is
perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson's writings.  The
hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his
temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason
of the passionate character of his feelings on this point.  The world
is still new and untried.  In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of
what others saw, shall a man find what truth is.  "Each one of us can
bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be
himself one of the children of the light."  "Trust thyself, every heart
vibrates to that iron string.  There is a time in each man's education
when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when
he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which it was given him to till."

The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty
of the living individual electrified and emancipated his generation,
and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as
the soul of his message.  The present man is the aboriginal reality,
the Institution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and
obliterate for present issues.  "If anyone would lay an axe to your
tree with a text from 1 John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say
to him," Emerson wrote, "'My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.'  Let
him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient,
and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your
Creator."  "Cleave ever to God," he insisted, "against the name of
God;"--and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his
total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his
brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an
iconoclast and desecrator.

Emerson's belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the
vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being,
is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of our
youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their
own private conscience.  Nothing can harm the man who rests in his
appointed place and character.  Such a man is invulnerable; he balances
the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small, as
by being great and spreading when he is great.  "I love and honor
Epaminondas," said Emerson, "but I do not wish to be Epaminondas.  I
hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his
hour.  Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by
saying, 'He acted and thou sittest still.'  I see action to be good
when the need is, and sitting still to be also good.  Epaminondas, if
he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace,
if his lot had been mine.  Heaven is large, and affords space for all
modes of love and fortitude."  "The fact that I am here certainly shows
me that the Soul has need of an organ here, and shall I not assume the
post?"

The vanity of all superserviceableness and pretence was never more
happily set forth than by Emerson in the many passages in which he
develops this aspect of his philosophy.  Character infallibly proclaims
itself.  "Hide your thoughts!--hide the sun and moon.  They publish
themselves to the universe.  They will speak through you though you
were dumb.  They will flow out of your actions, your manners and your
face. . . .  Don't say things: What you are stands over you the while
and thunders so that I cannot say what you say to the contrary. . . .
What a man _is_ engraves itself upon him in letters of light.
Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing.  There is confession
in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the
grasp of hands.  His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression.
Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him.  His
vice glasses the eye, casts lines of mean expression in the cheek,
pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast upon the back of the head,
and writes, O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king.  If you would not
be known to do a thing, never do it; a man may play the fool in the
drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see.--How can
a man be concealed?  How can he be concealed?"

On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a sincere thought
utterly lost.  "Never a magnanimity fell to the ground but there is
some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly. . . .  The hero fears
not that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go
unwitnessed and unloved.  One knows it,--himself,--and is pledged by it
to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the
end a better proclamation than the relating of the incident."

The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one
only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson's way of thinking, from
persons to things and to times and places.  No date, no position is
insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine:--

"In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns.
With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story
of the Emperor, Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to
the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and
marches in Germany.  He is curious concerning that man's day.  What
filled it?  The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign
despatches, the Castilian etiquette?  The soul answers--Behold his day
here!  In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray
fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains;
in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet,--in the hopes of the
morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the
disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great
idea and the puny execution,--behold Charles the Fifth's day; another,
yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's,
Scipio's, Pericles's day,--day of all that are born of women.  The
difference of circumstance is merely costume.  I am tasting the
self-same life,--its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so
admire in other men.  Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable,
obliterated past what it cannot tell,--the details of that nature, of
that day, called Byron or Burke;--but ask it of the enveloping
Now. . . .  Be lord of a day, and you can put up your history books."

"The deep to-day which all men scorn," receives thus from Emerson
superb revindication.  "Other world! there is no other world."  All
God's life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or
nowhere, is reality.  "The present hour is the decisive hour, and every
day is doomsday."

Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an
optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything.
Emerson's drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite
pole from this weakness.  After you have seen men a few times, he could
say, you find most of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and
soon as musty and as dreary.  Never was such a fastidious lover of
significance and distinction, and never an eye so keen for their
discovery.  His optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate
hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us
familiar.  For Emerson, the individual fact and moment were indeed
suffused with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved
the situation--they must be worthy specimens,--sincere, authentic,
archetypal; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral
Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the
Universe's meaning.  To know just which thing does act in this way, and
which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat
incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we
must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency.  Emerson
himself was a real seer.  He could perceive the full squalor of the
individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration.  He might
easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against
our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his
own time.  He might have called him, as a private person, a tedious
bore and canter.  But he would infallibly have added what he then
added: "It is strange and horrible to say this, for I feel that under
him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea, and
all that in them is, and the axis round which the Universe revolves
passes through his body where he stands."

Be it how it may, then, this is Emerson's revelation:--The point of any
pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if
genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity.  This vision is the
head-spring of all his outpourings; and it is for this truth, given to
no previous literary artist to express in such penetratingly persuasive
tones, that posterity will reckon him a prophet, and, perhaps
neglecting other pages, piously turn to those that convey this message.
His life was one long conversation with the invisible divine,
expressing itself through individuals and particulars:--"So nigh is
grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man!"

I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after
they are departed?  Emerson's wraith comes to me now as if it were but
the very voice of this victorious argument.  His words to this effect
are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on,
and to take their place among the Scriptures of humanity.  "'Gainst
death and all oblivious enmity, shall you pace forth," beloved Master.
As long as our English language lasts men's hearts will be cheered and
their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages
with which you have enriched it.



[1] An Address delivered at the Centenary of the Birth of Ralph Waldo
Emerson in Concord, May 25, 1903, and printed in the published
proceedings of that meeting.




III

ROBERT GOULD SHAW[1]

Your Excellency, your Honor, Soldiers, and Friends: In these unveiling
exercises the duty falls to me of expressing in simple words some of
the feelings which have actuated the givers of St. Gaudens' noble work
of bronze, and of briefly recalling the history of Robert Shaw and of
his regiment to the memory of this possibly too forgetful generation.

The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their
picturesqueness.  For two nights previous to the assault upon Fort
Wagner, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment had been afoot, making
forced marches in the rain; and on the day of the battle the men had
had no food since early morning.  As they lay there in the evening
twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold sands of Morris Island, with
the sea-fog drifting over them, their eyes fixed on the huge bulk of
the fortress looming darkly three-quarters of a mile ahead against the
sky, and their hearts beating in expectation of the word that was to
bring them to their feet and launch them on their desperate charge,
neither officers nor men could have been in any holiday mood of
contemplation.  Many and different must have been the thoughts that
came and went in them during that hour of bodeful reverie; but however
free the flights of fancy of some of them may have been, it is
improbable that any one who lay there had so wild and whirling an
imagination as to foresee in prophetic vision this morning of a future
May, when we, the people of a richer and more splendid Boston, with
mayor and governor, and troops from other States, and every
circumstance of ceremony, should meet together to celebrate their
conduct on that evening, and do their memory this conspicuous honor.

How, indeed, comes it that out of all the great engagements of the war,
engagements in many of which the troops of Massachusetts had borne the
most distinguished part, this officer, only a young colonel, this
regiment of black men and its maiden battle,--a battle, moreover, which
was lost,--should be picked out for such unusual commemoration?

The historic significance of an event is measured neither by its
material magnitude, nor by its immediate success.  Thermopylae was a
defeat; but to the Greek imagination, Leonidas and his few Spartans
stood for the whole worth of Grecian life.  Bunker Hill was a defeat;
but for our people, the fight over that breastwork has always seemed to
show as well as any victory that our forefathers were men of a temper
not to be finally overcome.  And so here.  The war for our Union, with
all the constitutional questions which it settled, and all the military
lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but
one meaning in the eye of history.  And nowhere was that meaning better
symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Northern
negro regiment.

Look at the monument and read the story;--see the mingling of elements
which the sculptor's genius has brought so vividly before the eye.
There on foot go the dark outcasts, so true to nature that one can
almost hear them breathing as they march.  State after State by its
laws had denied them to be human persons.  The Southern leaders in
congressional debates, insolent in their security, loved most to
designate them by the contemptuous collective epithet of "this peculiar
kind of property."  There they march, warm-blooded champions of a
better day for man.  There on horseback, among them, in his very habit
as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy
youth every divinity had smiled.  Onward they move together, a single
resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so
different frames.  The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays
the very soul and secret of those awful years.

Since the 'thirties the slavery question been the only question, and by
the end of 'fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a
traveller who has thrown himself down at night beside a pestilential
swamp, and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his
bones.  "Only muzzle the Abolition fanatics," said the South, "and all
will be well again!"  But the Abolitionists would not be muzzled,--they
were the voice of the world's conscience, they were a part of destiny.
Weak as they were, they drove the South to madness.  "Every step she
takes in her blindness," said Wendell Phillips, "is one more step
towards ruin."  And when South Carolina took the final step in
battering down Fort Sumter, it was the fanatics of slavery themselves
who called upon their idolized institution ruin swift and complete.
What law and reason were unable to accomplish, had now to be done by
that uncertain and dreadful dispenser of God's judgments, War--War,
with its abominably casual, inaccurate methods, destroying good and bad
together, but at last able to hew a way out of intolerable situations,
when through man's delusion of perversity every better way is blocked.

Our great western republic had from its origin been a singular anomaly.
A land of freedom, boastfully so-called, with human slavery enthroned
at the heart of it, and at last dictating terms of unconditional
surrender to every other organ of its life, what was it but a thing of
falsehood and horrible self-contradiction?  For three-quarters of a
century it had nevertheless endured, kept together by policy,
compromise, and concession.  But at the last that republic was torn in
two; and truth was to be possible under the flag.  Truth, thank God,
truth! even though for the moment it must be truth written in hell-fire.

And this, fellow-citizens, is why, after the great generals have had
their monuments, and long after the abstract soldier's-monuments have
been reared on every village green, we have chosen to take Robert Shaw
and his regiment as the subjects of the first soldier's-monument to be
raised to a particular set of comparatively undistinguished men.  The
very lack of external complication in the history of these soldiers is
what makes them represent with such typical purity the profounder
meaning of the Union cause.

Our nation had been founded in what we may call our American religion,
baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take
care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well
enough together if left free to try.  But the founders had not dared to
touch the great intractable exception; and slavery had wrought until at
last the only alternative for the nation was to fight or die.  What
Shaw and his comrades stand for and show us is that in such an
emergency Americans of all complexions and conditions can go forth like
brothers, and meet death cheerfully if need be, in order that this
religion of our native land shall not become a failure on earth.

We of this Commonwealth believe in that religion; and it is not at all
because Robert Shaw was an exceptional genius, but simply because he
was faithful to it as we all may hope to be faithful in our measure
when the times demand, that we wish his beautiful image to stand here
for all time, an inciter to similarly unselfish public deeds.

Shaw thought but little of himself, yet he had a personal charm which,
as we look back on him, makes us repeat: "None knew thee but to love
thee, none named thee but to praise."  This grace of nature was united
in him in the happiest way with a filial heart, a cheerful will, and a
judgment that was true and fair.  And when the war came, and great
things were doing of the kind that he could help in, he went as a
matter of course to the front.  What country under heaven has not
thousands of such youths to rejoice in, youths on whom the safety of
the human race depends?  Whether or not they leave memorials behind
them, whether their names are writ in water or in marble, depends
mostly on the opportunities which the accidents of history throw into
their path.  Shaw recognized the vital opportunity: he saw that the
time had come when the colored people must put the country in their
debt.

Colonel Lee has just told us something about the obstacles with which
this idea had to contend.  For a large party of us this was still
exclusively a white man's war; and should colored troops be tried and
not succeed, confusion would grow worse confounded.  Shaw was a captain
in the Massachusetts Second, when Governor Andrew invited him to take
the lead in the experiment.  He was very modest, and doubted, for a
moment, his own capacity for so responsible a post.  We may also
imagine human motives whispering other doubts.  Shaw loved the Second
Regiment, illustrious already, and was sure of promotion where he
stood.  In this new negro-soldier venture, loneliness was certain,
ridicule inevitable, failure possible; and Shaw was only twenty-five;
and, although he had stood among the bullets at Cedar Mountain and
Antietam, he had till then been walking socially on the sunny side of
life.  But whatever doubts may have beset him, they were over in a day,
for he inclined naturally toward difficult resolves.  He accepted the
proffered command, and from that moment lived but for one object, to
establish the honor of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth.

I have had the privilege of reading his letters to his family from the
day of April when, as a private in the New York Seventh, he obeyed the
President's first call.  Some day they must be published, for they form
a veritable poem for serenity and simplicity of tone.  He took to camp
life as if it were his native element, and (like so many of our young
soldiers) he was at first all eagerness to make arms his permanent
profession.  Drilling and disciplining; interminable marching and
counter-marching, and picket-duty on the Upper Potomac as lieutenant in
our Second Regiment, to which post he had soon been promoted; pride at
the discipline attained by the Second, and horror at the bad discipline
of other regiments; these are the staple matter of earlier letters, and
last for many months.  These, and occasional more recreative incidents,
visits to Virginian houses, the reading of books like Napier's
"Peninsular War," or the "Idylls of the King," Thanksgiving feats, and
races among officers, that helped the weary weeks to glide away.  Then
the bloodier business opens, and the plot thickens till the end is
reached.  From first to last there is not a rancorous word against the
enemy,--often quite the reverse,--and amid all the scenes of hardship,
death, and devastation that his pen soon has to write of, there is
unfailing cheerfulness and even a sort of innermost peace.

After he left it, Robert Shaw's heart still clung to the fortunes of
the Second.  Months later when, in South Carolina with the
Fifty-fourth, he writes to his young wife: "I should have been major of
the Second now if I had remained there and lived through the battles.
As regards my own pleasure, I had rather have that place than any other
in the army.  It would have been fine to go home a field officer in
that regiment!  Poor fellows, how they have been slaughtered!"

Meanwhile he had well taught his new command how to do their duty; for
only three days after he wrote this he led them up the parapet of Fort
Wagner, where he and nearly half of them were left upon the ground.

Robert Shaw quickly inspired others with his own love of discipline.
There was something almost pathetic in the earnestness with which both
the officers and men of the Fifty-fourth embraced their mission of
showing that a black regiment could excel in every virtue known to man.
They had good success, and the Fifty-fourth became a model in all
possible respects.  Almost the only trace of bitterness in Shaw's whole
correspondence is over an incident in which he thought his men had been
morally disgraced.  It had become their duty, immediately after their
arrival at the seat of war, to participate, in obedience to fanatical
orders from the head of the department, in the sack and burning of the
inoffensive little town of Darien on the Georgia coast.  "I fear," he
writes to his wife, "that such actions will hurt the reputation of
black troops and of those connected with them.  For myself I have gone
through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not like to
degenerate into a plunderer and a robber,--and the same applies to
every officer in my regiment.  After going through the hard campaigning
and the hard fighting in Virginia, this makes me very much ashamed.
There are two courses only for me to pursue: to obey orders and say
nothing; or to refuse to go upon any more such expeditions, and be put
under arrest and probably court-martialled, which is a very serious
thing."  Fortunately for Shaw, the general in command of that
department was almost immediately relieved.

Four weeks of camp life and discipline on the Sea Islands, and the
regiment had its baptism of fire.  A small affair, but it proved the
men to be staunch.  Shaw again writes to his wife: "You don't know what
a fortunate day this has been for me and for us all, excepting some
poor fellows who were killed and wounded.  We have fought at last
alongside of white troops.  Two hundred of my men on picket this
morning were attacked by five regiments of infantry, some cavalry, and
a battery of artillery.  The Tenth Connecticut were on their left, and
say they would have had a bad time if the Fifty-fourth men had not
stood so well.  The whole division was under arms in fifteen minutes,
and after coming up close in front of us, the enemy, finding us so
strong, fell back. . . .  General Terry sent me word he was highly
gratified with the behavior of our men, and the officers and privates
of other regiments praise us very much.  All this is very gratifying to
us personally, and a fine thing for the colored troops.  I know this
will give you pleasure for it wipes out the remembrance of the Darien
affair, which you could not but grieve over, though we were innocent
participators."

The adjutant of the Fifty-fourth, who made report of this skirmish to
General Terry, well expresses the feelings of loneliness that still
prevailed in that command:--

"The general's favorite regiment," writes the adjutant,[2] "the
Twenty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, one of the best that had so far
faced the rebel foe, largely officered by Boston men, was surrounding
his headquarters.  It had been a living breathing suspicion with
us--perhaps not altogether justly--that all white troops abhorred our
presence in the army, and that the Twenty-fourth would rather hear of
us in some remote corner of the Confederacy than tolerate us in advance
of any battle in which they themselves were to act as reserves or
lookers-on.  Can you not then readily imagine the pleasure which I felt
as I alighted from my horse before General Terry and his staff--I was
going to say his unfriendly staff, but of this I am not sure--to report
to him, with Colonel Shaw's compliments, that we had repulsed the enemy
without the loss of a single inch of ground.  General Terry bade me
mount again and tell Colonel Shaw that he was proud of the conduct of
his men, and that he must still hold the ground against any future
sortie of the enemy.  You can even now share with me the sensation of
that moment of soldierly satisfaction."

The next night but one after this episode was spent by the Fifty-fourth
in disembarking on Morris Island in the rain, and at noon Colonel Shaw
was able to report their arrival to General Strong, to whose brigade he
was assigned.  A terrific bombardment was playing on Fort Wagner, then
the most formidable earthwork ever built, and the general, knowing
Shaw's desire to place his men beside white troops, said to him:
"Colonel, Fort Wagner is to be stormed this evening, and you may lead
the column, if you say Yes.  Your men, I know, are worn out, but do as
you choose."  Shaw's face brightened.  "Before answering the general,
he instantly turned to me," writes the adjutant, who reports the
interview, "and said, Tell Colonel Hallowell to bring up the
Fifty-fourth immediately.'"

This was done, and just before nightfall the attack was made.  Shaw was
serious, for he knew the assault was desperate, and had a premonition
of his end.  Walking up and down in front of the regiment, he briefly
exhorted them to prove that they were men.  Then he gave the order:
"Move in quick time till within a hundred yards, then double quick and
charge.  Forward!" and the Fifty-fourth advanced to the storming, its
colonel and colors at its head.

On over the sand, through a narrow defile which broke up the formation,
double quick over the chevaux de frise, into the ditch and over it, as
best they could, and up the rampart with Fort Sumter, which had seen
them, playing on them, and Fort Wagner, now one mighty mound of fire,
tearing out their lives.  Shaw led from first to last.  Gaining
successfully the parapet, he stood there for a moment with uplifted
sword, shouting, "Forward, Fifty-fourth!" and then fell headlong, with
a bullet through his heart.  The battle raged for nigh two hours.
Regiment after regiment, following upon the Fifty-fourth, hurled
themselves upon its ramparts, but Fort Wagner was nobly defended, and
for that night stood safe.  The Fifty-fourth withdrew after two-thirds
of its officers and five-twelfths or nearly half its men had been shot
down or bayoneted within the fortress or before its walls.  It was good
behavior for a regiment, no one of whose soldiers had had a musket in
his hands more than eighteen weeks, and which had seen the enemy for
the first time only two days before.

"The negroes fought gallantly," wrote a Confederate officer, "and were
headed by as brave a colonel as ever lived."

As for the colonel, not a drum was heard nor a funeral note, not a
soldier discharged his farewell shot, when the Confederates buried him,
the morning after the engagement.  His body, half stripped of its
clothing, and the corpses of his dauntless negroes were flung into one
common trench together, and the sand was shovelled over them, without a
stake or stone to signalize the spot.  In death as in life, then, the
Fifty-fourth bore witness to the brotherhood of man.  The lover of
heroic history could wish for no more fitting sepulchre for Shaw's
magnanimous young heart.  There let his body rest, united with the
forms of his brave nameless comrades.  There let the breezes of the
Atlantic sigh, and its gales roar their requiem, while this bronze
effigy and these inscriptions keep their fame alive long after you and
I and all who meet here are forgotten.

How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten!  As we meet here this
morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the
waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient
site.  But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the
commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a
brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk
into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation
are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told.
Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties
comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due
to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that
by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were
those leaden-footed hours and years.  The photographs themselves
erelong will fade utterly, and books of history and monuments like this
alone will tell the tale.  The great war for the Union will be like the
siege of Troy; it will have taken its place amongst all other "old,
unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago."

In all such events two things must be distinguished--the moral service
of them from the fortitude which they display.  War has been much
praised and celebrated among us of late as a school of manly virtue;
but it is easy to exaggerate upon this point.  Ages ago, war was the
gory cradle of mankind, the grim-featured nurse that alone could train
our savage progenitors into some semblance of social virtue, teach them
to be faithful one to another, and force them to sink their selfishness
in wider tribal ends.  War still excels in this prerogative; and
whether it be paid in years of service, in treasure, or in life-blood,
the war tax is still the only tax that men ungrudgingly will pay.  How
could it be otherwise, when the survivors of one successful massacre
after another are the beings from whose loins we and all our
contemporary races spring?  Man is once for all a fighting animal;
centuries of peaceful history could not breed the battle-instinct out
of us; and our pugnacity is the virtue least in need of reinforcement
by reflection, least in need of orator's or poet's help.

What we really need the poet's and orator's help to keep alive in us is
not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed
when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment.  It is that more
lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in
the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the
Fifty-fourth.  That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it
in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of
nations should most of all be reared, for the survival of the fittest
has not bred it into the bone of human beings as it has bred military
valor; and of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side
with others, perhaps not one would be found ready to risk his worldly
fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse.  The deadliest
enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within
their borders.  And from these internal enemies civilization is always
in need of being saved.  The nation blest above all nations is she in
whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts
without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting
reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between
parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and
preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.  Such
nations have no need of wars to save them.  Their accounts with
righteousness are always even; and God's judgments do not have to
overtake them fitfully in bloody spasms and convulsions of the race.

The lesson that our war ought most of all to teach us is the lesson
that evils must be checked in time, before they grow so great.  The
Almighty cannot love such long-postponed accounts, or such tremendous
settlements.  And surely He hates all settlements that do such
quantities of incidental devils' work.  Our present situation, with its
rancors and delusions, what is it but the direct outcome of the added
powers of government, the corruptions and inflations of the war?  Every
war leaves such miserable legacies, fatal seeds of future war and
revolution, unless the civic virtues of the people save the State in
time.

Robert Shaw had both kinds of virtue.  As he then led his regiment
against Fort Wagner, so surely would he now be leading us against all
lesser powers of darkness, had his sweet young life been spared.  You
think of many as I speak of one.  For, North and South, how many lives
as sweet, unmonumented for the most part, commemorated solely in the
hearts of mourning mothers, widowed brides, or friends did the
inexorable war mow down!  Instead of the full years of natural service
from so many of her children, our country counts but their poor
memories, "the tender grace of a day that is dead," lingering like
echoes of past music on the vacant air.

But so and so only was it written that she should grow sound again.
From that fatal earlier unsoundness those lives have brought for North
and South together permanent release.  The warfare is accomplished; the
iniquity is pardoned.  No future problem can be like that problem.  No
task laid on our children can compare in difficulty with the task with
which their fathers had to deal.  Yet as we face the future, tasks
enough await us.  The republic to which Robert Shaw and a quarter of a
million like him were faithful unto death is no republic that can live
at ease hereafter on the interest of what they have won.  Democracy is
still upon its trial.  The civic genius of our people is its only
bulwark, and neither laws nor monuments, neither battleships nor public
libraries, nor great newspapers nor booming stocks; neither mechanical
invention nor political adroitness, nor churches nor universities nor
civil service examinations can save us from degeneration if the inner
mystery be lost.  That mystery, as once the secret and the glory of our
English-speaking race, consists in nothing but two common habits, two
inveterate habits carried into public life,--habits so homely that they
lend themselves to no rhetorical expression, yet habits more precious,
perhaps, than any that the human race has gained.  They can never be
too often pointed out or praised.  One of them is the habit of trained
and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly
wins its innings.  It was by breaking away from this habit that the
Slave States nearly wrecked our Nation.  The other is that of fierce
and merciless resentment toward every man or set of men who break the
public peace.  By holding to this habit the free States saved her life.

O my countrymen, Southern and Northern, brothers hereafter, masters,
slaves, and enemies no more, let us see to it that both of those
heirlooms are preserved.  So may our ransomed country, like the city of
the promise, lie forever foursquare under Heaven, and the ways of all
the nations be lit up by its light.



[1] Oration at the Exercises in the Boston Music Hall, May 31, 1897,
upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument.

[2] G. W. James: "The Assault upon Fort Wagner," in _War Papers read
before the Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, Military Order of the
Loyal Legion of the United States_.  Milwaukee, 1891.




IV

FRANCIS BOOTT[1]

How often does it happen here in New England that we come away from a
funeral with a feeling that the service has been insufficient.  If it
be purely ritual, the individuality of the departed friend seems to
play too small a part in it.  If the minister conducts it in his own
fashion, it is apt to be too thin and monotonous, and if he were not an
intimate friend, too remote and official.  We miss direct discourse of
simple human affection about the person, which we find so often in
those lay speeches at the grave of which in France they set us nowadays
so many good examples.  In the case of the friend whose memory brings
us together on the present occasion, it was easy to organize this
supplementary service.  Not everyone leaves musical compositions of his
own to fill the hour with.  And if we may believe that spirits can know
aught of what transpires in the world which they have forsaken, it must
please us all to think how dear old Francis Boott's shade must now be
touched at seeing in the Chapel of this university to which his
feelings clung so loyally, his music and his life at last become the
subjects of cordial and admiring recognition and commemorated by so
many of his neighbors.  I can imagine nothing at any rate of which the
foreknowledge could have given him deeper satisfaction.  Shy and
sensitive, craving praise as every normal human being craves it, yet
getting little, he had, I think, a certain consciousness of living in
the shadow.  I greatly doubt whether his daydreams ever went so far as
to let him imagine a service like this.  Such a cordial and spontaneous
outgoing towards him on our part would surprise as much as it would
delight him.

His life was private in the strongest sense of the term.  His
contributions to literature were all anonymous, book-reviews chiefly,
or letters and paragraphs in the New York Nation on musical or literary
topics.  Good as was their quality, and witty as was their form,--his
only independent volume was an almost incredibly witty little book of
charades in verse--they were too slight in bulk for commemoration; and
it was only as a musical composer that he touched on any really public
function.  With so many of his compositions sounding in your ears, it
would be out of place, even were I qualified, to attempt to
characterize Mr. Boott's musical genius.  Let it speak for itself.  I
prefer to speak of the man and friend whom we knew and whom so many of
us loved so dearly.

One of the usual classifications of men is into those of expansive and
those of conservative temper.  The word conservative commonly suggests
a dose of religious and political prejudice, and a fondness for
traditional opinions.  Mr. Boott was a liberal in politics and
theology; and all his opinions were self-made, and as often as not at
variance with every tradition.  Yet in a wider sense he was profoundly
conservative.

He respected bounds of ordinance, and emphasized the fact of limits.
He knew well his own limits.  The knowledge of them was in fact one of
the things he lived by.  To judge of abstract philosophy, of sculpture
and painting, of certain lines of literary art, he admitted, was not of
his competency.  But within the sphere where he thought he had a right
to judge, he parted his likes from his dislikes and preserved his
preferences with a pathetic steadfastness.  He was faithful in age to
the lights that lit his youth, and obeyed at eve the voice obeyed at
prime, with a consistency most unusual.  Elsewhere the opinions of
others might perplex him, but he laughed and let them live.  Within his
own appropriated sphere he was too scrupulous a lover of the truth not
to essay to correct them, when he thought them erroneous.  A certain
appearance comes in here of a self-contradictory character, for Mr.
Boott was primarily modest and sensitive, and all his interests and
pre-occupations were with life's refinements and delicacies.  Yet one's
mind always pictured him as a rugged sort of person, opposing
successful resistance to all influences that might seek to change his
habits either of feeling or of action.  His admirable health, his sober
life, his regular walk twice a day, whatever might be the weather, his
invariable evenness of mood and opinion, so that, when you once knew
his range, he never disappointed you--all this was at variance with
popular notions of the artistic temperament.  He was indeed, a man of
reason, no romancer, sentimentalist or dreamer, in spite of the fact
that his main interests were with the muses.  He was exact and
accurate; affectionate, indeed, and sociable, but neither gregarious
nor demonstrative; and such words as "honest," "sturdy," "faithful,"
are the adjectives first to rise when one thinks of him.  A friend said
to me soon after his death: "I seem still to see Mr. Boott, with his
two feet planted on the ground, and his cane in front of him, making of
himself a sort of tripod of honesty and veracity."

Old age changes men in different ways.  Some it softens; some it
hardens; some it degenerates; some it alters.  Our old friend Boott was
identical in spiritual essence all his life, and the effect of his
growing old was not to alter, but only to make the same man mellower,
more tolerant, more lovable.  Sadder he was, I think, for his life had
grown pretty lonely; but he was a stoic and he never complained either
of losses or of years, and that contagious laugh of his at any and
every pretext for laughter rang as free and true upon his deathbed as
at any previous time of his existence.

Born in 1813, he had lived through three generations, and seen enormous
social and public changes.  When a carpenter has a surface to measure,
he slides his rule along it, and over all its peculiarities.  I
sometimes think of Boott as such a standard rule against which the
changing fashions of humanity of the last century might come to
measurement.  A character as healthy and definite as his, of whatsoever
type it be, need only remain entirely true to itself for a sufficient
number of years, while the outer conditions change, to grow into
something like a common measure.  Compared with its repose and
permanent fitness to continue, the changes of the generations seem
ephemeral and accidental.  It remains the standard, the rule, the term
of comparison.  Mr. Boott's younger friends must often have felt in his
presence how much more vitally near they were than they had supposed to
the old Boston long before the war, to the older Harvard, to the older
Rome and Florence.  To grow old after his manner is of itself to grow
important.

I said that Mr. Boott was not demonstrative or sentimental.
Tender-hearted he was and faithful as few men are, in friendship.  He
made new friends, and dear ones, in the very last years of his life,
and it is good to think of him as having had that consolation.  The
will in which he surprised so many persons by remembering them--"one of
the only purely beautiful wills I have ever read," said a
lawyer,--showed how much he cared at heart for many of us to whom he
had rarely made express professions of affection.

Good-by, then, old friend.  We shall nevermore meet the upright figure,
the blue eye, the hearty laugh, upon these Cambridge streets.  But in
that wider world of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours
forms so infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and
their missions here will continue in some way to be represented, and
that ancient human loves will never lose their own.



[1] An address delivered at the Memorial Service to Francis Boott in
the Harvard Chapel, Sunday, May 8, 1904.  Printed in 38 _Harvard
Monthly_, 125.




V

THOMAS DAVIDSON: A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.[1]

I wish to pay my tribute to the memory of a Scottish-American friend of
mine who died five years ago, a man of a character extraordinarily and
intensely human, in spite of the fact that he was classed by obituary
articles in England among the twelve most learned men of his time.

It would do no honor to Thomas Davidson's memory not to be frank about
him.  He handled people without gloves, himself, and one has no right
to retouch his photograph until its features are softened into
insipidity.  He had defects and excesses which he wore upon his sleeve,
so that everyone could see them.  They made him many enemies, and if
one liked quarrelling he was an easy man to quarrel with.  But his
heart and mind held treasures of the rarest.  He had a genius for
friendship.  Money, place, fashion, fame, and other vulgar idols of the
tribe had no hold on his imagination.  He led his own life absolutely,
in whatever company he found himself, and the intense individualism
which he taught by word and deed, is the lesson of which our generation
is perhaps most in need.

All sorts of contrary adjectives come up as I think of him.  To begin
with, there was something physically rustic which suggested to the end
his farm-boy origin.  His voice was sweet and its Scottish cadences
most musical, and the extraordinary sociability of his nature made
friends for him as much among women as among men; he had, moreover, a
sort of physical dignity; but neither in dress nor in manner did he
ever grow quite "gentlemanly" or _Salonfähig_ in the conventional and
obliterated sense of the terms.  He was too cordial and emphatic for
that.  His broad brow, his big chest, his bright blue eyes, his
volubility in talk and laughter told a tale of vitality far beyond the
common; but his fine and nervous hands, and the vivacity of all his
reactions suggested a degree of sensibility that one rarely finds
conjoined with so robustly animal a frame.  The great peculiarity of
Davidson did indeed consist in this combination of the acutest
sensibilities with massive faculties of thought and action, a
combination which, when the thought and actions are important, gives to
the world its greatest men.

Davidson's native mood was happy.  He took optimistic views of life and
of his own share in it.  A sort of permanent satisfaction radiated from
his face; and this expression of inward glory (which in reality was to
a large extent structural and not "expressive" at all) was displeasing
to many new acquaintances on whom it made an impression of too much
conceit.  The impression of conceit was not diminished in their eyes by
the freedom with which Davidson contradicted, corrected and reprehended
other people.  A longer acquaintance invariably diminished the
impression.  But it must be confessed that T. D. never was exactly
humble-minded, and that the solidity of his self-consciousness
withstood strains under which that of weaker men would have crumbled.
The malady which finally killed him was one of the most exhausting to
the nervous tone to which our flesh is subject, and it wore him out
before it ended him.  He told me of the paroxysms of motiveless nervous
dread which used to beset him in the night-watches.  Yet these never
subdued his stalwartness, nor made him a "sick-soul" in the theological
sense of that appelation.  "God is afraid of me," was the phrase by
which he described his well-being to me one morning when his night had
been a good one, and he was feeling so cannibalistic that he thought he
might get well.

There are men whose attitude is always that of seeking for truth, and
men who on the contrary always believe that they have the root of it
already in them.  Davidson was of the latter class.  Like his
countrymen, Carlyle and Ruskin, he felt himself to be in the possession
of something, whether articulate or as yet articulated by himself, that
authorized him (and authorized him with uncommon openness and
frequency) to condemn the errors of others.  I think that to the last
he never fully extricated this philosophy.  It was a tendency, a faith
in a direction, which gave him an active persuasion that other
directions were false, but of which the central insight never got fully
formulated, but remained in a state which Frederic Myers would have
called subliminal.  He varied to a certain extent his watchwords and
his heroes.  When I first knew him all was Aristotle.  Later all was
Rosmini.  Later still Rosmini seemed forgotten.  He knew so many
writers that he grew fond of very various ones and had a strange
tolerance for systematizers and dogmatizers whom, as the consistent
individualist that he was, he should have disliked.  Hegel, it is true,
he detested; but he always spoke with reverence of Kant.  Of Mill and
Spencer he had a low opinion; and when I lent him Paulsen's
Introduction to Philosophy (then just out), as an example of a kind of
eclectic thought that seemed to be growing, and with which I largely
sympathized, he returned it with richer expressions of disdain than
often fell even from his lips: "It's the shabbiest, seediest pretence
at a philosophy I ever dreamed of as possible.  It's like a man dressed
in a black coat so threadbare as to be all shiny.  The most
poverty-stricken, out-at-elbows thing I ever read.  A perfect monument
of seediness and shabbiness," etc.

The truth is that Davidson, brought up on the older classical
traditions, never outgrew those habits of judging the world by purely
aesthetic criteria which men fed on the sciences of nature are so
willing to abandon.  Even if a philosophy were true, he could easily
fail to relish it unless it showed a certain formal nobility and
dogmatic pretension to finality.  But I must not describe him so much
from my own professional point of view--it is as a vessel of life at
large that one ought to keep him in remembrance.

He came to Boston from St. Louis, where he had been teaching, about the
year 1873.  He was ruddy and radiant, and I soon saw much of him,
though at first it was without the thoroughness of sympathy which we
afterwards acquired and which made us overflow, on meeting after long
absences, into such laughing greetings as: "Ha! you old thief!  Ha! you
old blackguard!"--pure "contrast-effects" of affection and familiarity
passing beyond their bounds.  At that time I saw most of him at a
little philosophical club which used to meet every fortnight at his
rooms in Temple Street in Boston.  Of the other members, J. Elliot
Cabot and C. C. Everett, are now dead--I will not name the survivors.
We never worked out harmonious conclusions.  Davidson used to crack the
whip of Aristotle over us; and I remember that, whatever topic was
formally appointed for the day, we invariably wound up with a quarrel
about Space and Space-perception.  The Club had existed before
Davidson's advent.  The previous year we had gone over a good part of
Hegel's larger Logic, under the self-constituted leadership of two
young business men from Illinois, who had become enthusiastic Hegelians
and, knowing almost no German, had actually possessed themselves of a
manuscript translation of the entire three volumes of Logic, made by an
extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant, named Brockmeyer.  These disciples
were leaving business for the law and studying at the Harvard
law-school; but they saw the whole universe through Hegelian
spectacles, and a more admirable _homo unius libri_ than one of them,
with his three big folios of Hegelian manuscript, I have never had the
good fortune to know.

I forget how Davidson was earning his subsistence at this time.  He did
some lecturing and private teaching, but I do not think they were great
in amount.  In the springs and summers he frequented the coast, and
indulged in long swimming bouts and salt-water immersions, which seemed
to agree with him greatly.  His sociability was boundless, and his time
seemed to belong to anyone who asked for it.

I soon conceived that such a man would be invaluable in Harvard
University--a kind of Socrates, a devotee of truth and lover of youth,
ready to sit up to any hour, and drink beer and talk with anyone,
lavish of learning and counsel, a contagious example of how lightly and
humanly a burden of erudition might be borne upon a pair of shoulders.
In faculty-business he might not run well in harness, but as an
inspiration and ferment of character, as an example of the ranges of
combination of scholarship with manhood that are possible, his
influence on the students would be priceless.

I do not know whether this scheme of mine could under any circumstances
have been carried out.  In point of fact it was nipped in the bud by T.
D. himself.  A natural chair for him would have been Greek philosophy.
Unfortunately, just at the decisive hour, he offended our Greek
department by a savage onslaught on its methods, which, without taking
anyone's counsel, he sent to the _Atlantic Monthly_, whose editor
printed it.  This, with his other unconventionalisms, made advocating
his cause more difficult, and the university authorities, never, I
believe, seriously thought of an appointment for him.

I believe that in this case, as in one or two others like it, which I
might mention, Harvard University lost a great opportunity.
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean
more in a university, where a few undisciplinables like T. D. may be
infinitely more precious than a faculty-full of orderly routinists.  As
to what Davidson might have become under the conventionalizing
influences of an official position, it would be idle to speculate.

As things fell out, he became more and more unconventional and even
developed a sort of antipathy to all regular academic life.  It subdued
individuality, he thought, and made for Philistinism.  He earnestly
dissuaded his young friend Bakewell from accepting a professorship; and
I well remember one dark night in the Adirondacks, after a good dinner
at a neighbor's, the eloquence with which, as we trudged down-hill to
his own quarters with a lantern, he denounced me for the musty and
mouldy and generally ignoble academicism of my character.  Never before
or since, I fancy, has the air of the Adirondack wilderness vibrated
more repugnantly to a vocable than it did that night to the word
"academicism."

Yet Davidson himself was always essentially a teacher.  He must give
forth, inspire, and have the young about him.  After leaving Boston for
Europe and Africa, founding the Fellowship of the New Life in London
and New York (the present Fabian Society in England is its offshoot),
he hit upon the plan which pleased him best of all when, in 1882 or
thereabouts, he bought a couple of hundred acres on East Hill, which
closes the beautiful Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, on the north, and
founded there, at the foot of Hurricane Mountain, his place "Glenmore"
and its "Summer School of the Culture Sciences."  Although the primeval
forest has departed from its immediate vicinity, the region is still
sylvan, the air is sweet and strong and almost alpine in quality, and
the mountain panorama spread before one is superlative.  Davidson
showed a business faculty which I should hardly have expected from him,
in organizing his settlement.  He built a number of cottages pretty in
design and of the simplest construction, and disposed them well for
effect.  He turned a couple of farm buildings which were on the grounds
into a lecturing place and a refectory; and there, arriving in early
April and not leaving till late in November, he spent the happiest part
of all his later years, surrounded during the summer months by
colleagues, friends, and listeners to lectures, and in the spring and
fall by a few independent women who were his faithful friends, and who
had found East Hill a congenial residence.

Twice I went up with T. D. to open the place in April.  I remember
leaving his fireside one night with three ladies who were also early
comers, and finding the thermometer at 8 degrees Fahrenheit and a
tremendous gale blowing the snow about us.  Davidson loved these
blustering vicissitudes of climate.  In the early years the brook was
never too cold for him to bathe in, and he spent days in rambling over
the hills and up the glens and through the forest.

His own cottage was full of books whose use was free to all who visited
the settlement.  It stood high on a hill in a grove of silver-birches
and looked upon the Western Mountains; and it always seemed to me an
ideal dwelling for such a bachelor-scholar.  Here in May and June he
became almost one with the resurgent vegetation.  Here, in October, he
was a witness of the jewelled pageant of the dying foliage, and saw the
hillsides reeking, as it were, and aflame with ruby and gold and
emerald and topaz.  One September day in 1900, at the "Kurhaus" at
Nauheim, I took up a copy of the Paris _New York Herald_, and read in
capitals: "Death of Professor Thomas Davidson."  I had well known how
ill he was, yet such was his vitality that the shock was wholly
unexpected.  I did not realize till that moment how much that free
companionship with him every spring and autumn, surrounded by that
beautiful nature, had signified to me, or how big a piece would be
subtracted from my life by its cessation.

Davidson's capacity for imparting information seemed endless.  There
were few subjects, especially "humanistic" subjects, in which at some
time or other he had not taken an interest; and as everything that had
ever touched him was instantaneously in reach of his omnipotent memory,
he easily became a living dictionary of reference.  As such all his
friends were wont to use him.  He was, for example, never at a loss to
supply a quotation.  He loved poetry passionately, and the sympathetic
voice with which he would recall page after page of it--English,
French, German, or Italian--is a thing always to be remembered.  But
notwithstanding the instructive part he played in every conceivable
conversation, he was never prolix, and he never "lectured."

From Davidson I learned what immunities a perfect memory bestows upon
one.  I never could discover when he amassed his learning for he never
seemed "occupied."  The secret of it was that any odd time would do,
for he never had to acquire a thing twice over.  He avoided stated
hours of work on principle.  Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of
my own on "Habit," he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no
regular habits.  When he found himself in danger of settling into even
a good one, he made a point of interrupting it.  Habits and methods
make a prisoner of a man, destroy his readiness, keep him from
answering the call of the fresh moment.  Individualist _à outrance_,
Davidson felt that every hour was an unique entity, to whose claims one
should lie open.  Thus he was never abstracted or preoccupied, but
always seemed, when with you, as if you were the one person whom it was
then right to attend to.

It was this individualistic religion that made T. D., democrat as he
nevertheless was, so hostile to all socialisms and administrative
panaceas.  Life must be flexible.  You ask for a free man, and these
Utopias give you an "interchangeable part," with a fixed number, in a
rule-bound organism.  The real thing to aim at is liberation of the
inner interests.  Give man possession of a _soul_, and he will work out
his own happiness under any set of conditions.  Accordingly, when, in
the penultimate year of his life, he proposed his night-school to a
meeting of young East-Side workingmen in New York, he told them that he
had no sympathy whatever with the griefs of "labor," that outward
circumstances meant nothing in his eyes; that through their individual
wills and intellects they could share, just as they were, in the
highest spiritual life of humanity, and that he was there to help them
severally to that privilege.

The enthusiasm with which they responded speaks volumes, both for his
genius as a teacher and for the sanity of his position.  A small
posthumous book of articles by Davidson and of letters written from
Glenmore to his class, just published, with an introduction by his
disciple Professor Bakewell,[2] gives a full account of the experiment,
and ought to stand as a model and inspirer to similar attempts the
world over.  Davidson's idea of the universe was that of a republic of
immortal spirits, the chief business of whom in their several grades of
existence, should be to know and love and help one another.  "Creeds
are nothing, life is everything. . . .  You can do far more by
presenting to the world the example of noble social relations than by
enumerating any set of principles.  Know all you can, love all you can,
do all you can--that is the whole duty of man. . . .  Be friends, in
the truest sense, each to the other.  There is nothing in all the world
like friendship, when it is deep and real. . . .  The divine . . . is a
republic of self-existent spirits, each seeking the realization of its
ideas through love, through intimacy with all the rest, and finding its
heaven in such intimacy."

We all say and think that we believe this sort of thing; but Davidson
believed it really and actively, and that made all the difference.
When the young wage-earners whom he addressed found that here was a man
of measureless learning ready to give his soul to them as if he had
nothing else to do with it, life's ideal possibilities widened to their
view.  When he was taken from them, they founded in New York the Thomas
Davidson Society, for study and neighborhood work, which will probably
become perpetual, and of which his epistles from Glenmore will be the
rule, and keep the standards set by him from degenerating--unless,
indeed, the Society should some day grow too rich, of which there is no
danger at present, and from which may Heaven long preserve it.  In one
of his letters to the Class, Davidson sums up the results of his own
experience of life in twenty maxims, as follows:


1. Rely upon your own energies, and do not wait for, or depend on other
people.

2. Cling with all your might to your own highest ideals, and do not be
led astray by such vulgar aims as wealth, position, popularity.  Be
yourself.

3. Your worth consists in what you are, and not in what you have.  What
you are will show in what you do.

4. Never fret, repine, or envy.  Do not make yourself unhappy by
comparing your circumstances with those of more fortunate people; but
make the most of the opportunities you have.  Employ profitably every
moment.

5. Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books;
live with the mighty.  But learn to be happy alone.

6. Do not believe that all greatness and heroism are in the past.
Learn to discover princes, prophets, heroes, and saints among the
people about you.  Be assured they are there.

7. Be on earth what good people hope to be in heaven.

8. Cultivate ideal friendships, and gather into an intimate circle all
your acquaintances who are hungering for truth and right.  Remember
that heaven itself can be nothing but the intimacy of pure and noble
souls.

9. Do not shrink from any useful or kindly act, however hard or
repellent it may be.  The worth of acts is measured by the spirit in
which they are performed.

10. If the world despise you because you do not follow its ways, pay no
heed to it.  But be sure your way is right.

11. If a thousand plans fail, be not disheartened.  As long as your
purposes are right, you have not failed.

12. Examine yourself every night, and see whether you have progressed
in knowledge, sympathy, and helpfulness during the day.  Count every
day a loss in which no progress has been made.

13. Seek enjoyment in energy, not in dalliance.  Our worth is measured
solely by what we do.

14. Let not your goodness be professional; let it be the simple,
natural outcome of your character.  Therefore cultivate character.

15. If you do wrong, say so, and make what atonement you can.  That is
true nobleness.  Have no moral debts.

16. When in doubt how to act, ask yourself, What does nobility command?
Be on good terms with yourself.

17. Look for no reward for goodness but goodness itself.  Remember
heaven and hell are utterly immoral institutions, if they are meant as
reward and punishment.

18. Give whatever countenance and help you can to every movement and
institution that is working for good.  Be not sectarian.

19. Wear no placards, within or without.  Be human fully.

20. Never be satisfied until you have understood the meaning of the
world, and the purpose of our own life, and have reduced your world to
a rational cosmos.


One of the "placards" Davidson tried hardest to keep his Society from
wearing was that of "Socialism."  Yet no one felt more deeply than he
the evils of rapacious individual competition.  Spontaneously and
flexibly organized social settlements or communities, with individual
leaders as their centres, seem to have been his ideal, each with its
own religious or ethical elements of discipline.  The present isolation
of the family is too inhuman.  The ideal type of future life, he
thought, will be something like the monastery, with the family instead
of the individual, for its unit.

Leveller upwards of men as Davidson was, upon the intellectual and
moral level, he seemed wholly without that sort of religion which makes
so many of our contemporary anarchists think that they ought to dip, at
least, into some manual occupation, in order to share the common burden
of humanity I never saw T. D. work with his hands in any way.  He
accepted material services of all kinds without apology, as if he were
a patrician, evidently feeling that if he played his own more
intellectual part rightly, society could make no further claim upon him.

This confidence that the life of the spirit is the absolutely highest,
made Davidson serene about his outward fortunes.  Pecuniary worry would
not tally with his program.  He had a very small provision against a
rainy day, but he did little to increase it.  He used to write as many
articles and give as many "lectures," "talks," or "readings" every
winter as would suffice to pay the year's expenses, and thereafter he
refused additional invitations, and repaired to Glenmore as early in
the spring as possible.  I could but admire the temper he showed when
the principal building there was one night burned to ashes.  There was
no insurance on it, and it would cost a couple of thousand dollars to
replace it.  Excitable as Davidson was about small contrarieties, he
watched this fire without a syllable of impatience.  _Plaie d'argent
n'est pas mortelle_, he seemed to say, and if he felt sharp regrets, he
disdained to express them.

No more did care about his literary reputation trouble him.  In the
ordinary greedy sense, he seemed quite free from ambition.  During his
last years he had prepared a large amount of material for that history
of the interaction of Greek, Christian, Hebrew, and Arabic thought upon
one another before the revival of learning, which was to be his _magnum
opus_.  It was a territory to which, in its totality, few living minds
had access, and in which a certain proprietary feeling was natural.
Knowing how short his life might be, I once asked him whether he felt
no concern lest the work already done by him should be frustrate, from
the lack of its necessary complement, in case he were suddenly cut off.
His answer surprised me by its indifference.  He would work as long as
he lived, he said, but not allow himself to worry, and look serenely at
whatever might be the outcome.  This seemed to me uncommonly
high-minded.  I think that Davidson's conviction of immortality had
much to do with such a superiority to accidents.  On the surface, and
towards small things, he was irritable enough, but the undertone of his
character was remarkable for equanimity.  He showed it in his final
illness, of which the misery was really atrocious.  There were no
general complaints or lamentations about the personal situation or the
arrest to his career.  It was the human lot and he must even bear it;
so he kept his mind upon objective matters.

But, as I said at the outset, the paramount thing in Davidson in my
eyes was his capacity for friendship.  His friends were
innumerable--boys and girls and old boys and old girls, Papists and
Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, married and single; and he cared deeply
for each one of them, admiring them often too extravagantly.  What term
can name those recurrent waves of delighted laughter that expressed his
greeting, beginning from the moment he saw you and accompanying his
words continuously, as if his pleasure in you were interminable?  His
hand too, stretched out when yards away, so that a country neighbor
said it reached farther than any hand he ever met with.  The odd thing
was that friendship in Davidson seemed so little to interfere with
criticism.  Persons with whom intercourse was one long contradiction on
his part, and who appeared to annoy him to extermination, he none the
less loved tenderly, and enjoyed living with them.  "He's the most
utterly selfish, illiberal and narrow-hearted human being I ever knew,"
I heard him once say of someone, "and yet he's the dearest, nicest
fellow living."  His enthusiastic belief in any young person who gave a
promise of genius was touching.  Naturally a man who is willing, as he
was, to be a prophet, always finds some women who are willing to be
disciples.  I never heard of any sentimental weakness in Davidson in
this relation, save possibly in one case.  They harmed themselves at
the fire of his soul, and he told them truths without accommodation.
"You 're farther off from God than any woman I ever heard of."  "Nay,
if you believe in a protective tariff, you 're in hell already, though
you may not know it."  "You had a fine hysterical time last night,
didn't you, when Miss B was brought up from the ravine with her
dislocated shoulder."  To Miss B he said: "I don't pity you.  It served
you right for being so ignorant as to go there at that hour."  Seldom,
strange to say, did the recipients of these deliverances seem to resent
them.

What with Davidson's warmth of heart and sociability, I used to wonder
at his never marrying.  Two years before his death he told me the
reason--an unhappy youthful love-affair in Scotland.  Twice in later
life, he said, temptation had come to him, and he had had to make his
decision.  When he had come to the point, he had felt each time that
the tie with the dead girl was prohibitive.  "When two persons have
known each other as we did," he said, "neither can ever fully belong to
a stranger.  So it would n't do."  "It would n't do, it would n't do!"
he repeated, as we lay on the hillside, in a tone so musically tender
that it chimes in my ear now as I write down his confession.  It can
surely be no breach of confidence to publish it--it is too creditable
to the profundity of Davidson's affections.  As I knew him, he was one
of the purest of human beings.

If one asks, now, what the _value_ of Thomas Davidson was, what was the
general significance of his life, apart from his particular books and
articles, I have to say that it lay in the example he set to us all of
how, even in the midst of this intensely worldly social system of ours,
in which each human interest is organized so collectively and so
commercially, a single man may still be a knight-errant of the
intellectual life, and preserve full freedom in the midst of
sociability.  Extreme as was his need of friends, and faithful as he
was to them, he yet lived mainly in reliance on his private
inspiration.  Asking no man's permission, bowing the knee to no tribal
idol, renouncing the conventional channels of recognition, he showed us
how a life devoted to purely intellectual ends could be beautifully
wholesome outwardly, and overflow with inner contentment.  Fortunately
this type of man is recurrent, and from generation to generation,
literary history preserves examples.  But it is infrequent enough for
few of us to have known more than one example--I count myself happy in
knowing two and a half!  The memory of Davidson will always strengthen
my faith in personal freedom and its spontaneities, and make me less
unqualifiedly respectful than ever of "Civilization," with its herding
and branding, licensing and degree-giving, authorizing and appointing,
and in general regulating and administering by system the lives human
beings.  Surely the individual, the person in the singular number, is
the more fundamental phenomenon, and the social institution, of
whatever grade, is but secondary and ministerial.  Many as are the
interests which social systems satisfy, always unsatisfied interests
remain over, and among them are interests to which system, as such,
does violence whenever it lays its hand upon us.  The best Commonwealth
will always be the one that most cherishes the men who represent the
residual interests, the one that leaves the largest scope to their
peculiarities.



[1] First published in _McClure's Magazine_ for May, 1905.

[2] "The Education of the Wage-Earners."  Boston, Ginn & Company, 1904.




VI

HERBERT SPENCER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY[1]

"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform."  If the
greatest of all his wonders be the human individual, the richness with
which the specimens thereof are diversified, the limitless variety of
outline, from gothic to classic or flowing arabesque, the contradictory
nature of the filling, composed of little and great, of comic, heroic,
and pathetic elements blended inextricably, in personalities all of
whom can _go_, and go successfully, must surely be reckoned the supreme
miracle of creative ingenuity.  Rarely has Nature performed an odder or
more Dickens-like feat than when she deliberately designed, or
accidentally stumbled into, the personality of Herbert Spencer.
Greatness and smallness surely never lived so closely in one skin
together.

The opposite verdicts passed upon his work by his contemporaries bear
witness to the extraordinary mingling of defects and merits in his
mental character.  Here are a few, juxtaposed:--

"A philosophic saw-mill."--"The most capacious and powerful thinker of
all time.

"The  Arry' of philosophy."--"Aristotle and his master were not more
beyond the pygmies who preceded them than he is beyond Aristotle."

"Herbert Spencer's chromo-philosophy."--"No other man that has walked
the earth has so wrought and written himself into the life of the
world."

"The touch of his mind takes the living flavor out of everything."--"He
is as much above and beyond all the other great philosophers who have
ever lived as the telegraph is beyond the carrier-pigeon, or the
railway beyond the sedan chair."

"He has merely combined facts which we knew before into a huge
fantastic contradictory system, which hides its nakedness and emptiness
partly under the veil of an imposing terminology, and partly in the
primeval fog."--"His contributions are of a depth, profundity, and
magnitude which have no parallel in the history of mind.  Taking but
one--and one only--of his transcendent reaches of thought,--namely,
that referring to the positive sense of the Unknown as the basis of
religion,--it may unhesitatingly be affirmed that the analysis and
synthesis by which he advances to the almost supernal grasp of this
mighty truth give a sense of power and reach verging on the
preternatural."

Can the two thick volumes of autobiography which Mr. Spencer leaves
behind him explain such discrepant appreciations?  Can we find revealed
in them the higher synthesis which reconciles the contradictions?
Partly they do explain, I think, and even justify, both kinds of
judgment upon their author.  But I confess that in the last resort I
still feel baffled.  In Spencer, as in every concrete individual, there
is a uniqueness that defies all formulation.  We can feel the touch of
it and recognize its taste, so to speak, relishing or disliking, as the
case may be, but we can give no ultimate account of it, and we have in
the end simply to admire the Creator.

Mr. Spencer's task, the unification of all knowledge into an articulate
system, was more ambitious than anything attempted since St. Thomas or
Descartes.  Most thinkers have confined themselves either to
generalities or to details, but Spencer addressed himself to
everything.  He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first
principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry after a
fashion, in biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics.
Hardly any subject can be named which has not at least been touched on
in some one of his many volumes.  His erudition was prodigious.  His
civic conscience and his social courage both were admirable.  His life
was pure.  He was devoted to truth and usefulness, and his character
was wholly free from envy and malice (though not from contempt), and
from the perverse egoisms that so often go with greatness.

Surely, any one hearing this veracious enumeration would think that
Spencer must have been a rich and exuberant human being.  Such wide
curiosities must have gone with the widest sympathies, and such a
powerful harmony of character, whether it were a congenital gift, or
were acquired by spiritual wrestling and eating bread with tears, must
in any case have been a glorious spectacle for the beholder.  Since
Goethe, no such ideal human being can have been visible, walking our
poor earth.

Yet when we turn to the "Autobiography," the self-confession which we
find is this: An old-maidish personage, inhabiting boarding-houses,
equable and lukewarm in all his tastes and passions, having no
desultory curiosity, showing little interest in either books or people.
A petty fault-finder and stickler for trifles, devoid in youth of any
wide designs on life, fond only of the more mechanical side of things,
yet drifting as it were involuntarily into the possession of a
world-formula which by dint of his extraordinary pertinacity he
proceeded to apply to so many special cases that it made him a
philosopher in spite of himself.  He appears as modest enough, but with
a curious vanity in some of his deficiencies,--his lack of desultory
interests, for example, and his nonconformity to reigning customs.  He
gives a queer sense of having no emotional perspective, as if small
things and large were on the same plane of vision, and equally
commanded his attention.  In spite of his professed dislike of
monotony, one feels an awfully monotonous quality in him; and in spite
of the fact that invalidism condemned him to avoid thinking, and to
saunter and potter through large parts of every day, one finds no
twilight region in his mind, and no capacity for dreaminess or
passivity.  All parts of it are filled with the same noonday glare,
like a dry desert where every grain of sand shows singly, and there are
no mysteries or shadows.

"Look on this picture and on that," and answer how they can be
compatible.

For one thing, Mr. Spencer certainly writes himself _down_ too much.
He complains of a poor memory, of an idle disposition, of a general
dislike for reading.  Doubtless there have been more gifted men in all
these respects.  But when Spencer once buckled to a particular task,
his memory, his industry, and his reading went beyond those of the most
gifted.  He had excessive sensibility to stimulation by a challenge,
and he had preëminent pertinacity.  When the notion of his philosophic
system once grasped him, it seemed to possess itself of every effective
fibre of his being.  No faculty in him was left unemployed,--nor, on
the other hand, was anything that his philosophy could contain left
unstated.  Roughly speaking, the task and the man absorbed each other
without residuum.

Compare this type of mind with such an opposite type as Ruskin's, or
even as J. S. Mill's, or Huxley's, and you realize its peculiarity.
Behind the work of those others was a background of overflowing mental
temptations.  The men loom larger than all their publications, and
leave an impression of unexpressed potentialities.  Spencer tossed all
his inexpressibilities into the Unknowable, and gladly turned his back
on them forever.  His books seem to have expressed all that there was
to express in his character.

He is very frank about this himself.  No _Sturm und Drang
Periode_, no problematic stage of thought, where the burden of the
much-to-be-straightened exceeds the powers of straightening.

When George Eliot uttered surprise at seeing no lines on his forehead,
his reply was:--"I suppose it is because I am never puzzled."--"It has
never been my way," he continues, "to set before myself a problem and
puzzle out an answer.  The conclusions at which I have from time to
time arrived, have not been arrived at as solutions of questions
raised; but have been arrived at unawares--each as the ultimate outcome
of a body of thought which slowly grew from a germ.  Some direct
observation, or some fact met with in reading, would dwell with me;
apparently because I had a sense of its significance. . . .  A week
afterwards, possibly, the matter would be remembered; and with further
thought about it, might occur a recognition of some wider application:
new instances being aggregated with those already noted.  Again, after
an interval," etc., etc.  "And thus, little by little, in unobtrusive
ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would
grow up a coherent and organized theory" (vol. i, page 464).

A sort of mill, this, wound up to grind in a certain way, and
irresponsive otherwise.

"To apply day after day merely with the general idea of acquiring
information, or of increasing ability, was not in me."  "Anything like
passive receptivity is foreign to my nature; and there results an
unusually small tendency to be affected by others' thoughts.  It seems
as though the fabric of my conclusions had in all cases to be developed
from within.  Material which could be taken in and organized so as to
form part of a coherent structure, there was always a readiness to
receive.  But ideas and sentiments of alien kinds, or unorganizable
kinds, were, if not rejected, yet accepted with indifference, and soon
dropped away."  "It has always been out of the question for me to go on
reading a book the fundamental principles of which I entirely dissent
from.  I take it for granted that if the fundamental principles are
wrong the rest cannot be right; and thereupon cease reading--being, I
suspect, rather glad of an excuse for doing so."  "Systematic books of
a political or ethical kind, written from points of view quite unlike
my own, were either not consulted at all, or else they were glanced at
and thereafter disregarded" (vol. i, pages 215, 277, 289, 350).

There is pride rather than compunction in these confessions.  Spencer's
mind was so narrowly systematized, that he was at last almost incapable
of believing in the reality of alien ways of feeling.  The invariable
arrogance of his replies to criticisms shows his absolute
self-confidence.  Every opinion in the world had to be articulately
right or articulately wrong,--so proved by some principle or other of
his infallible system.

He confesses freely his own inflexibility and censoriousness.  His
account of his father makes one believe in the fatality of heredity.
Born of old nonconformist stock, the elder Spencer was a man of
absolute punctuality.  Always he would step out of his way to kick a
stone off the pavement lest somebody should trip over it.  If he saw
boys quarrelling he stopped to expostulate; and he never could pass a
man who was ill-treating a horse without trying to make him behave
better.  He would never take off his hat to any one, no matter of what
rank, nor could he be induced to address any one as "Esquire" or as
"Reverend."  He would never put on any sign of mourning, even for
father and mother; and he adhered to one style of coat and hat
throughout all changes of fashion.  Improvement was his watchword
always and everywhere.  Whatever he wrote had to be endlessly
corrected, and his love of detail led all his life to his neglecting
large ends in his care for small ones.  A good heart, but a pedantic
conscience, and a sort of energetically mechanical intelligence.

Of himself Herbert Spencer says: "No one will deny that I am much given
to criticism.  Along with exposition of my own views there has always
gone a pointing out of defects in those of others.  And if this is a
trait in my writing, still more is it a trait in my conversation.  The
tendency to fault-finding is dominant--disagreeably dominant.  The
indicating of errors in thought and speech made by those around has all
through life been an incurable habit--a habit for which I have often
reproached myself, but to no purpose."

The "Autobiography" abounds in illustrations of the habit.  For
instance:--

"Of late I have observed sundry cases in which, having found the right,
people deliberately desert it for the wrong. . . .  A generation ago
salt-cellars were made of convenient shapes--either ellipses or
elongated parallelograms: the advantage being that the salt-spoon,
placed lengthwise, remained in its place.  But for some time past,
fashion has dictated circular salt-cellars, on the edges of which the
salt-spoon will not remain without skilful balancing: it falls on the
cloth.  In my boyhood a jug was made of a form at once convenient and
graceful. . . .  Now, however, the almost universal form of jug in use
is a frustum of a cone with a miniature spout.  It combines all
possible defects.  When anything like full, it is impossible to pour
out a small quantity without part of the liquid trickling down beneath
the spout; and a larger quantity cannot be poured out without exceeding
the limits of the spout and running over on each side of it.  If the
jug is half empty, the tilting must be continued a long time before any
liquid comes; and then, when it does come, it comes with a rush;
because its surface has now become so large that a small inclination
delivers a great deal.  To all which add that the shape is as ugly a
one as can well be hit upon.  Still more extraordinary is the folly of
a change made in another utensil of daily use"--and Spencer goes on to
find fault with the cylindrical form of candle extinguisher, proving by
a description of its shape that "it squashes the wick into the melted
composition, the result being that when, next day, the extinguisher is
taken off, the wick, imbedded in the solidified composition, cannot be
lighted without difficulty" (vol. ii, page 238).

The remorseless explicitness, the punctuation, everything, make these
specimens of public fault-finding with what probably was the equipment
of Mr. Spencer's latest boarding-house, sound like passages from "The
Man versus the State."  Another example:--

"Playing billiards became 'my custom always of the afternoon.'  Those
who confess to billiard-playing commonly make some kind of an
excuse. . . .  It suffices to me that I like billiards, and the
attainment of the pleasure given I regard as a sufficient motive.  I
have for a long time deliberately set my face against that asceticism
which makes it an offence to do a thing for the pleasure of doing it;
and have habitually contended that, so long as no injury is inflicted
on others, nor any ulterior injury on self, and so long as the various
duties of life have been discharged, the pursuit of pleasure for its
own sake is perfectly legitimate and requires no apology.  The opposite
view is nothing else than a remote sequence of the old devil worship of
the barbarian, who sought to please his god by inflicting pains upon
himself, and believed his god would be angry if he made himself happy"
(vol. ii, page 263).

The tone of pedantic rectitude in these passages is characteristic.
Every smallest thing is either right or wrong, and if wrong, can be
articulately proved so by reasoning.  Life grows too dry and literal,
and loses all aërial perspective at such a rate; and the effect is the
more displeasing when the matters in dispute have a rich variety of
aspects, and when the aspect from which Mr. Spencer deduces his
conclusions is manifestly partial.

For instance, in his art-criticisms.  Spencer in his youth did much
drawing, both mechanical and artistic.  Volume one contains a
photo-print of a very creditable bust which he modelled of his uncle.
He had a musical ear, and practiced singing.  He paid attention to
style, and was not wholly insensible to poetry.  Yet in all his
dealings with the art-products of mankind he manifests the same curious
dryness and mechanical literality of judgment--a dryness increased by
pride in his non-conformity.  He would, for example, rather give a
large sum than read to the end of Homer's Iliad,--the ceaseless
repetition of battles, speeches, and epithets like well-greaved Greeks,
horse-breaking Trojans; the tedious enumeration of details of dresses,
arms, and chariots; such absurdities as giving the genealogy of a horse
while in the midst of a battle; and the appeals to savage and brutal
passions, having soon made the poem intolerable to him (vol. i, page
300).  Turner's paintings he finds untrue, in that the earth-region is
habitually as bright in tone as the air-region.  Moreover, Turner
scatters his detail too evenly.  In Greek statues the hair is falsely
treated.  Renaissance painting, even the best, is spoiled by unreal
illumination, and non-rendering of reflected light in the shadows.
Venetian gothic sins by meaningless ornamentation.  St. Mark's Church
may be precious archaeologically, but is not aesthetically precious.
Of Wagner's music he admires nothing but the skilful specialization of
the instruments in the orchestra.

The fault-finding in all these cases rests on observation, true as far
as it goes; but the total absence of genial relations with the entirety
of the phenomenon discussed, the clutching at some paltry mechanical
aspect of it that lends itself to reasoned proof by _a_ plus _b_, and
the practical denial of everything that only appeals to vaguer
sentiment, show a mind so oddly limited to ratiocinative and explicit
processes, and so wedded to the superficial and flagrantly
_insufficient_, that one begins to wonder whether in the philosophic
and scientific spheres the same mind can have wrought out results of
extraordinary value.

Both "yes" and "no" are here the answer.  Every one who writes books or
articles knows how he must flounder until he hits upon the proper
opening.  Once the right beginning found, everything follows easily and
in due order.  If a man, however narrow, strikes even by accident, into
one of these fertile openings, and pertinaciously follows the lead, he
is almost sure to meet truth on his path.  Some thoughts act almost
like mechanical centres of crystallization; facts cluster of themselves
about them.  Such a thought was that of the gradual growth of all
things, by natural processes, out of natural antecedents.  Until the
middle of the nineteenth century no one had grasped it _wholesale_; and
the thinker who did so earliest was bound to make discoveries just in
proportion to the exclusiveness of his interest in the principle.  He
who had the keenest eye for instances and illustrations, and was least
divertible by casual side-curiosity, would score the quickest triumph.

To Spencer is certainly due the immense credit of having been the first
to see in evolution an absolutely universal principle.  If any one else
had grasped its universality, it failed at any rate to grasp him as it
grasped Spencer.  For Spencer it instantly became "the guiding
conception running through and connecting all the concrete sciences"
(vol. ii, page 196).  Here at last was "an object at once large and
distinct enough" to overcome his "constitutional idleness."  "With an
important and definite end to achieve, I could work" (vol. i, page
215).  He became, in short, the victim of a vivid obsession, and for
the first time in his life seems to have grown genuinely ambitious.
Every item of his experience, small or great, every idea in his mental
storehouse, had now to be considered with reference to its bearing on
the new universal principle.  On pages 194-199 of volume two he gives
an interesting summary of the way in which all his previous and
subsequent ideas moved into harmonious coördination and subordination,
when once he had this universal key to insight.  Applying it wholesale
as he did, innumerable truths unobserved till then had to fall into his
gamebag.  And his peculiar trick, a priggish infirmity in daily
intercourse, of treating every smallest thing by abstract law, was here
a merit.  Add his sleuth-hound scent for what he was after, and his
untiring pertinacity, to his priority in perceiving the one great truth
and you fully justify the popular estimate of him as one of the world's
geniuses, in spite of the fact that the "temperament" of genius, so
called, seems to have been so lacking in him.

In one sense, then, Spencer's personal narrowness and dryness were not
hindering, but helping conditions of his achievement.  Grant that a
vast picture _quelconque_ had to be made before the details could be
made perfect, and a greater richness and receptivity of mind would have
resulted in hesitation.  The quality would have been better in spots,
but the extensiveness would have suffered.

Spencer is thus the philosopher of vastness.  Misprised by many
specialists, who carp at his technical imperfections, he has
nevertheless enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative
mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists
and chemists, and of thoughtful laymen generally.  He is the
philosopher whom those who have no other philosopher can appreciate.
To be able to say this of any man is great praise, and gives the "yes"
answer to my recent question.

Can the "no" answer be as unhesitatingly uttered?  I think so, if one
makes the qualitative aspect of Spencer's work undo its quantitative
aspect.  The luke-warm equable temperament, the narrowness of sympathy
and passion, the fondness for mechanical forms of thought, the
imperfect receptivity and lack of interest in facts as such, dissevered
from their possible connection with a theory; nay, the very vividness
itself, the keenness of scent and the pertinacity; these all are
qualities which may easily make for second-rateness, and for
contentment with a cheap and loosely woven achievement.  As Mr.
Spencer's "First Principles" is the book which more than any other has
spread his popular reputation, I had perhaps better explain what I mean
by criticising some of its peculiarities.

I read this book as a youth when it was still appearing in numbers, and
was carried away with enthusiasm by the intellectual perspectives which
it seemed to open.  When a maturer companion, Mr. Charles S. Peirce,
attacked it in my presence, I felt spiritually wounded, as by the
defacement of a sacred image or picture, though I could not verbally
defend it against his criticisms.

Later I have used it often as a text-book with students, and the total
outcome of my dealings with it is an exceedingly unfavorable verdict.
Apart from the great truth which it enforces, that everything has
evolved somehow, and apart from the inevitable stimulating effect of
any such universal picture, I regard its teachings as almost a museum
of blundering reasoning.  Let me try to indicate briefly my grounds for
such an opinion.

I pass by the section on the Unknowable, because this part of Mr.
Spencer's philosophy has won fewer friends than any other.  It consists
chiefly of a rehash of Mansel's rehash of Hamilton's "Philosophy of the
Conditioned," and has hardly raised its head since John Mill so
effectively demolished it.  If criticism of our human intellectual
constitution is needed, it can be got out of Bradley to-day better than
out of Spencer.  The latter's way of reconciling science and religion
is, moreover, too absurdly _naïf_.  Find, he says, a fundamental
abstract truth on which they can agree, and that will reconcile them.
Such a truth, he thinks, is that _there is a mystery_.  The trouble is
that it is over just such common truths that quarrels begin.  Did the
fact that both believed in the existence of the Pope reconcile Luther
and Ignatius Loyola?  Did it reconcile the South and the North that
both agreed that there were slaves?  Religion claims that the "mystery"
is interpretable by human reason; "Science," speaking through Spencer,
insists that it is not.  The admission of the mystery is the very
signal for the quarrel.  Moreover, for nine hundred and ninety-nine
men out of a thousand the sense of mystery is the sense of
_more-to-be-known_, not the sense of a More, _not_ to be known.

But pass the Unknowable by, and turn to Spencer's famous law of
Evolution.

"Science" works with several types of "law."  The most frequent and
useful type is that of the "elementary law,"--that of the composition
of forces, that of gravitation, of refraction, and the like.  Such laws
declare no concrete facts to exist, and make no prophecy as to any
actual future.  They limit themselves to saying that if a certain
character be found in any fact, another character will co-exist with it
or follow it.  The usefulness of these laws is proportionate to the
extent to which the characters they treat of pervade the world, and to
the accuracy with which they are definable.

Statistical laws form another type, and positively declare something
about the world of actuality.  Although they tell us nothing of the
elements of things, either abstract or concrete, they affirm that the
resultant of their actions drifts preponderantly in a particular
direction.  Population tends toward cities; the working classes tend to
grow discontented; the available energy of the universe is running
down--such laws prophesy the real future _en gros_, but they never help
us to predict any particular detail of it.

Spencer's law of Evolution is of the statistical variety.  It defines
what evolution means, and what dissolution means, and asserts that,
although both processes are always going on together, there is in the
present phase of the world a drift in favor of evolution.  In the first
edition of "First Principles" an evolutive change in anything was
described as the passage of it from a state of indefinite incoherent
homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity.  The existence of a
drift in this direction in everything Mr. Spencer proves, both by a
survey of facts, and by deducing it from certain laws of the elementary
type, which he severally names "the instability of the homogeneous,"
"the multiplication of effects," "segregation," and "equilibration."
The two former insure the heterogeneity, while "segregation" brings
about the definiteness and coherence, and "equilibration" arrests the
process, and determines when dissolutive changes shall begin.

The whole panorama is resplendent for variety and inclusiveness, and
has aroused an admiration for philosophy in minds that never admired
philosophy before.  Like Descartes in earlier days, Spencer aims at a
purely mechanical explanation of Nature.  The knowable universe is
nothing but matter and motion, and its history is nothing but the
"redistribution" of these entities.  The value of such an explanation
for scientific purposes depends altogether on how consistent and exact
it is.  Every "thing" must be interpreted as a "configuration," every
"event" as a change of configuration, every predicate ascribed must be
of a geometrical sort.  Measured by these requirements of mechanics
Spencer's attempt has lamentably failed.  His terms are vagueness and
ambiguity incarnate, and he seems incapable of keeping the mechanical
point of view in mind for five pages consecutively.

"Definite," for example, is hardly a physical idea at all.  Every
motion and every arrangement of matter is definitely what it is,--a fog
or an irregular scrawl, as much so as a billiard ball or a straight
line.  Spencer means by definiteness in a thing any character that
makes it arrest our attention, and forces us to distinguish it from
other things.  The word with him has a human, not a physical
connotation.  Definite things, in his book, finally appear merely as
_things that men have made separate names for_, so that there is hardly
a pretence of the mechanical view being kept.  Of course names increase
as human history proceeds, so "definiteness" in things must necessarily
more and more evolve.

"Coherent," again.  This has the definite mechanical meaning of
resisting separation, of sticking together; but Spencer plays fast and
loose with this meaning.  Coherence with him sometimes means
_permanence in time_, sometimes such _mutual dependence of parts_ as is
realized in a widely scattered system of no fixed material
configuration; a commercial house, for example, with its "travellers"
and ships and cars.

An honestly mechanical reader soon rubs his eyes with bewilderment at
the orgy of ambiguity to which he is introduced.  Every term in
Spencer's fireworks shimmers through a whole spectrum of meanings in
order to adapt itself to the successive spheres of evolution to which
it must apply.  "Integration," for instance.  A definite coherence is
an Integration; and examples given of integration are the contraction
of the solar nebula, the formation of the earth's crust, the
calcification of cartilage, the shortening of the body of crabs, the
loss of his tail by man, the mutual dependence of plants and animals,
the growth of powerful states, the tendency of human occupations to go
to distinct localities, the dropping of terminal inflexions in English
grammar, the formation of general concepts by the mind, the use of
machinery instead of simple tools, the development of "composition" in
the fine arts, etc., etc.  It is obvious that no one form of the motion
of matter characterizes all these facts.  The human ones simply embody
the more and more successful pursuit of certain ends.

In the second edition of his book, Mr. Spencer supplemented his first
formula by a unifying addition, meant to be strictly mechanical.
"Evolution," he now said, "is the progressive integration of matter and
dissipation of motion," during which both the matter and the motion
undergo the previously designated kinds of change.  But this makes the
formula worse instead of better.  The "dissipation of motion" part of
it is simple vagueness,--for what particular motion is "dissipated"
when a man or state grows more highly evolved?  And the integration of
matter belongs only to stellar and geologic evolution.  Neither
heightened specific gravity, nor greater massiveness, which are the
only conceivable integrations of matter, is a mark of the more evolved
vital, mental, or social things.

It is obvious that the facts of which Spencer here gives so clumsy an
account could all have been set down more simply.  First there is
solar, and then there is geological evolution, processes accurately
describable as integrations in the mechanical sense, namely, as
decrease in bulk, or growth in hardness.  Then Life appears; and after
that neither integration of matter nor dissipation of motion play any
part whatever.  The result of life, however, is to fill the world more
and more with things displaying _organic unity_.  By this is meant any
arrangement of which one part helps to keep the other parts in
existence.  Some organic unities are material,--a sea-urchin, for
example, a department store, a civil service, or an ecclesiastical
organization.  Some are mental, as a "science," a code of laws, or an
educational programme.  But whether they be material or mental
products, organic unities must _accumulate_; for every old one tends to
conserve itself, and if successful new ones arise they also "come to
stay."  The human use of Spencer's adjectives "integrated," "definite,"
"coherent," here no longer shocks one.  We are frankly on teleological
ground, and metaphor and vagueness are permissible.

This tendency of organic unities to accumulate when once they are
formed is absolutely all the truth I can distill from Spencer's
unwieldy account of evolution.  It makes a much less gaudy and
chromatic picture, but what there is of it is exact.

Countless other criticisms swarm toward my pen, but I have no heart to
express them,--it is too sorry an occupation.  A word about Spencer's
conception of "Force," however, insists on being added; for although it
is one of his most essential, it is one of his vaguest ideas.

Over all his special laws of evolution there reigns an absolutely
general law, that of the "persistence of force."  By this Spencer
sometimes means the phenomenal law of conservation of energy, sometimes
the metaphysical principle that the quantity of existence is
unalterable, sometimes the logical principle that nothing can happen
without a reason, sometimes the practical postulate that in the absence
of any assignable difference you must call a thing the same.  This law
is one vast vagueness, of which I can give no clear account; but of his
special vaguenesses "mental force" and "social force" are good examples.

These manifestations of the universal force, he says, are due to vital
force, and this latter is due to physical force, both being
proportionate to the amount of physical force which is "transformed"
into them.  But what on earth is "social force"?  Sometimes he
identifies it with "social activity" (showing the latter to be
proportionate to the amount of food eaten), sometimes with the work
done by human beings and their steam-engines, and shows it to be due
ultimately to the sun's heat.  It would never occur to a reader of his
pages that a social force proper might be anything that acted as a
stimulus of social change,--a leader, for example, a discovery, a book,
a new idea, or a national insult; and that the greatest of "forces" of
this kind need embody no more "physical force" than the smallest.  The
measure of greatness here is the effect produced on the environment,
not a quantity antecedently absorbed from physical nature.  Mr. Spencer
himself is a great social force; but he ate no more than an average
man, and his body, if cremated, would disengage no more energy.  The
effects he exerts are of no nature _of releases_,--his words pull
triggers in certain kinds of brain.

The fundamental distinction in mechanics between forces of
push-and-pull and forces of release is one of which Mr. Spencer, in his
earlier years, made no use whatever.  Only in his sixth edition did he
show that it had seriously arrested his attention.  In biology,
psychology, and sociology the forces concerned are almost exclusively
forces of release.  Spencer's account of social forces is neither good
sociology nor good mechanics.  His feeble grasp of the conception of
force vitiates, in fact, all his work.

But the task of a carper is repugnant.  The "Essays," "Biology,"
"Psychology," "Sociology," and "Ethics" are all better than "First
Principles," and contain numerous and admirable bits of penetrating
work of detail.  My impression is that, of the systematic treaties, the
"Psychology" will rank as the most original.  Spencer broke new ground
here in insisting that, since mind and its environment have evolved
together, they must be studied together.  He gave to the study of mind
in isolation a definitive quietus, and that certainly is a great thing
to have achieved.  To be sure he overdid the matter, as usual, and left
no room for any mental structure at all, except that which passively
resulted from the storage of impressions received from the outer world
in the order of their frequency by fathers and transmitted to their
sons.  The belief that whatever is acquired by sires is inherited by
sons, and the ignoring of purely inner variations, are weak points; but
to have brought in the environment as vital was a master stroke.

I may say that Spencer's controversy over use-inheritance with
Weismann, entered into after he was sixty, seems to me in point of
quality better than any other part of his work.  It is genuine labor
over a puzzle, genuine research.

Spencer's "Ethics" is a most vital and original piece of
attitude-taking in the world of ideals.  His politico-ethical activity
in general breathes the purest English spirit liberty, and his attacks
on over-administration and criticisms on the inferiority of great
centralized systems are worthy to be the textbooks of individualists
the world over.  I confess that it is with this part of his work, in
spite of its hardness and inflexibility of tone, that I personally
sympathize most.

Looking back on Mr. Spencer as a whole, as this admirably truth-telling
"Autobiography" reveals him, he is a figure unique for quaint
consistency.  He never varied from that inimitable blend of small and
vast mindedness, of liberality and crabbedness, which was his personal
note, and which defies our formulating power.  If an abstract logical
concept could come to life, its life would be like Spencer's,--the same
definiteness of exclusion and inclusion, the same bloodlessness of
temperament, the same narrowness of intent and vastness of extent, the
same power of applying itself to numberless instances.  But he was no
abstract idea; he was a man vigorously devoted to truth and justice as
he saw them, who had deep insights, and who finished, under terrible
frustrations from bad health, a piece of work that taken for all in
all, is extraordinary.  A human life is greater than all its possible
appraisers, assessors, and critics.  In comparison with the fact of
Spencer's actual living, such critical characterization of it as I have
been at all these pains to produce seems a rather unimportant as well
as a decidedly graceless thing.



[1] Written upon the publication of Herbert Spencer's "Autobiography."
Published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1904.




VII

FREDERIC MYERS' SERVICES TO PSYCHOLOGY[1]

On this memorial occasion it is from English hearts and tongues
belonging, as I never had the privilege of belonging, to the immediate
environment of our lamented President, that discourse of him as a man and
as a friend must come.  It is for those who participated in the endless
drudgery of his labors for our Society to tell of the high powers he
showed there; and it is for those who have something of his burning
interest in the problem of our human destiny to estimate his success in
throwing a little more light into its dark recesses.  To me it has been
deemed best to assign a colder task.  Frederic Myers was a psychologist
who worked upon lines hardly admitted by the more academic branch of the
profession to be legitimate; and as for some years I bore the title of
"Professor of Psychology," the suggestion has been made (and by me gladly
welcomed) that I should spend my portion of this hour in defining the
exact place and rank which we must accord to him as a cultivator and
promoter of the science of the Mind.

Brought up entirely upon literature and history, and interested at first
in poetry and religion chiefly; never by nature a philosopher in the
technical sense of a man forced to pursue consistency among concepts for
the mere love of the logical occupation; not crammed with science at
college, or trained to scientific method by any passage through a
laboratory, Myers had as it were to recreate his personality before he
became the wary critic of evidence, the skilful handler of hypothesis,
the learned neurologist and omnivorous reader of biological and
cosmological matter, with whom in later years we were acquainted.  The
transformation came about because he needed to be all these things in
order to work successfully at the problem that lay near his heart; and
the ardor of his will and the richness of his intellect are proved by the
success with which he underwent so unusual a transformation.

The problem, as you know, was that of seeking evidence for human
immortality.  His contributions to psychology were incidental to that
research, and would probably never have been made had he not entered on
it.  But they have a value for Science entirely independent of the light
they shed upon that problem; and it is quite apart from it that I shall
venture to consider them.


If we look at the history of mental science we are immediately struck by
diverse tendencies among its several cultivators, the consequence being a
certain opposition of schools and some repugnance among their disciples.
Apart from the great contrasts between minds that are teleological or
biological and minds that are mechanical, between the animists and the
associationists in psychology, there is the entirely different contrast
between what I will call the classic-academic and the romantic type of
imagination.  The former has a fondness for clean pure lines and noble
simplicity in its constructions.  It explains things by as few principles
as possible and is intolerant of either nondescript facts or clumsy
formulas.  The facts must lie in a neat assemblage, and the psychologist
must be enabled to cover them and "tuck them in" as safely under his
system as a mother tucks her babe in under the down coverlet on a winter
night.  Until quite recently all psychology, whether animistic or
associationistic, was written on classic-academic lines.  The consequence
was that the human mind, as it is figured in this literature, was largely
an abstraction.  Its normal adult traits were recognized.  A sort of
sun-lit terrace was exhibited on which it took its exercise.  But where
that terrace stopped, the mind stopped; and there was nothing farther
left to tell of in this kind of philosophy but the brain and the other
physical facts of nature on the one hand, and the absolute metaphysical
ground of the universe on the other.

But of late years the terrace has been overrun by romantic improvers, and
to pass to their work is like going from classic to gothic architecture,
where few outlines are pure and where uncouth forms lurk in the shadows.
A mass of mental phenomena are now seen in the shrubbery beyond the
parapet.  Fantastic, ignoble, hardly human, or frankly non-human are some
of these new candidates for psychological description.  The menagerie and
the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made
to deliver up their material.  The world of mind is shown as something
infinitely more complex than was suspected; and whatever beauties it may
still possess, it has lost at any rate the beauty of academic neatness.

But despite the triumph of romanticism, psychologists as a rule have
still some lingering prejudice in favor of the nobler simplicities.
Moreover, there are social prejudices which scientific men themselves
obey.  The word "hypnotism" has been trailed about in the newspapers so
that even we ourselves rather wince at it, and avoid occasions of its
use.  "Mesmerism," "clairvoyance," "medium,"--_horrescimus
referentes_!--and with all these things, infected by their previous
mystery-mongering discoverers, even our best friends had rather avoid
complicity.  For instance, I invite eight of my scientific colleagues
severally to come to my house at their own time, and sit with a medium
for whom the evidence already published in our "Proceedings" had been
most noteworthy.  Although it means at worst the waste of the hour for
each, five of them decline the adventure.  I then beg the "Commission"
connected with the chair of a certain learned psychologist in a
neighboring university to examine the same medium, whom Mr. Hodgson and I
offer at our own expense to send and leave with them.  They also have to
be excused from any such entanglement.  I advise another psychological
friend to look into this medium's case, but he replies that it is
useless; for if he should get such results as I report, he would (being
suggestible) simply believe himself hallucinated.  When I propose as a
remedy that he should remain in the background and take notes, whilst his
wife has the sitting, he explains that he can never consent to his wife's
presence at such performances.  This friend of mine writes _ex cathedra_
on the subject of psychical research, declaring (I need hardly add) that
there is nothing in it; the chair of the psychologist with the Commission
was founded by a spiritist, partly with a view to investigate mediums;
and one of the five colleagues who declined my invitation is widely
quoted as an effective critic of our evidence.  So runs the world away!
I should not indulge in the personality and triviality of such anecdotes,
were it not that they paint the temper of our time, a temper which,
thanks to Frederic Myers more than to any one, will certainly be
impossible after this generation.  Myers was, I think, decidedly
exclusive and intolerant by nature.  But his keenness for truth carried
him into regions where either intellectual or social squeamishness would
have been fatal, so he "mortified" his _amour propre_, unclubbed himself
completely, and became a model of patience, tact and humility wherever
investigation required it.  Both his example and his body of doctrine
will make this temper the only one henceforward scientifically
respectable.

If you ask me how his doctrine has this effect, I answer: By
co-ordinating!  For Myers' great principle of research was that in order
to understand any one species of fact we ought to have all the species of
the same general class of fact before us.  So he took a lot of scattered
phenomena, some of them recognized as reputable, others outlawed from
science, or treated as isolated curiosities; he made series of them,
filled in the transitions by delicate hypotheses or analogies; and bound
them together in a system by his bold inclusive conception of the
Subliminal Self, so that no one can now touch one part of the fabric
without finding the rest entangled with it.  Such vague terms of
apperception as psychologists have hitherto been satisfied with using for
most of these phenomena, as "fraud," "rot," "rubbish," will no more be
possible hereafter than "dirt" is possible as a head of classification in
chemistry, or "vermin" in zoology.  Whatever they are, they are things
with a right to definite description and to careful observation.

I cannot but account this as a great service rendered to Psychology.  I
expect that Myers will ere long distinctly figure in mental science as
the radical leader in what I have called the romantic movement.  Through
him for the first time, psychologists are in possession of their full
material, and mental phenomena are set down in an adequate inventory.  To
bring unlike things thus together by forming series of which the
intermediary terms connect the extremes, is a procedure much in use by
scientific men.  It is a first step made towards securing their interest
in the romantic facts, that Myers should have shown how easily this
familiar method can be applied to their study.

Myers' conception of the extensiveness of the Subliminal Self quite
overturns the classic notion of what the human mind consists in.  The
supraliminal region, as Myers calls it, the classic-academic
consciousness, which was once alone considered either by associationists
or animists, figures in his theory as only a small segment of the psychic
spectrum.  It is a special phase of mentality, teleologically evolved for
adaptation to our natural environment, and forms only what he calls a
"privileged case" of personality.  The out-lying Subliminal, according to
him, represents more fully our central and abiding being.

I think the words subliminal and supraliminal unfortunate, but they were
probably unavoidable.  I think, too, that Myers' belief in the ubiquity
and great extent of the Subliminal will demand a far larger number of
facts than sufficed to persuade him, before the next generation of
psychologists shall become persuaded.  He regards the Subliminal as the
enveloping mother-consciousness in each of us, from which the
consciousness we wot of is precipitated like a crystal.  But whether this
view get confirmed or get overthrown by future inquiry, the definite way
in which Myers has thrown it down is a new and specific challenge to
inquiry.  For half a century now, psychologists have fully admitted the
existence of a subliminal mental region, under the name either of
unconscious cerebration or of the involuntary life; but they have never
definitely taken up the question of the extent of this region, never
sought explicitly to map it out.  Myers definitely attacks this problem,
which, after him, it will be impossible to ignore.

_What is the precise constitution of the Subliminal_--such is the problem
which deserves to figure in our Science hereafter as the _problem of
Myers_; and willy-nilly, inquiry must follow on the path which it has
opened up.  But Myers has not only propounded the Problem definitely, he
has also invented definite methods for its solution.  Posthypnotic
suggestion, crystal-gazing, automatic writing and trance-speech, the
willing-game, etc., are now, thanks to him, instruments of research,
reagents like litmus paper or the galvanometer, for revealing what would
otherwise be hidden.  These are so many ways of putting the Subliminal on
tap.  Of course without the simultaneous work on hypnotism and hysteria
independently begun by others, he could not have pushed his own work so
far.  But he is so far the only generalizer of the problem and the only
user of all the methods; and even though his theory of the extent of the
Subliminal should have to be subverted in the end, its formulation will,
I am sure, figure always as a rather momentous event in the history of
our Science.

Any psychologist who should wish to read Myers out of the profession--and
there are probably still some who would be glad to do so to-day--is
committed to a definite alternative.  Either he must say that we knew all
about the subliminal region before Myers took it up, or he must say that
it is certain that states of super-normal cognition form no part of its
content.  The first contention would be too absurd.  The second one
remains more plausible.  There are many first hand investigators into the
Subliminal who, not having themselves met with anything super-normal,
would probably not hesitate to call all the reports of it erroneous, and
who would limit the Subliminal to dissolutive phenomena of consciousness
exclusively, to lapsed memories, subconscious sensations, impulses and
_phobias_, and the like.  Messrs. Janet and Binet, for aught I know, may
hold some such position as this.  Against it Myers' thesis would stand
sharply out.  Of the Subliminal, he would say, we can give no
ultra-simple account: there are discreet regions in it, levels separated
by critical points of transition, and no one formula holds true of them
all.  And any conscientious psychologist ought, it seems to me, to see
that, since these multiple modifications of personality are only
beginning to be reported and observed with care, it is obvious that a
dogmatically negative treatment of them must be premature and that the
problem of Myers still awaits us as the problem of far the deepest moment
for our actual psychology, whether his own tentative solutions of certain
parts of it be correct or not.

Meanwhile, descending to detail, one cannot help admiring the great
originality with which Myers wove such an extraordinarily detached and
discontinuous series of phenomena together.  Unconscious cerebration,
dreams, hypnotism, hysteria, inspirations of genius, the willing-game,
planchette, crystal-gazing, hallucinatory voices, apparitions of the
dying, medium-trances, demoniacal possession, clairvoyance,
thought-transference, even ghosts and other facts more doubtful; these
things form a chaos at first sight most discouraging.  No wonder that
scientists can think of no other principle of unity among them than their
common appeal to men's perverse propensity to superstition.  Yet Myers
has actually made a system of them, stringing them continuously upon a
perfectly legitimate objective hypothesis, verified in some cases and
extended to others by analogy.  Taking the name "automatism" from the
phenomenon of automatic writing--I am not sure that he may not himself
have been the first so to baptize this latter phenomenon--he made one
great simplification at a stroke by treating hallucinations and active
impulses under a common head, as _sensory_ and _motor automatisms_.
Automatism he then conceived broadly as a message of any kind from the
Subliminal to the Supraliminal.  And he went a step farther in his
hypothetic interpretation, when he insisted on "symbolism" as one of the
ways in which one stratum of our personality will often interpret the
influences of another.  Obsessive thoughts and delusions, as well as
voices, visions, and impulses, thus fall subject to one mode of
treatment.  To explain them, we must explore the Subliminal; to cure them
we must practically influence it.

Myers' work on automatism led to his brilliant conception, in 1891, of
hysteria.  He defined it, with good reasons given, as "a disease of the
hypnotic stratum."  Hardly had he done so when the wonderfully ingenious
observations of Binet, and especially of Janet in France, gave to this
view the completest of corroborations.  These observations have been
extended in Germany, America, and elsewhere; and although Binet and Janet
worked independently of Myers, and did work far more objective, he
nevertheless will stand as the original announcer of a theory which, in
my opinion, makes an epoch, not only in medical but in psychological
science, because it brings in an entirely new conception of our mental
possibilities.

Myers' manner of apprehending the problem of the Subliminal shows itself
fruitful in every possible direction.  While official science practically
refuses to attend to Subliminal phenomena, the circles which do attend to
them treat them with a respect altogether too undiscriminating,--every
Subliminal deliverance must be an oracle.  The result is that there is no
basis of intercourse between those who best know the facts and those who
are most competent to discuss them.  Myers immediately establishes a
basis by his remark that in so far as they have to use the same organism,
with its preformed avenues of expression--what may be very different
strata of the Subliminal are condemned in advance to manifest themselves
in similar ways.  This might account for the great generic likeness of so
many automatic performances, while their different starting-points behind
the threshold might account for certain differences in them.  Some of
them, namely, seem to include elements of super-normal knowledge; others
to show a curious subconscious mania for personation and deception;
others again to be mere drivel.  But Myers' conception of various strata
or levels in the Subliminal sets us to analyzing them all from a new
point of view.  The word Subliminal for him denotes only a region, with
possibly the most heterogeneous contents.  Much of the content is
certainly rubbish, matter that Myers calls dissolutive, stuff that dreams
are made of, fragments of lapsed memory, mechanical effects of habit and
ordinary suggestion; some belongs to a middle region where a strange
manufacture of inner romances perpetually goes on; finally, some of the
content appears superiorly and subtly perceptive.  But each has to appeal
to us by the same channels and to use organs partly trained to their
performance by messages from the other levels.  Under these conditions
what could be more natural to expect than a confusion which Myers'
suggestion would then have been the first indispensable step towards
finally clearing away.

Once more, then, whatever be the upshot of the patient work required
here, Myers' resourceful intellect has certainly done a service to
psychology.

I said a while ago that his intellect was not by nature philosophic in
the narrower sense of being that of a logician.  In the broader sense of
being a man of wide scientific imagination, Myers was most eminently a
philosopher.  He has shown this by his unusually daring grasp of the
principle of evolution, and by the wonderful way in which he has worked
out suggestions of mental evolution by means of biological analogies.
These analogies are, if anything, too profuse and dazzling in his pages;
but his conception of mental evolution is more radical than anything yet
considered by psychologists as possible.  It is absolutely original; and,
being so radical, it becomes one of those hypotheses which, once
propounded, can never be forgotten, but sooner or later have to be worked
out and submitted in every way to criticism and verification.

The corner-stone of his conception is the fact that consciousness has no
essential unity.  It aggregates and dissipates, and what we call normal
consciousness,--the "Human Mind" of classic psychology,--is not even
typical, but only one case out of thousands.  Slight organic alterations,
intoxications, and auto-intoxications, give supraliminal forms completely
different, and the subliminal region seems to have laws in many respects
peculiar.  Myers thereupon makes the suggestion that the whole system of
consciousness studied by the classic psychology is only an extract from a
larger total, being a part told-off, as it were, to do service in the
adjustments of our physical organism to the world of nature.  This
extract, aggregated and personified for this particular purpose, has,
like all evolving things, a variety of peculiarities.  Having evolved, it
may also dissolve, and in dreams, hysteria, and divers forms of
degeneration it seems to do so.  This is a retrograde process of
separation in a consciousness of which the unity was once effected.  But
again the consciousness may follow the opposite course and integrate
still farther, or evolve by growing into yet untried directions.  In
veridical automatisms it actually seems to do so.  It drops some of its
usual modes of increase, its ordinary use of the senses, for example, and
lays hold of bits of information which, in ways that we cannot even
follow conjecturally, leak into it by way of the Subliminal.  The
ulterior source of a certain part of this information (limited and
perverted as it always is by the organism's idiosyncrasies in the way of
transmission and expression) Myers thought he could reasonably trace to
departed human intelligence, or its existing equivalent.  I pretend to no
opinion on this point, for I have as yet studied the evidence with so
little critical care that Myers was always surprised at my negligence.  I
can therefore speak with detachment from this question and, as a mere
empirical psychologist, of Myers' general evolutionary conception.  As
such a psychologist I feel sure that the latter is a hypothesis of
first-rate philosophic importance.  It is based, of course, on his
conviction of the extent of the Subliminal, and will stand or fall as
that is verified or not; but whether it stand or fall, it looks to me
like one of those sweeping ideas by which the scientific researches of an
entire generation are often moulded.  It would not be surprising if it
proved such a leading idea in the investigation of the near future; for
in one shape or another, the Subliminal has come to stay with us, and the
only possible course to take henceforth is radically and thoroughly to
explore its significance.


Looking back from Frederic Myers' vision of vastness in the field of
psychological research upon the programme as most academic psychologists
frame it, one must confess that its limitation at their hands seems not
only implausible, but in truth, a little ridiculous.  Even with brutes
and madmen, even with hysterics and hypnotics admitted as the academic
psychologists admit them, the official outlines of the subject are far
too neat to stand in the light of analogy with the rest of Nature.  The
ultimates of Nature,--her simple elements, it there be such,--may indeed
combine in definite proportions and follow classic laws of architecture;
but her proximates, in her phenomena as we immediately experience them,
Nature is everywhere gothic, not classic.  She forms a real jungle, where
all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other, and untidy.  When
we add such a complex kind of subliminal region as Myers believed in to
the official region, we restore the analogy; and, though we may be
mistaken in much detail, in a general way, at least, we become plausible.
In comparison with Myers' way of attacking the question of immortality in
particular, the official way is certainly so far from the mark as to be
almost preposterous.  It assumes that when our ordinary consciousness
goes out, the only alternative surviving kind of consciousness that could
be possible is abstract mentality, living on spiritual truth, and
communicating ideal wisdom--in short, the whole classic platonizing
Sunday-school conception.  Failing to get that sort of thing when it
listens to reports about mediums, it denies that there can be anything.
Myers approaches the subject with no such _a priori_ requirement.  If he
finds any positive indication of "spirits," he records it, whatever it
may be, and is willing to fit his conception to the facts, however
grotesque the latter may appear, rather than to blot out the facts to
suit his conception.  But, as was long ago said by our collaborator, Mr.
Canning Schiller, in words more effective than any I can write, if any
conception should be blotted out by serious lovers of Nature, it surely
ought to be classic academic Sunday-school conception.  If anything is
unlikely in a world like this, it is that the next adjacent thing to the
mere surface-show of our experience should be the realm of eternal
essences, of platonic ideas, of crystal battlements, of absolute
significance.  But whether they be animists or associationists, a
supposition something like this is still the assumption of our usual
psychologists.  It comes from their being for the most part philosophers,
in the technical sense, and from their showing the weakness of that
profession for logical abstractions.  Myers was primarily a lover of life
and not of abstractions.  He loved human life, human persons, and their
peculiarities.  So he could easily admit the possibility of level beyond
level of perfectly concrete experience, all "queer and cactus-like"
though it might be, before we touch the absolute, or reach the eternal
essences.

Behind the minute anatomists and the physiologists, with their metallic
instruments, there have always stood the out-door naturalists with their
eyes and love of concrete nature.  The former call the latter
superficial, but there is something wrong about your laboratory-biologist
who has no sympathy with living animals.  In psychology there is a
similar distinction.  Some psychologists are fascinated by the varieties
of mind in living action, others by the dissecting out, whether by
logical analysis or by brass instruments, of whatever elementary mental
processes may be there.  Myers must decidedly be placed in the former
class, though his powerful use of analogy enabled him also to do work
after the fashion of the latter.  He loved human nature as Cuvier and
Agassiz loved animal nature; in his view, as in their view, the subject
formed a vast living picture.  Whether his name will have in psychology
as honorable a place as their names have gained in the sister science,
will depend on whether future inquirers shall adopt or reject his
theories; and the rapidity with which their decision shapes itself will
depend largely on the vigor with which this Society continues its labor
in his absence.  It is at any rate a possibility, and I am disposed to
think it a probability, that Frederic Myers will always be remembered in
psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental
wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it.  He was an
enormous collector.  He introduced for the first time comparison,
classification, and serial order into the peculiar kind of fact which he
collected.  He was a genius at perceiving analogies; he was fertile in
hypotheses; and as far as conditions allowed it in this meteoric region,
he relied on verification.  Such advantages are of no avail, however, if
one has struck into a false road from the outset.  But should it turn out
that Frederic Myers has really hit the right road by his divining
instinct, it is certain that, like the names of others who have been
wise, his name will keep an honorable place in scientific history.



[1] Written for a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research held
after the death of Frederic Myers and first published in the Society's
Proceedings, Part XLII, Page 17 (1901).




VIII

FINAL IMPRESSIONS OF A PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER[1]

The late Professor Henry Sidgwick was celebrated for the rare mixture
of ardor and critical judgment which his character exhibited.  The
liberal heart which he possessed had to work with an intellect which
acted destructively on almost every particular object of belief that
was offered to its acceptance.  A quarter of a century ago, scandalized
by the chaotic state of opinion regarding the phenomena now called by
the rather ridiculous name of "psychic"--phenomena, of which the supply
reported seems inexhaustible, but which scientifically trained minds
mostly refuse to look at--he established, along with Professor Barrett,
Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, the Society for Psychical Research.
These men hoped that if the material were treated rigorously, and, as
far as possible experimentally, objective truth would be elicited, and
the subject rescued from sentimentalism on the one side and dogmatizing
ignorance on the other.  Like all founders, Sidgwick hoped for a
certain promptitude of result; and I heard him say, the year before his
death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty
years he would be in the same identical state of doubt and balance that
he started with, he would have deemed the prophecy incredible.  It
appeared impossible that that amount of handling evidence should bring
so little finality of decision.

My own experience has been similar to Sidgwick's.  For twenty-five
years I have been in touch with the literature of psychical research,
and have had acquaintance with numerous "researchers."  I have also
spent a good many hours (though far fewer than I ought to have spent)
in witnessing (or trying to witness) phenomena.  Yet I am theoretically
no "further" than I was at the beginning; and I confess that at times I
have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended
this department of nature to remain _baffling_, to prompt our
curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that,
although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits,
are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they
also can never be susceptible of full corroboration.

The peculiarity of the case is just that there are so many sources of
possible deception in most of the observations that the whole lot of
them _may_ be worthless, and yet that in comparatively few cases can
aught more fatal than this vague general possibility of error be
pleaded against the record.  Science meanwhile needs something more
than bare possibilities to build upon; so your genuinely scientific
inquirer--I don't mean your ignoramus "scientist"--has to remain
unsatisfied.  It is hard to believe, however, that the Creator has
really put any big array of phenomena into the world merely to defy and
mock our scientific tendencies; so my deeper belief is that we
psychical researchers have been too precipitate with our hopes, and
that we must expect to mark progress not by quarter-centuries, but by
half-centuries or whole centuries.

I am strengthened in this belief by my impression that just at this
moment a faint but distinct step forward is being taken by competent
opinion in these matters.  "Physical phenomena" (movements of matter
without contact, lights, hands and faces "materialized," etc.) have
been one of the most baffling regions of the general field (or perhaps
one of the least baffling _prima facie_, so certain and great has been
the part played by fraud in their production); yet even here the
balance of testimony seems slowly to be inclining towards admitting the
supernaturalist view.  Eusapia Paladino, the Neapolitan medium, has
been under observation for twenty years or more.  Schiaparelli, the
astronomer, and Lombroso were the first scientific men to be converted
by her performances.  Since then innumerable men of scientific standing
have seen her, including many "psychic" experts.  Every one agrees that
she cheats in the most barefaced manner whenever she gets an
opportunity.  The Cambridge experts, with the Sidgwicks and Richard
Hodgson at their head, rejected her _in toto_ on that account.  Yet her
credit has steadily risen, and now her last converts are the eminent
psychiatrist, Morselli, the eminent physiologist, Botazzi, and our own
psychical researcher, Carrington, whose book on "The Physical Phenomena
of Spiritualism" (_against_ them rather!) makes his conquest
strategically important.  If Mr. Podmore, hitherto the prosecuting
attorney of the S. P. R., so far as physical phenomena are concerned
becomes converted also, we may indeed sit up and look around us.
Getting a good health bill from "Science," Eusapia will then throw
retrospective credit on Home and Stainton Moses, Florence Cook (Prof.
Crookes' medium), and all similar wonder-workers.  The balance of
_presumptions_ will be changed in favor of genuineness being possible
at least in all reports of this particularly crass and low type of
supernatural phenomena.


Not long after Darwin's "Origin of Species" appeared I was studying
with that excellent anatomist and man, Jeffries Wyman, at Harvard.  He
was a convert, yet so far a half-hesitating one, to Darwin's views; but
I heard him make a remark that applies well to the subject I now write
about.  When, he said, a theory gets propounded over and over again,
coming up afresh after each time orthodox criticism has buried it, and
each time seeming solider and harder to abolish, you may be sure that
there is truth in it.  Oken and Lamarck and Chambers had been
triumphantly despatched and buried, but here was Darwin making the very
same heresy seem only more plausible.  How often has "Science" killed
off all spook philosophy, and laid ghosts and raps and "telepathy" away
underground as so much popular delusion.  Yet never before were these
things offered us so voluminously, and never in such authentic-seeming
shape or with such good credentials.  The tide seems steadily to be
rising, in spite of all the expedients of scientific orthodoxy.  It is
hard not to suspect that here may be something different from a mere
chapter in human gullibility.  It may be a genuine realm of natural
phenomena.

_Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus_, once a cheat, always a cheat, such
has been the motto of the English psychical researchers in dealing with
mediums.  I am disposed to think that, as a matter of policy, it has
been wise.  Tactically, it is far better to believe much too little
than a little too much; and the exceptional credit attaching to the row
of volumes of the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, is due to the fixed intention
of the editors to proceed very slowly.  Better a little belief tied
fast, better a small investment _salted down_, than a mass of
comparative insecurity.

But, however wise as a policy the S. P. R.'s maxim may have been, as a
test of truth, I believe it to be almost irrelevant.  In most things
human the accusation of deliberate fraud and falsehood is grossly
superficial.  Man's character is too sophistically mixed for the
alternative of "honest or dishonest" to be a sharp one.  Scientific men
themselves will cheat--at public lectures--rather than let experiments
obey their well-known tendency towards failure.  I have heard of a
lecturer on physics, who had taken over the apparatus of the previous
incumbent, consulting him about a certain machine intended to show
that, however the peripheral parts of it might be agitated, its centre
of gravity remained immovable.  "It _will_ wobble," he complained.
"Well," said the predecessor, apologetically, "to tell the truth,
whenever _I_ used that machine I found it advisable to _drive a nail_
through the centre of gravity."  I once saw a distinguished
physiologist, now dead, cheat most shamelessly at a public lecture, at
the expense of a poor rabbit, and all for the sake of being able to
make a cheap joke about its being an "American rabbit"--for no other,
he said, could survive such a wound as he pretended to have given it.

To compare small men with great, I have myself cheated shamelessly.  In
the early days of the Sanders Theater at Harvard, I once had charge of
a heart on the physiology of which Professor Newell Martin was giving a
popular lecture.  This heart, which belonged to a turtle, supported an
index-straw which threw a moving shadow, greatly enlarged, upon the
screen, while the heart pulsated.  When certain nerves were stimulated,
the lecturer said, the heart would act in certain ways which he
described.  But the poor heart was too far gone and, although it
stopped duly when the nerve of arrest was excited, that was the final
end of its life's tether.  Presiding over the performance, I was
terrified at the fiasco, and found myself suddenly acting like one of
those military geniuses who on the field of battle convert disaster
into victory.  There was no time for deliberation; so, with my
forefinger under a part of the straw that cast no shadow, I found
myself impulsively and automatically imitating the rhythmical movements
which my colleague had prophesied the heart would undergo.  I kept the
experiment from failing; and not only saved my colleague (and the
turtle) from a humiliation that but for my presence of mind would have
been their lot, but I established in the audience the true view of the
subject.  The lecturer was stating this; and the misconduct of one
half-dead specimen of heart ought not to destroy the impression of his
words.  "There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood," is a maxim
which I have heard ascribed to a former venerated President of Harvard.
The heart's failure would have been misunderstood by the audience and
given the lie to the lecturer.  It was hard enough to make them
understand the subject anyhow; so that even now as I write in cool
blood I am tempted to think that I acted quite correctly.  I was acting
for the _larger_ truth, at any rate, however automatically; and my
sense of this was probably what prevented the more pedantic and literal
part of my conscience from checking the action of my sympathetic
finger.  To this day the memory of that critical emergency has made me
feel charitable towards all mediums who make phenomena come in one way
when they won't come easily in another.  On the principles of the S. P.
R., my conduct on that one occasion ought to discredit everything I
ever do, everything, for example, I may write in this article,--a
manifestly unjust conclusion.

Fraud, conscious or unconscious, seems ubiquitous throughout the range
of physical phenomena of spiritism, and false pretence, prevarication
and fishing for clues are ubiquitous in the mental manifestations of
mediums.  If it be not everywhere fraud simulating reality, one is
tempted to say, then the reality (if any reality there be) has the bad
luck of being fated everywhere to simulate fraud.  The suggestion of
humbug seldom stops, and mixes itself with the best manifestations.
Mrs. Piper's control, "Rector," is a most impressive personage, who
discerns in an extraordinary degree his sitter's inner needs, and is
capable of giving elevated counsel to fastidious and critical minds.
Yet in many respects he is an arrant humbug--such he seems to me at
least--pretending to a knowledge and power to which he has no title,
nonplussed by contradiction, yielding to suggestion, and covering his
tracks with plausible excuses.  Now the non-"researching" mind looks
upon such phenomena simply according to their face-pretension and never
thinks of asking what they may signify below the surface.  Since they
profess for the most part to be revealers of spirit life, it is either
as being absolutely that, or as being absolute frauds, that they are
judged.  The result is an inconceivably shallow state of public opinion
on the subject.  One set of persons, emotionally touched at hearing the
names of their loved ones given, and consoled by assurances that they
are "happy," accept the revelation, and consider spiritualism
"beautiful."  More hard-headed subjects, disgusted by the revelation's
contemptible contents, outraged by the fraud, and prejudiced beforehand
against all "spirits," high or low, avert their minds from what they
call such "rot" or "bosh" entirely.  Thus do two opposite
sentimentalisms divide opinion between them!  A good expression of the
"scientific" state of mind occurs in Huxley's "Life and Letters":

"I regret," he writes, "that I am unable to accept the invitation of
the Committee of the Dialectical Society. . . .  I take no interest in
the subject.  The only case of 'Spiritualism' I have ever had the
opportunity of examining into for myself was as gross an imposture as
ever came under my notice.  But supposing these phenomena to be
genuine--they do not interest me.  If anybody would endow me with the
faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the
nearest provincial town, I should decline the privilege, having better
things to do.  And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more
wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in
the same category.  The only good that I can see in the demonstration
of the 'Truth of Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument
against suicide.  Better live a crossing-sweeper, than die and be made
to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a _Seance_." [2]

Obviously the mind of the excellent Huxley has here but two
whole-souled categories namely revelation or imposture, to apperceive
the case by.  Sentimental reasons bar revelation out, for the messages,
he thinks, are not romantic enough for that; fraud exists anyhow;
therefore the whole thing is nothing but imposture.  The odd point is
that so few of those who talk in this way realize that they and the
spiritists are using the same major premise and differing only in the
minor.  The major premise is: "Any spirit-revelation must be romantic."
The minor of the spiritist is: "This _is_ romantic"; that of the Huxley
an is: "this is dingy twaddle"--whence their opposite conclusions!

Meanwhile the first thing that anyone learns who attends seriously to
these phenomena is that their causation is far too complex for our
feelings about what is or is not romantic enough to be spiritual to
throw any light upon it.  The causal factors must be carefully
distinguished and traced through series, from their simplest to their
strongest forms, before we can begin to understand the various
resultants in which they issue.  Myers and Gurney began this work, the
one by his serial study of the various sorts of "automatism," sensory
and motor, the other by his experimental proofs that a split-off
consciousness may abide after a post-hypnotic suggestion has been
given.  Here we have subjective factors; but are not transsubjective or
objective forces also at work?  Veridical messages, apparitions,
movements without contact, seem _prima facie_ to be such.  It was a
good stroke on Gurney's part to construct a theory of apparitions which
brought the subjective and the objective factors into harmonious
co-operation.  I doubt whether this telepathic theory of Gurney's will
hold along the whole line of apparitions to which he applied it, but it
is unquestionable that some theory of that mixed type is required for
the explanation of all mediumistic phenomena; and that when all the
psychological factors and elements involved have been told off--and
they are many--the question still forces itself upon us: Are these all,
or are there indications of any residual forces acting on the subject
from beyond, or of any "meta-psychic" faculty (to use Richet's useful
term) exerted by him?  This is the problem that requires real
expertness, and this is where the simple sentimentalisms of the
spiritist and scientist leave us in the lurch completely.

"Psychics" form indeed a special branch of education, in which experts
are only gradually becoming developed.  The phenomena are as massive
and wide-spread as is anything in Nature, and the study of them is as
tedious, repellent and undignified.  To reject it for its unromantic
character is like rejecting bacteriology because _penicillium glaucum_
grows on horse-dung and _bacterium termo_ lives in putrefaction.
Scientific men have long ago ceased to think of the dignity of the
materials they work in.  When imposture has been checked off as far as
possible, when chance coincidence has been allowed for, when
opportunities for normal knowledge on the part of the subject have been
noted, and skill in "fishing" and following clues unwittingly furnished
by the voice or face of bystanders have been counted in, those who have
the fullest acquaintance with the phenomena admit that in good mediums
_there is a residuum of knowledge displayed_ that can only be called
supernormal: the medium taps some source of information not open to
ordinary people.  Myers used the word "telepathy" to indicate that the
sitter's own thoughts or feelings may be thus directly tapped.  Mrs.
Sidgwick has suggested that if living minds can be thus tapped
telepathically, so possibly may the minds of spirits be similarly
tapped--if spirits there be.  On this view we should have one distinct
theory of the performances of a typical test-medium.  They would be all
originally due to an odd _tendency to personate_, found in her dream
life as it expresses itself in trance.  [Most of us reveal such a
tendency whenever we handle a "ouija-board" or a "planchet," or let
ourselves write automatically with a pencil.]  The result is a
"control," who purports to be speaking; and all the resources of the
automatist, including his or her trance-faculty of telepathy are called
into play in building this fictitious personage out plausibly.  On such
a view of the control, the medium's _will to personate_ runs the whole
show; and if spirits be involved in it at all, they are passive beings,
stray bits of whose memory she is able to seize and use for her
purposes, without the spirit being any more aware of it than the sitter
is aware of it when his own mind is similarly tapped.

This is one possible way of interpreting a certain type of psychical
phenomenon.  It uses psychological as well as "spiritual" factors, and
quite obviously it throws open for us far more questions than it
answers, questions about our subconscious constitution and its curious
tendency to humbug, about the telepathic faculty, and about the
possibility of an existent spirit-world.

I do not instance this theory to defend it, but simply to show what
complicated hypotheses one is inevitably led to consider, the moment
one looks at the facts in their complexity and turns one's back on the
_naïve_ alternative of "revelation or imposture," which is as far as
either spiritist thought or ordinary scientist thought goes.  The
phenomena are endlessly complex in their factors, and they are so
little understood as yet that off-hand judgments, whether of "spirits"
or of "bosh" are the one as silly as the other.  When we complicate the
subject still farther by considering what connection such things as
rappings, apparitions, poltergeists, spirit-photographs, and
materializations may have with it, the bosh end of the scale gets
heavily loaded, it is true, but your genuine inquirer still is loath to
give up.  He lets the data collect, and bides his time.  He believes
that "bosh" is no more an ultimate element in Nature, or a really
explanatory category in human life than "dirt" is in chemistry.  Every
kind of "bosh" has its own factors and laws; and patient study will
bring them definitely to light.

The only way to rescue the "pure bosh" view of the matter is one which
has sometimes appealed to my own fancy, but which I imagine few readers
will seriously adopt.  If, namely, one takes the theory of evolution
radically, one ought to apply it not only to the rock-strata, the
animals and the plants but to the stars, to the chemical elements, and
to the laws of nature.  There must have been a far-off antiquity, one
is then tempted to suppose, when things were really chaotic.  Little by
little, out of all the haphazard possibilities of that time, a few
connected things and habits arose, and the rudiments of regular
performance began.  Every variation in the way of law and order added
itself to this nucleus, which inevitably grew more considerable as
history went on; while the aberrant and inconstant variations, not
being similarly preserved, disappeared from being, wandered off as
unrelated vagrants, or else remained so imperfectly connected with the
part of the world that had grown regular as only to manifest their
existence by occasional lawless intrusions, like those which "psychic"
phenomena now make into our scientifically organized world.  On such a
view, these phenomena ought to remain "pure bosh" forever, that is,
they ought to be forever intractable to intellectual methods, because
they should not yet be organized enough in themselves to follow any
laws.  Wisps and shreds of the original chaos, they would be connected
enough with the cosmos to affect its periphery every now and then, as
by a momentary whiff or touch or gleam, but not enough ever to be
followed up and hunted down and bagged.  Their relation to the cosmos
would be tangential solely.

Looked at dramatically, most occult phenomena make just this sort of
impression.  They are inwardly as incoherent as they are outwardly
wayward and fitful.  If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure
discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to
interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle.  They seem like stray vestiges
of that primordial irrationality, from which all our rationalities have
been evolved.

To settle dogmatically into this bosh-view would save labor, but it
would go against too many intellectual prepossessions to be adopted
save as a last resort of despair.  Your psychical researcher therefore
bates no jot of hope, and has faith that when we get our data numerous
enough, some sort of rational treatment of them will succeed.

When I hear good people say (as they often say, not without show of
reason), that dabbling in such phenomena reduces us to a sort of jelly,
disintegrates the critical faculties, liquifies the character, and
makes of one a _gobe-mouche_ generally, I console myself by thinking of
my friends Frederic Myers and Richard Hodgson.  These men lived
exclusively for psychical research, and it converted both to spiritism.
Hodgson would have been a man among men anywhere; but I doubt whether
under any other baptism he would have been that happy, sober and
righteous form of energy which his face proclaimed him in his later
years, when heart and head alike were wholly satisfied by his
occupation.  Myers' character also grew stronger in every particular
for his devotion to the same inquirings.  Brought up on literature and
sentiment, something of a courtier, passionate, disdainful, and
impatient naturally, he was made over again from the day when he took
up psychical research seriously.  He became learned in science,
circumspect, democratic in sympathy, endlessly patient, and above all,
happy.  The fortitude of his last hours touched the heroic, so
completely were the atrocious sufferings of his body cast into
insignificance by his interest in the cause he lived for.  When a man's
pursuit gradually makes his face shine and grow handsome, you may be
sure it is a worthy one.  Both Hodgson and Myers kept growing ever
handsomer and stronger-looking.

Such personal examples will convert no one, and of course they ought
not to.  Nor do I seek at all in this article to convert any one to
belief that psychical research is an important branch of science.  To
do that, I should have to quote evidence; and those for whom the
volumes of S. P. R. "Proceedings" already published count for nothing
would remain in their dogmatic slumber, though one rose from the dead.
No, not to convert readers, but simply to _put my own state of mind
upon record publicly_ is the purpose of my present writing.  Some one
said to me a short time ago that after my twenty-five years of dabbling
in "Psychics," it would be rather shameful were I unable to state any
definite conclusions whatever as a consequence.  I had to agree; so I
now proceed to take up the challenge and express such convictions as
have been engendered in me by that length of experience, be the same
true or false ones.  I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of
better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor; I am
willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is _my_ truth, as I
now see it.


I began this article by confessing myself baffled.  I _am_ baffled, as
to spirit-return, and as to many other special problems.  I am also
constantly baffled as to what to think of this or that particular
story, for the sources of error in any one observation are seldom fully
knowable.  But weak sticks make strong faggots; and when the stories
fall into consistent sorts that point each in a definite direction, one
gets a sense of being in presence of genuinely natural types of
phenomena.  As to there being such real natural types of phenomena
ignored by orthodox science, I am not baffled at all, for I am fully
convinced of it.  One cannot get demonstrative proof here.  One has to
follow one's personal sense, which, of course, is liable to err, of the
dramatic probabilities of nature.  Our critics here obey their sense of
dramatic probability as much as we do.  Take "raps" for example, and
the whole business of objects moving without contact.  "Nature," thinks
the scientific man, is not so unutterably silly.  The cabinet, the
darkness, the tying, suggest a sort of human rat-hole life exclusively
and "swindling" is for him the dramatically sufficient explanation.  It
probably is, in an indefinite majority of instances; yet it is to me
dramatically improbable that the swindling should not have accreted
round some originally genuine nucleus.  If we look at human imposture
as a historic phenomenon, we find it always imitative.  One swindler
imitates a previous swindler, but the first swindler of that kind
imitated some one who was honest.  You can no more create an absolutely
new trick than you can create a new word without any previous
basis.--You don't know how to go about it.  Try, reader, yourself, to
invent an unprecedented kind of "physical phenomenon of spiritualism."
When _I_ try, I find myself mentally turning over the regular
medium-stock, and thinking how I might improve some item.  This being
the dramatically probable human way, I think differently of the whole
type, taken collectively, from the way in which I may think of the
single instance.  I find myself believing that there is "something in"
these never ending reports of physical phenomena, although I have n't
yet the least positive notion of the something.  It becomes to my mind
simply a very worthy problem for investigation.  Either I or the
scientist is of course a fool, with our opposite views of probability
here; and I only wish he might feel the liability, as cordially as I
do, to pertain to both of us.

I fear I look on Nature generally with more charitable eyes than his,
though perhaps he would pause if he realized as I do, how vast the
fraudulency is which inconsistency he must attribute to her.  Nature is
brutal enough, Heaven knows; but no one yet has held her non-human side
to be _dishonest_, and even in the human sphere deliberate deceit is
far rarer than the "classic" intellect, with its few and rigid
categories, was ready to acknowledge.  There is a hazy penumbra in us
all where lying and delusion meet, where passion rules beliefs as well
as conduct, and where the term "scoundrel" does not clear up everything
to the depths as it did for our forefathers.  The first automatic
writing I ever saw was forty years ago.  I unhesitatingly thought of it
as deceit, although it contained vague elements of supernormal
knowledge.  Since then I have come to see in automatic writing one
example of a department of human activity as vast as it is enigmatic.
Every sort of person is liable to it, or to something equivalent to it;
and whoever encourages it in himself finds himself personating someone
else, either signing what he writes by fictitious name, or, spelling
out, by ouija-board or table-tips, messages from the departed.  Our
subconscious region seems, as a rule, to be dominated either by a crazy
"will to make-believe," or by some curious external force impelling us
to personation.  The first difference between the psychical researcher
and the inexpert person is that the former realizes the commonness and
typicality of the phenomenon here, while the latter, less informed,
thinks it so rare as to be unworthy of attention.  _I wish to go on
record for the commonness_.

The next thing I wish to go on record for is _the presence_, in the
midst of all the humbug, _of really supernormal knowledge_.  By this I
mean knowledge that cannot be traced to the ordinary sources of
information--the senses namely, of the automatist.  In really strong
mediums this knowledge seems to be abundant, though it is usually
spotty, capricious and unconnected.  Really strong mediums are
rarities; but when one starts with them and works downwards into less
brilliant regions of the automatic life, one tends to interpret many
slight but odd coincidences with truth as possibly rudimentary forms of
this kind of knowledge.

What is one to think of this queer chapter in human nature?  It is odd
enough on any view.  If all it means is a preposterous and inferior
monkey-like tendency to forge messages, systematically embedded in the
soul of all of us, it is weird; and weirder still that it should then
own all this supernormal information.  If on the other hand the
supernormal information be the key to the phenomenon, it ought to be
superior; and then how ought we to account for the "wicked partner,"
and for the undeniable mendacity and inferiority of so much of the
performance?  We are thrown, for our conclusions, upon our instinctive
sense of the dramatic probabilities of nature.  My own dramatic sense
tends instinctively to picture the situation as an interaction between
slumbering faculties in the automatist's mind and a cosmic environment
of _other consciousness_ of some sort which is able to work upon them.
If there were in the universe a lot of diffuse soul-stuff, unable of
itself to get into consistent personal form, or to take permanent
possession of an organism, yet always craving to do so, it might get
its head into the air, parasitically, so to speak, by profiting by weak
spots in the armor of human minds, and slipping in and stirring up
there the sleeping tendency to personate.  It would induce habits in
the subconscious region of the mind it used thus, and would seek above
all things to prolong its social opportunities by making itself
agreeable and plausible.  It would drag stray scraps of truth with it
from the wider environment, but would betray its mental inferiority by
knowing little how to weave them into any important or significant
story.  This, I say, is the dramatic view which my mind spontaneously
takes, and it has the advantage of falling into line with ancient human
traditions.  The views of others are just as dramatic, _for the
phenomenon is actuated by will of some sort anyhow_, and wills give
rise to dramas.  The spiritist view, as held by Messrs. Hyslop and
Hodgson, sees a "will to communicate," struggling through inconceivable
layers of obstruction in the conditions.  I have heard Hodgson liken
the difficulties to those of two persons who on earth should have only
dead-drunk servants to use as their messengers.  The scientist, for his
part, sees a "will to deceive," watching its chance in all of us, and
able (possibly?) to use "telepathy" in its service.

Which kind of will, and how many kinds of will are most inherently
probable?  Who can say with certainty?  The only certainty is that the
phenomena are enormously complex, especially if one includes in them
such intellectual flights of mediumship as Swedenborg's, and if one
tries in any way to work the physical phenomena in.  That is why I
personally am as yet neither a convinced believer in parasitic demons,
nor a spiritist, nor a scientist, but still remain a psychical
researcher waiting for more facts before concluding.

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one
fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with
our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest.
The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and
Conanicut and Newport hear each other's fog-horns.  But the trees also
commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also
hang together through the ocean's bottom.  Just so there is a continuum
of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but
accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a
mother-sea or reservoir.  Our "normal" consciousness is circumscribed
for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is
weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the
otherwise unverifiable common connection.  Not only psychic research,
but metaphysical philosophy, and speculative biology are led in their
own ways to look with favor on some such "panpsychic" view of the
universe as this.  Assuming this common reservoir of consciousness to
exist, this bank upon which we all draw, and in which so many of
earth's memories must in some way be stored, or mediums would not get
at them as they do, the question is, What is its own structure?  What
is its inner topography?  This question, first squarely formulated by
Myers, deserves to be called "Myers' problem" by scientific men
hereafter.  What are the conditions of individuation or insulation in
this mother-sea?  To what tracts, to what active systems functioning
separately in it, do personalities correspond?  Are individual
"spirits" constituted there?  How numerous, and of how many hierarchic
orders may these then be?  How permanent?  How transient?  And how
confluent with one another may they become?

What again, are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and
matter?  Are there subtler forms of matter which upon occasion may
enter into functional connection with the individuations in the psychic
sea, and then, and then only, show themselves?--So that our ordinary
human experience, on its material as well as on its mental side, would
appear to be only an extract from the larger psycho-physical world?

Vast, indeed, and difficult is the inquirer's prospect here, and the
most significant data for his purpose will probably be just these dingy
little mediumistic facts which the Huxleyan minds of our time find so
unworthy of their attention.  But when was not the science of the
future stirred to its conquering activities by the little rebellious
exceptions to the science of the present?  Hardly, as yet, has the
surface of the facts called "psychic" begun to be scratched for
scientific purposes.  It is through following these facts, I am
persuaded, that the greatest scientific conquests of the coming
generation will be achieved.  _Kühn ist das Mühen, herrlich der Lohn!_



[1] Published under the title "Confidences of a Psychical Researcher"
in the _American Magazine_, October, 1909.  For a more complete and
less popular statement of some theories suggested in this article see
the last pages of a "Report on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson-Control" in
_Proceedings of the [Eng.] Society for Psychical Research_, 1909, 470;
also printed in _Proc. of Am. Soc. for Psychical Research_ for the same
year.

[2] T. H. Huxley, "Life and Letters," I, 240.




IX

ON SOME MENTAL EFFECTS OF THE EARTHQUAKE[1]

When I departed from Harvard for Stanford University last December,
almost the last good-by I got was that of my old Californian friend B:
"I hope they'll give you a touch of earthquake while you 're there, so
that you may also become acquainted with that Californian institution."

Accordingly, when, lying awake at about half past five on the morning
of April 18 in my little "flat" on the campus of Stanford, I felt the
bed begin to waggle, my first consciousness was one of gleeful
recognition of the nature of the movement.  "By Jove," I said to
myself, "here's B'ssold [Transcriber's note: 'B's old'?] earthquake,
after all!"  And then, as it went _crescendo_.  "And a jolly good one
it is, too!" I said.

Sitting up involuntarily, and taking a kneeling position, I was thrown
down on my face as it went _fortior_ shaking the room exactly as a
terrier shakes a rat.  Then everything that was on anything else slid
off to the floor, over went bureau and chiffonier with a crash, as the
_fortissimo_ was reached; plaster cracked, an awful roaring noise
seemed to fill the outer air, and in an instant all was still again,
save the soft babble of human voices from far and near that soon began
to make itself heard, as the inhabitants in costumes _negligés_ in
various degrees sought the greater safety of the street and yielded to
the passionate desire for sympathetic communication.

The thing was over, as I understand the Lick Observatory to have
declared, in forty-eight seconds.  To me it felt as if about that
length of time, although I have heard others say that it seemed to them
longer.  In my case, sensation and emotion were so strong that little
thought, and no reflection or volition, were possible in the short time
consumed by the phenomenon.

The emotion consisted wholly of glee and admiration; glee at the
vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term as "earthquake"
could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified
concretely; and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden
house could hold itself together in spite of such a shaking.  I felt no
trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.

"_Go_ it," I almost cried aloud, "and go it _stronger_!"

I ran into my wife's room, and found that she, although awakened from
sound sleep, had felt no fear, either.  Of all the persons whom I later
interrogated, very few had felt any fear while the shaking lasted,
although many had had a "turn," as they realized their narrow escapes
from bookcases or bricks from chimney-breasts falling on their beds and
pillows an instant after they had left them.

As soon as I could think, I discerned retrospectively certain peculiar
ways in which my consciousness had taken in the phenomenon.  These ways
were quite spontaneous, and, so to speak, inevitable and irresistible.

First, I personified the earthquake as a permanent individual entity.
It was _the_ earthquake of my friend B's augury, which had been lying
low and holding itself back during all the intervening months, in
order, on that lustrous April morning, to invade my room, and energize
the more intensely and triumphantly.  It came, moreover, directly to
_me_.  It stole in behind my back, and once inside the room, had me all
to itself, and could manifest itself convincingly.  Animus and intent
were never more present in any human action, nor did any human activity
ever more definitely point back to a living agent as its source and
origin.

All whom I consulted on the point agreed as to this feature in their
experience.  "It expressed intention," "It was vicious," "It was bent
on destruction," "It wanted to show its power," or what not.  To me, it
wanted simply to manifest the full meaning of its name.  But what was
this "It"?  To some, apparently, a vague demonic power; to me an
individualized being, B's earthquake, namely.

One informant interpreted it as the end of the world and the beginning
of the final judgment.  This was a lady in a San Francisco hotel, who
did not think of its being an earthquake till after she had got into
the street and some one had explained it to her.  She told me that the
theological interpretation had kept fear from her mind, and made her
take the shaking calmly.  For "science," when the tensions in the
earth's crust reach the breaking-point, and strata fall into an altered
equilibrium, earthquake is simply the collective _name_ of all the
cracks and shakings and disturbances that happen.  They _are_ the
earthquake.  But for me _the_ earthquake was the _cause_ of the
disturbances, and the perception of it as a living agent was
irresistible.  It had an overpowering dramatic convincingness.

I realize now better than ever how inevitable were men's earlier
mythologic versions of such catastrophes, and how artificial and
against the g

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/20768