The Common Enemy: Early Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William James

IN writing the Preface of his Principles of Psychology in 1890, William James recorded his indebtedness to Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce for ‘their intellectual companionship in old times.’ Adding Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., there were three of these old-time intellectual companionships which must be taken account of in any discussion of James’s early philosophical orientation, and which bear directly on the issue between science and religion. All of these men were of a relatively rigorous or skeptical turn of mind, and by exposure to their criticism James’s germinating metaphysics became a hardier plant.

The intimacy with Holmes began while the latter was a student in the Harvard Law School (1864-1866). In Brazil in 1865 James longed for Holmes, and after he returned to his medical studies in 1866 he ‘wrangled’ with Holmes by the hour. In the winter of 1866-1867 the two were deep in a continuing metaphysical discussion, echoes of which are preserved in a memorandum on ‘materialism,’ addressed by James to Holmes. It contained a defense of optimism against the negations of agnosticism — a defense which he ‘was groping for the other evening,’ but ‘could not say’ until Holmes was gone and he was in bed. On April 16, 1867, James sailed from New York on the Great Eastern — bound for his long voyage of exile and discovery. Suffering from mortification that he should be so unreliable in health and so vacillating in will, he had kept his plan a secret even from his family and friends. But on the eve of his departure he must hold a farewell session at the Holmes house on Charles Street: ‘Dear Wendy boy, — I will go in tomorrow night, and we will evolve cosmos out of chaos for positively the last time.’

During all the time of his homesickness and heart-searching in Germany, James felt that Holmes and Tom Ward were his ‘ best friends so far.’ In September 1867, he wrote from Berlin complaining of Holmes’s silence, inquiring after the results of his ‘study of the vis viva question,’ and referring familiarly to their ‘dilapidated old friend the Cosmos.’ He received this reply: —

BOSTON, Dec. 15, 1867
DEAR BILL, —
I shall begin with no apologies for my delay in writing except to tell you that since seeing you I have written three long letters to you at different intervals on vis viva, each of which I was compelled to destroy because on reflection it appeared either unsound or incomplete. But I was talking yesterday with Fanny Dixwell and she told me to fire away anyhow — that she thought it would please you to hear from me even without vis viva. So here goes. Writing is so unnatural to me that I have never before dared to try it to you unless in connection with a subject. Ah! dear Bill, do me justice. My expressions of esteem are not hollow nor hyperbolical — nor put in to cover my neglect. In spite of my many friends I am almost alone in my thoughts and inner feelings. And whether I ever see you much or not, I think I can never fail to derive a secret comfort and companionship from the thought of you. I believe I shall always respect and love you whether we see much or little of each other. . . .
For two or three months I debauched o’ nights in philosophy. But now it is law — law — law. My magnum opus was reading the Critique of Pure Reason and Schulze’s éclaircissement — which on the whole, though an excellent abridgment, does n’t much by way of éclaircissements. . . .
Assumed that logic exhaustively classifies judgments according to their possible forms, it. [Kant’s Critique] has then implicitly classified concepts in like manner. But all experience to be thought must be thought through concepts. The forms of concepts, then, are inherent in all organised experience as an a priori clement. Hence it is explained inter alia why, given phenomenon A, we say it must have had a cause in an antecedent phenomenon. The phenomenon only became thinkable through that form and others. You see how ingenious and audacious was his attempt — yet its fallacy seems obvious when the reasoning by which it was arrived at is grasped.
Thus, the logical categories have reference only to the form in which judgments are expressed. The conceptions of substance, causal relation, etc., belong to the content and are not given in the form. Thus, take the hypothetical judgment, ‘if A then B.‘ This form is not coterminous with the causal judgment, as Thomson (reasoning alio intuitu) points out; e.g., ‘if this be poetry, poetry is worthless,’ is as much hypothetical in form as ‘if the moon attracts in the same line as the sun the tides are at their highest.’ Thomson says the only case of causal relation is when the four terms are all different: ‘if A is B then C is D.’ But whether even this last is always so may be doubted — e.g., ‘if I am right then tomorrow will be warm.’ Again, he and Mansel have both shown — I should think successfully, but I am no logician — that all of these can be reduced to categorical judgments. And then what becomes of a theory based on their fundamental distinctions? But the other objection is, I think, insuperable — that if the concept cause and effect be only a form of thought corresponding to the hypothetical judgment, that judgment ought never to express any but causal relations. . . . It’s puerile stuff enough, I admit, to waste energy on. But it seems necessary to read a good deal of useless stuff, in order to know that it is so and not to depend only on a surmise. At present, I say it’s nothing but. law; though, by the by, I am reading Tyndall’s book on Heat — what a yellow-whiskered, healthy, florid-complected, pleasant English book it is, to be sure. Are n’t the foreigners simpler than we? See what one of the great lights of English law says in the preface to a book I’m reading (he is speaking of Savigny): ‘I have used great exertions, but without effect, to make myself sufficiently master of the German language to read this work in the original.’ If a man here had three cents’ worth of secondhand knowdledge would he confess that he did n’t know anything under the sun? Talking of Britons, there have been a lot here of late — one, a Mr. Henry Cowper — brother of the present Earl C., made a decided impression on me. He had the cosmos at heart, it seemed to me, and we hammered at it late into the night several times. . . .
Oh! Bill, my beloved, how have I yearned after thee all this long time. How I have admired those brave, generous and magnanimous traits of which I will not shame thee by speaking. I am the better that I have seen thee and known thee, — let that suffice. Since I wrote the last word I have been to see your father. By a rather remarkable coincidence, your last letter referred to Kant and to Schulze’s books. It is rather strange, is n’t it? It is now evening and the whole day has been yours with the exceptions noted and meals. I expect Gray directly. May this get to you in time to wish you a Happy New Year. By Heaven I do, — vis viva must wait. There are stickers I can’t answer. But I rather think you found difficulty — at least I did — in the insufficiency of facts. As one is shaping his views he wants to say, Is this experiment so or so? I got more out of Cooke on terms by way of translating mathematics into English than anyone else. But I found my first explanations in great measure chimœra bombinans in vacuo when I went into the matter a second time in order to write you. As it is I just see that force is n’t destroyed, without having mastered the formulæ. What a passion your father has in writing and talking his religion! Almost he persuadeth me to be a Swedenborgian, but I can’t go it so far — will see whether the other scheme busts up first, I think.
Good-bye, dear Bill — don’t forget me quite.
Affectionately yours,
O. W. HOLMES

BERLIN, Jan. 3, 1868
MY DEAR WENDLE, —
Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin, tonight. The ghosts of the past all start from their unquiet graves and keep dancing a senseless whirligig around me so that, after trying in vain to read three books, to sleep, or to think, I clutch the pen and ink and resolve to work off the fit by a few lines to one of the most obtrusive ghosts of all — namely the tall and lank one of Charles Street. Good golly! how I would prefer to have about twenty-four hours’ talk with you up in that whitely lit-up room — without the sun rising or the firmament revolving so as to put the gas out, without sleep, food, clothing or shelter except your whiskey bottle, of which, or the like of which, I have not partaken since I have been in these longitudes! I should like to have you opposite me in any mood, whether the facetiously excursive, the metaphysically discursive, the personally confidential, or the jadedly cursive and argumentative — so that the oyster-shells which enclose my being might slowly turn open on their rigid hinges under the radiation, and the critter within loll out his dried-up gills into the circumfused ichor of life, till they grew so fat as not to know themselves again. I feel as if a talk with you of any kind could not fail to set me on my legs again for three weeks at least. I have been chewing on two or three dried-up old cuds of ideas I brought from America with me, till they have disappeared, and the nudity of the Kosmos has got beyond anything I have as yet experienced. . . .
I don’t know how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter. I marked out a number of books when I first came here, to finish. What with their heaviness and the damnable slowness with which the Dutch still goes, they weigh on me like a haystack. I loathe the thought of them; and yet they have poisoned my slave of a conscience so that I can’t enjoy anything else. I have reached an age when practical work of some kind clamors to be done — and I must still wait!
There! Having worked off that pentup gall of six weeks’ accumulation I feel more genial. I wish I could have some news of you — now that the postage is lowered to such a ridiculous figure (and no letter is double) there remains no shadow of an excuse for not writing — but, still, I don’t expect anything from you. I suppose you are sinking ever deeper into the sloughs of the law — yet I ween the Eternal Mystery still from time to time gives her goad another turn in the raw she once established between your ribs. Don’t let it heal over yet. When I get home let’s establish a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss none but the very tallest and broadest questions — to be composed of none but the very topmost cream of Boston manhood. It will give each one a chance to air his own opinion in a grammatical form, and to sneer and chuckle when he goes home at what damned fools all the other members are — and may grow into something very important after a sufficient number of years. . . .
I’ll now pull up. I don’t know whether you take it as a compliment that I should only write to you when in the dismalest of dumps — perhaps you ought to—you, the one emergent peak, to which I cling when all the rest of the world has sunk beneath the wave. Believe me, my Wendly boy, what poor possibility of friendship in the crazy frame of W. J. meanders about thy neighborhood. Good-bye! Keep the same bold front as ever to the Common Enemy — and don’t forget your ally,
W. J.

P.S. Jan. 4 [Written on the outside of the envelope]. By a strange coincidence, after writing this last night, I received yours this morning. Not to sacrifice the postage stamps which are already on the envelope (Economical W!) I don’t reopen it. But I will write you again soon. Meanwhile, bless your heart! thank you! Vide Shakespeare: Sonnet XXIX.

BOSTON, April 19, 1868
DEAR BILL, —
The icy teeth have melted out of the air and winter has snapped at us for the last time. Now are the waters beneath my window of a deeper and more significant blue than heretofore. Now do the fields burn with green fire — the evanescent hint of I know not what hidden longing of the earth. Now all the bushes burgeon with wooly buds and the elm trees have put on bridal veils of hazy brown. Now to the chorus of the frogs answers the chorus of the birds in antiphony of morning and evening. Now couples, walking round Boston Common Sundays after sunset, draw near to each other in the dark spaces between the gas lights and think themselves unseen. Now are the roads around Cambridge filled with collegians with new hats and sticks and shining schoolboy faces. Now the young man seeks the maiden nothing loath to be pursued. Spring is here, Bill, and I turn to thee, — not with more affection than during the long grind of the winter, but desiring if it may be to say a word to thee once more.
Since I wrote in December I have worked at nothing but the law. Philosophy has hibernated in torpid slumber, and I have lain ‘sluttishly soaking and gurgling in the devil’s pickle,’ as Carlyle says. It has been necessary, — if a man chooses a profession he cannot forever content himself in picking out the plums with fastidious dilettantism and give the rest of the loaf to the poor, but must eat his way manfully through crust and crumb — soft, unpleasant, inner parts which, within one, swell, causing discomfort in the bowels. Such has been my cowardice that I have been almost glad that you were n’t here, lest you should be disgusted to find me inaccessible to ideas and impressions of more spiritual significance but alien to my studies. Think not, however, that I distrust the long enduring of your patience. I know that you would be the last of all to turn away from one in whom you discerned the possibility of friendship because his vigils were at a different shrine, knowing it was the same Divinity he worshipped. And the winter has been a success, I think, both for the simple discipline of the work and because I now go on with an ever increasing conviction that law as well as any other series of facts in this world may be approached in the interests of science and may be studied, yes and practised, with the preservation of one’s ideals. I should even say that they grew robust under the regimen, — more than that I do not ask. To finish the search of mankind, to discover the ne plus ultra which is the demand of ingenuous youth, one finds is not allotted to an individual. To reconcile oneself to life — to dimly apprehend that this dream disturbing the sleep of the cosm is not the result of a dyspepsy, but is well — to suspect some of the divine harmonies, though you cannot note them like a score of music — these things, methinks, furnish vanishing points which give a kind of perspective to the chaos of events. Perhaps I am fortunate in what I have often made a reproach to myself.
Harry never lets up on his high aims, — somehow it connects itself with the absence of humor in him which himself avows. I do. There are not infrequent times when a bottle of wine, a good dinner, a girl of some trivial sort can fill the hour for me. So for longer spaces, work, — of which only at the beginning and the end do I perceive the philosophic nexus, and while performing forget the Great Task Master’s Eye. This makes life easier though perhaps it does not deserve approval.
Let me give another example of ‘if A is B, then C is D ’ (in my last letter) which does not denote a causal connection — the one I gave was open to objection as standing on peculiar grounds. Take all judgments of universal or assumed universal concomitants: ‘If the barometer falls suddenly, there will be a gale’; ‘If the sun shines in Boston, the stars are out in China.’ In these, etc., there is no causal connection between protasis and apodosis, although by going outside of the judgment to an induction we may say with more or less confidence that where two facts are always found together, if one is not the cause of the other then they are both (probably) referable to a common cause. ... Is it not clear that . . . the relation of the if and the then to a common cause is not in any way given in the form of the judgment, and that said if and then don’t stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect? . . .
Dear old Bill, I have n’t said anything about your illness to you — there is nothing, perhaps, which particularly belongs to me to say. But for God’s sake don’t lose that courage with which you have faced ‘the common enemy’ (as you well have it). Would that I could give back the spirits which you have given to me so often. At all events doubt not of my love.
Let me not be sad, — at least for this letter. There is a new fire in the earth and sky. I, who through the long winter have felt the wrinkles deepening in my face and a stoop settling in my back — I, who have said to myself that my life henceforth must and should be given only to severe thought, and have said to youth, ‘procul esto,’ — I feel the mighty quickening of the spring.
The larches have sprouted.
I saw a butterfly today just loosed from the bondage of winter, and a bee toiling in sticky buds half opened.
O! passionate breezes! O! rejoicing hills! How swells the soft full chorus — for this earth which slept has awakened and the air is tremulous with multiplied joyous sound.
Sing, sparrow — kissing with thy feet the topmost tassels of the pines.
Cease not thy too much sound, O! robin. Squirrels, grind thy scissors in the woods. Creak, blackbirds. Croak, frogs. Caw, high-flying crows, who have seen the breaking of the ice in northern rivers and the seaward moving booms.
A keen, slender, stridulous vibration — almost too fine for the hearing, weaving in and out, and in the pauses of the music dividing the silence like a knife — pierces my heart with an ecstasy I cannot utter. Ah! what is it? Did I ever hear it? Is it a voice within, answering to the others, but different from them — and like a singing flame not ceasing with that which made it vocal?
Dear Bill, to whom should I vent this madness but to you? Good-bye. You know my sentiments — I will not repeat them.
Affectionately yours,
O. W. HOLMES

Apr. 25. It is snowing again. S’ help me.

DRESDEN, May 15, 1868
MY DEAR WENDELL, —
Your unexpected letter has just burst into my existence like a meteor into the sphere of a planet, and here I go for an answer while the heat developed by the impact is at its highest. I have got so accustomed to thinking of you as not a writing animal that such an event rather dislocates my mind from its habitual ‘sag’ in contemplating the world. I have of late been repeatedly on the point of writing to you but have paused ere slipping o’er the brink. It is easy to write people whom you have been steadily writing to, for one letter seems to continue the previous ones. But to fire off a letter point blank at a man once in six months has an arbitrary savor. There are so many things of about equal importance for you to tell him that there is no reason for you to begin with any particular one and leave off the rest. Consequently you don’t begin at all. However, heaven reward you for this inspired effusion and help you to another some time. It runs through the whole circle of human energy, Shelley, Kant, Goethe, Walt Whitman, all being fused in the unity of your fiery personality. Were I only in the vein, O! friend, I would answer in the same high strain, but today I grovel in prose. That you firmly embrace like a Bothriocephalus latus the very bowels of the law and grapple them to your soul with hooks of steel, is good. That the miasmas thence arising do not forever hide the blue Jove above, is better. I am firmly convinced that by going straight in almost any direction you can get out of the woods in which the young mind grows up, for I have an idea that the process usually consists of a more or less forcible reduction of the other elements of the chaos to a harmony with the terms of the one on which one has taken his particular stand. I think I might have fought it out on the line of practical medicine quite well. Your image of the ideals being vanishing points which give a kind of perspective to the chaos of events, tickleth that organ within me whose function it is to dally with the ineffable. I shall not fail to remember it, and if I stay long enough in Germany to make the acquaintance of ary a philosopher, I shall get it off as my own, you bet!
Your letter last winter I got and acknowledged on the cover of one I had just written you. Your criticism of Kant seems perfectly sound to me. I hoped to have got at him before now but have been interfered with. I have read only his Prolegomena and his little Anthropology (a marvellous, biting little work), and Cousin’s exposè of him (and of himself at the same time, darn him and the likes of him! — he is a mere politician). I hope soon to begin with the Kritik, for which I feel myself now quite prepared. And I reserve any half-ripe remarks I may have made on Kant till after that is done. I think a good five hours’ talk with you would probably do me more good than almost any other experience I can conceive of. I have not had any contact out of books with any soul possessed of reason since I left home, except, perhaps, Grimm — and I did not, owing to the linguistic wall between us, succeed in putting myself into communication with him. And in personal contact, Wendell, lies a deep dark power. I say ‘ reason,’ but I have no idea what the thing is. I have slipped so gradually out of sight of it in people that I did not know any particular thing was gone, till the day before yesterday I made the acquaintance of a young female from New York who is here in the house, and suddenly noticed that an old long-forgotten element was present (I mean in her way of accepting the world). It has been a beneficent discovery, and the suddenness and quasi-definiteness of it almost shatters one’s empirical philosophy. But probably it, too, may be resolved into other more vulgar elements.
The fact is, my dear boy, that I feel more as if you were my ally against what you call ‘the common enemy’ than anyone I know. As I am writing a grave statement of facts and not an effusion of friendliness, I may say that Tom Ward seems to me to have as great an intuition of the length and breadth of the enemy (which is the place in which most people fail), and perhaps a greater animal passion in his feeling about it, but poor Tom is so deficient in power of orderly thought that intercourse with him hardly ever bears fruit. With Harry and my Dad I have a perfect sympathy ‘personally,’ but Harry’s orbit and mine coincide but part way, and Father’s and mine hardly at all, except in a general feeling of philanthropy in which we both indulge. I have no idea that the particular point of view from which we spy the fiendish enemy has per se any merit over that of lots of other men. Such an opinion we recognize in other people as ‘conceit.’ But merely because it is common to both of us, I have an esteem for you which is tout particular, and value intercourse with you. You have a far more logical and orderly mode of thinking than I (I stand between you and T. Ward), and whenever we have been together I have somehow been conscious of a reaction against the ascendancy of this over my ruder processes — a reaction caused by some subtle deviltry of egotism and jealousy, whose causes are untraceable by myself, but through whose agency I put myself involuntarily into a position of self-defense, as if you threatened to overrun my territory and injure my own proprietorship. I don’t know whether you ever noticed any such thing, — it is hard to define the subtleness of it. Some of it may have been caused by the feeling of a too ‘cosmo-centric’ consciousness in you. But most of it was pure meanness. I guess that were we to meet now I should be less troubled with it. I have grown into the belief that friendship (including the highest half of that which between the two sexes is united under the single name of love) is about the highest joy of earth, and that a man’s rank in the general scale is well indicated by his capacity for it. So much established, I will try in a few brief strokes to define my present condition to you. If asked the question which all men who pretend to know themselves ought to be able to answer, but which few probably could offhand, — ‘ What reason can you give for continuing to live? What ground allege why the thread of your days should not be snapped now? ’
May 18th. Wendell of my entrails! At the momentous point where the last sheet ends I was interrupted by the buxom maid calling to tea and through various causes have not got back till now. As I sit by the open window waiting for my breakfast and look out on the line of Droschkes drawn up on the side of the Dohna Platz, and see the coachmen, red-faced, red-collared, and blue-coated, with varnished hats, sitting in a variety of indolent attitudes upon their boxes, one of them looking in upon me and probably wondering what the devil I am, — when I see the big sky with a monstrous white cloud battening and bulging up from behind the houses into the blue, with a uniform copper film drawn over cloud and blue, which makes one anticipate a soaking day — when I see the houses opposite with their balconies and windows filled with flowers and greenery — Ha! on the topmost balcony of one stands a maiden, black-jacketed, redpetticoated, fair and slim under the striped awning, leaning her elbow on the rail and her peach-like chin upon her rosy finger tips! Of whom thinkest thou, maiden, up there aloft? Here, here! beats that human heart for which in the drunkenness of the morning hour thy being vaguely longs, and tremulously, but recklessly and wickedly, posits elsewhere, over those distant housetops which thou regardest. Out of another window hangs the form, seen from behind and centre of gravity downwards, of an intrepid servant girl, washing the window. Blue frocked is she, and like a spider fast holding to his thread, or one that gathers samphires on dizzy promontory, she braves the danger of a fall. Against the lamppost leans the Dienstmann or commissionnaire, cross-legged and with tinbadged cap, smoking his cheap morning cigar. Far over the Platz toils the big country wagon with high-collared horses, and the still pavement rings with the shuffling feet of broad-backed wenches carrying baskets, and of shortnecked, wide-faced men. The day has in fact begun, and when I see all this and think that at the same moment thou art probably in a dead sleep whirled round through the black night with rocks and trees and monuments like an inanimate thing, when I think all this, I feel — how? — I give it up myself! After this interruption, which on the ground of local color and my half-awake condition you will excuse, I return to the former subject. But here’s the breakfast! Excuse me! Man eats in Germany a very light breakfast, chocolate and dry bread, so it won’t take me long.
’T is done, and a more genial glow than ever fills my system. Having read over what I wrote the day before yesterday I feel tempted not to send it, for I cannot help thinking it does not represent with perfect sincerity the state of the case. Still, if I do not write to you now, it may postpone itself a good while, and I let it go for the general spirit which animates it rather than for the particular propositions it contains. The point which seems to me unwarranted was my assumption of any special battle I was fighting against the powers of darkness, and of your being allied with me therein as the ground of my esteem for you. The truth is painfully evident to me that I am but little interested in any particular battle or movement of progress, and the ground of my friendship for you is more a sort of physical relish for your wit and wisdom, and passive enjoyment of the entertainment they afford, than anything else. Much would I give for a constructive passion of some kind. As it is, I am in great measure in the hands of Chance. Your metaphysical industry and the artistic satisfaction you take in the exercise of it, gives you an immeasurable advantage. In the past year if I have learned little else, I have at least learned a good deal that I previously did not suspect about the limits of my own mind. They are not exhilarating. I will not annoy you by going into the details but they all conspire to give my thoughts a vague emptiness wherever feeling is, and to drive feeling out wherever the thought becomes good for anything. Bah! My answer to the question I asked at the end of sheet two would be vague indeed; it would vary between the allegation of a dogged desire to assert myself, at certain times, and the undermined hope of making some nick, however minute, in the pile which humanity is fashioning, at others. Of course I would beg for a temporary respite from the inevitable shears, for different reasons at different times. If a particular and passionate reason for wishing to live for four hours longer were always forthcoming, I should think myself a very remarkable man, and be quite satisfied. But in the intervals of absence of such a reason, I could wish that my general grounds are more defined than they are. . . .
I am tending strongly to an empiristic view of life. I don’t know how far it will carry me, or what rocks insoluble by it will block my future path. Already I see an ontological cloud of absolute idealism waiting for me far off on the horizon, but I have no passion for the fray. I shall continue to apply empirical principles to my experiences as I go on and see how much they fit. One thing makes me uneasy. If the end of all is to be that we must take our sensations as simply given or as preserved by natural selection for us, and interpret this rich and delicate overgrowth of ideas, moral, artistic, religious and social, as a mere mask, a tissue spun in happy hours by creative individuals and adopted by other men in the interests of their sensations, — how long is it going to be well for us not to ‘let on’ all we know to the public? How long are we to indulge the ‘ people’ in their theological and other vagaries so long as such vagaries seem to us more beneficial on the whole than otherwise? How long are we to wear that uncomfortable ‘air of suppression’ which has been complained of in Mr. Mill? Can any men be trusted to dole out from moment to moment just that measure of a doctrine which is consistent with utility? I know that the brightest jewel in the crown of Utilitarianism is that every notion hatched by the human mind receives justice and tolerance at its hands. But I know that no mind can trace the far ramifications of an idea in the mind of the public; and that any idea is at a disadvantage which cannot enlist in its favor the thirst for conquest, the love of absoluteness, that have helped to found religions; and which cannot open a definite channel for human sympathies and affections to flow in. It seems exceedingly improbable that any new religious genius should arise in these days to open a fresh highway for the masses who have outgrown the old beliefs. Now ought not we (supposing we become indurated sensationalists) to begin to smite the old, hip and thigh, and get, if possible, a little enthusiasm associated with our doctrines? If God is dead or at least irrelevant, ditto everything pertaining to the ‘Beyond.’ If happiness is our Good, ought we not to try to foment a passionate and bold will to attain that happiness among the multitudes? Can we not conduct off upon our purposes from the old moralities and theologies a beam which will invest us with some of the proud absoluteness which made them so venerable, by preaching the doctrine that Man is his own Providence, and every individual a real God to his race, greater or less in proportion to his gifts and the way he uses them? The sentiment of philanthropy is now so firmly established and apparently its permanence so guaranteed by its beneficent nature, that it would be bold to say it could not take its place as an ultimate motive for human action. I feel no confidence (even apart from my doubts as to the theoretical finality of ‘sensationalism ’) that society is as yet ripe for it as a popular philosophy and religion combined, but as I said above, no one can measure the effects of an idea, or distribute exactly the shares which different ideas have in our present social order. And certainly there is something disheartening in the position of an esoteric philosopher. The conscientious prudence which would wish to educate mankind gradually instead of throwing out the line, and letting it educate itself, may be both presumptuous and timid. Do you take? I only throw out these as doubts, and would like to know whether you have been troubled by any similar ones on the matter of policy. The breath of my nostrils is doubt, and that is what makes me so the slave of chance. . . .
I have been reading lately in Teplitz in Schiller and Goethe. The possession of those two men’s lives and works by a people gives them a great advantage over neighboring nations. Goethe at last has shot into distinct individual shape for me, which is a great relief, and an enormous figure he is. ... I am sensible to your expression of sympathy with my stove-in condition of back. I shall endeavor (by jerks) to keep the upper lip rigid even if the vertebral column yields. An account of a man in a western settlement which I heard from a traveler on the ship coming over has afforded me much satisfaction ever since, and served as a good example. The traveler stopped at a grocery store to get some whiskey, and alarmed at the woebegone appearance of the storekeeper, asked him what was the matter. ‘Do you see that man sitting in the back shop? ’ said the other. ‘He’s the sheriff, and has attached all my goods.’ He then went on to tell his other misfortunes, ending with the story of his wife having run away the day before with another man, but presently wiped his eyes, and with a smile of sweet recollection said: ‘I don’t know, though, as I have any right to complain — I ’ve done pretty well on the whole since I came to this settlement.’ Comment is needless.
There, my dear boy, I hope you have not begun to thank your stars I don’t write oftener, since I write at such length. I wanted to give you a report of my mental condition, I have done so more or less, and trust you will respect the affection and confidence which dictated it. I’d rather my father should not see it. Use your own judgment about showing it to Harry. I leave here in a month or so for Heidelberg. Get my address from Harry whenever you write. And for God’s sake do so again before too long. I got a letter in Teplitz from Miss Fanny Dixwell which was a great godsend. Please remember me to all your family, and believe me thy friend
WM. JAMES

As is intimated in this letter, James’s affection for Holmes was not untroubled. He felt a certain constraint in his presence, which was perhaps due at bottom to a difference of emotional ‘wave length.’ James would let himself go, and then recoil when he felt that the circuit was not completed. He was more impulsive, headlong, self-forgetful — Holmes more firmly resolute and self-contained, as well as more ironical. James was sometimes led by this experience to attribute a certain hardness and self-seeking to Holmes. The latter is said to have remarked of another of his friends, ‘I’m afraid Brandeis has the crusading spirit. He talks like one of those upward-and-onward fellows.’ So did James, and he never wholly relished the air of flippancy or dry cynicism with which Holmes masked his own service of mankind. After James’s return from Europe, Holmes continued to be a familiar intimate of the James household. ‘ W. Holmes rings the bell as usual at eight and one-half o’clock on Saturday evenings, and we are all falling into our old ways,’ wrote the elder Mrs. James to her son Henry. But James was constantly baffled by him — found him ‘composed of at least two and a half distinct human beings.’

That there was something about Holmes’s very adherence to his chosen task which was appalling to the other members of the James family, as well as to William, will be seen in this paragraph from a letter written to Henry James by his mother in 1873: ’Wendell Holmes dined with us a few days ago. His whole life, soul and body, is utterly absorbed in his last work upon his Kent. He carries about his manuscript in his green bag and never loses sight of it for a moment. He started to go to Will’s room to wash his hands, but came back for his bag, and when we went to dinner, Will said, “Don’t you want to take your bag with you?” He said, “Yes, I always do so at home.” His pallid face, and this fearful grip upon his work, makes him a melancholy sight.’

As time went on there was a weakening of the philosophical bond that united the two men. Already, as early as 1868, James had felt that their divergent specialization had seriously diminished their community of interest. He had remarked to Ward that ‘the mystery of the Total is a rather empty platform to be the only one to meet a man on.’ And even within the field of this common interest there was a profound difference which was bound to widen with the years. James and Holmes had been drawn together chiefly through their common negations and defiances, and through their participation in the common problems of youthful emancipation. When James recovered from his weakness he recovered from his doubts; sensationalism and utilitarianism, as is clearly to be seen in all of his momentary avowals of them, were never more than a counsel of desperation. As he grew more constructive and speculative, as his beliefs multiplied, he traveled farther and farther from that crossroads where he and Holmes had met. The latter never lost his philosophical interest, and when James became a writer of books Holmes read them and sent his comment. But he could rarely agree on any point of doctrine. The two men were divided, morally and metaphysically. Their deepest and most durable bond was that ‘ physical relish ’ for one another’s ‘wit and wisdom’ to which James had alluded in his youthful confession.