It is difficult for a reader of these intensely vivacious and spontaneous outpourings to believe that the same qualities, when they enliven James's books, were the fruit of long incubation and laboured composition, as he himself always maintained. Perhaps what he meant was that the repression of his personality, and the toningdown of his exuberance, was the painful process that cost time and effort. But there is no noticeable difference between his books and his letters; and, if the style is the man, he is equally himself in both. Both abound in the same vividness, lucidity, fertility of illustration, and a pure Irish sense of fun, which had no doubt descended to him from an ancestry that came almost entirely from Ulster.

As in his letters, so he was in speech; always original, racy, vitalising, virile, utterly devoid of any sort of hauteur, humbug, and pretence, and genuinely interested in any human soul that crossed his path. Well do I remember how I took him round one afternoon to an eminent psychologist whom he desired to meet and with whom he was anxious to exchange views; but, when an undergraduate happened to come in who was suffering from an obsession, theoretic psychology was promptly put aside and James talked to him about his troubles for the rest of his visit ! It was no wonder that, within five minutes of meeting him, men found themselves talking to James as if they had known him all their life. He had also, it must be confessed, a peculiar fascination for 'cranks,' who are much more sensitive than professors to the human appeal. James listened to them with unending patience, sympathised, counselled, and sent them away comforted; but he utilised them as well, and had a deadly way of mobilising a quotation from some pet crank to ridicule and confound any theory he was upsetting. In short, his greatness was securely rooted in his personality.

William James was a great man; the greatest, probably, who has yet taken birth' in the Great Republic. He was also a great philosopher, one of the half-dozen who have made an epoch and given a new direction to the deepest, and dimmest, nisus of the human soul. But he was a great philosopher, because he was a great

man; a great man essentially, a philosopher consequentially. Nor did he achieve philosophic greatness by retiring from the world and suppressing his feelings; his personality, and his belief in personality, are the clue to all his philosophic achievements. It was because he believed in personality, and possessed so sympathetic and attractive a personality himself, that he developed his open-mindedness, his freshness of thought, and his directness of approach to the problems of life. It was the source also of his democratic appreciation of every sort of human endeavour; for the essence, both of democracy as a political ideal, and of Christianity as a specific religion, is just the value of personality. His belief in it could extract from an unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance' the profound dictum that there is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is is very important,' and entitled him to quote and adopt it; for he was ever exploring its possibilities, and thoroughly lived up to it himself. It was, moreover, because he believed in, studied, and loved personality that he became the incomparable psychologist he was. It was because he was a great psychologist that he became a great philosopher who inexorably brought shrivelled shibboleths and arid formulas to the test of immediate psychical experience, and broke down the artificial barriers erected between psychology and philosophy by the Brahmins of the academic caste.

*

His personality constituted both the glory and the tragedy of James's life. On the one hand multitudes were drawn towards him, to bask in its rays; but they absorbed much time and energy that might otherwise have augmented his literary fecundity, and have gone to make his views more ponderously systematic in their form and so more impressive to his philosophic confrères. These were filled with envy of James's popularity, and not by nature at all disposed to gloat over him, but rather to be shocked. For in the academic world a personality like James is inevitably something of an anomaly; having the effect, if not precisely of a bull in a china-shop, yet of a vacuum-cleaner in a 'museum of

* Will to Believe,' p. 256; cf. Essays and Reviews,' p. 149.

curios-as he once profanely called the philosophy of Kant. It is a thousand pities that none of the millionaires who endow universities in America with such lavish generosity knew enough about the academic life and its defects to realise that he could do infinitely more for human learning by liberating James from the strain of academic teaching, to which the duty of supporting his family kept him enslaved, than by founding university seminaries' for breeding pedants to all time, and for encouraging 'bald-headed and bald-hearted young aspirants for the Ph.D. to bore one another with the pedantry and technicality, formless, uncircumcised, unabashed, and unrebuked, of their "papers" and "reports."'*

Of course such men did not relish James. He did not seem to take himself and his subject seriously enough. His method of introducing neophytes to the philosophic atmosphere was not to plunge them into the sacerdotal gloom of a Gothic cathedral in a London fog, but to invite them to come out and explore the ascent of an unknown peak. No wonder solemn 'sophomores were driven to exclaim, 'Do be serious for a moment, Professor!' Their elders, more cunningly, complained that he was not systematic.' They told him this so often that not only they, but James himself also, came to believe it. And in a sense it was true. The wouldbe systematist must be made of sterner stuff. He must have the heart to sacrifice everything to his system, wife, child, and self. He must become a quaint crank, like Herbert Spencer, and go and live in a boarding-house, or be a book-verminous recluse, like Kant. 'The philo

sopher is a lone beast, dwelling in his individual burrow,' as James observes (II, p. 164), or a cross between a beast and a god, as Aristotle would have had to admit, and his collective life is little more than an organisation of misunderstandings' (II, p. 311).

But James's thought was not really incoherent and lacking in unity. It did not always seem consistent to a verbal critic who would not concern himself with James's meaning, was satisfied to argue from 'the' meaning of the words, and failed to notice that James was apt to

* Essays and Reviews,' p. 460.

Vol. 236.-No. 468.

C

start with an opponent's phraseology and to develop it into a vehicle of his own meaning. But then no

thought can seem consistent to a sufficiently minute and verbal criticism, simply because, as knowledge grows it expands, and ultimately bursts, 'the' meaning of the words it uses. James's thought drew its central and abiding unity from his personality. And, being personal, his distinctive attitude towards philosophic problems was assumed at a very early period of his life. His 'pragmatism' exists entire (all but the name) in his Principles of Psychology' (1890). Indeed, it exists already, in essentials, in an article he published in the 'Journal of Speculative Philosophy' twelve years before, which emphasises the teleological function of intelligence with all the momentous consequences James extracted from it.* Like all great thinkers, therefore, James arrived at his personal reaction upon the universe in youth, long before he had reasoned or written it out.

But his professional colleagues, not being expert in individual psychology, did not see this. They could not believe that a real philosopher could be so unprofessional, so human, so full of fun, so free from solemnity and humbug. They took his idiosyncrasy as proof positive that James could not really be a philosopher, although his new ideas were manifestly reviving interest in philosophy all the world over. So far as they understood him—which was not a long way-they disapproved of him. They writhed under his style, with its deliberate anti-technicality' (II, p. 297), which they rightly regarded as a sacrilegious attempt to break through the academic ring, and to appeal to the people. He quite recognised that it made him 'an object of loathing to many respectable academic minds' (II, p. 301). But for the most part they honestly did not understand him. How could they understand a philosophy that went abroad among the people clothed in racy English, and did not wrap itself up in sesquipedalian jargon? It was unfair and indecent to write like James. One always had to translate what he said into the familiar clichés of philosophic debate, and generally found that it would not fit them!

So the truly academic man struggled desperately to grasp what was as clear as daylight to the man in the street, and usually failed laughably. Few, however, had the candour and naiveté to admit it, like the late Prof. J. H. Hyslop. Not long before his death I had, in reviewing him, to point out that he had quite misunderstood James's very important theory of the 'transmissive' function of brain in relation to mind, which entirely demolishes the cogency of materialism. He defended himself by declaring that

'the difficulty always with Prof. James was to determine technically what he meant by his language on a crucial point. As a popular writer he was clear enough, but the moment he touched on technical problems you never could be sure that his language had the accepted meaning of history. It is quite probable that if I could have found what the meaning of his terms was my animadversions would have been very different. But I must insist that the terms mean either what I said, or they mean nothing.'

Prof. Hyslop did not see that in arguing from what he alleged to be the meaning of the words against James's, he was only pitting one man's meaning against another man's-in this case wrongly, because he could perceive no difference between 'transmissive' and 'transitive.'

The discrepancy between James and the conventional philosophers was not, however, merely due to a clash of personalities or to the fear of cheapening philosophy by making it easy to follow. There were also good philosophic reasons for it. James had carried respect for personality to the pitch of professing willingness to consider whether it was not as good a clue to reality as the method of abstractions; in other words, he was willing to assign to it metaphysical value. Now this was not only a revolutionary suggestion, but also one bound to gall traditional philosophy in a very sore point.

Ever since Plato, the treatment of personality had been involved in inextricable. difficulties, because the accepted theory of knowledge had found no room for

*Journal' of the S.P.R., No. 364, p. 198..