You have transferred the question of optimism to a wider field, where I can't well follow it now. The term would have to be defined first, and then I think it would take me ten or twelve years of hard study to form any opinion as to the truth of your second premise.--I send the above remarks on "materialism," because they were what I was groping for the other evening, but could not say till you were gone and I in bed. To conclude:
[Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.]
IN the spring of 1867 James interrupted his course at the Medical School again. He was impelled to do this, partly by the pressure of a conviction that his health required him to stop work or continue elsewhere under different conditions, and partly by a desire to learn German and study physiology in the German laboratories. He knew a little German already, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that if he went abroad immediately he would have time to familiarize himself with the language during a pleasant and restful summer and would be ready to enter one of the universities in the autumn. He sailed in April and spent the summer in Dresden and Bohemia. But his health became worse instead of better.
It is unnecessary to detail the record of a long illness by selecting for this book the passages of his correspondence in which James sooner or later revealed what his condition was. It would also be idle to inquire closely about the causes of his illness, considering that, for one reason, James was completely puzzled and baffled himself. Insomnia, digestive disorders, eye-troubles, weakness of the back, and sometimes deep depression of spirits followed each other or afflicted him simultaneously. If his trouble was in part nervous, it was a reality none the less. A photograph that was taken of him at about this period recorded the aspect of a very ill man. If his introspective genius made things worse for him for a while, it probably did more to pull him through in the end than the--to our present-day understanding--harsh and unnecessary treatments, regimens, water-cures, courses of exercise, galvanisms, and blistering to which he subjected himself.
On the other hand, the illness which began in 1867, and which limited James's activities and occupations for several years, had another effect. It overtook him when he was only twenty-five years old, and threw him heavily upon his inner moral and intellectual resources. It caught him alone and among strangers, more or less prostrated him, and defeated his plans just at a time of life when he was beginning, with the eagerness of youth and philosophic genius combined, to reckon over each fresh experience into the terms of a possible answer to the riddles of life and death, predestination, freedom, and responsibility. It gave a personal intimacy and intensity to the deepest problems that philosophy and religion can present to man's understanding. This illness may perhaps have prevented James from becoming a physiological investigator. But clearly it developed and deepened the bed in which the stream of his philosophic life was to flow.