The Letters of William James, Vol. 1 · William James
W. J.
I can't myself agree in some of your theories. _A priori_, your muscular sense-theory of psychic measurements seems to me incredible in many ways. Your general mechanical _Welt-anschauung_ is too abstract and simple for my mind. But I find in you just what is lacking in this critique of Müller's--a sense for the perspective and proportion of things (so that, for instance, you _don't_ make experiments and quote figures to the 100th decimal, where a coarse qualitative result is all that the question needs). Whose _theories_ in Psychology have any _definitive_ value today? No one's! Their only use is to sharpen farther reflexion and observation. The man who throws out most new ideas and immediately seeks to subject them to experimental control is the most useful psychologist, in the present state of the science. No one has done this as yet as well as you. If you are only _flexible_ towards your theories, and as ingenious in testing them hereafter as you have been hitherto, I will back you to beat the whole army of your critics before you are forty years old. Too much ambition and too much rashness are marks of a certain type of genius in its youth. The _destiny_ of that genius depends on its power or inability to assimilate and get good out of such criticisms as Müller's. Get the good! forget the bad!--and Müller will live to feel ashamed of his tone.
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