The Letters of William James, Vol. 1 · William James
WM. JAMES.
_To G. H. Howison._ CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1885_. MY DEAR HOWISON,--I've just reread (for the fourth time, I believe) your letter of the 30th November. I need not say how tickled I am at your too generous words about my Divinity school address on Determinism.[76] Sweet are the praises of an enemy. There is, thank Heaven! a plane below all formulas and below enmities due to formulas, where men occasionally meet each other moving, and recognize each other as brothers inhabiting the _same depths_. Such is this depth of the _problem_ of determinism--howe'er we solve it, we are brothers if we know it to be a _problem_. No man on either side awakens any sense of intellectual respect in me who regards the solution as a cock-sure and immediately given thing, and wonders that any one should hesitate to choose his party. You find fault with my deterministic disjunction, "pessimism or subjectivism," and ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral activity," etc. (You probably remember.) I didn't forget it. It entered for me into pessimism, for, since such activity has failed to be universally realized, it was (deterministically) _impossible from eternity_, and the Universe in so far forth not an object of pure worship, not an Absolute. My trouble, you see, lies with monism.
Determinism = monism; and a monism like this world can't be an object of pure optimistic contemplation. By pessimism I simply mean _ultimate_ non-optimism. The Ideal is only a part of this world. Make the world a Pluralism, and you forthwith have an object to worship. Make it a Unit, on the other hand, and worship and abhorrence are equally one-sided and equally legitimate reactions. _Indifferentism_ is the true condition of such a world, and turn the matter how you will, I don't see how any philosophy of the Absolute can ever escape from that capricious alternation of mysticism and satanism in the treatment of its great Idol, which history has always shown. Reverence is an accidental personal mood in such a philosophy, and has naught to do with the essentials of the system. At least, so it seems to me; and in view of that, I prefer to stick in the wooden finitude of an ultimate pluralism, because that at least gives me something definite to worship and fight for. However, I know I haven't exhausted all wisdom, and am too well aware that this position, like everything else, is a _parti pris_ and a _pis aller_,--_faute de mieux_,--to continue the Gallic idiom. Your predecessor Royce thinks he's got the thing at last. It is too soon for me to criticize his book; but I must say it seems to me one of the very freshest, profoundest, solidest, most human bits of philosophical work I've seen in a long time. In fact, it makes one think of Royce as a man from whom nothing is too great to expect.
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