A LETTER FROM WILLIAM JAMES 437 



To begin with, it does n't seem exactly like you, but rather like some quiet 

 and conscientious old passive contemplator of life, not bristling as you are 

 with "points," and vivacity. Its light is dampened and suffused, and all 

 the better perhaps for that. Then it is essentially a confession of faith and 

 a religious attitude, which one does n't get so much from you upon the 

 street, although even there 't is clear that you have that within which pa- 

 eth show. The optimism and healthy-mindedness are yours through and 

 through, so is the wide imagination. But the moderate and non-emphatic 

 way of putting things is not; nor is the absence of any "American humor." 

 So I don't know just when or where or how you wrote it. I can't place it in 

 the Museum or University Hall. Probably it was in Quincy Street, and in a 

 sort of Piperio-Armadan trance 1 Anyhow it is a sincere book, and tremen- 

 dously impressive by the gravity and dignity and peacefulness with which 

 it suggests rather than proclaims conclusions on these eternal themes. No 

 more than you can 7 believe that death is due to selection : yet I wish you 

 had framed some hypothesis as to the physico-chemical necessity thereof, 

 or discussed such hypotheses as have been made. I think you deduce a little 

 too easily from the facts the existence of a general guiding tendency towards 

 ends like those which our mind sets. We never know what ends may have 

 been kept from realization, for the dead tell no tales. The surviving witness 

 would in any case, and whatever he were, draw the conclusion that the uni- 

 verse was planned to make him and the like of him succeed, for it actually 

 did so. But your argument that it is millions to one that it did n't do so by 

 chance does n't apply. It would apply if the witness had preexisted in an 

 independent form and framed his scheme, and then the world had realized 

 it. Such a coincidence would prove the world to have a kindred mind to his. 

 But there has been no such coincidence. The world has come but once, the 

 witness is there after the fact and simply approves, dependently. As I under- 

 stand improbability, it only exists where independents coincide. Where 

 only one fact is in question, there is no relation of "probability" at all. 

 I think, therefore, that the excellences we have reached and now approve 

 may be due to no general design, but merely to a succession of the short de- 

 signs we actually know of, taking advantage of opportunity, and adding 

 themselves together from point to point. We are all you say we are, as 

 heirs; we are a mystery of condensation, and yet of extrication and individu- 

 ation, and we must worship the soil we have so wonderfully sprung from. 

 Yet I don't think we are necessitated to worship it as the Theists do, in the 

 shape of one all-inclusive and all-operative designing power, but rather like 

 polytheists in the shape of a collection of beings who have each contributed 

 and are now contributing to the realization of ideals more or less like those 

 for which we live ourselves. This more pluralistic style of feeling seems to 



