Collected Essays and Reviews

The recent reading and re-reading of all of James’ known writings have impressed two things very deeply on my mind. First, there was one and only one James from the beginning to the end. With all of his versatility and openmindedness he remained unconsciously loyal to certain fundamental convictions. It is even permissible to say that there is one germinal idea from which his whole thought grew, provided we do not overlook the even more important fact that his thought did grow. This germinal idea is the idea of the essentially active and interested character of the human mind. Second, I have been impressed as never before by James’ extraordinary intellectual chivalry and hospitality, the reflection of his peculiar social genius. He was a man quick to reach to the heart of another man, quick to praise, quick to esteem the gifts of others, even when, as sometimes happened, no one else esteemed them at all. This gratitude which James felt so genuinely-and manifested with so much kindliness was not infrequently the foundation in others of their sustaining self-respect. Beginning with the older generation of his father and teachers, and ending with the younger generation of his children and students, his life was a continuous succession of marvellous human discoveries. As it was with his personal intercourse, so it was in his relations with those whom he knew more remotely or only through their writings. Most of these discoveries he has published to the world, in his prefaces and citations, or in those remarkable memorial addresses which have been reprinted in the Memories and Studies and which few men have known so well how to write.