CHAPTER VIII.

The last letter ends with the announcement that Chauncey had taken his passage for Europe. He was little of a traveller, and this was the only time he ever went abroad: at home, he had never gone further west or south than a single rapid journey to Washington had carried him. An occasional visit to New York or Philadelphia, and his vacation rambles in New England, made up the sum of his journeying.

Of his visit to Europe there is no record of his own, except a letter giving an account of a night at Mr. Darwin’s in England, and the mention of one or two details in a letter to Mr. Darwin himself; but Mr. Norton, who met him while abroad, has given me a few facts.

“In the autumn of 1872,” he says, “Wright joined us in Paris. He had come abroad a month or two before, had made a rapid but pleasant tour through parts of Ireland and Scotland, and had spent a short time in London. Paris amused and entertained him, but to him it mattered little where he was, — Paris was as good as Cambridge. He carried on his own life of thought, his real life, in the same way in one place as in another. He sought no new acquaintances, partly because he found many old ones in Paris, — ourselves, Mr. and Mrs. Lowell, Mr. Rowse (with whom he was staying at the Grand Hotel), Mr. Henry James, Jr., and others. Before long he followed us to London, and here he was more interested in the great city. One beautiful October day he and I went together to Blackheath to see Mr. Mill, with whom he had had some correspondence; but Mr. Mill was at Avignon. I do not think he tried to see any one else. He met some interesting

Englishmen, especially Mr. John Simon, between whom and himself a strong mutual regard was established. But, before long, he got tired of Europe, and returned home.

“We came home the next spring, and from that time for the next two years and a half he was more than ever an intimate of our house, — always the same thorough, consistent, considerate friend.”

To Mr. Darwin.

Tavistock Hotel, Covent Garden,

London, Aug. 29, 1872.

I hope to have the pleasure of calling on you within a few days, and before leaving London for the continent. I have, after a long but rapid journey with a party of American friends through Ireland and the North, been resting here for several weeks, or rather trying the anti-tourist plan of making acquaintance with London and its neighborhood; that is, taking time, instead of doing it by rapid journeys. This seemed like idling at first, but now I am satisfied with the plan; since it takes time to see any thing well, and especially so great a thing as London.

I was much struck by the suggestive views you give in your last letter On June 3, Mr. Darwin had written, thanking Wright for a copy of his article on “Evolution by Natural Selection,” which “he had read with great interest.” “Nothing,” he says, “can be clearer than the way in which you discuss the permanence or fixity of species. ... As your mind is so clear and as you consider so carefully the meaning of words, I wish you would take some incidental occasion to consider when a thing may properly be said to be effected by the will of man. I have been led to the wish by reading an article by your Professor Whitney versus Schleicher. He argues that, because each step of a change in language is made by the will of man, the whole language so changes; but I do not think that this is so: a man has no intention or wish to change the language. It is a parallel case with what I have called ‘unconscious selection,’ which depends on men consciously preserving the best individuals, and thus unconsciously altering the breed.” ⁶⁹ of the limits or definition of the effects that can

properly be ascribed to “man’s agency” (or to the agency of free or intelligent wills, as the metaphysical moralists would name it); namely, that intended consequences only are properly attributable to this cause. This seems to me to simplify matters very much, and to be the common-sense view of the subject; and to be decisive with reference to the question of the origin of a language in any way essentially different from the origin of other customs or powers or structures in men or in other living beings.

A practical way of testing the matter would be to ask who are responsible or feel themselves to be responsible for the existence of any language; or who are to be personally credited with the invention, or for any changes or improvements, of a language, — excepting, of course, the inventions and improvements of scientific nomenclatures and those schemes of philosophical language which have been proposed; but even in these, credit is due for the proposition rather than the adoption or the actual existence and use among men of a form of speech. The test of responsibility is all the more pertinent, since it is agreed on all hands that responsibility or the feeling of it, is the evidence, or at least the mark, of so-called free, personal agency.

There is, however, one apparently serious objection to this test as a substitute for your view. We are held by moralists (not the metaphysical ones only) to be responsible for more than we intend. Therefore, personal agency extends beyond the intended consequences. We are responsible for consequences with which the non-existence of intentions can be charged, as well as for those which are intended. This happens when the existence of intentions which ought to have been ours would have altered the result. This objection, together with the mystical doctrine of theologians regarding the nature of the moral sense, gives rise, I am convinced, to that view of free or intelligent human agency which represents

it as a line of cause and effect arising in an absolute beginning, thus introducing a condition or an element of causation peculiar and non-natural into whatever effects may be depended on it; and thus making these effects distinct from those that are strictly natural or due to unbroken lines of physical causation. I believe that this view is purely fanciful, or at least poetical; but that it is implicitly contained in, or lies at the bottom of, such objections as Professor Whitney’s to inquiries and positions which are really dealing only with strictly scientific or physical problems, and are not concerned with the truth or falsity of the mystic view of causation, either in human or non-human agency.

But, to make this perfectly clear, it is necessary to consider what is strictly true in the statements that our responsibility extends beyond our intentions, that unintended consequences are therefore ours, and hence that our free agency concerns the beginnings rather than the ends of our actions. These statements, which are taken by the metaphysical moralist as absolute premises, simpliciter, are properly in need of qualification or explanation, secundum quid. They are concerned with the philosophy of moral or personal discipline, the question for what men as moral agents are rationally condemned or approved, punished or rewarded. Obviously, it is for many consequences of their actions which they may not have contemplated or intended, provided discipline tends effectively to bring such consequences, whenever important, under the purview of foreseeing and intelligent agency; that is, whenever intention ought to have been present and efficacious, or can he made so by the requisite discipline. But here the responsibility is a different thing from that sense of accountability that is appealed to as evidence of an absolute personal freedom, since responsibility is not really felt with reference to unforeseen consequences, or is not felt directly and specifically, but only through the obligation

we feel to be better informed, more careful, or to submit ourselves to the guidance and hence to the correction of the better instructed, and to the ultimate authority on what is right or wrong.

Hence the sphere of human freedom and responsibility, though extending beyond what is actually foreseen as the consequences of our actions, is still within the limit of what might and ought to be known as the consequences of our actions; that is, either specifically foreseen, or implicitly contained in a moral principle, instinct, precept, or commandment. In other words, this sphere is limited to the objects and means of moral discipline. Its extension beyond the range of actually foreseen consequences has, therefore, nothing to do with strictly scientific or theoretical inquiries concerning that in which neither the foreseeing nor the obedient mind is an agent or factor, but of which the intellect is rather the recorder or mere accountant.

If the question concerning the origin of languages were how men might or should be made better inventors, or apter followers of the best inventions, instead of being how these inventions have actually arisen and been adopted, there might be some pertinency in insisting on the peculiar character of the choice to which changes in language are due. Moreover, an invention becomes or amounts to a change of language only when adopted by several speakers, or when it is more or less generally agreed to. It is this adoption with which selection is concerned. The inventions, which are, or may be, acts of individual or personal agents only, correspond to the variations in structures and habits from which selection is made in nature generally; and they survive and become customs of speech because they are liked by many speakers. They are thus, as you say, analogous to the variations in domestic animals and plants that are unintentionally converted by savages or semi-civilized peoples into permanent

race-differences. Their adoption by the many speakers who fancy them, or choose them for any definite reasons, such as the authority of an influential speaker or writer, ease in pronouncing them, distinctness from other words already appropriated to other meanings, their analogies in sound and sense with other words, and similar reasons, — this adoption seems to me to correspond very closely to what you call “unconscious selection.”

It appears to me probable that Professor Whitney had in mind, in denying that this is a case of “natural selection,” the narrower meaning of the word “natural,” as distinguished not only from systematic, intended, or artificial selection, but also from personal agency altogether; or was speaking from that view of natural phenomena, which, “binding nature fast in fate, leaves free the human will.” This was the idea of his objection, which I expressed rather obscurely in a foot-note in my review of Mr. Wallace’s book nearly two years ago. I imagine that he was also actuated in giving emphasis to the contrast of “nature” and “man” by his opposition to theories of an original natural language, and especially to Professor Max Müller’s theory of roots, “the ding-dong theory,” or the idea that invention in speech is governed by certain linguistic instincts, different for different races or groups of races, which affix general meanings a priori to certain sounds; and that his object was to insist on the arbitrary character of all the elements of speech, the roots of etymology as well as their developments. But perhaps I do him injustice by this supposition. Certainly, if he had more carefully considered the theory of natural selection, he would have seen that the theory, as it stands, more nearly accords with the linguistic views which he favors than with those of Professor Müller.

But the theory as it stands is not, it seems to me, inconsistent even with Müller’s views, since it ascribes nothing and

denies nothing to variations as a direct cause of changes in species or structures or habits or customs. It only attributes to them opportunities or the conditions for choice, and does not deny to them other forms of agency. Whether linguistic instincts, responsive to certain root vocables, govern the inventions, or rather the adoption of inventions, in any definite or general way, and independently of accidental associations,— or do not, it is certain that these inventions have such a range as to afford the conditions for a kind of choice that accounts for the diversities and continuous changes in languages derived from a common origin; and for this kind of choice it is obvious that men are neither individually nor jointly responsible in any proper meaning of the term. Whether in such choice they are bound fast in faith, or not, is a metaphysical question. But unless we distinguish man’s proper agency from other causes in the way which you propose, we must fall into the greatest confusion with respect to other matters besides the origin of languages. Thus, man is a geological agent. He affects and alters unintentionally the physical forces and conditions of the globe. He changes climate even, and its consequences, by actions designed for other effects. Could there be any sense or true philosophy in attempting to establish in physical geology a clear line of distinction between such agency, and that of other forms of living creatures, like the coral animals, — or even that of lifeless physical causes, — in distinguishing between quarrying, for example, and the agency of frosts and storms, or between the transfer of materials in ships and carts, under the direction of seamen and carters, and the transporting agency of other animals and of winds and water currents? These distinctions would be of the smallest importance in geology, though they might be essential from a moral or legislative point of view.

But I have written what reads more like an essay than the letter I intended, though I suppose I ought to be held responsible

for its unintended length. It will appear shorter, however, if we regard it as a brief of the case you have given me to work up, — and a more reasonable letter in view of the advantage writing has over talk, in continuous or consecutive discussion.

On August 31, Mr. Darwin writes his thanks for this “long and interesting letter,” and adds: “I write now to say how very glad I shall be to see you here. ... I trust that you will come and dine and sleep here. We shall thus see each other much more pleasantly than by a mere call, as you propose.”

To Miss Sara Sedgwick, at Cambridge.

London, Sept. 5, 1872.

I am not unmindful, as you will see, of my promise, —made a long time ago, as it now seems, and in the expectation of a very long letter in return, — to write you after seeing Mr. Darwin. It was some time after getting to these islands before I came to London. I turned tourist soon after landing in Ireland, and travelled with a party of Boston friends (who had a carefully matured scheme of travel), with whom I fell in on the very pleasant voyage we had in the “Olympus.” We went through Ireland, leaving my first companion, Professor Langdell, to rusticate there, and across to Chester and Liverpool, and thence by the English lakes and the west coast of Scotland and the Scottish lakes, and through many interesting towns and cities, and by lots of monuments, ruins, and other antiquities, — all in the rapid way of the tourist, which for once I wished to try; and, as I am not doomed to do all Europe in that way, I am very well satisfied with this trial. The panorama is only vaguely impressed on my memory; but future recollections will doubtless serve to develop it

into a more vivid picture than I now have or could sketch for you.

When I got to London, and parted with my tourists, a reaction, — or, I should say rather, an inaction, — came on, which, together with the inexhaustible interests of this town and its neighborhood, has kept me here a long time. But there has been so much of Boston here, so many of the best of our neighbors, that I have been very little alone, or at least have had but little feeling of loneliness, in my hearty enjoyment of the many interests which London has had for me. Many an odd or unexpected meeting with American friends has made the imagination familiar or not improbable, that I have only to walk a little way, or to call at some principal hotel, to be surer of meeting some Bostonian I know than I should in Boston itself. Thus, I met Mr. John Holmes one day on the Strand, and afterwards saw a little of him before he went to the continent. This was like meeting Cambridge itself. The last week, I spent several hours every day with Mr. Rowse, whom I luckily met in like manner when neighbors were beginning to be rare. We had many agreeable hours together. Such adventures and interests, together with my laziness, have kept me from seeking out friends belonging here; and so it was only yesterday that I made the little visit to the Darwins, from which I have just returned. A resolution to go to Paris near the end of this week, made with the help of Mr. Rowse, who went last Sunday, prevented my putting off the visit a little longer, so as to meet Mr. George Darwin, who is gone this week on a journey; and who was also absent in travels on the continent when I called at his rooms in London about a month ago. But the pleasure of meeting him again, though it would have added much to the satisfaction of my visit, seems little compared to the all but perfect good time I have had in the last few hours.

If you can imagine me enthusiastic, — absolutely and unqualifiedly so, without a but or criticism, — then think of my last evening’s and this morning’s talks with Mr. Darwin as realizing that beatific condition. Mr. Horace Darwin (whom I like very much, and mean to visit at his college in Cambridge before I sail for home) was at home; and I had several hours of pleasant discussion on various subjects with him, while his father was taking the rests he always needs after talking awhile. Who would not need rest after exercising such powers of wise, suggestive, and apt observation and criticism, with judgments so painstaking and conscientiously accurate, — unless, indeed, he should be sustained by an Olympian diet? I was never so waked up in my life, and did not sleep many hours under the hospitable roof. This morning, as the day was very bright, I walked through charming fields and groves to the railway station, most of the way with my younger host.

It would be quite impossible to give by way of report any idea of these talks before and at and after dinner, at breakfast, and at leave-taking; and yet I dislike the egotism of “testifying,” like other religious enthusiasts, without any verification, or hint of similar experience; though what I have said must be to you a confirmation of what you already know. One point I may mention, however, of our final talk. I am some time to write an essay on matters covering the ground of certain common interests and studies, and in review of his “Descent of Man,” and other related books, for which the learned title is adopted of Psychozoölogy,—as a substitute for “Animal Psychology,” “Instinct,” and the like titles, — in order to give the requisite subordination (from our point of view) of consciousness in men and animals, to their development and general relations to nature. So, if you ever see that learned word in print, you will know better than other readers when and where it was born! But you will not, I

imagine, care so much about the matter of the conversation, which might be repeated, as about its incommunicable manner and spirit, which you will readily supply from your own imagination.

I also found Mrs. Darwin and her daughter very agreeable; and I repent now, as I have regretted all along, that indolence has kept me so many weeks from making acquaintance with so charming a household. ... I had some idea of seeking out Professor Huxley, as well as Mr. Galton, Sir John Lubbock, and other fellow-disciples; but, not being in season to find them in London, or at home, I have yielded to the suggestions of indolence, and given up the project, at least for the present. . . .

This is the first letter that I have written home, having agreed with those friends who had any reason to expect such an effort from me that I would not do it, unless something more interesting or urgent than could be found in guidebooks should warrant it. . . .

To Miss Jane Norton.

Cambridge, June 19, 1873.

During the winter and spring, I had been unusually well, and part of the time deeply absorbed in one of my essays. I think, however, that I never had a bluer day than that of my landing last November in New York. The accounts given by friends who saw him after landing in New York, and for some days afterwards, fully confirm the impression which this letter gives of the depression which attended the first hours of his return home. ⁷⁰ I became then and there an undoubting convert to the climate theory of the difference between America and Europe, or at least America and England. As our ship steamed up New York harbor in the bleak, early morning, — depressed by the raw, icy air, I

was homesick for London, and would willingly have plunged back into its worst winter fogs, confident that I should not have found them worse than the exasperating, nerve-tormenting — otherwise-called exhilarating, stimulating — weather of our natal land. I believe my nerves to be natives of a foggy climate. It may have been, in part, the news of the Boston fire, which was the first tidings of home that came to us from the shore; except the climate, of which I was aware when nearly a day’s sailing from land, — a certain look and feeling in the air and sky, which you must have experienced. A season’s absence from their influence seemed to increase my susceptibility to them, though I am now, I believe, reacclimated. Our over-praised days in June, of which lately you must have had perfect specimens in Ashfield, — are they not like too large draughts of fragrant or sparkling wine? When well, one wakes in the morning fresh and invigorated, but soon becomes eager and excited by the overpowering day; and before noon one is ready to succumb to its stimulation, — that is, if one has nerves.

I had it in mind all winter to draw a letter from you about what you were seeing and doing in London; but much writing of another sort — not much, after all, yet enough for the usual effect — kept me from turning to the pen with any impulse of spontaneity such as inspires letters, or should do it. I see in Mr. Stephen’s letter to the “Nation” that Mr. Mill was in London a short time before his death. I think Mr. Stephen’s personal recollections A letter by Mr. Leslie Stephen on “The Late Stuart Mill,” in the “Nation,” for June 5, 1873 (Vol. XVI. p. 382). ⁷¹ of him quite interesting; yet I do not know whether I really regret not seeing him last fall. I somehow never had the kind of interest in the personality of men whom I have admired for their works that many have, or at least never any strong desire to join my personality to theirs. It is not like seeing more nearly

and intimately the man you have come to know, but is more like seeing his second, his intimate friend, his responsible agent, or even his scribe; though, no doubt, in Mr. Mill’s case, I should have been charmed by the social side of the author.

I was a good deal struck with Mr. Stephen’s account of Mill’s habits of rapid writing and reservation of his thought till it was ripe for rapid utterance, and of his habit of walking great distances. Mr. Stephen had said: “It was his habit, I believe, to have every thing closely arranged in his head before putting any thing on paper. The actual writing was, therefore, extremely rapid. . . . Like some other distinguished writers, he was fond of taking long walks, during which his reflections were gradually moulded into a form fit for expression. Within the last year or two, he was still equal to doing thirty or forty miles a day without excessive fatigue.” ⁷² The fact, not mentioned in this letter, that Mill was a skilful botanist, may account, in part, for this habit; but doubtless his walks were the occasion of many a profound meditation. I can imagine him in his rambles, alternately detecting a fallacy in metaphysics and enjoying a new plant. In fact, some of the subtlest points in his writings, which I have passed lightly and listlessly over in reading, have come to me in their full force while walking. Think of any one’s walking in America thirty or forty miles in a day without inconvenience! A walk of ten miles here is almost a feat for me, and five a considerable effort, though in London I made nothing of five. Muscular sensibility seems with us to take the place of muscular activity. The American appears to prefer a constrained attitude — his feet above his head — to a vigorous exertion of his muscles with his feet on the ground; and when he moves he prefers to fly, getting over the ground and the movement as expeditiously as possible. He may, with his instincts and nerves, ultimately develop wings, like a bat, and rest, hanging entirely by his heels, like that nervous animal, — a near relation, by the way, zoologically, to the human species.

It is getting very late, and I must reserve the rest of this letter for to-morrow. I spent the first few hours of this evening in a lively discussion with ----- on the nature and significance of hallucinations. Whether to-morrow I shall give you the result of this talk, or catechise you on less abstruse matters, will depend on the mood of Spontaneity, that omnipotent but now sleepy divinity of the faithful letter-writer. Good-night.

Morning of Class Day, and no rain yet, nor sign of any. The traditions of the day, as well as the predictions of the weather office, are against hope. Meantime, the grass in Cambridge is dying, looking now as it sometimes does in August, in spite of artificial showers which one sees everywhere from hydrants and hose.

I am this morning, more than ever, provoked with myself for having missed “the much you had to tell, of all sorts of things.” Half an hour’s talk, — the contents of how many letters might have been compressed into it! . . .

I can well believe that coming home, after so long and in some respects grievous an absence, must have been a very sad, yet, by turns, a joyous experience. Sorrow, springing from tender regards of home, kindred, or friends, is not an emotion of so unmixed a pain that we shun the thoughts that inspire it, or seek to repress them. Imaginations of a painful and pleasurable kind alternate in this emotion, — offset and heighten each other. We turn from one to the other, from the depression of deprivation or loss, past or present, to the contemplation of worths remaining or restored to us, or still retaining an inward reality for us. Sorrow is a mixture having all the substance or weight of the pleasures and pains that compose it, but has the special qualities of neither. It is a chemical union of them, in which these qualities are neutralized, but in which weights are combined. Feeling has a substance, a depth, a

weight with the will, which is not in its character, either as a pleasure or pain; but it is none the less a volatile salt of life, and is dissipated in time.

I hope the exertions and excitements of getting once again settled in your Ashfield home will not be found to have drawn too largely on the strength of any one of you. One feels such expenditures only some time after they have been incurred. But I imagine you, though resting, still preoccupied in gathering up old threads of association, bridging over, contrasting, or blotting out much of the interests and incidents of the long interval, — seeing, not without regret, that which has been so real fade into a dream.

I have been a good deal interested in England for a little time lately, —the England of the past and the present, — while reading M. Taine’s graphic criticisms and interesting theories of English literature. His style gives the impression, which I have heard expressed, of his writing on a theory and adapting his observations to it. But it strikes me as a well-considered theory, founded on much previous sagacious observation, though the only part of his book which I feel quite competent to judge, his criticisms of Mill and the “Experience Philosophy,”— as well as those on the same subject in his later work on “Intelligence,” — seems to me weak. In these criticisms, he has obviously reached beyond the length of his tether, though he may be still quite sound in his views of English imagination, and its causes and developments.

Did you see any thing of Mr. Darwin last winter? I have heard nothing from or about him, except a statement in the newspapers last month that he was in Paris. This seemed to indicate unusual health and vigor in him. I did not send him my last essay in the “North American;” Evolution of Self-Consciousness: North American Review, April 1873; Philosophical Discussions, p. 199. ⁷³ for I preferred that he should be led, if at all, by his own interest in the subject to read it.

Metaphysics is not his forte; and I feared to bore him, or at least desired not to compel from him either a judgment or a confession. I ought to have waited, and expanded the subject into a book, as ---- suggested to me last fall in London, instead of publishing the sketch, which the article really is. But the editor of the “Review” demanded it, and I weakly gave it to him.

To Miss Grace Norton.

[January, 1874.]

Thanks for your notes on -----’s pamphlet. If you say you find it “easy to understand,” I shall have something to say, when we meet, on the subject of understanding, — on the subtle distinction between understanding an author, or why he said so and so, what facts he had in mind, what divisions or distinctions he makes, or tries to magnify, in his subject, or what his motives were to the effort; and the understanding of his theory and of his statements in detail, with the degree of precision which analytic habits of thought demand. There is ease and ease — two kinds — in understanding. Mathematics is easy in one way, —cannot be misunderstood, except by gross carelessness; is no more vague than a boulder; is either out of, or in, the mind entirely. To make progress among a heap of boulders is, you know, far from easy, in one way; but it is easier than walking on water, or than clearing the rough ground by flight. It is easy to dream of making such a flight, and to have every thing else in our dream as rational as real things; and it is easy to be actually carried on the made ways of familiar phraseology over difficulties which we are interested in only as a picturesque under-view, but which do not tempt us to explore them with the chemist’s reagents, the mineralogist’s tests, or the geologist’s hammer. But I am running on to say what I

have promised to discuss with you in talk about this scientific understanding.

. . . My prime motive in writing, in disobedience to your commands, is my impatience to make known to you before the light of this bright day wanes, why you failed, as I at first did, yesterday, to see the black letters red. Wright had been surprised, one day in the horse-car, by seeing the large black letters of a title, printed on the dark-blue cover of a pamphlet, have the color of gold when the light struck them aslant; and he had endeavored to reproduce the appearance. ⁷⁴ I took a copy of the same blue book, on which I saw in the horse-car (and made others see) the black letters gleam with the color of gold; but, in the light that enters my sanctum, I could only see a faint dark red tint. The humiliating suggestion then occurred to me that perhaps the red curtains of the car-windows, though not golden in tint, might have contributed to the effect. If I had yielded to this suggestion, I should have punished myself unjustly. (Peccavi, let me add, ought to be only a general and comprehensive confession, or a presumption to be particularly applied only after judicial trial.) So I queried: What were all the differences of circumstances yesterday and the day before? I did not have to make a very long catalogue; only this: (1) Yesterday’s light was brighter. This I diminished, but without the expected effect. (2) The book I saw the day before was a fresh one; its cover had not lost the polish of pressed paper, as a handled book soon does; the black letters had perhaps a smoother surface, and reflected white or surface light more perfectly. It was easy to restore this surface to the letters of my copy by rubbing them with a hard, smooth body, — the end of a knife-handle or paper-knife. This I did, — and beheld the letters gleam in the reflected daylight with a brighter hue of gold than I had seen before. Even the gaslight, in the evening, was sufficient to produce this effect, which I then took pains to guard from illusion by submitting it to other eyes.

There are morals to be drawn from science as well as a science from morals. It is tame bathos, perhaps, instead of vague sublimity, to rest from scientific' effort in the following reflection, — but I make it nevertheless: How much better for truth is patient induction and the use of judgment, than obedient deduction,  humility , and submission to judgment? . . . Such patient, busy dealing with truth is sometimes falsely called humility . It is properly a reasonable pride; though if a metaphysician were to come down to it , it might be regarded as an act of humility . It is not humility to walk and climb   when one sees clearly that he cannot fly; it is simply good sense. But of this anon.

To Miss Jane Norton.

March, 1874.

Your note found me to-day in the midst of a metaphysical composition, and instead of distracting me infused a certain vigor of style into what I went on to write, — as I noted afterwards, or thought I did. Concrete inspirations, such as balmy air, or notes of inspiriting music, have this effect, as I have observed, of making abstraction more sure-footed.

No doubt, I shall gain for my composition (if it is not abandoned or completed before that time) an additional advantage of this sort by my coming down on Friday or Saturday — both will be free days to me — to the level of concrete magic and the entertainment of the children and their friends. At any rate, I shall be pleased to do what my art can for their pleasure on either day, and I will come to lunch as you propose. The only preparation which might be needed for some tricks is the “negative condition of darkness” of the spiritualists, or, at least, a light not especially appropriate to a sunny afternoon. But this, if necessary (and children have a savage’s keenness of perception), may be had by closing the

window-blinds in one of your rooms. It is only in the magical shower of bon-bons and the trick of the magnetized cane, and perhaps in certain card tricks, that two such powers of nature as a bright daylight and a bright child’s sight would together be likely to defeat the powers of magic. In other tricks, however, which may be as good as a feast, I am, as you know, as powerful against light and sagacious observation as any Indian juggler.

To Mr. E. L. Godkin.

Cambridge, June 3, 1874.

I do not think that, in the talks of which you write, I mistook or misstated the argument in your article on woman’s submission, in the way you suppose. The reference is to an article in the “Nation,” of May 14, 1874 (No. 463), on “Woman Suffrage in Michigan.” Some conversation with Wright relating to this article had been incorrectly reported to Mr. Godkin; who then wrote to him, in order to get at his views upon the points in question, and received this reply. ⁷⁵ It was clear to me that you did not agree with Mill’s theory (and without important qualifications I do not); and it was clear that the “fallacy” to which you wished to call attention was a fallacy of reasoning from his own assumptions, — namely, the assumptions that submissiveness in one sex and imperiousness in the other had become through ages of subjection heritable dispositions, which, nevertheless, legislation and opinion might alter or gradually eliminate. These assumptions seemed to you (and they seem to me) to involve the farther assumption, that such acquired qualities are sexually limited in their transmission; the one going down to the males alone and the other to the females alone, — or for the most part, — and passing, half the time, latently through the opposite sex, as from the maternal grandfather to a grandson, or from the paternal grandmother to a grand-daughter.

Now you think that such a mode of transmission is limited to natural (non-acquired) qualities alone; that is, to the natural or (relatively speaking) fixed distinctions of sex. You think that the contrary opinion would be, if true, “one of the most extraordinary facts in anthropology,” and would need more evidence to substantiate it than appears in the case. “The non-transmission of paternal imperiousness to daughters would be a most extraordinary fact,” you think, if we suppose this quality to be an acquired one; yet Mill has virtually assumed the fact without explanation. This is what I understood you to mean as the “fallacy” of the argument; and it might readily be admitted to be an omission of an important part in the exposition of the argument, — though not a very serious one in view of existing and published physiological evidence, or even of the not uncommon common-sense of unlearned but observant folks, on the subject of heredity. But I could not see the fallacy of this assumption, especially as it is true that “new characters often appear in one sex [both in men and animals], and are afterwards transmitted to the same sex, either exclusively or in a much greater degree, than to the other.” (Darwin on Animals and Plants under Domestication, ch. xiv. Vol. II. p. 92, Am. ed.)

Under domestication (and no race has been longer or more completely under domestication than the human, especially the civilized branches), the secondary sexual characters are often found to be very variable, and “to differ greatly from the state in which they exist in the parent species.” Now, it makes no difference in the argument whether we suppose the imperiousness of male men and the submissiveness of the female to be derived from a very remote animal race (as is most probable to the evolutionist); or suppose, with Mill, that these qualities were acquired, or at any rate increased, through the social conditions of barbarism. The fact is that the most fixed and the most uniformly transmitted physical

qualities are not more governed by sexual limitation in inheritance than are the variations, whether normal or abnormal, which physiologists have studied.

. . . From the various facts recorded by Dr. Lucas, Mr. W. Sedgwick, and others, Mr. Darwin concludes that “there can be no doubt that peculiarities first appearing in either sex, though not in any way necessarily or invariably connected with that sex, strongly tend to be inherited by the offspring of the same sex, but are often transmitted in a latent state through the opposite sex.” Analogous evidence from domestic animals is also given,—such as the unusual difference in size in the two sexes of the Scotch deer-hound, and the peculiar color of a variety of cats, called the tortoise-shell, being “very rarely seen in a male cat, the males of this variety being of a rusty tint.”

But such evidence would perhaps have little force with those who are interested mainly in its bearing on the woman question. The purely physical character of these examples of inheritance, as limited by sex, would also rule them out of the case with many such judges, —unless, perhaps, the rather numerous and conspicuous cases of the psycho-physical peculiarity of color-blindness were admitted in evidence.

That some mental and moral peculiarities are inherited in men, as some are well known to be in domestic animals, would doubtless be admitted by disputants, who would, nevertheless, deny that there is any evidence of sexual limitation in the transmission of them; and who might, on the contrary, assume, in spite of the resemblance of them to corporeal peculiarities in being heritable, that they are not sexually limited in the line of inheritance, — seeing that “mind and matter differ by the whole diameter of being,” and that the mind has no sex! Mr. Galton has done something towards clearing up the matter, by his researches on hereditary genius. It is certain, however, that the evidence in respect to the heritability

of mental and moral peculiarities is much less clear in general, and especially in reference to sexual limitation, than that of physical peculiarities. But here Stuart Mill’s fundamental assumption comes in for the explanation of this fact. Without denying the reality and importance (assuming them rather) of hereditary elements in the formation of mental and moral character, he ascribes a very large and important influence to education; including, in the meaning of this term, the unintended and unsystematic discipline of circumstances as well as the designed. The mental and moral characters are not born with the body of a man, and are, according to him, almost as much the offspring of teachers and society as of parents in the flesh. This assumption is probably near enough to the truth to explain why so little evidence appears in the human race, like what the mental and moral peculiarities of breeds of race-horses and dogs afford, in reference to the principles of inheritance.

But Mill seems to me to go altogether too far in this matter, and to attribute a disproportionate power to discipline, custom, and legislation; though it would be difficult to say what the true proportion of these influences to inherited ones really is, in the growth of individual minds and characters. I agree with you that the imperiousness of the man and the submissiveness of the woman are natural dispositions, or are fixed characters, so far as legislation can directly and designedly affect them, or so far at least as they can be immediately affected by any other legislation than that of Plato’s Republic, — or where the state is a grand selective human breeding institution, conducted on scientific principles, and with unlimited powers. But I nevertheless agree with Mill that, natural as they are, they are still alterable, and have been altered by civilization. I do not think it improbable that savage conditions of society have increased these dispositions from what

they may have been in a primitive human or more remote animal ancestry, and that civilization has again diminished them.

It has been noticed by more than one student of anthropology that civilization tends to assimilate the mental and moral characteristics of the sexes; and that, in moral characteristics at least, men have been more changed toward a common type than women. This anthropological observation agrees significantly with the more general biological fact, which I have quoted above; namely, that the male is commonly more variable than the female, and most variable in respect to secondary sexual characters. In the human race, the beard is a familiar illustration. It is wanting in most races of men, and is very variable in the bearded ones. Even allowing the full force which Mill seems to claim for disciplines, customs, sanctions, and institutions, when acting persistently, to modify inherited dispositions, — there would be no fallacy, but, on the contrary, very great reasonableness, in supposing these modifications to be sexually limited in their transmission; seeing that they are so limited in their direct effects on the parents. The male Scotch deer-hound has thus acquired, and is at the present time, from the want of his old training, actually losing, his abnormal superiority over the female in size and fleetness.

There is, however, one fundamental physiological fact accordant with your views, and pertinent to what women may do or become in the future, which Mill has almost entirely overlooked, and which late physiological writers on this subject have not sufficiently emphasized; namely, the difference of the human sexes in main or brute strength and courage, and its relations to mental and moral superiority. At first sight, this difference would seem, however firmly fixed or natural, to be only one among many cases of sexually limited inheritance, alterable by civilization, and not essentially related to primary

sexual differences; or to be merely due to the savage’s necessity of capturing, maintaining, and defending his spouse or spouses. There seems, however, to be a physiological relation of mere strength, or of unappropriated energies available for emergencies, which is more direct and essential, and is possibly sufficient to raise this difference to the rank of a primary one, or at least to an essential relation with the primary sexual differences; namely, its relation to child-bearing. Not only is the normal strength less in the female, but its resources are kept in reserve by a special check of constitutional habit during this period of life, except in gestation; for which occasions this general reserve, or restraint of force in all other directions, appears to be especially adapted. Whatever the ambition or energy of purpose in the woman may be, she cannot draw on her resources of main strength at much more than half the rate the idlest men ordinarily do. This conclusion is founded, so far as its estimate of quantity is concerned, on the ultimate physiological measure of expended energy, — the waste of the system, — and especially that determined by its gaseous exhalations in the form of the carbonic acid gas of respiration, the measure of oxygen consumed, which is, in the average, twice as great in the adult man as in the female (except in gestation) during the child-bearing period. This looks very like a natural check put on the ambition of the female, and a compulsion of nature, beneficent on the whole, which assigns her to her natural functions, however vehemently the individual’s ambition may determine otherwise, or rebel against this lot.

Even Mill recognizes one point of inferiority in the mental power of women, which it appears to me is ultimately referable to this physiological necessity; and not, as he seems to suppose, to an alterable inheritance. He says, “The things in which man most excels woman are those which require most plodding and long hammering at single thoughts.” This is

analogous to the muscular strength manifested in the stout bearing of burdens. Darwin regards it as an admission of greater energy and perseverance in the man; qualities which, with his greater courage, will (other qualities being equal) give him the victory in most competitions. But there is an ambiguity in the terms, energy, perseverance, and courage, which makes this conclusion far from clear or completely satisfactory. There is a moral as well as a physical courage, and a strength of purpose not altogether dependent on strength of nerves. The spiritual sources of untiring patience and perseverance are quite as important for the victories of genius as the available physical resources of work. But these, in turn, must set limits to the most urgent ambition or to the efficacy of the greatest spiritual strength. The woman, very likely, since she is most susceptible to moral and social influences, is apt to live more nearly up to the limit of her available strength. Whether this expenditure equals in effective amount, on the average, the average work which the consciences of men (less susceptible to spurs) call out from their uninvested resources, would be a very difficult problem. It is much easier to see that the most efficient patience and perseverance, or the genius, in which the greatest susceptibility to motives to work, and the greatest available resources of energy are combined, is most likely to be found in the man; even supposing the mental machinery to be, on the average, as perfect in one sex as in the other. It was upon this last element of genius, its machinery, which is mainly a product of discipline, that Mill fixed his attention too exclusively; to the neglect especially of the differences of sex in uninvested or available resources of mere energy or motor power.

Touching the suffrage question, I agree entirely with you, and not at all with Mill, and solely on grounds of public policy,—on which I conceive the right and justice of the

suffrage to rest. If, instead of the more probable effect of long-continued civilization in softening the imperiousness of men, women could be made by it Amazonians, there might be occasion to conciliate them, and secure the state from anarchy by making them participate in the responsibility of its government. Or if, on the contrary, this basis of the suffrage — the anarchical basis, I call it —should become in the far future less important than it is now, the suffrage might become restricted to a much smaller body of electors than now; and individual women with the requisite qualifications, which would probably have no relation to sex, might be included in this body. On the first supposition, however, the Amazonians would probably conquer by a more primitive form of election than what they would have gained through the suffrage; a form of choice of rulers, which they would have by natural rights, or without political endowment, — namely, sexual selection. As imperious men would have become intolerable to them, that variety would become extinct, and power would have passed involuntarily from its unnerved hands. The qualities of imperiousness and submissiveness, which have for so many ages been associated constitutionally with sex, or been sexually limited in inheritance, would probably, in this not unparalleled case, still remain associated with sex; but would have changed the line of descent, — as supernumerary and deficient digits, color-blindness, and other peculiarities sometimes do.

Agreeing, as I do, with your main practical conclusions on the woman’s suffrage question, there was no occasion for me to publish my dissent from one of your arguments, — or from your objections, rather, to one of Mill’s; especially as the interested partisan does not distinguish with clear logic between an objection to an argument and opposition to the conclusion.

Excuse the great length of this letter; for being engaged

in the matter I was tempted to make clear, at least to myself, my views on the subject.

To Miss Jane Norton.

Cambridge, June 23, 1874.

Thanks for your whiff of Ashfield. I suppose that it must seem a much longer time to you. The shifted scene, the rattling machinery of the stage (by rail and the stage-coach in real life, — as well as at the play), count moments or hours for months and years; a longer time to you than to those whom you leave behind, or who, like me, keep memory in bonds of terrible subjection to the present. When let loose, or breaking away in one of these life-scene shiftings, what pranks it plays; with what sportive contradiction it drags its chain,— combining and confusing the true distinctions of time, shifting the costumes, stealing the gray robes of the sober long-past and putting them over the petticoats of the customary just-past, and decking out the old Then with the vivid motley of the Now. If memory were always so lively, it might be more serviceable; but not perhaps in just this way, which, though a lively movement, can hardly be called progressive. This display is interesting psychologically, as showing the nature of the faculty; just as dancing and athletic sports show the capacities of our limbs in their greatest, though least serviceable, range of action.

No doubt, sports are measures of capacities for work. The humor of an age is an index of its sober interests. The animals that dream are nearest man in intelligence, and dreamers among men are nearest the great poets. These pranks are moreover instructive, as showing, by contrast, what are the more common illusions of memory. Whatever conscience (the court of resident foreign ambassadors in us) may require of memory in behalf of prudence and considerateness, this

servant does grudgingly; it is secretly in alliance with our individual weaknesses and unreason. The memory and the self are one in the flesh. Its black marks are more delible than the white. Pleasures last longer than pains in memory, or more of them last, because the selfish will practises memory secretly in the rehearsal of them. For the most part, we remember what we like, and are therefore grateful to memory, — the indulgent, the kind, illusive painter of the past, whose pictures are on the whole bright day-scenes, — or, at worst, tender twilights. I say, for the most part, and on the whole, notwithstanding typical instances to the contrary, which memory, no doubt just now on its duty, will be pleading to your consciences as proofs of its fidelity.

But it is unreasonable to expect that a wise court of Olympus will listen uncritically to the testimony of this Hermes in his own trustworthiness. Conscience does not really trust the crafty cup-bearer, but is always trying to surprise him by the accidents of life, — searching his pockets, setting the eloquence of the preacher against his persuasions, shifting scenes to catch him at his thefts. But this only incites him to his grander pranks and lies, — as you were observing in a sentence, and as I have been repeating through these pages, not exactly in rhyme.

You seem to doubt whether the memories of the blind are capable of such great revivals, or the rousing of great feelings by little thoughts and impressions, since they lack the associations of vision. I have no doubt they are so capable. Why not?

The world is always as large as the mind, and varied in as many individual objects or impressions as the interests of feeling can create in it, though these be only groups of touches and sounds. Or the unexperienced world is so much greater than the mind that it presses through narrowest crevices into the moulds prepared for it in our capacities for

thought or feeling. Mr. Darwin quotes about Laura Bridgman, that, “when a letter from a beloved friend was communicated to her through the gesture language (by touch), she laughed and clapped her hands, and the color mounted to her cheeks.” “On other occasions, she has been seen to stamp for joy.” Here, touches alone gave a world large enough to rouse depths of feeling to which greater and graver depths doubtless answered.

At this point, I broke off my talk for lunch; and, after lunch and a talk with a friend from our table, who came to smoke with me, we were summoned by discharges of cannon to the festival scenes of the Dedication ceremonies. The dedication of the Memorial Hall at Cambridge, on Tuesday afternoon, July 23, 1874. ⁷⁶ I wandered without design in the crowd, or with the design only of escaping shortly back to the high, moralizing themes of this letter. But unjust fortune ruled otherwise. I espied classmates in a procession; joined them; was conducted with them to within a few benches from the speakers; heard every word, the prayer included; and learned afterwards that I had unwittingly joined the honored company of “the Committee of Fifty;” whereas many enthusiastic ladies, who had thought of nothing all day but to enjoy the things I despised, who had waited patiently an hour and a half of the hot afternoon for this purpose, were given reserved seats where they could hear nothing. The hall appears to have poor acoustical capacities; but does not seem worse adapted to the end of hearing than Providence seemed to be for bringing right ears to the hearing point. But perhaps devotion and enthusiasm are, in the arrangements of Providence, their own great and sufficient reward; and the occasion as a whole duly honored, may have more than compensated for the loss to its devotees of its details. Not to know what they lost may be a blessed oblivion.

I cannot tell how great an enthusiasm would have survived it. . . .

I have projected a philosophical dialogue with three interlocutors (to represent duly the varieties of the human mind), into which I propose to introduce the metaphysics I was writing some time ago, — about the time of your magical party for the children, — and all the various points of my recent studies in optics. It shall be called “Color and Form,” and may include, among other things, some art criticisms, which I talked about with ----- on Sunday. First scene, Sunset; second, a Laboratory, or Study by gaslight, with Huxley Perkins’s Positivist Hymn. This refers to an amusing piece in the “New York World,” professing to be the account of the life and death of a positivist child. ⁷⁷ I propose to explain in the person of my scientific sceptic why colors exist, and to make him confound the teleology of the æsthetic and religious enthusiast, in accordance with the judgment of my third interlocutor, who shall have good sense without subtlety, and shall keep the others down to the point of intelligibleness. I have not thought yet what names to give them, except A. B. C. Perhaps Greek names would be best. But shall they all be men? or shall the sensible one, or shall the enthusiast, be a woman? What do you think? If she be the sensible one, her decision might be attributed to personal preference or prejudice. If the enthusiast, it would be ungallant that she should be defeated by two men. I doubt if sex would not complicate the plot, and compromise the argument, as Mr. Godkin thinks it would in politics.

Perhaps you will help me in the dramatic arrangements. I think that, to begin with, a sunset is a happy thought. It introduces the colors so naturally. The scientific observer shall be looking at it between his legs, and the æsthetic religious enthusiast will disdain to do so. Shall I send the parts, as they are done, in the form of letters?

To Miss Grace Norton.

July 14, 1874.

I fear the “conversational essay” will have to wait on conscience, too; for, in my thoughts about it lately, I have been going on with my speculative researches or theorizings in my head, not liking to arrest their growth by putting them prematurely in any form on paper; but “mewing their mighty youth and kindling their undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beams” of crucial tests and facts. Having settled several questions of physiological optics to my satisfaction, the last being “why colors exist,” which includes in its answer why the delight in them exists, instead of giving this delight as the answer (a very subtile teleology, you see, — I hope you won’t condemn it as “ingenious,” as the unconvinced do), I have taken up another subtile question, to which the various momenta of my theories have led up; namely, how touch and sight alone, without the muscular sense, or how the nerves of the skin and the retinas alone, give a perception of space, as I am convinced they do. This conviction came after the explanation; for I had previously believed, with most of the German and English physiologists, that tactual sensations, including the retinal, give only associated “local signs,” without giving any idea, or any essential constituent of the idea of extension in objects. I was led, without making any hypotheses that were not probable antecedently and applicable to previous questions, to an explanation of how tactual impressions may be perceived immediately as more or less distant from one another; that is, independently of the changes consequent on muscular movements, or independently of the muscular sense, as well as of their own proper qualities and intensities. This explanation is very far from going back to that ignorant assumption of absolute simplicity, or immediacy in the perception of space or extension, which some metaphysicians have

made in the teeth of physiological facts. I take, however, a shorter physiological road, and one that leads to a more immediate relation of tactual sensation to the perception of extension than that of local signs associated with movements. The effect of attention moving over a tactile surface, or from nerve to nerve in it, or the cerebral incitement or quantity of innervation produced by attention, gives a physiological datum in the perception of extension which has not been, so far as I know, yet taken account of. I do not consider it a merit of the theory in which I take account of this new quantity as an element in space-perception, that it seems to accord with common sense more nearly than the older one, for common sense is stupid in this matter. A power of trained imagination is indispensable in this most difficult subject, or an understanding which can not only emancipate itself from the stress of sense, but can even turn round and subjugate sense combinations to its analysis, or see how we see, without visualizing and thus duplicating the process.

There is endless confusion, it seems to me, in the still more abstruse questions of metaphysics about object and subject in perception, on account of the lack in thinkers of that analytic imagination, or abstractive understanding, which can possess itself of the dissolved yet distinguished elements, instead of the broken pieces, of sensuous images, and can put them together chemically, so to speak; or can take up a movement in perception as it individually exists, dissecting it out both from what causes it and from what follows it. I wonder whether you get any adequate idea from this most inadequate sentence, or are duly impressed by it with the difficulty of exposition I shall have to contend with in setting forth my theories.

Science has compelled psychologists to the so-called empirical theory of perception, but has not yet, for the most part, trained their imaginations to the adequate comprehension of empirical idealism, to which I believe they will have to come.

Idealism is a “discipline,” rather than a theory; or is true only to an understanding subtile enough not to grossly suppose an external world to be demonstrated, or the question of its nature in any way affected, by striking the ground with a walking-stick. But this theory is in need of a little clearing up as it stands. Its positions are somewhat dislocated, from its contest with metaphysics. It has hitherto made too emphatic its incidental opposition to metaphysical substance in matter, and has become itself metaphysical by positing a substance of consciousness. Empiricism has driven philosophy from both these positions. The real and essential battle of idealism is then against the transference, of the introspective duality, or distinction of subject and object in consciousness, to the line of physical causation in perception; or is against the confusion of the physical conditions of perception with the object of it, and of the psychical conditions with the subject as introspectively distinguished.

About this time last summer, I discussed with Professor Wyman the substitution of new terms in physiology for the metaphysically confused terms, “subject” and “object;” proposing to call what depends in consciousness on internal conditions “encephalic,” instead of subjective, and what depends on external ones “eccephalic.” I held that an hallucination is objective, though encephalic, and that its illusory character does not make it a subjective phenomenon, or an imagination, as is sometimes supposed. The accidental or afterimages of vision, and other illusory appearances, are sometimes called by English writers “subjective,” by a still cruder use of these vague words. The true and false in judgment, or the real and unreal in consciousness, is not a distinction coincident with the introspective division of mental states into subjective and objective. One may either truly or falsely remember and imagine, and either truly or falsely perceive and act. The true and the false, or the real and unreal, of waking

and dreaming, are not the two worlds (as they are somewhat poetically called) of the duplicate or reflective consciousness. Although it is proved by all experience that an objective phenomenon of encephalic origin, like a dream, is illusory, yet this is not an identical proposition, or its truth is not involved in the meaning of its terms. That subjective phenomena are all encephalic is empirically known; and the converse of the proposition, or that all encephalic is subjective, is not true.

The aid I hope to get from the form of the conversational essay is, of course, the motive I have for turning dramatist. But this form brings its own peculiar difficulties, which is the reason, I suspect, why it is not more often used. All that I have put on paper are certain headings of subjects. The dramatic arrangements are still in the shell, while the main themes are some of them still moulting. But do not suppose that I shall send you these lucubrations as substitutes for letters. I shall probably write long prefaces to each part in way of letters, as authors always do, making a great flutter about the new-fledged things, gratulations that they have survived the dangers of callow youth, and deprecations of injurious criticisms.

To Miss Grace Norton.

July 29, 1874.

I have just tried my butterfly nature in search of summer sweets. I spent Friday night at Blue Hill with the Putnams. On Saturday, I flitted to Portsmouth, going in the evening on a picnic, up with the tide, on the banks of the Piscataqua, and floating, after tea, down the tide in the moonlight very romantically. On Sunday, Mr. Emery and I walked or crawled to York, visited our friends, the Brookses, of Cambridge, absorbed the beauties of the place by sunset, and returned by moonlight, —

a round trip afoot of more than twenty miles. Mr. Emery is an excellent travelling companion, devoted mainly to the business afoot. . . . We only settled on the walk one important question, which Clifford Watson, at the picnic, had propounded from his experience in boating. We, or at least I, concluded that the question was to be decided by moral, not mechanical, causes; and I generalized that in the moral world difficulty increases success, instead of diminishing it, as in mechanical efforts; and that the problems of boating were threefold, or depended on three classes of momenta, — the purely mechanical, the physiological, and the moral, the several advantages of which have in practice to be duly adjusted; a very owl-wise settlement of the practical question!

On Monday, I had no disposition to walk, but took wing again, and alighted on the way back at Magnolia, where I found my young friend, Meggie Lesley, and several other friends. Mrs. Lesley was gone away for a visit of a few days. Yesterday brought me back here to the old grub-chamber, a still living, full-grown, full-blown, and, perhaps, full-flown imago; whether thus ephemeral, or whether I may go farther, is as yet undeveloped in my moral consciousness. Invitations to Mount Desert, to Northampton, to Florida Mountain, and, neither last nor least, to Ashfield, are prophetic of a longer winged life. . . .

Why do you want me to spell color with a “u”? If it is only a prejudice, I have one opposed to it, and will compromise by not insisting on your leaving the “u” out. Let it be one of those orthographical varieties that are the very spice of spelling, which else had scarcely enough of flavo(u)r. I should prefer to leave it so, rather than to quote, count, or weigh authorities against you. I think, however, that the best that can be said for colour, flavour, honour, and the like, is that they preserve some of the ancient liberties of English speech. I can conceive of one use, besides, in the two forms;

namely, allowing a division of meanings between them, as synonymes often do. Let deep, pure, or “saturated,” as opposed to pale or insipid colors, flavors, and honors, be spelt with a “u.” There would then be a utilitarian, as well as æsthetic, reason for keeping both forms. It is much easier to understand why colors exist than why they are so named and spelt; that is, we can get nearer the root of the thing in the uses of life than to that of the word in the usages of speech.

I do not feel so confident about your problem, “Why do we exist?”. . . Not that I believe there is any essential mystery in the nature of things, other than what an idle question-asking habit gratuitously imports into them for the sake of won der,—a rather dry and superfluous fodder for that divine sentiment! All the ends of life are, I am persuaded, within the sphere of life, and are in the last analysis, or highest generalization, to be found in the preservation, continuance, and increase of life itself, in all its quantities of rank, intensity, and number, which exists — “for what,” do you ask? Why, for nothing, to be sure! Quite gratuitously. Does any one seriously expect to be answered in any other terms than those in which the question could be rationally framed? Are any ends suggested out of the sphere of life itself? If not, this is an aimless curiosity. Interrogation is reduced by it to the point which one may answer thus [Here follows an interrogation point with the mark of exclamation across it.—Ed.] . . .

The social value of questions is, indeed, a matter we might overlook in a too serious purpose to find their answers. The social value of the weather is nothing to theirs; and insoluble questions have a permanent value of this sort. Religions are founded on them.

Still, in the interest of sober inquisitiveness, it might be worth while to root out some of these questions for the sake of others more genuine. Let the questions of the uses of life, then, be put in this shape: To what ascertainable form or

phase of life is this or that other form or phase of life valuable or serviceable? If we fail in this direction, we need not be quite non-plussed; for no form of movement in life is without a value in itself. It is not pleasures alone that would go on, if they were permitted. Pains and griefs hug themselves sometimes, and think they have the same right to last: and the nobler ones even win the will over to their conservation. I am more than half persuaded that most, if not all, of the puzzles of metaphysics, may be reduced to unconscious puns, or unseen ambiguities in terms. Now, “life” means in common discourse two things very different, but easily confounded. We sometimes mean by “life” what is comprised in the plans, purposes, inquisitions, and aspirations that make ambition and the zests of curiosity 'and anticipation so large a part of the conscious life of youth. Well, if for any cause (an indigestion, for example), the strength and zest that went in search of these goods of life happen to fail, we say we have tried life, and exhausted its resources! It has no more value for us. We are ready to die! If we meditate suicide, it is not our duty to others, nor the rights others may have in our lives, that should restrain us. We are more irrational than to merely forget the claims of conscience. We suffer from a mental indigestion. We have not solved the ambiguities of words. The life we would attack is not the culprit. The kind of dying which a wise moralist would enjoin is the death of the unsatisfied anticipations, curiosities, ambitions, which, fixed as habits, still linger, and distress the soul, since the strength and zest have failed which could give them further fruition. But these forms of life die without sacrificing one’s usefulness or duties to others, or without cutting off a host of resources which come in old age to make “life” quite tolerable. “As to exhausting life objectively,” the wise moralist would add, “that is sheer illusion, even if you happen to be an Alexander. Gain back the nerve, the strength, the zest, and you have gained back the world with its inexhaustible resources. But the true philosophical way is to look on life as it is, as somewhat broader than the fading pictures, plans, and purposes which you have mistaken for it, and as consisting in more than that set of inveterate habits which you call yourself. The death you should desire is the death of those desires, which, like all unsupported or no longer satisfied impulses of habit or instinct, have become pains. Work in other channels, and thus immolate yourself, and you will not find an end of life desirable. Life in this wider sense is neither good nor evil; but the theatre of possible goods and evils. There is no choice between it and death, not because their claims are equal, but because real, unillusioned choice lies wholly within the sphere of life. The will is constrained between this and that form of life, and is never impelled to real unconsciousness. We desire sleep, it is true, but, rationally, in only two ways, neither of which is unconsciousness ; namely, first, the falling asleep as an immediate end or pleasure in itself, and, secondly, sound sleep as a means to the anticipated end of a refreshed and invigorated waking. All the rest is beyond our choice, a matter of fate and automatic change, or else of frenzied action under the influence of illusion, — the illusion that death resembles sleep in any thing for which sleep can be desired. There is never any real choice between a state of consciousness, however painful, and unconsciousness, — no real movement of the will that way, — though there is an illusory superficial resemblance to unconsciousness in vague anticipations of more pleasurable conditions than those we seek to escape.”

The penalty, I suppose, for disobeying these wise directions, is to be judged foolish. I agree with this wise councillor that life in general exists for nothing. The impossibility of really wishing for annihilation, or for real unconsciousness, is, however, no evidence to me, as it is to the mystics, that there is no such thing, or that the fates, of which my choice is no part,

have not this condition in store into which to turn me, as automatic changes in life put me into a soundness of sleep in itself undesired, however pleasant the way to it or the refreshment of waking from it may be.

To limit the question of rational ends to the sphere of life is to bring a host of questions to light touching the dependence of one form of life on another, which to the moralist as well as the naturalist promise more than the gratification of a prurient wonder at insoluble mysteries, and are more than topics of social incitement.

Now, the question why colors exist is just one of these. If colors are of use for any thing beyond the delight they inspire, then this delight may be subservient thereto, since it engages the will in the exercises and disciplines which are serviceable to their use. One of your poets has said, —

“If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

I do not know that I quite understand the logic of this, if any was meant. . . . There is an ellipsis in the reasoning, which I propose to supply. The play of all the faculties of an animal is adapted to developing them to the point of their serious usefulness; and delight in the mere exercise is what sustains a faculty in its immaturity, and makes it grow. Other motives come in afterwards, and more immediately relate it to its real uses, or serious purposes, in life. Now, this is also curiously the case with colors (or, perhaps, I should spell them here colours) that is, the most simple or pure ones, — the red, the green, and the violet of the spectrum.

But what are these colours? The opticians say that they are three specific, but usually mingled, effects on the sensibilities of retinal nerves, produced, in the highest degrees, by ethereal tremours of three certain definite wave-lengths; but also produced,

in lesser degrees, by other tremors within narrow limits from these. The nerves of the retinæ have in general been made (apparently for some purpose) especially sensitive to wave-lengths extending altogether over scarcely a quarter of the whole range of actual ethereal tremors, and even less than this amount with the color-blind, who are insensible to pure redness. The three primary colors are produced in ordinary eyes from similar, but subordinate, emphases or concentrations of sensibility, and doubtless exist for a similar purpose. Now what can this purpose be? It is now known that the eye is not the perfectly achromatic instrument it was once supposed to be. All the various tremors of different lengths and different refrangibilities from any point in a white object are not brought by the lenses of the eye to the same focus, or to a point, but are concentrated along a short line of depth in the retina; feeling red at the greatest depth, green in the middle, and violet at the front end. Or they would feel so, if separately and successively attended to, instead of combining their effects, as it were, chemically, in our consciousness of whiteness.

·Now, Helmholtz supposes that the nerves at various depths are especially sensitive to wave-lengths, which, in ordinary circumstances of adjustment, would be brought to a focus at or near these depths. To give the turn to the problem which I propose, the hypothesis may be stated thus: Three transparent nervous screens, at slightly different distances, contain nerve corpuscles that are but little sensitive to wave-lengths, differing much either way from those which are ordinarily brought to a focus upon them. That is, these corpuscles are but little affected by the light, which is scattered, passing through them, but out of focus at their several distances, and which comes to a focus at, or nearer to, depths in the retina where appropriately sensitive corpuscles are situated. Dispersion—or the non-focalization, at a point, of all the

rays of white light from any point of an object — is a cause of imperfect definition, or indistinctness in the minute parts of an optical image. It is also called in dioptric instruments chromatic aberration, on account of the more conspicuous evidence of it shown by the colored fringes about white objects. This defect of dioptric instruments, which is essentially the lack of perfect definition or minute precision in images, is partly remedied by compound lenses called “achromatic.” Though the eye is provided with lenses of different materials, it is far from perfectly achromatic; dispersion is remedied, however, or provided for in them by a much neater way. A paradox; namely, that what renders the defects of refracting instruments so conspicuous (the colors shown in them) is what avoids the effect of dispersion in the eye! Colors were invented by Nature to avoid the confusing effects of dispersion; to produce definition by limits in sensibility, subordinate to the general limits, which make possible a selection of the physically well-defined movements of light out of the confused.

Light is, in general, so feeble a force that a considerable range of its undulations had to be called into the service of vision in order to affect the nervous tissue adequately, and to bring into sufficient contrasts the lights and shades by which the forms of objects could be discriminated. But such a range involved the defect of dispersion, or want of definition: and to provide for this defect ordinary vision was divided into three parts, each with a range of sensibility for which the defect of dispersion was insignificant; while these parts in their combination still retained sufficient intensity in the total effects of light. Definition is also secured in a less ingenious way at the centres of our retinas, or at the yellow spots. The middle portion of the spectrum rays are at these parts transmitted with greater relative intensity than elsewhere, or the extreme rays are here partly absorbed. In the eyes of many

birds and reptiles, absorption of light by minute colored globules of oil, placed at the front extremities of many of the rods and cones (some of them red and some yellow), appears in a similar manner to limit the range and the consequent dispersion of the rays which affect these nerves.

The invention of the three colours is, however, the most ingenious application of physics in vision; and all the three ways, namely, specific subordinate sensibilities, general absorption or narrowing of the range of refrangibility, as in the yellow spots, and specific absorptions, as in the eyes of birds, are better adapted to the purpose (considering the materials in which the vital opticians had, and have, to work) than the device of compound achromatic lenses would be.

The eye as an optical structure is not only in fact, as Helmholtz has shown, a bungled work compared to that of the mechanical optician, but is necessarily so from the nature of its materials and formative causes. Its defects as a mechanical structure are, however, provided against by its perfections as a nervous and muscular apparatus. If it could have been rendered perfectly achromatic, or if all effective wave-lengths could have been brought to perfect foci, these would have required a perfect sensitive surface or nervous screen, perfectly shaped to receive the image thus defined; and colours, or different kinds of sensibility, would not then have been needed for definition of form. (Would they have existed?) The retina is really not a geometrical surface, and could not be effectively made so (like that of a daguerreotype plate), but is a transparent body having some small thickness even in its sensitive parts, within and about which the image, or a luminary series of images in different colours, is formed. And the perception of color is the separation by the sensibilities of the retina of these laminæ of concentrated light, from the different light of different refrangibilities, passing through and mingled with them.

The fact that we delight in colors, not only in childhood but far into life, seems to be good evidence that these specifically limited and narrow ranges of sensibility in the three sets of nerves is partly the result of habit and discipline; the value of which to life in general is obviously in the uses of distinct vision. The pleasing effects of complementary colors is a direct disciplinary play of these faculties of discrimination. Beauty is our motive to exercises, the natural ends of which we discover only by philosophy, — by that philosophy which is founded on a study of physics and natural history.

. . . What a narrow, selfish, childish, and egotistical philosophy is that of the poets and sentimentalists, who look on life as a play-ground which they think their Maker has laid out for their delectation: whereas it is for keeping their race a-going (or was), whatever the use of that may be. There is one among that sort of philosophers, who has caught a glimpse of this great natural truth in what his disciples call “Newman’s principle,” — an important half-truth. “You will not be happy,” he says, “unless you are virtuous; but you will not be virtuous, if you seek for happiness.” No wise utilitarian would be disposed to question this as a psychological fact; but none would accept the paradox as an ultimate theoretical principle of morals. And there are not wanting illustrative parallels to it in the natural science of life. Nature puts the most important functions of life in charge of automatic and instinctive agents, which have their own most vigilant and effective motives. These are sometimes so independent of the will that even a favoring interference of this general governor disconcerts the special agent, and frustrates the common purpose. Thus, we sneeze much more vigorously against our wills than with their aid; which, if too eager to promote the action, may actually suspend it, or prevent it altogether. The same is true of an acquired nature or

habit. If we, or our reasons, distrust any one of our acquired dexterities, and attempt by attention to help it out, we are apt to put it quite out of kilter, or to paralyze its proper efficiency. Every habit (and virtue, as Aristotle taught, is a habit) is its own motive, its own “excuse for being,” — or one of its excuses. The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours. So that, practically, we find ourselves acting the more reasonably and more for the real ends of nature, in proportion as these are not our immediate motives, but give place to more completely devoted, single-purposed, and therefore effective powers, or to instincts and habits: which we should, nevertheless, as reasonable beings, subject theoretically, or in our philosophy of life and duty, to the test of the good they subserve in the economy of life.

Utilitarianism needs to be supplemented, in order to meet misunderstandings, by a Philosophy of Habit, and to lay down among its practical principles that, since motives are effective, not in proportion to their usefulness or reasonableness, but rather to their singleness or instinctiveness, therefore it is reasonable to foster and to rely practically on the force of proper habits and just, natural inclinations. In the serene and unopposed play of these, — and especially in their concord or harmonious play, — there is a source of happiness to the agent, which the sentimental moralist mistakes for the real, or natural, end of virtue, but which belongs to it only as a habit, or as a body of mutually supporting or concordant habits; and is quite distinct from the happiness or well-being to which as virtuous or reasonable habits and inclinations they are or should be adapted. Dignity is a weight with the will, or an effective source of happiness, which these powers of habit and instinct gain from their mutual support or

harmonious action, and from their persistent influence, and which would be the natural result of accordance with the harmonious real ends of life. It is to questioned and artificial rules of life, and to the morals of legislation rather than to the instincts of the individual conscience, that the utilitarian test is of greatest practical importance. Nature has not waited for human reason to discover or to test all the instincts and disciplines best adapted for keeping the surviving races of men in the most flourishing condition; just as she did not wait for physiological science to disclose the uses of color, but secured them in her economy by making them the delight and one, apparently, of the most important ends of vision, though really one, as we have seen, of its most important means.

At the beginning of the last letter there is some account of a visit to Portsmouth with Mr. Woodward Emery. Mr. Emery, then and now a member of the bar in Boston, was Chauncey’s chum at Cambridge during the last years of his life. He has kindly given me a sketch of the habits of his friend at this period, from which I copy the following passages: —

“My intimate acquaintance with Chauncey Wright is confined to the last two years of his life. . . . He rarely went from home; his wants were few, and his tastes simple. There was so little variation in his daily life that the description of one day may suffice for all. He rose late, breakfasted heartily, and, lighting his cigar, sauntered to his lodgings, — always amiable and ready for a chat by the way. He rarely worked hard in the forenoon, passing his time in reading or in conversation. The afternoon was his time for exercise, of which, however, he was not very fond; yet he could endure a hard walk very comfortably. I have walked with him twenty miles between afternoon and bed-time. Dinner was his chief meal, and he fully appreciated the merit of a well-

appointed and well-spread table; at the same time, it is rare to meet one so indifferent to a poor one. The table seemed to bring out his unrivalled conversational powers, and he would talk for hours with interest and animation.

“He labored best and performed the hardest work at night. He fairly bloomed, if I may be allowed the expression, in the night; and it was far into the morning when he sought his bed. . . . His habit of work was always a fearful strain upon his nervous system; when once he began to write out his cogitations,— thoughtfully constructed always before he touched pen to paper, — nothing interested him or broke the thread of continuous effort until it was determined by its natural end, or by his own physical exhaustion; meals, sleep, and exercise were alike forgotten, or partaken with utter irregularity. Otherwise, simplicity and regularity were the rule of life with one who was more regular than most men I have known, more simple than any.”

To Miss Grace Norton.

Aug. 12, 1874.

I went last Tuesday week to Mr. Shattuck’s, at Mattapoisett, for a visit of a few days, — a visit long ago projected. It was a very agreeable one, extending to nearly a week. The Rev. Dr. Rufus Ellis and his daughter were the other guests at first; after them came Professor and Mrs. Dunbar, of Cambridge, and their daughter. It was a pleasant as well as edifying variety in life to be so long with these sensible as well as conservative and religious people. Mr. Ellis, you know (or perhaps you don’t), was my first instructor in theology, and he is said to have been the main adviser in sending me to Cambridge. What a scoffer I should have become, probably, at Amherst or Williams College! It has been many years since I have had with him any real talks. I did not tell you,

I think, that I met him first this season, shortly before, at Magnolia; but we did not get deeply there into religious conferences. ... I have always found myself quite in easy relations with sensible, orthodox Chauncey uses this word here, not in its specific local sense, [e.g. ante, p. 64], as intimating the doctrine of the Trinitarian Congregationalists, — once the established church; but with the more general meaning expressed just before, where he speaks of his friends as conservative in their opinions. They were all Unitarians. ⁷⁸ people, though a little surprised sometimes at the freedom I feel and take. They entertain sharp but honest doubts without annoyance, and do not impatiently brush at them with vagaries like the so-called “liberal” sentimentalists. I did not quite convince Dr. Ellis, I think, that his sense of indestructible vitality, even at the lowest ebb of strength, spirits, and purpose, was not good evidence that he was going to last for ever, though I charged his personality with being only a set of inveterate habits; but I was interested to find that he, with other conservative thinkers with whom I have talked, regarded this evidence as good only for the individuals who feel it. This tenet may spring from an unconscious proselyting spirit, — an indirect compulsion of one by leaving one out in the cold. Our freest, longest talks were on a drive to New Bedford, and in walks through that old town.

... I did not quite desert science on this visit, but mastered Dr. Gray’s little book on “How Plants Behave,” and found illustrations of it in numerous flowers of the place, among them fine specimens of orchis in the woods. I had just read in Mr. -----’s discourse, as to how teleology was a much misunderstood science, and did not treat of the use one thing is to another, but of the service each is to the universe (to “the glory of God” perhaps he meant, according to your quotation from the Catechism). But I am curious to see an instance of the successful treatment of scientific things that

way. I quite agree that a true teleology does not include such facts as that the beauty and perfume and sweetness of flowers are serviceable to us, or even to insects; but is deeper than this in its scrutiny of ends, and finds in the colors, odors, sweets, and, above all, in the particular structures of flowers, means to the end of perpetuating their lives or the life of their species. Dr. Gray, in his late notice of Mr. Darwin, praises him for restoring teleology to its true place. A better statement of the question of Final Causes than I thought of then, or in my “statement” to you, now occurs to me. The Final Cause of any thing is that very thing, when it is or can be considered as conserved or reproduced by that essential part of its action or effects which perpetuates the life of which it is a part. Is it not singular that this definition has just reminded me of what I read long ago about Aristotle’s definition of Final Causes? I never quite understood that, and find, on turning to the Encyclopaedia, that it is in these words: “The final cause of the thing is that very thing in its completeness ; as a statue when made.” The material, efficient, and formal causes of the statue are, according to the illustrations of Aristotle’s four causes, — severally, the marble, the sculptor, and the particular shape or individuality, or the what-it-is-in-itself-ness of the statue.

These subtilties of classification are not worth much; yet, as there is a resemblance between Aristotle’s “final cause” and what I have just drawn from natural history, I am tempted to see how close the agreement can be made without making too ingenious an interpretation of the words in search of clearer meaning. “That very thing in its completeness” does not seem to me sufficiently distinguished from its formal cause or particular determination, which is sometimes called its type. Should we not say, rather, that the properties of any thing by which it is the agent, though indirectly, of its own production or of the reproduction of its sort, belong to

and define it as an end or final cause? The “completeness” meant is, perhaps, in the round of its self-restoring or selfpreserving agency as a species. Conceived in the mind of the sculptor, the statue is the “purpose” for which he works. Or, as being the embodiment of that which determined the sculptor’s purpose and labor, it is a final cause. The round of agency through which a thing realizes its sort, or realizes the conditions of its existence, may be called, if Mr. ----- wishes, a universe, — its universe as a final cause, — but not, if he pleases, the Universe. Don’t hold me responsible for the useless subtlety of trying to save to science this highly respectable name, Final Cause!

But let us pass now from statues and flowers to men and women. You say that while you do not believe the noblest end of life to be “serviceableness,” in the ordinary meaning of the word, — “whatever it may be as an aim”(proximate end?); yet you still less believe that in the last analysis we should find the ends of life in the preservation, continuance, and increase of life itself. I agree entirely with you about “serviceableness” as an end; that is, serviceableness as such: for this would be a foolish confusion of the essence of means with ends; though, as one of “a Christian’s” delights, and blissful habits or virtues, it doubtless makes part of the noble “perfectness” of individual human existence. This “perfectness,” which you contrast with the preservation, &c., of life, I meant to include in what, as I recollect, I added as the quantity in worth, dignity, or rank in the increase of life; its quantity in intensity and number being other parts of it as a final cause. What do we really mean, understanding^ (not emotionally), by the words “perfectness,” “dignity,” “absolute worth”? The mystic, who finds God in the inward perfectness he dreams of in himself, thinks it the end of the universe; whereas, I think its dignity is limited to that spiritual mechanism of the human flower which is most purely

and concentratedly serviceable to that whole life of mankind which reproduces and embodies it. Dignity, as I think I defined it in another connection, is a weight with the will, or a power as a motive, which depends on the mutual support that what we therefore call our virtues get from one another, and from all the motives of life in their most complete harmony and consistency. Mysticism is so stupid and spiritually self-engrossed that the better self, which it ought to contemplate as a particular representative of the endless solidarity of human life, is thought of by it as the individual mystic’s immortal part. Mysticism is so blindly self-engrossed that it cannot understand Utilitarianism, but supposes this doctrine to mean a service of the higher or the virtuous inclinations of our nature to the lower, or merely to the gross well-being of human life. Utilitarianism does not mean this, though this is a part of its meaning. The lower, so far as they are the conditions of the higher; the appetites, so far as they are also essential to the preservation, continuance, and increase of life; the passions, so far as their singleness or instinctiveness is serviceable to the whole, — are, in a stricter sense, ends, or final causes even, than is that perfectness of virtue which is its own reward. So far as the happiness of virtue depends on its being a fixed habit, as it does in the egotistic regard of the Pharisee, — so far it has no more worth, dignity, or perfectness than any instinct or any other habit in itself. But, so far as any habit, on the other hand, is not opposed by equally strong and persistent motives, but is in wide and strong alliance with others, which, with it, are therefore named “reasonable” or “virtuous,” it is an integrant part of a system of dispositions which, as superintending, so far as it goes, the whole of the conditions of human life, and leading to the conservation of the whole, itself included, is what we call conscience, and is pre-eminently a final cause in human nature.

Now, utilitarians have consciences as well as the sentimentalists. Their philosophy concerns itself with the conscience of conscience, with its truest harmony, or with its reasonableness, with the accordance of every thing in it with the least doubtful of its behests. “Nature,” says Cicero, “has inclined us to the love of mankind; and this is the foundation of laws” (fundamentum juris). This is both the rational and the disciplinary foundation, the ground and the efficacy of laws; since fear becomes a moral power only by its sanction; and even those laws which we may be said to observe instinctively, or as ends from the start and in themselves, are instinctively associated with the love of mankind, with the wish for the greatest good of the greatest number. On this wish hang all the law and the prophets.

The reliance of utilitarians on their philosophy, which (in consideration of their acknowledgment of the essential value of instincts and habits, though not of the ultimate authority of these) gives you so much surprise, — this reliance is not different from what the disciples of any other creed have on a philosophy that professes to be the guide of life. It is not a reliance on the ability of the individual reason to review, in the light of fundamental principles, the whole range of possible moral actions. It is not even a reliance on the whole reflective experience of mankind, as transmitted in customs and traditions. The reliance of experiential philosophers in general is not on the ability of each investigator to verify, by experiment and observation, what he nevertheless has good reason to accept as true laws of nature, and as really verifiable; nor is it on the completeness of what has been already ascertained experimentally. It is a reliance on its method, whenever or wherever any method is needed. But the reasonableness of many enjoined customs and rules of life is of a negative sort,—the non-existence of anything truly obligatory that is really seen to be opposed to them. This proves

their harmlessness at least, so far as we can see; and, wherever they seem to have a foundation in instinct (like the horror of suicide or murder), there is a positive presumption that they are somewhat more than merely harmless injunctions. Yet, in this, they have to the utilitarian nothing more than a presumption of obligation; for inherited instincts are not always right, or useful to present conditions of a progressive form of life. They may have made the whole transit from what ought, to what ought not, to be obeyed, though still remaining instincts in our nature, like fear and rage; or even though in the individual will they may have the pervasiveness and the permanent sway of a rational principle. The large part which the authority of teachers and force-sanctioned laws have in our moral life affords, indeed, a presumption against the trustworthiness of instincts in general; and, when a seemingly instinctive inclination receives sanction in customs and early discipline, it is often difficult to distinguish how much training has added to nature: for the consciences of savages differ from ours in both respects; and more discipline is needed for some of our youths than for others.

What utilitarianism distrusts, therefore, is the authority of mere strength or earnestness of moral feelings or injunctions, when set up as a reason for conduct. But this does not mean an habitual distrust in the utilitarian of his own conscientious feelings, nor a doubt of them leading to the abrogation of their actual authority or weight with his will. Earnestness is a proof of conscientiousness, not of the rightness of a conscience, or is the measure of efficacy, rather than of rectitude, and is often much greater in respect to mere superstitions and rules of etiquette than to the most certain of moral principles. For earnestness is oftener the result of that love for mankind which takes the form of reverence for teachers, or of following the supposed divine in human examples, than of that love for mankind which should (but, unfortunately, not always does) guide the reason of the leader and teacher.

This distrust becomes a positive rejection, on the part of this philosophy, of any authority in the earnestness of a feeling, when this is brought into the judgment, or rational trial, of a rule of conduct in any real dispute concerning it. In any real dispute about the wisdom or rectitude of a moral rule (not about the motives of a moral agent), utilitarianism takes the reins of judgment into its own hands, then actually asserting what is always its prerogative, the supremacy of its tests over all authorities, — tests supreme, so far as they are seen to go, even over the universal instincts of men; since only so far as these can be seen, or else presumed to be allied with the love and service of mankind, can they be justified; and utilitarianism sits in permanent judgment over all law-making, over all devices of expediency, whether these be deductions from laws, or exceptions to the existing and acknowledged rules of duty. Its reliance on the forces of habit and instinct is not for rational guidance, but for practical efficacy; yet these are so important to its aims, that they are not safely to be disregarded, or unnecessarily opposed, or weakened by substituting for them habitually the calculations of expediency. The mystic who mistakes for the final causes of the universe that better part in himself which, as the representative of all human interests, is a final cause of the universe of human life, dreams in his conceit that he is God, and that stars and flowers, as well as statues, exist for him and for his equals in immortality. He lays down his life, if at all, for the furthering of his own inward bliss (as he dreams), or for heaven; instead of for the furtherance of nature’s care in life for the whole, in which, sooner or later, he must disappear. . . .

“Sanity and insanity are more closely interlaced” than you have believed. Between them, as conditions of mind, there is not a wide gulf, nor even any sharp line of demarcation. We do not generally need to be enjoined to admire the beautiful or to loathe the ugly, though discrimination may grow by

instruction even in respect to what deserves these names; nor do we generally mistake pleasures for pains through too close a proximity of one to the other, spite of the close relation between them, imagined by the Socrates of Plato. But we have to be always on our guard against irrationality, which does not require a permanently diseased brain for its habitat. . . . Taking figures of speech literally is perhaps one of the commonest forms of insanity. . . .

To desire as an end, or for its own sake, what in the order of nature is a means, like going to sleep, is not irrational; but to mistake this means for its end in nature, or to suppose this end to be the happiness which we have in the means, is fatuity. To think we have perfected in sound sleep the pleasure we have in falling asleep, and then to suppose that unconsciousness in general, or that of death in particular, is perfect bliss, is doubly irrational. . . .

. . . The human heart is a gallery of the future, illuminated by the light of its instincts and experience reflected from pictures and images of the future and the universal. As the repository and agency of all rationally conceived ends, it is the only rational final cause to itself, however serviceable it may be incidentally to other forms of life or living beings. The uses of other forms of life to the human are not final causes, though the uses of any forms of life to the universe would properly be final, if it were true that the universe is served by them in any other way than to make it up, or to be among the threads that are woven in its endless combinations, — its formal rather than its final causes.

Touching “classification,” ... I don’t think the word “classification” is used very distinctively or serviceably when it is not restricted to the results of more or less cool attention to the grounds of the divisions we make in things, or to the sphere of the active sense of the word. The ego and non ego are classes of phenomena, it is true, considered as divisions

made by consciousness, and not as primordially involved in it; but to consider them as such is so disrespectful to both that most intuitional metaphysicians prefer to call them divisions in substance, though this comes perhaps to the same thing; since, as Fichte says, “Attributes [or phenomena], synthetically united, give substance [are synthems, In another place, Wright had said: “Syntheses; — synthems is a better word, which I borrow from the Greek to express the passive sense of syntheses, — as poem stands to poesis.” ⁷⁹ I should say], and substance analyzed gives attributes [marks or characters].” Again, to call that division of things or persons which we make because we like or approve some, and dislike or disapprove others, more or less,—to call that a classification, or even a real division, and not rather a feeling merely in us about them, is to force these stiff, logical terms out of their sober proprieties. I don’t dispute that in any sense “classification is judgment.” It is the converse that I dispute, and especially that an intuitive judgment is an analytical classification, or classification by characters. And all I assert is that descriptive classification or characterization indicates weak feeling, — mainly, an intellectual interest, — or that you don’t much love the subject; and I ventured from the point of view of intuitive or æsthetic judgment to say that such a throwing of a fellow-being to the logical dogs is severe, being a trifle worse than damning with faint praise.

It was not from any actual fear, however, that you had been describing me in your English letters (as you do to myself) as a man who never asks a question, or as a man just as queer, only just the opposite of Mr. -----; it was not from any such fear that I put myself in his place (the place of the characterized), but because in fact I sometimes do ask questions, though not very often in the social, interrogative form. Grammatically they are statements, rhetorically they are ironical, — that dangerous figure! Socrates is thought to have

made large use of irony in his discourses, but more especially in his questions, — mocking the show of logical acuteness, and letting himself get defeated in the battle of questions and opinions to show (when he cared to show it) how well his common-sense and his convictions, when they were clear, survived such exposures and assaults; and how logic, though the life, is not the armor of convictions. If Mr. -----’s questions were only ironical, now, they might have the force of statements; as ironical statements have the force of challenges and questions: so perverting is the use of irony! I think: that, on the whole, half-true categorical paradoxes are the deepest probing questions, especially if no irony is suspected. They rouse the real convictions of your interlocutor, if he has any, or discover the fact, if he has not, much better than the open sincerity or even the irony of questions. Do not ask, for example, whether the moon is made of green cheese or of earth, nor waste time in canvassing the probabilities of the two hypotheses only to prove everybody’s ignorance; but maintain the probability of the least plausible. That will bring out the best reasons for the other; which is better, I think, on the whole, than to discover the uncertainty of both. The weak side of Socrates was his contempt for the merely most probable. Modern scientific doctrines are many of them of this sort, which is something,—provided “the most probable” does not mean merely the most believed, as it does, independently of systematic induction.

One is exposed, to be sure, by this form of ironical inquisition to more injurious suspicions of trifling with truth than even Socrates was; and there is perhaps a safer way. Mother Goose was, indeed, a profounder philosopher; and philosophers have generally, in effect, followed her method rather than that of Socrates. For, as one of the ancients has remarked, “there is nothing so absurd as not to have been asserted by some one of the philosophers.” Categorical

nonsense — what you cannot believe — both entertains and edifies; and is honest, withal, and not unsocial like irony. Tickling arouses a reflective attention, and institutes a scientific exploration and a mapping of mental terra incognita. One discovers — not what Socrates taught, “how ignorant we are”—but how knowing, in such trifles of experience as might escape a common philosopher’s reflective notice. One gets well grounded at this school in common-sense, which is the faculty that never seriously doubts any thing, yet differs in different minds as to what is thus exempted from question. The philosophy of Mother Goose comprises all that is certainly common. There is no hope for the child who seriously questions the assertions of this great teacher. The plainest irony will never arouse in later years its slumbering powers of reflection. If it begins with doubting her statements, it will end by accepting the more plausible ones of dishonest people. Have you ever noticed that Mother Goose never asks questions, except, perhaps, indirectly, — or leading ones, like this? I have no doubt that you have, and do therefore despise all that are questions in form.

The mystics, from Pythagoras down, have taught a doctrine which is the sacred head or obverse of this sterling one. They held that “nothing concerning the gods, or divine doctrines, is to be doubted.” “Nothing is to be doubted as to its unconditional possibility, or as possible with God,” is the response of science. The unintelligible cannot be doubted — nor believed. And it is only about probabilities, the conditionally possible, — what is likely, not merely possible, that questions are legitimate or answers useful, for any but social and religious purposes. Beyond the court of science, and the jurisdiction of the probable, creeds are social badges of differences, which, to be rational, should be peacefully and lovingly maintained. Within this court, even axioms are only “the most probable.” They have no peculiar sanctity, and

must lay aside their priestly robes, or bear to have them defiled. Axioms in science have no “benefit of clergy,” but are tried like all the rest by the laws of induction. . . .

The now established doctrine of natural history, or biological science, — that genetic or inherited characters, and their variations, are not always fitted, even in the average, to circumstances of life (and are exactly fitted only by accident), and that the amendment of this defect is not, in general, to be found in the individual life, — opposes itself to the mystical doctrine that such ill-fittings are prophetic. The remedy for the ills that follow to the individual life is to be found only in the more vigorous development, and the prevalence in it of such powers as are adapted to its circumstances; or else by such command as is practicable of circumstances that are found by an intelligent examination of our natures to be fitted to them. Our natures are, it is true, prophetic, so far as by making themselves known to us in recognized past examples, and by thus defining for us their true circumstances or conditions of development, they lead us as reasonable beings to seek for these. No wonder that in Goethe — whose genius found no parallel in history, and was abetted by a powerful scientific inquisitiveness — it should at first have thought itself prophetic, and sought its destiny by suicide. But he also had the sense to wait, and the will to make the circumstances to which in old age it became so easily adjusted. No doubt, the adjustment between our natures and circumstances is mutual. If we live long enough, the “mystic sense” in us, unless too fondly cherished, may die first. “If every one lived to be old, no one would believe in immortality,” was said, near the end of her life, by a free-thinking but hardworking and devoted woman.

In the last letter, Chauncey gives some account of a meeting with his old friend, the Rev. Rufus Ellis. Dr. Ellis, in the

letter from which I have already made one extract, has referred to this same interview, in a passage which I will insert here. In doing so, I retain some expressions of opinion which may at least emphasize the catholic and kindly estimate formed by Dr. Ellis of one with whose conclusions, in some particulars, he so widely differed.

“I removed,” he says, “to Boston whilst Chauncey was in Cambridge; and, as one never sees the nearest persons so much as those who are occasionally near, I saw but little of him during his University life. . . . More than once we met during the summer vacation days, — once especially for more days than one, and I found what he had become. It was a strange experience, and yet I suppose not an uncommon one in these days, — sad in so many respects, if this must be regarded as an abiding or final state; but the promise of a very sweet dawn seemed to be wrapped up in the darkness. I remember a day’s drive with the philosopher who, as a boy, had been my parishioner, and how from the beginning to the end of it we talked about the highest religious themes, — God, duty, immortality. Once it came to my mind, What does our driver — a simple colored brother and Methodist deacon — think of all this? but I saw that, happily, it was Sanskrit to him. To one who looked only at the appearance, and rested on the surface, the minister was talking with a man who from having been his Sunday-school pupil in childhood had ‘developed’ into a full-grown infidel. And certainly as to the affirmations of Christian faith he was singularly lacking; but a few moments’ conversation with him would have convinced any candid man that here was one whose religion it was to have no religion, and that whatever he was, he was by the grace of God. I could not but be sorry, profoundly so, that he had not been so mastered by the Divine Master as to have been filled with religious faiths

and hopes, and thus furnished with the very facts which were to him so essential; but the light in him was so pure and steady that he seemed to me all unconsciously to have been enlightened of the One True Light, and his perfect candor and sweetness were more than what we call natural. He did not talk for victory, but as one who sought for truth, and rejoiced in it. There was no pause in his moral faith; and had I been the prophet I ought to have been, and witnessed as clearly as might be for the kingdom of God as Christ is revealing it in our world, I could not have asked for a more promising hearer of the good tidings. As it was, it seemed to me that we came nearer together; and, whilst I have sometimes come away from converse with men of immaculate orthodoxy, and most scrupulous in all ceremonies and ordinances, with a feeling that between them and me there was a great gulf, and that their religion and mine were essentially different, I was conscious of nothing of the kind when I returned with Chauncey from our day’s voyage out upon the fathomless and shoreless ocean of religious speculation. We had the same city in view, and its Builder and Maker is God. I cannot doubt that the heavens which seemed closed above him on earth are open now, and that being of the truth he hears the Teacher’s voice. I could see as we talked that the dogmatism of those who are known as advanced thinkers was as offensive to him as the dogmatism of the religionist; and, that whilst he hoped to find out what was right by learning what was useful, he recognized a motive power above and within all consequences, and had, however unnamed and unmapped, his realm of holy mystery, and was guided, however unwittingly, by the divine counsel. ‘A dangerous man,’ does some one say, ‘and able to deceive the very elect;’ but such was not the effect of his life and conversation, noticeably not upon the young, with whom he was so great a favorite. He destroyed no man’s, no child’s faith; but was fitted to show to all who would discern the signs of the times, what it is that some who seem to be irreligious are waiting for, ‘as they who wait for the morning.’” While Chauncey was on this visit at Mattapoisett, the daughter of his host secured the taking of what is called his “mental photograph;” and she has most kindly sent it to me. I am sure that Chauncey’s friends will thank her for the leave I have to print here this amusing paper, which is at the same time so characteristic. The patient, it will be remembered, while undergoing this process, is seated at a number of written questions, and writes his answers. “I remember Mr. Wright,” says Miss Shattuck, “perfectly as he wrote the answers, and seemed to take pleasure in thinking them out. Your favorite color? Ans. The complementary. Your favorite flower? Ans. The red, red rose. Your favorite tree? Ans. The Great Elm. Your favorite object in nature? Ans. Vistas of mountains. Your favorite hour in the day? Ans. 11 to 12 p. m. Your favorite season of the year? Ans. Days in June. Your favorite perfume? Ans. Incense of Havana. Your favorite style of beauty? Ans. The animated. Your favorite poets? Ans. Shakespeare and Tennyson. Your favorite prose authors? Ans. Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin. Your favorite character in romance? Ans. Plato’s Socrates. In history? Ans. The real Socrates. Book to take up for an hour? Ans. The one one feels inclined to read. What book (not religious) would you part with last? Ans. The one no one would care to borrow. August 9, 1874. What epoch would you choose to have lived in? Ans. The most modern. Where would you like to live? Ans. In the most familiar place. What is your favorite amusement? Ans. Metaphysics. What is your favorite occupation? Ans. Mathematical problems. What trait of character do you most admire in man? Ans. The disposition to be just. What trait of character do you most admire in woman? Ans. Thoughtful sympathy. What trait of character do you most detest in each? Ans. Brutality and vanity. If not yourself, who would you rather be? Ans. Nobody. What is your idea of happiness? Ans. Undisturbed, easy occupation. What is your idea of misery? Ans. Distracted ennui. What is your dream? Ans. Of flying. What is your favorite game? Ans. Solitaire. What do you believe to be your distinguishing characteristics? Ans. Ignorance and modesty. If married, what do you believe to be the distinguishing characteristics of your better-half? Ans. To wish to be married to another man, and therefore unhappy. What are the saddest words in the world? Ans. Those beginning with D, — as death, debt, diseases, dishonor, and all the d—d dises. What is your aim in life? Ans. To secure the most trustworthy means of happiness. What is your motto? Ans. The greatest good of the greatest number. ⁸⁰

To Miss Grace Norton.

Aug. 18, 1874.

When I say that any thing is not true, I generally mean that I think the statement inadequate, inexact, or even logically misleading, — a naming of what is true, perhaps, but a darkening, not an illuminating naming. I am often wholly engrossed in the interest of the form of truth. What does not tally with the balance of accurate statements seems, in my dissatisfaction, of little or no account, or to belong to the confused infinite of what we do not at all know. This Socratic disposition is apt to disregard the feeling for truths which, though inadequately embodied in words, are yet not the less — are perhaps even the more — deeply interesting.

But I also have the feeling which made Socrates, as he testifies in the “Apology,” very annoying to those with whom he discussed; namely, that there is no merit in any really known truth, however sacred to any one, greater than clearness and adequacy of expression. Many truths are, perhaps, better worth knowing than those which may have acquired this merit; but their worth is not really attained without it, though often involved in our personal worth, — in our experience, insights, and latent powers of giving birth, or external form, just proportions, and objective value to truth.

In discussions about abstract matters, in which one’s views are as inseparable from one’s self as our features are, the dialogue sometimes seems to me like that of the half-enchanted people in the “Tempest,” — each seeing and talking unintelligibly

about a different unexplored world. So I never aim at attacking any persons, though doubtless I seem to, since you so judge, — no real persons at least, or even imaginary ones, that could possibly stand for any real ones I know. Much less am I inclined to say to any one, as you suggest, “I think you are greatly mistaken;” for I think that the saying of this, though conventionally a civil or perhaps gallant way of conducting a discussion or closing it, does not lead to that end of discussion which seems to me desirable when I get into it. I think, on looking back by the light of your letter upon, the mood in which I wrote mine, that I could not make entirely clear to you, far less justify to you, what it was, — what idiosyncrasy of nature it came from, but, as it seems, did not fairly represent. It seems to me now a curious mixture of that which Dr. Walker alluded to in characterizing his friend — as having “an irritable intellect,” with an unsteady, flickering desire for friendly discussion, —not a desire for apparent conquest in discussion. . . . The letter, or essay, was a sort of preaching, not at all considerate, as I now see, — but not, as I venture to hope, essentially more disrespectful than that kind of literature is apt to be, although turned in an opposite direction. This style does not apply truths, or mean to apply them, but only utters applicable truths on general themes. . . . From the opinions of no persons that I know do I pretend to comprehend the personality in its springs so well as to be much surprised at the unexpected in what they may say or do. What is said by another, I am often disposed to cavil at, but not at all as charging thorough misconceptions or culpable confusions in any way peculiar. I am sure I have not imagination enough to adequately grasp or to sympathize with or assume for myself temporarily the mental history and life of another, so as to lead out of these to what might seem to me a better way of looking at things. I have only imagination enough to feel that I have not enough for this.

Impersonality seems to me to belong to the very essence of truth. To quote texts and criticise what is said, doing this without malice and without wilfully perverting its obviously intended meaning, and to test statements by the only tests that are valid, namely, what both parties believe clearly, or accept without question of fact or meaning, —is not to my feeling a personal attack. . . . Perhaps that was the effect on my style of the mood I was in. I had on Sunday, at Miss -----’s, just such a mood, and drove -----, in a discussion on art, not exactly to refusing to speak to me further, but to the perception, I imagine, of the true cause. It was, I suppose, a mad perversion, through emphasis, of an enthusiasm for exactness and systematic understanding, which forgets for the time the rights of persons.

To Miss Jane Norton.

Friday evening [September, 1874].

... I went [to Magnolia] for only a day’s visit, — the last day, as I had heard, of Mrs. Lesley’s stay there. I had missed her on a previous visit, and had put off the second till the last moment. But my coming induced her to linger two days longer by the sea, — perfect days of autumn weather. We drove to see the Gurneys at Beverly on Saturday; and all the short time at the seaside seemed, while it lasted, to be a season off from Cambridge times and circumstances.

But now these have had their revenge, and put those days off into telescopic distance and minuteness. As usual, when I come back to Cambridge from long or short absences, I come to it like a clod to its native earth, with all motive impulses expended and satisfied.

Before I went away last week, I got my head full of “facts for Darwin” from the stores of knowledge in Mr. Sophocles, touching the gestures of the Eastern peoples he had known;

and especially the gestures of the head, which I have long speculated about in relation to optical theories. These facts fitted on to my older observations and speculations (and even a “Magnolia” perspective gave me one good related point of optics). I have now written it all out in a letter to Mr. Darwin; adding three new points on expression that I have picked up this week, — two of them from Mr. Lowell, on the gestures of the Italians. I read to him on Wednesday all the rest I had set down. So you see I have not been idle, nor left entirely without explanation the appearance of coldness towards the attractions of Ashfield. I suppose that now, having got the matter all down in black and white, I shall gradually harden my heart towards it; so that when we meet I shall look upon it and treat it as a weak enthusiasm, — as old people look upon athletic sports. It is well that I did not sooner quench my thoughts in ink; for it seems to leave me without resource to turn to.

What satisfaction there must be in the habit of reading! The power to give one’s self up graciously to a book is the wealthiest habit, I imagine, that one can acquire. It is fulness itself, or an endless and ever-ready resource. To make books is to have one’s hive robbed. Now, I attack a book as a bee does a petunia, not reaching its honey delicately, as its regular customers, the night-moths, do; but biting into its nectary, or breaking in like a burglar. Yet the bee is accounted by moralists the more virtuous insect; the rule in the moral world being, since all fall so far short of perfection, to award praise where praise is most needed as a motive, rather than most fit or deserved in an absolute way. Still, I think bees and ants (as well as their Author) are much misunderstood by moralists; they love the excitement of their brisk business, and stand in no such need of praise or social support for a motive, as the lazy, unproductive people do who are sent to observe and imitate them. The rationale of rewards and

punishments has to do with the use of them, and involves essentially the short-comings of the agent, or the feebleness of motives to actions, as well as the absolute value of the actions themselves. Hence, hymns of praise seem to the practical utilitarian a sort of fetish worship, or else hyperbolical,— misleading either way, as matters of reverent belief. — The chief end of morals, however, seems to be to afford topics for my letters!

To Mr. Darwin.

Cambridge, Sept. 3, 1874.

In a late talk with Dr. Gray, he expressed so much interest in certain points of observation and inquiry which I have lately made on the gestures of the head, that I am encouraged to think they will be of sufficient interest to you to warrant my claiming your attention for them. I was led to this subject by my great interest in your principles of expression and a desire to trace them out in new directions, but principally through coming unexpectedly upon the matter from what at first sight seems a remote line of investigation.

For clearness, I ought first to explain this briefly. Many years ago, the problem of the physiological cause of the intensification of the sunset colors, produced by looking at them with the head inverted or much inclined on one side, interested me, and I found that the effect was not due to the position of the eyes, but to that of the images in them, since the same effect is observed in paintings of sunset by inverting the pictures instead of the head; and, later, I observed that reflections of the colors in a horizontal mirror, or in the surface of smooth water, gave the same result. I then roughly generalized the hypothesis that any distortion of a view, by withdrawing attention from the interpretation of forms, sizes, and distances, or from mensural perception, gave prominence,

at least, if not greater intensity, to the consciousness of colors as mere sensations. This was in accordance with the recognized principle in psychology that perception and sensation are in inverse relations to consciousness, — “inversely proportioned,” as Sir W. Hamilton expresses it; or, as I prefer to state the fact, the consciousness of a sensation as a sign is accompanied by a diminished consciousness of it in its special quality and quantity as a sensation. The application of this principle to the explanation of the phenomena considered was apparently confirmed by a fact which I learned from an artist; namely, that certain defects of form, where colors are not employed, as in crayon portraits, are discovered by artists by inverting their pictures! For a long time I vaguely associated this fact with the above theory; but I have lately come to think that the true explanation of the heightening of colors and that of bringing out small defects in form by a change or distortion of aspect are different though analogous explanations; and this difference seems to promise a useful point in the difficult psycho-physical problem of mensural or space perception.

But I must not stop to explain this here. To pass directly to the matter in hand, the next fact that came to my notice in this connection was an observation by a gentleman, which I got from him in talk a few months ago. When a boy, he noticed and called his father’s attention to the fact that the servant girl, in arranging the furniture of a room or the table, inspected her work critically, not by looking straight at it from various points of view, but askant, and in walking by it. “Was this,” he asked, “because the side vision is keener than that of direct looking?” “Not at all,” the old gentleman answered, “for, if I wish to see exactly what time it is, I look straight at the clock; so,” — with his eyes directed straight at the clock, but with his head decidedly though unconsciously inclined to one side. On telling this story to a friend, and

mentioning in connection with it the habit of artists of observing their work sidewise for the effects of finishing-touches (one artist, celebrated for his crayon portraits, whom I know, has a mirror at his right into which to glance for the effects of touches; and lately I read in an English novel how the heroine, being busied with the final touches of a drawing, glanced sidewise at them), my friend remarked that a woman, in examining the fitting and other points of another woman’s dress, will turn her head first to one side and then to the other, stepping backwards, and around the object of her inspection.

These facts led me to think that there is a serviceableness or advantage in the side-glance and a meaning in it, besides the sheep’s-eye of shyness, or the movement away from direct vision from the desire to conceal the look. A dog, such as the one whose picture you give in Chapter I., under the topic of “Associated Habitual Movements in the Lower Animals,” watches for things he is on the alert for, or when in uncertainty about what is going to happen, as when waiting for a gesture of command from his master, — with his head turned so as to raise one eye above the other. But the intentness of watching in simple expectation is effected by direct and level vision, as in the pointer. It occurred to me that, in the case of a woman, as a dressmaker, inspecting another’s dress, the movement of the head is possibly in part a true gesture, or expression of critical interest, as well as a really serviceable movement; and that, as a gesture, it is derived from the serviceable habit, in accordance with your first principle of expression.

I was then led to look for the exhibition of this gesture as a true unmixed one, or as depending merely on association, and as the gesture of critical interest or consideration. Not only are the eyes often half-shut in abstraction or meditation, but the head is often inclined on one side; and an instance of the lateral movement of the head is incidentally mentioned by you

where you illustrate the movement of the eyebrow in recollection, — the case of the “young lady earnestly trying to recollect a painter’s name, and she looked to one corner of the ceiling, and then to the opposite corner, arching the one eyebrow on that side.” Two of my friends show in a very marked manner— so marked that their acquaintances, to whom I have mentioned it, recognize the gesture at once as a characteristic one — the gesture of slow lateral movements of the head from side to side with pauses between, in giving serious attention or consideration to what is said. One of these gentlemen is a professor of law in Harvard University. The other is a grandson of a distinguished professor of theology in the College, of half a century ago, who had the same characteristic movement; and many now living who remember the grandfather are vividly reminded of him by this characteristic in the grandson. Other instances have occurred to my memory of this habit, which does not seem to me so rare, except in the degree of its manifestation in these two cases, as to be properly called a trick-gesture.

Without giving here the speculation I have pursued on the primary serviceableness of these movements, I will come at once to the matter to which all the above is preliminary. You state, on the authority of Dr. Lieber and Mr. Tylor, that the Turks express yes by a movement like that made by us when we shake our heads. This seemed to me, when I first read it, very strange, and it lay as a doubt in my mind until, on independent grounds, the shake of the head began to have to me the new significance which I have indicated; and the hypothesis then occurred to me that, in a derived or secondary meaning, it might signify a deliberative or cautious assent, or else an acquiescent deliberation, —besides having the meaning of pure categorical negation it has with us, and the meaning of disapprobation, anger, or threatening it has (as I have ascertained) throughout the East, with the Greeks, Turks, and

Arabs, or Semitics generally, and also had in the East in ancient times. I fortunately bethought me, at this point in my speculation, of an authority who turns out to be a much better one than I had imagined. Professor Sophocles — whose scholarly works, and especially his “Lexicon of Byzantine and Patristic Greek” and his “History of the Greek Alphabet,” have given him a great reputation with European philologues — is a native of Greece. His boyhood was passed at his birthplace on one of the slopes of Mount Pelion; and his early youth, in Egypt, at the celebrated ancient monastery at Cairo, of which the superior was his uncle. His education was finished in this country, at Yale College, from which he came to Harvard as a teacher of Greek many years ago. He has been Professor of Greek, Ancient and Modern, here for fifteen years; and has twice returned since he has been here, for short visits to Greece and travels in the East. But, in spite of all this, I did not at first think that his memory was to be trusted as to the negative fact, on which he has insisted strongly, namely, that the Turks do not signify yes by a shake of the head. It was only by accident, in a second talk with him on this and related subjects, that I found he still retains several characteristic expressions of his native country, and unreflectively makes use of them, with an instinctive sense of their meaning. For instance, he informed me that he frequently finds himself making the Greek sign of simple objective negation (the equivalent of οὐ); namely, nodding the head upwards. The cluck which accompanies this gesture among the Greeks and Turks is also used by him sometimes, as I learn from an officer of the College who sees him much oftener than I do. I have got a valuable hint from him as to the fundamental meaning or primary association of the cluck. I had previously noticed, unreflectively, the upward nod, — attaching no significance to it, though the accompanying half-closure and downward looking of the eyes indicated clearly enough the dissent he was expressing. If I had reflected on the gesture, I should have regarded it as a trick, — a very familiar one to me, as I recognized on his making it and explaining to me its meaning and its origin in his early habits. Another seeming trick was also familiar to me, but is now explained as the common Eastern gesture of beckoning or invitation; namely, moving the hand towards the body with the palm turned inward, but downward, instead of upward, as with us. A gesture which I had never seen him use unreflectively, but which, as I have since learned, others have seen in him, he explained to me as the Eastern equivalent of snapping the fingers to express contempt, and more abstractly to express minuteness, and secondarily nothing or negation, — namely, touching the upper front teeth with the thumb-nail, and then snapping it away, as if throwing away a bit of the nail.

Remembering that you had found no interpretation for the cluck, which is made by withdrawing the tongue suddenly from adhesive contact with the upper teeth and front palate, I cautiously asked Professor Sophocles, thinking that, as a philologue, he would have ingenious theories on the subject, what, independently of any theory, his sense of the primary meaning of the cluck was, or whether he attached any other meaning to it than that of simple negation. He immediately answered that it meant smallness, being the smallest of vocal sounds; and he proceeded to compare it to the gesture with the thumb-nail, which he said also meant nothingness or mere negation. We afterwards thought of similar verbal combinations of expression, as in English, “Not a bit,” “Not a jot;” or, in French, ne — pas or ne — point. He says that, among the common people of Greece, as with the shepherds he knew in the mountains, it is common to illustrate stupidity or clownishness in any one by saying of him that he answered a call from a distance, as, “Have you seen my sheep?” with, —and here

the upward nod and cluck are given. The clown should have answered, to make himself understood, by the verbal negation, which in ancient Greek was οὐχί, and to which the modern negative is similar. The upward nod and the cluck are the equivalent of the pure objective or matter-of-fact negative; namely, οὐ, or its modern equivalent, but is never used with the particle μή, which expresses the subjective negative; namely, doubt, disapprobation, warning, or threatening. With this negative, the shake of the head is the only head-gesture. Mr. Sophocles has often seen Turks shake their heads in anger, and to express threats or strong disapprobation; and this gesture, he says, is universal with the Eastern peoples he knows. This was the case also in ancient times. The passage (Matt, xxvii. 39), “And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads,” is paralleled by the passages in Psalms, noted in Reference Bibles; namely, xxii. 7, “All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out [protrude?] the lip, they shake the head;” and Ps. cix. 25, “I became also a reproach unto them; when they looked upon me, they shaked their heads.” The word in Matthew, translated “wagging,” is from σείω, and κατασείω “is in sign of disapprobation,” according to the Lexicon.

A rapid shaking of the head is a common gesture towards children to express disapproval or warning; or by them to express dislike or refusal, and seems to be a very natural one; and, as the equivalent of the subjective negative μή, is not only natural, but also much more extensive than appears when we do not thus limit its meaning. In this meaning, the origin you propose for it, as well as the origin of μή, becomes the more probable. The repetition and rapidity of the shake appears to give emphasis to its meaning, as reduplications do in the etymologies of vocal signs; for example, to express perfect past actions. Mr. Sophocles explains the apparent non-comprehension of the shake of the head by the Arabs on

the Nile, as observed by Dr. and Mrs. Gray, by their interpreting the shake as a threat or wagging, or as an expression of disapprobation, and by their not seeing the applicability of the gesture with this meaning to the particular occasions.

The gesture of objective negation, the upward nod for οὐ, appears to belong equally to the modern and to the ancient Greeks. Liddell and Scott say ἀνανεύω, I nod up, is the equivalent in token of denial of our shaking the head. It is opposed to κατανεύω, which expresses both the gesture and the meaning of simple affirmative. Both gestures belong to the modern Greeks as well as to the Turks. Mr. Sophocles has often seen Turks in their cafés, listening to narratives of travellers, as of merchants from the West. Etiquette forbids them to interrupt the speaker by words; but they express their interest and assent very conspicuously by close attention and by continually bowing their heads with great gravity. If any thing is said, however, to which they are unwilling to assent, they throw their heads straight back. He assures me that he has never seen them under such circumstances shake their heads. It would not follow that, under other circumstances, they might not use this gesture, and for other purposes than to express anger or disapprobation, though it seems probable that the gesture is not used for simple affirmation.

I have concluded, as to the value of Mr. Sophocles’s testimony, that, though it is that of a memory of long-past scenes, and without conscious or designed observation, yet, as coming from his instincts or habitual impressions, it is better than the record of a naturalist would be, who might have misinterpreted the recorded gesture.

In ancient Greek, ἀνανεύω and κατανεύω are in direct antithesis, and are the names of the gestures as well as of their meanings. Ἐπινεύω was also used as an equivalent for the latter, though not, Mr. Sophocles says, as a name for the

gesture; but, according to the Lexicon, it expresses the nod of approval or command. Άπονεύω had for a secondary meaning “to refuse by shaking the head.” Mr. Sophocles quoted to me from memory a curious passage in an early part of the Acharnians of Aristophanes to the following effect,—but I have not verified it: A Greek countryman is examining one who is really a Greek, but pretends to be a Persian ambassador. To a question concerning the intention of the Persian monarch, the sham ambassador answers by an upward nod. Stage direction, ἀνανεύει. To the next question, he answers with the downward nod, indicated also by a stage direction, κατανεύει. The countryman then says: “He nods like a Greek. I will question him further.” This, as Mr. Sophocles remarked, may indicate that in these gestures the ancient Greeks and Persians differed. The passage referred to begins at line 109 in Ribbeck’s edition of the play. ⁸¹

Now I was led to all this curious inquiry, as I have said, by a wish to discover the source of discrepancy between the authorities you quote on the affirmative meaning of the shake of the head with the Turks, and that of Mr. Sophocles; and I have conjectured that such a gesture may mean with the grave and reticent Turk either a deliberative assent, or an acquiescent consideration, or an emphatic expression of one or both of these states of mind. The original serviceableness of the movements from which such a gesture might be derived I take to be as follows: When any thing is seen in a natural aspect, or with direct and level vision, — anticipation, or expected and ideally determined looking, may interfere with true objective perception, and produce illusion in respect to slight features of form, or slight changes in form from movement. I call this an effect in perception of ideation. To avoid illusion from such an

effect on minutiae and “to see how it strikes the eye,” the artist examines his work askant, or by inversion, or by reflection from a mirror; or the watching animal will revolve its head so as to incline the medial plane of vision. The critical state of mind accompanying this serviceable movement will by the directest association tend to produce it, even when the service is very slight, or is of no account; so that the movement becomes a true expression of this state of mind from the very start, and will be a voluntary one whenever sympathy prompts to the expression of critical interest; as when politeness makes us attend to what is pointed out or submitted to our inspection. It will be made conspicuous, as .in the preacher, whenever this state of mind urges to the expression of itself with emphasis, as in solemn asseveration.

I may remark here, by the way, that according to the observation of a very intelligent English lady, long resident with us, who has lately returned from a short visit to England, emphatic expressive movements of the features and head are much more common, especially among women, in America, than in the same classes of persons in England; apparently, because etiquette does not forbid it here so strictly. The greater animation both in action and in fixed expression of the average American countenance, as compared with the English, has been remarked by others, and I have myself noticed it. We may believe that one of the most direct effects of civilization, or more properly of cultivation, is to make the subjects of it, and especially the subjects of self-culture, seek to difference themselves as much as possible from the manners of the uncultivated, with whom emphatic bodily expression is a prominent characteristic, derived from the savage. The very spirit of refinement, and the end of fine art, appear to be the avoidance of vulgar emphasis; and to reach the desired effects of it indirectly, by the composition in expression of congruent accessories which are individually

weak and are the stronger in combination from the beauty of novelty and distinction.

The speculation from which I started on this line of research — namely, as to the cause of intensification in the colors of sunset, when seen by inverted or much distorted vision, and which I for a long time failed to separate by its distinctive marks from the speculation just mentioned, on an effect of ideation — has now assumed for me a new and very great interest. The explanation I have now reached is analogous to the above, but is physiological. Colors are, I believe, not merely reduced from special attention by abstraction when the vision is engaged in mensural perception, or on perspective signs and marks, but are actually not produced in consciousness with the same degree of intensity, I think, for the following reasons: I extend the word “innervation” from its present physiological use, to denote not merely the incitement of motor nerves from the nerve-centres; but also that of the nerves of tactual surfaces, the retina included, or the action of attention on such nerves in mensural or space perception. This action of innervation wakens up, I suppose, all the nerves of such a surface; so that single and separate nerves cannot, on account of this division of nerve force, be externally excited to such a degree as when most of the nerves are asleep or inactive. The intensity of a sensation does not depend on the number of nerves affected. The lesion of a single nerve may produce the most intense and all-absorbing pain. Tickling is such an intense sensation; in it, single isolated nerves or small groups of nerves are externally excited. “The precise point to be touched in tickling must not be known,” as you remark. That is, the surface tickled must not be in use for space perception; which, as I suppose, involves the internal activity, innervation, or incitement of all the nerves of the surface. Such an attention to any surface as tickling one’s

self implies, is a perceptive use of that surface; so that, as you also remark, “a child can hardly tickle itself, or in a much less degree than when tickled by another person.” This is, I think, because nerve force or nutrition cannot in such a case be concentrated so as to produce intense action in single nerves.

Now I apply this theory of tickling to the passive perception of colors. I suppose the mind to be withdrawn from attention to minute perspective marks by an inverted or distorted vision; and although the colored lights fall continuously on extended parts of the retina, yet, I suppose, single nerves are accidentally more excited than their neighbors, and draw nerve force or nutrition to themselves. In other words, I suppose nerve force or nutrition in passive sensation to be in unstable equilibrium, and to tend to points in which it is accidentally first excited; whereas, in the mensural perception of minute space differences and marks, the innervation is uniform and steady. And so I was led to suppose that the intensification of inverted sunset colors is a sort of tickling of the retina. I suppose “innervation” to prevent or check the intensity of impressions in this case, just as “ideation” prevents or checks minute objective perception in other cases of direct and level or ordinary vision.

I studied a few days ago, at the seashore, the effect on an ordinary perspective view of an inverted or much inclined vision, with reference to effects independent of color which were first brought to my notice as objections to this theory. I found that judgments of distance were not, in the gross, diminished, but were, if affected at all, rather increased on the whole; yet the parts of the vista were roughly grouped, as in a landscape painting compared to a natural scene. Thus, the foreground of grass and shrubs by the shore, the water between them and a distant island, the island itself, and the open sea beyond touching the sky, seemed, compared to the

continuous natural perspective, so many successive and separate flat plains of the picture. In this case, it was clear that the minute perspective judgments of ordinary vision were much enfeebled.

It had long before occurred to me that painters, who, until lately, in aiming at making their pictures most natural in aspect, have used, instinctively, less pronounced colors than those of natural scenes, have done so on account, I conceived, of the. inherent imperfections of the perspective marks and signs of their art, and in order to keep the two kinds of vision in harmony with one another. If I am right in this, the more recent style of painting in vivid colors is in error, unless the beauties of color and atmospheric illuminations are the ends aimed at, as appears to be the case in some of Turner’s paintings. But, in this case, the careful and minute rendering of forms, practised by the same school of realists in art, would be an inconsistent aim \ though it might be justified on other grounds than those put forward, — on opposite grounds, indeed; namely, not of following nature, but imposing what is virtually a new convention, a self-imposed restriction, or condition, within which greater and greater perfection may be sought.

But the most important bearing of this theory, and to me the most interesting, is in consequences touching the empirical theory of space-perception, into which, however, it will not do for me to extend this letter, already, I fear, too promiscuous and too long.

I have just received a curious confirmation of the above theory of affirmative head-shaking from Professor Lowell. He said that, during his late visit to Italy, he frequently noticed (in Southern Italy, he believed) a shake of the head like our negative one which has an affirmative signification, but appears, as he remembers it, to express deliberative assent rather

than simple affirmation. This confirmation was the more valuable, since it was given by him before I had fully explained the points of the above theory, or more than put the problem before him. He suggests, since the population of Southern Italy is a mixed one, and as the Saracens lived there for a considerable time, that this gesture may have come from the East. He also mentioned — what I had before heard described— the habit in the common people of Italy of expressing anger by a rapid shaking of the head. But this gesture is, I suppose, more likely to come from the habits of childhood, or from innate dispositions, than by tradition from the East.

To this admirable letter Mr. Darwin wrote a prompt reply on September 21; but, owing to some error in the address of his letter, it did not reach its destination, and was returned to England from the dead-letter office. Mr. Darwin then forwarded it again on January 29, 1875, remarking, in a postscript, “It is by no means worth forwarding; but I cannot bear that you should think me so ungracious and ungrateful as not to have thanked you for your long letter.”

Mr. Darwin had said: “I have read your letter with the greatest interest; and it was extremely kind of you to take such great trouble. Now that you call my attention to the fact, I well know the appearance of nervous moving the head from side to side when critically viewing any object; and I am almost sure that I have seen the same gesture in an affected person when speaking in exaggerated terms of some beautiful object not present. I should think your explanation of this gesture was the true one. But there seems to me a rather wide difference between inclining or moving the head laterally and moving it in the same plane, as we do in negation and, as you truly add, in disapprobation. It may, however, be that these movements of the head have been

confounded by travellers when speaking of the Turks. Perhaps Professor Lowell would remember whether the movement was identically the same. Your remarks on the effects of viewing a sunset, &c., with the head inverted, are very curious. We have a looking-glass in the drawing-room opposite the flower-garden; and I have often been struck how extremely pretty and strange the flower-garden and surrounding bushes appear when thus viewed. Your letter will be very useful to me for a new edition of my Expression book; but this will not be for a long time. ... I dare say you intend to publish your views in some essay; and I think you ought to do so, for you might make an interesting and instructive discussion.”

To Miss Sara Sedgwick.

[1874.]

It will give me great pleasure to join in the delight the children will have in Mr. Trowbridge’s honest and natural magic. The choice of time seems happy, and' refers, I presume, to the religious instruction of the children; for the science of electricity is, you know, an explosion of the “theological theory of thunder.” If time remains after the exhibition, why shouldn’t we have the reading of a Greek tragedy by way of corrective and relief? “Œdipus at Colonos,” in which the hero is warned by Zeus, in peals of thunder, of his approaching exit to Hades, would be an appropriate choice. We might thus restore to poetry what is taken from dogma.

To the Same.

Dec. 18, 1874.

I am sorry to be unable to deceive your young friend this evening, but shall be consoled, if he will at some other time submit to my impostures.

It is difficult, without experience, to appreciate the satisfaction of the juggler, — a small divinity in his way. There is no love of power more natural or instinctive than that which we instinctively refer to the divus; namely, the desire to excite fear and wonder. And so I am sorry again that I have not discovered or invented, either in magic or science, any new miracles for Christmas, to serve for interlude or afterpiece to the play; but I shall have the nobler satisfaction of sympathy with the children’s performances,—in imitation of a later and finer, or more humane, attribute of the divus, or more truly of the diva, — whose I am very truly.