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.”