Volume 1

The letters of William James / edited by his son, Henry James.

  • William James
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The letters of William James / edited by his son, Henry James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    world, it will still survive in this dear and shabby old country; though I suppose the same sort of thing is really to be found in the East even more than in Italy, and that we shall seek it there when Italy has got as tram-roaded and modernized all over as Berlin. It is a curious smell of the past, that lingers over everything, speech and manners as well as stone and stuff's! I went to Padua last week to a Galileo anniversary. It was splendidly carried out, and great fun; and they gave all of us foreigners honorary degrees. I rather like being a doctor of the University of Padua, and shall feel more at home than hitherto in the “Merchant of Venice.” I have written a letter to the “Nation” about it, which I commend to the attention of your gentle partner.1 . . . Mark Twain is here for the winter in a villa outside the town, hard at work writing something or other. I have seen him a couple of times — a fine, soft-fibred little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and good. I should think that one might grow very fond of him, and wish he’d come and live in Cambridge. I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental palsy that has been over me for the past year, and to take a little “notice” in matters philosophical. I am now read¬ ing Wundt’s curiously long-winded “System,” which, in spite of his intolerable sleekness and way of soaping every¬ thing on to you by plausible transitions so as to make it run continuous, has every now and then a compendiously stated truth, or apergu, which is nourishing and instructive. Come March, I will send you proposals for my work next year, to the “Cosmology” part of which I am just begin¬ ning to wake up. [A. W.] Benn, of the history of Greek 1 See “The Galileo Festival at Padua”: Nation (New York), Jan. 5, 1893; a four-column account of the Festival.
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