WCP6958

[1]¹

105 Irving Street,

Cambridge, Mass.,

July 6, 1915.

My dear Professor Poulton:

I must again apologise for my delay in writing this second letter, in answer to your inquiry which reached me last summer in California. When I wrote in California, I think that I already apologized for some delay which had then occurred. Now my delays, as I fear, have passed beyond the reasonable limits of apology. My own excuse, such as it is, lies in the fact that my power to keep up with obligations, both personal and official, with obligations both of correspondence, and of other modes of expression, have been very greatly hindered, and at times almost wholly inhibited by the war, and by its chaos of sorrows and of crimes,— a chaos from which, as I well know, and often sadly remember, my dear Oxford friends suffer in a vastly more manifold and intimate way than is possible to me,

What poor sympathy I, in my helplessness, am at the time able to show, I wrote down not long since in a personal letter to Professor Jacks,— a letter which I asked him to show to friends, or, if he pleased, to print, or in any way whatever to make public, however he might choose. I do not think much of that letter as an adequate expression of my views, or of anybody's right views of a situation which now concerns humanity as a while, more and more as the time goes on. My letter, however, contains some few words that might possibly interest Oxford friends. If you were to find any interest or relief in listening to a voice from a distance, you might at some time remind Jacks of my letter, and of my willingness to have him show it to anybody, at his own choice. And in that way my words might, by [2] change, be of monentary [sic. momentary? interest to you.

And now to return to your memory and to your question regarding William James's words about Wallace, and about the seance. My² 3 Pars. extracted here for my <dilf?> of A.R.W. in Roy.Soc Proc.

My memory as a witness about ^what followed that particular seance was fallible enough last summer, and is still more so now. But as the matter now lies in my mind, there was a determined effort, somewhat later than the time when James and I visited the seance,— an effort to seize and hold the materialized forms, so far my memory appears to agree with that of Wallace, as you report Wallace's account in your letter of February 7th. But my own memory continues by making me believe that the report generally current in Boston and in Cambridge about that time amongst those interested in seances in question, declared that, at least on one occasion, the seizure of the "materialized forms", and the "exposure" both of the medium and of the confederates, was successfully accomplished, But then this current report, if I am now correctly remembering what was then reported in my hearing, was, at best, a more or less untrustworthy report. In sum, there remains of the entire incident, in my own mind, James's characteristically apt comparison between Wallace, who had plunged in and was wet all over in the water, and ourselves, the supposedly critical inquirers, who stood on the shore shaking our feet, and so

"Letting I dare not wait upon I would

Like the poor cat in the adage."

I do not remember that James used this quotation or mentioned "the cat in the adage". James, as I remember, seemed ^merely to be referring to the timid or uneasily curious experimenters ⁱⁿ sea bathing, at the moment when they find the water chilly and a little unwelcome, and so splash a little and shake their feet. [3]

So much, I hope, meets your wish, after this long delay, — a delay for which I once more humbly beg your pardon.

With every good wish for you, for all my dear Oxford friends, for Oxford, and for England, I remain | Yours very truly, | Josiah Royce [signature]