The Letters of William James - Livres de poche

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: how many of them, when in good health and awake, had ever heard a voice, seen a form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for. James received about seven thousand answers to the inquiries that were sent out in America; and after he had digested and reported them, the results turned out to be in remarkable conformity with the returns.from other parts of the world. Some of James's own deductions from the returns will be found in the essay, "What Psychical Research has Accomplished."1 Among other things, the census showed apparitions corresponding with a distant event as occurring more than four hundred times oftener than could be expected from a calculation of chances. After this task had been completed, he usually avoided spending time in personal investigations. To Charles Renouvier. Keene Valley, Aug. 5,1883 Adirondacks. My Dear Monsieur Renouvier,?My silence has been so protracted that I fear you must have wondered what its reasons could be. Only the old ones! ? much to do, and little power to do it, obliging procrastination. You will doubtless have heard from the Pillons of my safe return home. I have spent the interval in the house of my mother- in-law in Cambridge, trying to do some work in the way of psychologic writing before the fatal day should arrive whenthe College bell, summoning me as well as my colleagues to the lecture-room, should make literary work almost impossible. Although my bodily condition, thanks to my winter abroad, has been better than in many years at a corresponding period, what I succeeded in accomplishing was well-nigh zero. I floundered round in the morasses of the theory of cognition,? the Object and the Ego,? tore up almost each day what I had written the day before, and although I am inwardly, of course, more awar...