William James 
Selected Letters of William James 

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The majority of the letters in this volume have been previously printed in The Letters of William James, edited by his son, Henry James, or in The Thought and Character of William James, by Ralph Barton Perry. Both of these large works came out of the most careful study of James’s correspondence and therefore the best of his letters will usually be found in one or the other. However, there are some letters here, taken from the Houghton Library collection at Harvard, not found in either of the two well-known collections. I cannot be sure they have not been printed or referred to in other studies of William James.<br><br>When I first compared the letters in the two collections with the original manuscripts at Harvard, I was struck by the generous number of commas, dashes, periods and paragraphs that James’s son, on the one hand, and Professor Perry, on the other, had added to the manuscript letters. I set about laboriously de-punctuating. I soon found that the pure originals by William James were written in such enthusiastic haste that the addition, here and there, of editorial punctuation is almost a necessity – unless, of course, one were doing a facsimile reproduction of the letters. Rather than add a third unauthorized set of punctuation marks to James’s almost unmarked pages, I returned to the punctuation used by previous editors.