Philip Littell

“ Besides, William James has known efficient workers whose memories were never very good tools, just as he has known efficient workers who had little power of voluntary attention. They did not lose heart. You need not lose heart. There is something which can make you efficient in spite of your untrustworthy memory and your wandering mind, and that something is passion for your work. If you keep passionately pegging away you will wake up one morning and find yourself among the experts at your kind of job. ”

“ Be brave, he tells you, though you lack all the gifts, the desirable and admirable gifts, which flower into intellectual greatness. But what if you lack all others as well? What if you are absolutely instead of relatively a duffer? ”

“ William James, being in achievement and at heart no unifier, no system-maker, has written many chapters which can usefully be reprinted each by itself. Almost any chapter illustrates his insight into details. Almost any chapter persuades us that here is a philosopher who shares not only such philosophic doubts and worries as we happen to have, but also a great many of our other interests. ”

“ Still it pays to be brave. The whole moral world remains open, where victories are won by men and women who have no mental force worth mentioning. Into each of us each of us can put, if he chooses, an indomitable something. And most of us can choose.
Open William James almost anywhere and before long your feet will be on just a moral trail as the one we have been following. Your guide never tries to deceive you. ”

“ Although a man's general retentiveness "is a physiological quality, given once for all with his organization, and which he can never hope to change," he can make his memory a more serviceable instrument by "elaborating the associates of each of the several things to be remembered." ”

“ He accuses philosophers of reducing all things to law by coolly overlooking large tracts of the irreducible. Would the particular philosophy he has been grappling with be very different, he asks, if its maker had spent his life shut up in a box? ”