WJ's last words

To Mrs. Whitman:
"...I have found myself in much better condition than I was in last summer, and consequently better than for several years. It is pleasant to find that one s organism has such reparative capacities even after sixty years have been told out. But I feel as if the remainder couldn't be very long, at least for "creative" purposes, and I find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe s hash in one more book, which shall be epoch-making at last, and a title of honor to my children! Child ish idiot as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!" Letters, 1903

To Henry Adams:

...Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalises that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe s life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer!" Letters, June 1910

From A Pluralistic Mystic:

... “There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!” *