“A superb demonstration”? -or “a good front”?

The grieving part of him knew the "demonstration" was rooted in delusion:

"James's friend F.W.H. Myers—a year younger than James and already very sick with a bad heart and arteries and an associated respiratory problem called Cheyne-Stokes breathing—contracted double pneumonia and died in Rome on January 17. James wrote Eleanor Sidgwick (the widow of his friend Henry Sidgwick and a close friend of the Myerses) that, instead of the usual sickroom atmosphere of "physical misery and moral suffering," Myers's eagerness to go, and his mental clarity up to the time the death agony began, had been a "superb" thing to see, "a demonstration ad oculos of the practical influence of a living belief in future existence."

James was, in part, putting on a good front. Another glimpse of the effect of Myers's death on James is provided by a young doctor, Axel Munthe, who, along with Baldwin, attended Myers. Munthe says, in The Story of San Michele, that he saw James sitting with notebook and pencil outside the room in which Myers was dying, waiting for some communication from the other side. "When I went away William James was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open notebook on his knees. The page was blank." 8"

— William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
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