412 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
anything more definite, although it seems that a council of doctors had pronounced his case one of cancer of the tongue. In another letter dated February i, 1908, he writes:
My seventieth year is giving me some very unpleasant experiences, but
I am not sick, and moreover I am a perfectly free man I have
promised myself now to make up something of what I have been neglecting during the last ten years in the domain of sociology — and therefore, first of all, to occupy myself with your sociology (which is really a cosmology) is something that I greatly desired. The correction of the proofs is a very agreeable (and now almost my only) occupation.
It was in his letter of October 24, 1908, that he first explained to me the nature of the "nervous shock" of a year previous. In that letter he says :
Things are going better with me now, and they were really bad only in the opinion of the doctors, who appear to have been mistaken. This is the way it was : At the end of 1907, in consequence of a wound made by the sharp corner of a tooth there was formed a small scar and swelling on the tongue. The physicians suspected a carcinoma and advised an opera- tion. I could not reconcile myself to it, and was resolved to take my life in case the opinion of the doctors should be proved correct. However, such was not the case. Since the vote of the doctors ten months have elapsed and no single symptom of carcinoma has shown itself^-on the contrary the swelling has diminished, and I find myself quite well.
Alas ! it was he who was mistaken.
My last letter from him is dated March 28, 1909. Pure Sociology was out (the German edition), and he had offered to revise the manuscript of Mrs. Unger's German translation of Applied Sociology, not yet finished. At the end of the letter he says:
I regret that I shall not survive the appearance of your Angewandte Soziologie, for I am in a bad way — my wife also, who thanks you heartily for your friendly words, is very poorly, so that we are both thinking more of the other side {an's Jenseits denken), and life is a burden to* us. I am sorry that I must close this letter with such bad news about myself, but I do not consider my situation as at all tragic, for I have already reached my seventy-second year. I have also the satisfaction of seeing my Rasscnkampf appear in the second edition (after 26 years!), and before my departure I shall leave to the world still another little Sozialphilosophie — my swan song.
