You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
218F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
5 June 1914
Dear Friend,
I read your paper for the Jahrbuch1 yesterday and cannot refrain from congratulating you on it. I think it the best clinical contribution that has
appeared in any of the five volumes, unequalled in assurance, correctness, many-sidedness, and interest. Vivant sequentes!2
Rank will have written to you about the immediate political affairs that are engaging our attention. I do not share your confidence that the Zurichers and their Munich appendage will resign before the Congress. In any case, the uncertainty remains and disturbs our preparations for it. For should they attend, the preparations will have to be different from what they would be should we be left peacefully among ourselves.
I shall now make another attempt to spare ourselves the difficulties in question. I have made an appointment with Deuticke for Monday, and I shall ask him to make up and print my polemical historical contribution before anything else, so that the offprints can be dispatched before July. (Like you, I think it improbable that the Jahrbuch can come out so early.) I hope the editorial board agrees with this preferential treatment. I shall naturally send them out very generously. The advantage of this would be that we could be informed of the reaction of the Swiss before you send out the questionnaires on the Congress.
Another way would be for you to ask Maeder and Seif (at the right time) outright whether their groups propose to attend or not, and also emphasize particularly that your motivation is the necessity of determining the subject for discussion.
I am thinking of making it “The Objects and Aims of a Ψα Society”, in order to justify the association's existence, rebut the objections relating to restrictions on scientific research, and give a consilium abeundi3 to the Swiss, should they be present. In the event of our being undisturbed by them, the subject could still stand. I am not concerned about the effect on the American groups, who