[Letter 1 · p. front matter] FROM-THE-LIBRARYOF TRINITYCOLLEGETORDNTO Gift of the Friends of the Library, Trinity College SOCIETY THE REDEEMED FORM OF MAN, THE EARNEST OF GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE IN HUMAN NATURE: AFFIRMED IN LETTERS TO A FRIEND BY HENRY JAMES. "Man during his earthly life induces a form in the purest substances of his interiors, so that he may be said to form his own soul, or give it quality; and according to the form or quality of soul he thus gives himself will be his subsequent receptivity to the Lord's inflowing life : which is a life of love to the whole human race." BOSTON: HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. Cfce Etoeratoe IDreaa, €amtri»ffe. 1879. COPYRIGHT, 1879. BY HENRY JAMES. ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE. CONTENTS. LETTER I. PACK Antagonism between the ideas of human freedom and human destiny 3 " Destiny " fatal to nature as well 16 LETTER II. History a struggle between man's race force and his personal force 17 [Letter 1 · p. front matter] The struggle is inherent in man's creatureship 20 His spiritual creation exacts his previous natural formation 22 To what creative excellency is this exaction owing ? 24 LETTER III. The meaning of Infinite Love 26 It means, freedom from self-love, and hence stamps self-love unreal 28 Inferiority of science to philosophy as an intellectual culture 30 Man unreal in se, and made real only by natural redemption 32 Primacy of the heart in belief 3i LETTER IV. Divine truth has first to create the intelligence it afterwards en lightens 35 Its force purely regenerative 33 Persistent Judaism of the Church 39 "Professional" religion the true Antichrist 40 Ritualism, revivalism, radicalism 42 IV CONTEXTS. LETTER V. Sudden demoralization of the writer 43 Almost complete moral imbecility 46 Charm of English landscape 47 Growing delight in nature, and disgust with oneself 48 A friend's account of Swedeuborg 50 I am much interested 51 I resolve to read him 52 LETTER VI. [Letter 1 · p. front matter] A few explanatory words about Swedenborg 53 LETTER VII. Further observations about Swedeuborg 64 LETTER VIII. My moral death and burial 70 Profound moral illusion under which I had been living 72 My relief from it equivalent to my belief in the incarnation 74 The moral law essentially typical and prophetic 76 Its votaries make it utterly flat, vapid, and spiritless 78 The law a present stench in the earth 80 LETTER IX. Difference between the real Jew and the Christian imitation 81 We live not under a literal but a spiritual Divine administration ... 84 Growing indifference of men to their civic repute 86 Our current ecclesiastical culture frivolous and unmanly 88 The horse-car our true Shechinah at this day 90 Christ's precise work on earth 92 LETTER X. Swedenborg's interpretation of the gospel 93 The origin of spiritual evil 96 CONTENTS. Creation inevitably contracts soil on its subjective side 98 Creation as a spiritual work of God is plainly miraculous, and [Letter 1 · p. front matter] therefore admits no witness but that of life or consciousness 100 LETTER XI. Objection to miracle 104 Miracle is bad science, but very good philosophy 106 My own intellectual attitude towards miracle 112 Infirmity of the critical or sceptical understanding 118 Swedeuborg an out-and-out realist 124 LETTEE XII. Creation a spontaneous work 125 Nature unreal and impersonal 127 It is a functioning of Divine Love towards our spiritual manhood 130 The educative use of our natural experience 132 Genesis of this absurd cosmological " Nothing " 134 Creation as a letter an immense fallacy 136 Creation has no locus in, quo but the human consciousness 138 Its sole and total method : Redemption 140 LETTER XIII. God the sole subject in creation, man the sole object 141 Creation only a philosophic name for our natural redemption . . . 144 What do we mean by the term Nature ? 146 Nature a strictly subjective, or metaphysical existence 148 Concrete uses of the word 150 [Letter 1 · p. front matter] Nature realizable to thought, but not to sense 152 Human nature is the sphere of man's subjective relations 154 It has no existence but as the attribute of a subject 156 Humanity not a material fact, but a spiritual truth Human nature the living link between God and man 160 Our selfhood inexplicable without the creator's tuitural incar nation . 1^2 CONTENTS. LETTER XIV. Personality the true ground of unbelief Natural incarnation the only method of spiritual creation 166 History nothing else than a theatre of Divine revelation. ... 174 Spiritual value of miracle as a scientific irritant 178 LETTER XV. Human nature vs. the human person 180 The church, the main citadel of existing evil and falsity 182 Claim of a personal interest in Christ preposterous 184 Swedenborg's doctrine of the constitution of the church 186 Statements in regard to the prehistoric church 188 Innocence of a natural inclination to selfhood 190 Unhandsome pre-natal developments of the church 192 [Letter 1 · p. front matter] Creation essentially miraculous 194 LETTER XVI. Our selfish and worldly loves made evil by the influence of proprium 195 The excess of them even not hateful to God, because he utilizes it in the hells 198 The only intolerable evil to God is proprium, selfhood, or self-righteousness 200 Tor this is spiritual or living evil ; and fatal, if allowed, to the human race 201 The church alone produces this desperate evil in men 204 Conscience the evidence of an infinite and a finite struggle in our nature 206 The church a mere rudimentary exponent of conscience 208 Change of plan 210 LETTER XVII. Laws of the spiritual creation 211 Spiritual creation inert without the creature's natural constitution 214 CONTENTS. vii I indication of nature in creation gives it all its interest to the heart 218 Spiritual creation interpreted by the doctrine of evolution 220 Difference between the philosophic aud the scientific idea of it 222 [Letter 1 · p. front matter] Evolution relatively a spiritual flower ; involution its natural stem 224 Science essentially ministerial, not magisterial to the mind 226 Nature neither begins nor ends anything 228 LETTEE XVIII. The forte and foible of science 229 Nature's first lesson to the intellect 231 Difference between physical and natural existence 232 The philosopher has no call to look at nature outwardly 234 Science has no perception of the spiritual ends of nature, and therefore confounds nature with physics 236 It claims that natural existence is identical with spiritual being . . . 240 Professor Huxley as a philosopher 242 "What protoplasm symbolizes to the intellect 244 Physicism a providential gospel 246 LETTER XIX. Swedenborg's philosophy of nature 247 Good and evil the mere earth of the finite consciousness 250 Heaven and hell have only a subjective truth 252 Subjective genesis of hell in man 254 Hell is always heaven to the evil man but when he is forced not to do evil 256 [Letter 1 · p. front matter] Human nature the sole sphere of creative power 258 LETTER XX. Creation a fusion of God and man 260 It includes creator and creature quite equally 262 Deism as a philosophy is a gross absurdity 264 Creation consists spiritually in divinizing the created nature ; and so redeeming it from the power and taint of evil 266 Vlll CONTENTS. The evil of human nature is subjective consciousness 270 Man's moral evils are not the true evil of his nature 272 That consists in exteriorating the creator to the creature 271 LETTEE XXI. Illusory genesis of selfhood 276 Effect of the illusion in necessitating a Divine-natural order of life 278 This order alone releases man from the evils incident to his selfhood 280 Superiority of living knowledge to mere science for creative ends 282 Science or learning flatters the illusion of selfhood 284 The object in knowledge glorifies the subject out of self-conscious ness 286 The rule of our natural knowledge the rule of our natural life 288 [Letter 1 · p. front matter] Our nature — what? and how constituted P 290 The church's testimony to the Christian facts 292 The realm of fact inferior to the realm of truth 294 Unhappy results to the intellect in tethering it to sense 296 Attitude of men of science 298 Difference between science and faith 299 The gospel untrue tidings to every one who does not first find it good 300 Man's allegiance henceforth due to Divine-natural good alone 302 LETTER XXII. The state culminates in the republic 304 The republic ends our political life 306 The angels an imperfect work of God 307 Swedenborg's indictment of the angelic personality 308 He shows it severely ministerial to a work of God in human nature 310 Man's private selfhood the only inveterate enemy of God 312 Is our natural alienation from God, a fact of science ? 314 Or is it a truth of our personal consciousness merely ? 316 Our inherited theology sottish and suffocating 318 [Letter 1 · p. front matter] The Div'me-nafural humanity alone worthy of men's acknowledg ment .. .320 CONTENTS. Selfhood the natural birthmark or congenital stigma of the creature 322 An implication, not an explication of the spiritual creation 324 A dense mask behind which God effects our natural redemption ... 326 A mere generalized form of man's natural contrariety to God 328 Impossible to believe any longer in God's *wjo, or becomes infinited in the Creator, while the Creator alone naturally exists, or becomes finite, in the creature : so that the creature has at most only a seeming or phenomenal existence in himself, even while he has at the same time a most real or abso lute and unqualified being in his Creator. It is true enough no doubt that the creature — through his bottomless ignorance on one hand of the truth that creation is a purely spiritual work of God in the created nature, and through his bottomless conceit on the other that it is an altogether shabby natural work of God effected in the creature's petty self— egregiously misinterprets this fundamental logic, or attributes to himself and not to the Creator his natu ral or finite personality, while he remains persistently blind and deaf to the spiritual and infinite being he and all his kind have in God. But the spiritual truth of the case is not a whit inwardly altered or even prejudiced by this mistake ; it is only outwardly obscured or deadened. What alone happens is that the spiritual or creative truth is obliged to lower itself to the creature's sensuous and grovelling imagi nation, by masking itself in moral lineaments, or taking the creature at his own stupid estimate of [Letter 13 · p. 144] 144 CREATION ONLY A PHILOSOPHIC NAME himself, and addressing him as if he were in truth his own natural substance, and God himself conse quently his mere outward and moral or regulative kw. And this is literally all that happens. Crea tion becomes converted in men's infirm understand ing from a spiritual, or infinite and eternal, Divine life in the unconscious nature of the creature, which has therefore strictly public or universal issues in humanity, into a mere legal or moral administration of Divine power in the conscious person of the crea ture, having at best therefore strictly private or par ticular issues. [Letter 13 · p. 144] Let creation, then, in the sole and exclusive spir itual truth of the word, remain perfectly intact, dear friend, to our particular faith, whether all the world say us nay or yea. Let it be to us both forever nothing else than an inmost and inseparable life of God within the strictest limits of our nature, where by that nature — gladly responsive to such an un precedented subject ! — becomes freely redeemed out of its otherwise inveterate personal or selfish linea ments, into the imperishable image and likeness of God most High, that is, into grandly social form and order. Neither you nor I have ever had, have now, or ever shall have, any particle of just or ra tional hope towards God which is based either upon any possible personal difference in us to other FOR OUR NATURAL REDEMPTION. 145 [Letter 13 · p. 145] men, or any possible personal difference in us to ourselves in past time, but solely and wholly upon His own reconciling spirit or temper in universal man, whereby we and all men become gradually softened and refined out of our natural egotism and savagery, by being lifted out of our petty egotistic moral consciousness, and becoming gradually in vested with social or race-consciousness. This is what creation, spiritually regarded, means, and all it means, not any stupid and brutal event in space and time, transcending human nature and antedat ing human history, but a most real and authentic life of God identical with human nature and consubstantiate with human history : beginning with that history, animating all its movements, keeping steadfast pace with it through all its marvellous vicis situdes and revolutions, and bringing it at length to its grand triumphant climax in the coming splen dors of the mystical city of God. Thus our spirit ual creation is only the truer or philosophic name for our distinctively NATURAL REDEMPTION : since nothing short of this redemptive work can establish the Divine claim to be a universal creator. I know, for my own part at least, very well, that it must prove a " scandal " to our imitative modern Juda ism, and " foolishness " to our simulated modern Hellenism, but I cannot help saying all the same, [Letter 13 · p. 146] 146 WHAT DO WE MEAN nor rejoicing as I say it, that I look upon the fast- approaching close of our corrupt civilization in the Neio Jerusalem — which is the Gospel symbol for the evolution of a free society, fellowship, or equal ity of all men with each and each with all on earth and in heaven — as the veritable apotheosis of our nature, since it will reveal and vindicate to eternal years, not the truth of God's spiritual or essential manhood, for that has been long acknowledged, but to us the infinitely more momentous because infi nitely more prolific, truth of His NATURAL or ad ventitious manhood : a manhood forced upon Him, so to speak, in the interest of the strictly universal — which are the lowest corporeal and sensual — needs of His creature. But what precisely do we mean by the created nature ? [Letter 13 · p. 146] " Nature," then, when used abstractly means the realm of the undefined or relative in knowledge ; means that vast potentiality of existence which per petually allures and at the same time baffles the grasp of science, inasmuch as it is always becom ing, yet never is definitively known. It signifies what is generic, impersonal, or universal in exist ence, in contradistinction to what is specific, personal, or particular. It is not of course what creates, that is, gives invisible being or substance to things; but BY THE TERM NATURE? 147 [Letter 13 · p. 147] only what constitutes them, that is, gives them vis ible form or existence. It is the maternal principle in existence, thus what produces all things or gives them body, in opposition to the paternal principle which begets them, or gives them soul. In short, Nature is what all men instinctively believe in, yet what no man has ever had sensible contact with. We cannot help believing in it, because we see it revealed as we think in its endlessly varied phe nomena or productions ; but we have and can have no direct acquaintance with it, because it is not the least a fact of sense, but at most a probable truth of science. From the necessity of the case, or in the interest of science itself, it must always remain a merely probable — that is, a strictly imdemonstrated — truth : for if Nature, or the universe of our sci entific faith, could once be grasped by observation, and so be forced to confess itself Thing instead of Thought, science would ipso facto lose her whole intellectual capital, would forfeit in fact her sole raison d'etre, and be obliged to tumble inconti nently back into the arms of sense. To be sure we talk very glibly of " the laws of Nature " ; and where " laws " are of recognized obligation, it should be presumable at least that the lawgiver is very distinctly known. But these so-called " laws of na ture " are laws of human thought exclusively, and [Letter 13 · p. 148] 148 NATURE A STRICTLY SUBJECTIVE, laws of nature only in so far as nature itself is taken for a symbol of the mind. That is to say, they are only so many scientific generalizations on our part based upon sensible observation, whereby the mind moved by a profound instinct of its spir itual origin and destiny, seeks unconsciously to uni versalize itself, and so wrest from "Nature" the provisional or educative and superstitious homage it has so long enjoyed. [Letter 13 · p. 148] Nature in short, thus abstractly viewed, is the only purely subjective existence we are acquainted with, inasmuch as it never falls under the cognizance of our senses, but invariably posits itself as the attri bute of a subject, and utterly refuses to be cogi tated apart from such subjectivity. It is true that some one may object to regarding nature as this strictly subjective or metaphysical quantity, on the ground that we are in the habit of applying the term to the external world, which is made up of sensibly objective existences. But it is a sufficient answer to this objection to say that we always apply the term to the world as a whole, or by way of discriminating what is generic or universal in the sphere of sense, even, from what is specific or particular ; and universals claim no physical but a purely logical or metaphysic subsistence. The world or universe is not a thing of sense, but a pure OR METAPHYSICAL EXISTENCE. 149 [Letter 13 · p. 149] thought of the mind ; and when we designate it accordingly by the name of nature, the effect is not to degrade nature into a physical substance, but to elevate the world itself, regarded as a universe or whole, into a metaphysic substance. Whatsoever exists to sense is practically or at bottom nothing else than a concrete or specific form of the logical or metaphysic not-mc ; and outward nature, conse quently, regarded as the universal term in which alone all our sense perceptions are supposed to co here, is in its turn but the abstract or generic form of this negative judgment on our part. [Letter 13 · p. 149] Then too it ought to be noted, in reply to the objection just made, that when the word Nature is applied to the external world, or the phenomena of sense, it is used just as much to signify the field of the subjective and relative which we find there : only the relations existing between minerals, plants, and animals are outward or objective relations exclu sively, which are wholly unknown to and un perceived by the minerals, plants, and animals themselves, and which consequently presuppose and address our com manding subjectivity alone. The animal for exam ple has no science of the relations of agreement or difference which bind him to his own and other species, although he instinctively obeys them doubt less ; for they exist only to another eye than his 150 CONCRETE USES OF THE WORD. own. And all that the observant eye of our science cares to signalize in these relations is that they characterize the animal nature apart from any vis ible or objective subject of it. [Letter 13 · p. 150] All the concrete uses of the word betray the same universalizing or undefining scope and ten dency. What we call the nature of a horse, of a dog, of a bull, is not what belongs primarily to any particular animal so-named, but to the entire horse, dog, or bull species or kind ; although the particular animals in question may be at the same time exceptionably favorable specimens of their race. And so throughout the whole compass of the word's concrete application : the nature of a particular min eral, vegetable, or animal, is in every case strictly what universalizes, or equalizes, or identifies it with its species or kind, and so far forth of course in dividualizes it from all other kinds. But it confers no private individuality upon it, that is, no spirit ual or subjective discrimination with its own kind. We say to be sure that one man has a good nature, and another an evil nature : meaning by that phrase, that the one is sensitive and the other indifferent to his legal obligations. But all we are really en- filled to say in the premises is, not that the men are of a different nature, but that human nature itself is of so universal a range or quality as to [Letter 13 · p. 151] embrace a relatively high and a relatively low ele ment, or exhibit in itself the sheer neutrality, in difference, or equilibrium of good and evil: so that any particular subject of it may be morally good, and any other particular subject morally evil, with out the slightest strain or compromise, on either side, of their common nature For human nature is distinctively social in form, being the unity of self-love and neighborly love — thus of what is widest or most universal in affection and thought, and what is narrowest or most particular — and the morally good man accordingly is one in whom the higher element practically rules, while the morally evil man is one in whom that element is made practically to serve. In short they are men of a strictly identical nature, and their moral divergence is due to the fact that until human nature shall have attained to its destined sabbath in the permanent social evolu tion of the race, the greatest possible antagonism, consistent with providential order, must necessarily prevail between its component factors — to the ex tent even of organizing the entire spiritual world into the divided spheres of heaven and hell. [Letter 13 · p. 152] existence is never physical but metaphysical, discern ible therefore not by sense, but exclusively by life or consciousness. It is realizable to thought, but not to sight, and herein differs from specific existence which is realizable to sight, but not to thought. The earth really exists in space, and plant and animal really exist upon it clothing it with life and beauty. But strive as we may, we cannot think these existences ; cannot for the life of us think either earth or plant or animal ; and for the very good reason that they all of them anticipate and supersede thought, being already given to us in sense. We can recall them to mem ory whenever we list ; but we cannot possibly think them as we think God and man, or goodness and truth, grace and beauty, holiness and peace, justice and mercy, simply because they rigidly forestall our intelligence, or what is the same thing, because un like spiritual existence they have no inward or living but a purely outward and sensible objectivity to us. It is no way true of course to say that the objects of sense into which we are born, spiritually create our intelligence or give it soul ; but it is perfectly true to say that they materially constitute it, or give it body, cradling and nursing it indeed upon the chaste breasts of their maternity, until such time as it is fit to be weaned from sense, and fed upon truth alone. But we do unquestionably think nature or universal [Letter 13 · p. 153] existence, and can do no more than think it ; because it is not the least given us in sense, but is on the contrary a most strict projection of the spiritual world, or the associated human mind, upon our pri vate and personal thought. We do not see nature or the universe ; neither do we hear it, nor smell it, nor taste it, nor touch it. And being thus wholly inac cessible to our senses, it can never fall within the conditions of our memory even ; for we can remem ber nothing and imagine nothing which is wholly divorced from sense. But we think nature or uni versal existence day and night; and we think noth ing else. Our living intellect — which is heart and mind in actual unison — broods upon it, feeds upon it, waxes fat upon it, vehemently denies itself at last either anchorage or sustenance apart from it. We love and cherish it, we confide in it, we adore it, we aspire to it, we associate our eternal fortunes with it — do everything in short but pretend outwardly or sensibly to know it. [Letter 13 · p. 154] express what to the eye of science gives the thing objective relation with other things, so too by human nature we mean to express the sphere exclusively of the relative in human life, only the relations which connect man with man are not such as can be scien tifically discerned. They are not, like the other, ex ternal relations which address the sense; they are internal relations, which appeal for their truth only to consciousness. This establishes a great discrep ancy between human and brute life. The relations which exist between man and man, and which reflect their characteristically human nature, are not, like those of the animal, outward and organic. Man to be sure has these outward and organic relations also to his fellow-man, but it is only in so far as he is yet undivorced from animal, or uneducated into man. The relations which bind the partakers of human nature together, as such, are intensely living and con scious, or inward and aesthetic, instead of outward and organic. They are relations, not of appetite and passion, controlled by necessity and duty, but of taste or attraction, governed exclusively by the freedom or spontaneity of the parties ; and consequently, as the saying is, they never leave any bad taste in the mouth behind them. The contrary is well known to be the case when men identify themselves with the animal nature, and cherish its lower delights : for in [Letter 13 · p. 155] OF MAN'S SUBJECTIVE RELATIONS. 155 so doing they only reap disgust, degradation, and frequent despair. This sharp discrepancy of the hu man nature with the brute nature is owing of course to the truth of the spiritual creation, and is one of its most constant attestations. Man's nature, whatever the splendors of Divine power incident to it, is after all nothing but a vehicle of transcendent spiritual blessing to the man himself; whereas the brute na ture knows no such spiritual subserviency. And when accordingly the subject of the higher nature persistently identifies himself with the lower, he is sure to find in his way every sharp regret and bitter humiliation which may tend to frighten him back into his place. Otherwise he would be like a noble house mined by bad drainage. [Letter 13 · p. 155] And now, dear friend, I think you and I have attained to a pretty definite notion of what consti tutes human nature. Human nature is the field exclusively of man's subjective relations to his kind, and constitutes therefore the realm of identity among men, the realm in which all men, whatever may be their individual or spiritual differences to their own eye, are one and undistinguishable to God. And being such it is the appanage or attribute of course of a conscious or living subject, whose existence it therefore presupposes, just as the work of a statuary presupposes the existence of the marble. I say of 156 IT HAS NO EXISTENCE BUT [Letter 13 · p. 156] course, for this field of relationship between man and man, being intensely subjective, that is, free, sponta neous, inorganic, living, never falls by any chance within sense, like the relations of the animal, but ex clusively within consciousness. It is the whole virtue and efficacy of sense to antagonize one thing with another, to concentrate and inflame points of dis cord and difference between things. And if men accordingly were not endowed with a deeper life than that of sense, namely, consciousness : or the faculty of discerning the free or subjective unity which exists among them, in spite of their super ficial or obvious and outward personal disjunction : they would always have remained the inveterate animals they were aboriginally born, nor ever have dreamt consequently of the infinite possibilities which had been squandered in their own ineffectual hu man form. [Letter 13 · p. 156] Understand then, dear friend, that human nature has no existence in se, but is invariably the attri bute of a conscious subject, whose existence is pre supposed by it. It is almost superfluous to say that this natural subject must be an exclusively conscious subject, because human nature has two constitutive and extremely different elements, a finite and an infinite one, or a creator and creature, and these two can coexist only in the integral unity of AS THE ATTRIBUTE OF A SUBJECT. 157 [Letter 13 · p. 157] consciousness. But this much cannot be too em phatically said, namely : the natural subject cannot be a mere personal subject, cannot be what we are apt to call a mere individual subject, because in that case he would practically exclude the race-element. You yourself know quite as well as I do, that your own and my style of personal subjectivity is much too finite to do any sort of justice to the generic quality of our manhood, or what especially stamps it natural: our personalities are so far from doing our nature justice in fact, that they leave it, in our own spiritual estimation at least, an every way. futile, petty, egotistic, ignominious thing. And what is spiritually true of our natural subjectivities is true no doubt of all the world's. Accordingly, the only adequate exponent of human nature must be able to interiorate his object to himself, and not, like us, merely exteriorate it. He must be a man broad enough in other words to embrace his nature, and spiritually reproduce it in his own subjectivity. In short, he must be both universal and individual, both generic and specific, both natural and spiritual, or comprehend within his own undefined and equa torial personality, both poles of the nature he claims to make his own — infinite and finite, Divine and human : or else incontinently avouch himself an un worthy exponent and illustration of the nature. [Letter 13 · p. 158] But I must bring this long letter to a close. It is evident then from what has gone before, that — pace Messrs. Darwin and Spencer — man's natural genesis is not at all physical, but on the contrary strictly metaphysical, involving as it does his trans formation or development out of a selfish being into a social one. For humanity is not a material fact discernible to the outward eye ; it is a spiritual truth, discernible solely to the inward eye, an eye rendered clear by love. It is a SOCIETY, not a herd of men, and claims a distinctly qualitative not a quantitative unity. On his animal side man is doubt less physical enough, his origin connecting him not only with the animal tribes, but with the vegetable and mineral kingdoms as well. But when we speak of human nature, we speak of what logically be longs to man alone, and therefore disconnects him with all lower existence. This metaphysical nature of ours involves physics as its necessary basis of manifestation, just as the house involves its founda tion, the tree its bark, the gem its matrix. For the house which towers to heaven to lay permanent hold upon sun and air, descends first into the bowels of the earth to compel the damp and darkness of the latter sphere into its own higher vassalage. So pre cisely our natural evolution, which serves as a matrix for our subsequent spiritual or individual conjunction [Letter 13 · p. 159] with infinite goodness and truth, familiarizes us first with the death and hell latent in ourselves, latent in our finite or personal consciousness, in order to reduce them ever after to its eternal subserviency. Man's spiritual destiny is so sublime, it is so vivi fied and empowered by the intimate Divine fellow ship, as to call for this preliminary wealth of mineral, vegetable, and animal existence, in order to furnish him the alphabet of 5^-knowledge, and in that knowledge the sure pledge and guarantee of his ultimate free or spiritual acknowledgment of God. A finite consciousness can only recognize good by the previous contrast of evil, truth by the previous contrast of error ; so man by the experience of the wretched death-in-life wrapped up in his proper person, learns truly to know and heartily to aspire to the only real and true life. It is the only rational and satisfactory explanation of our moral experience to look upon physics as this necessary involution of our natural evolution : our moral ex perience being given us only to signalize the tran sition — only to bridge the interval, and make the passage practicable — between our finite organic or physical persons, and our undefined, inorganic, im personal, metaphysic nature: which it does by re leasing us from the bondage of animal instinct, and opening our interiors to spiritual Divine influx. [Letter 13 · p. 160] Such I do not hesitate to say is the literally awful grandeur of human nature, as being the sole link or liaison between creator and creature, between the infinitude of God and the finiteness of man ! And such the so long inscrutable secret of its incompres- sibility into any merely organic or finite physical dimensions! It involves — lodged or masked in our vicious, obdurate personalities — a fossil infinitude or chronic Divine element, and insists upon this ele ment being fairly reckoned with or put into fluid diffusible form, before it will permit the least right eous judgment of itself to be formulated. And there is no nature properly speaking but human nature. There is any amount of specific mineral, vegetable, and animal form, but there is no nature correspond ing to it, because there is no universal mineral, vege table, and animal substance except man, and his na ture infinitely transcends their wants. His nature is not theirs, any more than their form is his. The former contingency is gainsaid by the circumstance that his nature is a universal one while theirs is partial ; and the latter by the circumstance that their form is spe cific or gregarious, while his is strictly individual. Every man claims to be estimated by himself alone, every animal by its species. Thus there is a univer sal human substance called selfhood, not a material substance, not an organic substance, but a strictly [Letter 13 · p. 161] immaterial or inorganic one confined to consciousness, and hence incapable of scientific scrutiny. And hu man nature consequently is alone entitled to the des ignation of Nature, and to absorb in itself, as so many subject provinces merely, mineral, vegetable, and animal existence. I do not in the least mean to deny of course that besides this generic difference which I exhibit to all lower existence, and which puts an eternal gulf between us, I also exhibit many specific resemblances to it : being innocent with the dove, subtle with the serpent, gentle with the lamb, fierce with the tiger; and so forth. These are not generic traits of humanity, but only and at most spe cific traits, characterizing us not as homines, but as viri : not as we stand substantially knit together, all and each, each and all, in one immortal bond of unity called society, but only as we stand superficially differenced each from every other in our petty selves, and so become distributed by an adorable providential wisdom into two great classes of men — respectively celestial and infernal — in which the finiting or spe cific principle, the principle of endless variation and conflict, and the infiniting or generic principle, the principle of permanent unity and peace, are severally represented or embodied, and held in enforced mu tual equilibrium. [Letter 13 · p. 162] The adorable use of this arrangement in the Divine 162 OUR SELFHOOD INEXPLICABLE WITHOUT economy above adverted to, is our natural or race- development. For the race of man, or human nature, is not the least numerically or materially constituted, is not, as we are apt to conceive it, the mere un couth lumping or hideous agglomeration of our acrid, frivolous, and uncompromising selves. It is on the contrary altogether qualitatively or spiritually consti tuted, being an exquisite Divine distillation of our foul and perishable natural selfhood, and a subse quent sublimation or rectification of it into an ineffa ble unitary form and order called society. For obvi ously if selfhood be the mere adventitious base out of which human nature or the race-consciousness of man becomes divinely fashioned, it can have no show of pretension to enter into the finished superstructure itself, save at most as coloring matter, or perpetually vanishing reminiscence. [Letter 13 · p. 162] Thus there is no way open to us philosophically of accounting for selfhood in the human bosom, save upon the postulate of its being the mask of an infinite spiritual substance now imprisoned, but eventually to be set free, in our nature : a substance whose proper energy consists in its incessantly going out of itself, or communicating itself to what is not itself, to what indeed is infinitely alien and repugnant to itself, and dwelling there infinitely and eternally as in //.v rrry self. That is to say, the Divine being or substance THE CREATOR'S NATURAL INCARNATION. 163 [Letter 13 · p. 163] is Love, love without any the least set-off or limita tion of self-love, infinite or creative love in short ; and it communicates itself to the creature accordingly in no voluntary or finite but in purely spontaneous or infinite measure, in a way so to speak of overwhelm ing passion : so that we practically encounter no limit to our faculty of appropriating it, but on the contrary sensibly and exquisitely feel it to be our own indisputable being, feel it to be in fact our in most, most vital and inseparable self, and unhesitat ingly call it me and mine, you and yours, cleaving to it as inmost bone of our bone, and veritable flesh of our flesh, and incontinently renouncing all things for it. LETTER XIV. [Letter 14 · p. 164] 'Y DEAR FRIEND : — We have seen that the sphere of human nature is the rela tive or associated sphere of human life, the sphere of men's free, spontaneous fellowship, each with all and all with each, in con tradistinction to that of their felt or personal abso luteness, which is the sphere of their voluntary, interested, selfish disjunction of each with every other : so that society is of necessity the Divinely unitary form of human nature. But now what is the bearing of the definition of human nature I gave in my last letter, upon the doctrine of creation regarded as the regeneration of that nature? Why, as I conceive, it most clearly brings out the purely spiritual character of creation ; brings it out indeed with an emphasis sufficient to arrest and exalt even the simplest intelligence. If human nature, as we have seen, possess neither moral nor physical quality, save by implication, that is, be PERSONALITY THE TRUE GROUND OF UNBELIEF. 165 [Letter 14 · p. 165] neither person nor thing : if on the contrary it be nothing else than a most powerful but invisible Di vine bond of relationship between man individual and man universal ; a bond moreover so free and elastic as safely to permit the appropriation of a private selfhood to man, and the subsequent expansion of that selfhood even to diabolic proportions : then the only philosophic obstacle to the recognition of crea tion as a living or spiritual work of God disappears. That is to say : the only philosophic hindrance to men's believing in God as a creator, is their ina bility to believe in themselves as created. Self-con sciousness, the sentiment of personality, the feeling I have of life in myself, absolute and underived from any other save in a natural way, is so subtly and powerfully atheistic, that no matter how loyally I may be taught to insist upon creation as a mere traditional or legendary fact, I never feel inclined personally to believe in it, save as the fruit of some profound intellectual humiliation, or hopeless inward vexation of spirit. My inward ajjlatns from this cause is so great, I am conscious of such superabounding personal life, that I am satisfied, for my own part at least, that my sense of selfhood must in some subtle exquisite way find itself wounded to death — • find itself become that it exists fop nothing else but to constitute an orderly revelation of God's spiritual infinitude or perfection ; but stupidly settles down to the far more nattering conviction, that it consti tutes on the contrary a most real and permanent Divine work, a work of true and finished creation, and this in spite of its being destitute of every spirit ual Divine mark. Now the church was intended to1 be a standing witness or memorial of God amidst this prevalent ignorance of men concerning Him. It is a candle irradiating by its feeble but honest glim mer the otherwise unmixed and hopeless darkness. Swedenborg accordingly views the church throughout its entire history in the light of a Divine drama, pre figuring to the reflective understanding of men — who are inwardly callous to the most tender and spiritual Divine substance latent in their own coarse souls and bodies, and outwardly therefore unobservant of it — in certain symbolic or representative persons and peo ples, the entire and signally miraculous truth upon the subject of mans Divine nature and destiny. About the prehistoric beginnings of the church indeed he is naturally able to give us very little information, since the greatest amount of such information could only conduce to the satisfaction of a purely idle curiosity. But he shows that it grew out of a very [Letter 15 · p. 188] tender and infantile spiritual intelligence in man, scarce weaned as yet from Nature's maternal bosom ; and that this intelligence accordingly was wholly made up of a perception of the interior correspond ence that obtains between spirit and nature, that is, between celestial goods and their derivative terrestrial truths. That the peculiar quality of this intelligence, however, was very exalted, being inspired by the heart, appears from all he specifically says of it, and especially from a brief but pregnant incidental glimpse he gives of its broadly human genius and sympathies, in a remark he makes about the church called Adam, with which our sacred or symbolic scripture opens, and of which he saw the spiritual or heavenly state. He says : " Those who belonged to the most ancient church, designated by the name of Man or Adam, are above the head in the Maximus Homo, and dwell together in the utmost happi ness. They told me that it is seldom others come to them, except such occasionally as come, not from this earth but, as they phrased \i,from the universe."* The men of this church in fact " were internal men, delighted only with internal things," which are the things of Love and Wisdom, " and viewing external things only with their eyes, while they reflected upon the spiritual goods and truths they represented. Thus [Letter 15 · p. 189] It is very difficult, I admit, to do any justice with our inspissated spiritual faculty to Swedenborg's de scriptions of this early or internal development of the church in man. They suggest to our coarser intel lectual fibre a very much feebler grasp upon life than our own, and it even disconcerts us to imagine the truth otherwise. To the cultivated or regenerate heart, however, this intellectual judgment of ours, no doubt, seems very profane or sensuous ; very much as, to the common heart, a judgment which should affirm the superior sweetness of the adult man to the infant child would appear little short of sacrilegious. Anyhow the state of things here described was very incongruous with the Divine designs in humanity, for man then, as Swedenborg says, was more like a spirit than a man, and the Divine design could be fulfilled only by making him fesh. " For in this way only could celestial and spiritual life be adjoined to man s proper nature, that they might be as one."f [Letter 15 · p. 190] descendants of the church, thus styled Adam or Man, as inclining to selfhood: that is, desiring to become instead of an internal man an external one. But he does not fail to characterize this change of genius in it, though relatively unfortunate of course, since everything deteriorates in proportion as it becomes remote from its source, yet as by no means absolutely so; inasmuch as selfhood, though regarded in itself or absolutely it is unmixed evil, is yet the indis pensable condition of man's natural development, or race-evolution, and consequently of that redemptive achievement in our nature which constitutes God's true or eternal spiritual glory in creation. This rising inclination to selfhood is the inevitable dawn of the natural or race-mind in us, and as such of course is noway evil, though viewed apart from that subordination it is the fountain of all the evil known to the universe. We don't get angry with the infant, although we feel bound in the interests of his own maturity to correct him, when we see him instinc tively exhibiting the traits of his future natural man hood; on the contrary we are secretly diverted by his arch and graceful ways of self-assertion, because as yet they are full of innocence or innocuous. Ex actly so we may say there is no ground for moral disapprobation in these nascent or unconscious ego tistic inclinations on the part of the early church, [Letter 15 · p. 191] Indeed Swedenborg always draws a wide dis tinction between the natural love of self and the world, and an absolute or unnatural love of them, that is, a love of them for their own sakes ; calling the former a wise love, and the latter a stupid or insane one. He says for example in his profoundly clear and beautiful Essay upon the Divine Love and Wisdom, of which Lippincott published an extremely good translation by Mr. Foster eight or ten years ago, and which, if you are interested in what I say, I recom mend you to get : "The loves of self and of the world are by creation heavenly loves, because they are loves of the natural man subservient to spiritual loves, in the same way that foundations are subservient to houses. These natural loves guarantee a man's wish ing well to his own body, desiring food, raiment, and shelter, consulting the welfare of his family, seeking after useful occupation, and even after honors pro portionate to the worth of the public trusts he fulfils, and the extent of the fulfilment he renders them ; and guarantee moreover his enjoying worldly pleas ures, and finding delight and refreshment in them : but now mind ! our natural loves guarantee all these [Letter 15 · p. 192] 192 UNHANDSOME PRE-NATAL things, not at all for any absolute or unconditional worth to be found in them, for there is no such worth, but for a certain end of use which they pro mote in rendering a man fit to serve the Lord and serve the neighbor. But where this use is not pro moted, as in the case of a man who has no relish for serving the Lord or his neighbor, but only for serving himself by means of the world, then his natural self-love ceases to be heavenly and becomes infernal, be cause it cuts the man off from delighting in his nature or kind, and shuts him up, spiritually, to his own selfhood, which is wholly evil." l [Letter 15 · p. 192] Swedenborg goes on to give his readers a detailed mention of the specific churches that succeeded to this Adamic one, with the several characteristics that made each of them noticeably distinct from its predecessors. These details are excessively te dious and uninteresting at this day, though to future inquirers into our distinctively race - genesis they may prove perhaps exhilarating; and I have not the least intention of dwelling upon them. They were churches still in the gristle, unclad as yet with natural flesh and bone, and devoid therefore of proper historic interest, so far at least as indicating any con structive providential purpose in human nature ; be ing based every one of them upon some mere diver- * Divine Love and Wisdom. See also Ath. Creed, 43. DEVELOPMENTS OF THE CHURCH. 193 [Letter 15 · p. 193] gent relation in the personal genius of its founders with respect to every other that preceded it, and des tined like them to be engulfed in some more general form which should round them all off into visible unity. I suppose it is all very exact church-physi ology, but I confess I feel little or no interest in the very unhandsome pre-natal physiological development of the church, while it was still an immature and un born providential embryo in the earth, peopling it too with every uncouth, unclean, and monstrous form of life below the human. And even after it has attained to fully formed consciousness of itself as man, and separates itself from whatsoever is not-man, it awak ens no philosophic interest save as it tends, by uncon scious copulation with the world, to generate what men subsequently recognize as human nature. Ac cordingly I shall only attempt to give you a con densed philosophic aperqu of the ever-growing corrup tion of the early churches, until that corruption finally culminated, or became a momentous historic phenom enon, in the gross fanatical lineaments of the Jewish theocracy : certainly from a spiritual point of view the most complete and comprehensive embodiment of un godliness ever Divinely consecrated in human annals. But the only result of this philosophic glimpse will be, I hope, to suggest afresh to your mind what an adorable wonder-worker we have in Him who thus [Letter 15 · p. 194] 194 CREATION ESSENTIALLY MIRACULOUS. utilizes, or turns to the advantage of human nature, the inmost and' most implacable evil of its individ ual bosoms, making it indeed the fertile womb of infinite and otherwise inconceivable Divine and hu man good. LETTER XVI. DEAR FRIEND : — To say as Swedenborg says : that this early church catted Adam or man inclined to selfhood, or from internal tended to become external : is .mani festly equivalent to saying that it lost sight of the only reason it had for existing, namely : the service it miy '/it do the world in keeping it mindful of God : and began to value itself on its own account, as if it had existed ab oriyine for its own sake, and were itself an absolute Divine good in the earth. [Letter 16 · p. 195] The original bias to evil in the human heart, or what separates it from God, is constituted by self-love and love of the world. But these loves are not in themselves evil, but innocent and heavenly, because they are purely instinctive or organic loves in man serviceable to spiritual loves, just as foun dations are serviceable to houses. "For from these loves," say Swedenborg, " man wishes well to his body, desires to be fed, clad, lodged, to consult 196 OUR SELFISH AND WORLDLY LOVES MADE EVIL [Letter 16 · p. 196] the comfort of his family, to seek after useful em ployment, yes, to be honored for the worth of the services he thus renders to society, and also to be delighted and recreated by the pleasures of the world : but all these for a certain spiritual end, which ought to be use, for by these loves thus ex ercised and refreshed he is fitted to serve the Lord and the neighbor. But when these loves refuse to become subservient to more universal loves, as Di vine and neighborly love, they then become infer nal, because they then immerse a man's mind and soul in selfhood, WHICH IN ITSELF is ALL EVIL."* In course of time then these wholesome imper sonal loves are sure to lose their innocence or be come personal by being made to minister to self hood in man, or promote the interests of his falla cious individuality as against those of his common nature. In other words all men in time become selfish and worldly, that is, unduly addicted to the love of themselves and the love of the world. This natural degeneracy of mankind is not fatal by any means, but it calls aloud for God's redemptive power in human nature to save the race from pre mature blight. Neither selfishness nor worldliness will ever be considered obsolete forms of human nature, but they will always be considered more [Letter 16 · p. 197] and more disreputable or unworthy forms of it. They will always drive men of spiritual culture to desire to realize their nature in social or Divinely- redeemed form, but they will never have power actually to deprive any one of hope towards God. As long indeed as animals and vegetables continue to exist man will scarcely be robbed of his Godward faith and hope by any amount of selfishness or worldliness, for the animal is a very innocent and unconscious type of the former love, and the vegetable of the latter. Until God sends an utter blight upon the life of the animal and vegetable kingdoms therefore we shall feel no misgivings about His intimate dealings with our own nature. What is worldliness at bottom? We all know well enough what it is in a literal or moral aspect — as separating between man and man; for we all love the world too much, and sometimes sacrifice our neighbor's esteem, and our own peace of mind, to its tempting pleasures, honors, or emoluments. But what does worldliness mean in a spiritual rather than a moral aspect, that is, as separating no longer between man and man, but between man and God ? It means to esteem and love the world as a final ity, to be satisfied with it as a fulfilment of our hopes and aspirations towards God : thus it means at bottom to ignore God, to ignore His spiritual [Letter 16 · p. 198] 198 THE EXCESS OF THEM EVEN NOT HATEFUL TO GOD, perfection, or His essential infinity and eternity, and acknowledge Him at the most as a physical and moral power, the creator and maker of this realm of finite personal existence. When the worldling acknowledges God at all, this is the extreme limit of the homage he renders Him: he considers Him as the author of the very pleasant life that now is, the giver of every good and perfect gift to his senses. To be sure there is nothing very exhilar ating to the Divine mind in this degree of homage, provided it is anyway sincere, which is extremely problematical at least: but just as surely there can be nothing revolting in it, nor even displeasing, to that mind : so that if the creator had but destined His creature to remain an innocent animal merely, without any capacity of spiritual life or enjoyment, He would, I dare say, have been highly satisfied with it. [Letter 16 · p. 198] Selfishness to be sure is a much more potent, stubborn, and profound evil than worldliness, and far more hostile practically to human society or fellowship ; and Swedenborg in order to show the superior malignity of the former love to the latter as an element of human life, characterizes the hells which grow out of it as diabolic, whereas he always gives the hells of worldliness the milder designation of Satanic. But selfishness, although a less super- BECAUSE HE UTILIZES IT IN THE HELLS. 199 [Letter 16 · p. 199] ficial evil than worldliness, accommodates itself in some sort equally well to the Divine administration in human affairs : as is shown by what Swedenborg says of the hells to which it is ministerial. The devil and Satan would be very discreditable products of the creative love, provided they owed their original existence to it. But they do not in the slightest degree. Satan and the devil (by which terms respectively of course one would be understood to mean not any individual existences but the whole mass of human kind in whom either the love of the world or the love of self character istically predominates) owe their origin to a vital misconception they are both alike under in regard to human freedom, deeming it absolute instead of moral, contingent, relative. This misconception on their part is very unfortunate no doubt, because, as it leads to all manner of practical injustice and un truth, it requires them to be separated from the orderly mass of their brethren, and shut up for a long while in work-houses where they are com pelled under pain of forfeiting their daily bread, and of even worse punishments, to work, and re frain from bad manners. But they are never in the slightest degree objects of God's contempt, let alone abhorrence, but equally with heavenly existences at tract His unswerving mercy or compassion. [Letter 16 · p. 200] 200 THE ONLY INTOLERABLE EVIL TO GOD IS And thus you are prepared for what I have next got to say. It is a very intelligible proposition in itself, but it may perhaps encounter some prejudice in your understanding. The proposition is this : that while we owe our milder or moral evils, those, namely, which separate us outwardly from our fel low-man, to the inspiration of the world-spirit, the spirit which reigns in every man by virtue of his natural birth, the inspiring cause of our deeper spiritual evils, those which separate us inwardly from God, our life-source, and call for our natural redemption at His hands, is exclusively the church-spirit in humanity, the spirit that leads every man that has it to think himself nearer to God than other men. This proposition, I repeat, may meet with a slow reception at your hands. Let me then above all things make sure that you perfectly understand what I mean by it. [Letter 16 · p. 200] What I call the deeper spiritual evils which attach to men, separating them from their crea tive source, are those of confirmed selfhood or self-righteousness. Do I mean you to understand me, then, as saying that the church-spirit in humanity is the source of all our spiritual unrighteousness ? This is literally what I mean to say, and what I would be understood as saying : that the church-spirit is par PROPRIUM, SELFHOOD, OR SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS. 201 [Letter 16 · p. 201] excellence the evil-spirit in humanity, source of all its profounder and irremediable woes. Don't, I beg of you, interpret me to your own thought as saying that the church stimulates any of man's actual or moral evils. I say no such stupid thing. For it is notorious that the church studiously fosters the sen timent of moral worth or dignity in its disciples, the sentiment of distinction or difference between them and other men. It is only by so doing in deed that she jixes or hardens them in that ten dency to proprium or selfhood to which they are naturally inclined, and thus delivers them over bound hand and foot to spiritual pride, pride of character, in short a se^-righteous spirit, which is the only form of evil, the only form of sin or blasphemy, fundamentally at variance with man's spiritual ex istence. But this latter evil is undeniably a church development in our nature. The church is the ac tual parent or protagonist of all the spiritual evil latent or possible in human nature — evil of self hood or self-righteousness ; and by focusing it in her own haughty personality gives God at length his opportunity — in allowing the church to become the mere mendicant and impotent existence it now is in the earth — to crush out in every spiritual high- place, or most recondite corner of human nature itself, the otherwise inaccessible and flagitious evil [Letter 16 · p. 202] 202 FOE THIS IS SPIRITUAL OR LIVING EVIL; which it represents. God has no power to combat spiritual evil, save as it ultimates itself in natural or outward form. And the church pretension in humanity is the ultimate natural or outward form of all man's spiritual profligacy. For human nature has no existence in se, and comes to light only through men's consciousness : not their individual or private consciousness, but their associated or public one : and the church and the world are as yet the only recognized forms of this latter consciousness. [Letter 16 · p. 202] I mean then that the church-spirit in humanity is the expression of all man's patent or latent spir itual evil, and reduces his mere moral evil to com parative insignificance, for the latter is curable, and the former not. However selfish or worldly a man may be, these are good honest natural evils, and you have only to apply a motive sufficiently stimu lating in either case and you will induce the sub ject to forbear them. But spiritual evil is inward evil exclusively, pertaining to the selfhood of the man, or livingly appropriated by him as his own, and cannot therefore become known to him save in the form of an outward natural representation ; for it is not like moral evil mere oppugnancy to good, but it is the actual and deadly profanation of good, or the lavish acknowledgment of it with a view of subordinating it to personal, or selfish and worldly, AND FATAL, IF ALLOWED, TO THE HUMAN RACE. 203 [Letter 16 · p. 203] ends. It is the only truly formidable evil known to God's providence, being that of ^^/"-righteousness, and hence the only evil which essentially threatens to undermine the foundations of God's throne. It is that evil of unconscious hypocrisy or making believe which alone Christ is represented in the New Testament as having spiritually stigmatized to men's eternal abhorrence, and which Swedenborg says he was able to overcome only by subjugating the influence of all the heavens and all the hells to his own spotless love of mankind, so utterly elim inating from our nature or history in its Godward relations the vicious and thoroughly damnable ele ment of privacy or proprium — that is, of private or personal pretension among men, of individual char acter, or finite independent selfhood. This all seems plain enough, but now you will ask me : How the church comes to be representa tively identified with this capital evil of selfhood or self-righteousness in man. [Letter 16 · p. 204] through your own goodness of heart, or love of mankind. What I want to do then is to convince you that the church is alone chargeable with the production of actual proprium, character, differential selfhood, among men ; and that in so doing it has representatively brought to a head the fundamental evil of the created nature, that which spiritually vivifies all its other evils moral and physical : so that absolutely nothing remains between us and the full fruition of God's spiritual kingdom on earth, but the hearty recognition of the visible church as once a living but now an entirely fossil representa tive element of human nature. [Letter 16 · p. 204] To begin then : Suppose for a moment that self ishness and worldliness were our only vices. Sup pose that man and the world alone existed to men's senses and intelligence, just as they do to the senses and intelligence of the animals ; and that the influ ence of these things was entirely uncomplicated by any influence derived from the church as an insti tution. It is easy enough to see that selfishness and worldliness in this hypothetical state of things would be no vices at all, but simple instincts of men's natural life leading them to the fullest pos sible enjoyment of the goods about them, and be getting in them meanwhile of course the utmost possible indifference to God and their neighbor : THIS DESPERATE EVIL IN MEN. 205 [Letter 16 · p. 205] but there stopping. For these things are vices only as they tend to selfhood, or lead us into practical conflict with our spiritual destiny; only as they tend to interest us supremely in a lower order of life than that which our nature fits us to enjoy : and palpably in the case supposed these spiritual limita tions would be wholly lacking. It is to the church primarily that the world is indebted for its every gleam of spiritual knowledge ; and without the church therefore the world would never have learned to condemn either selfishness or worldliness. A man here and there by obeying a greedy or covetous spirit might paralyze the life of his senses, or bring practical ruin upon his organization ; but however unfortunate his particular excesses might prove him, he never by any possibility could deem them either sinful, as reflecting a certain inward or spiritual tur pitude on himself, or even evil, as reflecting a cer tain outward or moral opprobrium upon his conduct. So far indeed from anything of this sort being pos sible to the man, we have only got to invest him with a capacity of reflection in order to see that he would necessarily under the circumstances deem his selfishness and worldliness, or his lust and covetousness, his highest law or duty. [Letter 16 · p. 206] consequently no conscience of law or duty. Con science presupposes in all its subjects a personal development, or sense of selfhood, as its necessary ground ; and personality in every case is a result ant of two forces, a conventionally good and evil one, belonging to the unconscious nature of the subject, and yet so exquisitely adjusted to each other, or so evenly balanced, as to make him feel without the least misgiving that he is absolutely a free and rational individuality, the essential arbiter of his own actions. In short the existence of con science in men presupposes the existence of the church and the world as extreme representative fac tors of human nature, while the perfect equilibrium or mutual adjustment of these factors in their prac tical operation upon the subject argues a really Di vine or infinite purpose and providence in humanity. You see then that it would be the height of ab surdity to attribute to a man whose very nature is representatively expressed by the church and the world anything short of a highly composite genesis. It is thus exclusively the alliance of the church and the world in our nature that stamps it human, and so gives men their original consciousness of evil being, in being either selfish or worldly. And it is specifically the influence of the church in our nature that brings about this result. It is [Letter 16 · p. 207] AND A FINITE STRUGGLE IN OUR NATURE. 207 a grand providential work for the church to do, for it would never have got into the mind of man that to live for self and the world was not the highest ideal of human life, the supreme law of human destiny, unless the church had put it there. And since human history is only a conflict between the claims of our private selfhood and the claims of our Divine-natural manhood upon our allegiance, we may say that the church in stigmatizing selfish ness and worldliness to men's opinion, laid the foundation stone of human history. [Letter 16 · p. 207] But now do you not see at a glance that the practical effect of the church's initiative in this matter could only be to originate a broad division of men into two classes : one good, as painfully ab staining from selfish and worldly lusts, the other evil, as freely indulging them? The church, so far forth as it is a visible institution in the earth, and claims a Divine warrant corporately to exist and function, looks upon all men without exception as naturally bound to the pursuit of happiness. For bare existence is a happiness to man, stimulating as it does every variety of passional desire and ac tivity in his bosom, and by a necessary instinct he seeks to promote, enlarge, and intensify this happi ness. Now the church authoritatively bids the man pause in this enticing career, saying to him that 208 THE CHURCH A MERE RUDIMENTARY [Letter 16 · p. 208] happiness is not the supreme law of his activity, at all events is not its first law ; that he is first of all a creature of God, gifted with freedom and in telligence, and bound therefore to acquaint himself with his creator's will, in order to see that his pri vate pursuit of happiness involve him in no prac tical contrariety with that will. The man either listens, or does not listen. If he listens, he forth with enrolls himself in the church ranks, and sepa rates himself from a world conventionally supposed to be lying in wickedness. If he does not listen to the church's testimony, but rejects it as against him self, he identifies himself with the profane world, and cuts himself off from the church's blessing. [Letter 16 · p. 208] Hence, as I say, the inevitable division of man kind into two classes, a good and an evil class, or a sacred and a profane class, the one professing to observe the Divine will, or what is reputed to be such in all things, the other following its own will supremely, without making any profession one way or the other. Now however necessary and provi dential a work this may have been on the part of the church to effect, let me remark first of all that it was an exceedingly rude work at the very least; a very unskilful carrying out of the Divine design. Undoubtedly the Divine design in giving the church a visible institution was to establish a witness of EXPONENT OF CONSCIENCE. 209 [Letter 16 · p. 209] Himself in the earth of men's carnal memory, which miiilit always serve to base and authenticate their interior or spiritual apprehensions of Him as a power actively latent in human nature and human affairs. But it was, to say the very least, an exceedingly rude and crude memorial of the Divine name, to identify it not with the spiritual revelation exclu sively of that name or quality, but with the literal and objective discrimination of certain perfectly petty and squalid persons into a celestial and infernal class, the one full of righteous or just hope in God's favor, the other consigned to righteous despair. [Letter 16 · p. 209] I say " at the very least." But the work which this early church thus did in the earth was very much worse than coarse and unskilful. It spiritually falsified the sacred name it was intended to keep the world in remembrance of; and it has assidu ously perpetuated the falsification — through its long and dreary sequela of lineally descended churches — even down to the present day. For the distinction of men into good and evil, however fundamental a datum it be to our natural intelligence, does not really or spiritually exist to the Divine mind save in accommodation to the needs of that most nascent and infirm intelligence. That is to say : it is no absolute distinction, as the church holds, character izing men spiritually or as they exist in themselves, 210 CHANGE OF PLAN. [Letter 16 · p. 210] — But as I dimly foresaw, my friend, I shall be obliged to interrupt my writing here that I may try to impress you anew with the extreme intel lectual importance of rightly conceiving the work I am endeavoring to elucidate in this place : a work of spiritual creation, purporting to be ivrouglit by God within the precincts, by no means of men's phenom enal personality, but of their common substance or nature. This is our one theme, and we must per petually bear it in mind under all our discussion of incidental topics. I have undoubtedly been re miss in not sufficiently enforcing this necessity upon you. And I am persuaded that I cannot do better now, awkward and tardy proceeding though it be, than to interpose an intercalary letter or two just here, defining what I mean by spiritual creation much more fully than I have hitherto done : leaving the interrupted thread of my discourse in regard to church historv to be resumed afterwards. LETTER XVII. gfY DEAR FRIEND: — A spiritual or liv- [Letter 17 · p. 211] 'i'%/'-INr crenti°n> which consists in giving its creature life or being, must of necessity on the part of the creator confess itself a purely subjective or miraculous one, attesting at most His indwelling infinitude in the created nature. " From the nncreate, infinite Being itself and Life itself," says Swedenborg, "no being can be imme diately created, because the Divine is one and indi visible. Sut from created and finite substances, so formed that the Divine may be in them, beings may be created. Since men and angels are such beings, they are only recipients of life; wherefore if any suffers himself to be so far misled as to think that he is not a recipient of life but life itself, nothing can hinder him thinking himself a God." * Again : " Di vine Love cannot create any one immediately from itself, for in that case the creature would be love in * Divine Love and Wisdom, 4. 212 LAWS OF THE [Letter 17 · p. 212] its essence, or the Lord himself; but it can create beings from substances so formed as to be capable of receiving its love and wisdom. Comparatively as the mundane sun is unable by all its heat and light to make the earth germinate, when nevertheless it can produce germination from earthy substances," such as seeds, " in which it may be present by its heat and light, causing vegetation." * So he says elsewhere, to the same effect : " Life viewed in itself, which is God, cannot create another being that shall be life itself: for the life which is God is uncreate, continuous, and indivisible; hence it is that God is one. But the life which is God can create, out of substances which are not life, forms in which it can exist, giving these forms to seem as if they themselves lived. Now men are such forms, which as being only receptacles of life, could not in the first creation, or originally, be anything but images and likenesses of God: for life and its recipients adapt themselves each to the other like active and passive, but in no wise mix together. Hence human forms, being but recipient forms of life, do not live from themselves but from God who alone is life." f " It seems to man as if he lived from himself, but this is a fallacy. The reason why it seems as if life were in man is, that it enters by influx from the Lord into his i?imost forms, [Letter 17 · p. 213] arc remote from the sight of his thought, arid so are unpcrceived. Further, the principal cause which is life, and the instrumental cause which is recipient of it, act together as one cause and this action is felt in the latter, or in Man, as if it were in himself. Still another reason why life appears to be in man himself, is that the Divine love is of such an infinite quality that it desires to communicate to man " (or have in common with him) " what belongs to itself." * As is said in another place : " It is the essence of love not to love itself but others, and to be joined in unity with them by love. It is also essential to it to be beloved by those others, since thereby conjunc tion is effected. The essence of all love consists in conjunction : yea the life of it, what we call its en joyment, pleasantness, delight, sweetness, beatitude, happiness, felicity. Love consists in willing what is our own to be another's, and feeling that others pri vate delight as our own. This it is to love. But for a man to feel his own delight in another, and not the other's delight in himself, — this is not to love ; for in this case he loves himself, but in the other his neighbor. These two loves, self-love and neighborly love, are diametrical opposites ; for in proportion as any one loves another from self-love, he afterwards hates him. Hence it is evident that the Divine love [Letter 17 · p. 214] cannot help being and existing in oilier beings and existences whom it loves and by Avhom it is beloved. For when such a quality exists in all love, it is bound to exist in the amplest measure, that is, infinitely or without drawback, in Love itself." * And Swedenborg goes on to say, that if infinite love existed in others, by creation, they would be Love itself, and God consequently would be self-love, whereof not the least conceivable fibre is possible to Him, being totally opposed to His being. " This reciprocation of love must take place between God and other beings in whose selfhood there is nothing of the Divine." This objective middle-ground however, which all spiritual creation implies between creature and crea tor, and makes common to them both, is objective only to the creature's imperfect intelligence, while it is in truth a necessary element of his subjectivity, being requisite to define the spiritual creation to his limited perception, or give it anchorage and embodi ment to his experience. It no way enters as such objective middle-ground into the creative idea, but confesses itself a mere latent, still unrecognized, con stitutional factor or law of the created subjectivity. Thus in the actual creation nature is the objective middle-ground between creature and creator ; the [Letter 17 · p. 215] * Divine Love and Wisdom, 47, 48, 49. T11K CREATURE'S NATURAL CONSTITUTION. 215 mother-substance which to the created intelligence gives creation sensible background, or is necessary to constitute it, and make it visible. But this natural mother-substance has no independent existence to the creative intelligence ; but exists only as an implication or involution of the created or finite selfhood, to which fallacious quantity it affords all the while the only real or universal and quasi-spiritual pretext and justifica tion, and hence in every way invites and secures to it self the tenderest Divine concession or accommodation. Nature indeed offers to the universal heart of man the nearest possible symbol — that is, pledge or reali zation — of the Divine infinitude it is any way capa ble of acknowledging ; and it is freely worn therefore by God as a temporary mask or visor, under cover of which He pursues, and finally legitimates to the created intelligence, His stupendous spiritual ends. [Letter 17 · p. 215] It is plain to see, then, that creation, in the only sense in which it is capable of being rationally apprehended, that is, as a purely spiritual or living work, is bound by virtue of the creator's infinitude to determine itself to objective natural form ; or, to use a compact and convenient expression of Swedenborg, is bound to ultimate itself naturally or objectively to the creature's experience, in order to reflect or reproduce to his finite consciousness the infinite life or being he has in God. "By creation is meant," says Sweden- 216 SPIRITUAL CREATION INERT WITHOUT [Letter 17 · p. 216] borg, " what is Divine from inmost to outermost, or first to last. Everything which proceeds from the Divine begins from Himself, and progresses accord ing to order even to the ultimate end : thus through the heavens into the world, and there rests as in its ultimate " or home; " for the ultimate of Divine order is in the nature of the world. What is of such a quality is properly said to be created." * So, in another place, he says : " Scientific things " — by which he means, well-established facts as disengaged from the personal or superstitious fancies of men — " which belong to the sphere of man's natural intel ligence, are the ultimates of order there ; and things prior, that is, spiritual things, must be in ultimates that they may exist and appear in the natural sphere. All prior or spiritual things, moreover, tend to ulti mates as to their own boundaries or limits, and exist in those boundaries or limits as causes in their effects, or as superior things exist in inferior, as in their proper vehicles or vessels. Hence it is that the spiritual world terminates in man's natural mind, in which mind accordingly the things of the spiritual world are exhibited representatively" as in a glass, or picture. " Unless spiritual things " — which, re member, are always living affections of goodness and [Letter 17 · p. 217] " Divine order never stops in a middle-point (as the angel or heaven) and there forms a thing without its ultimate, for then it would not be in a full and perfect state; but goes straight on to its ultimate, and when it is in its ultimate, it then forms, and also by mediums there brought together, it redintegrates itself and produces ulterior things by procreations : whence the ultimate is called the seminary or seed-place of heaven." f " The ultimate of Divine order is in man, and because he is the ultimate of Divine order, he is also its basis and foundation. Heaven without the human race would be like a house want ing its foundation/'J "The end of creation, which is that all things may return to the creator, and that conjunction may be effected, exists in its ultimates." $ " That all ultimate ends become anew first ends, is evident from the fact that there is nothing so inert and dead but has some efficiency in it; even sand exhales somewhat which contributes assistance in producing and therefore in effecting something." | " The ultimate, when order is perfect, is holy above [Letter 17 · p. 218] It is this implication of the created nature, accord ingly, in the spiritual creation, which alone gives that creation its truly miraculous quality, and saves it from being what otherwise it must always have appeared to be, a mere magical product, or work of enchantment. Magic is the power of gratuitous or ostentatious productivity ; the power to produce some thing out of nothing, consequently without labor- pains : thus a something which has no inward ground of being, and therefore exists surreptitiously or by virtue of a deception practised upon the senses of those who acknowledge it. It is a power which used to flourish, in very high places too, upon the earth ; but is happily now confined to the hells, save in so far as the hells themselves are vainly trying to com pass an unsuspected lodgment in the human mind in the guise of an absurd doctrine called Spiritualism. But the power of all the hells put together would be impotent at this day to persuade any man of average spiritual intelligence that magic, however specious its performances, is anything but a gross mockery of creative power, or ever succeeds in demonstrating anything but its own unlikeness to it. It is the characteristic of power truly creative to be able to [Letter 17 · p. 219] * Arcana Calestia, 9824. See also 5077, 9360, 9212, 9216. GIVES IT ALL ITS INTEREST TO THE HEART. 219 endow its creature with a miraculous mother-sub stance, or natural basis, and by that means reproduce as in a glass all its own spiritual effects, so verifying or authenticating them to the creature's understanding. And it is the unfailing attribute of natural existence to be a form of use to something higher than itself, thus the mineral to the vegetable, the vegetable to the animal, and the animal to man ; so that whatso ever has not either potentially or actually this soul of use within it, does not honestly belong to nature, but confesses itself a mere sensational effect produced upon the individual intelligence.* [Letter 17 · p. 219] * " Hence," says Swedenborg, " you may discern how sensually — that is, from the inspiration of the bodily senses, and the darkness which they cast over spiritual things — they think who deem that na ture is self-originated. These men think from the eye and not from the understanding. People of this sort are able to think nothing of what being and existing is in itself, namely : that it is eternal, uncreate, and infinite. Nor are they able to think of Life in itself, but as of some volatile thing, passing off into nothing ; nor yet of Love and Wisdom, being totally incapable of discerning that all things of nature derive thence their existence. And indeed it cannot be seen by any one that all tilings of nature exist thence, unless nature herself be thought of a» an orderly series of uses, and not estimated from some of her oulicard forms merely, which are only visual objects. For the uses of nature proceed only from life, and their series and order from wisdom and love. But her visible forms arc mere continents of these uses, so that if they alone or primarily be regarded, nothing of life can be seen in nature, much less anything of love and wisdom, and consequently nothing of God." — Divine Love and Wisdom, 46. [Letter 17 · p. 220] Creative power in truth has at this day no fitter expression than that which is furnished it by the modern doctrine of Evolution : understood, to be sure, somewhat more largely than that doctrine is by its current scientific adherents. For to men of science generally the doctrine of evolution imports merely the development of one natural species or kind out of other pre-existing species or kinds ; whereas a true or philosophic doctrine of evolution implies the con version of natural (or lower) substance into spiritual (or higher) form. There is no doubt that man, in so far as his very inferior animality is concerned, is a strict product of the animal kingdom: but there is therefore no reason to hold him to be an evolution of it, unless indeed evolution means devolution, or a process from more to less, from strength to weakness. He is, doubtless, so far forth as his animal nature is concerned, identical with all other animals, only less highly gifted than they with aggressive and persistent force ; and so far accordingly there is more ground to pronounce him an involution of the animal king dom than an evolution of it. But man is not essen tially animal. He is animal at most on his organic side, and it is only by remorselessly slumping his distinctively inorganic or human attributes in his animal or organic ones, that any pretext is found for making his existence a product of evolution from [Letter 17 · p. 221] BY THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 221 lower forms. In so far as he is animal, he does not require anv doctrine of evolution to explain his ad vent unless it be one which explains at the same time the advent of the whole animal kingdom of which he forms a part. And so far as he is distinc tively human and inorganic — that is, unembraced in the animal kingdom — his own particular animality stands between him and the rest of that kingdom, stamping itself the only ground or earth of involution he can possibly need, for the subsequent uses of his spiritual or characteristic evolution. [Letter 17 · p. 221] My subjective existence, physical and moral, is in volved in my spiritual being, just as the shell is involved in the oyster, the egg in the chicken, the husk in the wheat, the matrix in the gem, the parent in the child : that is, as giving it not substance but surface, not being but background, not centre but circumference, not inward reality but outward appari tion, not soul but body. My subjective existence in short is the worthless, perishable ground of my im mortal spiritual being. Thus involution is anything else than evolution. It is the direct logical opposite of Evolution. It is indeed a literal and strict inver sion of it, just as the root of a plant is an inversion of its stem, or its seed an inversion of its fruit. In volution is logically proportionate and precedent to Evolution, as earth is logically proportionate and pre- 222 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHIC [Letter 17 · p. 222] cedent to heaven ; and no hypothesis of evolution will ever be competent to furnish a pedigree of existence, unless it start from a previous philosophy of involu tion. Thus if, as many self-constituted partisans of science are prone to believe, monkey evolves man, it can only be by virtue of man first involving monkey. And to account for man therefore on monkey prin ciples, near or remote, without first accounting for monkey on distinctively human principles, would be to leave our poor ancestral monkey himself unac counted for : that is, it would practically be to deify him. It would be to explain being by existence, the absolute by the contingent, substance by accident, church by steeple, ship by sails, house by cellar. Whatever is really involved in any existence is merely and at most constitutional to it, as conditioning its apparition, and is not the least essential to it, as con ferring its being. My various viscera are no doubt a condition of my physical statics ; but that they in the least degree explain my moral dynamics, can only be affirmed as it seems to me by wilful fatuity. They are involved in my physical existence, which is itself involved in my moral consciousness ; so that you will never be able to account for them, until you first account for me, independently of them. [Letter 17 · p. 223] is, causes it to exist in natura rerum. So that to attempt explaining evolution by involution, man by monkey, is a palpable logical dodge or quibble, whose whole force consists in confounding two essentially dis crepant and reciprocally inverse things, namely : crea tion and constitution, being and existence, substance and surface, cause and condition, spirit and flesh. Involution is to evolution precisely what shell is to oyster, what husk is to wheat, what matrix is to gem, what parent is to child ; and to explain evolution by involution, therefore, is to make the oyster cradle its shell, the wheat nourish its husk, the gem protect its matrix, the child support its parent ; all which to the eye of philosophy constitutes a downright witches' sabbath of science ; but a sabbath nevertheless which Mr. Herbert Spencer and the so-called positivists gen erally are content and proud to sanctify. To think of our most eminent religiosi being frightened by these vagaries of our modern scientific thought ! What does their alarm prove ? Certainly little or nothing with respect to the object of it, but very much with respect to its subjects. For it proves not that Pos itivism, or any subtler form of meditative Atheism, is any way dangerous to any properly human interest, but only that our existing religious faith is every way insecure, being founded not upon the rock of Truth, but upon the shifting sands of authorized opinion. [Letter 17 · p. 224] Thus, as I have said, evolution is an every way fit ting doctrine wherewith to express the truth of spirit ual creation, provided we give the phenomenal basis of involution which it claims a strictly subject posi tion ; or make Evolution a regenerate spiritual flower, and Involution its natural earthly stem. This is pre cisely what the scientific men fail to do. They invari ably put the cart before the horse, in making the stem account for the flower, and not the flower for the stem, which is the true philosophic order. They make the earth explain heaven, and not heaven the earth, the body explain the soul, and not the soul the body, physics explain morals, and not morals physics, and thus practically outrage all the deeper and finer instincts of humanity, dogmatically sundering that exquisite thread of . tradition which in the absence of positive knowledge has hitherto bound men in intel lectual and quasi-spiritual unity. The obvious phil osophic objection to recent scientific speculations is not that they practically tend to invalidate the current religious dogmas in regard to creation, which they cannot do half forcibly enough ; but that they substi tute in their place a scientific dogmatism which is not half so respectable in itself, to begin with, and which if it should ever become established in popular regard would be fatal to the very conception of creation, and hence to the spiritual dignity of human nature. [Letter 17 · p. 225] Science has a notable function in the world, but as I have already said it is an intensely humble not a commanding one; an abjectly servile not a leading function. Its name is Esau, not Jacob, being born of the bond woman not of the free. That is to say, science reflects the heart still in bondage to the intel lect, while philosophy alone expresses the intellect inspired by the heart. The function of science is to observe and connote the actual facts of existence, in order to determine the mental relation of unity which binds them all together ; not in the least to dogma tize, or build up a philosophic credo, either upon the physical facts themselves, or the logical unity with which the mind invests them. In short, fact and the relations affirmed by the mind amongst facts, is the field of science. Thus it is scientifically competent to Newton to prove that the elliptical movement of the earth around the sun as demonstrated by Kepler, is due to the attraction exerted by the sun upon the earth. For what Newton thus does is simply to establish by Kepler's aid a hitherto unrecognized law of planetary life or intercourse. And it is perfectly competent moreover to Mr. Darwin, in the point of view of science, to collect and colligate, under any generic law of unity he pleases — say Natural Selec tion, Sexual Selection, or both together — whatsoever actual facts of transmutation he may have observed in [Letter 17 · p. 226] existing animal and vegetable species. For what he thus does is simply to establish and announce a cer tain spiritual or living unity, with which the mind by an instinct of its own underlying infinitude, insists upon filling up all the crevices of nature, and account ing for all its changes. Mr. Darwin may, to be sure, have been faithless to fact, or faithless to the mind : that is to say, his observation may be imperfect, or his generalization premature : but at all events his method is thus far irreproachable. But when any one, under cover of Mr. Darwin's name, quietly " slips over," as Aristotle says, "into another kind," and making a fulcrum of his induction in regard to the existing or fossil variations in the same species, applies his lever to the disclosure of the origination of species, he at once casts off the honest livery of science, and converts himself all unconsciously into an ambitious dogma tist. Mr. Darwin makes it scientifically very proba ble that natural and sexual selection account for all the varieties observable within our existing species. But to reason hereupon that these two principles are sufficient to account for the origin of existing species themselves, is not to reason scientifically, because the reasoning admits of absolutely no verification in fact. My tailor yields a sufficient scientific explanation of the differences between my clothes and those of other peo ple ; but when you seek a philosophic justification of [Letter 17 · p. 227] NOT MAGISTERIAL TO THE MIND. 227 clothing itself, you must go beyond the tailor. It is good science to say : the sartorial art originated more or less all the varieties we observe in the costume of men ; certainly all those variations which simply im ply advance : for here we have any amount of well-attested fact to sustain us. But it is complete recre ancy to science to say hereupon " the sartorial art also originates clothing itself among men " : for here we have absolutely no historic fact to keep us in counte nance. [Letter 17 · p. 227] Just so w'ith the scientific evolutionist. The basis of his speculation here is not fact at all, but pure fancy. He says in effect : " I conclude that natural and sexual selection have operated all the changes we observe within our extant species of existence, and be tween some of these species again and certain allied species of which we have only a few fossil remainders ; because a great store of well-attested facts in natural history warrant this conclusion " ; and this is good science. But now he proceeds : " I take another step, and conclude, from the adequacy of these laws to ac count for specific changes in existence, that they are adequate also to account for the origination, which is the creation of existence." And this is spurious sci ence. Why ? Simply because it is obviously incapa ble of verification by any fact of nature or of history, and depends for its justification upon a certain bias 228 NATURE NEITHER BEGINS NOR ENDS ANYTHING. [Letter 17 · p. 228] Nature gives us absolutely no hint, much less any distinct affirmation, in respect either to the origin or destiny of any of her forms or species. All that we see in nature is a foreground of change upon a back ground of stability, thus fixity in universals, mutation in particulars. But nothing originates and nothing ends in nature. Why ? Because nature is not being nor even existence, but only, and at most, appearance. Hence all of nature's forms or species are purely rela tive or phenomenal ; that is to say, they presuppose an intelligence which is capable of comprehending them, and to which alone they exist. And the scien tific evolutionist consequently, in so far forth as he invents a natural origin even for the larvae of our exist ing marine ascidians, let alone for the mind of man itself, proceeds upon a total misunderstanding of what nature means, and so turns the actual truth of things upside down. In fact he discharges the mind of all freedom or life ; for he makes nature no longer the obedient mirror of truth, but its absolute source and arbiter. [Letter 18 · p. 229] LETTER XVIII. 'Y DEAR FRIEND : — Let me say again, in simple justice to myself, that I have no shadow of objection to the new scientific dogma, in so far as it is purely negative; that is, bears upon the stagnant religious faiths of the world. Doubt or denial is the legitimate weapon of scientific advance. And our present science is, I appre hend, only an indispensable John the Baptist blindly preparing the way, and proclaiming the advent, of a new, or a spiritual and living faith : which it does by 'vastating the active intellect of men of its dead faiths. Accordingly in so far as our recent bellicose science goes to discredit an historic or literal creation, I have no quarrel with it. For I see in it only the augury of a new faith, based upon a profounder ac knowledgment of creation, as being no preposterous physical exploit of God accomplished in the realms of space and time, but a wholly spiritual operation of His power in the realms of human affection and thought. [Letter 18 · p. 230] 230 THE FORTE AND FOIBLE OF SCIENCE. Thus it is altogether in their positive aspect that I pretend to any quarrel with our recent scientific dog matics. When science, disdaining the humble but honorable office of ministering to a new intellectual faith and a new spiritual life in man, assumes itself to constitute or even forecast such faith and life, she is no longer amiable nor respectable, and invites as it seems to me a just disclaimer on the part of the outraged common sense of mankind. [Letter 18 · p. 230] The forte of science, be it always remembered, is reflection, or reasoned observation ; and these things are plainly possible to man only in so far as his feet are planted in a fixed physical or organic world existing objectively or outwardly to his senses. Now reflection being the proper forte of science, or the mode of industry whereby she thrives, I hope it will be allowed me to ask what is her consequent foible, or the mode of activity by which she dwindles ? The foible of science, then, reflection being her forte, is perception, or spiritual insight; which is possible to man only in so far as his head dwells in a free, inorganic, ethereal, or metaphysical world existing inwardly or subjectively to his affections. Now, such being the forte, and such the foible, of science, it follows naturally enough to the eye of philosophy, that the puncttim saliens both of her reflective strength and her perceptive weakness should be, as I have be- NATURE'S FIRST LESSON TO THE INTELLECT. 231 [Letter 18 · p. 231] We give the designation of Nature to the outlying universe, or world of things existing to sense. Now what is the earliest and deepest intellectual lesson we derive from this world of sense ? It is that every thing embraced in it exists really in a composite man ner, however much it may seem to exist in a simple or absolute one. The reason of this discrepancy be tween the rational truth and the sensible fact of the case is, doubtless, the infirmity of the created intelli gence : we the dependents of nature, who get our high est knowledge exclusively from the gradual revelation she gives of the Divine goodness and truth, bring to her observation and study first of all a simple, and then a composite faculty of attention ; and she miraculously adjusts herself to our need. Thus we first apprehend nature by sense, and only afterwards learn to appre hend it by the understanding. The exigency of our senses imposes upon everything that exists an appar ently absolute, that is, a fixed or finite, quality, which the thing is thought to possess in itself, or quite irre spectively of all other things. But our reason or understanding subsequently enables us to convert this [Letter 18 · p. 232] absolute or fixed quality of existence, which it appar ently possesses in itself, into a relative, unfixed, or contingent quality which it possesses only in relation to other things. That is to say, we first apprehend the thing as a purely physical existence, and after wards rise to the conception of it as a natural exist ence. The first or sensuous aspect of the world pre sents us everything in a purely selfish, personal, or phenomenal point of view ; the second or rational aspect of it alone exhibits everything as existing in a purely relative, or associated, and harmonious light. A horse, for example, happens at this moment to be tied before my door. This horse, I repeat, is an ab solute or fixed fact of sense, entirely distinct from all other facts ; so fixed or absolute, that to dispute or deny it would be equivalent to disputing or denying the competence of my senses in their own sphere. But notwithstanding that the horse is this absolute or fixed fact to my senses, you yourself will agree with me that he has no existence to my reason out of re lation to all other horses. That is to say : while he apparently exists in himself alone, or as an individual horse, he in very truth exists only in solidarity with his kind. And so with all other things in the realm of sense. [Letter 18 · p. 233] you never have thought of before, namely ; that this relative existence of things — the existence they have in relation to all other things — alone stamps them natural ; while their absolute or individual existence — the apparent existence they have in themselves — is a grossly fallacious or unreal thing, in total contra diction to the constitution of nature. To be sure it is only a judgment of our infirm or imperfect sense that things have this absolute or fixed individuality. Nothing claims it but man ; but because he, inspired by sense and uncontrolled by reason, affects selfhood, he does not hesitate to bestow it also in modified form upon all other existence. All other things utterly dis claim it in fact ; and it is only the profound halluci nation which he cherishes in regard to himself as in volving his own being and existence, that ever leads him to invest them also in their degree with selfhood, reckoning their innocent persons in fact good and evil, and subjecting them to reward and punishment, as they stand affected to his dubious and very wilful supremacy. [Letter 18 · p. 234] subjective unity. That is to say, it is the strict unity in all its subjects of a public and a private, or a com mon and a proper, force. It embraces two elements, one universal the other particular, one statical the other dynamical, one material, in short, the other spiritual ; and these two elements moreover are most distinctly one or united, so that however easily we may divorce them in thought or reflectively, they are never separable in fact. A really absolute, finite, or independent existence, save as a fallacy of the human mind, is disavowed by the nature of things, and we may safely dismiss it from rational regard therefore. There is no such existence out of our infirm under standing, and no subjective pretension to it outside of hell, which fairly lives and grows fat upon the hallu cinations bred of it. But I admit that nature out wardly vieived does wear the appearance of being almost wholly made up of these absolute or finite and independent existences. But what business have we, as philosophers, to be caught looking at nature out wardly ? This in fact is just iny complaint in the premises, that we should be so long philosophically content to view nature as an outward thing, or as she stands revealed to sense, when she herself prays to be regarded inwardly alone, or as she reveals herself to our understanding : that is, to be regarded no more as mineral, vegetable, and animal, but as exclusively [Letter 18 · p. 235] human. It is only an inveterate sensuous fatuity on our part which leads us to mistake the mere sensible or physical appearances of things for their funda mental natural or rational realities. And there is no way of correcting the mistake but by outgrowing this fatal intellectual fatuity ; that is, by at once manfully deposing sense from the governing or inspiring rela tion it now bears to the intellect, and remanding it forthwith to a wholly ministerial or subordinate place. Believe me, my friend, it is nothing but this subtle and insinuating serpent of sense (rightly so named in sacred or symbolic writ) which — appealing to the woman in us, that is, the still latent or unrecognized spiritual Divine force in our nature — has ever had power so to falsify and otherwise bedevil our intelli gence as to make us look upon creation as a material or sensibly objective work of God, detached from Him by the laws of space and time, instead of a purely spiritual or inwardly subjective one, intimately blent with His eternal Love and Wisdom through the laws of our own nature or the life of our affection and thought. It is simply this stultifying pressure of sense upon the intellect that has always until now rendered it intellectually impossible for us to identify our own honest natural manhood, let alone our Divine natural one. Have you not under the guidance of sense always looked upon your natural manhood as [Letter 18 · p. 236] at bottom physically engendered? That is to say, as engendered out of the various limitations you de rive from your mineral, vegetable, and animal organi zation ? You have never thought — have you ? — that your natural manhood was what forever lifted you out of mineral, vegetable, and animal relation ship, and rendered you eternally solidaire with man kind. Much more, if you have ever considered the truth of a Divine natural manhood at all, you have thought — have you not ? — that it was altogether personally constituted : that is, constituted by a person of another nature to ours, acting in fact in total aloof ness from, and independence of, your and mine and all men's common nature, instead of identifying him self exclusively with that nature, and glorifying it to Divine dimensions. Personality has never been any thing else than a mark which we stupid men have required to assure us of our natural difference from mineral, vegetable, and animal, although we ourselves have none the less always contrived stupidly to in terpret it into a providential signal of the natural relation of disunion or inequality we were under to our fellow-men. Accordingly when the Divine natu ral humanity condescends to reveal itself in personal form, we may be sure that it is for no purpose of living to that form but only of dying to it, in order that men may cease any longer to find their life in [Letter 18 · p. 237] OF THE SPIRITUAL ENDS OF NATURE, 237 what merely differences them from lower natures, and seek it henceforth in all that identifies them with their own nature, now become Divine. But I am forgetting my purpose, which was to show a certain ontologic craze on the part of science, which rendering her view of nature hopelessly infirm or inadequate except for isoteric or shop purposes, utterly defeats her educational competence. [Letter 18 · p. 237] This craze consists all simply in looking upon nature as a fixed or finite existence, thus as materially constituted, as being in short a strict phenomenon of space and time. It is all very well, mind, nay, it is a matter of stern necessity, to regard nature as materially or outwardly constituted to our senses. For inasmuch as nature is a purely metaphysic quantity, it is evident that she can only be reflected to our un derstanding through the obedient mirror of physics. Her existence then to our recognition must be con ditioned upon fixed or sensibly objective relations between mineral, vegetable, and animal substance ; otherwise it will be impossible for us ever to appre hend her, ever to catch even a glimpse of her living and glorified presence. But this is not what science, at least in the person of her more renowned modern adepts, means. She does not hold that nature is de pendent for her intellectual recognition by us on a certain objective or material imagery addressed pri- [Letter 18 · p. 238] marily to our senses, and through them to our under standing. By no means. She holds that nature is actually identical with this physical imagery, and has neither conceivable being nor existence apart from the unconscious forms which to a more instructed eye simply reveal her perfections. This is why I called this illusion a craze on the part of science. Surely you would think a man out of his wits who should identify himself with his image in a glass. And I in like manner deem science out of her wits when she identifies the mistress she professes to worship with the perishable mirror that reflects her. These objective or material facts, which so gravel and im pede the onward march of science, are nothing, as we have seen, but ultimates of Divine order, in the sphere of sense ; just as bricks and mortar are ulti mates in the same sphere of architectural order. You would not rate very high a man's genius who should pretend to deduce the architectural order of the Par thenon from the stone and lime and water which nevertheless gave it its sole material basis ? So too you would not feel constrained to put a high estimate upon the conceited science, which — because it is able to lay a profane or familiar hand upon these mere bases, or material ultimates, of Divine order in human nature — irreverently supposes that it has got within its grasp the ineffable spiritual results of that order ? [Letter 18 · p. 239] Spiritual creation cannot possibly be understood save in so far as the spiritual or created subject is seen to be invested incidentally with natural consti tution. His person must be seen to be naturally constituted, in order to give him conscious projection from God, and make anything, even existence, truly predicable of him. For spiritual creation, you re member, is purely subjective creation; that is, the creator gives being to the creature only by giving Himself to him, or endowing him with his own infi nite substance. But no mere person, much less all persons, would be equal to this Divine communi cation, unless it incidentally provided, or involved in itself, a natural or objective development on the part of the creature to give him background or a basis of identity ; otherwise it must instantly collapse or turn out a false pretension. There would be no created object at all commensurate with the creative subject ; and creation consequently, which, to begin with, is a strict equation between creator and creature, would fall through, or confess itself impossible from the start. This is all that Swedenborg means by his doc trine of natural ultimates as incidental to spiritual creation. It is a doctrine which, for the first time in [Letter 18 · p. 240] 240 IT CLAIMS THAT NATURAL EXISTENCE the philosophic annals of the mind, not only accounts for Nature, and perfectly accounts for it too, but brings the dread and formidable spiritual world itself into our own keeping, as it were, by harnessing it and taming it down to the phenomena of men's familiar natural history. Any other doctrine would turn the creator into a mere magician, or supreme charlatan, making everything out of nothing, and so avouching himself infinitely below not merely any renowned art ist, but any honest stone-mason. For the mason's art does n't pretend to make bricks without straw, or sub jective existence without any objective implication, but finds its ultimation also in things most real and tangible to our senses, whereby alone it is that we are never liable to mistake it for a mere creation of the fata morgana. [Letter 18 · p. 240] Now it would be by no means remarkable if science should be content to fix her regard exclusively upon this constitutive sphere of things, thus objectively in volved in the spiritual or subjective creation. For this outwardly objective sphere of things constitutes the true and legitimate field of her activity, furnishes her with her sole raison d'etre in fact ; and within that sphere accordingly none can gainsay her voice. But she is not thus content in point of fact. Some busy imp from some dusky hell of ambition has bitten her with an unfortunate desire to dogmatize, or take IS IDENTICAL WITH SPIRITUAL BEING. 241 [Letter 18 · p. 241] captive the realm of faith in man ; that is to say, the field of his interior knowledge as well as his external. This is the only reason why I have allowed myself to call her craze an ontologic one. It does not confine itself to speculating upon existence, but assuming apparently that natural existence is the same thing with spiritual being, it undertakes authoritatively to check or limit what is by what sensibly appears to be ; or array natural constitution ayainst spiritual creation. Thus where Swedenborg says that all natural existence is created by a soul of use behind it — use to other and higher things — our modern science affirms that all natural existence is constituted by some primary natural substance, say protoplasm, and that there is an end of the matter. There can be no objection of course to the scientific man's attempt to reduce if he can all organized existence to a common basis ; but the objection comes in when he attempts to make any formula of his on this grossly gratuitous and imper tinent subject, of vital concern to philosophy. For in doing this he at once betrays his crass ignorance of what philosophy means, confounding, for example, every concept that is proper and dear to it with its exact opposite, individuality with identity, life with existence, form with substance, cause with condition, creation with constitution. Philosophy is perfectly in different to what naturally constitutes existence or [Letter 18 · p. 242] 242 PROFESSOR HUXLEY gives it outward body, but reserves all her interest for what spiritually creates it, or gives it inward soul. To misconceive and misrepresent this, however, is the inveterate temptation of clever scientific men, and the infirmity has never been more aptly illustrated than in the developments of our recent scientific material ism. " Pursue," says Professor Huxley, " the nettle and the oak, the rnidge and the mammoth, the infant and the adult, Shakespeare and Caliban, to their com mon root, and you have protoplasm for your pains. Beyond this analysis science cannot go ; and any metaphysic of existence consequently which is not fast tethered to this physical substance, which is not firmly anchored in protoplasm, is an affront to the scientific understanding." [Letter 18 · p. 242] Such in substance is Professor Huxley's attitude to wards philosophy. Professor Huxley is consciously no doubt a very independent man, and an uncommonly able writer ; but it seems to me very odd, to say the least, that any one interested not in the pursuit of scientific knowledge primarily, but of philosophic truth, should be at all moved, and especially at all disconcerted, by his facts : for whether they be scien tifically valid or not, they are properly irrelevant to philosophy. Like Mr. Spencer, M. Taine, and all the other men who desire not only to make science the king, but also to invest it with the priesthood AS A PHILOSOPHER. 243 [Letter 18 · p. 243] of the mind, Professor Huxley restricts his researches to the principle of identity in existence — that point in which all existence becomes essentially chaotic or substantially indistinguishable. The philosopher, on the other hand, who sees science to be not the end but the means of the mind's ultimate enfranchisement, enlarges his researches to the principle of individual ity in existence, or that comprehensive spiritual unity in which all existence becomes essentially cosmical, or formally differentiated inter se. Far be it from me to question Mr. Huxley's statistics, for I know noth ing about them ; I only question, nay I am heartily amused by, the extravagant intellectual conclusions he deduces from them. I have no doubt, on his own showing, that the initial fact in all organization is protoplasm. But at the same time I avow myself unable to conceive a fact of less vital significance to philosophy. Philosophy cheerfully takes that and every similar fad of science for granted. The initial fact in the edifice of St. Peter's at Rome was a quan tity of stone and lime. This fact was assumed by the architect as necessarily included in the form of his edifice, about which form alone he was concerned. The identity of his edifice, or what it possessed of common substance with all other buildings, interested him very little ; only its individuality, or what it should possess of differential form from all other [Letter 18 · p. 244] 244 WHAT PROTOPLASM SYMBOLIZES buildings, was what exercised his imagination. To conceive of Michael Angelo concerning himself mainly with the rude protoplasm, or mere flesh and bones, of his building, is at once to reduce him from an architect to a mason. And, in like manner, to con ceive the philosopher intent upon running man's im mortal destiny, or spiritual form, into the abject slime out of which his body germinates, is to reduce him from a philosopher to a noodle. [Letter 18 · p. 244] Protoplasm means intellectual chaos ; means the resolution of the existing cosmos into absolute form lessness or disorder. That is to say : you cannot arrive at protoplasm experimentally or livingly, ex cept by disowning our present cosmical form and order, except by eliminating all that you organically are, with all that is contingent upon your organiza tion, namely : all your experience of life and con sciousness, every fact of appetite and emotion, of reason and imagination, of passion and action, every thing, in short, that constitutes you a living person and so stamps you of the slightest moment to phi losophy. Protoplasm, in truth, as an intellectual symbol, means the extinguishing of the soul or life or being of things, and the permission of mere bodily existence to them, without any source either for them to exist, or go forth, from, but what is essentially in ferior to themselves. For no one will pretend that TO THE INTELLECT. 245 [Letter 18 · p. 245] protoplasm, or the formless unqualified material of things, is any way comparable in intellectual interest with the least of its formed or qualified products. Nevertheless, to such absolute drivel does the man of science reduce himself when he aspires, on scien tific (/rounds, to play the philosopher ! And such is the invariable penalty of violating spiritual bounds. The realm of Philosophy is invariably soul, or inward consciousness ; the realm of science is, as invariably, body, or outward sense. And although it is past all dispute that these two realms stand to each other in the relation of superstructure and base, it is none the less but all the more true that while the former is in deed outwardly conditioned upon the latter, the latter is inwardly created by the former ; and hence that the higher realm of soul is no more continuous with the lower realm of body, than a house is continuous with its foundation, or a tree which fills the air with bloom and fragrance is continuous with its underground roots. The roots of the tree are a mere involution of the tree in order to its subsequent evolution, and any expansion they may attain to is not in the direction of the tree, but in a contrary or inverse direction, that of the earth. The foundation of the house in like manner is so wholly subservient to the house, that every subsequent enlargement it may chance to un dergo in itself, will only enhance such subserviency [Letter 18 · p. 246] Notwithstanding all I have said, however, I have not the least doubt that the gospel of physicism is a strictly providential movement in our mental history. I have no doubt that in thus making as it does tabula rasa, or a clean sweep, of our sensuous or inherited ontology, it does unwitting good service to the mind in clearing the ground for a new and purely spir itual conception of being or life. Idealism seems in fact a gross but inevitable husk of the mind's spirit ual advent. But its role is essentially critical : that is, it is not the least rightfully dogmatic. And noth ing can be more insane, therefore, than to regard the new dogmatism as constituting the positive boon to the intellect which it ignorantly assumes to do. Our intelligence is built not upon negation but affirma tion, and the current scientific idealism is at best but a transition point between the once active but always baseless and now defunct metaphysics of theology, and that philosophic naturalism or realism which is even now looming in our intellectual horizon, and ready to avouch itself the fixed immovable earth of the mind, the adamantine rock of man's spiritual faith and hope. [Letter 19 · p. 247] LETTER XIX. now, my dear friend, we are almost ready to take up the thread of discourse we dropped, in reference to the function of the church in history : almost ready, but not quite. For I think a little further effort should first be made perfectly to familiarize your thought with Swedenborg's philosophy of nature as being a strictly necessary involution of the spiritual creation. Noth ing short of clear conceptions on this subject will per manently avail to free the mind from the rubbish of inane and idle ontologic speculation which now threat ens to drown it out. The intellectual formula to which the truth of the spiritual creation with its marvellous implication of nature reduces itself, may be thus expressed : The created subject, in order to his subjective life or con sciousness being perfectly authenticated, requires that it be alt oy ether outivardly or objectively realized, or claim a supremely natural root. The justification of this 248 SWEDENBORG'S PHILOSOPHY [Letter 19 · p. 248] intellectual formula, or law of thought, is to be found in the very nature of creation ; which, as being the operation of an infinite power, cut off therefore from all outside resources, is restricted to purely subjective issues ; and hence, in order spiritually to qualify its creature, or redeem him from the sheer and abject phenomenal subjectivity to which as a creature he is doomed, is obliged to endow him thereupon with a career of distinctively natural evolution, which may serve as a true and objective basis of his eventual spiritual enfranchisement. Creation of course is the prerogative of an infinite being ; but we are in the habit of borrowing the word to characterize the prod ucts of our own esthetic genius or free activity. Thus we say Hamlet is a creation of Shakespeare, Dante created the Inferno, the Parthenon divides its creation between Calibrates and Phidias, the artist creates the statue. Now, of course, regarded strictly, it is not a just use of the word to employ it simply in the way of characterizing our unforced or sponta neous activity ; because it is essential to the creative idea that the creator give spiritual or living form to His creature only by Himself first furnishing him with natural or mother-substance. And Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest, may worry themselves out of their meagre wits, before they will ever be able any of them to endow the products of their distinctive [Letter 19 · p. 249] Still we may get a very good hypothetical illustra tion out of the word even in this familiar misuse of it. Let us suppose then that the artist were a veritable creator, and had power accordingly to give his statue subjective or conscious life by himself spiritually vivifying the marble from which it comes. In that case one thing would be at once clear, and that is, that the statue would be no longer as now a dead material form, but a conscious or quasi-living one, instinct, no doubt, through its vivified mother-sub stance with all its creator's genius. But another thing would be almost equally clear, and that is, that he would never be able to reproduce that genius in himself. Why not ? Because this ability would pre suppose in the statue a certain interior or sympathetic discernment and appreciation of its creator's genius, whereas he is as yet, by the hypothesis of his finite maternal genesis, debarred all interior or sympathetic experience, and made conscious alone of his own material or outward existence. By the necessity of his finite generation he is ignorant not only of his creator's genius or individuality, but also of his crea tor's name or identity ; ignorant in fact of everything [Letter 19 · p. 250] 250 GOOD AND EVIL THE MERE but his mother-substance, and the outward life and sustenance wherewith it fills his veins. It is indeed evident to the least reflection that this self-conscious life of the statue — the self-conscious or quasi-\\iQ he derives from the mother — instead of spiritually approximating him to the father, will have the effect in the first instance to render him spiritually remote from the father, or spiritually alienate him from his creative source by filling him with the sentiment and animus of independent or unrelated existence. And consequently before he can come into any genuine spiritual or aesthetic sympathy and fellowship with the father, it is necessary that his natural force be abated — that he inwardly die to it in fact as the supreme law of his activity, and so rise again to the experience of an inward and better life. [Letter 19 · p. 250] But how shall we even conceive of any such issue coming about in the case supposed? In the first place when a thing is naturally biased to infirmity, and its nature is yet the only force it obeys or even recognizes, it seems impossible ever to expect it vol untarily to contract a contrary bias. The trite lines of the Roman poet : " Facilis descensus Averni, Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, Hie labor, hoc opus, est " : easily suggest the smooth and flowery path of dal- EARTH OF THE FINITE CONSCIOUSNESS. 251 [Letter 19 · p. 251] liance that leads downward, and the sharp and arduous return path. But I very much doubt whether Virgil himself, or any other poet, Pagan or Christian, has ever faced the real difficulty. The real difficulty in the way of a man becoming good out of evil, or celestial out of infernal, is that good and evil, heaven and hell, are not outgrowths or accidents of the human personality by any means, but necessary con stituents of human nature itself, by which the nature becomes freely developed to the recognition of its sub jects, and by whose active oppugnancy and contrast it becomes enabled at last in the person of some adequate subject gradually to slough off its infirm mortal lineaments, and ally itself with infinitude. Good and evil, heaven and hell, are not facts of creative, but of purely constitutive order. They bear primarily upon man's natural destiny, and have no relation to his spiritual freedom save through that. They are the mere geology of our natural consciousness, and this is all they are. They have no distinctively supernatural quality nor efficacy whatever. They have a simply constitutional relevancy to the earth of man's asso ciated consciousness, and disavow therefore any prop erly creative or controlling relation to his spiritual or individual freedom. We have been traditionally taught that good and evil, heaven and hell, were objective realities, having an absolute ground of [Letter 19 · p. 252] being in the creative perfection. But this is the baldest, most bewildering nonsense. They have not a grain of objective reality in them, and are noway vitalized by the absolute Divine perfection. They are purely subjective appearances, vitalized exclusively by the created imperfection, or the uses they subserve to our provisional moral and rational consciousness. When accordingly this consciousness — having more than fulfilled its legitimate office, and become as it now is a mere stumbling-block or rock of offence to the regenerate mind of the race — finally expires in its own stench, or else frankly allows itself to be taken up and disappear in our advancing social and aesthetic consciousness, good and evil, heaven and hell, will cease to be appearances even. For angel and devil, saint and sinner, will then find themselves per fectly fused or made over in a new or comprehensive race-manhood which will laugh to scorn our best empirical or tentative manhood, that is, our existing civic and ecclesiastic manhood so-called. Thus, as I have said somewhere else, I am fully persuaded for my part, that no objective heaven will ever be found expanding to our foolish personal hope, nor any ob jective hell ever be found responsive to our foolish personal fear. We may be very sure that our true immortality, that which is energized by the Divine NATURAL humanity, is far too human and miraculous [Letter 19 · p. 253] A SUBJECTIVE TRUTH. 253 to be mechanized on any such preposterously simple basis. No man, not a simpleton in all spiritual regards, will ever acknowledge a heaven of which he himself is not his own sole St. Peter, nor any hell of which he is not his own jealous and exclusive turn key. Assuredly no heaven could exert the attractive force of a toyshop to a good man's imagination, if it aimed to conciliate his self-love and his love of the world ; and no hell could exert the binding force of a cobweb to an evil man's imagination, if its primary aim were not to conciliate those exacting loves. [Letter 19 · p. 253] But we are digressing. If the evil of men then did not refer itself primarily to their nature, as that nature is determined by its spiritual Divine source, but were an outward or physical experience of the subject, asserting itself primarily through his sensations, there could be no manner of difficulty in the evil subject winning himself back to the upper air. For man's veriest life is a sensitive one at the best, and if any serious conflict accordingly should announce itself be tween the life of his senses and that of his habitual subjective aspirations, it is safe to say that he would very speedily end by renouncing the latter. But the idea is simply stupid. Evil is not an out ward thing save to the inexperienced mind. Hell is not objectively constituted save to a juvenile and flimsy imagination. It is on the contrary a purely 254 SUBJECTIVE GENESIS [Letter 19 · p. 254] subjective life in man, being the bloom of that exces sive delight he takes in his new-found natural self, and its proper belongings : a delight so naive and sincere at first, and at length so infatuated or magical, as to be capable of making evil seem unadulterate good, and falsity undissembled truth. So that what you vir tually ask of an evil man in expecting him to become heavenly, is literally to turn himself outside in, or dilapidate himself as to his existing carnal structure, and build himself up anew in quite an opposite style of life or consciousness to that which alone seems to him either practicable or savory. In short, you ask a rigid impossibility of him. Swedenborg is emi nently explicit and satisfactory as to this rigidly natu ral genesis of evil in man. He says somewhere — I forget at this moment exactly where, but I am very sure generally that it is in his most interesting little book on the laws of the Divine Providence : but I beseech you not to argue from this amiable scrupu losity of mine in trying to supply you with chapter and verse for all my citations from Swedenborg, that I hold his sayings to be of the slightest conceivable intellectual authority, for I do no such stupid thing ; and indeed if I were a priori inclined to any such fatuity, his books would supply the best possible cor rective of the inclination, being the only books I know which inwardly, or of their oicn proper substance, abjure [Letter 19 · p. 255] such an ungodly pretension : — that he had been, for demonstrative purposes no doubt, let into the life of hell in man ; and he found it to be a life of such abun dant and exquisite delight, arising from the immense love of dominion consequent upon the unrestrained love of self in the subject, that all the delights of the world seemed dull in comparison with it. He de scribes it, I remember, as " a delight of the whole mind from its centre to its circumference," though it only reported itself in the body as a certain triumphant swelling of the breast. And this delight moreover would never invite compression, as he says, if it were not for the tendency it has to express itself in unjust and injurious action. Whenever accordingly this in herent tendency ultimates itself outwardly, the evil doer finds his inward freedom, which is the freedom of mlling and thinking evil, suddenly converted into outward bondage, which is an inability to do evil. For hell is a condition of life in which men's outward necessities constrain them to live together in harmony, while they have no inward bent to that style of life. The possibility of their co-existence in this condition depends upon an inflexible law : that no person shall ever be allowed to harm another with impunity. This salutary law, which is full of infinite Divine benignity towards them, each and all, and which heavenly-minded people inwardly impose upon themselves [Letter 19 · p. 256] 256 HELL IS ALWAYS HEAVEN TO THE EVIL MAN every moment, is yet to hellish-minded people an absolute bondage, and constitutes the sole drawback or qualification to their bad blessedness. For what can be more absolutely disgusting to one who delights in willing and thinking evil towards another, than to be constrained by the righteous fear of punishment from ever doing him any evil? There can be no intenser hell known to a selfish man than to have a prudent regard for others thus enforced upon him. But Swedenborg always takes pains to apprize his gentle reader that the practical administration of this law, which the evil man finds it so hard,, and the good man so easy, to submit to, undergoes all needful mitigation — short, to be sure, of rendering its chas tisements ineffectual — through its always taking place under the most watchful and tender angelic supervision or control.* [Letter 19 · p. 256] * The broad flood of light which Swedenborg throws upon the inti mate Divine dealings with human nature throughout history, ending with its final apotheosis, or actual Divine glorification, is apt to leave his reader disenchanted of any speculative interest he may have felt in regard to the continued existence of hell. I think that a man must have read Swedenborg to little intellectual profit, if his mind is not hopefully made up to two things : First, that the antagonism of heaven and hell on moral grounds, or as a tradition of human nature, is some day sure to be done away with by the advance of human society or fel lowship : Second, that its persistence as a spiritual tradition, or condition of individual experience and culture, may always be counted upon. Still BUT WHEN HE IS FORCED NOT TO DO EVIL. 257 [Letter 19 · p. 257] But we are losing sight of our hypothetical illustra tive statue. The statue, then, in accordance with its constitutional limitations, and in spite of its apparent subjective vivification, must remain utterly hopeless of regeneration, or aesthetic life ; that is, must forever despair of reproducing in itself the genius which begat it. I say this is in accordance with its consti tutional limitations ; for its constitutive or mother-substance which gives it body, can do no more for it than give it body ; that is, cannot give it soul, or make it inwardly responsive to its creator's genius. And this simply because the constitutive or mother-substance of the statue was originally or in itself independent of the artist's genius, and beyond a cer tain point therefore refractory to his will. This in truth is the inherent defect of all artistic creation, that the artist is without infinitude, even his genius not being original with him, but inherited or derived [Letter 19 · p. 257] I have thought it best to throw together a few brief passages from his books, which may be suggestive of thought to you. His books contain no dogmatic statement of opinion on the subject of the eternity of the hells now so much mooted between the sentimentalist and traditionalist wings of the church ; and questions of this magnitude besides can never be settled for us by any the wisest and most erudite head, but only by our own wise and loving hearts. At all events all Swedenborg's utterances on the subject may be looked at without suspicion, as they have no pretension to be anything else than obiter dicta, or observations by-the-way. See Appendix A. 258 HUMAN NATURE THE SOLE [Letter 19 · p. 258] from his past ancestry ; and hence he is obliged to find the material or mother-substance of his work exclu sively within outward nature, and not, like the Divine genius, within Himself, or the resources of His own infinite spirit. Were the artist infinite like God to begin with — that is, did he also supply from his own aesthetic resources natural or mother-substance to his creations — then Ids creatures, like God's, would be capable of aesthetic regeneration or spontaneous life, by virtue of his prior capacity to overcome for them any latent death-tendency inherent in their merely constitutional substance. [Letter 19 · p. 258] And thus our supposititious statue perfectly illus trates, in a negative way, the positive truth I wish to impress upon you, namely : that the spiritual creation derives all its power to function from the implication or involution of the created nature. The actual — or ultimate and phenomenal — sphere of creative order is the sole sphere of creative power, in other words ; and if the power fail here, accordingly, the entire spiritual creation must instantly come to an end, like a tale that is told. If the creative power is unable to reduce the creative nature to order, and that more over to an order perfectly consonant with His own infinitude or perfection, the day must soon come when the creative name itself will be blotted out from men's recognition. But if it is competent — SPHERE OF CREATIVE POWER. 259 [Letter 19 · p. 259] even infinitely competent to this sublime neces sity, then we have only to look forward to the fast approaching advent of the Divine kingdom on earth — the earth, namely, of man's redeemed natural subjectivity, mind you, and not at all, save by im plication in that superior earth, the mere outside objective earth of his mineral, vegetable, and animal existence — and the consequent advent of a heaven of spiritual peace, felicity, and power in man, every way unimaginable save upon the basis of that re deemed or Divine-natural earth. But you ask me not merely to assert this com petency of God to our natural redemption, but to state the method of it. And that statement will require a complete letter to itself, or perhaps two. LETTER XX. [Letter 20 · p. 260] Y DEAR FRIEND: — Our almost soli tary topic hitherto has been CREATION. And creation is first of all a rigid practi cal equation between creator and creature, or the creative and created natures. No doubt creator evolves creature, as subject evolves object. But then as involution is always equal to evolution, being its strict logical counterpart or correlative, so if creator evolve creature, or subject object, just as truly on the other hand does creature Evolve creator or object sub ject. But if this were all the truth upon the subject, creation would be defeated by its own genesis. For where involution and evolution are thus logically equal, creature and creator, object and subject, prac tically neutralize each other, and no logical exodus from the difficulty is either possible or conceivable. That is, creator and creature must confess themselves convertible terms, in order to creation becoming liv- Created life or consciousness is CREATION A FUSION OF GOD AND MAN. 261 [Letter 20 · p. 261] possible only on one condition, which is : that crea tion exhibit so complete a fusion between its uncon scious and conscious factors, as practically to annul their logical inequality, and so make the resultant life or consciousness one. It is impossible that God should create absolute life or being — that is to say, what has life or being in itself — for such life or being is ex vi termini uncreated, would in truth be God himself. He can only create therefore what has not life or being in itself, what consequently is merely relative or associated life or being, and consists in loving others : and He creates this only by the free or infinite communication to the creature of His own life or being, that is, of Himself. It is this infinite communication which alone makes created life or consciousness conceivable. For how shall that which by the hypothesis of its creatureship is void of life or consciousness in its own right, ever attain to actual life or consciousness, but by the free unstinted com munication of its creator's life to it as henceforth its own life ? [Letter 20 · p. 262] human life into a sign or witness of their inveterate duality, and so fills the universe of consciousness with pride, blasphemy, and despair. How necessarily we make creation appear the limping, one-horse-concern it does appear, in thus making it include the creature but exclude the creator, or include matter and ex clude mind or spirit ! As if the creature could ever be given without the logical implication of creator to constitute him ! Or the creator ever be given with out the logical explication of creature to reveal Hint ! What wonder is it, under these circumstances, that our men of science should tend so generally to iden tify God's glory primarily with sun, moon and stars, and only secondarily or derivatively with man ? Our traditional creeds to be sure still echo the ancient faith of mankind, that matter and mind, nature and spirit, are inextricably married or interfused ; but this faith has so little vitality left, or has become so com pletely fossilized by the worldliness of the Church, that very many of our leading scientific men spring eagerly to the conviction, which some of them do not hesitate to avow, that the material universe exists ab solutely, or for its own sake exclusively, and betrays no record whatever of a creator. [Letter 20 · p. 263] we remain contentedly disabled we must forego our intellectual manhood, and lie supine and inert in spiritual infancy. For manifestly so long as I am content to look upon creation, not as the living fusion, but as the living divorce of the two natures, creator and creature, I must necessarily think the divine nature to be essentially alien or antagonistic to my own. That is to say, I can never think of God as a being of an essentially human quality. And if I can not think of God in this light, if I do not think of him as essential man, I had better not think of him at all, since I cannot think of him to any good but only to an evil purpose. For if God is my creator, and yet claims a nature essentially alien and antagonistic to my own, I never can really love him, because I can never really know him, inasmuch as I cannot know what my nature does not qualify me to know. In fact I can only hate him, however much my prudence may lead me to dissimulate my hate ; for no rational being can feel himself at the mercy of a power infi nitely superior to himself, and at the same time utterly alien and antagonistic to himself, without a righteous hatred to such power. So that if every man is — spiritually or intellectually — only what his idea of God makes him, I may freely say that my idea of God as being of a nature essentially foreign and repugnant to my own, makes all my worship of him supersti- [Letter 20 · p. 264] tious or depraved, and hence fixes me in intellectual night. So long as I admit an essential contrariety be tween the two natures, which I needs must do when I in thought identify the creative activity primarily with the geometry of the physical universe, and refuse to identify it, save in a very secondary and derivative or indirect way, with the laws of the human mind, I never can rationally acknowledge the Divine exist ence, nor consequently ever honestly worship it. For human nature claims so divine a quality to my im agination — seems to be so infinitely worthy of my devout love and worship — that I cannot spontane ously recognize any divinity outside of it. And if I yet pretend to recognize such a divinity, and offer Him my servile or interested homage, what am I but a degraded being, sunk in spiritual penury, or intellectual savagery? I may indeed be all uncon scious of my degradation, because such multitudes partake it in common with me ; but there it unmis takably is, all the while, nevertheless. [Letter 20 · p. 265] nature to scourge us into quasi or provisional man hood, while as yet we are blind to the spiritual truth. We ourselves reflect upon the universe the divinity which dwells latent, and unrecognized — if not cruci fied, in our souls ; and we see only what we ourselves give. The untaught mstic may look forever at the shapeless block of marble, without receiving a hint from it of its essential subserviency to the uses of Art. So we might forever contemplate the material world, without its ever giving us so much as a suggestion of deity, unless our inward instinct of his omnipresence compelled the suggestion. The animal sees the same things we see. Why does not he also suspect a latent divinity? Simply because he, unlike us, is destitute of an inward divine genius or nature, and hence has no power to shed an outward shadow of divinity upon things below him. No. God is a denizen first of the microcosm, and only by reflection thence of the macrocosm. That is to say, he spiritually inhabits the human mind alone, and what we discern of him in the mechanism of nature, or the laws of the uni verse, is but a faint image or reverberation of the living death, or spiritual infamy, to which we con sign Him in our own souls, while as yet we are obdu rate to the solicitations of His essential humanity. [Letter 20 · p. 266] place ; at all events it is not exactly what I set out to say. What I intended at starting to show you was that creation, being this undeniable spiritual or infinite equation of the Divine and human natures which I have described it to be, would be a very shallow form of blessing to bestow upon the creature. If the entire creative bounty consisted in giving the creature existence, if it involved no deeper, subtler Divine mercy than this, creation would turn out a signal curse to man, for it would leave the Divine being a mere prey to man's devouring and destroying appetites and passions. By creation alone — that is to say, creation left undivinized by the creature's subsequent natural redemption — man is made sim ply self-conscious, and endowed moreover with self hood of a marvellously infirm and even infra-bestial character. For in that case God's creature, unlike the beasts, would have no instinct to moderate and mitigate his natural ferocity, but would be an un qualified form of raven and slaughter. Accordingly I repeat, that if creation resulted only in giving man conscious existence, or phenomenal selfhood, it would be a boon altogether unworthy of the creator to bestow. [Letter 20 · p. 267] phenomenal personality. It merely assumes these things in the creature, or takes them for granted, as the outcome and expression of his essential spiritual imbecility and nothingness. And then it forthwith proceeds to make this negative base or spiritual unconsciousness of the creature the surest possible guarantee of his subsequent spiritual conjunction and fellowship with God. We may say then that crea tion, viewed as a spiritual or infinite Divine process, necessarily involves to the created intelligence two stages, first : a descending or centrifugal one, in which the creator becomes thoroughly identified with the nature of the creature, in becoming thoroughly alienated from his finite personality ; and, secondly : an ascending or centripetal stage, in which the crea ture becomes exalted in his turn to immortal spirit ual conjunction with God, in renouncing the interests of his proper person whenever they conflict with those of his common nature. [Letter 20 · p. 267] How is this natural redemption of the creature practically brought about? We shall be best able to answer this question by keeping clearly in mind what we have seen to be the precise form of evil in the creature to which his finite genesis, or his very nature as a creature, exposes him, and from which it is the true glory of God to deliver him. The evil then to which, as we have seen, man is 268 AND SO REDEEMING IT FROM [Letter 20 · p. 268] naturally prone, and indeed doomed by his finite gen eration, is personal consciousness, or the feeling of life in himself as his own life absolutely, or without re spect to other men. There is no evil at all comparable with this either for comprehensiveness or intensity, if it be allowed to go uncorrcctcd ; for it is altogether fatal to man's spiritual life, which consists in his loving his neighbor as himself. Now the only possi ble way for a man to do this is to feel that he is not self-centred, that his life is not his own personally, but belongs to him in strict community with his neighbor; thus that he and his neighbor are both alike dependent at every moment for every breath of life they draw upon one and the same merciful and impartial source. In other words a man loves his neighbor as himself only by virtue of his first loving God above himself, or supremely. And the only way this supreme love becomes developed or educated in him, is through his moral experience, or his obedience to law. Whenever, and so long as, man is tempted to commit false or malicious speaking, theft, adultery, murder, or covetousness, and yet abstains from doing it out of a sincere inward regard for the Divine name, his self-love, so far as it is harmful, is spiritually slain, and the Divine love infallibly replaces it. These formal vices express the whole substantial evil known to the human heart, and when man, therefore, in the [Letter 20 · p. 269] THE POWER AND TAINT OF EVIL. exercise of a felt freedom and rationality deposes them or any of them from their habitual control over his action, not because they conflict with his outward welfare, or expose him to the contempt of men, but simply because they wound his inward reverence for the Divine name, he becomes spiritually regenerate or new-born. Falsehood, theft, adultery, murder, and covetousness are, in other words, only signs or sym bols of a deeper and altogether latent spiritual evil fatally separating man from God : the evil of a su preme self-love. Grave as these evils unquestionably are* in themselves, or absolutely, they have yet only a superficial moral quality, that is, grow out of men's still unreconciled or inharmonic relations inter se, or their frank insubjection to the social sentiment, and do not by any means necessarily imply any perma nent spiritual or individual estrangement between them and God. [Letter 20 · p. 269] But the evil consciousness which they typify in men is man's only true and spiritual evil. The con sciousness of a finite existence or selfhood, given out- riyht to every man in strict independence of every other man: this is essential death and hell to the human bosom, and spiritually litters all its abounding moral corruption. Why ? Because it practically gives the lie to men's spiritual creatureship, or affirms that they have no natural form and order corresponding to 270 THE EVIL OF HUMAN NATURE [Letter 20 · p. 270] their inward or spiritual unity in God. Accordingly if man's mind had never been fatally drugged by this stupid conceit of his rightful independence of his neighbor in the Divine sight, he would never have been so suicidal as to dream of coveting the goods, or wounding the honor, or compassing the life of his neighbor. On the contrary he would have been exqui sitely sure to defend his neighbor's interests as if they were his own. Thus it is man's very nature as a crea ture to absorb or appropriate the Divine life or being to his own paltry and fantastic little self; and the Di vine name consequently would soon have lapsed from human regard even as a tradition, were the creature not all the while providentially prompted to conceal his flagrant misappropriation of the Divine substance from his own eyes, by assiduously expropriating the mere name of God to any worthless or imaginary supernatural candidate who may apply for the distinc tion : so relegating his creator to an entirely objective or outward relation to himself. [Letter 20 · p. 270] Subjective or personal consciousness, then : the feel ing we all of us have that our natural selfhood is our own absolutely, and without reference to any grander natural objectivity, such for example as SOCIETY: is the brimming spiritual death wrapped up in every man by virtue of his finite generation. And now we shall be able to see with all possible clearness with IS SUBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. 271 what a mighty hand the Divine providence delivers us from this infernal blight incident to our nature. [Letter 20 · p. 271] The inevitable vice of man's natural subjectivity, or finite selfhood, is, that it exteriorates object to subject, or places a man's proper life outside and below the man himself. This is hopelessly contrary to the spiritual order of human life, which interiorates object to sub ject, and places a man's proper life within or above the man himself. In other words, the fundamental infirm ity of human nature is that it subjects man primarily to the control of sense, and allows him only so much soul, or spirituality, as consists with that primary requisite. In confirmation of this, we may point to the notorious fact, that the method of man's spiritual or private regeneration has always been defined by the professing church as standing in no frivolous moral change or improvement wrought in the subject, but only in a change of heart : that is, such a com plete reversal of the law of his nature as makes him net henceforth from the impulsion of an inward mo tive or object, instead of an outward one. It is well known, moreover, that the church has always looked upon this reversal of the law of his nature as prac tically energized by the subject inwardly constraining Itinixclf, through a most living reverence for the Divine name, to deny his senses whenever they prompt him to selfish or unmanly action. [Letter 20 · p. 272] Do not mistake ray present purpose, however, in this reference. We are not now talking of a man's spiritual or private regeneration, which is his individ ual deliverance from the law of his nature, but of a much grander problem. We are talking in this place of our poor and abject human nature itself, and of the peculiar freeing or infiniting it gets at the Divine hands from the bondage imposed upon it by our wretched personalities, both good and evil. For human nature itself is condemned in its turn to inev itable and hopeless limitation or finiteness by all its personal subjects, whether these be relatively to each other celestial or infernal ; and is bound therefore by the Divine righteousness to undergo in its turn also a plenary redemption. And the question of immediate interest to us is, to ascertain the method of this tran scendent Divine deliverance. This is the problem I am about trying to solve to your understanding. If I only approximately solve it, I shall nevertheless deem myself entitled to claim your patient attention while doing thus much. But if I succeed in perfectly solving it, as I hope to be able to do — and that too without claiming to myself any exceptional ability — I trust that you then, like me, will honestly give the sole praise of my performance to the boundless intellectual inspiration and illumination of the Chris tian truth. [Letter 20 · p. 273] The characteristic natural evil of man is subjective conxciuax/H'Nx. Naturally ignorant that his life or be ing inheres exclusively in God his creator (though he is no way backward to admit that it originally came from Him), he unhesitatingly appropriates it to him self, feeling himself to be good when its issues are orderly, and evil when its issues are disorderly. This I say is the natural and therefore the deepest evil known to the human race. Man no doubt attributes to himself personally many much lesser evils than this, such as murder, adultery, false witness, theft, and covetousness, and thinks if he were once well rid of these outward evils, he would be inwardly or spirit ually quit of evil altogether; neither knowing nor dreaming that his moral maladies are only so many visible symptoms of a far deeper invisible disease in his nature to the cure of which God alone is ade quate. These moral evils, however grievous they may justly seem in a scientific or police estimate of human life, are of absolutely no consequence in a philosophic estimate, save as revealing that profound and otherwise undiscoverable spiritual evil in man to which alone they owe every fibre of their unhand some existence. This latter evil is the only deadly evil known to the heart, because it is the only one which directly impugns the Divine sovereignty over His creatures ; and in giving man deliverance from its [Letter 20 · p. 274] Now the immediate effect, as I have before said, of this fallacious subjective consciousness in man, or of his inwardly appropriating the Divine substance to 'himself, is to put the creator bodily outside of His creation to the imagination of His creature : to compel Him to occupy at best a merely magisterial or legal and critical relation to His creature ; in short : to relegate the father of our spirits to a purely external and objective intercourse with us. By this misappro priation of the creative life or being to himself, the creature becomes the only subjective consciousness, the only conscious form of selfhood, known to the universe, and by an unerring instinct of that limitary form after thus appropriating to himself the Divine substance, he instantly hastens — as if to hide that ugly transaction from his own eyes — to expropriate, as I have before said, the robbed and rifled Divine name away from himself, in relegating it to the use of any imaginary supernatural pretender who seems worthy of it, and evinces such worth by con senting to stand in a purely sensible or outward and objective relation to him : that is, consenting to treat him as an absolutely free and rational subject, right fully praiseworthy and blameworthy on the ground of his own independent merits alone: that is, as a dis- [Letter 20 · p. 275] Of course this little provisional drama that I have just been describing, enacts itself within, and confines itself to, the limits of the creature's consciousness, and those limits exclusively, and does not even project a passing shadow of itself upon the field of his true and intimate yet most unconscious relations to God. But within these limits the most High does tenderly condescend to the part assigned Him by his auda cious creature, and unfalteringly play it out more over to its last gasp of humiliation. For only by the creator consenting to incarnate himself in flesh and blood, and play the part of real object to the crea ture's fallacious subjectivity, does the drama of human nature and history convert itself out of a stupid and meaningless farce, into a grand, sublime, and tragic revelation of the infinite and eternal perfection. Do you ask me, How? I will gladly proceed to tell you, for this at length is the whole point of my pro tracted epistolary mission to you. [Letter 20 · p. 275] — But in order to do so fairly and squarely, I shall be obliged to make an addition to the sum of these specifically intercalary letters. LETTER XXI. T DEAR FRIEND : — We have seen that the creator, because He gives being to the creature, must always remain the latter's sole and total vital substance. How, in this state of things, shall the creature ever attain to selfhood, or come to feel himself an alien being to God? Only in a way we may be sure of the strictest illu sion, or in consequence of a gross deception imposed on him by his senses. [Letter 21 · p. 276] In the first place the creature is necessarily igno rant of the truth of a spiritual creation, and utterly blind therefore to the intellectual significance of Na ture as affording it a necessary basis of evolution. If he has ever at all entertained the idea of creation as an attribute of the Divine perfection, he regards it at most as an explanation of existing things, or as accounting for the production of Nature, which he hence conceives as a work of God taking place in ILLUSORY GENESIS OF SELFHOOD. 277 some pre-existing space and time, and finished at one or more successive coups-de-main of the Divine archi tect as his sacred traditions report. Thus nature, instead of being to his intellect the fertile evidence and argument of God's eternal spiritual activity, is the practical denial and stoppage of it when it once existed, interposing so far as the creature's faculties are concerned a dense wall of partition between him and God, instead of a transparent medium of com munication. [Letter 21 · p. 277] In the second place : being thus ignorant of the truth of a spiritual creation, and of nature's purely educative uses in subordination thereto, he is an every way apt pupil of his senses which stand ready to impose upon his nascent intelligence two immeas urable and wellnigh inveterate fallacies. The first of which is : That Nature, or the great realm of uncon scious life to which our senses give us our earliest introduction or initiation, exists ONLY to sense, being finitely or materially constituted. And the second follows from this : In that Nature being thus finitely or materially constituted, every natural thing must be created in sheer independence of every other natural thing, and exist therefore on its own substantial basis, being its own absolute self, without obligation to, or necessary connection with, any other coexisting thing. In this way then, or by the mere and sheer docility 278 EFFECT OF THE ILLUSION IN NECESSITATING [Letter 21 · p. 278] of his intellect to his senses, the creature not only attains to the illusion of selfhood, or the feeling of life in himself absolutely, and irrespectively of all other men, but he also manages to maintain himself in that illusion, through every casualty and calamity to which an earthly lot engineered upon so shallow and treach erous a basis, necessarily exposes him. And having these sensuous ideas of creation to begin with, the creature instinctively and unwittingly honors the Di vine name in making it henceforth sensibly external and objective to the sphere of his own fallacious and fraudulent subjectivity. What is the effect on the creator of this stupidity on the part of the creature? Does He consent to abandon — as the creature would gladly have Him do — His essential spiritual primacy in all the realm of the created consciousness? Does He consent to forego, at His creature's bidding, His indefeasible spiritual supremacy over the creature? [Letter 21 · p. 278] By no means. On the contrary, He enhances His spiritual hold upon the creature indefinitely, by frankly acquiescing in the banishment which the latter assid uously imposes on Him, and obediently masking or concealing Himself henceforth in the lineaments of the created nature. For the creature as finite or con scious subject can have no proper object but his unconscious nature. And if the creator consents to A DIVINE-NATURAL ORDER OF LIFE. 279 idi-ntity Himself with this object, sinking all His spiritual activity in the endeavor to develop it, His spiritual hold upon the creature will only be indefi nitely promoted in place of being abated. [Letter 21 · p. 279] What I have said, then, I now repeat: 1. That the creator in submitting to the misappropriation of His creative being or substance by the creature to his own shallow self, is necessarily — in condescension to His creature's infirm understanding — forced out of an exclusively spiritual or subjective relation to the crea ture, and obliged to occupy a purely natural or objec tive and personal relation to him : and 2. That this purely adventitious or limitary manhood into which the creator finds Himself constrained by zeal for the creature's welfare, constitutes His own eternal spirit ual glory, inasmuch as it affords Him his only oppor tunity to come in contact with the sphere of evil in the creature (that is, the sphere of selfhood], and hence endows Him with all His ability to deliver the latter from its mortal coil and defilement. THIS ORDER ALONE RELEASES MAN FROM [Letter 21 · p. 280] By the abstract nature of a thing, then, we mean the relation of community existing between that thing and all other things embraced in its nature, in spite of their specific differences. So by the created nature I mean the relations of community — that is, of com mon unity — necessarily existing between each and all creatures. Every creature claims to be in himself absolutely other than, or alien to, every other creature. Consequently, the nature of the creature imports, that in spite of these alleged personal, subjective, or abso lute differences on the part of the creature, they have all a common unity : and is in fact itself the expres sion and affirmation of such unity. Now, obviously, as all creatures claim to be in themselves, or subjec tively, alien to every other, hence without personal unity with each other, this reciprocal natural unity which they exhibit cannot possibly inhere in them selves, and so avouch itself a subjective or substantial unity, but must refer itself altogether to some foreign source, and so confess itself at best a purely formal or objective unity. Let us always remember therefore that the nature of the creature is obligatory upon him, and supremely obligatory. It does not express him, [Letter 21 · p. 281] but he expresses it. It does not derive from him, but he derives from it. He says for himself : "individual ity or difference a outrance" It says : " individuality or difference, to your heart's content indeed, as a final ity ; but only in virtue of a previous natural commun ity or identity keeping it eternally fresh and sweet." In short he is subject to his nature, and his nature is object or law to him. One cannot be subject to any thing, without the thing being his master, without its turning out his sole object or supreme law ; nor conse quently without his turning out its involuntary ser vant ; that is, its slave. For in all natural or related existence it is the object which determines and con trols the subject, and not, as the idealists foolishly hold, the subject which gives law to the object. It is indeed the object which altogether constitutes the subject, which makes it self-conscious, or seem to itself to be ; and never the latter which does this for the former : for the natural object is always uncon scious, or undefined and without selfhood, towards the natural subject. To say in one word all that need be said : it is the object which alone is mother-substance to the subject, or endows it with appreciable body : so guaranteeing to it a fixed or constant natu ral identity, whatever surprising enlargements may subsequently befall its spiritual individuality. [Letter 21 · p. 282] we speak of the created nature, and what we mean when we speak of the created personality. By the former we express that thing which alone gives spir itual reality or objectivity to the creature, in giving him constitutional or unconscious substance ; and we express by the latter that thing which alone stamps the creature with spiritual unreality or phenomenality, in giving him, not constitutional or unconscious sub stance, but only conscious personal form. I say, to be sure, that thus much is plain, and I would will ingly believe it to be so. But I confess I should like to make it much plainer by some fitting illus tration derived from our natural experience ; which, in showing how invariably and absolutely primary the real or objective element in consciousness is to the phenomenal or subjective element, may also throw some illustrative light upon the great truth of the spiritual creation : the Divine Incarnation. [Letter 21 · p. 282] Take, for example, any familiar fact of knowledge, say a horse. My living knowledge of the horse is direct and absolute, being given in sense. You may, if you like, divide this knowledge, for scientific pur poses, into the two constitutional factors which it involves to your logical or reflective understanding, namely: 1. the horse, or object known; 2. the me, or subject knowing. But this scientific practice no way modifies the living experience in question. It TO MERE SCIENCE FOR CREATIVE ENDS. 283 [Letter 21 · p. 283] is obviously a mere logical analysis on your part of that living experience, by which you attempt reflec tively or scientifically to resuscitate the body of knowledge after its soul has fled. Knowledge — and by knowledge, mind you, I mean knowledge in its true sense, as altogether actual or living ; as it is in volved, indeed, in your mental constitution, and so becomes the basis of your subsequent spiritual or intellectual manhood ; and not any mere beggarly sci ence, or learning, which is not living knowledge at all, but merely remembered or reflected knowledge, such as the people by a fine instinct stigmatize under the name of foo/t-knowledge — knowledge, I say, is within its own precinct the living marriage of object and subject; and therefore, like all true marriage, annuls the possibility of their subsequent divorce. In livingly knowing the horse, for instance, I am wholly unconscious of, and indifferent to, any logical relation of object and subject subsisting between us. The only thing that survives of this merely logical and pedantic relation to my feeling, is the horse, or object known ; while I, the knowing subject, am in continently licked up and disappear in his overpower ing sensible reality. Life or consciousness, in other words, knows nothing of the relation, which is so vital to mere science or learning, of subject and object in existence as given in sense ; but indissolu- [Letter 21 · p. 284] Thus life or consciousness — living knowledge or perception — defies analysis, or laughs it to scorn out of its own glorified personality. And its dissection consequently into object and subject is possible only when it has become a caput mortuum in your memory, or mental stomach, and been there reduced to pulp by the gastric juice of your ruminant or logical un derstanding. When you resolve any living experi ence into these purely logical constitutional factors, the result is very good logic no doubt, but is no longer life or experience. Just as when you chemi cally resolve water into oxygen and hydrogen, the issue of your analysis is very good chemistry, but it is no longer water. Oxygen and hydrogen combined in definite proportions constitute the chemistry of water, or give it visible body. But they are a very long way indeed from constituting its characteristic activity, or giving it soul. "Water claims both a physi cal co-existence or identity with all other things ; and a spiritual power or individuality of its own, which differentiates it from all other things, and which all the untamed gases of the universe are unable either to supply or to explain. Oxygen and hydrogen per fectly account for the physical constitution, or statical repose, of water. But they have no shadow of a [Letter 21 · p. 285] So object and subject no doubt constitute a very good logical analysis of any deceased fact of knowl edge ; but they are heaven-wide of any pretension to constitute the least vital experience itself so-called. Knowledge is direct or miraculous, being given in sense or gratuitously ; while logic, or science, or learn ing is indirect or reflective, being elaborately gener ated by our reasonings upon the data of sense. You may talk logic and chemistry, consequently, " till all is blue," as the old people say : you are never in so doing talking towards life, but always steadfastly away from it. Philosophy laughs at your logic and your chemistry both alike, as inevitably predestined to come limping along a day after the fair, and spectrally revel upon the stale victuals and drink which have survived the joyous banquet of life. Science is never life. It is at most the moon-lit shadow of life projected upon our logical or reflective understanding ; and the method of the one is no less disproportionate to that of the other than earth is disproportionate to heaven. That is to say : in all living or conscious experience the logical or scientific distinction of object and sub ject is utterly unknown, both ike alleged factors b*'in