[Introduction · p. 7] The autobiographic fragment dates from an earlier period. He had often been urged by members of his family to express his religious philosophy under the form of a personal evolution of opinion. But egotistic analysis was less to his taste than enunciation of objective results; so that, although he sat down to the autobiographic task a good many times, it was at long intervals; and the work, " Society the Redeemed Form of Man," as well as the one now first published, were both written after the Autobiography was begun. The Stephen Dewhurst, whose confessions it is supposed to be, is an entirely fictitious personage. The few items of personal and geographic fact he gives have been rectified in foot-notes, so as to be [Introduction · p. 8] true of Mr. James rather than of his imaginary mouthpiece. The fragments were set up in type as fast as written, and the proofs preserved and much revised. A good deal of manuscript has been interpolated. The editor has used some discretion in the printing of this, some passages being diffuse. Probably no one will read what is here printed without a deep regret that the work should not have extended over later years of the author's life. To atone for the loss, I have tried to weave into the quotations later to be made in this Introduction all the autobiographic passages and references that are found scattered through his other works. [Introduction · p. 8] It is judged best to publish, for the present at any rate, none of the manuscript lectures or other fragments left by Mr. James. And of his contributions to periodical literature, only one, the article on Carlyle, sees the light again in this volume. Exception was made in favor of that article, because of its exceptional " popularity " at the time of its original publication. It has seemed to me not only a filial but a phi- y losophic duty, in giving these posthumous pages to the world, to prefix to them some such account of their author's ideas as might awaken, in readers hitherto strangers to his writings, the desire to [Introduction · p. 9] become acquainted with them. I wish a less unworthy hand than mine were there to do the work. As it is, I must screen my own inadequacy under the language of the original, and let my father \ speak, as far as possible, for himself It would indeed be foolish to seek to paraphrase anything once directly said by him. The matter would be sure to suffer; for, from the very outset of his literary career, we find him in the effortless possession of that style with which the reader will soon become acquainted, and which, to its great dignity of cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human! quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scorn- 1 ful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular ' temperament of the old English masters, rather than that of an American of to-day. [Introduction · p. 9] With all the richness of style, the ideas are singularly unvaried and few. Probably few authors have so devoted their entire lives to the monoto-i^ nous elaboration of one single bundle of truths.^ Whenever the eye falls upon one of Mr. James's pages, — whether it be a letter to a newspaper or to a friend, whether it be his earliest or his latest book, — we seem to find him saying again and again the same thing; telling us what the trueiV relation is between mankind and its Creator. ) What he had to say on this point was the burden [Introduction · p. 10] of his whole life, and its only_ burden. When he had said it once, he was disgusted with the insufficiency of the formulation (he always hated the sight of his old books), and set himself to_work, to say it again. But he never analyzed his terms or his data beyond a certain point, and made very few fundamentally new discriminations; so the result of all these successive re-editings was repetitioii__and amplification and enrichment, rather than reconstruction. The student of any one of his works knows, consequently, all that is essential in the rest. I must say, however, that the later formulations are philosophically, if not always rhetorically, the best. In " Society the Redeemed Form of Man," which was composed while the lingering effects of an apoplectic stroke had not passed away, there are passages unsurpassed in any former writing., And in the work herewith published, although most of it was written when my father's general mental powers were visibly altered by a decay of strength that ended with his death, I doubt if his earlier readers will discover any signs of intellectual decrepitude. His truths were his life; they were the companions of his deathbed; and when all else had ebbed away, his grasp of them was still vigorous and sure. [Introduction · p. 11] an d so far as it perm its itself to hp tbpnlngiral at i all, it is growing more and more to distrust all systetBs-that-aiiii al cibtil Kct metaphysics In dogma" or pretend to rigor in their terms. The c onventional and traditional acquiescence we find in the older dogmatic formularies is confined to those who are intellectually hardly vitalized enough either to apprehend or discuss a novel and rival creed; whilst those of us who have intellectual vitality are either apt to be full of bias against theism in any form, or if we are theistic at all, it is in such a tentative and supplicating sort of way that the sight of a robust and dogmatizing theologian sends a shiver through our bones. A man like my father, lighting on such a time, is wholly out of his element and atmosphere^ and is soon left stranded high and dry. His effectiveness as a missionary is null; and it is wonderful if his voice, crying in the wilderness and getting no echo, do not soon I die away for sheer discouragement. That my father should not have been discouraged, but should have remained serene and active to the last, is a proof both of the stoutness of his heart and of the consolations of his creed. How many unknown persons may have re.ceived help and suggestion from his writings it is impossible to say. Of out-and-out disciples he had very few who ever named themselves. Few as they were, his cor- [Introduction · p. 12] respondence with them was perhaps his principal solace and recreation. I have often tried to imagine what sort of a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely theological age, with the Best minds about him fermenting with the mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories and counter-theories, and strenuous reasonings and contentions, about God's relations to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, furthered by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by passionate and j definite resistance, he would infallibly have developed his resources in many ways which, as it was, \he never tried; and he would have played a prominent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in the struggles of his time, for he was a religious pro- j phet and genius, if ever prophet and genius there [Introduction · p. 12] l.were. He published an intensely positive, radical, an d fre sh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our co nnection with him. And nothing shows better the altogether lifeless and unintellectual character of the professional theism of our time, than the fact that this view, this c onception, so vigor ously thrown down, should n ot have sti rred the f aintest tremulatioii o n its si-agnar;t- pQ »i The centre of his whole view of things is this intense conception of Gqd as a creator. Grant it. [Introduction · p. 13] accept it without criticism, and the rest follows. He nowhere attempts by metaphysical or empirical, arguments, to make the existence of God plausible;\ he simply assumes it as something that must be confessed. As has been well said in a recent little work,i "Mr. James looks at creation instinctively from the creative side; and this has a tendency to put him at a remove from his readers. The usual problem is, — given the creation, to find the crea-, tor. To Mr. James it is,- — given the creator, toj find the creation. God is; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are we^" [Introduction · p. 13] To sceptics of theism in any possible form, this fundamental postulate may naturally prove a barrier. But it is difficult to see why it should be an obstacle to professedly Christian istudents. Tfiey also confess God's existence; and the way in which Mr. James took it au grand sirieux, and the issues he read in it, ought, one would suppose, to speak to them with some accent of reality. Like any early Jewish prophet, like the Luther described in a recent work of genius,^ he went back so far and so deep as to find the religious sentiment in its purest and most unsophisticated form. He lived and breathed as one who knew he had not made 1 Philosophy of Henry James : A Digest. By J. A. Kellogg. New Yoi-k, John W. Lovell Company, 1883. * J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre. Paris, Fischbacher, 1884. Passim. 14 INTRODUCTIOI^. [Introduction · p. 14] himself, but was the work of a power that let him live from one moment to the next, and could doj, with him what it pleased. His intellect reacted on his sense of the presence of this power, so as to form a system of the most radical and self-consis-1^ tent, as well as of the most simple, kind. I will es' say to give the reader a preliminary notion of what its main elements and outlines were, and then try to build up a more adequate representation of it by means of quotations from the author's own pen. [Introduction · p. 14] It had many and diverse affinities. It was optimistic in one sense, pessimistic in another. Pantheistic, idealistic, hegelian, are epithets that very naturally arise on the reader's lips to describe it; and yet some part there is of the connotation of each of these epithets that made my father violently refuse to submit to their imposition. The ordinary empirical ethics of evolutionary natural-. ism can find a perfect /^^»«2!y flfej^' individual man, as such, is nothing, but owes all he is and has to the race nature he inherits, and to the society into which he is born. And, secondly, he scorned to admit, even as a possibility, that the great and loving Creator, who has all the being and the power, and has brought us as far as this, , I should not hx'va.'^Ms through, and out, into the most i triumphant \ harmom^^ I beseech the reader from now onwards to listen to my stammering exposition in a very uncritical mood of mind. Do not squeeze the terms or the ' logic too hard! And if you are a positivist, do not be too prompt to throw the book down with an ejaculation of disgust at Alexandrian theosophizing, and "of wonder that such brain-spinning should find a printer at the present day. My father's own \ disgust at any_abstEact..-statement of his system [Introduction · p. 15] ' could hardly be excelled by that of the most positivistic reader. I will not say that the logical relations of its terms were with him a mere after- 1 thought ; they were more organic than that. But the core and centre of the thing in him was always instinct and attitude, something realized at a stroke, and felt like a fire in his breast; and all attempts at articulate verbal formulations of it were makeshifts of a more or less desperately impotent kind. This is why he despised every formulation he made as soon as it was uttered, and set himself to the Sisyphus-labor of producing a new one that should be less irrelevant. I remember hearing him groan, when struggling in this way, " Oh, that I might thunder it out in a single interjection that would tell the whole of it, and never speak a word again! " But he paid his tribute to necessity; and few writers in the end iwere more prolix than he. [Introduction · p. 16] destitution, a death, an ultimate helplessness. Which of us but sometimes " lifts a pallid face in prayer to God, lest some hideous calamity engulf his fairest hopes?... We are all without real selfhood, without the selfhood which comes from God alone. We have only a showy and fallacious one... which is wholly inadequate to guarantee us against calamity. We shiver in every breeze, and stand aghast at every cloud that passes over the sun. When our ships go down at sea, what shrieks we hear from blanched and frenzied lips peopling the melancholy main, perturbing the sombre and sympathetic air for months afterwards I When our children die, and take back to heaven the brimming innocence wMch our INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 17] primitive factor in the creative problem. It plays an active and dynamic part through Mr. James's pages, and is the feature' which made me say, a moment back, that " hegelian " would be a very natural epithet to use in describing the' doctrine they set forth. Hegel sometimes speaks of the Divinity making an illusion first, in order to remove it; setting up his own antithesis in order to the subsequent neutralization thereof. And this will also very well describe the creative drama as ' pictured by _Mrj_J[arnes, provided one bear in mind that the preliminary production of an illusory stage of being is forced upon the Creator by the character of ^2.^. positively yawning •emptiness which is the opposite of himself, and with which he has to deal. [Introduction · p. 17] corrupt manhood feels no use for, and therefore knows not how to shelter; when our friends drop off; when our property exhales; when our reason totters on its throne, and menaces us with a downfall, — who then is strong? Who in fact, if he were left in these cases for a moment to himself, — that is, if he were not steadied in his own despite by the mere life of routine and tradition, — but would be ready to renounce God and perish? So too our ennui and prevalent disgust of life, which lead so many suffering souls every year to suicide, which drive so many tender and yearning and angel-freighted natures to drink, to gambling, to fierce and ruinous excess of all sorts, -^ what are these things but the tacit avowal (audible enough, however, to God I) that we are nothing at all and vanity; that we are absolutely without help in ourselves; and that we can never be blessed and tranquil until God take compassion on us, and conjoin us livingly and immortally with himself? " — Christianity the Logic of Creation^ p. 133. [Introduction · p. 18] The ordinary orthodox view of creation is that Jehovah explodes the universe absolutely out of what was previously pure blank; his fiat whacks it down upon the tabula rasa of time and space, and there it remains. Such simple, direct, and "magical" creation is always derided by Mr. James as a childish idea. The real nothingness cannot become thus promptly the seat of real being; it must taint "with its own " abysmal destitution "j whatever first comes to fill it, and reduce it to tha status of a sham, or unreal magic-lantern picture projected on the dark inane. [Introduction · p. 18] This first result of the intercourse of the creative energy with. the void may become however, by decaying unto itself, a surface of rebound for another\ movement, of which the result is real. Creation/ is thus made up of two stages, the first of which is mere scaffolding to the second, which is the final work. Mr. James's terminology is a little vacillating with regard to these two stages. On the whole, " formation " is the word he oftenest appHes to the first stage, and " redemption " to the second.! His view of the matter is obviously entirely different from the simple, direct process taught by natural theology and by the J ewish Scrip|;nre- i and it as obviously agrees in point of form with the composite movement of the Christian scheme. All this is verbally simple enough; but what are INTRODUCTIOI^. 1 9 [Introduction · p. 19] the facts it covers? To speak very oracularly, Nature is for Mr. James the movement of formation, the first quickening of the void unto itself; and Society is the movement of redemption, or the finished spiritual work of God. Now, both " Nature " and Society " are words of peculiar and complex meaning in Mr. James's writings, so that much explanation is needed of the assertions just laid down. " Nature " and " Society," if I understand our author correctly, do not differ from each other at all in substance or material. Thei r subs tance is the Creator^ himself, for he is the sole positive substance in the universe, all else being nothing-i ness.^ But they differ in form; for while Nature is the Creator immersed and lost in a nothingness] self-afiirming and obstructive. Society is the same' Creator, with~fhe nothingness saved, determinedX to transparency and self-confession, and traversed/ from pole to pole by his life-giving rays. [Introduction · p. 19] 1 This is why I said one might call the system pantheistic. Mr. James denounces pantheism, however; for he supposes it to exclude a dualism even of logical elements, and to represent the Divine as manifesting itself in phenomena by a simple outward movement without subsequent recoil. It is a matter of verbal definition after all. One might say that the gist of his differences, ■both with pantheism and with ordinary theism, is that while the.latter represent creation to be essentially the formatfon of Two (put of an original One, to Mr. James it is somgthing more like the vnion into Onejif-an-OHgioal-Two. [Introduction · p. 20] The matter covered by both these words is Humanity and the totality of its conditions, nothing short of the entire world of phenomenal expeirience, — mineral, vegetable, animal, and human, — " Nature " culminating in, whilst " Society " starts from, the moral and religious conscious-j -^ ness of man. This is why Tsaid the system could hospitably house anything that naturalistic evolutionism might ever have to say about man; for, according to both doctrines, man's morality and religion, his consciousness of self and his moral, conscience, are natural products like everything! ^ else we see. Now, for Mr. James, the consciousness of self and the conscience are the hinges on which the process of creation turns, as it slowl; revolves from its formative and natural to it redeemed and spiritual position of equilibrium What I say will still be dark and unreal enough to those who know nothing of the original; but the exercise of a little patience Will erelong make things clear. [Introduction · p. 21] " jin morality that being takes wholly, and in religion •it takes partly, the form of a lie. ' Let us consider the matter naively and mythically, so as to understand. Remember, that for Mr. James a mere resistless " bang " is no creative process at all, and that a real creation means nothing short of a real bringing to life of the essential nothingness, whicMis the eternal antithesis to God, — a work, therefore, upon that nothingness actually performed. Well, then, God must work upon the void; but how can the trackless void be wrought upon? It must first be vivified and quickened into some kind of substantiality of its own, and made exisA • tential and phenomenal instead of merely logical; and essential that it was, before any further fashioning of it can take place. God then must, in the first instance, make a being that has the void for its other parent, and involves nothingness in itself. ] To make a long story short, then, God's first pro- ^ duct is a Nature subject to self-consciousness or self- ^ hood, — that is, a Nature essentially good, as being divine, but the several members whereof appropriate the goodness, and egoistically and atheistically^ [Introduction · p. 21] 1 " That is to say, the only hindrance to men's believing in God a s a crea tor is their inability to believe in themselves as cre- ■^Cated. Self-consciousness, the sentiment of personality, the feeling r-'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 seek to identify it with their private selves. This selfishness of the several members is the trail of the serpent over creation, the coming to life of the ancestral void. It negates, because it entirely in- ; verts, God's own energy, which is undiluted altru- \ istic love; it intercepts the truth of his impartial J flowing tides; it is an utter lie, and yet a lie under the dense and unsuspecting mask of which alone " the great and sincere Creator of men " is able gradually to conciliate our instincts, and win us ' over to the truth. [Introduction · p. 22] This happens whenever we are weaned from the lie; for the abandoning of the he in this instance coalesces in the same conscious act With the confessing of the truth. " I am nothing as substan/ \tive, — I am everything as recipient; " this is a Ifhought in which both I and the Creator figure, put in which we figure in perfectiy harmonious and truthful guise. It is accordingly the threshold of spiritual life; and instead of obstructing and [Introduction · p. 22] I a mere traditional or legendary fact, I never feel inclined peri sonally to believe in it, save as the fruit of some profound intellectual humiliation or hopeless inward vexation of spirit. My inward afflatus 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 exquisitej way find itself wounded to death — find itself become death in fact-U the only death I am capable of believing in — before any genuine/ spiritual resuscitation is at all practicable for vas." — Society the Redeemed Form of Man, ^. iZ^., INTRODUCTION. Striving to intercept, it welcomes and furthers all that the divine Love may have in store for every member of the created family. [Introduction · p. 23] The agents of the weaning are conscience and religion. In the philosophy before us, these faculties are considered to have no other function than that of being ministers of death to the fallacious selfhood. They have no positive worth or • character, and are mere clearers of the way. They bring no new content upon the scene; they simply permit the pre-existing content to settle } into a new and truer form. The facts of our nature with every man in it blinded with pride and jealousy, and stiffened in exclusiveness and self-seeking, are one thing, — that thing whose destinies Church and State are invoked to control, and whose tragic and discordant history we partly know. Those very same facts, after conscience and religion have played their part, and undermined the illusion of the self, so that men acknowledge^ their life to come from God, and] love each other as God loves, having no exclu- ' sive private cares, will form the kingdom of heaven ( on earth, the regenerate social order which none { of us yet know. In a word, God will be fully incarnated at last in a form that no longer contradicts his character, in what Mr. James calls, with Swedenborg, the Divine-Natural Humanity. God's [Introduction · p. 24] real creature is this aggregate Humanity. He cannot be partial to one fractional unit of us more than to another. And the only difference between the unredeemed and the regenerate social form hes in the simple fact, that in the former the units will not fall into relations accordaijt with this truth, while in the latter, such an attitude is the one they most spontaneously assume. One Substance, extricating itself by finding at last a true form, — such is the process, once begun! And no one part is either "lost" or "saved" in any other sense than that it either arrests or furthers the transmission through itself to others of God's life-giving tides. [Introduction · p. 24] This probably sounds to most ears thin and cold and mythical enough, — the " Divine-Natural Humanity " especially, with its abolition of selfishness, appearing quite as shallow and insipid a dream as any other paradise excogitated by imaginative man. This is the inevitable result of trying to express didactically and articulately, in the form of a story, what in its origin is more like an intuition, sentiment, or attitude of the soul. The matter shall be immediately thickened and filled out to the reader's understanding by quotations from Mr. James himself, touching successively the various elements of the scheme. But if I may be permitted an opinion here, I should say that in no [Introduction · p. 25] such successive shape as this did the scheme have authority over Mr. James's own mind. I fancythat his belief in its truth was strongest when the dumb sense of human life, sickened and baffled as it is forever by the strange unnatural fever in its breast of unreality and dearth struggling with-, infinite fulness and possession, became a sort of voice within him, and cried out, " This must stop! ' The good, the good, is really there, and must see to its own! Who is its own? Is it this querulous usurping, jealous me, sickened of defeat and done to death, and glad never to raise its head again? Never more! It is some sweeter, larger, more innocent and generous receptacle of life than that cadaverous and lying thing can ever be.^ Let that but be removed, and the other may come in. And there must be a way to remove it, for God himself is there, and cannot be frustrated forever 1 "Just in proportion, accordingly, as a man's spiritual knowledge [Introduction · p. 25] improves, will his contempt for himself, as an unmixed spiritual tramp and irredeemable vagabond, increase and abound. We might very well bear with an uninstructed or inexperienced child, who, shut up to the companionship of its doll, constructed all of sawdust and prunella, looks upon it as spiritually alive; but one has no patience with an experienced, instructed man or churchman, who undergoes precisely the same hallucination with regard to his own worthless doll of a selfhood, — which is destitute even of so much as a sawdust and prunella reality, — and conceives that the Divine being has nothing better to do than literally to bestow divine and immortal life upon that dead, corrupt, and stinking thing." — New Church Independent, September, 1879, p. 413. of his aim, — least of all by such an obstacle as that! He must somehow, and by eternal necessity he shall, bring the kingdom of heaven about! " [Introduction · p. 26] I may as well say here, once for all, that the kingdom of heaven postulated in this deep and simple way, and then more articulately formulated as the " Divine-Natural Humanity," remained to the end a mere postulate or programme in my father's pages, and never received at his hands any concrete filling out. It was what must come to be, if God truly exist, — an assumption we owe to his power and his love, and that any man with \ a sense -of God's reality will scorn to hesitate to' make. That, moreover, the kingdom was to be made of no other stuff than the actual stuff of, human nature, was but another tribute, — a tribute ii of manly loyalty to the real divinity of the Good j existing in the human bosom now. In his earlier years, between 1842 and 1850, when Mr. James's ideas were being settled by the reading of Swedenborg, he also became interested in the socialistic fermentations then so rife, and in particular in the writings of Fourier. His first two works shadow forth the Divine-Natural Humanity as about to be born, through the yoking of the passions into harmonious social service, by the growth of socialistic organization, in place of the old regime of Church and State, among men. Since then, there [Introduction · p. 27] INTRODUCTION. 2/ have been many disappointments, in which he shared; and although Fourier's system was never displaced from his mind as at least a provisional representation of possible redeemed life, I think that at the last he cared little to dispute about matters of detail, being willing to cast the whole burden upon God, who would be sure to order it rightly when all the conditions were fulfilled. I will now let the author speak as much as possible for himself. And perhaps the best way to begin is to cull a few of the numerous passages in which he succinctly states the necessities which, by its own intrinsic logic, the problem of creation involves. [Introduction · p. 27] "Nothing can be so intensely antagonistic to the conception of a creator as that of a creature. To create is one thing; to be created is the total and exact opposite of that thing. For what is one's nature as a creature? It is abject want or destitution. To be created is to be void of all things in one's self, and to possess them only in another; and if I am the creature accordingly of an infinite creator, my want of course must be infinite. The nature of a thing is what the thing is in itself, and apart from foreign interference. And evidently what the creature is in himself, and apart from the creator, is sheer noth- ingness; that is to say, sheer want or destitution, — destitution of all things, whether of life, of existence, or even of being. So that to give the creature natural form or selfhood, is merely to vivify the, infinite void he is in himself; is merely to organize in living form the universal destitution he is' under with respect to the creative fulness."^ [Introduction · p. 28] 1 Secret of Swedenborg, p. 47. Another statement may here be given: — *' Swedenborg's doctrine summarily stated is, that what we call nature, and suppose to be exactly what it seems, is in truth a thing of strictly human and strictly divine dimensions, both as being at one and the same moment a just exponent of the creature's essential want or finiteness, and of the creator's essential fulness or infinitude.... [Introduction · p. 28] " In all true creation the creator is bound, by the fact of his giving absolute being to the creature, to communicate himself — make himself over — without stint to the creature; and the creature, in his turn, because he gives phenomenal form or manifestation to the creative power, is bound to, absorb the creator in himself, to appropriate him as it were to himself, to reproduce his infinite or stainless love in all manner of finite egotistic form; so that the more truly the creator alone is, the more truly the creature alone appears. Now, in this inevitable immersion which creation implies of creative being in created form, we have, according to Swedenborg, the origin of nature. It grows necessarily out of the obligation the creature is under by creation to appropriate the creator, or reproduce him in his own finite lineaments. It overtly consecrates the covert marriage of infinite and finite, creator and creature. By the hypothesis of creation, the creator gives sole and absolute being to the creature; and unless therefore the creature reverberate the communication, or react towards the creator, the latter will inevitably swallow him up, or extinguish him.... Thus in the hierarchical marriage of creator and creature which we call creation, the creator yields the creature the primary place by spontaneously [Introduction · p. 29] " It is a necessary implication, then, of the truth of the DivineNatural Humanity, that while the creator gives invisible spiritual being to the creature, the creature in his turn gives natural form — gives visible existence — to the creator; or, more briefly, while the creator gives reality to the creature, the creature gives phenomenality to the creator. In other words still we may say, that while the creator supplies the essential or properly creative element in creation, the creature supplies its existential or properly constitutive element, — that element of hold-back or resistance, without which it could never put on manifestation. Nature is the attestation of this ceaseless give-and-take between creator and creature; the nuptial ring that confirms and consecrates the deathless espousals of infinite and finite. In spite, therefore, of its fertile and domineering actuality to sense, it is as void of all reality to reason as the shadow of one's person in a glass. [Introduction · p. 29] It is, in fact, only the outward image or shadow of itself which is cast by the inward or spiritual world upon the mirror of our Tudimentary intelligence. And inasmuch as the shadow or subjective image of itself which any object projects of necessity reproduces the object in inverse form, so nature, being the subjective image or shadow of God's objective and spiritual creation, turns out a sheer inversion of spiritual order; exhibits the creator's fulness veiled by the creature's want, — the creator's perfection obscured, or negatively revealed, by the creature's imperfection. Spiritual or creative order affirms the essential unity of every creature with every other, and of all with the creator. Natural or created order must consequently exhibit the contingent or phenomenal oppugnancy of every creature with every other, and of all with the creator; or else furnish no adequate foothold or flooring to the spiritual world.... [Introduction · p. 29] " The logic of the case is inexorable. If creation at its culmination be an exact practical equation of creator and creature, scruple to endow him with moral consciousness, it would withhold from him all conscious life or joy, and leave him a mere form of vegetative existence. Creation', to allow of any true fellowship or equality between creator and creature, demands that the creature be himself, — that is, be naturally posited to his own consciousness. And he cannot be thus posited save in so -far as the creative love vivifies his essential destitution, organizes it in living form, and by the experience thus engendered in the created bosom lays a basis for any amount of free or spiritual reaction in the creature towards the uncreated good. [Introduction · p. 30] the minus of the latter being rigidly equivalent to the plus o£ the former, then it incorporates as its needful basis a sphere of experience on the creature's part in which he may feel himself utterly remote from the creator, and abandoned to his own resources, — an empirical sphere of existence, in fine, which may unmistakably identify him with all lower things, and so alienate him from (that is, make him consciously another than) his creator. Thus creation, with Swedenborg, being at its apogee a rigid equation of the creator's perfection and the creature's imperfection, necessitates a jiatural history, or provisional plane of projection upon which the equation may be wrought out to its most definite issues." — Secret of Swedenborg, pp. 22-30. INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 31] " I attempt no apology, accordingly, for Swedenborg's doctrine on this subject, but applaud it with all my heart. I perfectly agree with him that redemption and not creation avouches the proper i glory of the Divine name. Creation is not, and cannot be, the final word of the Divine dealings with us. It has at most a rigidly subjective efficacy as affording us self-consciousness, and not the le'ast objective value as affording us any spiritual fellowship of the Divine perfection. To be naturally created indeed — to be created an image of God — is to be anything except a spiritual like-' ness of him. The law of the image is subjectively to invert the lineaments of its original.... And to be spiritually like God is inwardly to undo this subjective inversion of the divine perfection to \ which we find ourselves naturally born or created, and put on that direct or objective presentation I Secret of Swedenborg, p 132. of it to which we are historically re-born or recreated." ^ [Introduction · p. 32] " You see, in short, how infinitely remote from spiritual sonship to God our natural creation leaves us, and how obligatory it is upon him therefore, if he would ever spiritually affiliate us to himself, to give us redemption from our own nature. And this great redemption, how shall it ever be able to;ome about? By the very nature of the case, the sphere of its evolution is restricted to the limits of the created consciousness, so that the creator can command absolutely no enginery to effect it which is not supplied exclusively by the resources of that The tragic evolution of the selfhood itself, " a limitation upon human life which on its face is one of inconceivable malignity," is the only enginery required. But of its tragedy anon. Meanwhile — [Introduction · p. 32] "In truth, this altogether unobtrusive fact of selfhood or natural life which we are all born to, and which we therefore think nothing of, but accept as a mere matter of course, is itself the eternal marvel of creation. We ourselves can modify existence almost at pleasure; we can change the 1 Secret of Swedenborg, p. 48. a Ibid., p. 57. ' J.form of existing things, — that is, can convert jnatural forms into artificial ones. But we cannot Konfer life; cannot make these artificial forms selfjconscious or living. We can turn a block of wood into a table, a block of stone into a statue; but our work in no wise reflects the vivacity of Nature, because we not being life in ourselves cannot possibly communicate life to the work of our hands. We frame a beautiful effigy of life; but the effigy remains forever uninhabited, forever irresponsive to the love which fashions it; in short, forever imconscious or dead. [Introduction · p. 33] " Now, the splendor of the creative activity is that it makes even this ^^gy of itself alive with the amplest life; its product being no cold inanimate statue, but a living, breathing, exulting person. In short, the everlasting miracle is that God is, able, in giving us himself, to endow us with our own finite selfhood as well; leaving us thereby so unidentified with himself, so utterly free and untrammelled to our own consciousness, as to be able very often seriously to doubt, and not seldom permanently to deny, his own existence. And this miracle, I say, is utterly inexplicable upon any datum but that I have alleged; namely, that God is so truly infinite in love as not to shrink from shrouding his uncreated splendor in his creature's lineaments, from eternally humiliating himself to '^^ 3 the lowest possibilities of creaturely imbecility and (iniquity, in order that the creature may thus be- ' jcome freely or spiritually elevated to the otherwise [Introduction · p. 34] " I ask no indulgence' of my reader for this language. I literally mean what I say, that creation is absolutely contingent upon the Divine ability to humble himself to the creature's level, to diminish himself to the creature's natural dimensions. J ^ Language is incapable of painting too vividly the ' strength of my convictions on this subject. If the creature by the bare fact of his creatureship be demonstrably void of life in himself, then the creator can only succeed in rescuing him from this intrinsic death, and elevating him to himself by first abasing himself to the creature; that is, allowing his proper infinitude or perfection to be so swallowed up in the other's proper finiteness or imperfection, as never by any possibility to come into the least overt collision with it. Thus, whenever I draw a breath or perform any automatic function; when I see or hear or smell or taste or touch; when I hunger or thirst; when I think or take cognizance of any truth; when I glow with passion; when I do good or evil to my Tellow-man, — my ability in all these cases is due exclusively to the great truth that God's love to me is so truly [Introduction · p. 35] infinite (that is, untainted by the least admixture of love to himself) as to permit him, within the entire periphery of my consciousness, physical, intellectual, and moral, to veil himself so effectually from sight, to obscure and as it were annihilate himself so completely on my behalf, that I cannot help feeling myself to exist absolutely or irrespectively of him, and enjoy a conscious ability not only to do what is congruous with his ultimate good pleasure in me, but to abound, if I please, at any moment in £ill manner of profane, injurious, and filthy behavior." ^ [Introduction · p. 35] " There is no alternative if creation is really to take place. The creative love must either disavow its infinitude, and so renounce creation, or else it must frankly submit to all the degradation the created nature imposes upon it, — that is, it must consent to be converted from infinite love in itself to _ an altogether finite love in the creature," namelyP the love of self. " This is the only true or philosophic conception of creation, — namely, the abandonment of yourself to what is not yourself in a manner so intimate and hearty, as that you thence- ^ forth shall utterly disappear within the precincts; of its existence; shall become phenomenally extinct within the entire realm of its personality, while it alone shall appear to be." The divine 1 Substance and Shadow, pp. 83, 84. [Introduction · p. 36] creation is no exception to this law, which " necessitates that the creature shall not even appear to be save by the creator's actual or objective disappearance within all the field of his subjective consciousness; save by the creator's becoming objectively merged, obscured, drowned out, so to speak,,in thell created subjeptivity." ^ '. Elsewhere the same truth is expressed in a way which to ordinary ears might sound almost revoltingly paradoxical, but which can alone bring out the full depth of its meaning. i " Creator and creature, then, are strictly corre- [Introduction · p. 36] J^ " 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 stijjstance whose proper energy consists in its incessantly going out of itself, or communi-. eating itself to what is not itself, to what indeed is infinitely alien and repugnant to itself, and dwelling there infinitely and eternally as in its very self. That is to say, the Divine being or substance is Love, — love without any the least set-off or limitation 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 ovfswhelming /ojj/ffw; 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 inmost, most vital, and inseparable self, and unhesitatingly call it me and mine, you andi yours; cleaving to it as inmost bone of our bone, and veritable flesh of our flesh, and incontinently renouncing all things for it." — Society the Redeemed Form of Man, j). 162. [Introduction · p. 37] lated existences, — the latter remorselessly implicating or involving the former; the former in his turnp assiduously e^cglicating or evolving the latter. The' Creator is in truth the inferior term of the relation, and the creature its superior term; although in point of appearance the relationship is reversed, — the Creator being thought to. be primary and controlling, while the creature is thought secondary and subservient. The truth incurs this humiliation, undergoes this falsification, on our behalf exclusively, who, because we have by nature no perception of God as a spirit, but only as a person like ourselves, are even brutally ignorant of the divine power and ways. But it is a sheer humiliation nevertheless; for in very truth it is the Creator alone who gives subjective constitution- to us, only that we, appearing to ourselves thereupon absolutely to be, may ever after give objective!' reality to him.^ Thus creation is not a something outwardly achieved by God in space and time, but a something inwardly wrought by him within the compass exclusively of human nature or hu-jv/man consciousness; a something subjectively con-jl ceived by his love, patiently borne or elaborated! by his wisdom, and painfully brought forth by his power, — just as the child is subjectively conceived, [Introduction · p. 37] 1 As effective Creator, namely. A few redundant words have been omitted from the passage, which will be found in the " Secret of Swedenborg," pp. 185, 186. — Ed. patiently borne, and painfully brought forth by the mother. Creation is no brisk activity on God's part, but only a long patience or suffering. It is no ostentatious self-assertion, no dazzling parade of magical, irrational, or irresponsible power; it is an endless humiliation or prorogation of himself to all the lowest exigencies of the created consciousness. In short, it is no finite divine action, as we stupidly dream, giving the creature objective or absolute projection from his creator; it is in truth and exclusively an infinite divine passion, which, all in giving its creature subjec tive or phenomenal existence, contrives to con vert this provisional existence of his into objectivdl or real being, by freely endowing the created na-f^ ture with all its own pomp of love, of wisdom, and! of power." [Introduction · p. 38] These two conceptions, of God's unendinglyj patient self-surrender to us, and of our intrinsic! nothingness, formed the deepest springs of Mr. James's view of life. He has no words of scorn too deep for the venerable notion of Christian theology that God creates for his own glory; and when he vindicates his own idea of the divine character, it is in language by whose passionate fervor all must be impressed. Here are some passages in point: [Introduction · p. 39] " It is an easy enough thing to find a holiday God who is all too selfish to be touched with the infirmities of his own creatures, — a God, for example, who has nought to do but receive assiduous court for a work of creation done myriads of ages ago, and which is reputed to have cost him in the doing neither pains nor patience, neither affection nor thought, but simply the utterance of a dramatic word; and who is willing, accordingly, to accept our decorous Sunday homage in ample quitance of obligations so unconsciously incurred on our part, so lightly rendered and so penuriously sanctioned on his. Every sect, every nation, every family almost, offers some pet idol of this description to our worship. But I am free to confess that I have long outgrown this loutish conception of deity. I can no longer bring myself to adore a characteristic activity in the God of my worship, which falls below the secular average of human character. In fact, what I crave with all my heart and understanding, — what my very flesh and bones cry out for, — is no longer a Sunday but a weekday divinity, a working God, grimy with the dust and sweat of our most carnal appetites and passions, and bent not for an instant upon inflating our worthless pietistic righteousness, but upon the patient, toilsome, thorough cleansing of our physical and moral existence from the odious defilement [Introduction · p. 40] " Accordingly, when orthodoxy commends God, the universal creator, to our rational reverence and affection, under the guise of a great melodramatic being so essentially heartless as to live for untold eternities without feeling any desire for companionship, so essentially irrational that it cost him no effort of thought to summon the universe into absolute being"; when "natural religion represents creation as an act of pure will on God's part, a movement of simple caprice, involving not one particle of the honest labor and sweat which go to the execution of any humane enterprise, — say, the growing or the making or the baking of a loaf of bread," — "I will not acknowledge a God so voic of human worth, so every way level to the char acter of a mere ostentatious showman or conjuror It is just such a childish caricature of deity, as Byron might paint to match those childish caricatures of manhood with which his purulent imagination runs riot. I am constrained by every inspiration of true manhood to demand for my worship a perfectly human deity; that is to say, a deity who is so intent. upon rescuing every creature he has made, from the everlasting death and damna- [Introduction · p. 41] " We laugh, as I said awhile ago, at an inventor who should ask us to take his genius on trust, or without any evidence of its reality. And there can be no more offensive tribute to the divine name than to show him a deference we deny to the rankest charlatan. How infinitely unworthy of God it would be to exact or expect of the absolute and unintelligent creatures of his power av belief out of all proportion to their sensible knowl- 1 edge, or unbacked by anything but tradition!... I am free to confess for my own part that I have no belief in God's absolute or irrelative and un- j -^ conditional perfection. I have not the least sentiment of worship for his name, the least sentiment of awe or reverence towards him, considered as a perfect person sufficient unto himself. That, style of deity exerts no attraction either upon my | heart or understanding. Any mother who suckles her babe upon her own breast, any bitch in fact who litters her periodical brood of pups, presents to my imagination a vastly nearer and sweeter [Introduction · p. 42] 1 Substance and Shadow, pp. 72, 73. ^ divine charm. What do I care for a goodness which boasts of a hopeless aloofness from my own nature, except' to hate it with a manly inward hatred? And what do I care for a truth which professes to be eternally incommunicable to its own starving progeny, but to avert myself from it with a manly outward contempt? Let men go on to cherish under whatever name of virtue, or wisdom, or power they will the idol of self-sufficiency; I for my part will cherish' the name of him alone whose insufficiency to himself is so abject that he is incapable of realizing himself except in others. In short, I neither can nor will spiritually confess any deity who is not essentially human, and existentially thence exclusively natural; that is to say, devoid of all distinctively personal or limitary pretensions." ^ [Introduction · p. 42] It is plain enough that a God like this can be neither a judge, nor a respecter, of persons; that every creature, as such, must be as dear to him as every other; and that private differences must be melted down in the warmth of his charity, as dust disappears in a furnace blast Our desperate clinging to private differences is what makes us the great enemies we are to the Creator, and is the next point it will be well to take up. 1 Society the Redeemed Form of Man, pp. 333, 334. [Introduction · p. 43] Mr. James uses the words " proprium " and " selfhood " to designate what more properly should be called selfishness or self-love; for the faculty in question is evidently not the mere cognitive awareness of one's self as a special part of all exist'ence, — which would be self-consciousness merely,,, — but an(active emotional Interest in the part so\ singled out, to the exclusion of the rest. Mr, James calls it sometimes the deliverance of our " consciousness," sometimes that of our " sense." Sometimes he calls it our "morality," — a very unusual use of the word, but one which has deep reasons in his system. On the whole, however, he has no properly psychological doctrine on the subject, but merely takes his stand upon the empirical fact that this surly and jealous principle exists within us, and then proceeds to tell its function and its fate. ' [Introduction · p. 43] " Morality expresses the sentiment I have of my I own absoluteness, the feeling I have of a selfhood I strictly independent of that of any other man.... It gives us that ample individual development and nursing, that affluent preliminary experience of our finite selves, which is necessary to base or engender our subsequent unlimited social expan- I sion. It lifts us out of the mud of animality, out of the. mire of mere natural passion and appetite, [Introduction · p. 44] and endows us with selfhood or soul, — that is, with the sense of a life so much more intimate and near than that of the body, as to lead us to identify ourselves with it or to cleave to it alone, cheerfully forsaking all things for it,... so allying us to our own inexperienced imaginations with God; giving us that sentiment of individual power and glory which is unknown to the animal nature, and which is the coarse rude germ of all our subsequent conceptions of spiritual things; whispering in short in our fondest hearts. Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.... [Introduction · p. 44] "Self-assertion is thus so clearly the fundamental law, the vital breath, of our moral Ufe, that it is no wonder we cling to that life as the true end of our being, and require an internal divine quickening, or the denunciatory voice of conscience, before we consent to regard it simply as a means to an infirtitely higher end, — which is our unity with all mankind. The inspiration of the moral sentiment, the sentiment of selfhood, is so powerful within us; it is so sweet to feel this delicious bosom inmate disengage itself from its gross carnal envelope, and come forth a radiant white-armed Eve, full-formed in all divine vigor and beauty, — that we cannot help clasping it to our bosoms as thenceforth bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, cheerfully forsaking for it father and mother, or all we have traditionally loved and traditionally believed, and cleaving undismayed to its fortunes though it lead us through the gloom of death and the fires of hell.... [Introduction · p. 45] " Self-love is the vital atmosphere of morality, and there can be no extrication from it but by honest conflict with it, — conflict if need be even unto death. Some men have been more grievously lacerated in this conflict than others, going down to their graves scourged by the contempt of the proud and unthinking, with banners once so lofty now all trailing in the dust of men's reproach. But this is not because they were spiritually any worse than other men; probably the exact contrary. It is only because they had fifty times the ordinary amount of moral or self-righteous force to start with, and it could only become spiritually weakened and overcome by this terrific personal humiliation." ^ ^ [Introduction · p. 46] verse. But were this so, we should sit like stocks and stones, leaving him who obviously was life to the exclusive appropriation and enjoyment of it." On the other hand, we might imagine ourselves. endowed with a prosperous and harmonious self from the start, and creation beginning and ending with the Garden of Eden,^ — " a state of blissful infantile delight, unperturbed as yet by those fierce storms of the intellect which are soon to envelop and sweep it away, but also unvisited by a single glimpse of that divine and halcyon calm of heart in which these hideous storms will finally rock themselves to sleep. Nothing can indeed be more remote (except in pure imagery) from distinctively human attributes, or from the spontaneous life of man, than this sleek and comely Adamic condition, provided it should turn out an abiding one; because man in that case would prove a mere dimpled nursling of the skies, without ever rising into the slightest divine communion or fellowship) without ever realizing a truly divine manhood and dignity, — mere unfermented dough, insipid and impracticable.... He would have mineral body and consequent inertia, no doubt; he would have [Introduction · p. 46] 1 Mr. James, following Swedenborg, often calls the creature abstracted from moral consciousness, the Adam; the moral consciousness being the Eve. Homo and vir are terms symbolizing the same distinction. / vegetable form, and consequent growth; he would have animal life and consequent motion, — but he ""( would be without all power of human action, be- 1 cause he would lack that constant permeation and i interpenetration of his spirit by the living spirit of / God, which weaves his pallid natural annals into the purple tissue of history, and separates man from Nature by all the plenitude and power of incarnate deity." ^ [Introduction · p. 47] But the consciousness of self cannot be innocent and prosperous. Being, as it is, a mere magic-lantern-phantom cast by the divine love upon essential nothingness, it must reveaHhe void on which it is based, and have a tragic history, if it have a history at all. The experience of the working out of the tragedy of the self is called by! our author sometimes " conscience," and some-| times " religion." " By religion I mean — what is invariably meant by the term where the thing itself still exists — such a conscience on man's part of a forfeiture of the divine favor, as perpetually urges him to make sacrifices of his ease, his convenience, his wealth, and if need be his life, in order to restore himself, if so it be possible, to that favor. This is religion J Christianity the Logic of Creation, p. 120. [Introduction · p. 48] I ence whose starting point was not pessimistic. Our modem optimism made him complain that " religion in the old virile sense of the word has disappeared from sight and become replaced by a feeble Unitarian sentimentality. The old religion involved a conscience of the profoundest antagonism between God and the worshipper, which utterly refused to 4)e placated by anything short of an unconditional pledge of the utmost divine mercy. The ancient believer felt himself sheerly unable to love God, or do anythmg else towards his salvation, were it only the lifting of a finger. To unlove was his only true loving; to un-learn, his only true learning; to un-do, his only true doing. The modern religionist is at once amused and amazed at these curious archaeological beginnings of his own history. He feels towards them as a virtuoso does towards what is decidedly rococo in fashion, and not seldom bestows a word of munificent Pharisaic patronage upon them, such as the opulent Mr. Ruskin dispenses to uncouth specimens of early religious art. He has not the slightest conception of himself as a spiritual form inwardly enlivened by all God's peace and innocence. On the conJ j trary, he feels himself to be a strictly moral or self-possessed being,! vivified exclusively by his own action, or the relations he volunta- [Introduction · p. 48] 1 rily assumes with respect to human and divine law. The modern (believer aspires to be a^aint; the ancTenf'one abhorred to be anything but a sinner. The former looks back, accordingly, to some fancied era of what he calls conversion, — that is, when he passed from death to life. The latter was blissfully content to forget himself, and looked forward exclusively to his Lord's promised spiritual advent in all the forms of a redeemed nature. The one is an absolutely changed man, no longer to be confounded with the world, and meet for the divine approbation. The other was a totally unchanged one, only more dependent than he ever was before upon [Introduction · p. 49] "Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect this; begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths, — the depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged.... The natural inheritance of every one who is Capable of spiritual life, is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls the unmitigated divine mercy. Tlie one feels sure of going to heaven if the Lord observes the distinctions which his own grace ordains in human character. The other felt sure of going to hell unless the Lord was blessedly indifferent to those distinctions." — Substance and Shadow, pp. 14, 15. [Introduction · p. 49] Again: " Religion has undergone so sheer a demoralization since her pure and holy prime, — has sunk into such a brazen handmaid to worldliness, such a painted and bedizened courtesan and streetwalker, proffering her unstinted favors to every sentimental fop, or clerical beau diseur, who has the smallest change of self-conceit in his pocket wherewith to pay for them, — ^that one finds himself secretly invoking the advent of some grand social renovation in order to blot it as a profession out of remembrance, and leave it extant only as a spiritual life. Religion was once a spiritual life [in the eMth, though a very rude and terrible_Qne; and her conquests were diligently auteenticated by the divine spirit. Then she meant terror and amazement to all devout self-complacency in man; then she meant rebuke and denial to fevery form of distinctively personal hope and pretension towards God; then she meant J I discredit and death to every breath of a Pharisaic or Quaker I temper in humanity, by which a man could be led to boast of a ' private spirit ' in his bosom, giving him a differential character and aspect in God's sight to that of other men, especially the great and holy and unconscious mass of his kind." — Secret of Swedenborg, p. 2Zi. [Introduction · p. 50] and every obscene bird of night chatters.^ The only valid natural superiority I can claim to the --^animal, lies in the fact that I have conscience and 'he has not. And the only valid moral superiority I can claim to my fellow-man is, that I am more hearty in my allegiance to it, and he less hearty. Thus deeper than my intellect, deeper than my heart, deeper in fact than aught and all that I recognize as myself, or am wont to call emphatically me, is this dread omnipotent power of conscience, which now soothes me with the voice and nurses me with the milk of its tenderness, as the mother soothes and, nurses her child, and anon scourges me. with the lash of its indignation, as the father scourges his refractory heir. [Introduction · p. 50] " But this is only telling half the story. It is very true that conscience is the sole arbiter of good and evil to man; and that persons of a literal and superficial cast of mind — persons of a good hereditary temperament — may easily fancy themselves in spiritual harmony with it, or persuade themselves and others that they have fully satisfied every claim of its righteousness. But minds of a deeper quality soon begin to suspect that the demands of conscience are not so easily satisfied; soon discover in fact that it is a ministration of death exclusively, and not of life, to which they 1 Substance and Shadow, p. 75. [Introduction · p. 51] are abandoning themselves. For what conscience inevitably teaches all its earnest adepts erelong is, to give up the hopeless effort to reconcile good and evil in their own practice, and learn to identify themselves, on the contrary, with the evil principle alone, while they assign all good exclusively to God. Thus no man of a sincere and honest intellectual make has ever set himself seriously to cultivate conscience with a view to its spiritual emoluments, — that is, with a view to placate the divine righteousness, — without speedily discovering that every such hope is illusory; that peace flees from him just in proportion to the eagerness with which he covets it. In other words, no man not a fool, since the beginning of history, has ever deliberately set himself ' to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,' — that is, to prosecute 4 his moral instincts until he should become inwardly [Introduction · p. 51] \ assured of Gqd's personal complacency in him, — ' without finding death and not life to his soul; without his inward and spiritual obliquity being sooner or later made to abound in the exact ratio of his moral or outward rectitude. I have no idea, of course, that a man may not be beguiled by the insinuating breath of sense into believing himself spiritually, or in the depths, just what he appears to be morally, or in the shallows. Vast numbers of persons, indeed, are to be found in every commu- [Introduction · p. 52] nity, who, having as yet attained to no spiritual insight or understanding, are entirely content with — nay, proud of — the moral 'purple and fine linen ' with which they are daily decked out in the favorable esteem of their friends, and are meanwhile at hearty peace with themselves. All this in fact is strictly inevitable to qur native and cultivated fatuity in spiritual things; but I am riot here concerned with the fact in the way either of denial or of confirmation. What I here mean specifica.lly to say is, that every one in whom, to use a common locution of Swedenborg, ' the spiritual degree of the mind has been opened,' finds conscience no i friend, but an impassioned foe to his moral right- 1 eousness or complacency in himself, and hence to [Introduction · p. 52] ■ his personal repose in God.... A stream cannot mount above its source, artd... when I earnestly aspire to fulfil the divine law, — when I earaestly strive after moral or personal excellence, — my aim ^ unquestionably is to lift myself above the level of human nature, or attain to a place- in the divine regard unshared by the average of my kind; unshared by the liar, the thief, the adulterer, the murderer. But the same law which discountenances false-witness, theft, adultery, and murder binds me also not to covet, —7 that is, not to desire for \ myself what other men do not enjoy; so that the law which I fondly imagined was designed to give me INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 53] life turns out a subtle ministry of death, and in the very crisis of my moral exaltation fills me with the profoundest spiritual humiliation and despair. It )^ is an instinct doubtless of the divine life in me to hate false-witness, theft, adultery, and murder, and actually to avert myself from these evils whenever I am naturally tempted to do them. But then I must hate them for their own sake exclusively, or V because of their contrariety to infinite goodness I and truth, and not with a base view to tighten my 7 hold ucojo. Go d's persona l a pprobation. I grossly^ pervert the spirit of the law, and betray its infinite / majesty to shame, if I suppose it capable of ratifying in any degree my private and personal cupidity towards God, or lending even a moment's sanction to the altogether frivolous and odious separation which I devoutly hope to compass between myself and other men in his sight. [Introduction · p. 53] "Tlie entire historic function of conscience has been to operate an effectual check upon our gigantic natural pride and cupidity in spiritual things, by avouching a total contrariety between God and ourselves, so long as we remain indifferent to the truth of our essential society, fellowship, or equality with our kind, and are moved only by selfish or personal considerations in the devout overtures we make to the divine regard.... The only respect it ever pays to the private votary is to convince him of sin through a conviction of God's wholly impersonal justice,... and make him frankly disavow every title to the divine esteem which is not quite equally shared by publican and harlot."^ [Introduction · p. 54] Selfhood and conscience, then, or "morality and religion, together, constitute the subject-earth of self-love, which revolves now in light, now in shade, — morality being the illuminated side of that love, religion its obscured side; the one constituting the splendor of its day, the other the darkness of its night. Morality is the summer lustihood and luxuriance of self-love, clothing its mineral ribs with vegetable grace, permeating its rigid trunk with sap, decorating its gnarled limbs with foliage, glorifying every reluctant virgin bud and every modest wifely blossom into rich, ripe motherly fruit. Religion is the icy winter which blights this summer fertility, which arrests the ascent of its vivifying sap, and humbles its superb life to the ground, in the interests of a spring that shall be perennial, and of autumns bursting with imperishable fruit. In other words, religion has no substantive force. Her sole errand on earth has beerf to dog the footsteps of morality, to humble the pride of selfhood which man derives from nature, and so soften his interiors to the reception of [Introduction · p. 55] 1 Secret of Swedenborg, pp. 161-65. INTROD UCTION. { e C ^" divine truth, as that truth shall stand fulfilled in the organization of human equality or fellowship," ^ " Self-conceit and self-reproach, pride and penitence, thus make up the fever and the chill into--, which that great intermittent, which we call our / moral and religious experience, ordinarily resolves [ itself." My father seems in his early years to havej had an unusually lively and protracted visitation of j, this malady, and his philosophy indeed is but thej statement of his cure. In the autobiographic pages to be found further on, there is a full ac-i count of his boyish evolution in this respect. Andj here and there in his other writings we get glimp- 1 ses of later states of mind which it will be profit-' able now to transcribe. Here is one of them: [Introduction · p. 55] " I had never for a moment intellectually realized my moral consciousness to be that mere steward or servant of the divine inheritance in our nature which Swedenborg showed it to be. On the contrary, with the intellect, and in spite of the heart's misgiving, I had always quietly allowed it to be the undeniable lord of the inheritance, and beheld it accordingly whipping the men-servants and the maid-servants at its pleasure, without a suspicion. Far from supposing my natural selfhood or proprium to constitute a strictly negative token, an 1 Substance and Shadow, p. lo. essentially inverse attestation, of God's spiritual and infinite presence in our nature, I habitually viewed it as the Church taught me to view it, — that is, as the only direct and positive manifestation of his power; and my religious life accordingly became one of incessant conflict and perturbation.' [Introduction · p. 56] " How could it have been otherwise? Having as I supposed a purely moral status by creation, — never dreaming that my selfhood possessed only a formal or subjective validity, — I attributed to ^1 myself an objective or substantial reality in God's I sight, and of course sought to attract his approbation to me by the unswerving pursuit of moral excellence, by studiously cultivating every method of personal purity. It was all in vain. The more I strove to indue myself in actual righteousness, the wider gaped the jaws of hell within me; the fouler grew its fetid breath. A conviction of inward defilement so sheer took possession of me, that death seemed better than life. I soon found my conscience, once launched in this insane career, acquiring so infernal an edge, that I could no longer indulge myself in the most momentary deviation from an absurd and pedantic literal rectitude; could not, for example, bestow a sulky glance upon my wife, a cross word upon my child, or a petulant objurgation on my cook, without tumbling into an instant inward frenzy of alarm [Introduction · p. 57] lest I should thereby have provoked God's personal malignity to me. There is indeed no way of avoiding spiritual results so belittling, but by ceasing to regard morality as a direct, and looking upon it as an inverse, image of God's true life in us. If my moral consciousness constitute the true and eternal bond of intercourse between me and God; that is to say, if he attribute to me all the good and evil which I in my insane pride attribute to myself, — then it will be impossible for me to avoid all eternity either a most conceited and disgusting conviction of his personal complacency in me, or else a shuddering apprehension of his personal ill-will. If Ihave a naturally complacent temper, my religious life will reflect it, and array me spiritually in all manner of nauseous Pharisaism and flunkeyism. If I have what is called a ' morbid ' natural temperament, on the other hand, leading me to self-distrust and self-depreciation, my religious life will deepen these things into despair, by making my self-condemnation confess itself a feeble reflection of God's profounder yindictiveness." ^ [Introduction · p. 58] " In the spring of 1844 I was living with my family in the neighborhood of Windsor, England, much absorbed in the study of the Scriptures. Two or three years before this period I had made an important discovery, as I fancied; namely, that the book of Genesis was not intended to throw a direct light upon our natural or race history, but was an altogether mystical or symbolic record of the laws of God's spiritual creation and providence. I wrote a course of lectures in exposition of this idea, and delivered them to good audiences in New York. The preparation of these lectures, while it did much to confirm me in the impression' that I had made an interesting discovery and one which would extensively modify theology, convinced me, however, that a much more close and studious application of my idea than I had yet given to the illustration of the details of the sacred letter was imperatively needed. During my residence abroad, accordingly, I never tiired in my devotion to this aim; and my success seemed so flattering at length, that I hoped to be finally qualified to contribute a not insignificant mite to the sum of man's highest knowledge. I remember I felt especially hopeful in the prosecution of my task all the time I was at Windsor; my health was good, my spirits cheerful, and the pleasant scenery of the great Park and its neighborhood [Introduction · p. 59] " One day, however, towards the close of May, having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at.the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly — in a lightning-flash as it were — ' fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.' To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck; that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy. The only self-control I was capa-' ble of exerting was to keep my seat. I felt the greatest desire to run incontinently to the foot of the stairs and shout for help to my wife, — to run to the roadside even, and appeal to the public to protect me; but by an immense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses, and determined not to budge from my chair till I had recovered my lost self-possession. This purpose I held to for a good [Introduction · p. 60] " Now, to make a long story short, this ghastly condition of mind continued with me, with gradu,ally lengthening intervals' of relief, for two years, I and even longer. I consulted eminent physicians, I who told me that I had doubtless overworked my brain, — an evil for which no remedy existed in medicine, but only in time and patience, and growth into improved physical conditions. They all recommended by way of hygiene a resort to the water-cure treatment, a life in the^open air, cheerful company, and so forth, and thus quietly and skilfully dismissed me to my own spiritual medication. At first, when I began to feel a half-hour's respite from acute mental anguish, the bottomless mystery of my disease completely fascinated me. The more, however, I worried myself with speculations about the cause of it, the more the mystery deepened, and the deeper also grew my instinct of resentment at what seemed so needless an interference with my personal liberty. I went to a famous [Introduction · p. 61] water-cure, which did nothing towards curing my malady but enrich my memory with a few morbid specimens of English insularity and prejudice; but it did much to alleviate it by familiarizing my senses with the exquisite and endless charm of English landscape, and giving me my first full rational relish of what may be called England's pastoral beauty. To be sure, I had spent a few days in Devonshire when I was young; but my delight then was simple enthusiasm, was helpless aesthetic intoxication in fact. The ' cure ' was situated in a much less lovely but still beautiful country, on the borders of a famous park, to both of which, moreover, it gave us unlimited right of possession and enjoyment. At least this was the way it always struck my imagination. The thoroughly disinterested way the English have of looking at their own hills and vales, the indifferent, contemptuous, and as it were disowning mood they habitually put on towards the most- ravishing pastoral loveliness man's sun anywhere shines upon, gave me always the sense of being a discoverer of these things, and of a consequent right to enter upon their undisputed possession. At all events, the rich light and shade of English landscape, the gorgeous cloud-pictures that forever dimple and diversify her fragrant and palpitating bosom, have awakened a tenderer chord in me than I have ever. [Introduction · p. 62] felt at home almost; and time and again while living at this dismal water-cure, and listening to its endless ' strife of tongues ' about diet, and regimen, and disease, and politics, and parties, and persons, I have said to myself, The curse of mankind, that which keeps our manhood so little and so depraved, is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd, abominable ~opinionativeness it engenders. How sweet it would be to find oneself no longer man, but one of those innocent and ignorant sheep pasturing upon that placid hillside, and drinking in eternal dew and freshness from Nature's lavish bosom! [Introduction · p. 62] " But let me hasten to the proper upshot of this incident. My stay at the water-cure, unpromising as it was in point of physical results, made me conscious erelong of a most important change operating in the sphere of my will and understanding. It struck me as very odd, soon after my breakdown, that I should feel no longing to resume the work which had been interrupted by it; and from that day to this (nearly thirty-five years) I have never once cast a retrospective glance, even of curiosity, at the immense piles of manuscript which had erewhile so absorbed me. I suppose if any one had designated me previous to that event as an earnest seeker after trtath, I should myself have seen nothing unbecoming in the appellation. But now, within two or three months of my catastro-; [Introduction · p. 63] phe, I felt sure I had never caught a glimpse of truth.; My present consciousness was exactTy that of an utter and plenar)f destitution of truth. Indeed, an ugly suspicion had more than once forced itself upon me that I had never really wished the truth, but only to ventilate my own ability in discovering it. I was getting sick to death in fact with a sfense of my downright intellectual poverty cmd dishonesty. My studious mental activity had served manifestly to base a mere ' castle in the air; ' and the castle had vanished in a brief fejtttey moment of t ime, leaving not a wrack behind. I never felt again the most passing impulse, even, to look where it stood, having done with it forever. Truth, indeed! How should a beggar like me be expected to discover it? How should any man of woman born pretend to such ability? Truth m ust reveal itself '\i it would be known; and even then Tiow iniperfectly known at best iTFor truth jsj G od^t the omniscient and omnipotent God; and who shall pretend to comprehend that great and adorable perfection? And yet who that aspires to the name of man, would not cheerfully barter all he knows of life for a bare glimpse of the hem of its garment? [Introduction · p. 64] of singular personal loveliness as well, — who desired to know what had brought me to the watercure. After I had done telling her in substance what I have told you, she replied: ' It is, then, very much as I had ventured from two or three previous things you have said, to suspect: you are undergoing what Swedenborg calls a vastation; and though, naturally enough, you yourself are despondent or even despairing about the issue, I cannot help taking an altogether hopeful view of your prospects.' In expressing my thanks for her encouraging words, I remarked that I was not at all familiar with the Swedenborgian technics, and that I should be extremely happy if she would follow up her flattering judgment of my condition by turning into plain English the contents of the very handsome Latin word she had used. To this she again modestly replied, that she only read Swedenborg as an amateur, and was ill-qualified to expound his philosophy; but there could be no doubt about its fundamental postulate, which was, that a new birth for man, both in the individual and the universal realm, is the secret of the Divine creation and providence; that the other world, according to Swedenborg, furnishes the true sphere of man's spiritual or individual being, the real and immortal being he has in God; and he represents this world, consequently, as furnishing only a pre- [Introduction · p. 65] liminary theatre of his natural formation or existence in subordination thereto, — so making the question of human regeneration, both in grand and in Httle, the capital problem of philosophy; that, without pretending to dogmatize, she had been struck with the philosophic interest of my narrative in this point of view, and had. used the word vastaiion to characterize one of the stages of the regenerative process, as she had found it described by Swedenborg. And then, finally, my excellent friend went on to outline for me, in a very interesting manner, her conception of Swedenborg's entire doctrine on the subject. [Introduction · p. 65] " Her account of it, as I found on a subsequent study of Swedenborg, was neither quite as exact nor quite as comprehensive as the facts required; but at all events I was glad to discover that any human being had so much even as proposed to ^ shed th e ligh t of jjositive knowledge upon,, the ( soul's history, or bring into rational relief the alternate dark and bright or infernal and celes- >. tial phases of its finite constitution. For I had an Imm ediate hope, amounting to an almost_proiyj pheticjustiiict, oi finding in the attempt, however / rash, some diversion to my cares; and I determined instantly to run up to London and procure a couple of Swedenborg's volumes, of which, if I should not be allowed on sanitary grounds absolutely to read [Introduction · p. 66] them, I might at any rate turn over the leaves, and so catch a satisfying savor, or at least an appetizing flavor, of the possible relief they might in some better day afford to my poignant need. From the huge mass of tomes placed by the bookseller on the counter before me, I selected two of the least in bulk, — the treatise on the ' Divine Love and Wisdom,' and that on the ' Divine Providence.' I gave them, after I brought them home, many a random but eager glance; but at last my interest in them grew so frantic under this tantalizing process of reading, that I resolved, in spite of the doctors, that instead of standing any longer shivering on the brink, I woujd boldly plunge into the stream, and ascertain, once for all, to what undiscovered sea its waters might bear me. [Introduction · p. 66] " I read from the first with palpitating interest. My heart divined, even before my intelligence was prepared to do justice to the books, the unequalled amount of truth to be found in them. Imagine a fever patient, sufficiently restored of his malady to be able to think of something beside himself, suddenly transported where the free airs of heaven blow upon him, and the sound of running waters refreshes his jaded senses; and you have a feeble image of my delight in reading. Or, better still, imagine a subject of some petty despotism condemned to die, and with (what is more and worse) [Introduction · p. 67] a sentimjent of death pervading all his consciousness, lifted by a sudden miracle into felt harmony with universal man, and filled to the brim with the sentiment '.of indestructible life instead; and you will have a true picture of my emancipated condition. For while these remarkable books familiarized me with the angelic conception of the Divine being and providence, they gave me at the same time the amplest rationale I could have desired of my own particular suffering, as inherent in the profound unconscious death I bore about in my proprium or selfhood," ^ [Introduction · p. 67] " I had always, from childhood, conceived of the Creator as bearing an outside relation to the creature, and had attributed to the latter, consequently, the power of provoking his unmeasured hostility. Although these crude traditional views had been much modified by subsequent reflection, I had nevertheless on the whole been in the habit of ascribing to the Creator, so far as my own life and actions were concerned, an outside discernment of the most jealous scrutiny, and had accordingly put the greatest possible alertness into his service and worship, until my will, as you have seen, — thoroughly fagged out as it were with the formal, heartless, endless task of conciliating a stonyhearted Deity, — actually collapsed. This "was a 1 Sodety the Redeemed Form of Man, pp. 43-54- \ [Introduction · p. 68] catastrophe far more tragic to my feelings, and far more revolutionary in its intellectual results, than the actual violation of any mere precept of the moral law could be. It was the practical abrogation of the law itself, through the unexpected moral inertness of the subject. It was to my feeling not only an absolute decease of my moral or voluntary power, but a shuddering recoil from my conscious activity in that line. It was an actual acute loathing of the moral pretension itself as so much downright charlatanry. No idiot was ever more incompetent, practically, to the conduct of life than I, at that trying period, felt myself to be. It cost me, in fact, as much effort to go out for a walk, or to sleep in a strange bed, as it would an ordinary man to plan a campaign or write an epic poem. I have told you how, in looking out of my window at the time at a flock of silly sheep which happened to be grazing in the green park opposite, I used to envy them their blissful, stupid ignorance of any law higher than their nature, their deep unconjdousness of self, their innocence of all private personality and purpose, their intense moral incapacity, in short, and indifference. I would freely — nay, gladly — have bartered the world at the moment for one breath of the spiritual innocence which the benign creatures outwardly pictured or stood for to my imagination; and all [Introduction · p. 69] INTROD UCTION. the virtue, or moral righteousness, consequently, that ever illustrated our specific human personality seemed simply foul and leprous in comparison with the deep Divine possibilities and promise of our common nature, as these stood symbolized to my spiritual sight, in all the gentler human types of the merely animate world. There seemed, for instance, — lustrously represented to my inward sense, — a far niore heavenly sweetness in the soul of a patient, overdriven cab-horse, or misused cadger's donkey, than in all the voluminous calendar of Romish and Protestant hagiology, which, sooth to say, seemed to me, in contrast with it, nothing short of infernal. [Introduction · p. 69] " You may easily imagine, then, with what relish my heart opened to the doctrine I found in these most remarkable books, of the sheer and abject phenomenality of selfhood in man; and with what instant alacrity my intellect shook its canvas free to catch every breeze of that virgin, unexplored sea of Being, to which this doctrine, for the first time; furnished me the clew. Up to this very period I had lived in the cheerful faith, nor ever felt the slightest shadow of misgiving about it, — any more, I venture to say, than you at this moment feel a shadow of similar misgiving in your own mind, — that my being or substance lay absolutely in myself, was in fact identical with the JO INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 70] various limitations implied in that most fallacious but still unsuspected quantity. To be sure, I had no doubt that this being or self of mine (whether actually burdened, or not burdened, with its limitations I did not stop to inquire, but unquestionably with a capacity of any amount of burdensome limitation) came originally as a gift from the hand of God; but I had just as little doubt that the, moment the gift had left God's hand, or fell into my conscious possession, it became as essentially independent of him in all spiritual or subjective re- y gards as the soul of a child is of its earthly father, ' however much in material or objective regards it might be expedient for me still to submit to his, external police. My moral conscience, too, lent L its influence to the same profound illusion; for ' all the precepts of the moral law being objectively so good and real, and intended in the view of an unenlightened conscience to make men righteous in the sight of God, I could never have supposed, even had I been tempted on independent grounds to doubt my own spiritual or subjective reality, that so palpably divine a law conterhplated, or even tolerated, a wholly infirm and fallacious subject; much less that it was, in fact, altogether devised for the reproof, condemnation, and humiliation of such a subject. I had no misgiving, therefore, as to the manifest purpose of the [Introduction · p. 71] law. The divine-intent of it at least was as clear to me as it ever had been to the Jew, — namely, to serve as a ministry of plain moral life or actual righteousness among men, so constructing an everlasting heaven out of men's warring and divided personalities: and not at all, as the apostles taught, a ministry of death, to convince those who stood approved by it of SIN, thereby shutting up all men, good and evil alike, but especially the good,, to unlimited dependence upon the sheer and mere mercy of God. [Introduction · p. 71] " It was impossible for me, after what I have told you, to hold this audacious faith in selfhood any longer. When I sat down to dinner on that memorable chilly afternoon in Windsor, I held it serene and unweakened by the faintest breath of doubt; before I rose from table, it had inwardly shrivelled to a cinder. One moment I devoutly thanked God for the inappreciable boon of selfhood; the next, that inappreciable boon seemed to me the one thing damnable on earth, seemed a literal nest of hell within my own entrails." ^ Thd reader who shall have persevered as far as this, is now well emerged from the apriori logical atmosphere in which our quotations concerning 1 Society the Redeemed Form of Man, pp. 70-74. These pages are headed, " My Moral Death and Burial." i^ the creative process began. He sees that those cold accounts were but a garb, a vehicle of intro- ' duction to the intellect, of experiences of the heart of the most living kind. He sees, if he be of a [Introduction · p. 72] I generalizing turn of mind, that Mr. James was one member of that band of saints and mystics, whose rare privilege it has been, by the mere example ! and recital of their own bosom-experience, to prevent religion from becoming a fossil conventionalism, and to keep it forever alive. The experience in question has always been an acute despair, passing over into an equally acute optimism, through a passion of renunciation of the self and surrender to '/4he higher power. Doubtless it would be easy enough to muster pages of quotations from spiritual literature, — pagah, catholic, and protestant, — which would tally in all essential respects with what my father felt and said about the relation of the Self and the Divine. But every man carries his signature stamped upon him, and my father's was, I think, very peculiar indeed. [Introduction · p. 73] many readers, even religious ones, to get any edification from their pages. One feels rebuked and distanced, and kept out of the pale. It is the /, and. not the we, that speaksT Now, my father, with w« all the mystical depth of experience, and all the mystical unction, had not a trace of the mystical egotism or voluptuousness, but was as drastic and unsentimental as old Epictetus or even Diogenes himself. A calm and clarified and triumphantly peaceful self was still a self,* as much as a bitter and grievous one. And not if he could help it, would he dally and toy with the enemy in any shape. Universal Man is God's one creature: ^. only in Man and through Man would he be saved^ " When Swedenborg called the selfhood the realm of our uncreation, he by that unexpected word sent a breath of health to the deepest heart of hell." Uncreated then shall my self become! Accordingly it was a strange thing to see him, when in a depressed mood, murmur the psalms of David to himself by the hour, apparently without a feeling of personal application. He fairly revelled in the " ^ emotion of humanity, and lost himself in the sentiment of unity with his kind, like a river in the sea. The following passage may be quoted here: [Introduction · p. 74] civilization tells me, with an undeviating persistency, that there is nothing so divinely true, because so divinely sweet and sufficing, as selfhood; and the consequence is that I actually succeed in giving the real divinity in my great race or nature only a scant and drowsy recognition. tiideedLif I should freely yiel^ to instinct within mei_or abandon myself to the current inspiration of cul-_ \ ture about me, I doubt not I should end by altogether sacrificing that patient divinity to the unscrupulous idol and counterfeit enshrined in myself. For then my senses, authenticated and unchecked, would be free to tell me that my life or being is strictly identical with my finite personality, and that the only death and hell I shall ever have to dread is one which menaces that personality with desolation; namely, the death and hell wrapped up in my intimate Divine-Natural innocence, truth, and chastity. I confess, though, that when once one's eyes are opened to a glimmer of eternal truth on the subject, one has no hesitation in hoping that ere he is caught hearkening to this gospel of an atheistic and drunken self-conceit he may actually perish out of life, and the great lord of life know him no more forever. J for. one should distinctly prefer forfeiting my self-consciousness altogether, to being found capable, in ever so feeble a degree, of identifying my being with it. [Introduction · p. 75] INTRObUCTION. 75 My being lies utterly outside of myself, lies in utterly forgetting myself, lies in utterly unlearning and disusing all its elaborately petty schemes and dodges now grown so transparent that a child is not deceived by them; lies, in fact, in honestly identifying myself with others. I know it will never be possible for me to do this perfectly, — that is, attain to self-extinction, — because being created, I can never hope actually to become Divine; but at all events I shall become through eternal years more and more intimately one in nature, and I hope in spirit, with a being who is thoroughly destitute of this finiting principle, — that is, a being who is without selfhood save in His creatures. And certainly the next best thing to being God is to know Him, for this knowledge makes one content with' any burden of personal limitation." ^ [Introduction · p. 75] Nothing so endlessly besotted in Mr. James's eyes, as the pretension to possess personally any substantive merit or advantage whatever, any worth other than your unconscious uses to your kind! Nothing pleased him like exploding the bubbles. of conventional dignity, unless it was fraternizing on the simplest and commonest plane with all lowly persons whom he met. To exalt humble and j abase proud things was ever the darling sport of! 1 Society the Redeemed Form of Man, p. 361. •j6 • INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 76] his conversation, — a conversation the somewhat reckless invective humor of which, when he was in the abasing mood, often startled the good people 7" of Boston, who did not know him well enough to see the endlessly genial and humane intuition from which the whole mood flowed. A friend, in a private letter received during this writing, says of Tiim: " He was of such an immense temperament, that when you took him to task for violating the feelings of others in his talk, he would score you black and blue for your distinctions; and all the while he made you feel that the origin of the matter was his divine rage with himself^dX still being so dominated by his natural selfhood which would not be shaken off. I have felt in him at times, away down at bottom of the man, so sheer a humility and self-abasement as to give'me an idea of infinity." [Introduction · p. 76] The theology that went with all this was the passionate conviction that the real creature of God — human nature at large, minus the preposterous claims of the several selves — must be wholly good. For is it not the work of the good God, or rather the very substance of the good God, there being nought beside? " What sort of a creator would he be who could allow, for a single moment, such an imputation to INTRODUCTION. yj [Introduction · p. 77] rest upon his creative power as that his creature was really bad? Evidently a most beggarly sort. For if God's creature were really bad, — that is, if his badness be,^ as the philosophers say, not only subjective, spiritual, formal, but objective, natural, substantial, — why, then, no man can even begin to form an estimate of how much worse than the creature the creator, himself must be, in order simply to account for the devilish atrocity of such a creation! The creature, you know, by the hypothesis' of his creation, is absolute nought in himself; and if therefore he be really evil, where does this evil reality of his come from, if not from him in whom alone he lives and moves and has his being? " i In another autobiographic passage he defends the rights of our nature as being the very incarnation of God: — [Introduction · p. 77] " As well as I can remember, in fact, the spring of all my intellectual activity in the past was to know for certain whether our felt finiteness was a necessity, of our spiritual creation, or simply" an incident of our natural constitution; whether, J for example, it was to be interpjiete^-as-Jiaidng-^ been arbitrarily imposed upon, us hy t h e Di vine will, or as inherent merely in the sentiment we SO inordinately cherish of personal independencei For in the former case, my hope in God necessaril; dies out by the practical decease of his infinitude,_ while in the latter case it is not only left unimfpaired, but is revived and invigorated..,. [Introduction · p. 78] " Here, in faci;, was the veritable secret source of all my intellectual unrest. During all rny early intellectual existence I was haunted by so keen a sense of God's natural incongruity with me — of his natural and therefore invincible alienation, otherness, externality, distance, remoteness to me — as to breed in my bosom oftentimes a wholly unspeakable heartsickness or homesickness. Thp sentiment, to be sure, masked its ineffable malignity from my perception under the guise of an alleged supemataral limitation on God's part; but it none the less filled my soul with the tremor and pallor of death. I have no doubt, indeed, that if it had not been for my excessive ' animal spirits ' as we ^ay, or the extreme good-will I felt towards sensu-j bus pleasure of every sort, which alternated with my! morbid conscientiousness and foiled its corrosive; force, I should have turned out a flagrant case of afrested intellectual development. I could have borne very well, mind you, a conviction of God's personal antipathy to me, carried to any pitch you please, for my person does not go with my nature ^as man; and a personal condemnation, thereforC [Introduction · p. 79] INTRODUCTION. which should not cut me off from a natural resurrection, would not deprive me of hope toward God. But my conviction of God's personal alienation had been hopelessly saddled, through the incompetency of my theologic sponsors, with the senseless tradition df his inveterate estrangement also from human nature. Thus, unhappily, though my person did not go with human nature, they made human nature to go with my person, or managed so perfectly to confound the two things to' my unpractised sense, that, whenever I felt a superficial or intrinsically evanescent pang of mere personal remorse, it was sure to pass, by a quick diabolical chemistry, into a sense of the deadliest natural hostility between me and the source of my life. [Introduction · p. 79] " It is in fact this, venomous tradition of a natural as well as a personal disproportion between man and his maker, — speciously cloaked as it iS under the ascription of a supernatural being and existence to God, — that alone gives its intolerable odium and poignancy to men's otherwise healthful and restorative conscience of sin. That man's personality should utterly alienate him from God, — that is to say, make him infinitely other and opposite to God, — this I grant you with all my heart since if God were the least like me personally, all my hope in him would perish.... But that r^ [Introduction · p. 80] God should be also an infinitely alien substance to me, — an infinitely other or foreign nature, — this wounds my spontaneous faith in him to its core.i or leaves it a mere mercenary and servile homagcW I perfectly understand how he should disown all private or personal relation to me, because I am,... to all the extent of my distinctively personal interests and ambitions, the impassioned foe and] rival of universal man. This is one thing. But it ' is quite a different and most odious thing that he should feel an envenomed animosity also to my innocent nature, or what binds me in indissoluble unity with every man of woman born." ^ [Introduction · p. 80] Some sort of antinomianism, or indifference to (Outward human contrasts, is the logical outcome of every creed which makes the Deity's love so impartial, and lays such stress upon the prominence of the whole to his regard. I cannot say that my father succeeded in practice in keeping faithful to this consequence; but in thfeory he did; and great was his delight in those pages of Swedenborg in which he found the doctrine of indifference clearly set down. First, concerning the angels: — "The angel would be incontinently overcome of hell, if he were not seduously preserved by the ' Society the Redeemed Form ot Man, pp. 314-3T8. [Introduction · p. 81] Divine power, vanquishing his incessant natural gravitation towards it. Swedenborg affirms that he found no angel in any heaven, however elevated, who was not in himself, or.intrinsically, of a very shabby pattern, and who did not, therefore, cordially refer all his goodness and wisdom to the Lord; and he sets it down as the fundamental principle of their intelligence, that they ascribe all their good to the Lord, and all their evil to the devil. No matter what heights of manly virtue the angel may have reached; no matter what depths of Divine peace and contentment he may have sounded, -^ Swedenborg invariably reports that in himself, or intrinsically, he' is replete with every selfish and worldly lust, being in fact utterly undistinguishable ^ from the lowest devil. Was ever testimony so loyal as this? Was ever honest heart or seeing eye so unseduced before by the most specious shows of things? I confess the wonder to me is endless. What other man in that rotten and degraded generation' was capable of such devotion to humanity? ' Of which one of his contemporaries could you allege, that, being admitted to the most lustrous company in the universe, he would never for an instant lose his balance, or duck his servile head in homage, but steadfastly maintain his invincible faith in the grfeat truth of human equality? George Washington is doubtless an unblemished [Introduction · p. 82] name to all the extent of his commerce with the world; but how puny that commerce was, compared with this grand interior commerce of the soul; and how juvenile and rustic his virtue seems beside the profound, serene, unconscious humanity of this despised old soldier of truth! To gaze undazzled upon the solar splendors of heaven; to gaze undismayed upon the sombre abysses of hell; to preserve one's self-respect, or one's fidelitj>^ to the Divine name, unbribed by the subtlest attractions of the one sphere, and unchilled by the nakedest horrors of the other, — implies a heroism of soul which in no wise belongs to the old Church, even in its highest sanctities, and which leaves the old State, even as to its most renowned illustrations, absolutely out of sight." ^ Here are a couple of soberer passages: — [Introduction · p. 82] " The true or spiritual creation ignores the sentiment of morality in its subjects, — that is, disallows the distinction of good and evil among men, as at all pertinent to the Divine mind. No angel that Swedenborg encountered was ever so foolish as to attribute the good which was visible in him to himself; and no devil was ever wise enough not to do so. The fundamental difference, in short, between Swedenborg's angels and devils was the difference * Christianity the Logic of Creation, p. 17. between huminty and loftiness, — the latter always cherishing an unsubdued selfhood, or pride of character; the former being always more or less culti- -■ vated out of it."^ [Introduction · p. 83] " Swedenborg shows, accordingly, throughout all his books, from their beginning to their close, that God has no joy in the angel, nor any grief in the devil, save as they tend to enforce or enfeeble the universality and the particularity of his presence and providence throughout the earth. The Lord's love, as Swedenborg invariably reports it, is a universal love, being the salvation of the whole 1^ human race; and no form of his church, therefore,' can satisfy his regard, which is not practically identical with the interests of human society, — that is, which does not in itself structurally reproduce and avouch the intimate and indissoluble fellowship, ^ equality, brotherhood of universal man."^ And here is an abstract statement about good and evil: — [Introduction · p. 84] 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 associated consciousness, and disavow therefore any sj properly 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 a:n absolute ground of 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 no way vitalized by the absolute Divine perfection. They are purely subjective appearances, vitalized exclusively by the created imper-, fection, 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 appearaijces even. For angel and devil, saint and sinner, will then find themselves perfectly fused or made over in a new or comprehensive race-manhood, which will laugh to [Introduction · p. 85] " There are no fundamental differences in men. All men have one and the same Creator, one and the same essential being; and what formally differences one man from another, what distinguishes hell from heaven, is that they are differently related to the Divine-Katural humanity; or to the life of i God in nature, which is a life of perfect freedom or spontaneity. In that^ life self-love freely subordinates itself to neighborly love, or promotes its own ends by-promoting the welfare of all mankind. But so long as this life is wholly unsuspected by men; so long as no man dreams of any other social destiny for the race than that which it has already realized, and which leaves one man out of all fellowship or equality with another, — self-love is completely unprovided for, except in subtle and hypocritical forms, and is consequently driven to these disorderly assertions of itself by way of actually keeping itself alive.... The liar, the thief, the adulterer, the murderer, no doubt utterly perverts the divine life which is latent in every human form; [Introduction · p. 86] he degrades and defiles self-love, in lifting it out of that free subordination which it will evince to j brotherly love in the 'Divm^-natural man: but he: nevertheless does all this in the way of a mute, / unconscious protest against an overwhelming sbciat tyranny, which would otherwise crush out the dis-fl tinctive life of man under the machinery of government and caste. Accordingly, I am profoundly convinced that if it had not been for these men; if we had not had some persons of that audacious make which would qualify them to throw off their existing social subjection, and so ventilate, even by infernal airs, the underlying life and freedom oi humanity, — that life and freedom would have been utterly stifled, and we should now be a race of abject slaves, without hope towards God, with-' out love to our fellow-man, contentedly, kissing the feet of some infallible Pope of Rome,, contentedly doing the bidding of some unquestionable Emperor of all the Russias. These, men have been, unknown to themselves, the forlorn hope of humanity, plunging headlong into the unfathomable night only that we by the bridge of their desecrate ed forms might eventually pass over its hideous abysses into the realms of endless day. Let us, then, at least manfully acknowledge our indebtedness to them; let us view them as the unconscious martyrs of humanity, dying for a cause so divinely^ [Introduction · p. 87] high as to accept no conscious or voluntary adhesion, and yet so divinely sure and sweet and human as ultimately to vindicate even their dishonored m^emory, ajid rehabilitate thern. in the love and tenderness of eternal ages* In short, let us agree with Swedenborg, that odious and fearful as these men. have seemed in merely celestial light, they have yet borne the unrecognized livery of the Divine-UATURAL humanity, and will not fail in the end to swell the triumphs of his majestic patience. And this, simply because by an undying divine instinct, under every depth of degradation Celestially viewed, they have always been true to them\ selves, — feeling themselves to be men and not i devils, — and over their scarred and riven legions have ever indestructibly waved the banner of a conscious freedom and rationality."^ [Introduction · p. 87] Such being Mr. James's intellectual destiny, there was no fending off the catastrophe that had to occur in his relations with the church m which he was born. For the church, the particular person is. the unit, wherewith, in the l^st resort, God deals. Whatever theological formulas the sects may use, whatever reasons for_the danining, whatever means for Jh« saving, they may assign, still it is always one of us who becomes God's vessel of 1 Christianity the Logic of Creation, pp. 104-7. honor, and another who is lost from out his sight. He thus stands over against us, an imputer, an outward and eventually a hostile power, consecrating, by the absolute distinctions he makes, that whole seething life of private jealousy and exclusion which is the bane of this world's estate. Here is an autobiographic passage which may usher in some of the drastic remarks on the bad stewardship of the church which our author scatr ters about with so profuse a hand: ^ — [Introduction · p. 88] " I never questioned the absoluteness of all the data, good and evil, of my moral experience. I never doubted the infinite and eternal consequences which seemed to me to be wrapped up in my consciousness of personality, or the sentiment I habitually cherished of my individual relations and responsibility to God. I had never, to my own suspicion, been arrayed in any overt hostility to the Diyine name. On the contrary, I reckoned myself an unaffected friend of God, inasmuch as I was a most eager and conscientious aspirant 1 His earlier writings were largely taken up with negative criti- cisms on Orthodoxy in its practice as well as its teaching. The essay entitled " The Old and the New Theology " {in the volume of " Lectures and Miscellanies"), and the work called the " Church of Christ not an Ecclesiasticism," are masterpieces in this vein. The last named work seems to have been written in a peculiarly happy hour, and is distinguished by a. charming freshness and geniality of tone. [Introduction · p. 89] after moral perfection. And yet the total unconscious current of my religious life was so egotistic, the habitual color of my piety was so bronzed by an inmost selfishness and indifference to. all mankind, save in so far as my action towards them bore upon my own salvation, that I never reflected myself to myself, never was able to look back upon any chance furrow my personality had left upon the sea of time, without a shuddering conviction of the abysses of spiritual profligacy over which I perpetually hovered, and towards which I incessantly gravitated.... From the day of my birth I had not only never known what it was to have an honest want, a want of my nature, ungratified, but I had also been able to squander, upon the will of my 1 personal caprice, an amount of sustenance equal to the maintienance of a virtuous household. And yet thousands of persons directly about me, in all respects my equals, in many respects my SuperiorSj had never in all their lives enjoyed- an honest meal, an honest sleep, an honest suit of clothes, save at the expense of their own personal toil or of that of some parent or child, and had, never once. been able to give the reins to their persohal caprice without an.ignominious exposure to severe social penalties. It. is, to be sure, perfectly just that I should be conveniently fed and lodged and clad, and that I should be educated out of my [Introduction · p. 90] go INTRODUCTION. native ignorance; but it is a monstrous affront to the divine justice or righteousness that I should be guaranteed, by what calls itself society, a lifelong career of luxury and self-indulgence, while so many other men and women, my superiors, go all their days miserably fed, miserably lodged, miserably clothed, and die at last in the same ignorance and imbecility, though not, alas! in the same innocence, that cradled their-infancy. [Introduction · p. 90] " Now, I had long felt this deep spiritual damnation in myself growing out of an outraged and insulted divine justice, had long been pent up in spirit to these earthquake mutterings and menaces of a violated conscience, without seeing any clear door of escape open to me. That is to say, I perceived with endless perspicacity, that, if it were not for the hand of God's providence visiting with constant humiliation and blight every secret aspiration of my pride and vanity, I should be more than any other man reconciled to the existing most atrocious state of things. I knew no outward want; I had the amplest social recognition; I enjoyed the converse and friendship of distinguished men; I floated in fact on a sea of unrighteous plenty; and I was all the while so indifferent, if not inimical in heart, to the divine justice, that save for the spiritual terrors it ever and anon supplied to my lethargic sympathies, to my swinish ambition, I [Introduction · p. 91] should have dragged out all my days in that complacent sty, nor have ever so much as dreamed that the outward want of my fellows — their want with respect to nature and society— i-was in truth but the visible sign and fruit of my own truer want, my own more inward destitution with respect to God. Thus my religious conscience was one of poignant misgiving toward God, if not of complete practical separation; and it filled my intellect with all manner of perplexed speculation and gloomy foreboding. Do what I might, I never could attain to the least religious self-complacency, or push my devout instincts to the point of actual fanaticism. Do what I would, I could never succeed in persuading piyself that God Almighty cared a jot for me in my personal capacity, — that is, as I stood morally individualized from, or consciously antagonized with, my kind; and yet this was the identical spiritual obligation imposed upon me by the Church. Time and again I consulted my spiritual advisers to know how it might do for me to abandon myself to the simple joy of.the truth as it was in Christ, without taking any thought for the Church, or the interests of mjr religious character. And they always told me that it would not do at all; that my Church sym; pathies, or the demands of my religious character, were everything comparatively, and my mere [Introduction · p. 92] INTRODUCTION. belief in Christ comparatively nothing, since devils Ijelieved just as much as I did. The retort was as apt as it was obvious, that the devils believed and trembled, while I beUeved and rejoiced; and that this joy on my part could not be helped, but only hindered, whenever it was allowed to be complicated with any question about myself. But, rio; the evidently foregone Conclusion to be forced upon me in eVery case was, that a man's religious standing, or the love he bears the Church, takes the place under the gospel -of his moral standing, or the love he bore the State under the law; hencd that no amount of delight in the truth, for the truth's sake alone, could avail me spiritually, \XQr less it were associated with a scrupulous regard for a sanctified- public opinion. [Introduction · p. 92] " Imagine, then, ray glad surprise, nxy cordial relief, when in this state of robust religious nakedMess, with no wretchedest fig-leaf of ecclesiastic^ finery to cover me from the divjne inclemency, I caught my first glimpse of the spiritual contents ' of revelation, or discerned the profoundly philosophic scope of the Christian truth. This truth at once emboldened me to obey my own regenerate intellectual instincts without further parley, in throwing the Church overboard, ' or demitting all care of my religious character to the devils, of whom alone such care is: an inspiration. The INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 93] Christian truth, indeed,... teaches me to look upon the Church's heartiest mahson as God's heartiest benison, inasmuch as whatsoever is most highly esteemed among men — namely, that pri-« vate or personal righteousness in man, of which the Church is the special protagonist and voucher ' — is abomination to God.... In other words, spiritual Christianity means the complete secula-jrization of the Divine name, or its identification henceforth only with man's common or natural want, — that want in which all men are absolutely one, — and its consequent utter estrangement from the sphere of his private or personal fulness, in which every man is consciously divided from his neighbor; so that I may never aspire to the Divine favor, and scarcely to the Divine tolerance, save in my social or redeemed natural aspect, — that is, as I stand morally identified with the vast community of men of whatever race or religion, cultivating no consciousness of antagonist interests to any other nlan, but -on the contrary frankly disowning every personal hope towards God which does not flow exclusively from his redemption of human nature, or is not based, purely and simply, upon his indiscriminate love to the race."^ [Introduction · p. 93] 1 Secret of Swedenborg ; pp. 170-175 (abridged). I append a couple of Q,ther passages which carry o,ut the same idea: — "The church spirit '\s par excellence the evil-spirit in humanity, source of all its profounder and irremediable woes. Do not, I " Deism," as I have already said, was Mr. James's name for the doctrine that represents God as external to a plurality of absolute and substantiaf subject; beings. [Introduction · p. 94] beg pf yooj, 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 sentiment 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, indeed, that, she fixes or hardens them in that tendency to proprium or selfhood to which they are naturally inclined, and thus delivers them over, bound hand andioot, to spiritual pride!... However self&h or worldly k man may be, these are good honest natural evils, and you have Only to apply a motive sufficiently stimulating in either case, and you will induce the subject to forbear them. But spiritual pride 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 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." — Society the Redeemed Forfn of Man, pp. 201, 202. [Introduction · p. 94] " Subjective or personal consciousness, then, — the feeling 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,—,4s the brimming spiritual death wrapped up in every man by virtue of his finite generation.... There is no evil at all comparable with this either for comprehensiveness^ or intensity, if it be allowed to go uncorrected; for it is altogether fatal to man's spiritual life, which consists in his loving his neighbor as himself. Now the only possible way for a man to do this is to feel that he is not self-centred, that his life is not his own INTRODUCTION. "If the Church could have sincerely felt to be true what she always formally professed, — namely, that God was the sole real and active life of our nature, — she might perhaps have put herself at the head of human affairs, and victoriously led man's forlorn hope against the sullen and sodden [Introduction · p. 95] 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 drdw, upon one and the same merciful and impartial source. In other words, a man loves y his neighbor as himself only by virtue of his first loving God above U^ 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. [Introduction · p. 95] These formal vices express the whole substantial evil known to the human heart; and when man, therefore, in the j 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 symbols of a deeper and altogether latent spiritual evil fatally separating man from God, — the evil of a supreme "self-love.- Grave' as these evils unquestionably are in" t^nSelves,' 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 permanent spiritual or individual estrangement between them and God." — Society the Redeemed Form of Man, pp. 268-270. [Introduction · p. 96] " The sincere, uncommitted mass of men are spiritually and intellectually incompetent to recognize any ' slough of despond ' half so fatal or frightful to them as that of deism, which is the. conception of God as a power essentially outside ^j/ of man, and therefore both inimical and hateful to him. Deism is out and out the only doctrine that has power logically to fill the human heart with despair towards God, in making man's person a reality. But this vile deistic doctrine is the very most cherished doctrine of the Church itself, without which indeed to inspire it, it would be ready to confess itself a mere lunatic organization, without further business upon the earth. ' And there is no chance, consequently, of the Church's again leading the human mind, in ministering to men's higher interests, unless she at once renounces the very doctrine by which she lives, and returns ex animo to the early faith which was once literally her only possession, — namely, that God, the only true God, the only God worthy to inspire the devotion of the human heart, is not any God of the nations, or foreign supernatural deity at all, but is all simply the Lord; that is, God-man figuratively made known to us in the Christ, — thus a most domestic deity, partaker of our own nature [Introduction · p. 97] " But it is idle, and worse than idle, to expect any revival of the Church. The Bible would have to be written over again, before that stale mother of harlots could ever presume again to put on the dew of her infancy, and aspire to head human hope in its patient, ever enduring battle against deistic oppression and tyranny. The Church is absolutely identified with the deistic name and fame throughout history, so that no honest human cause, nor any sincere zeal for humanity, has ever been ecclesiastically born or ecclesiastically propagated. The visible Church is altogether dead in fact, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Unknown to, and even unfelt by, itself consequently, it has providentially been replaced by a new and subtler, because living or invisible. Church, which will neither itself be, nor of itself breed, any hindrance to human hope and aspiration." ^ The treacherous part played by " professional religion " is thus described: — [Introduction · p. 98] " The only danger to the spirit of religion comes from the effort of the soul to assume and cherish a devout j^^-consciousness; or so to abound in a religious sense, as to incur the imputation of religiosity or superstition. This is the inalienable vice of professional religion, the only sincere fruit it is capable of bringing forth. The evil spirit which religion is primarily intended to exorcise in us is the spirit of selfhood, based upon a most inadequate apprehension of its strictly provisional uses to our spiritual nurture. Th e gradua l conquest or slaying of this unholy spirit o£ self- in ma ntis t he! sole function which religipn proposes to itself dur' ing his natural life; and without tcixing our cooperation too severely, it yet gives us enough to do before its benignant mission is fully wrought out. Such being the invariable office of the religious instinct, professional religion steps in to simulate its sway; and with an air all the while of even canting deference, proceeds to build again the things which were destroyed, by reorganizing man's selfhood on a more specious or consecrated basis, and so authenticating all its unslain lusts in a way of devotion to the conventicle, at least, if not to the open, undisguised world. [Introduction · p. 98] "Professional religion thus stamps itself the " devil's subtlest device for keeping the human soul in bondage. Religion says death — inward or spir- INTROD UCTION. itual death — to^the selfliood in man. Professional religion says: ' Nay, not death, above all not inward or spiritual — because this would be living — death, and obviously the selfhood must live in order to be vivified of God. By no means, therefore, let us say an inward ox living- death to selfhood, but an outward or quasi death, professionally or ritually enacted, and so operating a change of base for the selfhood. Selfhood doubtless has been hitherto based upon a most unrighteous ■ enmity on the part of the world to God, and has of itself shared the enmity. Let man then only acknowledge, professionally or ritually, this wicked enmity of the world to God, and he may keep his selfhood unimpaired and unchallenged, to expand and flourish in secula seculorum.' [Introduction · p. 99] "Professional religion, I repeat, is the devil's masterpiece for ensnaring silly, selfish men. __ The ugly beast has two heads: one called Ritualism, intended to devour a finer and fastidious style of men, — men; of sentiment and decorum, cherishing scrupulously moderate views of the difference between man and God; the other called Revivalism, with a great red mouth intended to gobble up a coarser sort of men, — men for the most part of a fierce carnality, of ungovernable appetite and passion, susceptible at best only of the most selfish hopes and the most selfish fears towards God. I must say, we [Introduction · p. 100] are not greatly devastated here in Boston — though occasionally vexed — by either head of the beast; on the contrary, it is amusing enough to observe how afraid the great beast himself is of being pecked to pieces on our streets by a little indigenous bantam-cock which calls itself Radicalism, and which struts and crows and scratches gravel in a manner so bumptious and peremptory, that I defy any ordinary barnyard chanticleer to imitate it."^ Even the possession of the Bible has been unavailing to us, since its official interpreters have' reversed its spiritual sense: — [Introduction · p. 100] " The letter of Rexslation-Jias doubtless proved inestimably advantageous to our civilization; but the most orderly citizenship is as remote from spontaneous or spiritual manhood as baked apples are from ripe ones. Compared with heathen nations, we are indeed as baked apples to green; but I do not see that apples plucked green from the tree and assiduously cooked, as we have been, are near so likely to ripen in the long run as those which are still left hanging upon the boughs, exposed to God's unstinted sun and air. We manage to maintain our egregious self-complacency unperturbed, by vehemently compassionating the heathen, and 1 Society the Redeemed Form of Man, p. 42. INTRODUCTIOl^. lOi [Introduction · p. 101] aending out missionaries to convert them to our foolish ecclesiastical habits, — precisely as if a baked apple should grudge its fellows their natural ripening, and beg them also to come and sputter their indignant life away under the burning summer of the oven, under the blackening autumn of the bake-pan. In fact, the heathen, I suspect, find it difficult to regard us yet even as baked fruit. Our ungenerous overbearing and polluting intercourse with them fits them rather to regard us only as very rotten fruit. Whether baked or rotten, however, we are in either case, so far as our ecclesiastical and political manners are concerned, past the chance of any inward or spiritual ripening. So far as our ecclesiastical conscience is concerned especially, there does not seem one drop of honest native unsophisticated juice left in us. If there were, could we be so content year in and year out to see our clergy, heterodox and orthodox, alternately cuff and clout God's sacred word, — which is inwardly all alive and leaping with spiritual or universal meaning, — as if it were some puny brat of man's begetting, some sickly old-wives' tale, some vapid and senile tradition, destitute even of a fabulous grace and tenderness? " ^ [Introduction · p. 102] " I knew a gentleman some years ago of exemplary religiosity and politeness, but of a seasoned inward duplicity, who failed in business, as was supposed, fraudulently. He was in the habit of meeting one of the largest of his creditors every Sunday on his way to church, where his own voice was always among the most melodious to confess any amount of abstract sins and iniquities; and he never failed to raise his hat from his head as he passed, and testify by every demonstrative flourish how much he would still do for the bare forms of friendship, when its life or substance was fled. The creditor was long impatient, but at last grew frantic under this remorseless courtesy, and stopping his debtor one day, told him that he would cheerfully abandon to him the ten thousand dollars he had robbed him of, provided he would forego the exhibition of so much nauseous politeness. ' Sir,' replied the imperturbable scamp, ' I would not forego the expression of my duty to you, when we meet, for twice ten thousand dollars! ' This is very much our case religiously; whereas, if we would only give over our eternal grimacing and posturing, only leave off our affable but odious ducking and bowing to our great creditor, long enough to see [Introduction · p. 103] the real truth of the case, and frankly acknowledge bankruptcy utter and fraudulent, nothing could be. so hopeful. The supreme powers are infinitely y above reckoning with us for our shortcomings, if/ we would only have the manliness to confess spir-C itual insolvency, and not seek any longer to hide ) it from their eyes and our own under these transparent monkey-shines of a mock devotion, under this perpetual promise to pay which never comes to maturity, but gets renewed from Sunday to Sunday in secula seculorum. God does not need our labored civility, and must long ere this have sickened of our vapid doffing of the hat to him as we pass. He seeks our solid advantage, not our ridiculous patronage. He desires our living, not our professional, humility; and he desires it only for our sakes, not his own. He would fashion us into the similitude of his perfect love, only "that we might enjoy the unspeakable delights of his sympathetic fellowship. If he once saw us to be thus spontaneously disposed towards him, thus genuinely qualified for the immortal participation of his power and blessedness, he would I am sure be more than content never to get a genuflexion from us again while the world lasted, nor hear another of our dreary litanies while sheep bleat and calves bellow. " ^ [Introduction · p. 104] ' Substance and Shadow, p. po. On the principle of corruptio optimorum pessima, it was natural that if the churches in general should in Mr. James's eyes have sold themselves to the devil, the arch-sinners in this respect should be the Swedenborgian congregations, who, if any, might be expected to know better. He accordingly never fails to lash them with his heartiest invective, — with what degree of justice or injustice, it is beyond my power to say. In the larger work in the present volume they have a chapter devoted to themselves. And here is a shorter extract, which will show the writer in his best denunciatory vein: — [Introduction · p. 104] " The Swedenborgian sect assumes to be the New Jerusalem, which is the figurative name used in the Apocalypse to denote God's perfected spiritual work in human nature; and under this tremendous designation it is content to employ itself in doing — what? why, in pouring new wine into old bottles, with such a preternatural solicitude for the tenacity of the bottles as necessitates an altogether comical indifference to the quality of the wine. New wine cannot safely go into old bottles but upon one condition, which is that the wine had previously become swipes, or was originally very small beer. In fact, the Swedenborgian sect, viewed as to its essential aims, though of course not as to INTRODUCTION. lOS [Introduction · p. 105] its professed ones, is only on the part of its movers a strike for higher wages, — that is, for higher ecclesiastical consideration than the older sects enjoy at the popular hands. And like all strikes, it will probably succumb at last to the immense stores of fat (or popular respect) traditionallj/^ accumulated under the ribs of the old organizations, and ' enabling them to hybernate through any stress of cold weather merely by sucking their thumbs, or without assimilating any new material. No doubt the insurgents impoverish the older sects to the extent of their own bulk; but they do not substantially affect them in popular regard, because the people, as a rule, care little for truth, but much for the good that animates it; very little for dogmas, but very much for that undeniably human substance which underlies all dogmas, and makes them savory, whether technically sound or un^ sound. And here the new sect is at a striking disadvantage with all its more ancient competitors; for these are getting ashamed of their old narrowness, and are gradually expanding into some show of sympathy with human want. The sect of the soi-disant New Jerusalem, on the other hand, ddiberately empties itself of all interest in the hallowed struggle which society is everywhere making for her very existence against established injustice and sanctified imposture, in order to con- [Introduction · p. 106] centrate its energy and prudence upon the washing and dressing, upon the larding and stuffing, upon the embalming and perfuming, of its own invincibly squalid" little corpus. This Pharisaic spirit, the spirit of separatism or sect, is the identical spirit of hell; and to attempt compassing any consideration for oneself at the Divine hands by making oneself to differ from other people, or claiming a higher divine sanctity than they enjoy, is to encounter the only sure damnation.... Let the reader, whatever else he may fairly or foolishly conclude against Swedenborg, acquit him point-blank of countenancing this abject ecclesiastical drivel." * [Introduction · p. 106] Thus did the sentiment of God's impartial indwelling in all humanity harden Mr. James's hfeart against all places where the "foolish babble of individual moralism " is preached, and make him unforgiving to whatever bore the name of Church. In setting forth his philosophy up to this point, I have made no reference to Christianity at all. Yet a Christian he was, and a most devout one, after his own fashion, — an abject Christian, as a clergyman in Boston called him at the time of his death. I confess, though, that I am myself unable to see any radical and essential necessity for the mission of Christ in his scheme of the ' Secret of Swedenborg, p. 209. INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 107] universe. A " fall " there is, and a redemption; but with his view of the solidarity of man, we are all redeemers of the total order so far as we open ourselves each in his little measure to the spirit of God. Our state reverberates through the whole spiritual world, and helps the construction of that "society" which is the race's redeemed form. All the a ccounts he gives of Christ do but represent him in this function, in which iii^Jesser degree all may share. I cannot help thinking that if my father had been born outside the pale of Christendom, he might perfectly well have brought together all the other elements of his system, much as it stands now, yet laid comparatively little stress on Christ. Still, the point is an obscure one, and I will let the author speak for himself. He speaks of Christ in a great many places, — always with the following tenor: — [Introduction · p. 107] " To suppose that the universal Father of mankind cared for the Jew one jot more than for the Gentile, and that he cared for one Jew also more than for another, actually intending to give both the former and the latter an endless earthly dominion, was manifestly to blacken the Divine character, and pervert it to the inflammation of every diabolic ambition. And yet this was that literal form of the Jewish hope to which Christ was born. The inno- cent babe opened his eyes upon mother and father, brother and sister, neighbor and friend, ruler and priest, stupidly agape at the marvels which heralded his birth; ^ and no doubt, as his intelligence 1 A word about Mr. James's attitude towards Biblical criticism [Introduction · p. 108] is here not out of place. With the education he had, and with the tenacity of his feelings, it was quite impossible he should ever have ceased to regard the Scriptures as inspired books. And yet the atmosphere of Aufklarung in which he lived forbade him to keep unaltered that simple mode of regarding these writings which had satisfied his youth. He finally drifted into a state of mind on the subject which was neither credulous nor rational i> alistic, and not easy-fw^-aaother persgn^tp defend. There is a/ chapter ad hoc in the work to which this is an introduction; and this quotation will meanwhile stop the gap: — [Introduction · p. 108] " I confess for my part that I should as soon think of spitting upon my mother's grave, or offering any other offence to her stainless memory, as of questioning any of the Gospel facts. And this, not because I regard them as literally or absolutely true, — for the i whole realm of fact is as far beneath that of truth a^ earth is be- J neath heaven, — but simply because they furnish the indispensable ^ WORD, or master-key, to our interpretation of God's majestic | revelation of himself in human nature. When, accordingly, I am asked whether I believe in the literal facts of Christ's birth from a virgin, his resurrection from death, his ascension into heaven, and so forth, I feel constrained to reply that I neither believe in them nor disbelieve, because the sphere of fact is the sphere of men's knowledge exclusively, and therefore invites neither belief nor disbelief; but that I have a most profound, even a heartfelt conviction of the truth which they, and they alone, reveal, — namely, the truth of God's essentially human perfection, and, as implied in that, the amazing truth of His natural or adventitious manhood; which conviction keeps me blessedly indifferent to, and utterly unvexed by, the cheap and frivolous scepticism with which so many of our learned modern pundits assail them. I have not the least reverence nor even respect for the facts in question. [Introduction · p. 109] dawned, he lent a naturally complacent ear to the promises of personal advancement and glory they showered upon him. He sucked in the subtlest spiritual poison with every swallow of his mother's milk; and his very religion bound him, so far as human probabilities went, to become an unmitigated devil. I find no trace of any man in history being subject to the temptations that beset this truest of men. I find no trace of any other man who felt himself called upon by the tenderest human love to loathe and disavow the proud and yearning bosom that bore him. I find no other' man in history whose profound reverence for infinite goodness and truth drove him to renounce the religion of his fathers, simply because that religion contemplated as its issue his own supreme aggrandizement; and whose profound love to man drove him to renounce every obligation of patriotism, simply because these - obligations were plainly coincident with the supremest and subtlest inspirations of his own gelf-lo ve. _ No dpubt many a man, has renounced his traditional creed because it associated him with the obloquy and contempt of his nation, or stood in the way of his personal [Introduction · p. 110] ambition; and so no doubt many a man has abjured his countfy, because it disclaimed his title and ability to rule. In short, a thousand men can be found every day who. do both of these things from the instinct of self-love. But the eternal peculiarity of the Christian fact is, that Christ did them utterly without the aid of that tremendous lever, actually while it was undermining his force, and subjecting him to ceaseless death. He dis^ credited his paternal gods simply because they were bent upon doing him unlimited honor; and ' shrank from kindred and countrymen, only because they were intent upon rendering him unparalleled gratitude and benediction. What a mere obscenity every great name in history confesses itself beside this spotless Judean youth, who in the thickest night of time, — unhelped by priest or ruler, by friend or neighbor, by father or mother, by brother or sister; helped, in fact, if we may so consider it, only by the dim expectant sympathy of that hungry rabble of harlots and outcasts who furnished his inglorious retinue, and still further drew upon him the ferocious scorn of all that was devout and honorable and powerful in his nation, — yet let in eternal daylight upon the soul, by steadfastly expanding in his private spirit to the dimensions of universal humanity, so bringing, for the first time in history, the finite human bosom into perfect [Introduction · p. 111] experimental accord with the infinite Divine love. For my part, I am free to declare that I find the conception of any Divinity superior to this radiant human form inexpressibly treasonable to my own manhood. In fact, I do not hesitate to say that I find the orthodox and popular conception of Deity to be in the comparison a mere odious stench in the nostrils, against which I here indite my exuberant and eternal protest. I shall always cherish the most hearty and cheerful atheism towards every deity but him who has illustrated my own nature with such resplendent power as to make me feel that Man henceforth is the only name of honor, and that any God out of the strictest human proportions, any God with essentially disproportionate aims and ends to man, is an unmixed superfluity and nuisance."^ [Introduction · p. 111] I Christianity the Logic of Creation, p. 217. The Angel, Mr. James says inanother place, could not do the work Christ did, — ^ the work of reconciling man's self-love with God's pure love, —, " because his" entire vitality proceeds not upon the reconciliation! of self-love with higher loves, but upon its forcible expulsion, and even, if that wereppssible, its extinction. ■ But in the bosom of Jesus, exposed through the letter of his national hope to the boundless influx of every selfish lust, and yet persistently subjugating such lust to the inspirations of universal love, the requisite '| basU of union was at last found; and infinite Wisdom compassed at length a direct and adequate access to the most finite of intelligences.... In his sublime and steadfast soul, I say, the marriage of the Divine and Human was at last perfectly consummated; so that thenceforth the infinite and eternal expansion of our nature [Introduction · p. 112] The reader ought now to be able to judge for himself whether the works of Henry James deserve further study on his part. For myself, nothing could be so agreeable as to believe that this unpretending introduction might lead a larger public to open the writings of which it treats. Although their author, as will have been noted, gives such ample credit to Swedenborg as the source of his opinions, I have all along spoken of him as an original thinker, whose philosophy was underived. Many disciples of Swedenborg, wielding high authority, say there is no warrant in the master's pages for Mr. James's views. It is certain, to say the very least, that Mr. James has given to the various elements in Swedenborg's teaching an extremely different accentuation and perspective relation to eaclj| other, from anything other readers have been ablef to find. In Swedenborg, as in other writers, much must count for slag, and the question " what is [Introduction · p. 112] became not merely possible, but most strictly inevitable. Accordingly, ever since that period, husband and father, lover and friend, patriot and citizen, priest and king, have been gradually assuming more human dimensions, have been gradually putting on glorified lineaments; or, what is the same thing, the universal heart of man has been learning to despise and disown all absolute sanctities, — not merely our threadbare human sanctities, sacerdotal and regal, conjugal and paternal, but also every the most renowned Divine sanctity itself, whose bosom is not the abode of the widest, tenderest, most patient and unswerving human love." — Christianity the Logic oj Creation, p. zoo. INTRODUCTION. [Introduction · p. 113] the real Swedenborg," will naturally be solved by different students in different ways. Such being the case, and I being personally entitled to no opinion, I have thought it best to ignore the name of Swedenborg altogether in the previous pages; not meaning by this to prejudge the question, or attribute to my father an originality he would have disclaimed, but wishing merely to keep the exposition as short and uncomplicated as I could. [Introduction · p. 113] A word of comment after so much exposition may not be out of place. Common-sense theism, the popular religion of our European race, has, through all its apparent variations, remained essentially faithful to' pluralism, one might almost | say to polytheism. Neither Judaism nor Chris- ' tianity could tend to alter this result, or make us generally see the world in any other light than as a collection of beings which, however they might have arisen, are now severally and substantively there, and the important thing about whom is their practical relations with each other. God, the Devil, Christ, the Saints, and we, are some of these.beings. Whatever monistic and pantheistic metaphysics may have crept into the history of Christianity has been confined to epochs, sects, and individuals. For the great mass of men, the practical fact o^ pluralism has been a sufficient _ I basis for the religious life, and the ultra-phe( nomenal unity has been nothing more than a lipformula. [Introduction · p. 114] And naive as in the eyes of metaphysics such a view may seem, finite and short of vision and lacking dignity from the intellectual point of view, no philosopher, however subtle, can afford to treat it with disdain; unless, perhaps, he be ready to say that the spirit of Europe is all wrong, and that of Asia right. God, treated as a principle among others, — primus inter pares, — has warmth and. blood and personality; is a concrete being whom '' I it does not take a scholar to love and make sacrifices and die for, as history shows. Being almost like a personage in a drama, the lightning of dramatic interest can play from him and about him, and rivet human regard. [Introduction · p. 114] The " One and Only Being," however, the Universal Substance, the Soul and Spirit of Things, the First Principle of monistic metaphysics, call it by names as theological and reverential as we will, always seems, it must be confessed, a pale, abstract, and impersonal conception compared with / 1 that of the eternal living God, worshipped by the ( incalculable majority of our race. Such a monistic principle never can be worshipped by a majority of our race until the race's mental constitution change. [Introduction · p. 115] Now, the great peculiarity of Mr. James's conception of God is, that it is monistic enough to satisfy the philosopher, and yet warm and living and dramatic enough to speak to the heart of the common pluralistic man. This double character seems to make of this conception an entirely fresh and original contribution to religious thought. I call it monistic enough to satisfy the metaphysician, for although Mr. James's system is anything but a bald monism, yet it makes of God the one and only a ctive principle; and that is practically all that monism demands. Our experience makes us, it is true, acquainted with an other of God, in our own selfhood; but for Mr. James, that other, that selfhood, has no positive existence, being really naught, a provisional phantom-soul breathed by God's love into mere logical negation. And that a monism, thus mitigated, can speak to the common heart, a perusal of those pages in which M^James jgortrays_creati.on on God's part as an infinite passion of self-surrender to his opposite, will convince any reader. Anthropomorphism and metaphysics seem for the first time in these pages to go harmoniously hand in hand. The same sun that lights up the frozen summits of abstraction, lights up life's teeming plain, — and no chasm, but an open highway lies between. [Introduction · p. 116] The extraordinary power and richness of this conception of the Deity ought, one would say, to make Mr. James's writings indispensable to students of religious thought. Within their compass, each old element receives a fresh expression, each old issue a startling turn. It is hard to believe, that, when they are better known, they will not, come to be counted among the few truly original theological works which our language owns. So that even those who think that no theological thought can be conclusive will, for this reason, perhaps, not refuse to them a lasting place in literature. [Introduction · p. 116] Their most serious enemy will be the philosophic pluralist. The naif practical pluralism of l popular religion ought, as I have said, to have no quarrel with the monism they teach. There is however a pluralism hardened by reflection, and deliberate; a pluralism which, in face of the old mystery of the One and the Many, has vainly sought peace in identification, and ended by taking sides against the One. It seems to me that the deepest of all philosophic differences is that between this pluralism and all forms of monism whatever. Apart from analytic and intellectual arguments, pluralism is a view to which we all practically incline when in the full and successful exercise of our moral energy. The life we then feel tingling through us vouches sufficiently for [Introduction · p. 117] itself, and nothing tempts us to refer it to a higher source. Being, as we are, a match for whatever evils actually confront us, we rather prefer to think of them as endowed with reality, and as being absolutely alien, but, we hope, subjugable powers. Of the day of our possible impotency we take no thought; and we care not to make such a synthesis of our weakness and our strength, and of the good and evil fortunes of the world, as will reduce them all to fractions, with a common denominator, of some less fluctuating Unity, enclosing some less partial and more certain form of Good. The feel- \ ing of action, in sh^rt, makes us turn a deaf^ earjp the tKought of being; and this deafness and insensibility may be said to form an integral part of what in popular phrase is known as " healthy- ' mindedness." Any absolute moralism must needs i be such a healthy- minded pluralism; and in a pluralistic philosophy the healthy-minded moral- \ ist will always feel himself at home. [Introduction · p. 117] But healthy-mindedness is not the whole of life;'' ^ and the morbid view, as one by contrast may call it, asks for a philosophy very different from that of absolute moralism. To suggest personial will and effort to one " all sicklied o'er ""with the sense of weakness, of helpless failure, and of fear, is to suggest the most horrible of things to him. What he craves is to be consoled in his very im- [Introduction · p. 118] potence, to feel that the Powers of the Universe recognize and secure him, all passive and failing as he is. Well, we are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clayi with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever \ we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hoUowest substitute for that vj^Ci-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas I are not. This wellbeing is the object of the religious demand, — a demand so penetrating and unassuageable that no consciousness of such occasional and outward well-doing as befalls the human lot can ever give it satisfaction. On the other hand, to satisfy the religious demand is to deny the demands of the moralist. The latter wishes to feel the empirical goods and evils, on the recognition of which his activity proceeds, to be real goods and evils, with ^ their distinction absolutely preserved. So that ow religion and moralism, the morbid and the healthy view, it may be said that what is meat to the one is the other's poison. Any absolute moralism is a pluralism; any absolute religion is a monism, shows the depth of Mr. James's religious insight that he first and last and always made moralism the target of his hottest attack, and pitted religion [Introduction · p. 119] 1It! INTRODUCTION. and it against each other as enemies, of whom one must die utterly, if the other is to live in genuine form. The accord of moralism and religion is A superficial, their discord radical. Only the deepest thinkers on both sides see that one must go. Popular opinion gets over the difficulty by compromise and contradiction, and the shifting, according to its convenience, of its point of view. Such inconsistency cannot be called a solution of the matter, though it practically seems to work with most men well enough. Must not the more radical ways of thinking, after all, appeal to the same umpire of practice for corroboration of their more consistent views? Is the religious tendency or the moralistic tendency on the whole the most serviceable to man's life, taking the latter in the largest way? By their fruits ye shall know them. 5 \ Solvitur ambulando ; for the decision we must per- [Introduction · p. 119] \ haps await the day of judgment. Meanwhile, the battle is about us, and we are its combatants, steadfast or vacillating, as the case may be. It will be a hot fight indeed if the friends of philosophic moralism should bring to the service of their ideal, so different from that of my father, a spirit even remotely resembling the life-long devotion of his faithful heart. W. J.