Introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James

" 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. 29 · line 524