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 REESE LIBRARY 
 
 I IK THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Received 
 Accessions No. ^ 
 
 Jb 
 
PHILOSOPHY 
 
 OF 
 
 JAMES, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 MORALISM AND CHRISTIANITY;" "LECTURES AND MISCELLANIES;" "THE 
 NATURE OF EVIL;" "CHRISTIANITY, THE LOGIC OF CREATION;" 
 "SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW;" U THE SECRET OF SWEDENBORG;" 
 "SOCIETY THE REDEEMED FORM OF MAN." 
 
 A DIGEST, 
 
 BY J. A. KELLOGG 
 
 NEW TORK : 
 
 JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY, 
 14 AND 16 VESEY STREET. 
 
r, 1883, 
 BY 
 
 J. A. KKLLOGG. 
 3 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 No attempt, so far as I am aware, has ever been 
 made to present a collective view of the philosophy 
 of Mr. Henry James, so as to bring it within the 
 scope of the general reader. The distinguished 
 philosopher himself, so lately gone from us, seems 
 not to have aimed to give his whole thought any- 
 where in brief compass. The essential principles 
 of it are in all the works which he has given to 
 the press from time to time during the last thirty 
 years, and there is a more or less complete state- 
 ment of his views in each of the later volumes; yet 
 a satisfactory insight into his ideas -cannot well be 
 obtained without bringing the whole of his writings 
 under one survey. 
 
 Laying no claim to a perfect comprehension of 
 this philosophy in its details, I shall yet endeavor, 
 however inadequately, to present its outlines, hop_ 
 ing thereby to aid in drawing attention to the 
 
4 PHILOSOPHY OF HENR Y JAMES. 
 
 works of one who, it seems to some of us, will yet 
 come to be recognized as the deepest thinker of the 
 century. 
 
 "* It is undeniable that Mr. James is obscure, unex- 
 pectedly obscure, if I may use the expression. His 
 style is so frank and alluring ; he gives himself so 
 unreservedly to his readers, is so profuse in his 
 illustrations, and so evidently master of his subject; 
 he berates us so cordially for our stupidity in not 
 having always seen the truths which he demon- 
 strates, and for our hard-heartedness in not having 
 obeyed them, that we wonderingly say to ourselves, 
 * Here at last we must have found an unerring 
 guide : let us confidently give ourselves up to him, 
 and he will lead us into the innermost courts of 
 truth.' But ere long we become bewildered, we 
 know not whither we are going ; we are dizzy, we 
 are blinded, we hear nothing, we see nothing ; and 
 at last we refuse to advance another step until we 
 find upon what ground we are treading. We doubt 
 at first whether this may not be owing to some lack 
 in ourselves, but by and by we are fain to divide 
 the fault between the difficulties of the subject and 
 the manner in which it is treated. 
 
 Mr. James looks at creation instinctively from 
 the creative side, and this of itself has a tendency to 
 put him at a remove from his readers. The usual 
 problem is: Given the creation, to find the Creator; 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 to Mr. James it is: Given the Great or^ 
 creation. God is ; of His being there is no doubt, 
 but who and what are we ? Another cause of obscu- 
 rity is Mr. James's use of words. To many of his 
 words he gives a signification of his own, and we 
 should get on well enough with that if he always 
 kept to it ; but ever and anon he slips back into the 
 old usage, with the object perhaps of coming more 
 closely to the ordinary method of thinking. The 
 word morality, with its adjective moral, is a verita- 
 ble-will-o'-the-wisp, until one has obtained the clew 
 to the whole thought, and has learned to accom- 
 modate its significance to the point at the moment 
 in view. Still another and most fruitful cause of 
 misapprehension is the fact tnat to Mr. James 
 the natural world is the correspondence of the 
 spiritual world, making it thus correct to use the 
 same terms in speaking of each ; but it is also the 
 inverse correspondence, so that the terms frequent- 
 ly mean exactly the opposite when used of one that 
 they mean when used of the other : as in viewing 
 objects in a mirror the right is left and the left 
 right, the east is west and the west east, et ccetera. 
 And, in addition to all, one cannot help suspecting 
 that the author loves paradox for its own sake 
 prefers it to a more direct method of stating his 
 thought. 
 
 Mr. James, as is well known, bases his philosophy 
 
O PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 upon ideas derived from Swedenborg, but the 
 philosophy itself comes not from Swedenborg : it 
 is profoundly original. A previous acquaintance 
 with the writings of the Swedish seer is not neces- 
 sary to the comprehension of it, but it is a great aid 
 to such comprehension. It enables one to read 
 between the lines, and also explains not a little of 
 the phraseology. 
 
 With this preliminary, I proceed to give, making 
 free and constant use of his own expressions, a synopsis 
 of what seems to me, after a study of many years, 
 to be Mr. James's philosophy of life. 
 
 God is Life in Himself. All life is one, therefore 
 there can be no other being in the universe having 
 life in himself. Creation is not the production of a 
 new being : it is a manifestation of the Infinite and 
 Eternal Being, which is from everlasting to ever- 
 lasting, and this manifestation is in man. Creation 
 implies God's communication of Himself to the 
 creature. It does not imply a transfer of life from 
 God Himself to another : that would be to divide 
 life, which is absurd. God cannot create a being 
 who shall be independent of Himself. To create a 
 being who should have life in himself would be to 
 create God. 
 
 God's life finds its activity in love. He cannot 
 love Himself, for that were self-love. He must love 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 that which is the total opposite of 
 the total opposite of Himself must be evil, since "He 
 is the all of goodness. Yet out of that which is 
 evil He can make a creature who will react against 
 the evil and aspire of his own free-will to a con- 
 junction with his Creator, to whom then He will be 
 able to communicate the blessedness of His own 
 life with ever-increasing bountifulness to all eter- 
 nity. 
 
 Creation is a composite, not a simple movement. 
 It provides first for the creature's subjective exist- 
 ence, and then for his objective being. We must 
 first be endowed with inalienable self-consciousness 
 in order to be subsequently qualified for God's 
 spiritual fellowship. The creature must have a life 
 as distinctively his own as God's life is distinctively 
 His own. This life is given to him by means of 
 Nature. A natural form is a derived form. It in- 
 volves the relation between a common nature and 
 an individual subject of that nature. Everything 
 in nature is a particular form of a common sub- 
 stance. 
 
 Nature is the exact opposite of God. God is the 
 One Life. He has no fellow or equal. Nature is 
 perfect community, and this community limits as it 
 confers all individual faculty and enjoyment. God 
 is ; nature exists. Existence is the manifestation of 
 being ; it means the going forth of being into form. 
 
8 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 Its nature is strictly not to be, as that of God is to 
 be. The animating principle of Nature is self-love. 
 Nature is the preliminary realm of formation, 
 'on which the actuality of creation is suspended. 
 Creation itself is an invisible process by which the 
 creature becomes ultimately qualified for conscious 
 unity with Goodness, Truth, and Power. It takes 
 place exclusively in the creature's consciousness. Out- 
 side of God there is nothing real in the universe 
 excepting the human consciousness. The great 
 spheres of space and time themselves fall within 
 that consciousness, not without it. There never 
 was a space where nor a time when things began 
 to be. Time and space are involved in existence. 
 Eternity and infinity transcend it. Eternity is not 
 time without end, nor infinity space without end. 
 Eternity is the denial of time, infinity the disappear- 
 ance of space. We can obtain a conception of this 
 metaphysical io^ea by means of some familiar ex- 
 periences. When in suspense or suffering we are 
 conscious of every minute in the hour we have 
 an acute realization of Time ; when through happi- 
 ness the minutes glide so swiftly that the hour has 
 gone ere it seems scarcely to have begun, we get 
 a glimpse of Eternity. So in our feeling of utter 
 nearness to an absent friend and absolute remote- 
 ness from a stranger at our side we have a percep- 
 tion of Infinity. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 9 
 
 Consciousness claims the totality of the sensible 
 universe as the indispensable realm of the me. The 
 visible world is but man turned inside out that he 
 may be revealed to himself. All that sensibly exists 
 is but the mind's furniture. The mineral life is the 
 fcetal condition of humanity, the me getting body. 
 Its character! stic is inertia, and it gives us the fixity 
 which is necessary that we may have a contrast for 
 our coming freedom. The vegetable life is theme 
 coming to sensation ; in the animal life the me has 
 attained to volition. Man reproduces in himself all / 
 mineral, all vegetable, and all animal forms. He is 
 fixed as the rock, unstable as water ; hard as the 
 iron, sensitive as the flower ; indolent as the sloth, 
 busy as the bee ; blind as the bat, far-sighted as the 
 eagle ; venomous as the serpent, harmless as the 
 dove. All the antagonisms of nature are united in 
 his form. Thus man is the measure of all the in- 
 ferior things of the universe ; the master-key which 
 fits all the wards of the lower creation and makes 
 its mysteries intelligible. When science shall have 
 developed all nature's resources of use and orna- 
 ment to man, then man will perceive an exact 
 correspondence between himself spiritually viewed 
 on the one side and the entire phenomena of the 
 visible universe on the other. Excepting as part 
 of the human consciousness, this natural universe 
 has no reality to the Divine mind. Man alone is 
 
10 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 objective to God, and the rose and the horse, for 
 example, exist to him only as constituent portions 
 of our mental structure, without which the human 
 mind would be to that extent impoverished or out 
 of correspondence with infinite being for as in- 
 ferior nature corresponds to man, so human nature 
 corresponds to God. 
 
 Man's natural individuality possessing thus every 
 conceivable characteristic of universal life, forms a 
 basis broad enough to image the Creator's infini- 
 tude. But man has besides this a distinctive differ- 
 ence from the lower forms of life. He alone has 
 the power to separate himself from his mere animal 
 conditions, to postpone his natural appetites to his 
 individual attractions. He is free to obey other 
 motives and aspirations than those which date from 
 his animal organization ; he can restrain his bodily 
 appetites within rational limits, or else urge them 
 to the most injurious excess. It is this faculty 
 which makes him man and stamps him the only 
 fitting tabernacle of God. The animal may obey 
 his nature without degradation, but if a man give 
 himself up to his nature he dehumanizes himself. 
 The animal and vegetable have no deeper life than 
 that of their nature. It is their glory to exhibit 
 their natural force in uncurbed luxuriance, but it is 
 the glory of man to transcend his nature and make 
 it obey an individuality above itself. The mineral 
 
It UNIVERSITY 
 
 \X p 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY jMCgSt^ I 
 
 is subject to the vegetable, the vegetable to the 
 animal, and the animal to man. Man alone is sub- 
 ject to no external power. 
 
 This state of conscious freedom arising from 
 man's sense of ownership of himself Mr. James 
 terms morality, which he calls the distinctive badge 
 of human nature. It is the point of individuation 
 of human nature from merely animal nature, and 
 the point of identification of all its subjects with 
 one another. The animal life is the instinctive life : 
 in it the passions rule the intellect. In the moral 
 life, the intellect rules the passions/!*" 
 
 Self-consciousness, which is the natural human 
 form of consciousness, is born of the union of the 
 will and the instinct. Man thus becomes both 
 objective and subjective to himself. He is the 
 subject of his nature in the realm of sense, and the 
 object of it in the realm of ideas. 
 
 But the whole of man is not comprised in nature 
 and morality. Man is a unit of two forces : a 
 material force which finites him, and a spiritual one 
 which infinites him. In the human consciousness 
 God and nature meet. Human nature has the 
 literally awful grandeur of being the sole link be- 
 tween Creator and creature. Its organic element 
 relates us to the outward arnd finite, i.e., to nature, 
 and gives us fixity ; its distinctively human element 
 relates us to the inward and infinite, i.e., to God, 
 
12 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 and gives us freedom. But we always identify 
 ourselves with nature and not with God. The me 
 absorbs the whole realm of the finite, the outer 
 sphere of consciousness; the not-me, the realm of 
 the infinite, its inner sphere. The human conscious- 
 ness unites these two spheres. It identifies itself 
 instinctively with the outer sphere, while at the 
 same time it dominates it. It worships the inner 
 sphere, while at the same time it recognizes itself, 
 by means of the intellect, as essentially belonging to 
 it. We identify ourselves with our organization 
 because that is the sole ground of our conscious- 
 ness, and it is our consciousness alone which gives 
 us an entity distinct from God. This is what dif- 
 ferences Mr. James's view from pantheism. Pan- 
 theism makes the creature continuous, as it were, 
 from the Creator ; Mr. James separates him by all 
 the breadth of his consciousness. 
 
 The truth is that God alone is life, and that He 
 communicates life to man. This truth we shall 
 never be able to feel on penalty of losing our free- 
 dom. If we felt that our life was other than our 
 own we should lose all our characteristic human 
 activity, should consider ourselves merely puppets, 
 and wait to be acted upon ; but while it is death to 
 feel it, it is life to believe it, and it is only through 
 believing it that our reason can be kept ever sane 
 and progressive, for it is the truth of truths, and 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 1 3 
 
 the reason can be nourished only by truth. It 
 wastes away and dries up when fed by falsehoods. 
 
 The actual adjustment of the finite with the in- 
 finite mind is the total secret of human history : it 
 constitutes both the universal and particular scope 
 of what we call progress, meaning by that man's 
 providential destiny upon earth, or the complete 
 education of the race. 
 
 Man is the only offspring of Deity, because he 
 alone is subject to an ideal selfhood. The dis- 
 tinctive trait of man is not subjection to nature, for 
 the vegetable is more entirely the subject of its 
 natural organization ; and it is not subjection to 
 society, for many of the animals the bee, the ant, 
 the beaver excel the best of men in this respect : 
 it is obedience to his own ideas of goodness, truth, 
 and beauty. His activity lies within himself, and 
 acknowledges an ideal end. Even vice and crime 
 show this. Vice expresses man's attempt to actual- 
 ize his ideal life without the concurrence of nature ; 
 crime, his attempt to actualize it without the con- 
 currence of society. 
 
 Our animal consciousness is constituted by our 
 susceptibility to pleasure and pain. The vegetable 
 life is that of pleasure alone. It is the oppugnancy 
 of pleasure and pain which lifts us from the vege- 
 table existence to the animal. It is by means of the 
 oppugnancy of good and evil, and their equilibrium 
 
14 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 in the human constitution, that our moral life is 
 evolved. We inherit a liability to all that is good 
 and to all that is evil in human nature. To some 
 qualities we are more susceptible undoubtedly 
 than to others, but we are susceptible to all on 
 presentation of adequate motives. Our wills then 
 can disturb the equilibrium, and incline our actions 
 to one side or the other. If our inheritance over- 
 powers our will we are no longer credited with, the 
 responsibility of our actions, as we see in the un- 
 fortunate victims of klopemania. The me cannot 
 survive a permanent disturbance of equilibrium. 
 
 Morality, therefore, does not characterize man 
 spiritually, as is generally supposed, but only natu- 
 rally. The two moral poles, the poles of good and 
 evil, are alike requisite to humanity. Neither of 
 them by itself defines, it as the North Pole by itself 
 or the South Pole by itself does not define the 
 earth. This balance of opposing forces is necessary 
 to give us our moral consciousness. 
 
 But if morality is not our true life it is the funda- 
 mental germ out of which our true or spiritual life 
 grows. Its function is to lift man out of the bond- 
 age of nature that he may become freely subject 
 to God. But how shall the creature, immersed in 
 his natural consciousness, filled with the instinct of 
 self-love, unable to know God intuitively, come to 
 a recognition of the Divine life which lies deeper 
 
<^ SE Lli 
 
 V^ fit rn-. 
 
 /,' ^' OF THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAfrSR 1 VEE^Il 
 
 within him than his nature ? He is endowed 
 a double consciousness. He comes to know him- 
 self at first as having a community with his kind; 
 then, feeling himself finited on every hand by this 
 natural community, he has a consciousness of death 
 and a profound instinct leads him to believe in a 
 positive good without contrast of evil. Thus is 
 generated conscience. Conscience is the first en- 
 trance of God into the human life. It is His voice J 
 in our bosom, saying : I make you each conscious 
 of a power of being or suffering infinitely transcend- 
 ing your power of doing or enjoying, and this 
 power it is which alone allies you with God. Thus 
 the moral element in us becomes disengaged from 
 the physical. We cease to recognize ourselves as 
 primarily under obligation to nature, and come to 
 look upon ourselves as subject to an inward and 
 infinite ideal. 
 
 Conscience^ is not a revelation to the intellect. 
 It does not tell us what is wrong and what is right. 
 J/ It is^simjply a perception of the inextinguishable 
 contrariety of good and evil. It is an instinct of 
 the soul, not an intuition of the reason. Its func- 
 tion is to make manifest to us the death which we 
 have in ourselves, the evil which is in our natural 
 make-up, and so prepare us to receive the life which 
 we have in God. Through it all our unconscious 
 imperfections become luminous to our conscious 
 
l6 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 self. Its invariable sentence is death, and this 
 death to ourselves we are obliged to undergo be- 
 fore we can become emancipated from the shackles 
 of the finite, and rise into the living discernment 
 and participation of the infinite. 
 
 The first effect of conscience, however, is to cause 
 us to aspire after a personal righteousness which 
 shall bring us into direct spiritual relations with 
 God. But the more we strive, the less we succeed. 
 A genuine conscience of sin is out of all ratio to the 
 amount of evil actually done, much more actually 
 doing. We all know that they who habitually do 
 the least evil have the tenderest consciences, and 
 they who do the most, the bluntest. A conscience 
 of sin always originates in a judgment which the 
 soul passes upon itself for having actually done 
 wrong, but it ends in a conviction of one's natural 
 unlikeness to God. In the spiritual man the subtler 
 consciousness of evil-being has utterly consumed 
 the grosser consciousness of evil-doing. 
 
 But conscience can go no further than to make 
 manifest to us our inward destitution. It cannot 
 tell us where to find our true or spiritual life, be- 
 cause it is itself a natural quality and nature knows 
 nothing of spirit. The natural and the spiritual 
 worlds are both embraced in the human conscious- 
 ness, the former being the lower region of the 
 mind and the latter the upper, but they do not con- 
 
If ViXlVMtSITTI 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAM^ 
 
 nect with each other by continuity : they connect 
 by correspondence, else there would be no dis- 
 crimination of base from building-. The natural 
 world is not the real world : it is but the image of 
 the real world. The infinite is the sole reality 
 which underlies all finite appearance. As books 
 presuppose wit in the reader, so the natural world 
 presupposes a spiritual world which will explain 
 it, and it is utterly unintelligible unless light be 
 thrown upon it from this spiritual world. This 
 light is Revelation. We as creatures can have no 
 intuitive knowledge of uncreated things : we can 
 only know them through our reason, and our reason 
 must be enlightened by revelation. Experience 
 gives us self-knowledge ; revelation, divine know- 
 ledge. An unrevealed God is practically no 
 God at all to the human understanding. But re- 
 velation is not information. Information means 
 knowledge which comes up to the soul from 
 the senses ; revelation, knowledge which comes 
 down to the senses from the soul. To reveal is to 
 unveil what has been hitherto concealed under a 
 veil of contrary appearance. Revelation is an in- 
 verted image of the truth ; information, a direct 
 image. If a direct knowledge of God were im- 
 parted to us it would leave the human mind no 
 chance to grow ; hence revelation is symbolic, thus 
 shielding and fostering human freedom. The re- 
 
18 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 ligious history of the race is the veritable history 
 of the human mind, and this history involves the 
 doctrine of a Divine revelation. 
 
 Revelation has taken many forms, but the great 
 revelation is in Christianity. Christianity is the 
 doctrine of the eternal and perfect union of God 
 and man in the person of Jesus Christ Its spiritual 
 meaning is that human nature itself is the adequate 
 and ample abode of perfect love and wisdom, that 
 the infinite and finite are in complete union in man. 
 It is a recognition of God in man, in distinction 
 from natural religion or paganism which is an 
 acknowledgment of God in nature. The Divine 
 life in man, which grows out of the conjunction of 
 the infinite Divine Love with our finite natural 
 loves, was perfectly manifested in Christ. In Him 
 for the first time the private human bosom was 
 brought into perfect experimental accord with in. 
 finite Love. Spiritually viewed, Christ is the in- 
 most and vital selfhood of every individual. What- 
 ever life was in him actually is potentially in all 
 men. The incarnation is a revelation of the true 
 principles of creative order, the order that binds 
 the universe of existence to its source. It is the 
 sole philosophic secret of creation, and the Chris- 
 tian facts in embodying the secret in a cipher until 
 such time as the human mind had grown wise 
 enough by experience to unriddle it, impose a defi- 
 nite end to men's crude speculations. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 1 9 
 
 Mr. James holds the recorded facts of Christ's 
 life to be authentic, because he sees them to be the 
 needful exponents of otherwise undiscoverable and 
 inconceivable spiritual truth. He considers them, 
 indeed, to be the only facts of human history which 
 are not in themselves illusory, because they alone 
 base a new creation in man to which every fibre of 
 his nature eagerly responds. 
 
 Christ came in history, because it is always in the 
 course of the history of the human heart that it de* 
 sires this knowledge of a possible Divine life. It 
 is not until conscience has disclosed to us our need 
 that we care to know the remedy for it. 
 
 We have seen that man is a unit of two forces: 
 one infinite and Divine, the other finite and natu- 
 ral; and that the human consciousness is so framed 
 that it identifies itself with nature, else it would 
 have no way of distinguishing itself from God if 
 we were good spontaneously we should simply be 
 God, because all goodness is one. Also we have 
 seen that our natural selfhood is composite, con- 
 sisting of a universal substance which is the same 
 in every one, and a particular form which differences 
 its subject from others, and that out of this duality 
 the natural consciousness is generated. We have 
 seen further that man recognizes his selfhood in his 
 private force, feels a freedom to renounce the do- 
 minion of his inherited nature and act from the 
 
2O PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 promptings of his own individual will, and so at- 
 tains to moral consciousness, which separates him 
 from the lower existences and identifies him with 
 his kind. Thus far we have only demonstrated the 
 natural creation, which is God's descending move- 
 ment by which the creature becomes posited and 
 obtains a life of his own as the basis of a divine life 
 which is to become his in the end. The next and 
 final creative movement is the ascending one, the 
 spiritual, which is the true creation. 
 
 Through the spiritual creation we become gradu- 
 ally freed from our inherent corruption and death, 
 and progressively invested with God's own infinity 
 and eternity. This implies the Creator's communi- 
 cation of Himself to the creature, which communi- 
 cation is contingent upon the creature's capacity 
 of reception. God cannot communicate His gifts 
 to man except in an inward way, or through the 
 man himself. We have first the consciousness of 
 a selfhood distinct from God, and then gradually 
 we attain to the consciousness of a selfhood united 
 with God. Man's infinite selfhood becomes evolved 
 by the elimination of his finite selfhood. While 
 the latter exists in full force he remains unconscious 
 of the former, and it is only as he puts the finite 
 selfhood from him accordingly that the true or 
 infinite one flows in and becomes established. 
 Spiritual creation first shapes itself to discriminate 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 21 
 
 the Divine element from all lower and temporary 
 elements. The Divine element in man, Mr. James 
 calls the truly-human element, because it is in man 
 only, and not in the other subjects of nature. 
 While the natural life controls his action, man can- 
 not realize the life he has in God. If it weren ot for 
 the perpetual disappointment he encounters in the 
 pursuit both of pleasure and righteousness, he 
 would sink into the abject votary of nature and his 
 fellow-man, and the immortal instincts he derives 
 from God would expire ; but these disappoint- 
 ments guard the interests of his unconscious 
 destiny. 
 
 The growth from the natural to the spiritual life 
 is Regeneration. As we are born into self-love, 
 we must be re-born if we come into universal love. 
 The regenerated man is the truly created man. 
 Regeneration begins when a man abstains from 
 doing evil, when tempted, out of reverent regard to 
 the will of God ; or when, some hereditary evil dis- 
 position having come to the surface in act, he sees 
 it in its true light, inwardly loathes it, and out- 
 wardly averts himself from it. To bring this about 
 is the office of conscience. But for conscience, we 
 should go on feeling that life is as it seems ; we 
 should never learn that our true individuality is 
 our regenerate spiritual one, and not the generic 
 moral one which we derive from our ancestry. 
 
22 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 When a man is regenerating, he acts from a sense 
 of duty merely ; when he is regenerated, he acts 
 from attraction or spontaneously. Our life has 
 three degrees : First, instinct, in which our passions 
 rule us; second, the moral or voluntary life, in 
 which the intellect rules ; third, the spontaneous 
 life, in which the true individuality has become pro- 
 nounced, and man acts from the promptings of his 
 heart, which are then in entire accord with the 
 judgments of his intellect. 
 
 In the instinctive life man seems to himself to be 
 free, but is not. He acts from pleasure and thinks 
 he is acting from his own private will, while he is 
 in reality acting from his inherited nature. This is 
 the exact inverse form of the Divine life. God is all 
 individuality. He has no identity with other exist- 
 ences, consequently His life is always spontaneous. 
 He is the controlling power, and the universe is 
 controlled by Him. If, then, man's private power, 
 his selfhood, which is his natural individuality, is 
 under the control of an outside force, the force of 
 his nature, he presents that exact contrariety to 
 God which makes his subsequent spiritual creation 
 possible. 
 
 In the moral life man not only seems to be free, 
 but he really is free to a certain extent. He is free 
 to act according to his reason, but this very free- 
 dom implies a coercion of a part of himself. He 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 2$ 
 
 must make his passions obey his judgment ; he 
 must force himself away from what he thinks evil 
 to what he considers good. In the spontaneous 
 life, however, man is really free. Heart and head 
 are in accord. The heart prompts what the head 
 approves, and the head furthers what the heart 
 prompts. This is the spiritual life. 
 
 When we act naturally or morally, the motive of 
 our action lies without ourselves, in our physical 
 organization or our fellow-man; when we act spon- 
 taneously, the motive of our action lies within 
 ourselves. Moral existence is the alliance of an 
 inward subject and an outward object ; spiritual 
 existence, of an outward subject and an inward 
 object In moral existence the universal dominates 
 the individual ; in spiritual existence the case is re- 
 versed, and the outward serves the inward. 
 
 In our moral experience begins our progress 
 toward God. It is the first step out of our animal 
 life of instinct towards the human life of spon- 
 taneity. It gives us a sense of alienation from 
 (otherness than] our Maker, against which we in- 
 stinctively react, and seek to reunite ourselves 
 with God. When man is at discord with his 
 inmost self he feels the lack of peace which no 
 gratification of his outward life can satisfy. But 
 the direct efforts which the moral subject makes 
 to readjust himself to his creative source cannot 
 
24 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 spiritually avail him, because his voluntary activity 
 tends constantly to enhance his conscious remote- 
 ness from the infinite rather than to abridge it. 
 The more he strives the more disheartening is his 
 sense of his utter inward disproportion to the 
 infinite goodness. At last he comes to perceive that 
 this desire for personal righteousness, the desire 
 to achieve his own spiritual safety, is really, though 
 unconsciously, but the exercise of a devout self- 
 love. Our morality, our will, is a part of our 
 nature ; it is our human nature. It is the power 
 which every man as man possesses, to rise above 
 those natural limitations which bind all lower exist- 
 ences and appear himself alone, unrelated to any one 
 else. Its vital atmosphere is self-love, and there- 
 fore it cannot bring us into harmony with God. 
 But God never violates our instincts. He does not 
 force Himself upon us, but works ever to incline 
 us towards a desire to seek Him of our own accord. 
 He tenderly guards the natural instinct of selfhood, 
 because it is the germ of the Divine life in us; it is 
 the mould into which the true selfhood is to run and 
 become manifested. Our natural selfish loves are 
 therefore made interested factors in working out 
 our spiritual destiny. If we are sincere in desiring 
 personal righteousness, we seek it by endeavoring 
 to fulfil all our obligations to our fellow-man. We 
 cannot do this, but by this means our subjective 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 2$ 
 
 love is gradually bent into a regard for society, 
 which is an objective love. We learn that our 
 interests are- inexorably bound up in the interests 
 of the race, that we cannot become personally 
 righteous except as all men become so. Thus 
 morality finds its fulfilment in the social senti- 
 ment. 
 
 The spiritual life is a life of attraction, but the 
 first step towards it is by self-denial. We must 
 first unlove ourselves before we can love others. 
 We must be primarily of use to others, and only 
 subordinately to such use are we to have life, or 
 delight, in ourselves. Finite love, so it be genuine 
 and unaffected, is spiritually harmonic with infinite 
 love. But finite love is only genuine when self- 
 love is subordinated to it, when we love others at 
 the expense of ourselves. If, then, it be the law of 
 the finite intelligence to realize a life in harmony 
 with that of its Creator only by inwardly dying to 
 its own subjective tendencies, it follows that the 
 subjective element in existence is an evil element, 
 and must be overcome or set at naught before the 
 creature can have any taste of true being. When 
 conscience has taught us that, it has fulfilled its 
 proper function. There can be no subjective 
 identity, but, on the contrary, ever a subjective 
 contrariety between Creator and creature. The 
 only unity they can aspire to is an objective unity. 
 
26 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 God's love is for the whole race of man ; His ac- 
 tivity is directed towards the welfare of all hu- 
 manity : if, then, our love and our activity are 
 the same, we are in unity with Him. We are 
 spiritually creatures of God only in so far as we 
 become identified in affection and thought with 
 the interests of the Divine righteousness on earth, 
 only in so far as we spontaneously renounce the 
 interests of our proper person whenever they con- 
 flict with those of our common nature. The only 
 righteousness which man can attain to lies in Ids par- 
 ticipation of the spirit of God, the spirit of universal 
 love. The true theatre of sin lies back of our ac- 
 tivity and centres in our fundamental affections. 
 In these is the seat of the only evil known to God 
 spiritual evil ; and this evil does not depend upon 
 inheritance, but besets every one equally. 
 
 Spiritual evil is inward exclusively. It does not 
 belong to man in his relations to nature o*r society, 
 but in his relation to God. It is the feeling that 
 he is something in himself, apart from God and 
 irrespective of his kind. It has two forms. One 
 is the choice of evil from the love of it, or the vol- 
 untary identifying of ourselves with our nature, 
 and the consequent renunciation of God from the 
 life. The other is still more interior: it is self- 
 righteousness, the acceptation of good, and the 
 profanation of it, by making it subserve our own 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 2/ 
 
 glory and not the glory of God. This is the most 
 fatal form of ungodliness. 
 
 Instinct causes us to shrink from physical evil, 
 and conscience haunts us if we give ourselves up 
 to moral evil ; but spiritual evil has this peculiar- 
 ity, that the subject of it does not call it evil, but 
 good. It is not death to him, but life. He may 
 perceive it to be evil through his reason, but 
 his heart tells him that it is the vital breath of his 
 being. There is no remedy for spiritual evil but 
 in belief : not in the belief of an infinite Power out. 
 side of us, the devils may believe that, but of an 
 infinite Goodness within us which is striving to woo 
 us into harmony with its own deathless perfec- 
 tion. As Mr. James exquisitely says: " His [man's] 
 belief saves him and his disbelief damns him only 
 because the armory of the Divine Love furnishes 
 no similar weapon capable of subduing the heart 
 of his rebellion." The happiness of a created being 
 must consist in the harmonious relations that bind 
 him to his Creator. If, then, these relations are 
 falsified at their very core by the creature putting 
 himself practically in the place of God with re- 
 spect to every important interest and responsibility 
 of life, every form of disaster is bound to ensue. 
 
 The antagonism of good and evil in the physical 
 and social spheres is a necessary part of our natural 
 creation. Through physical evil we are defined 
 
28 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 as animals, through moral evil as men. We are 
 not spiritually hurt by moral evil more than by 
 physical evil if we do not inwardly approve of it. 
 But spiritual good and evil are positive : they do 
 not exist from the antagonism of one another. 
 When we have come into spiritual good we are 
 endowed with a totally new motive of action, 
 which is the love of God and our neighbor. He 
 alone truly fulfils the law who regards it not with 
 a view to its rewards, but with an inward delight, 
 as breathing the divinest love. He must fulfil it 
 from life, and not to life ; must do it spontaneously, 
 and not from a sense of obligation. In the process 
 of regeneration, a man has a life of obedience to 
 truth in his intellect; after his regeneration is com- 
 plete, he lives from the inspiration of good in his 
 heart. Regeneration means coming to have an 
 interior sympathy with goodness and truth. To 
 be spiritually like God is to undo the subjective 
 inversion of the Divine perfection to which we find 
 ourselves naturally born, and put on the direct 
 presentation of it to which we are historically re- 
 born. So we become allied no longer negatively 
 and inversely, but positively and directly, with 
 infinite power, peace, and innocence. The differ- 
 ence between the two states is the difference be- 
 tween being a servant and being a son. 
 
 By means of regeneration we realize immortality. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Post-mortem consciousness is not immortality. Im- 
 mortal life is the realization of our true and God- 
 given individuality symbolized by our natural 
 selfhood. It is the prevalence of a man's inward 
 life over his outward one. Death is the state of a 
 man in love with himself more than with God and 
 his neighbor. To pass from death to life means 
 to cease from self-reliance and confide in the Love 
 which is infinite and universal. Personal salvation 
 is intimate and eternal exemption from the domin. 
 ion of evil. 
 
 But the regeneration of individuals, important 
 as it is to the individuals themselves, is only inci- 
 dental and tributary to the great work of God in 
 humanity, which is the regeneration of the human 
 race itself; for the race has as rigid a unity as any 
 of its individual members. It has, metaphysically 
 speaking, the human form. It isihemaximusfomv, 
 of which its members are minimi homines. It is 
 evident, then, that the human race itself, this great 
 human soul, may be regenerated, may be lifted 
 into union with God, and so become the basis of a 
 new spiritual development in the individual past 
 all prophecy to foretell. 
 
 This maximus homo, this man which is to be, is 
 the controller of our destiny. He is the Lord 
 whom Christ typified. In him will the Divine and 
 human natures be perfectly united. 
 
30 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 This truth is the hidden Divine leaven which 
 has been fermenting in all history and, even from 
 its rudest beginnings, moulding the mind of man 
 into conformity with itself. The gradual enlarge- 
 ment of our consciousness out of the personal lim- 
 itations in which it begins into the largest social 
 dimensions in which it ends constitutes the sole 
 veritable stuff of human history. Nature gives us 
 an infinitely modulated key wherewith to unlock 
 all the secret chambers of the human heart, all the 
 infinite possibilities of character among men ; but 
 nature of necessity is complicated with man's his- 
 toric evolution, and it is not until history conse- 
 quently has attained its culmination that we may 
 expect to begin the realization of our spiritual cre- 
 ation. 
 
 A living knowledge of God must come about 
 gradually. It is contingent upon the advent of a 
 true society among men; the evolution of such 
 society being itself contingent upon a previous ex- 
 perience and exhaustion of the patriarchal, the 
 municipal, and the national or political administra- 
 tion of human affairs. Whatever is logically 
 implied in man's nature, as a created and finite 
 being, must come to consciousness in him, so as to 
 constitute him to his own intelligence. Creation 
 is not an incident of history ; history is an incident 
 of creation. It is the fermentation and ripening of 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 31 
 
 human nature. It means the continuity of an iden- 
 tical germ, through root and branch, through stalk 
 and leaf, to fruit. It is simply a slow but unceas- 
 ing approximation to the embodiment in institu- 
 tions of the idea of the exact equality of man with 
 man. No feature of it could have been different 
 from what it has been. An infinite wisdom em- 
 beds all the phenomena of human experience, and 
 creation exhibits the only order possible for it to 
 exhibit. No truth is thrust upon the mind of the 
 race prematurely. A watchful love prevents our 
 receiving an excess of truth beyond the wants of 
 the life. 
 
 The race has the same development in its degree 
 that the individual has in its degree. In its infancy 
 it feels a power in nature superior to herself, and 
 thus it conies to the idea of a God. To this God it 
 appeals for help against the oppressions of nature, 
 and so the feeling arises that God cares more for 
 man than for nature, and by implication more for 
 his human soul than for his natural body. God's 
 answer to the prayer of His petitioner is by giving 
 him wit to invent protections for himself, and so 
 step by step He helps him in an inward way. As 
 the mind of the race progresses, mankind acquires 
 the sentiment of human brotherhood. This is 
 born of the necessity man feels of the aid of his 
 fellow-man to enable him to attain the lordship of 
 
32 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 nature. In the same way every issue of humanity 
 depends upon the education and discipline of the 
 human consciousness. By gradual steps the selfish 
 principle which represents the finite man is changed 
 into the social principle which represents the in- 
 finite humanity, so making at last God and man 
 naturally one, as they have always been spiritually 
 one. This is the Divine Natural Humanity. The 
 regeneration of the race, being the slow accretion 
 of experience, constitutes the very last result of 
 human history, the crowning achievement of cre- 
 ative wisdom. 
 
 That which is the Regeneration of the race on 
 the human side is, on the Divine side, Redemption. 
 By redemption the nature of the creature becomes 
 finally freed from its intrinsic limitations and eter- 
 nally associated with infinite goodness and truth. 
 This was accomplished potentially by Christ when 
 he successively met all the temptations to which 
 human nature is subject and overcame them, but 
 it will not be accomplished actually until the race 
 is completely regenerated, or exalted out of physi- 
 cal and moral into social and aesthetic lineaments, 
 which, again, cannot come about until man shall 
 have renounced his selfish instincts. To teach him 
 this renunciation has been the great lesson of God's 
 providence in all the dreary past. Our historic 
 past has made manifest the evil which is latent in 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 33 
 
 the finite selfhood, and so has prepared a perma- 
 nent foundation in experience for human society, 
 The evil thus latent is commensurate in quantity 
 and quality with the infinite Divine goodness, and 
 no Diviner mercy could befall us than to allow it 
 to be played out betimes in all its hideous malig- 
 nity. The rule for both the individual and the 
 race runs that no goodness endures but that which 
 is qualified by intelligence. Natural innocence is 
 destitute of the human element, spontaneity, and 
 hence will not keep. 
 
 The feeling that God cares more for man than 
 for nature prepared the way for the acceptance 
 of Christianity. Christ's history was the grand 
 starting-point for the hope of man. Henceforth 
 Paganism, or the conception of a God in nature and 
 apart from man, was at an end. His sole abode was 
 seen to be in the heart of a truly-loving man, and 
 His power to be exclusively exerted in the direc- 
 tion of his spiritual aggrandizement. Christ's 
 whole divinity lay in the fact of his having no in- 
 terest apart from the welfare of universal man. 
 He had no will apart from the will of God, which 
 will, of course, could only be the equal blessing of 
 all mankind. At his coming the inheritance of 
 evil had so accumulated that its power had got a 
 greater purchase upon the mind of man than the 
 power of good, so that his moral freedom was 
 
34 PHILOSOPHY OF HENR Y JAMES. 
 
 almost lost. The equilibrium of good and evil, by 
 which alone our natural freedom stands, was dis- 
 turbed in favor of evil. Through Christ's life came 
 a new power into humanity. In his soul the union 
 of the Divine and Human natures was perfectly 
 consummated, and thus in him was revealed the 
 birthright of all humanity. Christianity may be 
 styled a formal proclamation of the exhaustion of 
 religion as a ceremonial and its revival as a life. 
 Other religions swamp man in nature, are practi- 
 cally nothing more than a consecration of the ties 
 of nature ; Christianity lifts man out of these rela- 
 tions, and allies him in spirit with universal good- 
 ness and truth. 
 
 The social sentiment is possible only to man be- 
 cause in him alone of all the animals are the uni- 
 versal and individual elements essentially matched. 
 The only real fellow that the individual man has in 
 nature is by no means some other individual man, 
 for this would not be fellowship or equality, but 
 identity, but the complex or composite man, 
 society. Nature quantifies us and spirit qualifies 
 us, and the two exactly correspond to each other. 
 To the primary instinct the private element is sub- 
 ordinate to the public one, while by redemption, 
 regeneration, spiritual culture, the terms all mean- 
 ing the same as to result, our consciousness is 
 revolutionized, the private, internal, or specific 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF ^N^JA^&s 35 
 
 ^^ ii -"^ I"--"**"'" 
 element, which is the specially human element 
 
 through which comes our union with God, takes 
 its rightful place as controlling, and the pub- 
 lic, external or generic element takes the last or 
 ministerial place; but neither element is forced, 
 the natural does not overrule the spiritual, nor the 
 spiritual the natural. The pivot of this great his- 
 toric revolution is the life, death, resurrection, and 
 ascension of Jesus Christ. 
 
 In the absolute truth of things there is no vari- 
 ance between duty and pleasure, duty and taste, 
 duty and inclination. Self-love and neighborly 
 love are perfectly united. Fully to conform to the 
 absolute truth of things constitutes man's destiny, 
 and the accomplishment of this destiny will be 
 signalized by the advent of a true society upon 
 the earth, in which the principle of self-love will 
 be spontaneously subject to the principle of uni- 
 versal love, and universal love, subject to the in- 
 most ideal of life, i.e. t to God. Self-love itself will 
 then become the invincible guarantee of endless 
 peace and order. 
 
 Society is the fundamental principle of the Di- 
 vine economy on earth, meaning by that word the 
 essential brotherhood, fellowship, equality of each 
 man with all men and all men with each. The 
 created form, in order that it may fitly respond to 
 the creative being, must be a unitary form express- 
 
36 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 ing the unity of each and all creatures. An organ- 
 ized society is this form, in which one man shall 
 not be allowed any arbitrary advantage over an- 
 other, and every man's nature, whatever be his per- 
 sonal differences from other men, shall be alike 
 honored. Once human society is fairly inaugu- 
 rated by all men becoming endowed with an equal 
 interest in it, then every man will be a law unto 
 himself, and will spiritually execute justice and 
 judgment upon himself whenever he thinks a 
 thought or feels a desire of inequality with respect 
 to the meanest man that lives. 
 
 But by Society Mr. James does not mean a herd 
 of men. Society claims a qualitative, not a quan- 
 titative unity. It is a perfect hierarchy, in which 
 each member is sacred with an equal though vari- 
 ous sacredness. It is like the human body in which 
 the head, the trunk, and the limbs occupy positions 
 of different dignity according to the variety of 
 their powers, but are alike essential to the integ- 
 rity of the body. In every person there is a special 
 aptitude to some divine end, if we could only get 
 ' at it, a special potency for some beautiful function 
 which no other person embodies so highly. To 
 doubt this would be to doubt the Divine Love, 
 would be to suppose that it did not design its crea- 
 tures for harmony but for perpetual antagonism ; 
 for the more things resemble each other the more 
 
KtTNl 
 
 N^/FOR 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF HENR Y JA ME$T~ 
 
 they stand in each other's way. If men were liter- 
 ally equal to each other, they would have identity, 
 but not unity. This special function, characteristic 
 activity, or genius of each man is the real presence 
 of God in him, and when human fellowship is 
 rightly ordered we shall see God revealed in all 
 men alike, from the least to the greatest. And there 
 will be no room for envy, because there is an exact 
 proportion between each one's personal and intel- 
 lectual nature and his practical power, so that every 
 one's outward fortunes will exactly respond to his 
 inward desires. 
 
 Then at last, when we shall have become con- 
 sciously one, each with all and all with each in 
 God, we shall be able to be endued collectively 
 and individually with all the potencies, felicities, 
 and beatitudes of the Divine life. 
 
 In this great redemption all the participants of 
 human nature are included. Even the tremendous 
 issues of heaven and hell fall within creation, not 
 outside of it." Heaven and hell are mere incidents 
 of human progress ; they exhibit the unfettered 
 play of human freedom. The existence of hell 
 marks an energy in the earth not as yet fully 
 wrought into the tissue of human nature. That 
 evil should be separated from good and come 
 under its permanent though unconscious subjec- 
 tion, is necessary as a preliminary work. It is a 
 
38 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 strictly defecating process, a means of purifying 
 the human mind. For even in the angels self-love 
 is not spontaneously subordinate to universal love, 
 and if hell were not separated from heaven the 
 angels would not be free. Hell would suffocate 
 heaven, and the angels would preserve their pur- 
 ity only by constant self-control. But when the 
 reconstruction of human nature is complete, then 
 there will be no necessity for this separation ; there 
 will be but one richly unitary life. Behold, I make 
 a new heaven and a new earth, saith the scripture ; 
 but nothing is said about a new hell. 
 
 But the redemption of the human race does not 
 mean the spiritual regeneration of all its members. 
 As the whole race is the macrocosm of which the 
 individual is the microcosm, so just as the two 
 loves, self-love and neighborly love, dwell always 
 together in the regenerate private heart, there will 
 still be correspondingly in the regenerate public 
 life those who are in self-love side by side with 
 those in universal love, though, as now, not ob- 
 viously distinguishable from them. The principle 
 of self-love, which is the principle of evil, cannot be 
 destroyed, else the creature would be absorbed in 
 the Creator, and creation would lapse. This would 
 be Nirvana or self-extinction. There is a race-des- 
 tiny for man, but no such thing as an individual 
 destiny. The individual either remains what he 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 39 
 
 already is by derivation from his ancestry and the 
 circumstances of his own position, or else he be- 
 comes a new and regenerate form of life, according 
 to his own pleasure. Freedom and rationality by 
 no means give any of us a title to the Divine possi- 
 bilities which inhere in human nature : they only in- 
 scribe us as candidates for such title. Where there 
 is no susceptibility to inward life the Divine bene- 
 faction is thwarted. In all God's dealings with us 
 He regards the interests of our freedom as jeal- 
 ously as a man guards the apple of his eye. Good 
 and evil must both be presented to us in order that 
 we may choose good from the love of it. Even in 
 a true society there will be trials to be passed 
 through in the process of regeneration; tempta- 
 tions to spiritual pride and self-indulgence will 
 doubtless always beset the natural life. In truth, 
 while as a matter of philosophy we may speak of 
 the finished creation of God, as a matter of fact 
 creation will never be finished. Evil will ever be 
 decreasing and good increasing, but .God's per- 
 fections are infinite and our want is endless ; and 
 creation, as it is never past, being renewed every 
 moment, so it will never be done. 
 
 By self-love spontaneously subjecting itself to 
 brotherly love, Mr. James cannot mean that it will 
 do this through a sense of inferiority, because in 
 that case its nature would be changed it would 
 
4O PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 have humility which is the highest spiritual grace. 
 And he cannot mean that it would be hypocriti- 
 cally seeking the welfare of all while it was con- 
 sciously striving to make that welfare subservient 
 to its own base ends ; nor that it would look upon 
 life as a mere give and take, I will live for society 
 in order that society may live for me, for either 
 of these last would be a very unhandsome form of 
 life, unworthy of the perfected creation of God. 
 He must mean, then, that self-love will in sincerity 
 seek the good of society, while, all unconsciously 
 to itself, its real motive for this will be to secure 
 its own well-being. We often see this combination 
 in children, and those in self-love will be in a per- 
 petual childhood. They will have an arrested de- 
 velopment ; they will be in the innocence of igno- 
 rance, but will never attain to the innocence of 
 wisdom. But because they will have the social 
 sentiment, all manner of outward good will be 
 showered upon them. For our freedom is, after all, 
 conditioned : it cannot render us absolutely inde- 
 pendent of God, since, even if we do not love Him, 
 He loves us, and makes us, so far as our range of 
 life will allow, the recipient of His mercies. The 
 Divine goodness is really no greater towards a re- 
 generate man than towards the greatest devil or 
 degenerate man ; the gospel may be preached as 
 well in hell as in heaven, but the Divine good- 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY 
 
 ness can only give what the man is willing to 
 take. 
 
 This reduction of human nature, or the natural 
 mind, to Divine order is not for its own sake, but 
 for the sake of the spiritual mind, as a guarantee of 
 the integrity and permanence of the spiritual cre- 
 ation which is wholly an inward one. The race 
 is the natural end of creation ; the individual, the 
 spiritual end. The former is incidental to the 
 latter. Our natural consciousness must put on the 
 true form of life in order that there may be a basis 
 of continuity between the natural and spiritual ex- 
 istence. 
 
 The distinctively human form of life is a life de- 
 veloped exclusively from within to without. When 
 man shall have attained that, the Divinity of his 
 source will be properly avouched, and not before. 
 Then God will be able to fill him with the power 
 and peace of His own life; for it is our destiny to 
 have God's life in us our inmost and vital self, en- 
 dowing us with sweetness of affection, reach of 
 intellect, and a power of action spontaneous and 
 infinite. In the spontaneous life man perfectly 
 loses himself and perfectly finds himself. Here he 
 can say what every true creature of God is bound 
 to say : I and my Father are one. 
 
 I will hazard one comment upon a point in this 
 philosophy. 
 
42 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 As a metaphysical presentation, Mr. James's 
 statement of the difference between Creator and 
 creature is perfect [see " Substance and Shadow," 
 pp. 412-418] ; but it seems to me that another 
 method of putting it, equally correct so far as it 
 goes, would bring the thought more within the 
 reach of the practical mind. 
 
 Unorganized being, or God, tends to give Itself 
 utterly, and finds Its delight in so doing; organized 
 existence, or Nature, tends ever to preserve and 
 perpetuate itself; so one is the exact opposite of the 
 other. In human nature this instinct of self-pres- 
 ervation has a double action, corresponding to the 
 dual selfhood of its subject. One, which man has 
 in common with inferior existences, has for its ob- 
 ject simply the preservation of his life ; the other, 
 which is purely human, the preservation of some 
 quality or love that he holds dearer than his 
 bodily organization, which he feels to be, in fact, 
 the life of his soul, and according as the animal 
 or human side in him is more pronounced will 
 one or the other action of this instinct be the 
 stronger. In either case, however, the instinctive 
 desire is to keep, while the Creator spontaneously 
 gives. 
 
 Thus nature begins where spirit ends; the natu- 
 ral world sets bounds, so to speak, to the spiritual 
 world, i.e., as a conception of the mind ; not in 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 43 
 
 space, of course, for to the spiritual world, which 
 is the world of affection and thought, space does 
 not exist. 
 
 But as nature, or the natural creation, is abso- 
 lutely necessary in order that the spiritual crea- 
 tion may be begotten from it, so this instinct of 
 self-preservation has a certain Divine permission 
 to be which renders it innocent in itself, though it 
 is the fruitful mother of all evil. Iris to the mind 
 like the earth to the body. We must stand upon 
 it on penalty of being otherwise uncreated, but at 
 every step of our progress we must cast it behind 
 us. 
 
 When we have a perfect society, men will find 
 not only their lives but their ruling loves so much 
 better preserved and authenticated by the care of 
 all than they could possibly be by the fussy atten- 
 tion of each individual to himself, that this instinct 
 will perhaps lapse entirely to the consciousness, be 
 swallowed up in the social sentiment, so that the 
 inmost spiritual law, He that loses his life shall 
 find it, will become the actuating principle of the 
 most external natural life. 
 
 The peculiarity of Mr. James's mind of which 
 we spoke in the beginning his instinctively see- 
 ing creation from the creative side is strikingly 
 shown in one of his early essays, entitled " Prop- 
 
44 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 erty as a Symbol," in which he explains the in- 
 trinsic significance of the value put by man upon 
 the ownership of property. Now to most of us 
 'the selfish advantages arising from the possession 
 of property ourselves and from association with 
 those who possess it, are so obvious, that we should 
 never think of being puzzled for an explanation of 
 the estimation in which it is held. A much greater 
 mystery would seem to attach to the value put upon 
 birth, which in all ages and the most democratic 
 countries has been able to hold its own side by side 
 with wealth. 
 
 To Mr. James, every event of nature and history 
 symbolizes some great feature of human destiny. 
 Thus property symbolizes the perfect sovereignty 
 which man is destined to exercise over nature ; its 
 unequal distribution, the fact that a perfect society 
 will be a hierarchy, not a literal equality. The 
 church symbolizes a true society or brotherhood 
 among men. Man symbolizes the external ele- 
 ment, or the descending movement in creation ; 
 woman, the internal element, or the ascending 
 movement. The king symbolizes the power of the 
 coming man ; the priest his goodness ; the artist his 
 spontaneity, etc. ; "but it is the fate of symbols to 
 be ignorant of their due subordination, and to 
 claim to be the realities they only serve." 
 
 We close with a few quotations from our author 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 45 
 
 for which no place has been found in the body of 
 the article. 
 
 " The final cause of a phenomenon is the use it 
 promotes to something above itself." 
 
 " Every lower thing is involved in a higher." 
 
 " Every man claims to be estimated by himself ; 
 every animal, by its species." 
 
 " The devil is a conscious subject without any 
 unconscious object to control him." 
 
 " The ideal of the State is to reproduce upon an 
 enduring basis their lost paradise, while that of 
 the Church is to show men paradise well lost for 
 heaven." 
 
 " Culture is God's indwelling power in man." 
 
 " The tap-root of every man's spiritual character 
 is the conception he entertains of God." 
 
 "We rid ourselves of physical evils from 
 moral causes, and of moral evils from spiritual 
 causes." 
 
 " The only possible damage we sustain from evil 
 is not the suffering it causes, but the bosom-plea- 
 sure it affords." 
 
 " Our vices and follies, collective and personal, 
 have wrought us infinitely more advantage than 
 our virtue and knowledge have ever achieved." 
 
 " I am persuaded that no man ever suffered an 
 hour in God's universe without reaping, if he were 
 a good man, a quite endless internal profit from 
 
46 PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 
 
 the occurrence or, if he were a bad man, a quite end- 
 less external profit." 
 
 " A man contains in himself the stupendous con- 
 trarieties of heaven and hell, or the exactly equal 
 possibilities of the brightest spiritual day and the 
 murkiest spiritual night." 
 
 "The interests of our true manhood are our 
 eternal interests, and they have no more relevancy 
 to the life beyond the grave than they have to that 
 now present." 
 
 " Man's true good never comes from without 
 him, but only from the depths of Divinity within 
 him." 
 
 " Our life is always deeper than we know, is 
 always more Divine than it seems, and hence we 
 are able to survive degradations and despairs 
 which otherwise must have engulfed us." 
 
 " Our affections ally us with infinitude or God ; 
 our intelligence allies us with nature or the finite." 
 
 " Love is never voluntary, but always spontane- 
 ous. Its unconscious element controls its con- 
 scious element." 
 
 " God is the all of man's life; the power of man 
 at bottom is the power of God." 
 
 " To give the feminine element its hard-earned 
 but eternal supremacy of the masculine element 
 has been the secret inspiration of all past his- 
 tory." 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES. 47 
 
 " Evil is unknown at the heart of things." 
 
 " This makes the eternal distinction of man, that 
 the entire sparkling and melodious universe of 
 sense is but the appanage of his nature, is but the 
 furniture of his proper life, is but the platform of 
 his true individuality ; while the source of that life 
 or individuality is itself forever hidden in the in- 
 scrutable splendors of God." 
 
 " Love infinite Love is the final word, the 
 grand unuttered secret of Philosophy." 
 
 SOMERVILLE, MASS., Feb. 15, 1883. 
 
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