Introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James

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

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.

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.

" 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^

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....

" 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 —

" 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

" 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)