SOURCE: "The Philosophy," in The Elder Henry James, The Macmillan Company, 1934, pp. 189-218.

In the excerpt below, Warren discusses James's philosophy, examining in particular the relationship between the spiritual and the social.

Whenever the eye falls upon one of Mr James' 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 true relation is between mankind and its Creator. What he had to say on this point was the burden 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 analysed his terms or his data...