It is the mother-fallacy,” says Mr. James, “which breeds all these petty fallacies in the popular understanding.”  Those familiar with Dr. Mansel’s argument will see that he has not the remotest conception of Creation, except as an exploit of God in time and space, or of the Infinite, except as an unbounded aggregation of finites.  That God reposed alone through all the past eternities, but roused some day and sent forth a shout, or six successive shouts, and spoke things out of nothing into “noumenal” existence, were absurd enough, to use Mr. James’s nervous English, “to nourish a standing army of Tom Paines into annual fatness.”  The utter childishness of the theological quarrels over the first chapter of Genesis is obvious enough, so long as both parties swamp the spirit in the letter, or deny that the Finite can reveal the Infinite.

Following out his favorite postulate, that God alone has life in Himself, and all things else are only phenomena of life, Mr. James evolves the doctrine of Creation, of Man and Nature, and of Redemption, steering clear alike of the shoals of Atheism and the devouring jaws of Pantheism.  In his constructive argument he draws upon the vast wealth of Swedenborg, and herein, as we conceive, he has done a rare service to our literature.  Both the popular and ecclesiastical conception of Swedenborg would be ludicrously, if they were not shamefully inadequate.  He has been known but little, except as a ghost-seer, or as a Samson grinding painfully in sectarian mills.  Mr. James has done something like justice to his broad humanity, and his incomparably profound and exhaustive philosophy.  It was Kant who first called him a ghost-seer; but while Kant was doing his best to turn all realities into the ghastliest of spectres, and remove all the underpinning of faith, till the heavens themselves should tumble through, Swedenborg was laying the foundation of all knowledge on the solid floors of Nature, subordinating sense to science, science to philosophy, philosophy to revelation, each serving as the impregnable support of its superior, and all filled and quickened with the life of God, and lighted up with those divine illuminations in whose illustrious morning the first and faintest cock-crowing would scare the ghosts of the Kantian philosophy out of the universe.

We have regarded Mr. James for some time as among the first of American essayists.  There are few writers whose thought is more worthy to be spoken, or whose grand and nervous English displays it in finer shades and nobler proportions.  The present volume is his crowning work, and he has coined his life-blood into it.  But as honest critics we have some grounds of quarrel with him.  A man has no right to be obscure who can make words so flexible and luminous as he can.  In the present volume, his readers who here make his first acquaintance will inevitably misconstrue him, simply because he alters the fundamental nomenclature of religion and chiefly Ritualism, and