Still, with this noble falsity, romance would be nothing if it were not true in detail.  Walter Scott, obliged as he was to conform to the ideas of an essentially hypocritical nation, was false to humanity in his picture of woman, because his models were schismatics.  The Protestant woman has no ideal.  She may be chaste, pure, virtuous; but her unexpansive love will always be as calm and methodical as the fulfilment of a duty.  It might seem as though the Virgin Mary had chilled the hearts of those sophists who have banished her from heaven with her treasures of loving kindness.  In Protestantism there is no possible future for the woman who has sinned; while, in the Catholic Church, the hope of forgiveness makes her sublime.  Hence, for the Protestant writer there is but one Woman, while the Catholic writer finds a new woman in each new situation.  If Walter Scott had been a Catholic, if he had set himself the task of describing truly the various phases of society which have successively existed in Scotland, perhaps the painter of Effie and Alice—­the two figures for which he blamed himself in his later years—­might have admitted passion with its sins and punishments, and the virtues revealed by repentance.  Passion is the sum-total of humanity.  Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, would all be useless.

Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them as they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed, but wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and Materialism—­two aspects of the same thing—­Pantheism.  But their misapprehension was perhaps justified—­or inevitable.  I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man’s improvement in himself.  Those who insist on reading in me the intention to consider man as a finished creation are strangely mistaken. Seraphita, the doctrine in action of the Christian Buddha, seems to me an ample answer to this rather heedless accusation.

In certain fragments of this long work I have tried to popularize the amazing facts, I may say the marvels, of electricity, which in man is metamorphosed into an incalculable force; but in what way do the phenomena of brain and nerves, which prove the existence of an undiscovered world of psychology, modify the necessary and undoubted relations of the worlds to God?  In what way can they shake the Catholic dogma?  Though irrefutable facts should some day place thought in the class of fluids which are discerned only by their effects while their substance evades our senses, even when aided by so many mechanical means, the result will be the same as when Christopher Columbus detected that the earth is a sphere, and Galileo demonstrated its rotation.  Our future will be unchanged.  The wonders of animal magnetism, with which I have been familiar since 1820; the beautiful experiments of Gall, Lavater’s successor; all the men who have studied mind as opticians have studied light—­two not dissimilar things—­point to a conclusion in favor of the mystics, the disciples of St. John, and of those great thinkers who have established the spiritual world —­the sphere in which are revealed the relations of God and man.