. 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 we find only by the most wide-awake searching that he means
anything else. Morality means the Selfhood, not social justice, not that
which binds the individual in his relations to society and to humanity.
Very true, religion has operated mainly with precatory rites for the
purpose of deflecting God's wrath, or, as Mr. James would say, with some
sneaking design upon His bounty. And morality has been the starched
buckram in which men walk and strut for distinguished consideration. But
religion in its true and native meaning is that which binds man to God in
loving unison, and morality covers all the relations which bind a man to
his neighbor, not assumed as decorations of the selfhood, but with all
divine charities flowing through them. So Swedenborg uses the word
morality. See his noble chapter on Charity in the "True Christian
Religion." And for ourselves, we have not the least idea of abandoning
these honored words either to superstitious formalists or handsome
scoundrels.

We have no such respect for the Devil as Mr. James has expressed for him,
even when transformed into the gentleman a