James

Albany, N. Y., who had come to that place from
Ireland in 1793, and his third wife, Catharine
(Barber) James. During his schooldays at the
Albany Academy, Henry met with an accident
which necessitated the amputation of one of his
legs, and two years of acute suffering, together
with the permanent impairment of his physical
powers, decisively affected his later career. His
ancestry was mainly Scotch-Irish of a strictly
Presbyterian persuasion, but his father's rigid
orthodoxy repelled him. At the same time the
state of comparative affluence into which he was
born gave him an uneasy conscience, and led him
to brood upon the injustice of the social system
which had, as he thought, unduly favored him.
After his graduation from Union College in 1830
and brief ventures in law and business, he enter-
ed the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1835,
only to discover after two or three years how
irreconcilable a difference divided him not only
from Presbyterian orthodoxy, but from any in-
stitutional form of religion whatsoever. Hence-
forth he sought religious truth and salvation for
himself in his own w'ay.

In 1837 he made his first visit to England; here
he came under the influence of the teachings of
Robert Sandeman, whose Letters on Theron and
Aspasio he edited in 1838 after his return to
America. In the early 1840*3 he sought a sup-
port for his views in a mystic and symbolic inter-
pretation of the Scriptures. At the same time he
became acquainted with the doctrines of Sweden-
borg through the writings of their leading Eng-
lish exponent, J. J. Garth Wilkinson, who became
an intimate and lifelong friend. The great crisis
of his spiritual life occurred in 1844 in England
and resulted from a further study of Sweden-
borg. On July 28, 1840, he had married Mary
Robertson Walsh, the sister of Hugh Walsh, a
Princeton classmate. His two eldest children,
William and Henry \_qqv'.], were born in New
York City in 1842 and 1843. Then he sailed for
Europe with his young family upon his second
voyage of discovery. Some months after his ar-
rival in England, being in a state of general de-
pression, he repaired to a water-cure, where an
acquaintance prescribed Swedenborg. The works
of this master moved him profoundly in two
ways. In the first place, they produced the effect
of a religious conversion. The moral anxiety and
strain resulting from "the endless task of con-
ciliating a stony-hearted Deity," was suddenly
relieved by a sense of the nothingness of his pri-
vate selfhood; and he was "lifted by a sudden
miracle into felt harmony with universal man,
and filled to the brim with the sentiment of in-
<festructible life" (Society the Redeemed Form

James

of Man, p. 53). In the second place, they enabled
him to express his ideas in articulate and system-
atic form, and to enter upon a career of literary
productivity. He never became a literal or ortho-
dox Swedenborgian, still less did he identify him-
self with any sectarian organization, but he found
in Swedenborg's interpretation of Christianity a
framework for his thought, a terminology, and a
method.

He still lacked a social philosophy. This he
found in the teachings of Fourier, which began
to be actively propagated in New York about
1840. The Brook Farm "Institute of Agriculture
and Education" which had been founded in 1841,
became a Fourierist "phalanx" in 1845, an<3 be-
gan the publication of the Harbinger as the organ
of its doctrines. When Brook Farm was aban-
doned in 1847, many of its leading members, in-
cluding George Ripley, George William Curtis,
Parke Godwin, and Charles A. Dana, migrated
to New' York where they became associated
with Horace Greeley and Albert Brisbane, who
were already proclaiming the Fourierist gospel
through the pages of the Tribune. James, who
had returned from Europe in 1845, and resumed
his residence in New York in 1847, became an
intimate of this circle and a frequent contributor
to both papers. His acquaintance with Emerson
began in 1842 and quickly ripened into enduring
friendship. In England he had become an inti-
mate of the Carlyle household and he had thus a
wide acquaintance among contemporary men of
letters. His published lecture on "Emerson"
(Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1904), and his "Recol-
lections of Carlyle" (Literary Remains, 1885)
record not only his personal experience, but his
penetrating critical judgment. The bulk of
James's writings, however, were devoted to the
defense of his religious doctrines. The titles of
his principal works indicate their central theme,
—creation interpreted as the "divine natural hu-
manity," or the immanence of God in the unity
of mankind: Christianity the Logic of Creation
(1857) ; Substance and Shadow: or Morality and
Religion in their Relation to Life (1863); The
Secret of Swedenborg, being an Elucidation of
his Doctrine of the Divine Natural Humanity
(1869); Society the Redeemed Form of Man,
and the Earnest of God's Omnipotence in Human
Nature (1879). I*1 h*8 works, despite the fact
that their subject-matter was often abstruse and
argumentative, he displayed extraordinary gifts
as a master of English prose.

James made two more trips to Europe with his
family, the education of his children coming now
to be a dominant interest in his life. The three
years 1855-58 were spent, chiefly for this pur-

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