dom. In other words, it identifies the not-me exclusively with God, thus denying me, as subject, any proportionate or befitting object, short of the immaculate Divine perfection. And in so doing, it manifestly stifles Atheism on the one hand, by proving God the sole life of the universe; while on the other hand, it sops up Atheism's younger and feebler brother, Pantheism, in yet separating God from that universe by all the breadth of our spiritual consciousness, by all the amplitude of the finite me.

If you are desirous after a fuller investigation of the constitution of consciousness, I refer you to an article in Putnam's Monthly (New York, November 1853), entitled Works of Sir William Hamilton. An earnest attempt is there made to expose the vulnerable body of our orthodox philosophy, with what success I must leave you to determine. At present I hear you inquiring, what, after all, Swedenborg's rectification of our intellectual methods avails to the right understanding of creation, or to a scientific cosmology; and this question I at once proceed to answer.

I may answer it briefly by saying, that it avails thus much: without that rectification creation is inconceivable, is in fact a dense absurdity; and the old church is simply right in betaking herself, as we see her doing, in the person of all her actually living children, of all those whose intellectual life is not swallowed up in mere routine

and formalism, to the embraces either of Atheism or Pantheism. The hardier and intellectual sort among them will prefer the former terminus as effectually ending the journey, and giving the soul a long quietus. The tenderer and affectionate sort will prefer Pantheism, as still keeping up some faint semblance of progress, although that progress be decidedly inhuman, or from the solid back into the liquid, and even the gaseous state. But both sorts alike are the legitimate children of the orthodox church, and do but illustrate the logical dilemma into which her prevalent Naturalism forces all her honest and clear-sighted descendants. Nothing short of this explains the church's hatred of them, and her eager disavowal of intellectual complicity. She evidently feels herself endangered by their inability to keep counsel, and hates them accordingly very much as the convicted culprit hates the treacherous approver.

But you do not desire so brief an answer as this, and I had therefore better commit what I have to say to another letter.

Yours truly,

LETTER X.

MY DEAR W.

Paris, Nov. 29th, 1856.

I AM now going to discourse to you a little while about the two following propositions: first, that creation is strictly unintelligible on the orthodox hypothesis of personality; and, second, that it becomes strictly intelligible when you substitute an improved or scientific conception of that subject.

The orthodox hypothesis of spiritual existence, or of the me, imports that I am quite as absolute or finite with respect to my soul, as I am with respect to my body. It supposes that spiritual existence is equally absolute with physical, and consequently has as little dread of the conscience pronouncing me good or evil, amiable or hateful, and so limiting my spiritual personality, as it has of the senses pronouncing me blond or brown, handsome or ugly, so defining my natural personality. It accepts without any misgiving the insurgent dictation of the senses in this particular,

and looks upon the selfhood, or personal element in me, as spiritually claiming the same rigid fixity, the same absolute dimensions as my body. For example, I steal, commit adultery, or murder. Conscience tells me that these are evil and abominable deeds and my self-consciousness, instructed by the current theology and philosophy, appropriates this evil to myself, or pronounces me an evil man, justly abominable to God and all good men. There are others, who unlike me, refrain from all these misdeeds, who in all their domestic and civic relations strive to fulfil the golden rule, and do as they would be done by. Their selfconsciousness, again instructed by the orthodox philosophy of the selfhood, affirming its essential absoluteness, appropriates this good to them, or pronounces them good men, entitled to expect the blessing of heaven upon themselves and their posterity.

Manifestly, then, the orthodox notion stultifies itself. For it presents us two distinctly opposite beings claiming the creatureship of one and the same infinite power. It presents us two beings as vividly contrasted as evening and morning, only, unlike evening and morning, which both alike but in successive order melt into perfect day, these contrasted beings declare themselves absolute or unrelated, and refuse to merge therefore in any higher and unitary personality.

So sheer a contradiction as orthodoxy here

offers us, forces us of course upon one of two conclusions: either 1. that the good and evil man are not the final subjects of God, but only the intermediary and transient form of that subjectivity; in other words, that the moral life is not the true life of God in the soul of man: or 2. that the orthodox philosophy is wrong in her estimate of these men, they being not absolutely good and evil as she affirms, or good and evil with respect to each other, but only phenomenally so, or with reference to the divergent relation they bear to another and higher life. In short, their good or their evil cannot be attributed to themselves individually, and hence does not characterize them in the Divine sight, but must ascribe itself, all that is good in them, to their common creative source, exclusively, and all that is evil in them, exclusively to their common formative

nature.

No sane man can deny moral distinctions. The distinction of good and evil, truth and falsity, among men, is as palpable to the soul, or rational experience, as that of heat and cold, light and darkness, is to the bodily experience. The reason indeed is vivified by those differences, so that if you annul them you evaporate reason itself. But it is only the more clear, therefore, that such vital opposites, if you regard them absolutely or in themselves, and as unaffected towards some third and neutral term, cannot acknowledge the same