But the thoughts of which this work was the result were not appeased by its publication. They began to germinate afresh in a kindred, but in a different form. _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_ had for its immediate subject a position which was mainly insular--that is to say, the position, not of religion in general, but of the formal interpretations of Christianity which were at that time colliding with complete unbelief in England. But I had from the first--from the days when I was planning _The New Republic_ onward--urged that all doctrines pertaining to particular forms of Christianity were merely parts of a wider question--namely, that of the credibility of supernatural religion of any kind, and that this credibility must be tested, not by an examination of religious doctrines as such, or even of religious emotion in the purer and more direct manifestations of it, but in the indirect effects produced by it on the quality of life generally. Thus merely in the capacity of a thinker I felt myself presently impelled to a reconsideration of the contents of the life of the individual; and this impulsion was aggravated by certain domestic dramas which, in one way or another, came to my own knowledge. In describing my visit to Hungary I mentioned a young and extremely engaging lady, who looked as though she were made for happiness, but whose life, though prematurely ended, had had time since then to become entangled in tragedy. I had often, since I left Hungary, wondered what had become of her; but not till some years later did I learn, quite accidentally, what her story and her end had been. I was told few details, but these sufficed to enable me, by a mere use of the imagination, to reconstruct it, and see in it certain general meanings. Of this reconstructive process the result was my novel, _A Human Document_. It was not, indeed, due to the stimulus of this story alone, and of the philosophic meanings which I read either in or into it. It was partly due, I must confess, to the effects which Hungarian life had on my imagination generally--effects with which the affairs of this lady had nothing at all to do--and to an impulse to reproduce these in some sort of literary form. The castles, the armor, the shepherds playing to their flocks, the wild gypsy music, the obeisances of the peasants, the mysteries of the great forests--all these things, like an artist when he paints a landscape, I longed to reproduce for the mere pleasure of reproducing them. Such being the case, the heroine of my novel and her experiences became unified with the scenes among which I had actually known her.