without a handle! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful tippings-up?"[9] To a modern ear these words confess not only the mental isolation and bewilderment of their author, but also the rarity of the atmosphere in which his philosophic impulse was struggling to draw breath. Like many other struggling spirits of his time, he fell into a void between two epochs. He was a theologian too late to repose on the dogmas and beliefs that were accepted by the preceding generation and by the less critical multitude of his own contemporaries. He was, in youth, a skeptic--too early to avail himself of the methods, discoveries, and perspectives which a generation of scientific inquiry conferred upon his children. The situation was one which usually resolved itself either into permanent skepticism or a more or less unreasoning conformity. In the case of Henry James there happened ere long one of those typical spiritual crises in which "man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust."[10] While he was still struggling out of his melancholy state a friend introduced him to the works of Swedenborg. By their help he found the relief he needed, and a faith that possessed him ever after with the intensity of revelation. "The world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him. Those elements were very deep ones and had theological names." So wrote his son after he had died.[11] He never achieved a truly philosophic formulation of his religious position, and Mr. Howells once complained that he had written a book about the "Secret of Swedenborg" and had _kept it_. He concerned himself with but one question, conveyed but one message; and the only business of his later life was the formulation and serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and personal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of man's proper relation to him. "The usual problem is--given the creation to find the Creator. To Mr. James it [was]--given the Creator to find the creation. God is; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are we?" So said a critic quoted in the Introduction to the "Literary Remains," and William James's own estimate may be quoted from the same place (page 12). "I have often," he wrote "tried to imagine what sort of a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely theological age, with the best minds about him fermenting with the mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories and counter-theories, and strenuous reasoning and contentions, about God's relation to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, furthered by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by passionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have developed his resources in many ways which, as it was, he never tried; and he would have played a prominent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in