Substance and Shadow Author:Henry James Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. The profoundest of our sensuous judgments, and the basis of the religious instinct in us, is, that our natural force is final: that far from being... more » strictly incidental to a grander subsequent evolution of the Divine power in us, it is, on the contrary, its own end: thus that the pleasure and the pain, the health and the disease, the strength and the weakness, the growth and the decay, upon whose equilibrium our natural consciousness is contingent, are in themselves absolute goods and evils: to be received, the former with thankfulness, as a mark of the Divine favor; the latter with sorrow, as a mark of the Divine displeasure. Christianity has done very much to soften the fierceness of this Pagan inheritance in our bosoms, if not altogether to extinguish it. But the same prejudice in application to our moral instincts, still exists there unsuspected, awaiting the slow correction of science. Almost every one in Christendom, especially in literal or European Christendom, conceives that our moral judgments, our judgments of character, are a direct efflux of the Divine judgment: thus that where we see a difference of good and evil among men, God sees the same difference, onlyMoral Life in order to Spiritual. 51 in aggravated form; that where we approve the good man and condemn the evil one, He feels literally the same emotions in kind that we feel, only more intense in degree. I scarcely know an orthodox ecclesiastic who is not so content with feeding upon this windy fruit of "the tree of knowledge of good and evil," as virtually to agree with the old serpent in considering that diet as the soul's best nutriment, infallibly assimilating our intelligence to God's, in place of forever differencing it from His. Swedenborg effectually exposes this insanity, by provin...« less