Society the Redeemed Form of Man 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: 22 HIS SPIRITUAL CREATION EXACTS upon any other logical basis than this of his crea- tureship: that is to say, upon the basis of his referring his true or spi... more »ritual being infinitely away from himself, namely: to God; and claiming to himself instead a mere natural, phenomenal, or shadowy existence. At all events this is the view which I find myself forced to take of man's being and history, that is, of his spiritual origin and his natural destiny; and it is especially the view which I shall try to enforce throughout the present letters. Very well then: so far at least there is no room for misunderstanding. No one can deny that history demonstrates a divided empire in man. Every man of experience or observation knows that man is subject to a double law, one outward, natural, constitutional, so to speak, relating him whether he will or not to his fellow-man; the other inward, spiritual, creative, so to speak, relating him freely to God. The first of these laws has respect to man as a whole, or in a universal aspect, obeying the empire of necessity. The second has respect to him only in his individual capacity, obeying the inspiration of freedom. I repeat then: so far there is no ground for misunderstanding between us. But now I am going to say something which perhaps neither experience nor observation has made plain to you, and which may therefore give rise to HIS PREVIOUS NATURAL FORMATION. 23 misunderstanding, if I do not very fully explain myself. You know that I have traced the fact of man's divided existence to the truth of his creatureship, which requires on the one hand that he possess spiritual or invisible being in his Creator, and on the other natural or visible existence in himself. Because if man possessed only spiritual being in his Creator, he would be wi...« less