Acquaintances
I also knew Lowell, in his last phase; I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbour in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.
Actual (thought / deed) (knowledge / virtue)
When the 'infinite' spirit enters the human body, it is determined to certain limited forms of life by the organism which it wears; and its blank potentiality becomes actual in thought and deed, according to the fortunes and relations of its organism. The ripeness of the passions may thus precede the information of the mind and lead to groping in by-paths without issue; a phenomenon which appears not only in the obscure individual whose abnormalities the world ignores, but also in the starved, half-educated genius that pours the whole fire of his soul into trivial acts or grotesque superstitions. The hysterical forms of music and religion are the refuge of an idealism that has lost its way; the waste and failures of life flow largely in those channels. The carnal temptations of youth are incidents of the same maladaptation, when passions assert themselves before the conventional order of society can allow them physical satisfaction, and long before philosophy or religion can hope to transform them into fuel for its own sacrificial flames.
Americanism
[One critic] proclaims in large letters that I am an American. It is a true honour to be claimed when one might so easily be disowned . . . .
The limitations of my Americanism are easily told. . . . .
Yet as this book shows, my intellectual relations and labours still unite me closely to America; and it is as an American writer that I must be counted, if I am counted at all.
Causation / Physical Sciences / Life Sciences / Darwinism / Poetry
[C]auses can never be truly found, however, so long as appearances are not first reduced to the terms of substance, and the mechanism of this substance is not disclosed. For this reason only the exact physical and mathematical sciences can make any solid progress: in others, the superficial plane of the enquiry forbids all thorough understanding of the actual methods of change. In Darwinism, for instance, natural history seemed to take a great step forward: and so, indeed, it did, in that it conceived the possibility of reducing the superficial fact of diverse species, and the adaptation of their organs to one another and to the environment, to the mechanical influence of selection by death. Nevertheless, as the exact method of this selection was not traced, so as to become calculable mathematically, and as the exact origin of variations also remained unexplored, the positive gain and even the scientific tendency of Darwinism could come to be doubted: and it has not prevented a relapse into vitalism in some half-scientific quarters. The argument has even been heard that the "sciences of life" required a different method, because the mechanical method had not succeeded in dealing with them. These "sciences of life," however, are only the vague impressions and dreams of people unable to understand what occurs in nature: astronomy was once a "science of life," of that of the beasts of the Zodiac, or of the divine children of Heaven. Natural history, psychology, and all other fields where observation remains superficial, can be distributed only into impressionistic units and described in rhetorical terms, so long as the substantial movement and inner connection of their objects is not discovered. If that should occur, however, the sciences of life would really begin to exist, because the mechanism of life would begin to be clear. Such understanding of nature everywhere on the material plane, with its universal order and consecutiveness, would not destroy, of course, the appearances from which human investigation must start. Astronomical appearances endure, and so vital appearances always will; but if they were understood they would cease to be confused with powers or causes, and to the great gain of the spirit, they would be recognised as that coinage of the brain which fancy is very cunning in; and as the ghosts disappeared, poetry would come into its own.
Egotism Learned & Mistaken
Indeed, nothing beside his own purpose will have any value in his eyes, or even any existence. He will therefore inevitably act without consideration for others, without courtesy, without understanding. When he chooses to observe anything external—and he is studious—his very attentions will be an insult; for he will assume that his idea of that external thing is the reality of it, and that other people can have only such rights and only such a character as he is willing to assign to them. It follows from his egotistical principles that in judging others he should be officious and rude, learned and mistaken.
Externalizing Ideals
Man is still in his childhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not imposed on him against his will, nor can he find satisfaction in a good created by his own action.
Facts / Ideals
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for reality, but mad. The expedient of recognizing facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals . . . , although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination.
Facts / Ideals : Experience of
It is hard to convince people that they have such a gift as intelligence. If they perceive its animal basis they cannot conceive its ideal affinities or understand what is meant by calling it divine; if they perceive its ideality and see the immortal essences that swim into its ken, they hotly deny that it is an animal faculty, and invent ultramundane places and bodiless persons in which it is to reside; as if those celestial substances could be, in respect to thought, any less material than matter or, in respect to vision and life, any less instrumental than bodily organs. It never occurs to them that if nature has added intelligence to animal life it is because they belong together. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality.
Fashion
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitations without benefit. It marks very clearly that margin of irresponsible variation in manners and thoughts which among a people artificially civilised may so easily be larger than the solid core. It is characteristic of occidental society in mediæval and modern times, because this society is led by people who, being educated in a foreign culture, remain barbarians at heart.
Religion '26 at 114 ("Pagan Custom and Barbarian Genius Infused Into Christianity").
gscateg [used in introduction]
The importance and beauty of any incident lie in itself: and morally they transcend its accidental function in time and belong in the realms of truth and of value. These realms, being determinate and excluding many features that figure with equal right in the realm of essence, are contingent and, viewed from outside, unnecessary. Yet their importance and beauty, being intrinsic, are inalienable and forever actual in their own being.
gscateg [used in introduction]
Existence, as it inevitably generates truth, may on special occasions also generate beauty or goodness, but not with the same pervasiveness. Beauty and goodness are far more accidental than truth: they arise only at certain junctures, when various streams of events, already flowing in definite tropes, meet and mingle in a temporary harmony; a harmony which such of these streams as are organized into psyches may feel and rejoice in. Truth, on the other hand, arises by automatic radiation from every region of fact; since no event can occur without rendering it eternally true that such an event and no other fills that point in space and time.
Realms '72 at 445-46 ("The Realm of Truth: Radiation of Truth").
gscath [used in introduction]
I doubt whether the earth supports a more genuine enemy of all that the Catholic Church inwardly stands for than I do.
gsdef [used in introduction]
Such in brief is German philosophy, at least, such it might be said to be if any clear account of it did not necessarily falsify it; but one of its chief characteristics, without which it would melt away, is ambiguity. You cannot maintain that the natural world is the product of the human mind without changing the meaning of the word mind and of the word human. You cannot deny that there is a substance without turning into a substance whatever you substitute for it. You cannot identify yourself with God without at once asserting and denying the existence of God and of yourself. When you speak of such a thing as the consciousness of society you must never decide whether you mean the consciousness individuals have of society or a fabled consciousness which society is to have of itself: the first meaning would spoil your eloquence, and the second would betray your mythology.
What is involved in all these equivocations is not merely a change of vocabulary, that shifting use of language which time brings with it. No, the persistence of the old meanings alone gives point to the assertions that change them and identify them with their opposites. Everywhere, therefore, in these speculations, you must remain in suspense as to what precisely you are talking about. A vague, muffled, dubious thought must carry you along as on a current. [A] certain afflatus must bear you nobly onward through a perpetual incoherence. . . .
Egotism '40 at 17-18 ("The General Character of German Philosophy").
gsepi [used in introduction]
But if we adopted this language we should have to remove from the notion of causation the suggestion of an identical substance or force passing from an earlier to a later arrangement: the psychic expression of life is contemporary with its material phases, and it is in itself perfectly unsubstantial, evanescent, inconsequential, and impotent. It is no continuation of the same process that goes on in body, no transformation of the same energy. It is a spirit brooding over the waters; and the principle on which it arises here and not there, and reveals this sensuous quality and not that, is a mysterious corollary to the morphology of animal life.
gsepi [used in introduction]
Yet the element of succession is absent, the terms being simultaneous; and it is consequently more proper to name the feelings that arise the expression or entelechy or hypostasis of the bodily situation, and this the organ or instrument of the actual consciousness. For we must remember that while in the order of genesis consciousness is the last, most unsubstantial, and most fugitive of beings, it is first in the order of discovery, and in its intensity of being; so much so that, from its point of view, the whole realm of matter may be called merely potential, until actualised, discovered, and brought to a head in experience.
gsisms [used in introduction]
It is true that the romantic empiricist is not very radical . . . . In strictness, however, he has no right to this fond interest in himself. If he became a perfect empiricist he would trust experience only if it taught him absolutely nothing, even about is own past.
gsisms [used in introduction]
. . . I am not at all sure that the extant sayings of Democritus and the rest will justify everything that I put in their mouths. I use them only as Platonic types for points of view which are natural to my own mind . . . .
gsisms [used in introduction]
. . . I plead guilty to having treated Plato (and all other philosophers) somewhat cavalierly, not at all from disrespect or quarrelsomeness or lack of delight in their speculations, but because my interest has seldom been strictly philological or historical. I have studied very little except for pleasure, and have made my authors a quarry or a touchstone for my own thoughts.
gslife [used in introduction]
The same minds [the profounder ones] are, moreover, often swayed by emotion, by the ever-present desire to find a noble solution to all questions, perhaps a solution already hallowed by authority and intertwined inextricably, for those who have always accepted it, with the sanctions of spiritual life.
Poetry and Religion '00 at 6 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
gslife [used in introduction]
As common morality itself falls easily into mythical expressions and speaks of a fight between conscience and nature, reason and the passions, as if these were independent in their origin or could be divided in their operation, so spiritual life even more readily opposes the ideal to the real, the revealed and heavenly truth to the extant reality, as if the one could be anything but an expression and fulfillment of the other. Being equally convinced that spiritual life is authoritative and possible, and that it is opposed to all that earthly experience has as yet supplied, the prophet almost inevitably speaks of another world above the clouds and another existence beyond the grave; he thus seeks to clothe in concrete and imaginable form the ideal to which natural existence seem to him wholly rebellious. Spiritual life comes to mean life abstracted from politics, from art, from sense, even in the end from morality. Natural motives and natural virtues are contrasted with those which are henceforth called supernatural, and all the grounds and sanctions of right living are transferred to another life.
gslife [used in introduction]
As to the Socratic philosophy of love, there is an obvious spiritual tendency in it, inasmuch as it bids the heart turn from the temporal to the eternal; and it does so not by way of an arid logic but by a true discipline of the affections, sublimating erotic passion into a just enthusiasm for all things beautiful and perfect. . . . It lives by a poignant sense of eternal values—the beautiful and the good—revealed for a moment in living creatures or in earthly harmonies. Yet who has not felt that this Platonic enthusiasm is somewhat equivocal and vain? Why? Because its renunciation is not radical. In surrendering some particular hope or some personal object of passion, it preserves and feeds the passion itself; there is no true catharsis, no liberation, but a sort of substitution and subterfuge, often hypocritical. Pure spiritual life cannot be something compensatory, a consolation for having missed more solid satisfactions: it should be rather the flower of all satisfactions, in which satisfaction becomes free from care, selfless, wholly actual and, in that inward sense, eternal. Spiritual life is simple and direct, but it is intellectual. Love, on the contrary, as Plotinus says, is something material, based on craving and a sense of want. For this reason the beautiful and the good, for the Platonic enthusiast, remain urgent values; he would cease to be a true Platonist or a rapt lover if he understood, if he discounted his illusions, rose above the animal need or the mental prejudice which made these values urgent, and relegated them to their relative station, where by their nature they belong. Yet this is what a pure spirit would do, one truly emancipated and enlightened.
gslife [used in introduction]
Spiritual life is not a worship of "values," whether found in things or hypostatized into supernatural powers. It is the exact opposite; it is disintoxication from their influence. Not that spiritual insight can ever remove values from nature or cease to feel them in their moral black and white and in all their aesthetic iridescence. Spirit knows these vital necessities: it has been quickened in their bosom. All animals have within them a principle by which to distinguish good from evil, since their existence and welfare are furthered by some circumstances and acts and are hindered by others. Self-knowledge, with a little experience of the world, will then easily set up the Socratic standard of values natural and inevitable to any man or to any society. These values each society will disentangle in proportion to its intelligence and will defend in proportion to its vitality. But who would dream that spiritual life was at all concerned in asserting these human values to be alone valid, or in supposing that they were especially divine, or bound to dominate the universe for ever?
gslife [used in introduction]
Such a power of intellectual synthesis is evidently the mental counterpart of the power of acting with reference to changing or eventual circumstances: whether in practice or in speculation, it is the faculty of putting two and two together, and this faculty is what we call reason. It is what the idiot lacks, the fool neglects, and the madman contradicts. But in no case is reason a code, an oracle, or an external censor condemning the perceptions of sense or suppressing the animal impulses. On the contrary, in the moral life, reason is a harmony of the passions, a harmony which perceptions and impulses may compose in so far as they grow sensitive to one another, and begin to move with mutual deference and a total grace.
Genteel Tradition at Bay '31 at 59-60 ("Moral Adequacy of Naturalism").
gslife [used in introduction]
I think that pure reason in the naturalist may attain, without subterfuge, all the spiritual insights which supernaturalism goes so far out of the way to inspire. . . .
In this congenital spiritual life of his, man regards himself as one creature among a thousand others deserving to be subordinated and kept in its place in his own estimation: a spiritual life not at all at war with animal interests, which it presupposes, but detached from them in allegiance, withdrawn into the absolute, and reverting to them only with a charitable and qualified sympathy, such as the same man can have for the madman, or the soul in general for inanimate things: and of course, it is not only others that the spiritual man regards in this way, but primarily himself. . . .
. . . .
Reason may thus lend itself to sublimation into a sort of virtual omniscience or divine ecstasy: yet even then reason remains a harmony of material functions spiritually realised, as in Aristotle the life of God realises spiritually the harmonious revolutions of the heavens. So it is with reason in morals.
Genteel Tradition at Bay '31 at 64-67 ("Moral Adequacy of Naturalism").
gsmind [used in introduction]
[T]he peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
On America '68 at 56 ("The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy").
gsmind [used in introduction]
Although Americans, and many other people, usually say that thought is for the sake of action, it has evidently been in these high moments, when action becomes incandescent in thought, that they have been most truly alive, intensively most active, and although doing nothing, have found at last that their existence was worth while. Reflection is itself a turn, and the top turn, given to life. . . . [W]hen reflection in man becomes dominant, it may become passionate; it may create religion and philosophy . . . .
gsphil [used in introduction]
Suppose I arrange the works of the essential philosophers—leaving out secondary and transitional systems—in a bookcase of four shelves; on the top shelf (out of reach, since I can't read the language) I will place the Indians; on the next the Greek naturalists; and to remedy the unfortunate paucity of their remains, I will add here those free inquirers of the renaissance, leading to Spinoza, who after two thousand years picked up the thread of scientific speculation; and besides, all modern science: so that this shelf will run over into a whole library of what is not ordinarily called philosophy. On the third shelf I will put Platonism, including Aristotle, the Fathers, the Scholastics, and all honestly Christian theology; and on the last, modern or subjective philosophy in its entirety. I will leave lying on the table, as of doubtful destination, the works of my contemporaries.
gsphil [used in introduction]
And there are two things which I should be much pleased if people found in this book, although I am afraid they won't: one is a connected doctrine and theme, the other an assimilation in spirit, though not in language, between Greek and Indian philosophy. I have long thought that the earlier Greeks had virtually the same wisdom as the Indians, and that it was only an accident of race and rhetoric that they seemed physiologers rather than religious mystics. My Democritus is intended to establish between his 'atoms and void' on the one hand and his 'normal madness' on the other precisely the same opposition and connection that the Indians established between Brahma and Illusion. I think myself that this is the only right physics or metaphysics: but it is only half of human philosophy. Socrates (who is nothing in physics, or a mere child) is brought into [sic] supply the other half, the self-justification of Illusion, because it is the moral essence and fruit of life: and the 'Secret of Aristotle' (which I am much pleased that you take to kindly) is the means of harmonising the two points of view, and proving them to be not only consistent but indispensable to one another if the nature of things is to be understood at all.
Letters '55 at 222-23 ("To Robert Bridges, Paris, August 8, 1925").
gsrelative [used in introduction]
Suppose we discount as fabulous every projection of human morality into the supernatural: need we thereby relapse into moral anarchy? In one sense, and from the point of view of the absolute or monocular moralist, we must: because the whole moral sphere then relapses into the bosom of nature, and nature, though not anarchical, is not governed by morality. But for a philosopher with two eyes, the natural status of morality in the animal world does not exclude the greatest vigour in those moral judgments and moral passions which belong to his nature. On the contrary, I think that it is only when he can see the natural origin and limits of the moral sphere that a moralist can be morally sane and just. Blindness to the biological truth about morality is not favourable to purity of moral feeling: it removes all sense of proportion and relativity; it kills charity, humility, and humour; and it shuts the door against that ultimate light which comes to the spirit from the spheres above morality.
Genteel Tradition at Bay '31 at 51 ("Moral Adequacy of Naturalism").
Hierarchy of Goods
The idea of Christ and his precepts answer these questions unequivocally. All inspirations are intrinsically good, but they form a hierarchy, and the lower become sinful when they disturb the higher. Where the higher are not sent, the lower remain innocent and amiable, as in the brutes. In man, however, the dominance of the animal becomes ugly and vicious; while in mature or highly favoured souls such animal functions as are not indispensable—for instance, the sexual and the warlike—remain in abeyance, potential in the psyche and understood, but never actually exercised. . . .
Imagination on Human Scale
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.
index [used in body of index page]
. . . Cory and I have both been surprised to find "The Life of Reason" so much like my later views.
Letters '55 at 429 ("To John Hall Wheelock, February 23, 1952").
Instinctive love vs. Friendship
Whereas the images in the eye or the thoughts of the heart can agree but loosely . . . with material things, they may agree exactly with the images in another eye, and the thoughts of another heart. This free unanimity was called friendship by the Greeks, who alone among all nations have understood the nature of friendship. Barbarians of course may fight faithfully in bands, and may live in tribes and in cities, hugging their wives and children to their bosom; but such instinctive love, which all animals manifest, is not friendship. . . . [F]riendship is agreement in madness, when the same free thoughts and the same fraternal joys visit two kindred spirits. It was not for fighting loyally side by side that the Spartan phalanx or the Theban band were incomparable in the annals of war, but for fighting side by side for the sake of the beautiful, and in order that the liberal madness of their friendship might not end, unless it ended in death.
Man as End-in-Itself
Man, however, is not one of these purely instrumental animals. He is a selfish or, as he calls it, a rational creature, and nothing offends him more than to feel himself a slave.
Dominations '72 at 71 ("Natural Selfishness and Unselfishness").
Man as End-in-Itself
Nothing living is a means: all is automatic, spontaneous, justified by whatever it tends to and loves.
Metanoia
Thus materialism also, by its very hopelessness, opens the way to metanoia. For it, as for the Indian sages, the endless succession of catastrophes and paradises is an old story. Redemption is not to be sought horizontally, but vertically. Life would be a predicament in any paradise; the point is to make a fine art of it, whatever it may chance to be. Claim possession of nothing that you are not ready to surrender. Then you may live a reasonable life—free, as Lucretius says, from care and from fear, with judicious abstention here, with smiling participation there, with perhaps some small achievement on your own part, and above all with a little of that philosophy which the ancients preached and sometimes even practiced. Then, neither boastfully nor mournfully, you might say to yourself daily: I have lived.
Animal Faith '67 at 123-24 ("Some Developments of Materialism").
Metanoia
The remedy, which it will take centuries to make thoroughly efficacious, but which every one may apply in a measure for himself, is simply to deepen practical life, to make it express all its possible affinities, all its latent demands. Were that done, we should find ourselves in unexpected and spontaneous harmony with the traditions which we might seem to have disregarded. . . . . All traditions have been founded on practice: in practice the most ideal of them regain their authority, when practice really deals with reality, and faces the world squarely, in the interest of the whole soul. To bring the whole soul to expression is what all civilization is after.
Moralism
Here, before the pattern of my philosophy was fully disentangled, I find in the mouth of my Harvard teachers, full as they were of kindness towards my person, the latent and permanent principle of almost all the hostility I encounter. This principle is what I call moralism, and has two forms. . . . . It was moralism and not logic that led Royce to deprecate my separation of essence from existence.
Moralism was likewise the preconception that led James to think my aestheticism corrupt.
This same moralism, sometimes political, sometimes romantic or pseudological, sometimes humanitarian, animates the more severe strictures passed upon me in this book.
No Right or Wrong
The art of mysticism is to be mystical in spots and to aim the heavy guns of your transcendental philosophy against those realities or those ideas which you find particularly galling. Planted on your dearest dogma, on your most precious postulate, you may then transcend everything else to your heart's content. You may say with an air of enlightened profundity that nothing is "really" right or wrong, because in Nature all things are regular and necessary, and God cannot act for purposes as if his will were not already accomplished; your mysticism in religion and morals is kept standing, as it were, by the stiff backing which is furnished by your materialistic cosmology.
Poetry & Religion '00 at 16-17 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
Orthodoxy
Only an orthodoxy can possibly be right, as against the bevy of its heresies, which represent wayward exclusions, or a fundamental disloyalty.
Realms '72 at 106-07 ("The Realm of Essence: The Basis of Dialectic").
Rational Ideals (of knowledge and love) vs. Superstition (mysticism and unmeaning passions)
Accordingly Aristophanes, remembering the original religious and political functions of tragedy, blushes to see upon the boards a woman in love. And we should readily agree with him, but for two reasons,—one, that we abstract too much, in our demands upon art, from nobility of mind, and from the thought of totality and proportion; the other, that we have learned to look for a symbolic meaning in detached episodes, and to accept the incidental emotions they cause, because of their violence and our absorption in them, as in some sense sacramental and representative of the whole. Thus the picture of an unmeaning passion, of a crime without an issue, does not appear to our romantic apprehension as the sorry failure it is, but rather as a true tragedy. Some have lost even the capacity to conceive of a true tragedy, because they have no idea of a cosmic order, or general laws of life, or of an impersonal religion. They measure the profundity of feeling by its intensity, not by its justifying relations; and in the radical disintegration of their spirit, the more they are devoured the more they fancy themselves fed. But the majority of us retain some sense of a meaning in our joys and sorrows, and even if we cannot pierce to their ultimate object, we feel that what absorbs us here and now has a merely borrowed or deputed power; that it is a symbol and foretaste of all reality speaking to the whole soul. At the same time our intelligence is too confused to give us any picture of that reality, and our will too feeble to marshal our disorganised loves into a religion consistent with itself and harmonious with the comprehended universe. A rational ideal eludes us, and we are the more inclined to plunge into mysticism.
Sciences of Fact and Value
Was Christianity right in saying that the world was made for man? Was the account it adopted of the method and causes of Creation conceivably correct? Was the garden of Eden a historical reality, and were the Hebrew prophecies announcements of the advent of Jesus Christ? Did the deluge come because of man's wickedness, and will the last day coincide with the dramatic denouement of the Church's history? In other words, is the spiritual experience of man the explanation of the universe? Certainly not, if we are thinking of a scientific, not of a poetical explanation. As a matter of fact, man is a product of laws which must also destroy him, and which, as Spinoza would say, infinitely exceed him in their scope and power. His welfare is indifferent to the stars, but dependent on them. And yet that counter-Copernican revolution accomplished by Christianity—a revolution which Kant should hardly have attributed to himself—which put man in the centre of the universe and made the stars circle about him, must have some kind of justification. And indeed its justification (if we may be so brief on so great a subject) is that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values. While the existence of things must be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their results, in other words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness.
The Christian drama was a magnificent poetic rendering of this side of the matter, a side which Socrates had envisaged by his admirable method, but which now flooded the consciousness of mankind with torrential emotions. Christianity was born under an eclipse, when the light of Nature was obscured; but the star that intercepted that light was itself luminous, and shed on succeeding ages a moonlike radiance, paler and sadder than the other, but no less divine, and meriting no less to be eternal. Man now studied his own destiny, as he had before studied the sky, and the woods, and the sunny depths of water; and as the earlier study produced in his soul—anima naturcditer poeta—the images of Zeus, Pan, and Nereus, so the later study produced the images of Jesus and of Mary, of Heaven and Hell, of miracles and sacraments. The observation was no less exact, the translation into poetic images no less wonderful here than there. To trace the endless transfiguration, with all its unconscious ingenuity and harmony, might be the theme of a fascinating science. Let not the reader fancy that in Christianity everything was settled by records and traditions. The idea of Christ himself had to be constructed by the imagination in response to moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external points of attachment. The facts were nothing until they became symbols ; and nothing could turn them into symbols except an eager imagination on the watch for all that might embody its dreams.
Poetry & Religion '00 at 91-93 ("The Poetry of Christian Dogma").
Spirit Incarnate
For the freest spirit must have some birthplace, some locus standi from which to view the world and some innate passion by which to judge it. Spirit must always be the spirit of some body.
Superstition
[M]en became superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because they were not aware that they had any.
Poetry & Religion '00 at 108 ("The Poetry of Christian Dogma").