THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 (The Oxford History of Early Modern Europe) (Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 1995) (From the bookjacket: "One of the principal aims of the book is to provide a new type of integrated history which draws the different dimensions of the discipline firmly together in strictly non-technical language.).

BRITISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2000) ("Enlightenment histories claimed to be replacing error with truth, but they were in reality trading new myths for old--their own mentalities were mythopoeic too. Yet, however, blind to their own myth-making the enlightened were energetic anatomists of myth, going beyond accounts of individual fables to shape grand anthropologies--or pathologies--of the myth-making imagination self." Id, at 233. "The eighteenth century bought conflicts of allegiances for intellectuals, torn between cosmopolitan leanings and local loyalties. Being a 'citizen of the world' was attractive for those steeped in Graeco-Roman values and disgusted by sectarian and chauvinistic bigotry. Yet there a growing clamor, too, for national identity: enlightenment libertarianism, after all, demanded independence from oppressors, while a new fascination with roots and race, with vernacular, customs and history was fostering feeling of nationhood which transcend dynastic fealties." Id. at 239. "Postmodernism has one virtue at least--it has reopened inquiries into modernity and its origins. When, why, how did the 'modern' self and 'modern' society come into being? Should we root back as far as the 'self-fashioning' men of the Renaissance, or pitch out inquiries further forward?" Id. at 476.).

RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT

Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (Early Modern Europe Today) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981) ("The first revolution in modern Western history led to a breakdown of established authority of such major proportions that lower-class spokesmen were for the first time capable of putting in print coherent statements of their democratic and republican goals. At every turn these Levelers . . . directed the human condition and the natural world in language best described as pantheistic and materialistic." "The pantheistic materialism of seventeenth-century radical owed the origins to the magical and and naturalistic view of the universes which Christian churchmen and theologians had laboured for centuries to defeat. At the heart of this natural philosphy lay the notion that nature is a sufficient explanation or cause for the existence and workings of man and his physical environment. In other words, the separation of God from Creation, creature from creator, of matter from spirit, so basic to Christian orthodoxy and such a powerful justification for social hierarchy and even for absolute monarchy, crumbles in the face of animistic and naturalistic explanations. God does not create ex nihilo; nature simply is and all people (and their environment) are part of this greater All. Of course there are mystical tendencies in this pantheism and indeed the practice of magic can be but one of its logical conclusions." Id. at 31-32. I cannot help but sense that here, in early twenty-first-ceentury America, we are still in the middle of two wars concerning our 'intellectual traditions.' The first is between those who embrace the Enlightenment and those who do not embrace the Enlightenment. The second is between those who embrace the Moderate Enlightenment and those who embrace the Radical Enlightenment.).

SPIRITUAL IMPOVERISHMENT? AND, ON BEING A GROWNUP!

Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment, translated from the German by Henry Maas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1968, 1973) ("Kant, who adopted many of the basic ideas of the Enlightenment, and in some important respects went beyond them, began his essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? with the words: 'Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed minority. This minority is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. It is self-imposed if its cause lies not in a lack of understanding, but in the lack of courage and determination to rely on one's own understanding and not another's guidance. Thus the motto of the Enlightenment is 'Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding!' Idleness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a part of mankind, after nature has long since released them from the tutelage of others, willingly remain minors as long as they live; and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is most convenient to be a minor. If I have a book to reason for me, or a confessor to act as my conscience, or a physician to prescribe my diet, and so on, I need not take any trouble myself. As long a I can pay, I do not have to think. Others will spare me the tiresome necessity.'" Id. at 2-3. In short: take responsibility for yourself. Be a grownup! "The western world is now engaged in constructing a fundamentally secular and deconsecrated industrial society. This is a society in which--of it is achieved--all men will live in comfort. Perhaps there will also be a large measure of formal freedom and religious and philosophical toleration. But it is a society that threatens to deprive human life of all spiritual content, a society in which the growth of freedom is likely to be accompanied by the growth in numbers of those whose inner emptiness robs them of the desire to use it, a society in which religious and philosophical toleration will be made all the easier to achieve as spiritual impoverishment makes religious and philosophical commitment constantly more rare," Id. at 85.).

EDUCATING THE BIGOT'S ENEMIES

Stephen Eric Bronner, The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2014) ("I didn't write this book with the naive idea of converting bigots. If one or two of them, or their friends, should read it and change their opinions, then so much the better--but I have my doubts. My concern here is also not with analytically defining a philosophical category, specifying an empirical determination, providing inspirational tales of struggles against discrimination or persecution, or condemning an epithet. This book has a different purpose. [I]t is intended to help educate the bigot's enemies. Classic studies have insightfully analyzed different prejudice such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and religious intolerance. In practice, however, it makes little sense to compartmentalize them: the bigot rarely has only one target for his hatred. Prejudices tend to intersect in their ideological and political expressions. Solidarity in combating such clusters of hatred requires illuminating what is shared by all yet reducible to none." Id. at 3-4.).

CEASE "OBSESSING OVER THE INTERNAL RUMBLINGS OF THE SELF."

Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2004) ("The Enlightenment was a movement in which the striving for truth was more important than its acquisition: its major representatives understood reality as an experiment and sought to foster conditions in which the new might glimmer. They never embraced a self-serving ambiguity: they knew what they supported and knew what they were against. Their assumptions were simple enough: they viewed tyranny, ignorance, and misery as the product of natural rather divine forces; they believed that curing people of their vices begins by curing them of their prejudices; that progress is the enemy of cruelty; and that a fuller life lies more in exploring the rich diversity of the planet than in obsessing over the internal rumblings of the self. That general perspective retains its salience. Enlightenment thinkers assumed that society could be changed and that political engagement was necessary to bring that change about. They spoke for the lowly and the insulted, the exploited and the oppressed, and the constellation of values and attitudes that defined their undertaking are neither irrelevant or passe. They remain with us, they underpin the struggle of every progressive movement, and--perhaps more important of all--they project the type of world that ever decent person wishes to see." Id, at 167. "To be sure, from the beginning, 'progress' was open to perversion. It was capable of being projected back into the past, thereby justifying the exploitation of those considered lower on the evolutionary scale, and it could be identified with an escalator that moves society ever upward. The idea was always in danger of becoming regimented and stripped of it critical character. But it is absurd to doubt the fundamentally liberating vision with which the notion of progress should remain associated." Id. at 23.).

THE HISTORY AND BROADER IMPLICATIONS OF THE INSIDIOUS IDEOLOGY: ANTISEMITISM

Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumor About the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000) ("Genuine democratic education calls upon citizens to make decisions not only about what they want but also about what they need to know. Santayana's famous truism, that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, is probably not quite as true as many would care to believe. But the contemporary public still needs to understand what inspired the imagination of Nazism and other antisemitic movements all over the world. They deserve to see what informs the authoritarian personality. The work of the progressive critic begins with illuminating the unintended consequences of fabricated appeals to prejudice. This requires support for liberal political values rather than a knee-jerk response in favor of repression. Dealing with falsehoods is an immanent moment in arriving at truth, and coming to terms with the past means facing the evil it unleashed. There is nothing safe about freedom." Id. at 133. "The genuine struggle against antisemitism is ultimately no different than the genuine struggle against any other form of discrimination. It does not privilege the particular suffering of any group and it does not unconsciously embrace the values of its enemies. It instead places primacy upon a certain form of ethical conduct and a stance that explicitly speaks to the freedom of all minorities. Those who preach the particular without reference to the universal and who place faith about reason in political life, whatever their religion or race, remain mired in the past. Whether consciously or unconsciously, purposely or unintentionally, they are still ensnared in the grip of works like the Protocols. They indeed have learned nothing from the dire warning provided by Moses in the Old Testament: 'Accursed is he who misleads the blind.' (Deut 27:18)." Id. at 154.).

THE LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE: LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE

Morris R. Cohen, The Faith of a Liberal: Selected Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1946) (From "What I Believe": "The liberal views life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, but in which there is no guaranty that the new will always be the good or the true. Like science, liberalism insists on a critical examination of the content of all our beliefs, principles, or initial hypotheses and on subjecting them to a continuous process of verification so that they will be progressively better founded in experience and reason." Id. at 3, 8. "Unless men reason they remain sunk in blind dogmatism, clinging obstinately to questionable beliefs without the consciousness that these may be more prejudices. 'To have doubted one's own first principles,' said Justice Holmes, 'is the mark of a civilized man.' And to refuse to do so, we may add, is the essence of fanaticism." Id. at 9. If this is the criterion for 'being liberal,' then, quite sadly, twenty-first-century America is quite illiberal. Critical thinking, etc., are not values higher, only given lip-service. We are, in a real sense, living in an age of fanaticism. We need to re-embrace the Enlightenment! From "Three Great Justices": "[Holmes] was personally respected, but his rigor of thought was caviar to the general, and could not appeal to a profession that is engaged primarily inhaling the country's sines and is called learned only be traditional courtesy." Id. at 20, 23. From "Calvinism Without the Glory of God": "Now there are few doctrines so intellectually dishonest as doctrines concerning the rewards and punishments of the moral life. They may be well-intentioned people who say that virtue always leads to success and vice to misery. But it is an obvious and monstrous falsehood in a world where we profit by the good deeds of our parents and where millions are suffering unutterable tortures because of the deeds of foreign potentates. That those who suffer most have been wicked, and that those who triumph must have been virtuous, is one of the most inhuman beliefs in history." Id. at 72, 75. From "Democracy Inspected": "Men have always been more willing fight for their gods than to look at them too closely. This is certainly true of the modern god, Democracy. No modern subject, probably, has brought forth so much lyric liturgy and acrimonious debate devoid of illumination." Id. at 155, 155. From "The Dark Side of Religion": "One of the effective ways of avoiding any real discussion of religion or discriminating its darker from its brighter side is to define or identify to as 'our highest aspiration.' This is very much like defining a spouse as the essence of perfection or our country as the home of the brave and the free. Some particular religion, like some particular wife of country, may perhaps deserve the praise. But we must first be able to identify our object before we can tell whether the praise is entirely deserved. To define religion as out highest aspiration, and then to speak of Christianity Islam, or Judaism as a religion, is obviously to beg the whole question by a verbal trick of definition." Id. at 337, 339. "Religion strengthens superstition and hinders science or the spirit of truth-seeking" "Religion as an anti-moral force." "Religion and the emotionalize." "I mention Jonathan Edwards because his life and teachings enable us to turn the tables on religion by what [William] James regards as the great pragmatic argument in its favor. Accept it, Jams says, and you will be better off at once. As most religious condemn forever those who do not follow them, it is as risky to accept any one as none at all. And it is possible to take the view that they are all a little bit ungracious, too intense, and too sure of what in out uncertain life cannot be proved. Let us better leave them all alone and console ourselves with the hypothesis--a not altogether impossible one--that the starry universe and whatever gods there be do not worry about us at all, and will not resent our enjoying whatever humane and enlightened comfort and whatever vision of truth and beauty our world offers us. Let us cultivate our little garden. The pretended certainties of religion do not really offer much more. This is of course not a refutation of religion, or of the necessity which reflective minds find to grapple with it. But it indicates that there may be more wisdom and courage as well as more faith in honest doubt than in most of the creeds." Id. at 341-361).

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CONTAINS THE ROOTS OF THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

Stephen Eric Bronner, Moments of Decision: Political History and the Crisis of Radicalism , 2d. ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) ("Progress has always retained elements of regression. Just as the Enlightenment provided the conceptual and political framework for the Counter-Enlightenment, indeed, modernity has generated (and will continue to generate) ever new critical reactions by premodern forces." Id. at 171. In the following passage substitute "liberal democrats" for "social democrats," substitute "racism" for "anti-Semitism," "anti-immigrant" for "xenophobia," and "extreme-right Republican or radical evangelicals or those who can taps into them" for "Nazis," and one has a good slant on the politics of the 2016 presidential campaign or the state of early twenty-first-century America. "Social democrats underestimated the ideological hatred directed against them by their enemies and often mistakenly ascribed a distinctly 'capitalist' frame of mind to them. Anti-Semitism or xenophobia bear as little relation to an instrumental bourgeois worldview as the 'leader principle' or the desire to join a 'death head squadron.' Yet beliefs such as these inspired the Nazis and their followers. The SPD never fully understood that ideology is not merely epiphenomenal or derivative of economic concerns. Instead, shaping the perception of 'rational' interests, it often becomes a factor in the determination of 'objective' conditions. Different movements with different worldview can consequently perceive supposedly calculable, instrumental and objective issues in very different ways." Id. at 35. "Historical experience suggests that only the given disenfranchised, exploited and marginalized group can lead the struggle for its freedom--and that undertaking requires ideological confidence. The process begins, as Simone de Beauvoir put the matter in The Second Sex, when two members of the oppressed say 'we.' With the collapse of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and the new recognition accorded to the fight against prejudice, the rise of identity political makes sense. For all its cultural importance, however, it ushered in a fragmenting political dynamic. Identity politics was initially based on race, gender, and then later sexual preference. But identity has an existential element that requires increasing precision with respect to an authentic understanding of individuality. If a woman is also gay, black, and working class, for example, it is questionable whether her specific identity can be determined by the National Organization of Women or any of the more generic original groups. A person can obviously share multiple identities and new forms of 'hybridity' or 'inter-sectionality' will constantly appear. New organizations are then required to represent these more precise configurations of identity." Id. at 110-111.)

GOETHE

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Essential Goethe, edited and introduced by Matthew Bell (Princeton & Oxford Press, 2016).

PAMPHET DEBATE ON THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1764-1776

Gordon S. Wood, ed., The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate: I: 1764-1772 (New York: Library of America, 2015).

Gordon S. Wood, ed., The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate: II: 1773-1776 (New York: Library of America, 2015)("There is no honour but what is founded in Justice and Virtue. Take these away, and what is called so is mere name; it maybe whim, it may be caprice, it may be pride, it may be selfish-ness: But HONOUR it can not be." Samuel Seabury (aka A. W. Farmer), The Congress Canvassed: or An Examination into The Conduct of the Delegates, at Their Grand Convention Held in Philadelphia, Sept. 1, 1774 (1774).).

LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS

Louisa Thomas, Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams (New York: Penguin Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "An intimate portrait of Louisa Catherine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams, who witnessed firsthand the greatest transformation of her time.").

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 2016) (Food for thought regarding legal education: "In his first months town, John Quincy Adams barely had time to look up for the reading mass of legal texts he was obliged to master--William Blackstone's four-volume Commentaries, surveying English law, Sir Edward Coke's Institutes of the Law of England, Sir Michael Foster's Crown Law, and the like. Fortunately for Adams, Theophilus Parsons was an unusually erudite attorney, a serious dabbler in botany, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as a master of the classics. He assigned his charges words of history and ethics in order to ward off the 'universal skepticism' that comes of 'defending indiscriminately the good and the bad.'" Id. at 51.).

ABIGAIL ADAMS

Abigail Adams, Letters, edited by Edith Gelles (New York: Library of America, 2016).

JOHN ADAMS

John Adams, Revolutionary Writings 1755-1775, edited by Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2011).

John Adams, Revolutionary Writings 1775-1783, edited by Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America. 2011) (From the Diary, May 17, 1779: "This Evening L. said that Mathematicians were never good Company. That Mathematics made a Man unhappy. That they never were good writers. "I said no nor the Lawyers--it had been often observed that Lawyers could not write. "L. said that Observation is not just, there are many other Instances of that besides you.--This looks like Art, but was too obvious. "I said, the Roman Lawyers were good Writers. Justinian Institutes were pure as Classics. Several French Lawyers had been fine Writers as Cochin, &c. [] and some English Lawyers as Bacon, Claredon, Couper, Blackstone. But it was a common Observation in England, and I found it as common in Paris, that Lawyer were generally bad Writers." Id. at 211, 212.).

John Adams, Writings from the New Nation 1784-1826, edited by Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2016).

AMERICAN RELIGION: DIVINITY OF THE SELF

Harold Bloom, American Religious Poems: An Anthology, edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba (New York: Library of America, 2006) ("After the birth of the United States, we produced no devotional poets of high merit." Id. at xxviii. "Any distinction between sacred and secular literature is finally a political judgment, and therefore irrelevant in the realms if the aesthetic. The United States, already of plutocracy, flickers these days towards theocracy. A theocratic American doubtless will distinguish between sacred and secular utterances, but Whitmanian democracy fuses them in the divinity of the self, which is our native understanding of the Resurrection  as an escape form history, that is to say, from European time." Id. at xxviii-xxix.).

JONATHAN EDWARDS AND THE LITTLE AWAKENING

Jonathan Edwards, Writing from the Great Awaking, Philip F. Gura, ed. (New York: Library of America, 2013) (From the book jacket: "For five months during the winter and spring of 1734-35 the frontier town of Northampton, Massachusetts, experienced a surge in religious conversions, something that has occurred several times before, in its eighty-year history. What made this revival (now known as 'the Little Awakening') different was the conviction of the town's young minister that the Holy Spirit was undertaking world-shaking work in the wilds of western New England, and his determination to publicize it in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls, a dramatic account that quickly became an inspiration for evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic.").

MENTAL HEALTH

Bernhard Schlonl Self's Deception: A Gerhard Self Mystery, translated from the German by Peter Constantine (New York: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original, 2007) ("I spent the following day at the municipal library, reading up on psychiatry. []  I found mental health defined as the ability to play the social game well. Someone is mentally ill when we no longer take him seriously because he does not play along or does not play along well. A chill ran down my spine." Id. at 59-60.).

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN 7

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon: A New Edition and Translation of Le phenomene humain by Sarah Appleton-Weber, with a foreword by Brian Swimme (Brighton, England. & Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 1999) ("These pages represent an effort to see and to show what the human being becomes, what the human being requires, if placed wholly and completely in the context of appearance." "Why should we try to see? And why turn our eyes more particularly toward the human object?" "Seeing. One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing--if  not ultimately, at least essentially. To be more is to be more united--and this sums up and is the very conclusion of the work to follow. But unity grows, an we will affirm this again, only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more. Are not the perfection of an animal and the supremacy of the thinking being measured by the penetration and power of synthesis of their glance? To try to see more and to see better is not, therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence. And thus, to a higher degree, this is the human condition." Id. at 3.),

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN 6

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Toward the Future (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt/A Helen and Kurt Wolf Book, 1975).

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN 5

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy, translated from the French by Rene Hague (New York: A Harvest Book/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt, 1978) ("Hypothesis: a very poor choice of word to designate the supreme spiritual act by which the dust-cloud of experience takes on form and is kindled at the fire of knowledge." Id. at 9.).

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN 4

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001) ("Let us establish ourselves in the divine milieu. There we all find ourselves where the soul is most deep and where matter is most dense. There we shall discover, where all its beauties flow together, the ultra-vital, the ultra-sensitive, the ultra-active point of the universe. And, at the same time, we shall feel the plenitude of our powers of action and adoration effortlessly ordered within our deepest selves." " But the fact that all the external springs of the world should be co-ordinated and harmonised at that privileged point is not the only marvel. By a complementary marvel, the man who abandons himself to the divine milieu feels his inward powers clearly directed and vastly expanded by it with a sureness which enables him to avoid, like child's play, the reefs on which mystical ardour has so often foundered." Id. at 87.).

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN 3

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of the Matter, translated from the French by Rene Hague (New York: A Hellen and Kurt Wolf Book. A Harvest Nook; Harcourt, 1978) (From "The Christic": "Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze." Id. at 80, 103.).

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN 2

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, translated from the French by Norman Denny (New York: Image Books/ Doubleday, 1964) (From "The Grand Option": "By virtue of the emergence of Thought a special and novel environment has been evolved among human individuals within which they acquire the faculty of associating together, and acting upon one another, no longer primarily for the preservation and continuance of the species but for the creation of a common consciousness. In such an environment the differentiation born of union may act upon that which is most unique and incommunicable in the individual, namely his personality. Thus socialization, whose hour seems to have sounded for Mankind, does not by any means signify the ending of the Era of the Individual upon earth, but far more its beginning. All that maters at this crucial moment is that the massing together of individualities should not take the form of a functional and enforced mechanization of human energies (the totalitarian principle), but of a 'conspiration' informed with love. Love has always been carefully eliminated from realist and positive concepts of the world; but sooner or later we shall have to acknowledge that it is the fundamental impulse of life, or, if you prefer, the one natural medium in which the rising course of evolution can proceed. With love omitted there is truly nothing ahead of us except the forbidding prospect of standardization and enslavement--the doom of ants and termites. It is through love and within love that we must look for the deepening of our deepest self, in the life-giving coming together of humankind. Love is the free and imaginative outpouring of the spirit over all unexplored paths. It links those who love in bonds that unite but do not confound, causing them to discover in their mutual contact an exaltation capable, incomparably more than any arrogance of solitude, of arousing in the heart of their being all that they possess of uniqueness and creative power." Id. at 28, 45-46. From the "Conclusion": "Forced against one another by the increase in their numbers and the multiplication of their interrelations--compressed together by the activation of a common force and the awareness of a common distress--the men of the future will form, in some way, but one single consciousness; and since, once their initiation is complete they will have gauged the strength of the associated minds, the density of the universe and the narrowness of their prison, this consciousness will be truly adult and of age." Id. at 308, 308-309.).

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDiN 1

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution: Reflections on Science and Religion, translated from the French by Rene Hague (New York: A Harvest Book/A Helen and Kurt Woolf Book/Harcourt, 1974) (From "How I Believe": "The great appeal of the Eastern religion . . . is that they are supremely universal and cosmic. Never perhaps has the sense of the Whole, which is the life-blood of all mysticism, flowered more exuberantly than in the plains of India. It is there, when a synthetic history of religions comes to be written, that we shall have to locate, some centuries before Christ, the birth of pantheism. It is there again, when the expectation of a new revelation is growing more intense, that in our days the eyes of modern Europe are turned. Governed . . . by love of the world, my own individual faith was inevitably peculiarly sensitive to Eastern influences; and I am perfectly conscious of having felt their attraction, until the day came when it became clear to me that by the same words the East and I understood different things. For the Hindu sage, spirit is the homogeneous unity in which the complete adept is lost to self, all individual features and values being suppressed. All quest for knowledge, all personalization, all earthly progress are so many diseases of the soul. Matter is dead weight and illusion. By contrast, spirit for me . . . the unity by synthesis in which the saint realizes his full being, carrying to the furthest possible point what differentiates its nature, and the particular resources it possesses. Knowledge and power--that is the only road that leads to freedom. Matter is heavy loaded, throughout, with sublime potentialities. Thus the East fascinates me by its faith in the ultimate unity of the universe; but the fact remains that the two of us, the East and I, have two diametrically opposed conceptions of the relationship by which there is communication between the totality and its elements. For the East, the One is seen as a suppression of the multiple; for me, the One is born from the concentration of the multiple. Thus, under the same monist appearances, thee are two moral systems, two metaphysics and two mysticisms. Once the ambiguity is made plain, no more will be needed I think (since Eastern religions logically lead to passive renunciation) for our modern world, eager as it is to find above all a religious vindication for its achievements, to reject them. For me, in any case, their current has ipso facto lost it power. The God whom I seek must reveal himself to me as a savior of man's work. I thought that I could discern him n the East. But it is clear that he awaited me at the other end of the horizon in those areas more recently opened to human mysticism by the 'road of the West'.  Id. at 96, 121-123.").