notes freom William james

Henry believed that GOd is incarnated ina ll of humankind; that the "fall" is not a fundamental part of the human condition, as it was for Calvin, but rather a result of individual egotism; and that human wellbeing lies in giving up egotistic pursuits by joining God's work of perfecting creation through liberating the natural divinity and goodness of human beings. SUrely a worthless hour of life when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in fellings of excited significance like these, engendered in someon by what the hour cokntains? Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any percepiton of life's meaning on a large objective scale. ONly your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human values in the wirnkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying loww in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hardworking conventional man a lifetime to build up. Walt Whitman,as he crosses brooklyn ferry: this is what he feels; Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west? sun there half an hour high! I see you als face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats, the hundred and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose; ffffff And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, that you might suppose. Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore; Others will watch the run of the flood-tide; Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east; Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, then sun half an hour high; A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred yearss hence, others will see them, WIll enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the seas of the ebb-tide. It avails not, neither time or place- disntance avails not; Jist as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so i felt; Just as nay .... yada yada yada... These, an all else, were to me the same as they are to you.