parts of human nature which remain substantially unaltered in the face of
whatever changes of opinion, civilization, and religion. The truth that he
brings to light is not the sensational fact of a fashion or a period, but
a verity of the human heart, which may foretell, but can never be affected
by, anything which that heart may conceive. In other words, Hawthorne
belonged neither to this nor to any other generation of writers further
than that his productions may be used as a test of the inner veracity of
all the rest.

But of late years a new order of things has been coming into vogue, and
the new novelists have been among the first to reflect it; and of these
the Americans have shown themselves among the most susceptible. Science,
or the investigation of the phenomena of existence (in opposition to
philosophy, the investigation of the phenomena of being), has proved
nature to be so orderly and self-sufficient, and inquiry as to the origin
of the primordial atom so unproductive and quixotic, as to make it
convenient and indeed reasonable to accept nature as a self-existing fact,
and to let all the rest--if rest there be--go. From this point of view,
God and a future life retire into the background; not as finally
disproved,--because denial, like affirmation, must, in order to be final,
be logically supported; and spirit is, if not illogical, at any rate
outside the domain of logic,--but as being a hopelessly vague and
untrustworthy hypothesis. The Bible is a human book; Christ was a
gentleman, related to the Buddha and Plato families; Joseph was an ill-
used man; death, so far as we have any reason to believe, is annihilation
of personal existence; life is--the predicament of the body previous to
death; morality is the enlightened selfishness of the greatest number;
civilization is the compromises men make with one another in order to get
the most they can out of the world; wisdom is acknowledgment of these
propositions; folly is to hanker after what may lie beyond the sphere of