ABSTRACT
JAMES, HENRY, SR Henry James, Sr (1811-82), religious philosopher, Christian socialist, sometime transcendentalist, and founder of his own private religion, was father to Henry James the novelist and William James the psychologist. Raised in a strict Irish Presbyterian and Calvinist household, Henry James, Sr, rebelled and at an early age took up instead the ideas of the Scottish minister Robert Sandeman, who preached vegetarianism, communal living, and the shunning of morality, considering egotism the greatest sin of Christians. As a young man, James Sr then became a follower of Charles Fourier, French utopian thinker whose communal phalanxes were spread throughout the US. James Sr later co-financed several Fourierist communes, notably Eagleswood in Rahway, New Jersey. Though a New Yorker, after 1842 he became a member of the Transcendentalist circle in Concord, Massachusetts. Through his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Sr was then led to Carlyle’s dinner table in England, where he met Bain, Mill, and other of the foremost philosophers of utilitarianism and British Empiricism of his day. In England he also experienced a spiritual crisis that cast him into total despair, until, through the English physician and homeopath James John Garth Wilkinson, he was led to the writings of the eighteenth-century scientist and philosopher of religion Emanuel Swedenborg. Thereafter, he wrote some dozen pamphlets and books interpreting Swedenborg’s writings, helping to elevate Swedenborg to one of the most important influences in popular American thought in the nineteenth century.
