James associated informally with many like-minded American intellectual leaders, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Parke Goodwin, Charles Anderson Dana, Albert Brisbane, and George Ripley. James lectured, traveled, and wrote extensively on his views about Christianity, morality, Swedenborg, social redemption, and God's pervasive power in human affairs.
Today the works of Henry James, Sr., are only of antiquarian interest, but his influence upon his family was enormous. He encouraged free and easy chatter, dinner-table debating, freedom to attend church--any church--or not, reading and travel and museum attending--in short, an unmethodical, eclectic, intellectual foraging of the most stimulating kind. His father's writings may have influenced Henry James the novelist in some ways, but the influence was probably indirect in the main. After the old philosopher's death, his distinguished son William James edited The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1884) and sent copies to Henry, who replied with gratitude but added, "how beautiful and extraordinarily individual (some of them magnificent) all the extracts from Father's writings which you have selected so happily. It comes over me as I read them ...
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