"THE INDIVIDUAL" 435 



book did nothing more (and it will do far more) than to make the men with 

 whom the future of the country lies feel that religion is worthy the consid- 

 eration of thoughtful men, it would have been worth your while to write it. 



"The Individual," "The Citizen," and "The Neighbor" form 

 a trilogy of scientific and philosophical thought which seemed 

 to meet the public need, one might almost say the public crav- 

 ing, for some such exposition of the eternal problem of man's 

 relation to the Universe and his fellow beings. These books 

 follow one another without any formal plan, the one growing 

 spontaneously out of the other, or perhaps it is truer to say that 

 the later ones were sent on their way by the letters which came 

 to the author after the publication of "The Individual." 



In many instances these letters are pathetic in their revela- 

 tions of the comfort the writers extracted from its pages. In 

 the welter of modern thought so thirsty were these souls for 

 some spiritual staff to lean upon that they seized with eagerness, 

 and as if they were demonstrated facts, upon the hints and sug- 

 gestions of immortality so judicially expressed. Like much else 

 that he wrote, these books were partly the outcome of the 

 author's need to reduce to form the thoughts which thronged 

 upon him. The sympathetic motive upon which he so persist- 

 ently dwells in their pages was strong in his own case and was 

 of no recent origin ; from early manhood the subject had con- 

 stantly beset him. In some of his first letters he emphasized its 

 importance and often expressed surprise that it was so little 

 thought about and discussed. "Its light," he said, "had in the 

 beginning radiated from the family," and therefore the purity 

 and warmth of all family relations he especially cherished. The 

 curious thing about Mr. Shaler's mental work was that his dif- 

 ferent intellectual interests were never divorced from the actual 

 problems of existence, and that subjects like the above, although 

 removed from the practical questions of his profession, lived side 

 by side with them. 



Letters written to an author sometimes reveal the various 

 states of mind awakened by his writings, showing the good 



