ght to be "the better world," as was said by
Mme. Necker, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the last century.

Still, with this noble falsity, romance would be nothing if it were not
true in detail. Walter Scott, obliged as he was to conform to the ideas
of an essentially hypocritical nation, was false to humanity in his
picture of woman, because his models were schismatics. The Protestant
woman has no ideal. She may be chaste, pure, virtuous; but her
unexpansive love will always be as calm and methodical as the fulfilment
of a duty. It might seem as though the Virgin Mary had chilled the
hearts of those sophists who have banished her from heaven with her
treasures of loving kindness. In Protestantism there is no possible
future for the woman who has sinned; while, in the Catholic Church, the
hope of forgiveness makes her sublime. Hence, for the Protestant writer
there is but one Woman, while the Catholic writer finds a new woman in
each new situation. If Walter Scott had been a Catholic, if he had set
himself the task of describing truly the various phases of society which
have successively existed in Scotland, perhaps the painter of Effie
and Alice--the two figures for which he blamed himself in his later
years--might have admitted passion with its sins and punishments,
and the virtues revealed by repentance. Passion is the sum-total of
humanity. Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, would all be
useless.

Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them
as they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed,
but wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and
Materialism--two aspects of the same thing--Pantheism. But their
misapprehension was perhaps justified--or inevitable. I do not share the
belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's
improvement in himself. Those who insist on reading in me the intention
to consider man as a finished creation are strangely mistaken.
_Seraphita_, the doctrine in action of the Christian Buddha, seems to me
an ample answer to this rather heedless accusation.

In certain fragments of this long work I have tried to popularize the
amazing facts, I may say the marvels, of electricity, which in man
is metamorphosed into an incalculable force; but in what way do
the phenomena of brain and nerves, which prove the existence of an
undiscovered world of psychology, modify the necessary and undoubted
re