“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Few people would see any connection between William James and Scott Nearing, and yet both were in their own ways peculiarly concerned with “the American soul.”

Nearing was born into the world just left by James, and he saw the industrial developments that at one time William James had anticipated with such vigor and optimism.

(I should note here that SN was evidently born in 1883, and that WJ died in 1910—which leaves a period of some 27 years during which their physical lives overlapped. So either Seth is in error here, or his words carry a symbolic meaning. But SN never met James, he told Jane in reply to her question.)

Your country, far more than others, has been a country of individualists, do-it-yourselfers—a country of enthusiasts—and of course some fanatics, but a country of pioneers in one fashion or another. As a young mean, Nearing, as he told you, was aware of spiritualism, and of those very aspects that were so explored by James, and he was fascinated. Spiritualism exists with such fervor in your country because Americans like the idea of a communication with the dead on an individual basis, minus the intervention of priests, and hence the pioneering spirit was early tuned to do-it-yourself séances and the like. Americans would explore the spiritual world as they pioneered the physical continent.

He became aware of the growing inequalities of government, and again saw in actuality the early industrial world perceived by James. But James was a gentleman by class, almost in European terms, and Nearing picked, say, the individualism of Whitman or even Thoreau over Emerson’s “inner independence.”