most infamous scoundrel; — no difference betwixt the most virtuous lady and the vilest prostitute ..." Swedenborgianism Around 1841, James began to be interested in Swedenborgianism when he read some articles in London's Monthly Magazine on the subject by J. J. Garth Wilkinson, who would become one of James's closest friends. In his quest, he met and befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, but did not find much satisfaction in Emerson's thought. Emerson introduced James to Thomas Carlyle. But it was in the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, religious visionary and teacher, that James found a spiritual home. In May 1844, while living in Windsor, in England, James was sitting alone one evening at the family dinner table after the meal, gazing at the fire, when he had the defining spiritual experience of his life, which he would come to interpret as a Swedenborgian "vastation," a stage in the process of spiritual regeneration. This experience was an apprehension of, in his own words, "a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life." James's "vastation" initiated a spiritual crisis that lasted two years, and was finally resolved through the thorough exploration of the work of Swedenborg and Christian mystics. James became convinced that, as he put it, "the curse of mankind, that which keeps our manhood so little and so depraved, is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd abominable opinionativeness it engenders." He remained attached to Swedenborg's thought for the rest of life, and never traveled without carrying Swedenborg's works with him. In 1845, James again returned to the United States and began a lifetime of lecturing about his spiritual discoveries. He devoted his mornings to writing, and published a number of discursive volumes devoted to the exposition of his thought. Social thought In the late 1840s, James became interested in the former members of Brook Farm, an experiment in communal living at West Roxbury, Massachusetts that lasted from 1841 to 1847, and in Fourierism, the school of utopian socialism that grew out of the thought of French social philosopher Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and which was a major influence in the last several years of Brook Farm. James was interested in utopianism as a