Woolf, T. E. Hulme, William James, and the Unseen

Abstract

This essay observes that Virginia Woolf followed nineteenth-century writers in using “the unseen” to adumbrate a realm of spirit divided from, yet profoundly close to, the sphere of ordinary experience. It argues that Woolf’s uses of “unseen” indicate a philosophical position resonant with that of William James, who speculated that what mediated between the unseen (for him, the source of all religious feeling) and conscious experience was what he called the subconscious. It argues in addition that Woolf’s position puts her starkly at odds with T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot, who insisted on a radical separation between the vital and human, on the one hand, and the absolute with which religion is concerned, on the other.