Alas for churches in New England! We be all dead men, for the Transcendentalists have come! They say there is no Christ; no God; no soul; only “an absolute nothing,” and Hegel is the Holy Ghost. Our churches will be pulled down; there will be no Sabbath; our wives will wear the breeches, and the Transcendentalists will ride over us rough shod.10
Who precisely were these shadowy figures associated with all things German? A large number were Unitarian clergymen—Cyrus Bartol, Charles Timothy Brooks, Orestes Brownson, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Convers Francis, William Henry Furness, William B. Greene, Frederic Henry Hedge, Sylvester Judd, Samuel Osgood, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Samuel Robbins, Caleb Stetson, and Thomas T. Stone the most prominent. Some remained in the ministry as Unitarians; others redefined the nature of the churches they led—Clarke and Parker, the most notable examples; while still others left the church altogether. Brownson became an editor and social reformer, for example; Dwight became the nation’s foremost music critic; Cranch a poet and painter; and Emerson a lecturer and writer.
There also were many in the cohort—among them, prominent women—who found the path to Transcendentalism in other ways, often through association with one or more of the above-named individuals. Such was the case with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who served as amanuensis to the great Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing before joining the educational reformer Bronson Alcott as a teacher in his primary school, which was based on Transcendentalist principles. George Ripley’s wife, Sophia, was at his side when he decided to begin a socialist commune; she oversaw its well-regarded school. Margaret Fuller’s closest teenage friend was James Freeman Clarke, with whom she studied German and prepared herself for a career as a writer and women’s rights advocate. In turn, she influenced such younger women as Caroline Healey Dall, Caroline and Ellen Sturgis, and Anna Ward, all of whom gravitated in the Transcendentalist orbit. Still other fellow travelers were Emerson’s protégés, Henry David Thoreau, the most famous, and younger aspiring writers such as Jones Very, Charles King New-comb, and Charles Stearns Wheeler also taking inspiration from him. The poet William Ellery Channing, nephew of the Unitarian clergyman of the same name, owed much to his association with Thoreau.
Finally, there were important second-generation representatives who carried the Transcendentalist standard into the Gilded Age. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Unitarian minister and the movement’s first historian, was among these, as were fellow clergy David Wasson, John Weiss, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow (younger brother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and Moncure Conway. Thomas Wentworth Higginson began his career as a clergyman but achieved most fame as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Franklin Sanborn, abolitionist, social reformer, and biographer of many individuals in the movement, rounds out these important late-nineteenth-century representatives.
Before 1830, however, there was no cohesive or identifiable movement, simply “like-minded” people who for different reasons were critical of contemporary religious and philosophical thought and had discovered in a novel body of European ideas a way to address this dissatisfaction. In these years Transcendentalism is best considered as a way of perceiving the world, centered on individual consciousness rather than on external fact. This hallmark persisted for five decades, even as adherents quarreled among themselves as to the implication of such an epistemology. Evident among a remarkably varied group of thinkers, more than anything else this emphasis on the primacy of self-consciousness defined American Transcendentalism.
Beginning in the 1830s, there were points of convergence or intersection when certain thinkers recognized common interests and concerns, times that Herman Melville, speaking of his chance encounter with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works that changed his life, memorably termed “shock[s] of recognition.” Such moments of heightened self-awareness—when adherents, supporters, and critics alike came to use the term “Transcendentalism” in full confidence that it had an identifiable, if not fully agreed on, meaning—are crucial to the group’s history. The year 1836 in particular saw the appearance of several books and pamphlets that exemplified the religious and philosophical interests of the group but also considerably confused the public as to the term’s precise meaning. By the early 1840s, however, participants and observers began to publish detailed analyses that now provide convenient benchmarks for understanding how the general public perceived Transcendentalism. In particular, in 1842 the movement’s identity came into sharp focus.
This year was important in the lives of several key Transcendentalists. Tragedy struck both the Emerson and Thoreau families, with the losses of the Emerson’s five-year-old son, Waldo, to scarlet fever, an event that marked a decisive shift in this thinker’s philosophy, and of Thoreau’s older brother John, who succumbed to painful death from lockjaw. That same year, Theodore Parker published A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, his magnum opus of comparative religion, and Orestes Brownson his Mediatorial Life of Jesus, a pamphlet that marked an important turning point in his journey from Transcendentalism to Roman Catholicism.
Adding to the heightened self-consciousness such events engendered, two years earlier the first issue of The Dial, a quarterly periodical first edited by Margaret Fuller and devoted to the intellectual and social interests of the group, had appeared, and by 1842 its reputation as the chief organ of the New Thought was well established. At around the same time, on West Street in Boston, Elizabeth Peabody opened a foreign-language bookstore and lending library, making available a remarkable range of journals and books from France, Germany, and England. In 1841 George Ripley had resigned his pulpit at Boston’s Purchase Street Church to found the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, the period’s most famous utopian experiment; and Horace Greeley assumed editorship of the daily New-York Tribune, in which he touted his reformist agenda (and any who supported it, particularly the Transcendentalists ).
By 1842, then, Transcendentalism was squarely in the public eye, and Americans wanted to know more about it. Serendipitously, three important assessments of it, one by an insider, the other two by more objective observers, appeared. In December 1841 Emerson himself, never wholly comfortable with the Transcendentalist label but now more frequently acknowledged as one of the movement’s chief representatives, delivered a lecture in Boston on “The Transcendentalist” in a series called “Signs of the Times.” The following month he published the piece in The Dial, then under his editorship. Charles Mayo Ellis, a Massachusetts attorney active in the antislavery movement, anonymously provided a book-length account in his Essay on Transcendentalism. Finally, James Murdock, who had recently been a professor at the Andover Theological Seminary, brought forward a third assessment in his Sketches of Modern Philosophy, a lengthy analysis of the rise of German Idealism that concludes in a discussion of its American incarnations. What did these three say of the radical philosophical and religious principles that most identified Transcendentalist thought and united such varied individuals?
Ellis is the most helpful because he is analytic. Having in mind the public’s great discomfort with Transcendentalism, vague and threatening as it seemed, he tried to calm such fears. Simply put, he said, Transcendentalism maintains “that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses, or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world.”11
How could this be objectionable or dangerous? The problem lay in the implications of such belief. When Ellis discussed God’s “immanent presence in the spiritual world” a few pages later, for example, he made a critical distinction:
This, then, is the doctrine of Transcendentalism, the substantive, independent existence of the soul of man, the reality of conscience, the religious sense, the inner light, of man’s religious affections, his knowledge of right and truth, his sense of duty … his love for b
eauty and holiness, his religious aspirations—with this it starts as something not dependent on education, custom, command, or anything beyond man himself.12
Innately present in each individual, in other words, is a spiritual principle that, of itself, without any external stimuli, allows one to distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, God and Satan, and it supersedes any outward laws or injunctions. Transcendentalism, he continued, is thus predicated “on the reality of the spiritual or religious element in man; his inborn capacity to perceive truth and right, so that moral and religious truths can be proved to him with the same degree of certainty that attends all material demonstrations.”13 The highest law comes from the promptings of the spirit, a potentially anarchic belief held in check, Transcendentalists believed, by the universality of the religious sentiment.
Ellis contrasted this conception of spirituality to that predicated on the opposing worldview. The other, the “old” way of thinking about man’s acquisition of knowledge, he writes, is one in which he “derives all ideas from sensations, [and which] leads to atheism, to a religion which is but self-interest—an ethical code which makes right synonymous with indulgence of appetite, justice one with expediency and reduces our love of what is good, beautiful, true and divine, to habit, association, or interest.”14 The “old,” in other words, is based in the empirical philosophy of John Locke—who believed that knowledge derived from sensory experience—and his disciples in the Scottish Common Sense school—Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid, and Thomas Brown—who adumbrated his ideas. Whatever else Transcendentalists represented, in other words, they revolted against this empiricism and the putative self-interest on which it was based.
Throughout his small book, Ellis eschewed denominational backbiting as he argued for this universal religious sentiment. Ellis sought, in other words, to move the discussion from debates over doctrine to consideration of the philosophy of religion. Rightly understood, he explained, Transcendentalism was not concerned with “the divine origin of the Sabbath or church,” nor with “the authenticity or authority of the old or new testament, their infallible or plenary inspiration,” questions that for years had fueled heated debates between Unitarians and their more conservative Trinitarian brethren. Addressing the Unitarians’ conservative wing, he explained that Transcendentalism did not have anything to do with “the trinity or unity, the humanity or divinity of the Saviour.” Such questions, he explained, were for “critics, historians, divines, [and] theologians,” while this new faith pertained to one’s personal relation to the spirit. Writing in The Dial the year before, the minor Transcendentalist J. A. Saxton put it more bluntly: “All men mostly, perhaps, unconsciously, believe and act upon [this spiritual principle].” Transcendentalism is thus “the practical philosophy of belief and conduct,” and “every man is a transcendentalist.”15
In contrast, James Murdock, until 1829 a professor of sacred rhetoric and ecclesiastical history at Andover, who retired to New Haven to pursue scholarship in church history, devoted the last three chapters of his study of German Idealism to an elucidation of how Americans had appropriated and extended the European “speculative” tradition. Essentially a genealogy of Idealist philosophy from Kant through Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the book is remarkable for how thoroughly and lucidly it introduces so potentially abstruse a topic.
Murdock devoted his first chapter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s redaction of Kant in Aids to Reflection, and thus Coleridge’s influence, in the 1820s, on James Marsh, a Trinitarian Congregationalist who was president of the University of Vermont. Marsh’s explanation of the distinction, in his lengthy “Preliminary Essay” to Coleridge’s work, between “Reason”—that is, intuition or conscience—and “Understanding”—the rational, logical faculty—did much to bring German philosophy to public attention. Similarly, in his final chapter, Murdock discussed Frederick Rauch, the late president of Marshall College in Pennsylvania, whose Psychology, or A View of the Human Soul (1840) similarly popularized Hegel’s ideas. Most germane, however, is Murdock’s chapter sandwiched in between—“American Transcendentalism”—in which he explored several recent publications by members of that group, including a lengthy essay in The Dial in which Harvard Divinity College graduate William Dexter Wilson traced America’s interest in German philosophy to earlier turmoil within the Unitarian ranks.
As Murdock noted (citing Ripley, Brownson, and Emerson), some Unitarians, “laboring to improve their system of theology,” eventually “cast their eyes on foreign countries.” There they found a different philosophy—the “speculative”—that suggested an entirely new version of Christianity and invested it “with more spiritual character, with more power to move the soul, to call forth warm emotions, and to produce communion with God” than any contemporary faith. In Murdock’s view, when several such disaffected Unitarians noted their mutual interest in this novel way of philosophically grounding their belief, American Transcendentalism was born.16
He cited as this group’s main inspiration the French philosopher Victor Cousin, not Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, or any of the Germans directly, thus challenging what many subsequently identified as the most important route for the transmission of these ideas.17 Through Cousin’s synthesis of Idealism with the Scottish Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and Thomas Brown, Murdock explained, Americans learned that “Spontaneous Reason acquaints us with the true and essential nature of things.”18 This principle makes “all the doctrines of natural religion the objects” of man’s direct, intuitive knowledge. Thus, to know the realm of the spirit, men do not need any explanation or confirmation from teachers or books. Rather, they have only to listen to “the teachings of [their] own souls, the light that shines within [them].”19
Murdock’s emphases are significant. As much as Idealist philosophy was central to the movement’s coalescence, Transcendentalism began as a religious demonstration.20 No American Transcendentalists were “philosophers by profession,” Murdock noted, and nearly all of them were clergymen “of the Unitarian school.” As a result, their “habit of thought, their feelings, and their aims” were “manifestly theological.”21 Only later, as they discovered the social implications of their acknowledgment of “spontaneous reason” did they realize that they were prophets of a wholly new secular as well as spiritual order.
Ellis’s and Murdock’s assessments resonated among other contemporaries as well as with early historians of the movement. In 1876, O. B. Frothingham, for example, noted that although Transcendentalism was usually spoken of as a philosophy, it was more justly regarded “a gospel.” Running through it all, he continued, was a belief in “the living God in the Soul, faith in immediate inspiration, in boundless possibility, and in an unimaginable good.”22 Similarly, Ezra Stiles Gannett, a prominent Unitarian minister with friends among the more radical in his denomination, observed that Transcendentalism “implied a universal law of access and communion.” It affirmed “inspiration fresh as well as old; Revelation constant; Miracle but the human spirit’s pinnacle of action; God the living God, not a deity then and there” but rather “indwelling here and now in every presence.”23 George Ripley concurred. Many years later, recalling the excitement of the antebellum period, he observed that Transcendentalism was but “the assertion of the high powers, dignity, and integrity of the soul; its absolute independence and right to interpret the meaning of life, untrammeled by tradition and conventions.”24 Simply put, it was another American Revolution, spiritual in nature and remarkably varied in its practical implications.
Emerson’s assessment is more complicated because it is revelatory of his attempt to control the meaning of an increasingly unruly movement as those associated with it broke into different parties, depending on how they understood those implications. Six years earlier he had provided one of the New Thought’s first manifestos in his book Nature, but its difficult prose did not provide the explanation the public
sought. Reviewing it for The Christian Examiner, Francis Bowen found the author’s ideas and his manner of expression abstruse and offered advice to those who found the book’s ideas of interest: “If the partisans of the New School,” he wrote, “still insist upon it, let them manufacture a treatise on the rudiments of Transcendentalism, [so] that tyros may begin with the alphabet of the science, and toil slowly but surely up its cloud-capt heights.”25 Late in 1841 and early the next year, Emerson, solidifying his career as a lecturer, attempted just that when he delivered eight “Lectures on the Times” at the Masonic Temple in Boston and devoted his fourth offering to “The Transcendentalist.”
Those looking for a clear and concise rendering of the term, however, were disappointed, for Emerson couched his presentation in the same abstractions that already marked his thought. He was maddeningly vague, declaring that the “new views here in New England”—he had in mind Orestes Brownson’s New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church, issued the same year and by the same publisher as his Nature—were not new, “but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times.” “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us,” he observed, is simply “Idealism as it appears in 1842.”26
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