Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
destroyed its romantic dreams. It accepted kinship with the social
idealism of the Declaration of Independence; it accepted the dynamic
principle of equalitarianism; but it sought to go farther and provide a
sure defense and justification of an idealism that it professed to find
established in human nature, by establishing it in metaphysics.
The explanation of this curious throwback to earlier times in the mind
of transcendental New England is clear enough to anyone acquainted with
the history of Puritan thought struggling with the mystical element of
Christian experience. Since the far-off days of Roger Williams--the
seeker and mystic who was so great a puzzle to his realistic
brethren--idealism had been starved in New England. Its mystical
aspirations had been repressed by dogma, and its elusive dreams brought
to nothing. Jonathan Edwards struggled life-long to hold his idealism
in subjection to theology, and ended in abortive reaction; a potential
Emerson, another Berkeley, he re-welded the bonds of dogma on the mind
of New England, putting off for two generations the day of its release.
Even in the freer minds idealism suffered from the repressions of the
common rationalism; with Locke and Hume in the ascendancy the mystic
found the times uncongenial to his needs. The dawn of a new day seemed
to be breaking with the shift of interest from theology to politics,
during the stirring days of the Revolution. The submerged idealism of
New England came to expression in the dreams of homespun democrats
like Sam Adams, and expanded in the sunshine of French Utopianism; but
unfortunately Boston Federalism reasserted the old dogmatisms and put
a speedy end to the movement. It shut the door upon all democratic
aspiration and bade it go about its business. It was from such a
narrow environment that the rising movement of Unitarianism received
its impress. From a sterile rationalism, a respectable close-fisted
conservatism, it could not escape; and in consequence the new movement
of liberalism was taken over by Federalism and became a new orthodoxy.
“The pale negations of Boston Unitarianism”--to use Emerson’s
well-known phrase--provided little nourishment for transcendental hopes.
Nevertheless Unitarianism carried within it the seeds of the new
faith--in its intellectual attitude, if not in its philosophy. “The
Unitarians as a class,” remarks Frothingham, “belonged to the school
of Locke, which discarded the doctrine of innate ideas, and its
kindred beliefs.... Unitarianism ... has rarely, if ever, been taught
or held by any man of eminence in the church who was a Platonist”
(_Transcendentalism in New England_, Chapter VI). But in spite of
its eighteenth-century nurture--because of it, indeed--Unitarianism
was a profoundly liberalizing movement. It was a narrow and local
phase of a world-wide revolution; the special contribution of Boston
to the great work of disintegrating the past to make ready for the
future. It loosened the grip of dogma on the Puritan mind and widened
the field of reading and thinking. But it did very much more--it
recovered the original principle of Protestantism, the principle of
individual responsibility, that had been tacitly denied by Calvinistic
orthodoxy. It asserted the essential decency of human nature--men may
not be the children of God but they are assuredly not children of the
devil; and it summoned this decent human nature to live decently in
accordance with its nature. It would not coop up the mind in dogma; it
would not close all roads to heaven but one. The Unitarians might be
instinctively conservative, as was natural to prosperous persons, but
they at least acknowledged “themselves to be friends of free thought
in religion.” Their doctrine was not a creed but an attitude of mind.
If they themselves were not Seekers, they professed a willingness
for others to become Seekers. Very likely few of them measured up to
the full stature of such liberalism; nevertheless they “honestly but
incautiously professed a principle broader than they were able to
stand by, and avowed the absolute freedom of the human mind as their
characteristic faith” (_ibid._, Chapter VI).
All this was excellent, but it was not enough. It remained to see
what the free mind should discover in its venturesome quest into the
unknown. Intellectually emancipated, with the bleak dogmas of election
and reprobation put away, with the God of wrath dethroned and the
God of love lifted up, and with the dynamic principle of freedom of
inquiry in their possession, the younger generation of New England
intellectuals naturally opened their eyes to discover what winds of
new doctrine were blowing in the world. They were pretty much all
Unitarians--the young transcendentalists--and largely clergymen; their
primary interest was metaphysical and they had already abandoned Locke
for Plato. The rationalistic eighteenth century was dead to them and
they set forth to discover another age. Hints and suggestions of
that better age had come to them from overseas--from Wordsworth and
Shelley, from Cousin and Madame de Staël, from Coleridge and Carlyle;
and the fresh beauty of that new poetry, the enormous stimulus of that
new metaphysic, fired them with a desire to seek this inspiration at
its source and drink from the living waters. And so they discovered
romantic Germany where the new idealism had quite routed the philosophy
of sensationalism, and a great school of transcendental thinkers was
in triumphant possession of the field. It was a profoundly stimulating
discovery, and from it dated the rise of New England transcendentalism.
The immediate creative influence of the new contact with Germany was to
strengthen the incipient Platonism of the rebellious intellectuals, and
provide it with an added sanction. Transcendentalism, it must always
be remembered, was a faith rather than a philosophy; it was oracular
rather than speculative, affirmative rather than questioning; and it
went to Germany to find confirmation of its faith, not to reëxamine
its foundations. Faith preceded metaphysics, and if the metaphysics
had been lacking intuition would have supplied its place, poetic
inspiration would have sufficed the needs of transcendental minds. They
had found God for themselves before the philosophers justified them;
they took to Germany what they sought there. Nevertheless it was a
tremendous experience to come upon their own philosophy there, erected
into a system, supported by a complete metaphysic; a philosophy that
had put to rout the fashionable skepticism of Voltaire and Condillac,
established on the sensationalism of Locke, and offering justification
for faith in God and man--faith in a divinity indwelling in nature
and the individual soul--by a masterly dialectics. That experience
determined the development of New England transcendentalism. The
metaphysic of Kant, the mysticism of Jacobi, the idealistic egoism of
Fichte, the transcendentalism of Schleiermacher--the new gospel of
the renascent German spirit--these were the living waters of truth to
the thirsty minds of the New England intellectuals, from which they
drank eagerly, never doubting their sufficiency. They were poets and
prophets; they were young and strong in faith; others might concern
themselves with the dialectics of idealism, they would apply it in
their daily lives.
In essence this new transcendental faith was a glorification of
consciousness and will. It rested on the rediscovery of the soul that
had been dethroned by the old rationalism; and it eventuated in the
creation of a mystical egocentric universe wherein the children of God
might luxuriate in their divinity. The Unitarians had pronounced human
nature to be excellent; the transcendentalists pronounced it divine.
They endowed it with great potentialities; made of it a dwelling place
of the Most High; discovered the secret voice of God in the buried life
that men call instinct; refused to heed any other command save this
inner voice of God. With ebbing faith men may deny their own divine
nature, but the divinity is not destroyed; the music of the indwelling
Godhood murmurs in the shell till the tide returns to flood it again.
The one great miracle is the daily rebirth of God in the individual
soul; every day is a new day; every act is a fresh wonder; faith, hope,
trust, accompany man in his adventurous journeyings. Why, therefore,
demanded the transcendentalist, should he not trust himself? Why should
he not walk confident in his own high purpose? Why should he doubt and
question the buried compulsions that urge him forward? If he is indeed
a child of God, let him live as unto God; and if it should turn out
that there has been some mistake in the premises and he proves to be a
child of the devil, then let him live as unto the devil. Better so than
not to trust himself.
Quite obviously they were arch-romantics--these young poets of the new
faith; children of an age given over to new hopes and disintegrating
revolutions; inexperienced prophets of a world in flux, before the
scientific spirit had stripped them of their wings. The fascinating
book of nature and of man had been newly opened to them, and like
Miranda they were ready to exclaim,
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!
They could see only God because in their thinking God had filled
their minds. No evil lurked in the secret places of their hearts to
whisper doubts concerning the goodness of life; no ominous clouds
veiled the divine light that wrapped their universe about. After
two hundred years of discipline in righteousness the old dogmatic
pessimism was dissipated, leaving not a rack behind. The evil was gone
and God remained; and in this new world the sons of God were to be
henceforth heirs of the kingdom, free to fulfill that good which is
the final reality. Arch-romantics, they were dreaming a transcendental
dream, as other arch-romantics were dreaming their Jacksonian dream,
their imperialistic dream, their Utopian dream. Romanticism comes to
different issues in different men and different times: Emerson and
Jefferson were unlike enough, as their worlds were unlike; but they
were both romantics and their idealism was only a different expression
of a common spirit.
Years after the transcendental ferment had subsided, one of the lesser
prophets of the movement offered a statement of the faith that deserves
to be recalled:
Transcendentalism [he said] relies on those ideas in the mind
which are laws in the life. Pantheism is said to sink man and
nature in God; Materialism to sink God and man in nature;
and Transcendentalism to sink God and nature in man. But the
Transcendentalist at least is belied and put in jail by the
definition which is so neat at the expense of truth. He made
consciousness, not sense, the ground of truth.... Is the soul
reared on the primitive rock? or is no rock primitive, but the
deposit of spirit--therefore in its lowest form alive, and ever
rising into organism to reach the top of the eternal circle again,
as in the well one bucket goes down empty and the other rises
full? The mistake is to make the everlasting things subjects of
argument instead of sight.... Our soul is older than our organism.
It precedes its clothing. It is the cause, not the consequence,
of its material elements; else, as materialists understand, it
does not exist.... What is it that accepts misery from the Most
High, defends the Providence that inflicts its woes, espouses its
chastiser’s cause, purges itself in the pit of its misery of all
contempt of His commands, and makes its agonies the beams and