Childhood," was a clear reminiscence of Platonism. This famous poem was
the favorite above all other effusions of Wordsworth with the
Transcendentalists, who held it to be the highest expression of his
genius, and most characteristic of its bent. Emerson in his last
discourse on Immortality, calls it "the best modern essay on the
subject." Many passages in the "Excursion" attest the transcendental
character of the author's faith. Coleridge quotes the following lines:
"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
The passage quoted next suggests the very language of Fichte in his
Bestimmung des Menschen, "In der Liebe nur ist das Leben, ohne Sie ist
Tod und Vernichtung."
This is the genuine course, the aim, the end,
Of prescient Reason; all conclusions else
Are abject, vain, presumptuous and perverse,
The faith partaking of those holy times.
Life, I repeat, is energy of Love,
Divine or human; exercised in pain,
In strife and tribulation; and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass
Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy.
Another extract recalls the "pantheism" of Schelling.
Thou--who didst wrap the cloud
Of infancy around us, that Thyself
Therein with our simplicity awhile
Might'st hold, on earth, communion undisturbed,
Who from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,
Or from its death-like void, with punctual care,
And touch as gentle as the morning light,
Restorest us, daily, to the powers of sense
And reason's steadfast rule,--Thou, thou alone
Art everlasting, and the blessed Spirits,
Which Thou includest, as the Sea her Waves.
For adoration Thou endurest; endure
For consciousness the motions of Thy will;
For apprehension those transcendent truths
Of the pure Intellect, that stand as laws;
Submission constituting strength and power,
Even to Thy Being's infinite majesty!
Having before me a copy of Wordsworth's poems, once the possession of an
earnest Transcendentalist, I find these, and many lines of similar
import, underlined; showing how dear the English poet was to the
American reader.
There were others who held and enunciated the new faith that came from
Germany, the transfigured protestantism of the land of Luther. But these
three names will suffice to indicate the wealth of England's
contribution to the spiritual life of the New World--Coleridge, Carlyle,
Wordsworth--the philosopher, the preacher, the poet; the man of thought,
the man of letters, the man of imagination. These embrace all the
methods by which the fresh enthusiasm for the soul communicated its
power. These three were everywhere read, and everywhere talked of. They
occupied prominent places in the public eye. They sank into the shadow
only when the faith that glorified them began to decline.
It is remarkable that Emerson in the paper just quoted, written in 1840,
passes from Wordsworth to Landor; while the author of the other paper,
written in 1843, passes, and almost with an expression of relief, from
Wordsworth to Tennyson, the new poet whose breaking glory threatened the
morning star with eclipse. By this time Transcendentalism was on the
wane. The "Dial" marked for one year longer the hours of the great day,
and then was removed from its place, and the scientific method of
measuring progress was introduced. Wordsworth from year to year had a
diminishing proportion of admirers: from year to year the admirers of
Tennyson increased. As early as 1843 the passion for music, color, and
external polish was manifest. Tennyson's elegance and subtlety, his rich
fancy, his mastery of language, his metrical skill, his taste for the
sumptuous and gorgeous, were winning their way to popularity. The critic
in the "Dial" has misgivings: "In these boudoirs of damask and alabaster
one is further off from stern nature and human life than in "Lalla
Rookh" and "The Loves of the Angels." Amid swinging censers and perfumed
lamps, amidst velvet and glory, we long for rain and frost. Otto of
roses is good, but wild air is better." But the sweets have been tasted,
and have spoiled the relish for the old homeliness. For the man who
loved him the charm of Wordsworth was idyllic; for the few who bent the
head to him it was mystical and prophetic. The idyllic sentiment palled
on the taste. It was a reaction from artificial forms of sensibility,
and having enjoyed its day, submitted to the law of change that called
it into being. The moral earnestness, the mystic idealism became
unpopular along with the school of philosophy from which it sprung, and
gave place to the realism of the Victorian bards, who expressed the
sensuous spirit of a more external age. Transcendentalism lurks in
corners of England now. The high places of thought are occupied by men
who approach the great problems from the side of nature, and through
matter feel after mind; by means of the senses attempt the heights of
spirit.
VI.
TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND.
The title of this Chapter is in a sense misleading. For with some truth
it may be said that there never was such a thing as Transcendentalism
out of New England. In Germany and France there was a transcendental
philosophy, held by cultivated men, taught in schools, and professed by
many thoughtful and earnest people; but it never affected society in its
organized institutions or practical interests. In old England, this
philosophy influenced poetry and art, but left the daily existence of
men and women untouched. But in New England, the ideas entertained by
the foreign thinkers took root in the native soil and blossomed out in
every form of social life. The philosophy assumed full proportions,
produced fruit according to its kind, created a new social order for
itself, or rather showed what sort of social order it would create under
favoring conditions. Its new heavens and new earth were made visible, if
but for a moment, and in a wintry season. Hence, when we speak of
Transcendentalism, we mean New England Transcendentalism.
New England furnished the only plot of ground on the planet, where the
transcendental philosophy had a chance to show what it was and what it
proposed. The forms of life there were, in a measure, plastic. There
were no immovable prejudices, no fixed and unalterable traditions. Laws
and usages were fluent, malleable at all events. The sentiment of
individual freedom was active; the truth was practically acknowledged,
that it takes all sorts of people to make a world, and the many minds of
the many men were respected. No orders of men, no aristocracies of
intellect, no privileged classes of thought were established. The old
world supplied such literature as there was, in science, law,
philosophy, ethics, theology; but an astonishing intellectual activity
seized upon it, dealt with it in genuine democratic fashion, classified
it, accepted it, dismissed it, paying no undue regard to its foreign
reputation. Experiments in thought and life, of even audacious
description, were made, not in defiance of precedent--for precedent was
hardly respected enough to be defied--but in innocent unconsciousness of
precedent. A feeling was abroad that all things must be new in the new
world. There was call for immediate application of ideas to life. In the
old world, thoughts remained cloistered a generation before any
questioned their bearing on public or private affairs. In the new world,
the thinker was called on to justify himself on the spot by building an
engine, and setting something in motion. The test of a truth was its
availability. The popular faith in the capacities of men to make states,
laws, religions for themselves, supplied a ground work for the new
philosophy. The philosophy of sensation, making great account, as it
did, of circumstances, arrangements, customs, usages, rules of education
and discipline, was alien and disagreeable to people who, having just
emancipated themselves from political dependence on the mother country,
were full of confidence in their ability to set up society for
themselves. The philosophy that laid its foundations in human nature,
and placed stress on the organic capacities and endowments of the mind,
was as congenial as the opposite system was foreign. Every native New
Englander was at heart, whether he suspected it or not, radically and
instinctively a disciple of Fichte or Schelling, of Cousin or Jouffroy.
The religion of New England was Protestant and of the most intellectual
type. Romanism had no hold on the thinking people of Boston. None beside
the Irish laboring and menial classes were Catholics, and their religion
was regarded as the lowest form of ceremonial superstition. The
Congregational system favored individuality of thought and action. The
orthodox theology, in spite of its arbitrary character and its fixed
type of supernaturalism, exercised its professors severely in
speculative questions, and furnished occasions for discernment and
criticism which made reason all but supreme over faith. This theology
too had its purely spiritual side--nay, it was essentially spiritual.
Its root ran back into Platonism, and its flower was a mysticism which,
on the intellectual side, bordered closely on Transcendentalism. The
charge that the Trinitarian system, in its distinguishing features, was
of Platonic, and not of Jewish origin, was a confession that it was born
of the noblest idealism of the race. So in truth it was, and so
well-instructed Trinitarians will confess that it was. The Platonic
philosophy being transcendental in its essence and tendency,
communicated this character to Christian speculation. The skeletons of
ancient polemics were buried deep beneath the soil of orthodoxy, and
were not supposed to be a part of the structure of modern beliefs, but
there nevertheless they were. The living faith of New England, in its
spiritual aspects, betrayed its ancestry. The speculation had become
Christian, the powers claimed by pagan philosophers for the mind were
ascribed to the influences of the Holy Spirit and the truths revealed in
consciousness were truths of the Gospel; but the fact of immediate
communication between the soul of the believer and its Christ was so
earnestly insisted on, the sympathy was represented as being of so
kindred and organic a nature, that in reading the works of the masters
of New England theology, it requires an effort to forget that the
speculative basis of their faith was not the natural basis of the
philosopher, but the supernatural one of the believer. The spiritual
writings of Jonathan Edwards, the "Treatise on the Religious Affections"
especially, breathe the sweetest spirit of idealism. Indeed, whenever
orthodoxy spread its wings and rose into the region of faith, it lost
itself in the sphere where the human soul and the divine were in full
concurrence. Transcendentalism simply claimed for all men what
Protestant Christianity claimed for its own elect.
That adherents of the sensuous philosophy professed the orthodox
doctrines, is a circumstance that throws the above statement into bolder
relief. For these people gave to the system the hard, external,
dogmatical character which in New England provoked the Unitarian
reaction. The beliefs in scripture inspiration, incarnation, atonement,
election, predestination, depravity, fall, regeneration, redemption,
deprived of their interior meaning, became ragged heaps of dogmatism,
unbeautiful, incredible, hateful. Assault came against them from the
quarter of common intelligence and the rational understanding. The
sensuous philosophy associated with the school of Locke,--which Edwards
and the like of him scorned,--fell upon the fallen system and plucked it
unmercifully. Never was easier work than that of the early Unitarian
critics. The body of orthodoxy having lost its soul, was a very
unsightly carcass,--so evidently, to every sense, a carcass, that they
who had respected it as a celestial creation, and could not be persuaded
that this was all they respected, allowed the scavengers to take it
away, only protesting that the thing disposed of was not the revealed
gospel, or anything but a poor effigy of it.
The Unitarians as a class belonged to the school of Locke, which
discarded the doctrine of innate ideas, and its kindred beliefs.
Unitarianism from the beginning showed affinity with this school, and
avowed it more distinctly than idealists avowed Trinitarianism. Paul of
Samosata, Arius, Pelagius, Socinus, the Swiss, Polish, English advocates
of the same general theology and christology were, after their several
kinds, disciples of the same philosophical system. Unitarianism, it was
remarked, has rarely, if ever, been taught or held by any man of
eminence in the church who was a Platonist. The Unitarians of New
England, good scholars, careful reasoners, clear and exact thinkers,
accomplished men of letters, humane in sentiment, sincere in moral
intention, belonged, of course with individual exceptions, to the class
which looked without for knowledge, rather than within for inspiration.
The Unitarian in religion was a whig in politics, a conservative in
literature, art and social ethics. The Unitarian divine was more
familiar with Tillotson than with Cudworth, and more in love with
William Paley than with Joseph Butler. He was strong in the "Old
English" classics, and though a confessed devotee to no school in
philosophy, was addicted to the prevailing fashion of intelligent,
cultivated good sense. The Unitarian was disquieted by mysticism,
enthusiasm and rapture. Henry More was unintelligible to him, and Robert
Fludd disgusting. He had no sympathy with Helvetius, D'Holbach, Diderot
or Voltaire, those fierce disturbers of intellectual peace; he had as
little with William Law and Coleridge, dreamers and visionaries, who
substituted vapor for solid earth. The Unitarian leaders were
distinguished by practical wisdom, sober judgment, and balanced
thoughtfulness, that weighed opinions in the scale of evidence and
argument. Even Dr. Channing clung to the philosophical traditions that
were his inheritance from England. The splendid things he said about the
dignity of human nature, the divinity of the soul, the moral kinship
with Christ, the inspiration of the moral sentiment, the power of moral
intuition, habitual and characteristic as they were, scarcely justify
the ascription to him of sympathy with philosophical idealism. His
tenacious adherence to the record of miracle as attesting the mission of
the Christ, and his constant exaltation of the Christ above humanity,
suggest that the first principles of the transcendental philosophy had
not been distinctly accepted, even if they were distinctly apprehended.
The following extract from a letter written in 1819, expresses Dr.
Channing's feeling toward Christ, a feeling never essentially altered:
"Jesus Christ existed before he came into the world, and in a state of
great honor and felicity. He was known, esteemed, beloved, revered in
the family of heaven. He was entrusted with the execution of the most
sublime purposes of his Father." About the same time he wrote: "Jesus
ever lives, and is ever active for mankind. He is Mediator, Intercessor,
Lord, and Saviour; He has a permanent and constant connection with
mankind. He is through all time, now as well as formerly, the active and
efficient friend of the human race." The writer of such words was
certainly not a Transcendentalist in philosophy. His biographer, himself
a brilliant Transcendentalist, admits as much. "His soul" he says, "was
illuminated with the idea of the absolute immutable glory of the Moral
Good; and reverence for conscience is the key to his whole doctrine of
human destiny and duty. Many difficult metaphysical points he passed
wholly by, as being out of the sphere alike of intuition and of
experience. He believed, to be sure, in the possibility of man's gaining
some insight of Universal Order, and respected the lofty aspiration
which prompts men to seek a perfect knowledge of the Divine laws; but he
considered pretensions to absolute science as quite premature; saw more
boastfulness than wisdom in ancient and modern schemes of philosophy,
and was not a little amused at the complacent confidence with which
quite evidently fallible theorists assumed to stand at the centre, and
to scan and depict the panorama of existence." In a letter of 1840,
referring to the doctrines of Mr. Parker and that school of thinkers, he
writes: "I see and feel the harm done by this crude speculation, whilst
I also see much nobleness to bind me to its advocates. In its opinions
generally I see nothing to give me hope. I am somewhat disappointed that
this new movement is to do so little for the spiritual regeneration of
society." A year later, he tells James Martineau that the spiritualists
(meaning the Transcendentalists) "in identifying themselves a good deal
with Cousin's crude system, have lost the life of an original movement.
They are anxious to defend the soul's immediate connection with God, and
are in danger of substituting private inspiration for Christianity."
What he knew of Kant, Schelling and Fichte, through Mad. de Stael and
Coleridge, he welcomed as falling in with his own conceptions of the
grandeur of the human mind and will; but his acquaintance with them was
never complete, and if it had been, he would perhaps have been repelled
by the intellectual, as strongly as he was attracted by the moral
teaching.
In this matter the sentiment of Channing went beyond his philosophy. The
following extracts taken at random from a volume of discourses edited
in 1873 by his nephew, under the title "The Perfect Life," show that
Channing was a Transcendentalist in feeling, whatever he may have been
in thought.
"The religious principle, is, without doubt, the noblest working of
human nature. This principle God implanted for Himself. Through
this the human mind corresponds to the Supreme Divinity."
"The idea of God is involved in the primitive and most universal
idea of Reason; and is one of its central principles."
"We have, each of us, the spiritual eye to see, the mind to know,
the heart to love, the will to obey God."
"A spiritual light, brighter than that of noon, pervades our daily
life. The cause of our not seeing is in ourselves."
"The great lesson is, that there is in human nature an element
truly Divine, and worthy of all reverence; that the Infinite which
is mirrored in the outward universe, is yet more brightly imaged in
the inward spiritual world."
"They who assert the greatness of human nature, see as much of
guilt as the man of worldly wisdom. But amidst the passions and
selfishness of men they see another element--a Divine element--a
spiritual principle."
"This moral principle--the supreme law in man--is the Law of the
Universe, the very Law to which the highest beings are subject, and
in obeying which they find their elevation and their joy."
"The Soul itself,--in its powers and affections, in its
unquenchable thirst and aspiration for unattained good, gives signs
of a Nature made for an interminable progress, such as cannot be
now conceived."
The debt which Transcendentalism owed to Unitarianism was not
speculative; neither was it immediate or direct. The Unitarians, clergy
as well as laity, so far as the latter comprehended their position,
acknowledged themselves to be friends of free thought in religion. This
was their distinction. They disavowed sympathy with dogmatism, partly
because such dogmatism as there was existed in the minds of their
theological foes, and was felt in such persecution as society permitted;
and partly because they honestly respected the human mind, and valued
thought for its own sake. They had no creed, and no system of philosophy
on which a creed could be, by common consent, built. Rather were they
open inquirers, who asked questions and waited for rational answers,
having no definite apprehension of the issue to which their
investigations tended, but with room enough within the accepted theology
to satisfy them; and work enough on the prevailing doctrines to keep
them employed. Under these circumstances, 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; instead of a creed, the right to judge all creeds; instead of a
system, authority to try every system by rules of evidence. The
intellectual among them were at liberty to entertain views which an
orthodox mind instinctively shrank from; to read books which an orthodox
believer would not have touched with the ends of his fingers. The
literature on their tables represented a wide mental activity. Their
libraries contained authors never found before on ministerial shelves.
Skepticism throve by what it fed on; and, before they had become fully
aware of the possible results of their diligent study, their powers had
acquired a confidence that encouraged ventures beyond the walls of Zion.
This profession of free inquiry, and the practice of it within the
extensive area of Protestant theology, opened the door to the new
speculation which carried unlooked-for heresies in its bosom; and before
the gates could be closed the insidious enemy had penetrated to the
citadel.
There was idealism in New England prior to the introduction of
Transcendentalism. Idealism is of no clime or age. It has its proportion
of disciples in every period and in the apparently most uncongenial
countries; a full proportion might have been looked for in New England.
But when Emerson appeared, the name of Idealism was legion. He alone was
competent to form a school, and as soon as he rose, the scholars trooped
about him. By sheer force of genius Emerson anticipated the results of
the transcendental philosophy, defined its axioms and ran out their
inferences to the end. Without help from abroad, or with such help only
as none but he could use, he might have domesticated in Massachusetts an
idealism as heroic as Fichte's, as beautiful as Schelling's; but it
would have lacked the dialectical basis of the great German systems.