American Transcendentalism: Overview

 

Nineteenth Century American Transcendentalism does not name a clearly defined doctrine or school of thought.  It refers to a general orientation to the universe and nature and a family of related positions.  It may or may not be regarded as a religion; for some adherents it is a pragmatic philosophy, a state of mind, and a form of spirituality, but not a doctrine prescribing specific dogma, rituals nor replacing religious belief.  For others, the religious and spiritual implications of the transcendentalist perspective are woven into a Neo-Pagan Pantheism, incompatible with Traditional Christianity in particular and with Western Monotheism generally.

 

American Transcendentalism:  Who

 

Assumed, Presumed, or the Self-Identified Transcendentalists:

 

The Big Three:

 

  1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
  2. Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
  3. Margaret Fuller (1810 – 1850)

 

Others:

 

Amos Bronson Alcott

Orestes Augustus Brownson

William Ellery Channing

William Henry Channing

James Freeman Clarke

Charles Anderson Dana

John Sullivan Dwight

Sarah & Angelina Grimke

Sophia Peabody-Hawthorne

Frederick Hedge

James Marsh

Theodore Parker

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

George & Sophia Ripley

Jones Very

 

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) may or may not be considered a Transcendentalist.  But he was 16 years younger than Emerson, did not come from the same upper class background or run in the same social circles.  And Whitman came to poetry late at the age of 37, after a career as a journalist.  Nevertheless he was strongly influences by his reading of Emerson.  

 

In his letter to Emerson, printed in the second edition of Leaves of Grass, speaking of "Individuality, that new moral American continent," Whitman stated:

 

"Those shores you found; I say, you led the States there, -- have led me there." And it seemed hardly possible that the first determined attempt to cast into literature a complete man, with all his pride and passions, should have been made by one whose feet were not already firmly planted on "those shores."

 

Whitman mailed a copy of his first edition to Emerson.  But the timing was such that Whitman did not influence the Transcendentalists so much as was influenced by them.

 

Origins and Roots of American Transcendentalism:

 

There was no one precise "cause" for the beginning of Transcendentalism.  According to Paul Boller, chance, coincidence and several independent events,  thoughts and tendencies seemed to have converged in the 1830s in New England. 

 

Some New Englanders were seeming becoming alarmed at the industrialization changing their environment and way of life.  Nor were they happy about growing materialism.  They  formed an informal club to discuss the matters of interest to their individual and regional concerns as well as of the nation as whole. Most of them were teachers or clergyman, radicals reacting against what Emerson referred to as “corpse cold” Unitarianism.

 

Some of the historical developments that contributed were:

 

  1. Erosion of Calvinism.
  2. The progressive secularization of modern thought under the impact of science and technology.
  3. The emergence of a Unitarian intelligentsia with the means, leisure, and training to pursue literature and scholarship.
  4. The failure of traditional religion to appeal to questing young minds - lack of involvement in women's rights and abolitionism.
  5. The intrusion of the machine into the New England garden and the disruption cause by growing industrialism.
  6. The impact of European ideas on Americans traveling abroad.
  7. The appearance of talented and energetic young people like Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau on the scene.
  8. The imperatives of logic itself for those who take ideas seriously - the impossibility, for instance, of accepting modern science without revising  traditional religious views.

 

As Minister at the Second Church in Boston, Emerson, publicly rejected the practice of the Lord’s Supper in 1832, and left his pastorate, renouncing what he termed the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College." 

 

In 1836, Hedge, Emerson, and George Ripley (1802-1880) founded an informal group they called Hedge’s Club, later changed the name to discuss the in philosophy and theology

 

1836 The annus mirabilis of the movement:

 

·         Emerson published  Nature (the "gospel" of transcendentalism)

·         George Ripley published Discourses  on the Philosophy of Religion

·         Orestes Brownson published New Views of  Christianity, Society, and Church

·         Bronson Alcott published Record of  Conversions in the Gospel (based on classroom discussions in his Temple School  in Boston, and provoking severe criticism)

·         The Transcendental Club met for  the first time.

 

In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson concluded his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Address, The American Scholar, with these words:

 

“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

 

American Transcendentalism:  What

Philosophical Debts:

 

Perhaps the oldest are owed to Plato.  From Plato came the idealism according to which reality is inherently rational, but subsists beyond the appearances of the world. Plato suggests that the world is an expression of logos, spirit, or mind, which is sheer intelligibility and therefore good.   Further, what is god is good for us and the proper object of our attention, contemplation and reverence.

 

Transcendentalism is rooted in the American past. 

 

1.       Puritanism: pervasive morality and the "doctrine of divine light." (Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758)[1]

2.       Quakerism: one’s individual "inner light," the indwelling of the Holy Spirit

However, both these concepts assume acts of God, whereas transcendental “intuition” is/may be an act of an individual.

3.       Unitarianism[2]: rejection of traditional Trinitarian theologies. A single deity as a kind of immanent principle in every person - an individual was the true source of moral light.

  1. Romanticism: rejection of mechanist accounts of nature and advocating viewing nature as a living mystery.  From Coleridge came the importance of wonder, of antirationalism, and the importance of individual consciousness.

 

A subtle chain of countless rings

The next unto the farthest brings;

The eye reads omens where it goes,

And speaks all languages the rose;

And, striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

 

Years before the "Divinity School Address" of 1838, Emerson had decided that man creates a consciousness of God — "God" being the spiritual force that he also termed the "oversoul," or the "ideal." If, Emerson reasoned, man creates consciousness of the divine, then, in effect, he creates the divine. If he intellectually creates the divine, then he possesses a divine power and must thus be divine himself. Accordingly, in Nature (1836), Emerson described the individual who does not realize this god-like power of consciousness within himself as "a god in ruins." (Thoreau used a phrase very similar to Emerson's in the "Winter Animals" chapter of Walden; there, the men who are unconscious of the divinity in them are termed "defaced and leaning monuments" of God.) He believed that each man, through the potential power of his intellect, has the ability to become god-like, to realize an ideal mode of existence, to raise himself above (that is, transcend) his presently imperfect, unsatisfactory situation in life. In short, Emerson proposed to his readers the possibility of total, ecstatic self-fulfillment; this was what fired Thoreau's imagination. Years later it was what he offered to his readers in Walden: "I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures . . . but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complain of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them." With the same optimism and faith in man's capabilities that Emerson had, Thoreau told his audience, "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."

 

Kant’s Theory of Beauty and American Transcendentalism:

 

In Critique of Pure Reason Kant distinguished the transcendental from the transcendent. The transcendental refers to the necessary conditions for the very possibility of experience. Sense data are organized by the categories of mind, the two pure forms of intuition (space & time), and what he calls the “transcendental unity of apperception.”  Intelligible experience would be impossible without the organizing contributions of active mind. 

 

This being so, the transcendent is what lies beyond the scope of experience (the noumenal thing- in-itself/ things-n-themselves).  The transcendent is necessarily inaccessible to theoretical reason.  Kant rejects the classic arguments for the existence of God, (along with traditional metaphysics in general) on the grounds that knowledge of the transcendent is impossible.  So the necessity of the transcendental is what makes the transcendent inaccessible.

 

In his Critique of Practical Reason, however, Kant’s claims that the very possibility of moral experience demands we assent to three metaphysical claims: the existence of a Divine arbiter of justice (God) the possibly to prefect our wills (immorality of the soul), and the ability to act unconditionally (personal free will).  These claims about the transcendent, he argues, are foundational to the possibility of morality. We are morally obligated to act on these transcendent suppositions. 

 

In his third major work, the Critique of Judgment, Kant proposes that our judgments of beauty arise from a sense of purposiveness or “form of purpose.[3]”   Organic natures (plants, animals, etc.) are purposive.  Their purposiveness we observe when we see that their parts are organized into a harmonized unity.  The parts are means to the wholes, and the wholes are means to the parts.

 

  1. Thus everything (exhibiting this purposiveness) can be seen/ ought to be seen  as beautiful.  This purposiveness considered disinterestedly results in a universal pleasure/satisfaction that is experienced as beauty.
  2. But a “conceptual understanding” of beauty is impossible for human beings.

 

Both of these points would be adopted by the American Transcendentalists.  Word of Kant’s transcendental idealism may have reached Emerson through Frederick Henry Hedge (1805-1890), a Unitarian[4] minister who had studied in Germany.

 

Influence of Kant’s transcendental idealism on American transcendentalism:

 

 

From Immanuel Kant came the notion of the “native spontaneity of the human mind[5]” against the passive conception of the 18th century empiricism of John Locke and David Hume; the concept that the mind begins as a tabula rasa and that all knowledge develops from sensation.

 

 

Celebrating:

 

 

Transcendentalism in a Nutshell:

NOTE : The Transcendentalists, in keeping with the individualistic nature of this philosophy, disagreed readily with each other.

 

Here are points of general agreement:

 

·         Neither asserts nor denies the existence of God.

·         Neither asserts nor denies and individual afterlife.

·         Neither asserts nor denies a heaven or hell as a consequence for our actions in this life.

 

Basic Assumptions:

Transcendentalists generally adhere to a monist/idealist (all is thought/spirit/consciousness) metaphysics.   They do not explicitly reject an afterlife, but emphasize this life.

 

It is via the intuitive faculty, rather that the rational or sensical faculties, that one achieves a conscious union of the individual psyche (the “Atman” of Eastern thought) with the world psyche also known as the Oversoul, life-force, prime mover, ground of being and God (known in Eastern traditions as Brahma).

 

Basic Premises:

1.       An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself.  This is not an explicit rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain an individual and the world in terms of an individual.

 

Here is Darrel Abel's "take" on this concept:

 

"Since one divine character was immanent everywhere in nature and in man, man's reason could discern the spiritual ideas in nature and his senses could  register impressions of the material forms of nature. To man the subject, nature the object, which shared the same divine constitution as himself, presented external images to the innate ideas in his soul. " (American Literature, Vol.2, 1963, 4-5.)

 

2.       The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge.  But conversely, knowledge of nature is in fact knowledge of self.

 

Thus the Transcendentalists believed that "knowing yourself" and "studying nature" is the same activity since much of your experience of nature is an experience of your projections.  Nature mirrors one’s psyche.  If I cannot understand myself, maybe understanding nature will help.

 

3.       Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living mystery, full of signs (logos)- nature is symbolic.

4.       The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization. This, in turn,  depends upon the reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies:

a.       the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the world.

b.      the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence.  It is a concept which suggests that the external is united with the internal.

 

Family of Ideas:

 

Note : This list must not be considered to be a creed common to all transcendentalists. It is merely a grouping of certain important concepts shared  by many of them.  

 

1.       Transcendentalism, essentially, is a form of idealism.

2.       The transcendentalist "transcends" or rises above the lower animalistic impulses of life (animal drives) and moves from the rational to a spiritual  realm.

3.       The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit (or "float" for  Whitman) to which it and other souls return at death.

4.       Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a  portion of that Oversoul (God).

5.       This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere - travel to holy  places is, therefore, not necessary.

6.       God can be found in both nature and human nature (Nature, Emerson stated,  has spiritual manifestations).

7.       Jesus also had part of God in himself - he was divine, just as everyone is divine  - He was exceptional in that he lived a more exemplary and transcendental life than anyone  else, and made the best use of that Power which is within each one.

8.       "Miracle is monster." The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important as they were to the people of the past. Miracles are all about us -the whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature is one.

"A mouse is a  miracle enough to stagger quintillions of infidels." – Whitman

9.       More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for  this life

"the one thing in the world of value is the active soul." -  Emerson 

10.   Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the  oversoul.

11.   Emphasis should be placed on the here and now.

"Give me one world at a  time." - Thoreau 

12.   Evil is a negative - merely an absence of good. Light is more powerful  than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the dark. 

13.   Power is to be obtained by defying fate or predestination, which seem to  work against humans, by exercising one's own strength. Emphasis on  self-reliance.

14.   Hence, the emphasis is placed on a human thinking.

15.   The transcendentalists see the necessity of examples of great leaders,  writers, philosophers, and others, to show what an individual can become  through thinking and action.

16.   It is foolish to worry about consistency, because what an intelligent  person believes tomorrow, if he/she trusts oneself, tomorrow may be completely  different from what that person thinks and believes today.

"A foolish  consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." – Emerson

17.   The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship  between all things.

18.   One must have faith in intuition, for no church or creed can communicate  truth.

19.   Reform must not be emphasized - true reform comes from within.  

 

Emerson and His Practices

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

 

·         Denied he was a transcendentalist

·         But rightly viewed as one]

·         Followed by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).

 

Three practices by which facts may be exchanged for ideas.

 

The first enacts a form of idealism. Instead of seeing the world as an independent power that may lay waste to our purposes and plans, we can view it as a display of images or pictures created by us, rendering it harmless and even benevolent.

 

Secondly, we can focus on moral actions and rejoice in their goodness.

 

The third practice (perhaps the one for which transcendentalism) is best known is that of contemplating beauty.

These practices come naturally to many of us. We many not connect them to Emerson, his contemporaries, or the period in American intellectual history─ roughly between the publication of Emerson’s “Nature” in 1836 and Thoreau’s death in 1862─when transcendentalism flourished as a movement; but inasmuch as we seek to improve our lives by turning away from facts and embracing ideas, we are transcendentalists.

If there is a single practice with which American transcendentalism can be identified, it is contemplation of beauty.

Emerson held a sort of Platonic theory of beauty:

Responded to Plato’s theory that beauty, truth, and goodness are one by saying that even so beauty is the best of the three.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Children seem to see (beauty) radiating from the most ordinary objects to their exquisite delight. Adults sometimes find themselves feeling like children again in its presence. The transcendentalists thought of beauty as eternal, because a mere glimpse of it was enough to make them drop everything and simply take in what they heard or saw with neither motive nor intention. This activity satisfied them so deeply that while they were thus engaged it was as if time stood still.

Perhaps the most famous experience of beauty described by Emerson is the one in which he became a “transparent eyeball.”  Alone in the woods, “head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space”, he found that he had vanished from his own experience. It was as if he consisted of nothing but impersonal vision, the object of which was “unconstrained and immortal beauty.”  Thoreau was equally susceptible to such enthralling experiences of beauty.  Snow drifts, the shapes and colors of leaves, and the way light falls revealed to him so much beauty that he thought of them as imprints of the divine.

Of the three practices distinguished by Emerson, contemplation of beauty is perhaps the one that came most naturally to the transcendentalists. They were ready, like Socrates, for beauty to give them wings on which they could ascend to heaven and see reality from the standpoint of the gods. Facts, with all of their hard edges, quickly melted into images or ideas under beauty’s divine influence. The contemplative absorptions this created were immensely satisfying, but they were also deceptive. Had the facts actually melted or did it merely seem as if they had?

Motivated by the tremendous appeal of the former hypothesis, Emerson attempted to extend the influence of beauty far beyond momentary absorptions. He reached the conclusion that everything is beautiful by arguing that beauty derives from purposiveness. Emerson thought of nature as a single, all-embracing system governed by immutable moral laws. In such a system, everything has a purpose in relation to the whole and is rendered beautiful by that relation. Marcus Aurelius proposed something similar in his Meditations. He said that even the foam at the mouths of ravening beasts takes on a certain beauty once its purpose is known.  Notice the echo of Kant here

The argument that purposiveness confers beauty is plausible when purposes are present and when they are at least arguably benevolent. A towering concrete dam may spoil the beauty of a river, until we understand that it was built to provide water to surrounding communities. Yet even though we see a benevolent purpose behind it, the ugliness of the dam may not be diminished. The argument is much weaker when applied to objects or events the purposes of which are evil, and it fails altogether in the case of realities that are non-purposive. Weapons of mass destruction are not rendered beautiful in light of their purpose. Earthquakes that strike major cities may occur for the sake of maintaining the structural equilibrium of the planet, but this adds little beauty to them. Moreover, nothing prevents us from understanding natural disasters as mechanical rather than purposive processes.

The transcendentalists were eminently capable of stretching their imaginations. When they exercised this capacity to the fullest, they saw around them an abstract world of interrelated ideas. The beauty of that world was so captivating that it tended to blind them to all external realities. Emerson went as far as to say there is a certain beauty in a corpse. We can hardly fault the transcendentalists for wishing to live always in the presence of the beautiful; yet the feats of imagination by which they conjured an ideal world could not be sustained forever. The transcendentalists were drawn to the beauty of ideas, but they knew they had to make their way in a world that also included stubborn facts. Once more we can see that it was not their practices, but their efforts to ground them in theories that created problems for the transcendentalists. Emerson’s attempt to demonstrate that all things are beautiful made ugliness a little uglier and a little sadder. Even worse, it made it confounding. When a homely or a grotesque fact intruded into the beautiful world of his ideas, he loathed it all the more because he could not make sense of the intrusion.

Transcendentalism Timeline:

1832 Emerson resigns the ministry of the Unitarian Church - unable to  administer the holy communion. 

 

1836 The annus mirabilis of the movement, during which Emerson published  Nature (the "gospel" of transcendentalism);

·         George Ripley published Discourses  on the Philosophy of Religion

·         Orestes Brownson published New Views of  Christianity, Society, and Church

·         Bronson Alcott published Record of  Conversions in the Gospel (based on classroom discussions in his Temple School  in Boston, and provoking severe criticism)

·         The Transcendental Club met for  the first time.

 

1837 Emerson delivers his Phi Beta Kappa address on "The American Scholar" at  Harvard, which James Russell Lowell called "an event without former parallel  in our literary annals." 

 

1838 Emerson delivers his Divinity School Address at Harvard which touched off  a great storm in religious circles.

 

1840 The founding of the Dial, a Transcendental magazine, which "enjoyed its obscurity," to use Emerson's words, for four years.

 

1841 The launching of George Ripley's Brook Farm - a utopian experiment. 

 

·         Hawthorne was a resident there for a short time and wrote The Blithedale  Romance based upon his experience there.

 

1842 Alcott's utopian experiment at Fruitlands.

 

1845 Thoreau goes to live at Walden Pond.

 

1846 Thoreau is put in jail for his refusal to pay poll tax.

 

1850 Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

 

·         The Transcendentalists found  themselves increasingly involved in abolition of slavery.

 

1855 Walt Whitman publishes his Leaves of Grass.

 

1859 Charles Darwin's Origin of Species is published.

 

1862 Henry David Thoreau dies.

 

Towards a Definition of Transcendentalism: A Few Comments: 

 

"Transcendentalism was, at its core, a philosophy of naked individualism,  aimed at the creation of the new American, the self-reliant man, complete and  independent."

 

"The achievement of the transcendentalists has a grandeur. They did confront,  and helped define, the great issues of their time, and if they did not resolve  those issues, we of the late twentieth century, who have not yet resolved them,  are in no position to look down our noses at their effort."

 

From Henry David Gray, Emerson: A Statement of N. E. Transcendentalism as  Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent, 1917)

 

"The spirit of the time is in every form a protest against usage and a search  for principles." - Emerson in the opening number of The Dial.

 

"I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be  certainly Transcendental." - Charles Dickens in American Notes

 

"I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would  have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my  explanations." - Thoreau, Journal, V:4

 

"The word Transcendentalism, as used at the present day, has two  applications. One of which is popular and indefinite, the other, philosophical  and precise. In the former sense it describes man, rather than opinions, since  it is freely extended to those who hold opinions, not only diverse from each  other, but directly opposed." - Noah Porter, 1842

 

Transcendentalism is the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth  intuitively, or of attaining a scientific knowledge of an order of existence  transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible  experience." - J. A. Saxton, Dial II: 90

 

"Literally a passing beyond all media in the approach to the Deity,  Transcendentalism contained an effort to establish, mainly by the discipline of  the intuitive faculty, direct intercourse between the soul and God." - Charles  J. Woodbury in Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 "Transcendentalism was not ... speculative, but essentially practical and  reformatory." - John Orr in "The Transcendentalism of New England,"  International Review, XIII: 390

 

"Transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system. Practically it was an  assertion of the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of  the immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural  attributes to the natural constitution of mankind. ... Transcendentalism is  usually spoken of as a philosophy. It is more justly regarded as a gospel. As a  philosophy it is ... so far from uniform, that it may rather be considered  several systems than one. ... Transcendentalism was ... an enthusiasm, a wave of  sentiment, a breath of mind." - O. B. Frothingham in Transcendentalism in New  England, 1876

 

"The problem of transcendental philosophy is no less than this, to revise the  experience of mankind and try its teachings by the nature of mankind, to test  ethics by conscience, science by reason; to try the creeds of the churches, the  constitution of the states, by the constitution of the universe." - Theodore  Parker in Works VI: 37

 

"We feel it to be a solemn duty to warn our readers, and in our measure, the  public, against this German atheism, which the spirit of darkness is employing  ministers of the gospel to smuggle in among us under false pretenses." Princeton  Review XII: 71

 

"Protestantism ends in Transcendentalism." - Orestes Brownson in Works, 209

 

"The fundamentals of Transcendentalism are to be felt as sentiments, or  grasped by the imagination as poetical wholes, rather than set down in  propositions." - Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1887, I: 248

 

"First and foremost, it can only be rightly conceived as an intellectual,  aesthetic, and spiritual ferment, not a strictly reasoned doctrine. It was a  renaissance of conscious, living faith in the power of reason, in the reality of  spiritual insight, in the privilege, beauty, and glory of life." - Frances  Tiffany, "Transcendentalism: The New England Renaissance," Unitarian Review,  XXXI: 111.

 

"The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine.  ... If there is anything grand or daring in human thought or virtue, any  reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance of faith,  the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The oriental mind has always  tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist ... is a  Transcendentalist. ... Shall we say then that Transcendentalism is the  Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his  integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction  of his wish?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson's lecture on "The Transcendentalist," Works  I: 317-320

 

"(Transcendentalism was) a blending of Platonic metaphysics and the Puritan  spirit, of a philosophy and a character ... taking place at a definite time, in a specially fertilized soil, under particular conditions." - H. C. Goddard,  Studies in New England Transcendentalism, 1908.

 

"If I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist." - Charles  Dickens in American Notes      (Recommended resource: Boller, Paul F. American Transcendentalism,      1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry. NY: Putnam, 1974. [B905 B64].

 

Wordsworth on the sublime and the Beautiful: in speaking of seeing the mountains of Langdale pike--

Let me then invite the Reader to turn his eyes with me towards that cluster of Mountains at the Head of Windermere; it is probable that they will settle ere long upon the Pikes of Langdale and the black precipice contiguous to them. If these objects be so distant that, while we look at them, they are only thought of as the crown a comprehensive Landscape; if our minds be not perverted by false theories, unless those mountains be seen under some accidents of nature, we shall receive from them a grand impression, and nothing more. But if they be looked at from a point which has brought us so near that the mountain is almost the sole object before our eyes, yet not so near but that the whole of it is visible, we shall be impressed with a sensation of sublimity.--And if this analyzed, the body of this sensation would be found to resolve itself into three component parts: a sense of individual form or forms; a sense of duration; and a sense of power. . . . A mountain being a stationary object is enabled to effect this in connection with duration and individual form, by the sense of motion which in the midst accompanies the lines by which the Mountain itself is shaped out" (351-2). . . .Individuality of form is the primary requisite; and the form must be of that character that deeply impresses the sense of power. And power produces the sublime whether as it is thought of as a thing to be feared, to be resisted, or that can be participated. To what degree consistent with sublimity power may be dreaded has been ascertained; but as power, contemplated as something to be opposed or resisted, implies a twofold agency of which the mind is conscious, this state seems to be irreconcilable to what has been determined, exists in the extinction of the comparing power of the mind, & in intense unity.(356).

 

 


[1] "Though all of creation reflects the divine light or emanation, man's inner self, when gracious, provides the fullest reflection of divine reality" (Scheick 136). Scheick, William J. The Writings of Jonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style. College Station: Texas A&M UP. 1975.

[2] Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood outside the context of Unitarianism, the dominant religion in Boston during the early nineteenth century. Unitarianism had developed during the late eighteenth century as a branch of the liberal wing of Christianity, which had separated from Orthodox Christianity, most significantly rejecting the Trinitarian concept of God, during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s. They rejected the notion that Christ and the Holy Spirit were the consubstantiated co-equals of God-the-Father.  That Awakening, along with its successor, revolved around the questions of divine election and original sin, and saw a brief period of revivalism. The Liberals tended to reject both the persistent Orthodox belief in inherent depravity and the emotionalism of the revivalists; on one side stood dogma, on the other stood pernicious "enthusiasm." The Liberals, in a kind of amalgamation of Enlightenment principles with American Christianity, began to stress the value of intellectual reason as the path to divine wisdom. The Unitarians descended as the Boston contingent of this tradition, while making their own unique theological contribution in rejecting the doctrine of divine trinity.

[3] We are aware of a “design-like” quality of the apprehended object.  But it is not a judgment of the actual purpose of a thing..  That would be a “ordinary judgment, “the application of a known concept to an object.

[4] The American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825, and in 1865 a national conference was organized. A congregational form of government prevails in the Unitarian churches, each congregation having control of its own affairs. Neither ministers nor members are required to make profession of any particular doctrine, and no creed has been adopted by the church. The covenant in general use is simply, "In the love of truth, and in the spirit of Jesus, we unite for worship of God and the service of man." In 1961 the Universalist Church of America merged with the American Unitarian Association to form the Unitarian Universalist Association.

[5] Howison, George Holmes The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism. XIX