This volume reads pleasantly. There is attached to it a peculiar interest, and something of the charm of a romance, for those who have had some knowledge of the transcendental movement in New England, and acquaintance with its leaders. The author has evidently written his account with feelings of sympathy and friendship, which he acknowledges, and these have led him to bring out all the good points of the movement, while its shortcomings, exaggerations, and absurdities are scarcely, if at all, hinted at. The style is clear and smooth, the narrative never falters; the writer has contrived to throw a certain halo around the leaders of transcendentalism, and succeeded in presenting in his book a series of ideal portraits calculated to impose somewhat upon strangers. The impression which the work leaves on the mind of the reader is as if he had been listening to the conversation of a member of a mutual admiration society. Octavius Brooks Frothingham is not a “central thinker,” his knowledge of the subject of which he treats is very limited, and his religious insight is null. Transcendentalism requires a differently-equipped man to be its historian. There is, somehow, a narrowness of structure and a peculiar twist in the faculties of the New England mind—perhaps a constitutional inheritance—which renders it inapt to conceive first principles and grasp universal truths; and although transcendentalism was an effort to rise above this condition, it nevertheless carried with it in its flight all these defects.
Our author has not written a history, but an interesting sketch which will be useful, no doubt, to some future historian. To write a history, especially of a philosophical and religious movement such as transcendentalism pretended to be, and really was, requires more than an acquaintance with persons and facts. One must comprehend its real origin, and have mastered and become familiar with his subject. This is a task which Mr. Frothingham has not accomplished.
Every heresy segregates its adherents from the straight line of the true progress of the human race, all deviations from which are, in the nature of things, either transitory or fatal. They live, for the greater part, outside of the cumulated wisdom and the broad stream of the continuous life of humanity. When the heresy has almost exhausted its derived life—for no heresy has a source of life in itself—and the symptoms of its approaching death begin to appear, the intelligent and sincere who are born in it at this stage of its career are the first to seek to regain the unbroken unity of truth. This is reached by two distinct and equally legitimate ways. The first class gains the knowledge of the whole body of the originally revealed truth, from which its heresy cut it off, by tracing the truths retained by the sect to their logical connection with other no less important truths equally contained in the same divine revelation. The second class falls back upon the essential truths of natural reason; and as all supernatural truth finds its support in natural truth, it follows that the denial of any of the former involves a denial of the latter. Heresy always involves a mutilation of man’s natural reason. Once the integral natural basis recovered, the repudiation of heresy as contrary to reason follows logically. But the experience of the human race, that of the transcendentalists included, shows plainly that nature does not suffice nature; and this class, at this moment, starts out to find a religion consonant with the dictates of reason, satisfactory to all their spiritual necessities, and adequate to their whole nature. They ask, and rightly, for a religion which shall find its fast foundations in the human breast. This appeal can only be answered, and is only met, by the revelation given to the world in the beginning by the Author of man, completed in the Incarnation, and existing in its entirety and in unbroken historical continuity in the Catholic Church alone.
This dialectical law has governed the course of all heresies, from which they could not by any possibility escape; the same law has governed the history of Protestantism on its native soil, in Germany, as well as in old England, in New England, and wherever it has obtained a foothold.
Our business at present is with those of the second class, under which head come our New England transcendentalists; and what is not a little amusing is the simplicity with which they proclaim to the world, in this nineteenth century of the Christian era, the truths of natural reason, as though these were new and original discoveries! They appear to fancy that the petty sect to which they formerly adhered, and their dreary experience of its rule, have been the sad lot of the whole human race! It is as if a body of men had been led astray into a cavern where the direct rays of the sun never penetrated, and, after the lapse of some generations, their descendants approach its mouth, breathe the fresh air, behold the orb of light, the mountains, the rivers, and the whole earth covered with trees, flowers, and verdure. For the first time this glorious world, in all its wonderful beauty, bursts upon their view, and, in the candor of their souls, they flatter themselves that they alone are privileged with this vision, and knowledge, and enjoyment! Their language—but, be it understood, in their sober moods—affects those whose mental sight has not been obscured by heresy; somewhat like the speech of children when first the light of reason dawns in their souls. For the transcendental movement in New England was nothing else, in its first instance, than the earnest and righteous protest of our native reason in convalescence against a false Christianity for its denial or neglect of rational truths.
Mr. Frothingham tells us that “he was once a pure transcendentalist,” and that perhaps “his ardor may have cooled.” We protest, and as a disinterested party assure him that he writes with all the glow of youth, and in his volume he has furnished a pretty cabinet-picture, in couleur du rose, of transcendentalism in New England, without betraying even so much as the least sign of a suspicion of its true place in the history either of philosophy or religion. In seeking for the “distinct origin” and the place in history of the transcendental movement in New England, he goes back to Immanuel Kant, born at Königsberg, in Prussia, April 22, 1724, and finds it, as he supposes, in Kant’s famous Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1771. After mentioning some of the disciples of Kant, we are taken to the philosophers of France—Cousin, Constant, Jouffroy; then we are next transported across the Channel to old England, and entertained with Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth; finally we are landed in New England and are told:
“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 foreign thinkers took root in the native soil and blossomed out in every form of social life. The philosophy assumed its 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” (p. 103).
The contact with the productions of the foreign philosophers as well as religious and literary writers whom Mr. Frothingham mentions undoubtedly stimulated and strengthened the transcendental movement in New England; but it did not originate it. The movement was the spontaneous growth of the New England mind, in accordance with the law which we have stated, aided by the peculiar influence of our political institutions, as will be shown further on. Its real authors were Channing, Alcott, and Emerson, who were neither affected at their start nor afterward—or if at all, but slightly—by foreign or extraneous influences.
Moreover, the Kantian philosophy afforded no logical foothold for the defence of the movement in New England. Were our New Englander, who still clings to his early faith in transcendental ideas, to present himself to the philosophical offspring of Kant, he would no more pass muster than his old orthodox Protestant antagonist of the exclusive traditional school. The logical descendants of Kant are, in the region of philosophy, to use an Americanism, played out, and those who still keep up an existence will be found in the ranks of positivism, materialism, and blank atheism.
The idea of God, the immortality of the soul, the liberty of the will, the creation of the world—these and all such ideas the descendants of Kant have politely conducted to the frontiers of philosophy, and dismissed each and every one, but not before courteously thanking them for their provisional services. Our New Englander would appear to their eyes as a babe still in swaddling-clothes, or as a child learning to read by amusing itself with the pictures of old Mother Goose stories. Whatever hankering Mr. Frothingham and some few others may have after their first love of transcendental ideas—and those in New England with whom they are most in sympathy, one and all are moving in the same direction—they are only in the initial stage of the process of evolution of the Kantian germ-cell, the product of Protestant protoplasm, and will end eventually in the same logical issues as their less sentimental German, French, and English confrères.
To give us a right history of transcendentalism, Mr. Frothingham must enlarge the horizon of his mental vision, and include within its scope a stretch of time which elapsed before his ancestors were led off by heresy into the cavern of obscurity. He will find a historical no less than a “dialectical basis” for its ideas or primary truths, and other truths of natural reason of which he has not yet made the discovery, in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, in Augustine, in Vincent of Lerens, in Anselm, and above all in Thomas of Aquinas, whose pages contain all the truths, but purified from the admixture of error, of the pagan philosophers, as also of those who had preceded him in Christian philosophy—men whose natural gifts, as well as devotion to truth, were comparable, to say the least, with Immanuel Kant and his French, or English, or American disciples. Those profound thinkers maintained and demonstrated the truth of the great ideas which Kant, according to his own showing, neither dared affirm nor deny, and which the transcendentalists held for the most part by openly contemning logic and by submissively accepting the humiliating charge of being “sentimentalists.” What those great men taught from the beginning has been always taught, even to our day, by all sound Catholic teachers in philosophy. So jealous has the supreme authority of the church been in this matter of upholding the value of the natural powers of human reason against those who would exalt tradition at its expense it has required, if they would teach philosophy in the name of the church, as a test of their orthodoxy, a subscription to the following proposition: “Reason can with certitude demonstrate the existence of God, the spirituality of the soul, and the liberty of man.” Had the author of the volume which we are briefly reviewing read the Summa of St. Thomas, or only the chapters which treat of these subjects, and understood them—which is not, we hope, asking too much from an advanced thinker of our enlightened age, inasmuch as St. Thomas wrote this work in the “dark ages” for mere tyros—he would have gained a stand-point from which he might have done what he tells us in his preface was “the one purpose of his book—to define the fundamental ideas of philosophy, to trace them to their historical and speculative sources, and to show whither they tended” (p. viii.) Such a work would have been more creditable to his learning, more worthy of his intellectual effort, more satisfactory to intelligent readers, and one of permanent value. We commend to Octavius Brooks Frothingham the perusal and study of St. Thomas’ Summa—above all, his work Contra Gentiles, which is a defence of Christianity on the basis of human reason against the attacks of those who do not admit of its divine revelation; or if these be not within his reach, to take up any one of the modern works on philosophy taught in Catholic colleges or seminaries to our young men.
After all, perhaps, the task might prove an ungracious one; for it would not be flattering to the genius of originality, on which our transcendentalists pride themselves, to discover that these utterances concerning the value of human reason, the dignity of the soul, and the worth of man—barring occasional extravagant expressions attributable to the heat of youth—were but echoes of the voice of the Catholic Church of all ages, of the traditional teachings of her philosophers, especially of the Jesuitical school; all of which, be it said between ourselves, has been confirmed by the sacred decrees of the recent Vatican Council! Still, passing this act of humiliation on their part, it would have afforded them what our author says their system “lacked,” and for which he has had recourse—in our opinion in vain—to the great German systems: namely, a “dialectical basis.” He would have found in Catholic philosophy solid grounds to sustain every truth which the transcendentalists so enthusiastically proclaimed in speech, in poetry, and prose, and which truths, in their practical aspect, not a few made noble and heroic sacrifices to realize.
To have secured such a basis would not have been a small gain, when one considers that these primary truths of reason are the sources from which religion, morals, political government, and human society draw their vitality, strength, and stability. Not a small service to humanity is it to make clear these imperishable foundations, to render them intelligible to all, and transmit them to posterity with increased life and strength. It is well that this noble task of philosophy did not depend on the efforts of the transcendentalists; for Mr. Frothingham sadly informs us in his preface that “as a form of mental philosophy transcendentalism may have had its day; at any rate it is no longer in the ascendant, and at present is manifestly on the decline, being suppressed by the philosophy of experience, which, under different names, is taking possession of the speculative world” (p. vii.) Who knows what might have been the precious fruits of all the high aspiration and powerful earnestness which were underlying this movement, if, instead of seeking for a “dialectical basis of the great German systems,” its leaders had cast aside their prejudices, and found that Catholic philosophy which had interpreted the divine oracles of the soul from age to age, consonant with man’s original and everlasting convictions, and sustaining his loftiest and noblest hopes?
But with the best will in the world to look favorably on the practical results of the transcendental movement, and our sincere appreciation of its leaders—both of which, the issues and the men, are described from chapter vii. to xv., which latter concludes the volume—in spite of these dispositions of ours, our sympathy for so much praiseworthy effort, and our respect for so many highly-gifted men, in reading these chapters a feeling of sadness creeps over us, and we cannot help exclaiming with the poet Sterling:
But this is not to be wondered at; for although these men had arrived at the perception of certain great truths, they held them by no strong intellectual grasp, and finally they escaped them, and their intellectual fabric, like the house built upon sand, when the storm came and the winds blew, great was the fall thereof. This was the history of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, communities in which the two wings of transcendentalism attempted to reduce their ideas into practice. Here let us remark it would have increased the interest of the volume if its author had given to his readers the programme of Brook Farm, “The Idea of Jesus of Society,” together with its constitutions. It is short, interesting, and burning with earnestness. There is scarcely any account of the singular enterprise of the group of idealists at Fruitlands, and the name of Henry Thoreau, one of the notables among transcendentalists, is barely mentioned, while to his life at Walden Pond there is not even an allusion. True, these experiments were, like Brook Farm, unsuccessful, but they were not without interest and significance, and worthy of a place in what claims to be a history of the movement that gave rise to them; at least space enough might have been afforded them for a suitable epitaph.
We will now redeem our promise of showing how the influence of our political institutions aided in producing what goes by the name of transcendentalism. But before doing this, we must settle what transcendentalism is; for our author appears to make a distinction between idealism and transcendentalism in New England. Here is what he says:
“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” (p. 115).
If we seize the meaning of this passage, it is admitted that previous to the knowledge of the German systems Mr. Emerson had already defined the axioms, run out their inferences to the end, and anticipated the results of the German transcendental philosophy. But this is all that any system of philosophy pretends to accomplish; and therefore, by his own showing, the distinction between idealism and transcendentalism is a distinction without a difference.
Mr. Frothingham, however, tells us on the same page that “transcendentalism, properly so-called, was imported in foreign packages”; and Mr. Frothingham ought to know, for he was once, he tells us, “a pure transcendentalist”; and on pages 128 and 136 he criticises Mr. Emerson, who identifies idealism and transcendentalism. With the genius and greatness of the prince of the transcendentalists before his eyes, our author, as is proper, employs the following condescending language: “It is audacious to criticise Mr. Emerson on a point like this; but candor compels the remark that the above description does less than justice to the definiteness of the transcendental movement. It was something more than a reaction against formalism and tradition, though it took that form. It was more than a reaction against Puritan orthodoxy, though in part it was that. It was in a very small degree due to study of the ancient pantheists, of Plato and the Alexandrians, of Plutarch, Seneca, and Epictetus, though one or two of the leaders had drunk deeply from these sources. Transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system” (p. 136).
So far so good. Here is the place, if the author knows what he is talking about, to give us in clear terms the definition of transcendentalism. But what does he? Does he satisfy our anticipations? Mr. Emerson, be it understood, does not know what transcendentalism is! Well, hear our author, who thinks he does. He continues: “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.… Through all was the belief in the living God in the soul, faith in immediate inspiration, in boundless possibility, and in unimaginable good” (p. 137). Ordinarily when writers attempt to give a definition, or convey information of a “distinct philosophical system,” they give one to understand its first principles or axioms, its precise method, and its important conclusions, and particularly wherein it differs in these respects from other systems of philosophy. This is what Mr. Frothingham in the passage last quoted has led us to expect; but instead of this he gives to the reader mere “assertions” and “beliefs.” And these assertions and beliefs every one knows who has heard Dr. Channing, or Mr. Emerson, or Mr. Alcott, or who has a slight acquaintance with their writings, to have been the sources of inspiration in their speech, which appear on almost every page they have written! Proof is needless; for there is no one who will venture a contradiction on this point. The men who were most influenced by the study of the philosophers abroad were neither the originators nor leaders of the so-called transcendental movement in New England—Brownson, Parker, and William Channing. Mr. Frothingham, we submit, has not made out his case, and has given too much credit where it was not due, while robbing others of their just merit, whatever that may be. If “transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system,” nowhere in his book has this been shown.
Transcendentalism, accepting the author’s statement as to its true character, was never a philosophical system in New England; and had its early disciples been content to cultivate the seeds sown by its true leaders, instead of making the futile attempt to transfer to our clime exotics from Germany which would not take root and grow in our soil, we should have had, in place of a dreary waste, stately trees whose wholesome and delicious fruits would now refresh us.
And now for our reasons why it was native to the soil from which it sprang. If we analyze the political system of our country, we will find at its base the maxim, “Man is capable of self-government.” The American system exhibits a greater trust in the natural capacities and the inherent worth of man than any other form of political government now upon this earth. Hence all the great political trusts are made elective; hence also our recourse to short periods of election and the great extension among us of the elective franchise. The genius and whole drift of the current of our political life runs in this direction. Now, what does this maxim mean, that “Man is capable of self-government”? It means that man is endowed by his Creator with reason to know what is right, true, and good. It means that man possesses free-will and can follow the right, true, and good. These powers constitute man a responsible being. It supposes that man as he is now born is in possession of all his natural rights, and the primal tendencies of his native faculties are in accordance with the great end of his existence, and his nature is essentially good. But such views of human nature are in direct opposition to the fundamental doctrines of Puritanism and orthodox Protestantism. These taught and teach that man is born totally depraved, that his nature is essentially corrupt, and all his actions, springing from his nature, nothing but evil. Now, the political influence of our American institutions stimulated the assertion of man’s natural rights, his noble gift of liberty, and his inalienable worth, while the religion peculiar to New England preached precisely the contrary. In the long run, the ballot-box beat the pulpit; for the former exerted its influence six days in the week, while the latter had for its share only the Sabbath. In other words, the inevitable tendency of our American political system is to efface from the minds of our people all the distinctive dogmas of the orthodox Protestant views of Christianity by placing them on a platform in accordance with man’s natural capacities, his native dignity, and with right and honorable views of God. Herein lies the true genesis of Unitarianism and its cogenitor, the transcendental movement in New England.
Dr. Channing was right in discarding the attempt to introduce the worse than idle speculation of the German and French philosophical systems in New England. “He considered,” so says his biographer, “pretensions to absolute science 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.” “The transcendentalists,” he tells James Martineau in 1841, “in identifying themselves a good deal with Cousin’s crude system, have lost the life of an original movement.” In this last sentence Dr. Channing not only anticipated history but also uttered a prophecy. But how about a philosophy whose mission it is to maintain all the great truths for which he so eloquently and manfully fought? How about a conception of Christianity which places itself in evident relations with human nature and the history of the universe?—a religion which finds its sanctuary in man’s soul, and aims at the elevation of his finite reason to its archetype and its transformation into the Infinite Reason?
Unitarianism in New England owes its existence to the supposition that Calvinism is a true and genuine interpretation of Christianity. “Total depravity,” “election,” “reprobation,” “atonement,” etc., followed, it was fancied, each other logically, and there was no denying one without the denial of all. And as it was supposed that these doctrines found their support in the divinity of Christ, and in order to bring to ruin the superstructure they aimed at upsetting its base by the denial of the divinity of Christ. They had grown to detest so heartily the “five points” of Calvinism that they preferred rather to be pagans than suckled in such a creed. Is it probable, is it reasonable to suppose that our New Englanders, who have a strong vein of earnest religious feeling in their nature, would have gone across the ocean to find a support for the great truths which they were so enthusiastic in affirming among the will-o’-the-wisps of the realms of thought, when at their very doors was “the church which has revealed more completely man to himself, taken possession of his inclinations, of his lasting and universal convictions, laid bare to the light those ancient foundations, has cleansed them from every stain, from every alien mixture, and honored them by recognizing their impress of the Divinity?”
But Mr. Frothingham tells us: “The religion of New England was Protestant and of the most intellectual type. Romanism had no hold on the thinking people of Boston. None besides the Irish laboring and menial classes were Catholics, and their religion was regarded as the lowest form of ceremonial superstition” (p. 107); and almost in the same breath he informs his readers that “the Unitarians of New England were good scholars, accomplished men of letters, humane in sentiment and sincere and moral in intention” (p. 110). Is Octavius Brooks Frothingham acquainted with all “the ceremonial superstitions” upon this earth, and does he honestly believe that the Catholic religion is “the lowest form” of them all? Or—what is the same thing—does he think that the “good scholars and accomplished men of letters” of New England thought so? Perhaps such was his received impression, but that it was common to this class of men we stoutly deny. No one stood higher among them than Dr. Channing, and his estimate of the Catholic religion was certainly not the same as Mr. Frothingham’s. It would be difficult to find in a non-Catholic writer a higher appreciation of her services to humanity, and more eloquent descriptions of certain aspects of the Catholic Church, than may be found in his writings. Mr. Frothingham ought to know this, and only the limits of our article hinder us from citing several of these. Is he aware that President John Adams headed the subscription-list to build the first Catholic church in Boston. Our author, by his prejudices, his lack of insight, and limited information, does injustice to the New England people, depreciates the intelligence and honesty of the leaders in Unitarianism, and fails to grasp the deep significance of the transcendental movement.
He does injustice to the people of Boston especially, who, when they heard of the death of the saintly Bishop Cheverus, tolled the bells of the churches of their city to show in what veneration they held his memory; and if he was not of the age to have listened, he must have read the eloquent and appreciative eulogium preached by Dr. Channing on this great and good man. And Bishop Cheverus was the guide and teacher of the religion of the Irish people of Boston!
Mr. Frothingham will not attempt to make a distinction between the “Catholic religion” and “the religion of the Irish menial and laboring classes”—a subterfuge of which no man of intelligence and integrity would be guilty. The Irish people—be it said to their glory—have from the beginning of their conversion to Christianity kept the pure light of Catholic faith unsullied by any admixture of heresy, and have remained firm in their obedience to the divine authority of the holy church, in spite of the tyranny, of the bitterest persecution of its enemies, and all their efforts of bribery or any worldly inducements which they might hold out. When our searchers after true religion shall have exhausted by their long and weary studies Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Svenalis, Plato, Epictetus, Brahma, Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, and any other notable inventor of philosophy or religion; when they have gathered up all the truths scattered among the different heresies in religion since the Christian era, the end of all their labors will only make this truth the plainer: that the Catholic Church resumes the authority of all religions from the beginning of the world, affirms the traditions and convictions of the whole human race, and unites, co-ordinates, and binds together all the scattered truths contained in every religious system in an absolute, universal, divine synthesis.
[147] Transcendentalism in New England. A History. By Octavius Brooks Frothingham. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.