Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the metaphysicians, the world of religious seers a world which is real and visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.
Familiarly associated in general apprehension with that inductive triad known as "Kepler's Laws," which form the foundation of Celestial Geometry, it is much less generally known that he was an august and oracular soul, one of those called Mystics and Transcendentalists, perhaps the greatest genius for analogy that ever lived, that he led a truly epic life, a hero and helper of men, a divine martyr of humanity.
As a whole, this world is better adapted for the production of fish than genius most of the really good climate falls on the sea. Christian Scientists are Transcendentalists whose distinguishing point is that they secrete millinery California quail with rainbow tints and topknots, Balboaic instincts well defined. Let this fact stand: it was Emerson who made Concord.
Harriet Martineau, whose whole work was practical, and who wrote her journal in 1855 and in the light of history, was hardly able to do justice to these unpractical but sincere spirits. Emerson was divided from the Transcendentalists by his common sense. His shrewd business intellect made short work of their schemes.
A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature, surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers. They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious campaign.
In speaking of the Transcendentalists, who were essentially the children of the Puritans, we must begin with some study of the chief traits of Puritanism. What parts the factors of climate, circumstance, and religion have respectively played in the development of the New England character no analysis can determine. We may trace the imaginary influence of a harsh creed in the lines of the face.
What he thought himself, or by what writers he was influenced, it was not easy to fathom. He was deeply acquainted with the writings of the New-England Transcendentalists, then at their greatest notoriety, yet never for an instant seemed giddy upon the hazy heights where those earnest spirits soared.
His career was an exceptional one; for he was connected with some of the most important contemporaneous movements of thought, and passed through several distinct phases: Presbyterianism, Universalism, Socialism of a mild and benevolent kind, not to be confused with the later fiery and destructive socialism of "the Reds"; afterward sympathizing somewhat with the aims and tendencies of the New England Transcendentalists; a close intellectual associate of Ralph Waldo Emerson; then the apostle of a "new Christianity" finally becoming a Roman Catholic.
We approach the limit of the present inquiry, but before summing up and presenting such a general statement or conclusion as may be warranted by the facts, there is one point, left over hereunto, and designed for final consideration, because it appeals more exclusively to professed transcendentalists, which it will be necessary to treat briefly.
I am writing ostensibly for transcendentalists, of whom I am one; it is as a student of transcendentalism that I have been led to examine this modern mystery, equipped as it is with such portentous phenomena. Diabolism is, of course, a transcendental question, and black magic is connected with white by the same antinomy that connects light and darkness.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking