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Updated: July 16, 2025
The scientific movement of the nineteenth century influenced him partly as a force to be met and opposed by his militant transcendentalism. Yet he gives definite expression in Paracelsus to an idea of evolution both in nature and in human society, an idea of evolution which is, however, essentially theistic.
The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm ploughed the fields and milked the cows; but I think that an observer from another clime and society would have been much more struck with their spirit of conformity than with their déréglements. Their ardour was a moral ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never rested upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism.
For strong people are not so much advertised by their loving friends as by their rabid enemies. Make the scene Ohio: slip Bossuet out and Doctor Buckley in; condense the virtues of Miss Frances E. Willard and Miss Susan B. Anthony into one, and let this one stand for Madame Guyon; call it New Transcendentalism, dub the Madame a New Woman, and there you have it!
In both its parts, however, transcendentalism had much to recommend it to American philosophers, for the transcendental method appealed to the individualistic and revolutionary temper of their youth, while transcendental myths enabled them to find a new status for their inherited theology, and to give what parts of it they cared to preserve some semblance of philosophical backing.
There is no necessary connection between such an idyllic-socialistic experiment and a belief in the direct perception of a great First Clause; but Brook Farm was popularly supposed at that time to be an emanation of Transcendentalism, and is still largely so considered.
Dr Hirsch, though born in France and covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was temperamentally of another type mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism.
How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed.
They were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died. But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics and their subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed at the thing with the shameless rationality of another race.
It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle- like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day, bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the school of Emerson to America.
If there is this amount of reason for referring the wayward heroine of Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distinguished woman of her day in Boston, that Margaret Fuller was the only literary lady of eminence whom there is any sign of his having known, that she was proud, passionate, and eloquent, that she was much connected with the little world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment of Brook Farm sprung, and that she had a miserable end and a watery grave if these are facts to be noted on one side, I say; on the other, the beautiful and sumptuous Zenobia, with her rich and picturesque temperament and physical aspects, offers many points of divergence from the plain and strenuous invalid who represented feminine culture in the suburbs of the New England metropolis.
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