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Updated: June 27, 2025
It was a mirthful if not a wholly good-natured performance. Herries had listened with ill-concealed disgust, and excused himself at the end of the recital on the plea of work. As the door closed behind him, Musgrave said with a wink, "I am afraid my story has rather disgusted our young transcendentalist.
It is like thinking of a parliament in the Pleiocene, or of a court-house on the Grand Banks. Any transcendentalist who wishes to furbish up his philosophic furniture will find this a good workshop for the purpose. There is ample room for any school, positive or negative, plenty of cloud-land for all conceits.
When a certain transcendentalist left his wife and children in Newport, and came to Concord to write poetry and live the life of an old bachelor, there were many who blamed him severely; but Emerson said, "He is no doubt to blame, but you cannot tell how much; perhaps this is the only way in which he can live." So that there was a large portion of liberality mixed with his natural severity.
It believed in man's ability to apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness. It resembled the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced this to a supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the Transcendentalist believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a natural endowment of the human mind. It had only to be trusted.
In every century a few men have lived who knew the value of plain living and high thinking, and very often the men who reversed the maxim have passed them the hemlock. All those sects known as Primitive Christians represent variations of the idea Quakers, Mennonites, Communists, Shakers and Dunkards! A Transcendentalist is a Dukhobortsi with a college education.
Nay, farther, the conscious ability to do without happiness, in such a condition of the world, is the best prospect of realizing such happiness as is attainable. Meanwhile, self-devotion belongs as much to the Utilitarian as to the Stoic or the Transcendentalist; with the reservation that a sacrifice not tending to increase the sum of happiness is to be held as wasted.
We treat it as a positive nihility, "a barrier from which all our batted balls of being rebound." Upon this idea Mr. Blood passes the usual transcendentalist criticism. There is no such separate opposite to being; yet we never think of being as such of pure being as distinguished from specific forms of being save as what stands relieved against this imaginary background.
The transcendentalist standing on the streets of New York can extend his vision and look at a street or building in Chicago or Cairo or London, while the surface man alongside of him can scarcely read the signs on the other side of the street.
The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors, but who in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist. "These exacting children advertise us of our wants.
Of course the obvious remedy is marriage; but one cannot marry from prudence, or from a sense of duty, or even to increase the birth-rate, which I am concerned to see is diminishing. I am, moreover, to be perfectly frank, a transcendentalist on the subject of marriage.
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