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Updated: June 27, 2025
He thought out the whole plan of the Barclay Economy Car Door Strip about midnight, sitting in his night clothes at the piano after reading "Abt Vogler," and the central idea for the address on the "Practical Transcendentalist," which he delivered at the opening of the state university the next year, came to him one winter night after he had tried to compose a clanging march as an air to fit Emerson's "The Sphinx."
He loves physical symbols for mental and moral states, and was poet and Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful affection for parables; but his true field as a story-teller is the erring, questing, aspiring, shadowed human heart. "The Scarlet Letter," for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is provincial.
An explorer in search of the North Pole must bring back proofs of his journey, but when a Transcendentalist affirms that he has reached the far heights of human experience and even caught sight of the gods sitting on their thrones, you and I are obliged to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness of the method.
Next to the grand structure of his head, this is the most noticeable characteristic in the pictures of him. He seems to have been attracted to them at first, and was even mistaken for a transcendentalist by Edgar A. Poe, and was attacked by that fiery Virginian in a most belligerent manner.
The search of the Puritan was rather along the path of logic, spiritualized, and the transcendentalist of reason, spiritualized a difference in a broad sense between objective and subjective contemplation. The dislike of inactivity, repose and barter, drives one to the indefinite subjective.
Even so, he failed to understand the impelling power of those moral ideals which border on the unattainable. For the transcendentalist in politics and philanthropy, he had only contempt. The propulsive force of an idea in his own mind depended wholly upon its appeal to his practical judgment. His was the philosophy of the attainable. Results that were approximately just and fair satisfied him.
Comparing the modern transcendentalist and his pathway with that of the olden transcendentalist with his ascent of travail and pain, we find a profound satisfaction in the picture of power, peace and love of the modern supra-man. The pathway of the elder supra-man was one of crucifixion, self-denial, renunciation, affliction, poverty, disease and self-mortification.
The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with truth, as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good enough for him.
But for an accident, Kant was a dead man. However, on considerations of "morality," it happened that the murderer preferred a little child, whom he saw playing in the road, to the old transcendentalist: this child he murdered; and thus it happened that Kant escaped.
We may take each word in, yet not understand the sentence; but if suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the sense of each word is taken up into that whole meaning. Just so, according to our transcendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks the whole sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause, a word, a syllable, or a letter.
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