Robert Richardson Quotes

I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)

Warm summer sun, shine friendly here Warm western wind, blow kindly here; Green sod above, rest light, rest light, Good-night, Annette! Sweetheart, good-night!

Lily la chilenita, la camarada Arlette, madame Robert Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko y madame Ricardo Somocurcio, se llamaba, en realidad, Otilia. Otilita.

2013, the Roberts Supreme Court handed down the Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.

Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion…

Mighty well, Mr. Robert! said I; I never saw an execution but once, and then the hangman asked the poor creature's pardon, and wiped his mouth, as you do, and pleaded his duty, and then calmly tucked up the criminal. But I am no criminal, as you all know: And if I could have thought it my duty to obey a wicked master in his unlawful command, I had saved you all the merit of this vile service.

But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescant spirit of the man!

Obamacare, he claimed, was “about capitalism versus socialism.” Republicans opposed socialism, O’Reilly said, “but Republicans have not been able to convince the majority of Americans that income redistribution is harmful.”[4] There was another solution to that dilemma, though: flooding the zone with propaganda. In January 2010, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, whose professional career had been spent opposing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. It ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they were not formally working with a candidate or a party.

And yet, in early January 2017, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a report that aggregated the findings of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA (National Security Agency, which operates under the authority of the director of national intelligence), concluding that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. Over the next two years, two investigations, one by Special Counsel Robert Mueller from the Department of Justice and another by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, found that the Trump campaign had, at the very least, played along.[1] The story was not just about Trump or Russia or the private dealings between the two. It was the story of authoritarianism undermining American democracy by using disinformation to manipulate voters.

the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced

Dewey’s treatment of fact and theory. They are not really different,

This is the good and the evil of trade, that it would put everything into market; talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself.

he was himself aware of the defects of a society in which everything and everybody had to endure what Robert Frost would call “trial by market.” But he thought that eventually “the historian of the world will see that trade was the principle of liberty, that trade planted America and destroyed feudalism, that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery.

Great truths demand great utterance. The highest truths need the highest utterance, which means poetry. The religious nature finds its full expression only in communication between people. When poetry (or preaching or lecturing) achieves this, it is doing its job.

THE BOSTON TO WHICH EMERSON RETURNED AFTER COLLEGE in 1821 was a prosperous, growing, commercial seaport of just over 40,000 people. It was organized as a town and run by town meeting. After remaining stable at around 20,000 for most of the eighteenth century, the town’s population had grown by 30 percent in each of the first two decades of the nineteenth century. By 1820 the pace of growth had quickened further. Boston was to grow by 40 percent to 61,000 persons by 1830.

And for the next two years he read more or less continuously the writings of the Scottish philosophers of common sense, Adam Smith, Thomas Brown, James Mackintosh, Thomas Reid, and especially Dugald Stewart. One of Emerson’s students later remembered that the way to please the young schoolmaster was to praise Dugald Stewart. Scottish Common Sense philosophy was the prevailing mode of thought at Emerson’s Harvard. It

The real enemy for Stewart is not Locke but David Hume. Stewart understood Hume to have claimed that “all the objects of our knowledge are divided into two classes, impressions and ideas.” Impressions are sense impressions; ideas are “copies of impressions.” Hume thus directly doubts the existence of such a thing as mind. He doubts what Descartes said could not be doubted, “the existence of a thinking percipient I.” Not only did Hume consider mind an imaginary substance, he also thought matter to be “an imaginary and exploded substance.

The result of this rupture between cause and effect is radical skepticism. “As we can have no idea of anything which never appeared to our outward senses or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be, that we have no idea of connexion or power at all.” In Stewart’s view Hume aimed “to establish a universal skepticism, and to produce in the reader a complete distrust of his own faculties.”4 Taking his lead from Stewart, Emerson was to struggle against Hume for years. To a great extent Emerson’s life and work—indeed, transcendentalism itself—constitutes a refutation of Hume. It is therefore important to recognize how fully Emerson and his contemporaries confronted and recognized the potential for nihilism in Hume.

We measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort we can put forth  .  .  .  He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero. William James

Emerson had also by now learned to think of ideas not as abstractions but as perceptions, laws, templates, patterns, and plans. Ideas were not less real than the phenomenal world. If anything, ideas were more important than phenomena because they lay behind them, creating and explaining the visible world. Ideas for Emerson were tangible and had force. “Believe in magnetism, not in needles,” he wrote. Ideas, even the idea of death, could not be separated from sense experience.

has been to make the great scheme of the salvation of man absolutely incredible.” He would live no longer with the dead. “Let us express our astonishment,” he wrote in his journal in May, “before we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss. I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.”5 Before the year was out, Emerson had resigned his pulpit, moved his mother, sold his household furniture, and taken ship for Europe. He set out on Christmas Day, 1832. A northeast storm was on its way as the ship sailed from Boston, plunging into the grey expanse of the North Atlantic.

Carolina alone. In Emerson’s day, a student commonly entered college at thirteen or fourteen, graduating at seventeen or eighteen. As a result, college life had at times a certain rowdiness. In Emerson’s sophomore year an epic food fight broke out on the first floor of University Hall. The fight quickly got beyond the throwing of food and almost all the school’s crockery was smashed. But it would be a mistake to assume this was the dominant tone of college life. Young people grew up faster then. Emerson could read before he was three; he taught his first class at fourteen. Girls were little women, boys little men. The curriculum shows that Harvard was not like either the high school or the college of today; it offered a combination of basic and advanced studies, functioning as a sort of early college.

(in The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 1747) argues that the Bible can fruitfully be approached as Hebrew poetry. He points out that the words for poet and prophet are the same in Hebrew; he treats the Old Testament prophets as the poets of their era—and thus made it possible for modern poets to claim the role of prophet for their era. The concept of the modern poet-prophet runs from Lowth to Blake, to Herder, and to Whitman. If we can approach Homeric poetry as Greek religion and Hebrew religion as Jewish poetry, the result is, on one side, skepticism about the historical reliability of either text, but on the other side, the elevation of the poet as the prophet of the present age, the truth teller, the gospel maker, the primary witness for his time and place.

the one book down into multiple narratives written at different times by different people. This

Emerson’s religious notes during his last year and a half at Harvard range from conventional views of the awful immanence of the Day of Judgment to efforts to apprehend “the immediate presence of God,” which he thought “a fine topic of sublimity.” What these thoughts had in common was an interest not in dogma or theology but in the immediate personal experience of religion. More often, however, it was religious eloquence that Emerson hungered for. Everett was eloquent and talked about eloquence.

In most respects these early writings serve mainly to take the temperature of Emerson’s youthful fervor. The Uilsa story reveals his strong, almost violent emotional side and his ability to tap the Dionysian spirit; the ethics essay reflects his lifelong interest not in epistemology but in ethics. Already his question is not “What can I know?” but “How should I live?”10

groundwork of an Encyclopedical classification of the arts and sciences.” This is Stewart’s starting point, and it shows how close Scottish Common Sense and German idealism are in their fundamentals.

Concord—was to America what Goethe’s Weimar had been to Germany. In each case, a small if not humble society came to have enormous moral and intellectual importance for a country, coming eventually to symbolize the best of the national culture. And both Concord and Weimar owed that central and symbolic importance to their productive interest in what John Stuart Mill called “the culture of the inward man.” Concord was acutely aware that it was following Weimar in this interest; nothing Emerson and his friends took from Goethe’s Germany was more important than the concept of Bildung.

Arnold’s normative public concept of culture as “the best that has been thought and said,” and from the anthropological use of the word culture to mean the habits and customs of any distinct social or ethnic group. The essentially individualistic inwardness of personal culture may owe something to the eighteenth-century revival of Stoic thought. As a recent commentator notes, “The notion of stoical self-respect, of inner freedom, the ‘No man need say “I must”’ of Lessing, was of course one of the central ideas of the German Enlightenment.”1

things of the mind  .  .  .  given to autobiographical confession and deeply personal.

But it is principally in Emerson’s writings that the German concept of self-culture was taken over and reworked into the still-familiar American emphasis on self-reliance and self-improvement. Emerson had, in fact, been writing on the subject since at least 1828, long before his serious encounter with Goethe, and in the titles of some of his early sermons we can see how deeply he was interested in the problem of self-development.

with duckweed, looking like green confetti. Early settlers had found Concord damp, poor, low, and mean; it was, they complained, unusually subject to storms and full of swamps and impenetrable undergrowth. All that had changed by 1837. There were still extensive lowlands and swamps, but Concord on the whole was a healthy place. Surrounded by open land, it was drier than it is now, and it seems to have been relatively free of insects. Life expectancy was around forty, but almost one person in four lived until seventy. One out of every five died from fevers of various sorts, while one out of every seven deaths was from “consumption.” The disease was endemic in many families, including Thoreau’s.5

United States and the defense of the American Indians. Thoreau himself became an active and early supporter of John Brown, and even Emerson was far warmer and more active in the antislavery movement than most of those who mocked transcendentalists for having their heads in the clouds. If indeed they did, the clouds were more apt to be storm clouds of revolt than wisps of antisocial daydreaming.4

man could base a good life, a just life, on nature.

kind of sketching with words.4 It is not quite accurate to say flatly that Goethe influenced Thoreau; no one more resisted influence in the usual sense. But, like Emerson, Goethe showed Thoreau the path to his own work. Reading Goethe’s account of his Italian trip made Thoreau all the more eager to start on his own travels and to be about his own work.

the ideas of evolution and natural selection became our catchall explanation of natural change—and our all-but-universal and therefore invisible metaphor for social change—the Romantic generation, from Goethe to Whitman, expressed its conception of the role of change in nature, quite detached from any notion of progress, in the idea of metamorphosis.

By March he was reading—or at least recalling—Mme de Stael’s Germany (1812), that widely read introduction to German thought and culture. Mme de Stael ends her book with three strong chapters on “enthusiasm” which, she said, was the leading, all-important characteristic of the Germans. It was, in her view, the one indispensable key to the subject. What the Germans had taught her, they also taught Thoreau: “Thought is nothing without enthusiasm.”8

Thoreau’s earliest poems reflect the very different kinds of verse he admired at the time. In some early efforts he worked to make phrases about Musketaquid, the Indian name for Concord River.

August on “Self-Command.” In September of 1830 his topic was “Self-Culture,” in December “Trust Yourself.” In July of 1831 he talked on “Limits of Self-Reliance,” and in the following February on “Self-Improvement,” a favorite sermon he was to repeat fourteen times over the next four years.5

Although not so much influenced, he said, by the German concept of Kultur (public, “official” culture: plays, operas, cultural institutions and events), the idea of individual culture struck a deeply responsive chord in Emerson, and his study of Goethean and Herderian ideas of self-culture led Emerson to his 1837—38 lecture series called “Human Culture.” Testimony to the importance he gave the subject is his catechistic note to himself in 1837: “What is culture? the chief end of man.”6

Emersonian individualism is neither antisocial nor imperial; it does not advocate withdrawal from society, nor does it seek to rule others. It is overwhelmingly concerned with the self-education and development of the individual, and convinced that there can be neither love nor society unless one first has a group of autonomous individuals. Emersonian self-reliance is, like the Stoic’s self-respect, the necessary means to self-culture, to the development of the self. Insofar as it is a means to power it is only power over the self, not over others.7

was characteristic of these Americans to urge individualism as the best means of social reform, and not just as self-aggrandizement or a narrow self-culture. In this they differed from the Germans, whose Bildung was a self-justifying concept of self-culture which Thomas Mann has complained led Germans who espoused it away from, rather than toward, political or social action. It

Emerson’s leading idea about history is that there is one mind, of which history is the record. Another way to put it is to say that human nature—the human mind—is and has been essentially the same in all ages and places. There are variations, of course, sometimes important and even blinding differences. But the similarities between people, even those of widely different times and places, far outweigh, in importance, the differences. If the human mind has always been essentially the same, then it has neither progressed nor declined from age to age. Chronology, therefore, is not what is important in history. All ages are equal; the world exists for the writer today just as much as it did for Homer. This way of looking at history, which sets the present as high as any past era, is a direct response to what W. J. Bate has so brilliantly described as the burden of the past, it is the basis for most of Emerson’s best work from 1835 to 1850, and it quickly became a deep and permanent conviction—and a liberating, enabling conviction for Henry Thoreau. In October of 1837, evidently at Emerson’s urging, he began to keep the journal that would be his own history, and by the third week in November he was telling himself to read Virgil to be reminded of the essential uniformity of human nature, past and present, Roman and American.

Emerson and the circle of liberal intellectuals around him, Kant and Fichte were simply more important than Locke or Hume or the Scottish Common Sense school in philosophy; Goethe and Novalis were more important than Wordsworth or Keats in literature, and the work of Herder, Coleridge (himself strongly influenced by German thought), and Schleiermacher was more important in theology than Jonathan Edwards and the American Puritan tradition. One simply could not expect, in 1837, to understand the advanced intellectual atmosphere of the times without taking up Germany.1

a paying career out of her writing. She and Emerson talked about many things, including self-reliance, but most concentratedly about German literature. She, as well as Carlyle, was now absorbed in Goethe’s writings and was working on a translation of Eckermann’s great Conversations with Goethe. Emerson was working on his (German, increasingly convinced, as were other friends such as Hedge from Bangor, and Parker and Ripley from Boston, that the most interesting intellectual and artistic currents, the really vital ideas seemed recently to have been coming out of Germany. No one, they thought, would be able to understand the nineteenth century without taking Kant, Herder, Hegel, and Goethe into account. Until one had read them, one’s basic education was not complete.

In his most eloquent and moving tribute to the classics, the chapter on “Reading” in Walden, he tried again to explain: The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. If we can see as much and as well as they saw, we can also hope to write as well as they wrote. If, as Thoreau notes in his journal in mid-February of 1838, each of the sons of Greece “created a new heaven and a new earth for Greece,” there was no compelling reason why each of the sons and daughters of Concord should not be able to do the same.4

man alike, lies in the last re-sort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their interior characters, and nowhere else.”28

The inference is that consciousness develops or evolves “to remedy defect of brain.”9 Most important, the advent of consciousness (James is still thinking in evolutionary terms) means the end of the reign of chance and the beginning of the reign of intelligence.10 Accepting consciousness as an active, choosing, comparing process also means abandoning pure materialism and pure determinism. “I for one,” James concluded his sixth and last lecture, “as a scientific man and practical man alike, deny utterly that Science compels me to believe that my conscience is an ignis fatuus or outcast, and I trust that you too after the evidence of this evening will go away strengthened in the natural faith that your delights and sorrows, your loves and hates, your aspirations and efforts are real combatants in life’s arena, and not impotent, paralytic spectators of the game.”11

Noting that “consciousness is presumably at its minimum in creatures whose nervous system is simple,” James suggests that consciousness “is most needed where the nervous system is highly evolved,” and he asks what defects exist in highly evolved nervous systems for which consciousness might be the remedy. “Whoever studies consciousness, from any point of view whatever, is ultimately brought up against the mystery of interest and selective attention.” James concludes that the function of consciousness is to enable us to select, to give us the ability “always to choose out of the manifold experiences present to it [consciousness] at a given time some one for particular accentuation, and to ignore the rest.” The passenger may, if it interests him, and if he selects it for attention, take hold of the helm and raise, lower, or reef the sail, and so, in small but meaningful ways, direct the voyage. Such a person, taking such actions, cannot fairly be called an automaton.17

The essay starts from “the assumption that if thought is not to stand forever pointing at the universe in a maze of helpless wonder, its movement must be diverted from the useless channel of purely theoretic contemplation.” James then undertook to redeem thought from what he understood as unmoored theory. He aimed, he said, to determine “what that definition of the universe must be which shall awaken active impulses capable of effecting this diversion.” He was looking, not for some definition of the universe that would prove “true” in some absolute or abstract way, but for a definition that would call upon our best energies. “A conception of the world which will give back to the mind the free motion which has been checked, blocked, and inhibited in the purely contemplative path will . . . make the world seem rational again.”3 The boldness and novelty of this approach can hardly be overstated.

James here singles out for disapproval “a pessimistic principle like Schopenhauer’s incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann’s wicked jack-of-all-trades, the Unconscious.” The trouble with determinism, fatalism, pessimism, the unconscious, and materialism is that in our better hours we feel such limited and limiting forces to be “so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in human affairs.” Each explains away the objects of our thought or translates them “into terms of no emotional pertinency, [leaving] the mind with little to care or act for.”4 James pins his argument to daily life. “It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests,” he writes. “Cognition is incomplete until discharged in act.”5

some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for it if I will, and not a footless waif.

the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.

In fact, he maintains, “we cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith.

The Concord to which Henry Thoreau returned in 1837 has been called a village, but it was really a good-sized town of two thousand inhabitants lying sixteen miles, or four hours by stage, west of Boston.

Like Emerson’s moment standing on the bare hillside, Fuller’s moment of self-affirmation was accompanied at once by a sense that one is not an isolate self but a part of a central, all-pervading consciousness. “I saw,” she goes on, in her Ecclesiastes-like way, “that there was no self: that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered.”5

than Emerson, Fuller was Goethe’s reader in America.

The Greeks,” she said, “saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause.

his, that ideas are ideas of particular persons. It seems altogether likely that Fuller, even in this first meeting, pushed Emerson away from the abstract and theoretical idealism toward which Nature kept drifting and pushed him toward what may be called biographical idealism—idealism that is concerned with ideas only as they can be lived, with laws only as they can be seen in events, with the word only when it becomes flesh, with the spiritual only when it animates the material.

.” Through our imagination we can place ourselves in the situations of others. By our fellow feeling for the misery of others, we can imagine how we would feel in similar circumstances and can act accordingly. In other words, the moral sentiment arises from sympathy and from sympathetic identification.6

These primary elements arise from a belief in our own identity and the evidence of memory. What comes first, for Stewart, is consciousness, which assures us we exist. Then comes memory. The fundamental laws of human belief follow. First, I exist. Second, I am the same person today I was yesterday. Third, the material world has an existence independent of my mind. Fourth, the general laws of nature will continue in future to operate uniformly, as in time past.7 Scottish Common Sense philosophy avoids both the pure materialism of Gassendi, Diderot, Holbach, and la Mettrie and the pure idealism of Leibniz and Berkeley. Affirmative

A movement to repatriate American blacks created Liberia.

Margaret Fuller, and Henry Longfellow all were impelled by the book to the study of German language and literature. The book is attractive, lucid, and accessible. Its four parts cover Germany and the Germans, literature and the arts, philosophy, and religion. There is practically nothing in the book about biblical criticism aside from a paragraph that mentions Michaelis. But there is an excellent and still valuable introduction to Kant and his followers, and there is a great deal about the religious spirit as it flourished in Germany.

She thought nothing great could be accomplished without enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is “the quality which really distinguishes the German nation,” the quality responsible for its great achievements in literature, religion, and philosophy.

In other words, the question is not whether the gods exist but whether they intervene in our affairs. Emerson was unable to solve either this or the Manichaean proposition that unless one posits an evil deity as well as a good one, one must somehow accept the paradox “that evil may arise from the fountain of all good.” With that phrase Emerson stopped writing. Skepticism could go no further. At this point his uveitis set in and he was forced to abandon his studies.4

was to advise Waldo to prepare to preach at once, whether he had the full use of his eyes or not, with or without his degree. In crisis after crisis, whether of events or convictions, it was Mary Moody Emerson’s hand on the tiller that got Emerson through. He fought more with his aunt than did his brothers, but he trusted her, at bottom, much more than they did.

Emerson’s interest in Plato would become a major preoccupation. Plato was the single most important source of Emerson’s lifelong conviction that ideas are real because they are the forms and laws that underlie, precede, and explain appearances. Emerson found Plato the way Schliemann found Troy. Over a period of many years, Emerson dug down through successive layers of translation, commentary, and editorial arrangement until he came to the real thing. Emerson could read Greek; he was familiar with the Platonic texts, but he preferred to work with translations. His general understanding of Plato evolved through at least seven discernible stages.

Certain books, among them Plutarch and Montaigne, were particularly rich for him and could bear endless rereading. In

Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only on those principles that you can will to be principles for everybody.” “The state of society,” says Gerando, “is a state of nature. Society is the grand vocation of nature for man. Without

was deeply congenial to the man who was already brooding on the idea that all things have their compensations.3 Cousin was on a path parallel to Emerson’s in several respects. Lecture 10 of the Cours is an extensive treatment of great men, understood by Cousin as by Emerson, not as individuals but as representative or symbolic figures. Great persons are “representations of nations, epochs, of humanity, of nature, and of universal order.” Cousin was farther down this road than Emerson at the moment, but Emerson would return to this theme in the 1840s.4 From Emerson’s excited reading of

read that summer as if searching for the right recipe—how to do it. In Bob’s book I found familiar prescriptions: travel, reading, nature, friendship, journal-keeping, letter-writing. Yet all of this was delivered with heightened impact through a method Bob calls “documentary biography,” in words and scenes lifted straight from the past, as if the book were a documentary film.

The freshness of James’s views in these lectures comes partly from his tenacious returning again and again to the question of what it is about consciousness that makes it a trait favored by evolution. The value—the evolutionary or survival value—is the issue. “If consciousness can load the dice, can exert a constant pressure in the right direction, can feel what nerve processes are leading to the goal, can reinforce and strengthen these and at the same time inhibit those which threaten to lead us astray, why, consciousness will be of invaluable service.”8

materialist nor an idealist approach, but experimental, or as it will come to be called, phenomenological, or functional.

talk that Alcott might come to live with them.2

Discontent with industrialism was already strong on both sides of the Atlantic. Marx and Engels would soon be heard from. The American phenomenon, not even approached in Europe, of more than forty model communities founded during the 1840s alone, was very much part of the times. The impulse to create communities was linked with the cause of nonviolence; most of the founders were more interested in building models, which would be emulated because they succeeded, than in the destruction of the existing order. Still, American utopian socialism had much in common with the spirit of 1848.

On the twenty-sixth of April, Thoreau solved for the time being his problem of where to live, if not the problem of what to live for, by moving into Emerson’s house. The arrangement turned out to be a good one and it would last for two years, a sojourn almost equal in length to his later stay at Walden Pond. Thoreau

Observing that since the War of 1812, “the line of socialist excitements lies parallel with the line of religious Revivals,” Noyes cites the early-nineteenth-century division of Puritan Congregationalism into orthodoxy and Unitarianism; the first party, he says, “was set to defend religion, the other liberty.” Orthodoxy, he goes on, “had for its function the carrying through of the Revival system; the other the development of Socialism.

He did not see this as an exclusively religious matter, certainly not just a Christian one, nor did he think of it as essentially a social matter. Nevertheless he was drawing on several long traditions of reformational zeal. One certainly was Protestant. Thoreau’s ultimate reformed community of one at Walden would be an example of the extreme results of the tendency of Protestants to splinter away from any parent body. Thoreau’s interest in individual reformation also led him back to the Greek ethical schools, and particularly to Stoicism—the search for self-rule or autarky—and the same interest should also be seen as a practical consequence of a serious immersion in the new, Kantian, subjectivism. All three impulses, Protestant, Stoic, and Kantian, lay behind and fed into the increasingly clear logic of his own personal life, his search for personal reformation, the discovery and fulfillment of his own destiny as an autonomous individual.

However much this transcendental aesthetic pointed to the primacy of mind over both things and words, Thoreau

thought.” Emerson himself gave the most lucid account in an 1842 address: It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant of Konigsburg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired: that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.2

The American idealists did not, singly or in a group, make a perceptible contribution to the development of German idealism. They pioneered no advance in metaphysics or epistemology. Insofar as the technical problem of knowledge concerned them, it was as it affected language and the communication of knowledge, and the New England group was a fertile one in ideas about the symbolic aspects of language. But their overriding interest was in the ethical implications of the new subjectivism. In ways that prefigure William James and pragmatism, they asked what the practical implications of the new ideas were for life and writing. Thus the great—and to a large extent still unrecognized—achievement of the transcendentalists as a group, and Parker and Ripley, Fuller and Peabody, Emerson and Thoreau in particular, was in working out the ethical implications of transcendentalism and making them widely accessible and, above all, liveable.3

But their ideas threatened institutions such as State Street, Harvard College, and the Unitarian Establishment, and the transcendentalists were, singly and as a group, more radical and more socially and politically activist than such writers as Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville, who held older, darker views of man and nature. Most of the transcendentalists found that the ethical consequences of transcendental idealism impelled them into social, political, and intellectual reform.

Coleridge notes that there are four kinds of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly bag, and the Golconda. In the first everything that runs in runs right out again. The sponge gives out all it took in, only a little dirtier. The jelly bag keeps only the refuse. The Golconda runs everything through a sieve and keeps only the diamonds.

encapsulate moments of high insight. Both

Anyone can amass an impressive amount of reading. But the active filtration and the tight focus of constant intention which convert that reading into real life experience and then into adequate expression, these are the exclusive properties of the great writer.

individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.8

Though he was firmly opposed to slavery, he still was not free of the casual racism of white society of the time. He now doubted, as he said, that “the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family.

By culture, Emerson does not mean official culture—what the Germans call Kultur, of museums, theater, and symphony performances—but self-development, education, Bildung. As always, Emerson is the philosophical idealist, but now he is at pains to emphasize the practical side of idealism, which he pointedly defines not as the pursuit of the best but of the better: “That Better we call the Ideal. Ideal is not opposed to Real, but to Actual. The Ideal is the Real. The Actual is but the apparent and the temporary.

The highest state of which we have any experience,” he says, “is the act of adoration.” When we have learned that the sources of nature are in our own souls, then we will see that “the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh,” and we will understand that “there is no profane history, that all history is sacred.”7

or academies in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Connecticut.3 Literacy was fairly high among the Cherokees. Not many spoke or read English, but over half could read and write using the Cherokee alphabet devised by the Cherokee scholar Sequoya in 1821. The nation had a press that turned out a newspaper, hymnbooks, and pamphlets in Cherokee. They were essentially an agricultural people, living by the plow, the spinning wheel, and the anvil. The inventory of 1825 shows 17,531 cattle, 7,653 horses, 47,732 swine, 752 looms, 2,486 spinning wheels, 72 wagons, 921 plows, 10 sawmills, 31 gristmills, 62 blacksmith shops, 8 cotton machines, and 12 schools.4

May 9, the Appalachicolas on October 11, the Chickasaws on October 20, the Kickapoos on October 24, the Pottawattomies on October 26, the Shawnees, Delawares, Piankashaws, and Peorias on October 26, and the Weas and Senecas on October 29. The Cherokees, under Chief Ross, refused. They had made twenty-eight previous treaties, each one guaranteed in perpetuity. All twenty-eight had been broken. Jackson’s

was made.”6 If all that the newspapers said was true, Emerson thundered, the country stood on the brink of a terrible crime, a “crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country;

Emerson’s address was indeed an attack on formal historical Christianity, but the talk was even more dangerous than that, for Emerson proposed as a counterweight to formal religion not atheism but a personal religious consciousness. “I deny personality to God because it is too little not too much,” he said. What Emerson produced for this occasion is a modern confession of faith, an announcement of the gospel according to the present moment, a belief not so much in pantheism as hypertheism, a declaration of the divinity of the human. Never content just to attack what he disapproved, Emerson puts the case for positive religious feeling.8

Emerson says that the “religious sentiment,” the religious feeling, is universal and that it derives from or is awakened by the “moral sentiment,” which is the even more fundamental perception that the world has an essential balance and wholeness. The feeling of veneration or reverence that arises from this perception is the basic building block of all religion. That feeling is an intuition, revealed to each person; it cannot be had at second hand.9 The divine nature is present in all persons. The mischief begins, says Emerson, when the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, denied to all the rest, and “denied with fury.” Jesus’ life illustrates his central teaching, which is that the divine manifests itself in the human, much as the Hegelians say spirit manifests itself in matter.

as their obvious interest in Concord, in nature, in walks, and in Walden Pond. They were both modern Stoics, interested in self-rule and autonomy. Both believed in the stability of human nature, in the essential equivalence of all times and places, and in Kantian rather than in Lockean theories of mind. Both believed in the process of individuation and in the authority of individual conscience.

there was often a crowd for dinner. Ellen Emerson later said all her mother’s recipes began “beat two dozen eggs  .  .  .

For Schleiermacher, as for Emerson now, the religious impulse in human nature demands not only expression but communication with others. Great truths demand great utterance. The highest truths need the highest utterance, which means poetry. The religious nature finds its full expression only in communication between people. When poetry (or preaching or lecturing) achieves this, it is doing its job. Only when live religious feeling has been driven out of a society must it take refuge under the dead letter of a canonical bible.12

rethought Erasmianism and Arminianism in the light of Kant, Schelling, and Lyell. Speaking of his differences with the whole range of what he called historical Christianity, from orthodox Calvinism to orthodox Unitarianism, Emerson considered himself to have accepted the truth of Christianity. Where he differed was in his conviction that Christianity was founded on human nature, not on the Bible. “They call it Christianity. I call it consciousness.”15