American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Marsh’s success in spreading Coleridgean thought rested on his reprints of Aids to Reflection and The Friend in 1831, the former with a lengthy “Preliminary Essay” that became required reading for young Unitarians, even though its author had studied at Andover. Herein Marsh focused on the debilitating split between reason and faith that had preoccupied him for a decade. The central problem, he claimed, lay in the Unitarians’ insistence that faith unsupported by reason was mere superstition, while the equally stubborn orthodox maintained that reason alone could never ignite the emotion necessary to vital faith. Redacting contemporary German Idealist philosophers, Coleridge suggested that the painful fragmentation of man’s sensibility was based on an inherent division within the mind itself.

  In the nineteenth century, Marsh explained, the “natural” or rational mode of knowing had become estranged from the “spiritual” or intuitive, of which one became aware only through persistent examination of one’s inner life, a self-consciousness that the empiricists, for whom objective reality was supreme, discouraged. As Marsh put it,

  So long as we hold the doctrines of Locke and the Scottish metaphysicians respecting power, cause and effect, motives, and the freedom of the will, we not only make and defend no essential distinctions between that which is natural and that which is spiritual, but we cannot even find rational grounds for the feeling of moral obligation, and the distinction between regret and remorse. 11

  Coleridge’s importance lay in his emphasis on just this epistemological distinction, which he termed that between Reason and Understanding. As Marsh put it, it was unfortunate that in most contemporary thinkers these two had not merely been “blended and confounded” but “obscured and hidden from our observation in the inferior power.”12 If one grasped the distinction, however, one understood man’s religious impulse in a wholly new way.13 Contemporary religious disputes originated in imprecise terminology, as people talked at cross-purposes without understanding one another. There was a “necessity of associating the study of words with the study of morals and religion,” a lesson not lost on those enmeshed in the Higher Criticism.14

  By the 1830s Marsh’s edition of Coleridge was hard to keep in stock in bookstores at Andover and Cambridge, and it initiated debates about the nature of religious experience that, when combined with some New Englanders’ firsthand experience with German Idealist thought, reshaped American intellectual history. Karl Follen, the German émigré who taught the language at Harvard, said as much when he wrote Marsh that his edition of Coleridge, with its “excellent prefatory aids,” has “done and will do much to introduce and naturalize a better philosophy in this country.” It will as well, he continued, make men perceive that “there is still more in the depths of their minds that is worth exploring, and which cannot be cheap and handy in the works of Scotch [sic] and English dealers in philosophy,” an allusion to the Common Sense philosophers who trolled in Locke’s wake.15 James Freeman Clarke, who came across Marsh’s edition of Aids to Reflection shortly after it appeared, was equally effusive. Something in him had revolted at all attempts “to explain soul out of sense,” he wrote, “deducing mind from matter.” He had almost foregone the study of metaphysics, until Coleridge showed him “from Kant that though knowledge begins with experience it does not come from experience.” Whereupon he discovered that he was “a born Transcendentalist.”16

  Marsh later disavowed any connection with such young Turks, even as they praised him for liberating them from an outmoded philosophy. In 1841, for example, he wrote University of Vermont alumnus Henry Jarvis Raymond that he viewed “the whole of Boston Transcendentalism” as a “rather superficial affair.” “They have many of the prettinesses of the German writers,” he continued caustically, “but without their manly logic and strong systematizing tendency,” an assessment with which many contemporaries agreed.17 Despite Marsh’s disclaimers, however, his Coleridge had done its work. By introducing receptive readers to the concept of “Reason,” an internal principle not subject to empirical proof, he accounted for a universal religious sentiment, a mysterious source of intuition that informed all belief. It was a lesson that budding Transcendentalists never forgot.

  A letter to Marsh in 1832 from his friend Follen revealed the depth of Marsh’s interest in the German thinkers who had inspired Coleridge. Follen expressed his pleasure at having heard that Marsh had announced a book “on the basis of Fries.”18 Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843) addressed inconsistencies in Kant’s system of knowledge by putting it on more solid psychological ground. Marsh died before finishing the work, but by then Fries’s system was widely known in New England intellectual circles, mainly through the translation and publication of several works by his chief student, the philosopher and theologian Wilhelm de Wette.19 No fewer than four volumes of the fourteen published in Ripley’s Specimens, for example, were by de Wette, including the two-volume novel Theodore; or, the Skeptic’s Conversion. Patently autobiographical, Theodore illustrates de Wette’s endorsement of Fries’s revision of Kant, particularly his grounding of faith in a psychological “feeling” that locates the infinite here and now, in the world.

  J. D. Morell—an Englishman whose Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1841) offers a cogent contemporary account of the development of German Idealism—clarifies the attraction of Fries for Marsh and other Americans. He groups this philosopher in his section on “Mysticism in Germany” and places him in a direct line of descent from Friedrich Henry Jacobi (1743-1819), who insisted that human understanding can bring mankind only so far toward the first principles of knowledge and never to the point of knowing absolute truth.20 Hence, a philosophy based on understanding alone leads to skepticism and, potentially, fatalism. To validate Kant’s Idealism, Jacobi posited another fundamental principle, which he termed “faith” or “intuition.” As Morell put it, “Just as sensation gives us immediate knowledge of the world, so there is an inward sense—a rational intuition—a spiritual faculty—by which we have a direct and immediate revelation of supersensual things” such as God, providence, freedom, and immortality.21

  Fries identified intuition as the inward “faith-principle” to which all other thoughts and notions were subordinate. While sensory experience can be fallible, he argued, intuition always provides insight into the true nature of things. Man learns of the absolute not solely through objective knowledge but as well through spiritual intimation. 22 Thus, Fries sought to restore the respect for intuitive feeling that Kant had rejected, for only through it could people know the relationship between this finite world and eternal realities, spirit mirrored in matter. Intuition, in other words, allows us to move from knowledge to faith. With his insistence on the centrality and vitality of the eternal spiritual principle, Fries went far toward overturning Kant’s skeptical view of theology. His notion of a “philosophical anthropology,” that is, a philosophy of ultimate knowledge dependent on man’s subjective awareness, promised a new understanding of religious belief.

  At the end of his discussion of Fries, Morell observed that the German philosopher’s opinions had gained their greatest fame through their application to religion, particularly in “the celebrated theologian De Wette.”23 Indeed, de Wette credited Fries with rescuing him from the philosophical confusion into which he had fallen after his almost simultaneous introduction to Kant’s and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling’s ideas when he was at university.24

  De Wette chronicled his experiences at Jena in Theodore, published two decades after he had studied there but still revelatory of his intellectual development. Taking courses from Johann Jakob Griesbach and Heinrich Paulus in biblical criticism, for example, young Theodore was disheartened by disagreements over the accuracy and legitimacy of the Gospels and, in particular, the final import of Christ’s miracles, confusion that cleared somewhat after his introduction to Kant’s works. Thereupon a whole new world opened, for the thought of the “independence of reason,” a corne
rstone of Kant’s system, powerfully seized his mind. Theodore now understood Christ as nothing more than “the Kantian wise man, who taught, in figurative language and emblems suited to his age,” what now, after Kant, could be expressed “in clear and pure thoughts.”25

  But the impersonality of this philosophy, as well as Kant’s lack of interest in the aesthetic, troubled de Wette, as did Kant’s deterministic conception of God. After hearing Schelling lecture, de Wette was impressed by this philosopher’s emphasis on the aesthetic element in philosophy and specifically his presentation of nature in light of a transcendent “Absolute.” Empirical science takes one only so far into knowledge. Because the aesthetic sense provides subjective ways of comprehending this Absolute, it is essential in man’s attempts to know himself and the universe.

  De Wette, however, was disappointed that for all his brilliance, Schelling was unable to ground an ethics of personal responsibility through the aesthetic. But de Wette was fortunate enough to meet one more master. When he moved to the University of Heidelberg in 1807 to teach theology, he encountered Fries, his new colleague. As de Wette later wrote to James Freeman Clarke, Fries taught him to “reconcile understanding and faith in the principle of religious feeling.”26 Fries also made him aware of “the dependency and limitation of human knowledge,” de Wette explained, allowing him to find a place for emotion in Kant’s logic.27 Fries’s concept of intuition fired de Wette’s imagination, and he finally overcame his skepticism of the Gospels’ authenticity as he realized that spiritual truth could not be verified through historical criticism, but only through intuition.

  New Englanders had learned of de Wette as early as 1819, in Moses Stuart’s Letters to the Rev. Wm. E. Channing, but his main influence was not felt until a decade later.28 Through various conduits, including Marsh’s works and Ripley’s series, by the early 1830s Friesian philosophy, as embraced by de Wette and disseminated in Theodore as well as other of his works, was central to New Englanders’ understanding of philosophical Idealism. In particular, Fries’s distinction between knowledge and faith, and his insistence that the infinite can be grasped only by faith, were central to emergent Transcendentalism. His significance was fully apparent in Ripley’s testimony to Marsh in 1838, for example, when Ripley reported his “great respect for Fries as a philosophical writer,” an indication of firsthand acquaintance with his thought. “I think,” Ripley continued, “that he has done much by his recognition of the class of truths which are independent of demonstration, and founded on immediate deduction from our inward nature, to redeem the system of Kant.”29

  In this same letter, Ripley confessed, though, that despite his respect for Fries, he finally found the German’s epistemology “too subjective,” which is a telling comment. With Fries, Ripley explained, “I am standing on I know not what,” for the German philosopher never rose “above the sphere of self.” He “gives me the building,” Ripley continued, “beautiful in its symmetrical proportions, shown [sic] upon by the clearest light of day.” But while some Transcendentalists found Fries’s views of the self liberating and empowering, Ripley needed a deeper foundation. For this he turned to Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who, he claimed, “leaves Fries in the rear.”30 Not surprisingly, when Ripley began his series of Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, the first two volumes (which he edited) contained generous selections from this French thinker.31

  Ripley’s sponsorship of Cousin provides another important clue to why and how, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Idealist thought found its way across the Atlantic. Born in Paris in 1792, Cousin studied at the Sorbonne, where his precocity made him a sensation. Inspired by Pierre Laromiguière’s lectures on Locke’s works, he made philosophy his career. Another French scholar, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, also greatly influenced him through his argument that experiential sensations are dependent on internal principles not accounted for by logic. Finally, Maine de Biran, through his lectures on the will and his emphasis on the power of individual consciousness in epistemology, greatly shaped Cousin’s thought. All three of these philosophers were linked in their desire to counter the skepticism and fatalism to which the inquiries of Locke and his successors, including, in France, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, had led. Cousin eagerly followed the paths they cleared.

  His early career culminated in work on religion that most inspired New England Unitarians like Ripley. A major part of Cousin’s project was a reintegration of religion into contemporary philosophical debate on a scientific basis; hence, his continuing interest in the empiricist school as well as in that based on self-consciousness. Discerning in such opposed philosophical ideas certain congruence, Cousin worked out his own contribution to contemporary philosophy, a compelling “Eclecticism” that urged mankind to survey all relevant philosophical systems to cull and order their most important principles into one overarching system. Because competing philosophical schools were not so much wrong as partial, and none fully honest regarding the complexity of human consciousness, the Eclectic philosopher scientifically integrated truth from each.

  When William Henry Channing, Unitarian minister and soon-to-be Transcendentalist, published in Ripley’s series a translation of some of the work of Cousin’s understudy, Théodore Jouffroy (1796-1842), he succinctly summarized the principles of this “French school” of philosophy. First, Channing explained, Eclectics declared that “PSYCHOLOGY IS THE BASIS OF PHILOSOPHY,” with profound and objective reflection on the powers of the mind being the foundation of any serious philosophical inquiry. Second, “THE HIGHEST PROBLEMS OF ONTOLOGY MAY BE SOLVED BY INDUCTIONS FROM THE FACTS WHICH PSYCHOLOGY ASCERTAINS.” When man examines the powers of the mind, in other words, he gains knowledge of the “Infinite Being.” Whereas Germany’s post-Kantians began with the absolute and descended to man, Channing continued, the French reversed the inquiry. Finally, as the linchpin of the Eclectic system, Jouffroy and others believed that “PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY RECIPROCALLY EXPLAIN EACH OTHER.”32

  By the early 1830s generous selections from Cousin’s works that provided the foundation of his Eclecticism were available in English translations that circulated widely, prompting Ripley to venture to say that there was no living philosopher who had “a greater number of readers in this country.”33 When he published his own selections from Cousin’s works, he explained that their appeal lay in the Frenchman’s clarity, in contrast to the often seemingly willful obscurantism of the German philosophers. He also credited Cousin for his ability to translate “the most sublime contemplations of the philosopher” into “the language of the market,” a gift particularly appropriate to American readers. “Our national taste,” Ripley admitted, “may certainly be said to repudiate all mystery and concealment.” Thus, his countrymen were apt to slight or disregard “truths of unutterable consequence both to society and individuals, on account of the unusual, it may be, the repulsive phraseology in which they are conveyed.”34 Cousin’s redaction of German Idealism and its recombination with salient features of the works of other thinkers rendered him the conduit for popular reception of the most significant European thought and helped popularize a “scientific grounding of a spiritual religion.”35

  His disciple, Jouffroy, also drew the attention of young Unitarians. In 1837, for example, Brownson reviewed his Course of Natural Law in The Christian Examiner, and shortly thereafter William Henry Channing translated for the same journal his “Skepticism of the Present Age,” part of the larger work Brownson had treated.36 More important was Channing’s two-volume translation of Jouffroy’s major work of moral philosophy, Introduction to Ethics, for Ripley’s Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature. Jouffroy was a student of Thomas Reid, the Scottish philosopher whose works he had translated and brought to the attention of French intellectuals, and in this work he popularized Reid’s notion of a “common sense” that binds humanity and provides its moral foundation. Jouffroy’s contributions thus lie more in moral philosophy than in metaphysics, but his name alway
s was linked to Cousin’s.

  In 1842, when James Murdock evaluated the rise of German philosophy in America and its effect on the Transcendentalists, he was explicit about the significance of the Eclectics. “None of the Transcendentalists of this country are Philosophers by profession,” he wrote, and they had not produced any work “professionally on the subject, not even an elementary treatise.” Instead, as far as he could judge, American Idealists had “merely taken up the philosophy of Victor Cousin, and, after comparing it according to their opportunity with that of the more recent German schools,” modified “a little some of its dicta, and applied them freely to scientific and practical theology.” He pointed to Henning Gotfried Linberg’s translation of Cousin’s Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1832) as “the great store house” from which most Americans “derived their peculiar philosophical opinions, their modes of reasoning, and their forms of thought and expression.”37

  Just as Coleridge’s works served a turn and were superseded by the Transcendentalists’ firsthand experience with German thought, Cousin and the Eclectics’ influence also waned as New Englanders enlarged their knowledge at other European “store houses.” “I am told that in the city Cousin & Jouffroy & and the opinion of this & that Doctor showed large,” Emerson wrote in his journal. “But as soon as we got ten miles out of town, in the bushes we whistled at such matters, cared little for Societies, systèmes, or bookstores.” There, he continued, “God & the world return again to mind, sole problem,” to be solved by direct experience, not by reading “whole Encyclopedias.” Emerson now found “nothing of worth in the accomplished Cousin & the mild Jouffroy,” only “the most unexceptionable cleanness, precision, & good sense,—never a slip, never an ignorance, but unluckily, never an inspiration.”38 By then the Eclectics had done their most important work, and the New Englanders looked for inspiration in new places.