What organized the material world, in other words, flowed as well through the spiritual, a sentiment Frothingham shared with Emerson.14 “Will the irresistible grace,” Frothingham wrote lyrically, “which makes the orbs of the solar system dance to their spheral [sic] music cause no lyric movement among the members of the human family?”15 To him, God was not a personality, but the organizing power in nature. Humanity itself was an extension of divinity, an idea that Auguste Comte, in his own formulation of a “religion of humanity,” had rejected. Although Comte, Frothingham wrote, believed in the solidarity of mankind, he erroneously dismissed the spiritual element, concentrating instead on “a mechanical arrangement of outward apparatus,” without soul. Those who championed the new radical religion understood the eternal place of soul in humanity and embraced it, rejecting Comte’s “scientific chimera.”16
Most remarkable was Frothingham’s sense of a “Christ of Humanity,” by which he meant the conglomerate human race, the sum of all its parts. Believing that God existed as an “Unsearchable One,” men and women yearned for inspiration by a God-Man. For Frothingham, however, “nothing less than all the humanity there is in the race meets the conditions of a doctrine of incarnation.” “A perfected humanity,” he continued, “would not more than express the Absolute in the form of qualities; a perfected humanity, comprised of living men and women regenerate and happy; and surely nothing less than all the completed humanity there is will furnish anything approaching to a relatively adequate expression of it.” The Christ of Humanity was, then, “the human element in mankind.”17
Thus, the historical Jesus was not the Christ. Rather, he was no other than “the greatest souls among themselves, the best they knew, whether the best were near or far off.” Such people in history were “transfigured and translated,” and others conjured with their names. Jesus, Frothingham concluded, was precious for what he represented rather than for what he was. “He glorified common qualities; he set the seal on principles that all share; he made illustrious the spirit of goodness that has its lowly, retired shrine in every heart.” He was the symbol “of that essential human nature which is the Messiah cradled in the bosom of every man.”18 In Frothingham’s schema, man’s calling was to mankind, for in it was his humanity and his divinity.
Frothingham remained in New York until 1879, when, developing health problems, on the advice of doctors he retired to Boston. He became the unofficial memoirist of the Transcendentalist movement, a role he had long prepared for. In 1874 he published a Life of Theodore Parker, more readable than Weiss’s unwieldy compendium, and soon thereafter a biographical account of the abolitionist Gerrit Smith (1878). In his retirement he prepared George Ripley (1882) for Charles Dudley Warner’s prestigious American Men of Letters series; a Memoir of William Henry Channing (1886); a collection of David A. Wasson’s essays with a lengthy biographical introduction (1889); a memoir of his father, Boston Unitarianism, 1820–1850 (1890); and his own Recollections and Impressions, 1822–1890 (1891). Frothingham had become, de facto, both the movement’s historian and, through his own contributions to “Radical” religion, its seer, true to the first generation’s dream of a common humanity united by an inherent spiritual principle.
In this light, however, his magnum opus, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (1876), published the same year as Stedman’s encomium to him, is oddly elegiac. Here if anywhere one should look to understand in what, among second-generation Transcendentalists, the movement’s legacy consisted. But for someone with friends among the most vital successors to first-generation Transcendentalists, Frothingham approached the period as though it were only a memory kept alive by a few septuagenarians like Emerson and Bronson Alcott, eviscerated of its early force rather than existing as a living faith. Frothingham observed that as “a form of mental philosophy,” Transcendentalism “may have had its day.” At any rate, he continued, it was “no longer in the ascendant,” for everywhere it was being “suppressed by the philosophy of experience, which, under different names,” was taking possession of the speculative world. Frothingham admitted that he “was once a pure Transcendentalist,” warmly sympathetic to the movement’s aspirations, and “an ardent admirer of transcendental teachers,” by which he meant an admirer of Emerson’s belief in the primacy of individual consciousness, but now he had moved on to a new understanding of the religious life, one that, while still championing the universality of religious experience, made room for faith’s personal dimension, which might include appreciation of the very science so lamented by many of his peers.19
For all his praise of younger Radical Club colleagues like Weiss and Wasson, Frothingham worried that as proponents of pure Idealism, they could do little to halt that philosophy’s eclipse. In the 1830s and 1840s, he explained, the Transcendentalists’ opponents had been literalists, dogmatists, and formalists. Now they were Positivists. Transcendentalists turned Radical Club members, denying the relevance of science to religion, were embattled like the “holders of a royal fortress” facing overwhelming insurgents or “the king and queen of France” looking out “on the revolution from their palace at Versailles.” They—Frothingham did not include himself—would fight “admirably to the last,” he wrote, but would be defeated. Transcendentalism, Frothingham concluded, had been “an episode in the intellectual life of New England; an enthusiasm, a wave of sentiment, a breath of mind that caught up such as were prepared to receive it, elated them, transported them, and then passed on,—no man knowing whither it went.”20
Some cognoscenti begged to differ. The New York Unitarian clergyman and erstwhile Transcendentalist Samuel Osgood took issue with the author’s characterization of the movement as a thing of the past. He suggested that the group’s very success in spreading its ideas now made their philosophy seem less visible and relevant. “The sect of Transcendentalists has disappeared,” he wrote, “because their light has gone every where.”21 If by this he meant that American culture had simply absorbed the group’s most distinctive thought, its deification of the individual, he was correct.
Bronson Alcott, too, thought differently from Frothingham and, still deeply committed to Idealist philosophy, refused to surrender the field. In 1879, with his friend the St. Louis Hegelian William Torrey Harris, he founded the Concord Summer School of Philosophy and Literature, an annual institute whose lecturers and discussants kept the subject of consciousness front and center.22 Each summer from fifty to one hundred participants—college professors and students, schoolteachers, writers, theologians—from all parts of the country descended on Hillside Chapel on Alcott’s Orchard House grounds to address their generation’s chief philosophical challenge, the spread of materialism.
Always more committed to Plato than to Hegel, a position that had made his visits to the St. Louis Hegelians uncomfortable, Alcott presided over the four- to- six-week sessions as their patron saint. After a stroke in 1882, he relinquished leadership of the school to Harris and Franklin Sanborn, who administered it until Alcott’s demise, in 1888. But despite the considerable intellectual firepower on display—lecturers included, besides Alcott and Harris, Emerson, Higginson, Hedge, Sanborn, William Henry Channing, the former Brook Farmer and social reformer Ednah Cheney, and David A. Wasson—their utter refusal to entertain any arguments from science doomed the school to final irrelevance, a judgment typified by Caroline Healey Dall’s confident dismissal of Alcott in her lecture on Transcendentalism. “Although he was prominent in the public eye,” she wrote, and “did more than anyone to bring ridicule upon the movement, he had no significant influence.”23 With Alcott’s passing, Transcendental Idealism as the antebellum generation knew it disappeared as a viable faith. Frothingham viewed himself as a harbinger of a different kind of religion, the first genuinely to merge the world and the spirit.
In 1911 George Santayana lectured at the University of California on “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” and described a country ruled by “two mentalities.” One was “a survi
val of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generation.” American philosophy, that is, was compounded of a Calvinism that oscillated “between a profound abasement and a paradoxical elation of the spirit,” and a cosmic optimism, typified by Transcendentalism, in which the sense of sin had evaporated and nature was “all beauty and commodity.” “If you told the modern American,” Santayana said, “that he is totally depraved, he would think you were joking,” for he “is convinced that he always had been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.”24
Santayana described how Transcendentalism fitted into this scheme. He understood it as a point of view rather than a creed. Transcendentalism, he said, was “systematic subjectivism.” “It studies the perspectives of knowledge as they radiate from the self,” for knowledge is “always seated here and now, in the self of the moment,” while “the past and the future, things inferred and things conceived, lie around it.” They cannot be “lighted up save by some centrifugal ray of attention and present interest, by some active operation of the mind.”25 His assessment is extraordinarily apt, for just such a dependence on consciousness linked Emerson, Brownson, and Ripley in the 1830s to Frothingham and his cohort in the 1880s. But child of the new era as he was, Santayana also observed that Transcendentalist logic, “the method of discovery for the mind,” had been transformed into “the method of evolution in nature and history” and, so “abused, became transcendental myth.” What had begun as a conscientious critique of knowledge was turned into a “sham system of nature.” We must, the great twentieth-century philosopher urged, distinguish sharply “the transcendental grammar of the intellect” from the “various transcendental systems of the universe, which are chimeras.”26
Santayana identified Emerson as one who had best understood Transcendentalism as a mode of seeing. “He was a cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil.” He practiced the transcendental method in all its purity, opening his eyes to the world every morning “with a fresh sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then.” Nature, according to Emerson, was precious because it was man’s own work, a mirror in which he looks at himself and says, “What a genius am I. Who would have thought there was such stuff in me?”27 “To reject tradition and think as one might have thought if no man had existed before,” Santayana wrote elsewhere, “was indeed the aspiration of the Transcendentalists.”28
Here Santayana captured the problematic egotism at the heart of Emersonian thought as well as the dangerous solipsism it could encourage if one believed that the individual himself is separate from what he sees. This led to the elevation of liberal principles of selfhood into precisely the kind of dogmatism against which Emerson warned. Concomitantly, and crucially for those who urged social reform, if one privileged the self in this way, why should one break from his protective shell to serve the needs of others?
Santayana inherited the nineteenth-century Idealist tradition and transformed it, not by an adherence to Transcendentalist method, but from a willingness to subject it to critical analysis, salvaging what he could. In this work he found a fellow traveler and generously accorded him primacy in the effort. William James, his Harvard colleague, also struggled to come to terms with what his father’s friend Emerson had bequeathed to the Genteel Tradition. James, particularly in his examination of religious experience, Santayana observed, “gave a sincere and respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and impostors” because he believed that any of these might have something to teach him. But trained as he was in physiology, he also represented the new scientific mind. For James, Santayana wrote, “intelligence is no miraculous, idle faculty, by which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose.” Rather, it “has its roots and its issue in the context of events.” Intelligence is “one kind of practical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension,” and “does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to connect them.”29
Reality, then, was never only of mind but rather the interaction of life with it. Frothingham’s scientific theism, with its respect for the varieties of religious experience, led, finally, to this: a world in which each person makes his own truth from what works for him. James termed it Pragmatism. Emerson called it “Experience.” With its ascension, the other half of the Transcendentalists’ dream, of a common humanity committed to social justice, fell by the wayside. If truth is what an individual finds congruent with his experience rather than a deeply shared social ideal, individualism triumphs, as it did in the Gilded Age and beyond. This was the Transcendentalists’ lasting legacy, for better or worse. They were, if nothing else, great optimists.
They called themselves “the club of the like-minded”; I suppose because no two … thought alike.
—James Freeman Clarke
No single term can describe them. Nothing can be more unjust to them, or more likely to mislead the public, than to lump them all together, and predicate the same things of them all.
—Orestes Brownson
Thus, by mere attraction of affinity, grew together the brotherhood of the “like-minded,” as they were pleasantly nicknamed by outsiders, and by themselves, on the ground that no two were of the same opinion.
—William Henry Channing
The new Boston school of philosophy [hold] no very precise doctrines, and [are] without any one band of union … They comprise an independency of opinion. They unite to differ.
—“J”
[Transcendentalism] is the practical philosophy of belief and conduct. Every man is a transcendentalist; and all true faith, the motives of all past action, are transcendental.
—J. A. Saxton
ALSO BY PHILIP F. GURA
Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (2005)
C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796–1873 (2003)
Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829–1831 (2001)
America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (with James F. Bollman, 1999)
The Crossroads of American History and Literature
(1996)
A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660
(1984)
Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (with Joel Myerson, 1982)
The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance
(1981)
NOTES
PREFACE
1 J. A. Saxton, “Prophecy—Transcendentalism—Progress,” Dial 2 (July 1841), 101.
2 Orestes Brownson, review of John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, Brownson’s Quarterly Review 4th ser., 3 (April 1875), 158.
3 Cyrus Bartol, Radical Problems (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 73.
4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Editors to the Reader,” Dial 1 (July 1840), 2–3.
5 James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, Diary, and Correspondence (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), 133.
6 Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 1:133.
7 Higginson, “Sunny Side,” Part of a Man’s Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905), 12.
8 Ibid.
9 Henry Adams, review of O. B. Frothingham’s Transcendentalism in New England: A History, North American Review 123 (October 1876), 471.
10 Francis Bowen, Critical Essays: On a Few Subjects Connected with the History and Present Condition of Speculative Philosophy (Boston: H. B. Williams, 1842), 7.
11 “J,” “R.W.E.,” Arcturus 1 (April 1841), reprinted in Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson, eds., Critical Essays: On American Transcendentalism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 21.
12 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960
–82), 8:211.
13 Saxton, “Prophecy,” 87.
14 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), v–vi.
15 Frederic Henry Hedge, one of the Transcendental coterie, did so in an article on Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Christian Examiner 14 (March 1833), 119–20. But see chapter 2, note 54, below.
16 The phrase was the Reverend William Ellery Channing’s in a sermon (1838) of that title. On the Market Revolution see Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE “LIKE-MINDED”
American Transcendentalism Page 36