21 Ibid., 598–601; quotations from 600 and 601.
22 Fries presented these ideas in his important Wissen, Glauben, und Ahnung (Jena: J.C.G. Göpfert, 1805).
23 Morell, Historical and Critical View, 666 and note.
24 On de Wette’s reception in the United States, see Siegfried B. Puknat, “De Wette in New England,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102, no. 4 (August 1958), 376–95.
25 Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, Theodore; or, The Skeptic’s Conversion. History of the Culture of a Protestant Clergyman, trans. James Freeman Clarke, 2 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1841), 1:15.
26 Ibid., xxxi.
27 Ibid., 76–77.
28 Moses Stuart, Letters to the Rev. Wm. E. Channing, Containing Remarks on His Sermon, Recently Preached and Published in Baltimore, reprinted in Miscellanies (Andover, Mass.: Allen, Morrill, and Wardlaw, 1846), 81–82.
29 George Ripley to James Marsh, February 23, 1838, in Duffy, Coleridge’s American Disciples, 210.
30 Ibid.
31 Philosophical Miscellanies, translated from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy, and B. Constant, trans. George Ripley, 2 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1838), vol. 1.
32 William H. Channing, Introduction to Ethics, Including a Critical Survey of Moral Systems, translated from the French of Jouffroy, 2 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1841), 2:xv–xvii.
33 Philosophical Miscellanies, 1:29.
34 Ibid., 1:32–33.
35 Ibid., 1:37.
36 Orestes Brownson, “Recent Contributions to Philosophy,” Christian Examiner 22 (May 1837), 181–217; and William Henry Channing, “Skepticism of the Present Age,” ibid. 25, no. 3 (November 1838), 137–57.
37 James Murdock, Sketches of Modern Philosophy, Especially Among the Germans (1842; New York: M. W. Dodd, 1844), 177, 179. Victor Cousin, Introduction to the History of Philosophy. Translated from the French by Henning Gotfried Linberg (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1832).
38 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (hereafter JMN), eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 5:455.
39 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures; Historical Introduction and Notes by Robert E. Spiller; Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 68.
40 James John Garth Wilkinson, Emanuel Swedenborg: A Biography (Boston: O. Clapp, 1849), 75. Another good contemporary biography is Nathaniel Hobart, Life of Swedenborg: with Some Account of His Writings (Boston: Allen and Goddard, 1831).
41 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883), in Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, ed., 12 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903–04), 10:311–12.
42 Wilkinson, Swedenborg, 86.
43 On Reed see Clarence P. Hotson, “Sampson Reed, a Teacher of Emerson,” New England Quarterly 2 (April 1929), 249–77; and Kenneth Walter Cameron, Young Emerson’s Transcendental Vision (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971), 285–87, for a list of his articles in the New Jerusalem Magazine.
44 Ralph Waldo Emerson to William Emerson, September 29, 1826, in Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–95), 1:176. Reed’s book was reviewed in Christian Examiner 3 (January 1826): 418–26.
45 Sampson Reed, Observations on the Growth of the Mind (Boston: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1826), 13.
46 Ibid., 22–24.
47 Ibid., 24.
48 Wilkinson, Swedenborg, 261.
49 Sampson Reed, Observations on the Growth of the Mind (rev. ed., 1838; reprint, Boston: O. Clapp, 1841), vi.
50 Theophilus Parsons, “Transcendentalism,” New Jerusalem Magazine 14 (December 1840), reprinted in Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson, eds., Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 16.
51 Emerson, JMN, 7:322.
52 Ibid., 8:182–83.
53 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4, Representative Men; Historical Introduction and Notes by Wallace E. Williams; Text Established and Textual Apparatus by Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 75, 68.
54 George Willis Cooke, A Historical and Biographical Introduction to the “Dial,” 2 vols. (1902; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 1:17.
55 Caroline Healey Dall, Transcendentalism in New England: A Lecture (Boston: Sold by Roberts Brothers, 1897), 15. With a letter ca. 1840 to Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Peabody included an essay written around 1826 but not published in which she used “the word transcendentalism,” which she had not seen elsewhere “except in Coleridge’s friend [The Friend]”; see Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to Orestes Brownson [ca. 1840], in Bruce A. Ronda, ed., Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American Renaissance Woman (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 248. The essay was one of a series of six on the Hebrew scriptures, three of which had been published in the early 1830s in Christian Examiner, that she wanted Brownson to publish in his Boston Quarterly Review; see chapter 1, note 46, above.
56 Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 144; Henry David Gray, Emerson: A Statement of New England Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent (1917; reprint, New York: Frederic Ungar Publishing Co., 1958), 188.
57 Cyrus Bartol, Radical Problems (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 70.
58 Frederic Henry Hedge, “Swedenborg,” Christian Examiner 15 (November 1833), 196.
59 Ibid., 218.
60 George Ripley, “Professor Marsh’s Translation of Herder,” Christian Examiner 18 (May 1835), 172.
61 George Ripley, “Herder’s Theological Opinions and Services,” ibid. 19 (November 1835), 180–81.
62 Ibid., 195–96.
63 George Ripley, “Schleiermacher as a Theologian,” Christian Examiner 20 (March 1836), 1, 2, 4.
64 Morell, Historical and Critical View, 617.
65 Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5 vols. to date (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000–), 3:2.
66 Clarke in de Wette, Theodore, 1:xvi.
67 Orestes Brownson, “Cousin’s Philosophy,” Christian Examiner 21 (September 1836), 33–64; “Recent Contributions to Philosophy,” ibid. 22 (May 1837), 181–217; “Benjamin Constant,” ibid. 17 (September 1834), 63–77.
3: TRANSCENDENTALISM EMERGENT
1 Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 268–72, for a description of the bicentennial festivities.
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Frederic Henry Hedge, July 20, 1836, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hereafter LRWE), eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–95), 2:29.
3 James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887), 1:244–45.
4 Joel Myerson, “A Calendar of Transcendental Club Meetings,” American Literature 44, no. 2 (May 1972), passim.
5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (hereafter JMN), eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 5:194.
6 Myerson, “Calendar,” 197–207.
7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883), in Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903–04), 10:322.
8 Sterling Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 26.
9 Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambrid
ge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 106, termed 1836 the annus mirabilis of the movement.
10 Brownson mentions Follen, along with Schleiermacher and Constant, in the preface to New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (Boston: J. Munroe and Company, 1836). See also Charles Follen, Religion and the Church (Boston: J. Munroe and Company, 1836).
11 Ripley to Bancroft, September 20, 1837, in Siegfried B. Puknat, “De Wette in New England,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102, no. 4 (August 1958), 384.
12 Orestes Brownson to George Bancroft, September 12, 1836, in Daniel R. Barnes, “An Edition of the Early Letters of Orestes Brownson” (Ph.D. diss., 1970), 122.
13 Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson’s Early Life (Detroit: Henry F. Brownson, 1898), 90–91.
14 For example, Brownson reviewed his New Views and Charles Elwood in the journal; see Boston Quarterly Review 1 (1838), 1–27; and ibid. 3 (1840), 258–60.
15 Isaac Hecker, “Dr. Brownson in Boston,” Catholic World 45 (July 1887), 466.
16 Noah Porter, “Transcendentalism,” American Biblical Repository, n.s., 8 (July 1842), reprinted in Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson, eds., Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 40.
17 On Tuckerman see Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Har vard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 246–55; and Conrad Edick Wright, “Saving a Soul: Joseph Tuckerman and the Final Days of Sylvester Colson,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 104 (1992), 110–22.
18 Orestes Brownson, The Convert, in Brownson, The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, collected and arranged by Henry F. Brownson, 20 vols. (Detroit: T. Nourse, 1882–1907), 5:82–83.
19 See John Weiss, Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Convers Francis, D.D. (Cambridge: privately printed, 1863) for a good assessment of this important Unitarian.
20 Orestes Brownson, “Benjamin Constant on Religion,” Christian Examiner 17 (September 1834), 64.
21 Ibid., 70.
22 Orestes Brownson, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (Boston: J. Munroe and Company, 1836).
23 Ibid., 11–13.
24 Ibid., 55.
25 Ibid., 64–65.
26 Ibid., 86–87.
27 Ibid., 91–94.
28 Ibid., 115.
29 James Walker, “Editorial Notice,” Christian Examiner 22 (March 1837), 128–29.
30 Brownson, The Convert, in Works, 5:93.
31 The modern biography of Ripley is Charles R. Crowe, George Ripley, Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967).
32 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 45.
33 George Ripley in Philosophical Miscellanies, translated from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy, and B. Constant, 2 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1838), 1:278.
34 George Ripley, review of Friedrich Lücke’s “Recollections of Schleiermacher,” Christian Examiner 20 (March 1836), 3–4. A year earlier, in the Biblical Repository and Quarterly Observer, Moses Stuart had offered the first American translation of any of Schleiermacher’s work in his “On the Discrepancy between the Sabellian and Athanasian Method of Representing the Doctrine of the Trinity” (5, no. 18 [April 1835], 265–70).
35 Ripley, “Schleiermacher,” 4.
36 George Ripley, Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion, Addressed to Doubters Who Wish to Believe (Boston: J. Munroe and Company, 1836), iv.
37 Ibid., 9–11, 35.
38 Ibid., 59.
39 George Ripley, “Martineau’s Rationale of Religious Inquiry,” Christian Examiner 21 (November 1836), 228.
40 George Ripley, “Schleiermacher as a Theologian,” Christian Examiner 20 (March 1836), 35–36.
41 Ripley, “Martineau’s Rationale,” 249–51.
42 Ibid., 253–54.
43 Andrews Norton, [Letter to the Editor,] Boston Daily Advertiser, November 5, 1836, p. 2. In Joel Myerson, ed., Transcendentalism: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 160–62.
44 George Ripley, [Letter to the Editor,] Boston Daily Advertiser, November 9, 1836, p. 2. In Myerson, Transcendentalism, 163–67; and Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists, 160–63.
45 The modern biography is Frederick C. Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott, an Intellectual Biography (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982).
46 Alcott later approvingly heard him preach there, and shortly thereafter the minister moved in with the Alcott family, for Abigail kept boarders to supplement her husband’s income.
47 Odell Shepard, Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1937), 235.
48 The description of the school is taken from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Record of a School, Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (Boston: Russell, Shattuck and Company, 1836), 1–2.
49 Ibid., 2–25.
50 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of the Rev. Wm Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), 356–57.
51 [William Woodbridge,] “Record of a School,” American Annals of Education and Instruction 5, no. 10 (October 1835), 477–78.
52 Myerson, “Calendar,” 200.
53 [Nathan Hale,] “Conversations with Children on the Gospels,” Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot 42 (March 21, 1837).
54 [Joseph T. Buckingham,] “Alcott’s Conversations on the Gospels,” Boston Daily Courier 12 (March 29, 1837).
55 See LRWE 7:278, n. The statement was published by Joseph T. Buckingham in his editorial comment in the Boston Daily Courier in early April 1837: he attributed the words to a “clergyman at no great distance from Boston.” Alcott’s copy of the paper identifies this person as Norton.
56 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Bronson Alcott, March 24, 1837, in LRWE 2: 61–62. See also Charles Lane, The Law and Method of Spirit-Culture: An Interpretation of A. Bronson Alcott’s Idea and Practice at the Masonic Temple, Boston (Boston: J. Munroe and Company, 1843).
57 Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, 5 vols. to date (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2000–), 3:76.
58 Francis Bowen, review of Emerson’s Nature, Christian Examiner 21 (January 1837), 377.
59 United States Magazine and Democratic Review 1 (February 1838), 319.
60 Francis Bowen, “Nature,” 371, 378; and “Locke and the Transcendentalists,” Christian Examiner 23 (November 1837), 193.
61 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, September 17, 1836, in Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 149.
62 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Frederic Henry Hedge, July 20, 1836, in LRWE, 2:30.
63 Thornton Kirkland Lathrop, ed., Some Reminiscences of the Life of Samuel Kirkland Lathrop (Cambridge: John Wilson & Son, 1888), 65.
64 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures; Historical Introduction and Notes by Robert E. Spiller; Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 10, 7, 43, 45.
65 Ibid., 17, 19.
66 Ibid., 7, 9.
67 Ibid., 11, 26, 30.
68 Ibid., 42, 43, 44.
69 Brownson, Early Works, 4:51–52, from the Boston Morning Post.
70 “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New School,” Western Messenger 6, no. 1 (November 1838), 46.
71 James Walker and Francis Greenwood, “Editorial Notice,” Christian Examiner 22 (March 1837), 135.
72 Brownson, The Convert, in Works, 5:75–76.
4: RELIGIOUS COMBUSTION
1 See Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Recollections and Impressions, 1822–1890 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), 26–30; Conrad Wright, “The Early Period (1811–1840),” in George Hunston Williams, ed., The Harvard Divinity School: Its Place in Harvard University and in American Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 21–7
7.
2 He got it from Henry Walker, minister to Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1836 or 1837; see John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1864), 1:122.
3 Theodore Parker, “Strauss’ Life of Jesus,” Christian Examiner 18 (July 1840), 273–316.
4 William Henry Furness, Remarks on the Four Gospels (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1836), 151, 157. Ripley’s sermon is excerpted by Perry Miller in The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).
American Transcendentalism Page 38