PREFACE

This thesis was completed just at the time when Emerson's Journals were announced for publication. Thus it happened that the writer had either to print an essay which was antiquated in advance, or wait until the Journals could be read and the book revised in accordance with the "new evidence." The delay of publication-prolonged beyond all expectation was granted by the Columbia Faculty of Philosophy, and at the same time permission was given to add chapters on Emerson's contribution to ethics, sociology, and esthetics, in order that a certain completeness might be given to the subject. The Journals continued to appear at intervals until 1914. No revision of the original thesis has been made necessary by them, but they have gone far to confirm the attitude which was taken at the start; for the whole purport of this study was to trace the development of Emerson's thought and to find how far the ideas to which he gives a fragmentary and poetic rendering are consistent parts of a larger theory. It has always been known that it was Emerson's custom to make use in his essays and addresses of ideas which he had jotted down in his note-books years before; the publication of these note-books reveals just how and when the idea first came into his mind. But inasmuch as these ideas have received a more perfect expression in the essays and addresses, it has seldom been found necessary or advisable to quote from them; and since there has been little of importance concerning Emerson's philosophy published since 1904, the essay as now set forth stands practically as it originally did through Chapter VII. References to the Journals here and there, as well as to Mr. Goddard's Studies in New England Transcendentalism, Mr. Firkins' Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Professor Woodbridge Riley's American Thought, with some other contributions to the subject made since this essay was first written, have been added without changing more than the immediate

context.

References to the works of Emerson are to the paging of the Riverside edition, since the thesis was written before the Centenary edition was completed; but the notes of Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, as well as the additional matter included in the later edition, have been read in connection with the Journals for this revision of the essay.

After so many years I still remember with gratitude the friendly

[5]

assistance given me by Professor Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, under whose direction the thesis was prepared; that it has so many rhetorical as well as philosophical shortcomings is due largely to the fact that it had to be written for the most part without his personal guidance. My thanks are due also to Professor Warner Fite of Indiana University, to Professor Killis Campbell of the University of Texas, to Professor John Erskine of Columbia University, and to Professor H. W. Stuart of Leland Stanford Junior University, for friendly criticisms and suggestions. There are, as always, other obligations not the less appreciated because not publicly acknowledged.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY, May 1917.

H. D. G.

EMERSON

A STATEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM AS EXPRESSED IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF

ITS CHIEF EXPONENT

INTRODUCTION

The term "New England Transcendentalism" is applied, first, to the various phases of idealism which found expression in New England during, roughly, the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But an examination of the attitude of that group of men who are recognized as the New England Transcendentalists soon reveals the fact that they themselves were not primarily concerned with philosophy for its own sake, but imported and modified the thought of Plato, of the NeoPlatonists and Mystics, or of Kant and his successors, merely as a basis for their attitude toward religion and conduct; that they thought of Transcendentalism not only as a philosophy but as a "movement"; that however they might differ in theory, they were Transcendentalists by virtue of a common impulse. "This spirit of the time," says Emerson in his manifesto in the opening number of The Dial, “is in every form a protest against usage, and a search for principles." This is a second meaning of the term "New England Transcendentalism." A third meaning, which has been the source of much confusion, may be summed up in the phrase "Transcendental nonsense." The Transcendental movement was attended by a general spirit of unrest and hostility to convention. Whims and absurdities of all sorts were in the air. "Bran had its prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs," writes Lowell, in his delightful essay on Thoreau. "Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business. No brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes." And in the same spirit Hawthorne, in his American NoteBooks, speaks of Margaret Fuller's refractory cow at Brook Farm as a "transcendental heifer." The name New England Transcendentalism has been applied to cover all the wild vagaries of the time.

1 "The Editors to the Reader," Dial, I, 3.

4

There was some excuse for this. The first announcements of Transcendentalism 2 were incomprehensible, and hence an immediate source of mirth, to "ordinary" and "sensible" people; an abstruseness of utterance was so often combined with eccentricity of conduct that it was easy to laugh at both of them together. Even the scholarly and the learned were bewildered by the first writings of Emerson and Alcott; and of the latter, at least, the absurd side, both in the "Orphic Sayings" and in the Fruitlands venture, is still quite apparent. "I was given to understand," says Dickens in his American Notes, "that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental."” 5 "Transcendentalism was the name applied to whatever lay beyond the realm of common sense, whether in thought, language, or behavior.

The connection between the half-mad representatives of what they called "The Newness" and the more serious exponents of Transcendentalism proper was so close that it is hard to know where to draw the line. Emerson himself, the most conspicuously sane man among them all, was thought mad in the first extreme expression of his individualism, and the most foolish of his associates had, or thought he had, his own peculiar variation of the "intuitional philosophy." It is impossible to set up some arbitrary standard of sense and sanity, and say that whoever fell below this standard was not a transcendentalist. It is better to admit frankly that all three meanings of the term are quite legitimate provided that no one meaning is used to the exclusion of the other two; that New England Transcendentalism had its philosophic side, which in Emerson

2 I use the word always as referring to New England Transcendentalism. 3 As, for example, in such a man as Charles Newcomb, not to mention others. One need not be a philistine for failing to take such a man with perfect sobriety. "Emerson was convinced that Newcomb's remarkable subtlety of mind amounted to genius," says Lindsay Swift (Brook Farm, p. 199), and proceeds to quote a sentence from "Dolon,” which appeared in The Dial, as showing "if not genius, its next of kin." Newcomb's absurdities of conduct were also famous.

4 Holmes compares Professor Francis Bowen reviewing Emerson's Nature, to "a sagacious pointer making the acquaintance of a box tortoise." There is more than humor in this; yet Bowen showed more comprehension of Transcendentalism than any other critic on the "outside."

5 The members of the group were of course conscious of their reputation. "I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist," says Thoreau. "That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations." Journal, V, 4.

6 Emerson breaks into delicious raillery when speaking of the whims and oddities of some of his associates; while two such good transcendentalists as James Freeman Clarke and C. P. Cranch illustrated Emerson himself with humorous drawings for their own amusement. See G. W. Cooke, "Contributors to The Dial," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, XIX, 236.