In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial views to the high platform of universal and necessary history, it is a happiness for mankind that innovation has got on so far and has so free a field before it. The boldness of the hope men entertain transcends all former experience. It calms and cheers them with the picture of a simple and equal life of truth and piety. And this hope flowered on what tree? It was not imported from the stock of some celestial plant, but grew here on the wild crab of conservatism. It is much that this old and vituperated system of things has borne so fair a child. It predicts that amidst a planet peopled with conservatives, one Reformer may yet be born. THE TRANSCENDENTALIST HE first thing we have to say respecting TH what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on acle, on individual culture. These two m of thinking are both natural, but the id contends that his way of thinking is in h nature. He concedes all that the other aff admits the impressions of sense, admits coherency, their use and beauty, and then the materialist for his grounds of assurance things are as his senses represent them. B he says, affirm facts not affected by the illus of sense, facts which are of the same natu the faculty which reports them, and not 1 to doubt; facts which in their first appearan us assume a native superiority to material f degrading these into a language by which first are to be spoken; facts which it only n a retirement from the senses to discern. E materialist will be an idealist; but an ide can never go backward to be a materialist. I The idealist, in speaking of events, sees t as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous by no means; but he will not see that al He does not deny the presence of this t this chair, and the walls of this room, bu looks at these things as the reverse side of tapestry, as the other end, each being a se or completion of a spiritual fact which ne |
