"Transcendentalism, Latest Form of Infidelity" pt. I (Brownson's Quarterly Review for 1845-46)
Transcendentalism, or latest Form of Infidelity
Part I of II
Brownson's Quarterly Review, July, 1845
We have nothing to add to the brief sketch we gave of the general character of the author of this volume in our last Review ; and very little to say of the volume itself, as a simple literary production, detached from the system in exposition and defense of which it appears to have been written. It is loosely, and even heavily written, in a flippant and affected style, and sins hardly less against grammar and rhetoric than against piety and truth. It bears the marks of haste, and seems to have been hurriedly thrown together, from the author's commonplace-book and the fag ends of his sermons and discourses, and sent forth to the public without his having taken the time or the pains to melt his heterogeneous materials down into a common mass, or to think out, so to speak, the principles he had rashly adopted, in their systematic relations, and logical connections and consequences. It is crude, confused ; without method, order, systematic unity, or scientific development. As the production of a vain, conceited pedant and scoffer, it may pass ; but as the production of a scholar, a theologian, a man ambitious of contributing to the literature of his country, and establishing a high literary and scientific character of his own, the less we say of it, the more shall we consult the credit of the author.
But we are not concerned with the author, nor with his book, save so far as one or the other is connected with the system he attempts to set forth, and is to be taken as its exponent. This system we propose to examine, not simply the author or his hook ; neither of which, separated from this system, which is not without numerous adherents, both at home and abroad, would deserve any serious attention. But this system, called ordinarily Transcendentalism, by Mr. Parker, Natural Religionism, and not inaptly, by Mr. Andrew's Norton, The latest Form of Infidelity, it is by no means easy to ascertain. Its expounders write on the principle, that u ideas are shy of being expressed in words, and must be suggested rather than stated." They professedly eschew clear and definite statements, and seem to hold that truth can be seen and judged of in its true proportions only as it looms up in the dim and uncertain twilight of vague and indeterminate expressions. This is, no doubt, a convenient theory for them, but it is exceedingly perplexing to readers who would understand what they read, and especially to reviewers who would be just both to themselves and their author. We are not a little perplexed, the moment we undertake to analyze Mr. Parker's book, and reduce it to fundamental propositions which may be clearly apprehended and distinctly stated. It is a book of many pieces. Its author abounds in contradictions no less than in loose and intangible statements, and sometimes brings together in the same sentence not less than two or three mutually contradictory systems. Nevertheless, after much toil and pains, aided by our own familiar acquaintance with the general subject, we believe we may compress what is systematic in the book, what the author most values, what constitute the bases of the Transcendental doctrines generally, within the three following propositions ; namely : I. Man is the measure of truth and goodness. II. Religion is a fact or principle of human nature.
III. All religious institutions, which have been or are, have their principle and cause in human nature.
A single glance at these propositions reveals the character of the system. It is sheer Naturalism, and Mr. Parker himself calls it " the natural-religious view." Its advocates, however, profess to be religious, to be the especial friends of religion, and to have put a final conclusion to the controversy between believers and infidels, by having discovered a solid and imperishable foundation for religion in the permanent and essential nature of man. Man is religious because he is man, and must be religious or cease to be man. According to them, religion has its foundation, not in supernatural revelation, but in human nature, and rests for its authority, therefore, not on the veracity of God, but on the veracity of man; and as man can neither deceive nor be deceived, it of course must be eternally and immutably true ! They also affect to discover truth in all religions, and to accept it. But this does not take their system out of the category of Naturalism, because, 1, they recognize no religion as having been supernaturally given ; and, 2, because they acknowledge in religious institutions, which have been or are, nothing to be truth, which transcends the natural order, or which the natural faculties of man are not adequate to discover, and of whose intrinsic truth they are not competent to judge. All the rest they hold to be misapprehension or exaggeration of natural phenomena, or a mere symbolic way of expressing simple truths lying within the reach of natural reason.
This they all admit ; but they fancy that they escape the condemnation to which Naturalism as ordinarily set forth is justly exposed, by holding that religious institutions depend on what is permanent and essential in man, not on what is accidental and transient. Whence comes the institution of religion? " To this question," says Mr. Parker, " two answers have been given, one foolish, one wise. The foolish answer, which may be read in Lucretius and elsewhere, is, that religion is not a necessity of man's nature, which comes from the action of eternal demands within him, but is the result of mental disease, so to say ; the effect of fear, of ignorance combining with selfishness......The wise answer is, that religion comes out of a principle deep and permanent in the heart,.....from sublime, permanent, and universal wants, and must be referred to the soul, to the unchanging realities of life. “ pp. 13, 14. But this amounts to nothing ; for both the wise answer and the foolish agree in asserting that religion is of human origin, and that it, itself, not its necessity, merely, comes out of human nature. Moreover, what Lucretius regards as the result of mental disease, and rejects under the name of religion, the Transcendentalists themselves regard as springing from the same source, and also reject under the name of the form, or symbol ; and all they hold to be true and permanent, as springing from the permanent and essential nature of man, and which they call religion, Lucretius himself accepts, as well as they, and holds to be eternally true, but is foolish enough to call it "nature." The only real difference, then, between Lucretius and Mr. Parker, between the " foolish" answer and the " wise," is that the former, with all the world, calls what he contemns and discards religion, and what he retains and commends nature, but the latter is too wise to be guilty of such folly.
' Whatever, then, the merits of the system under examination, it is Naturalism, nothing more, nothing less. The question, then, between us and Transcendentalism is the old question between Naturalism and Supernaturalism. Is man's natural relation the only relation he sustains to his Creator? Have there been supernatural revelations, or are the so-called supernatural revelations explicable on natural principles? Do man's natural forces that is, what he is and receives by virtue of his natural relation to God suffice for the fulfilment of his destiny ; or needs he the gracious, that is, supernatural, interposition and assistance of his Maker? These are the real questions at issue ; and these questions Mr. Parker and the Transcendentalists answer in favor of nature against grace, of man against God. The validity and value of their answer is, then, what we propose to examine.
With these remarks, we proceed to take up, seriatim, the propositions themselves. We begin with the first.
I. Man is the Measure of Truth and Goodness.
We do not understand the Transcendentalists to assert by this proposition, that man actually knows all truth and goodness, though from many things they say we might infer this ; but that man is the measure, the standard, the criterion of all truth and goodness, the touchstone on which we are to try whatever is alleged to be true and good, and to determine whether it be true and good, or false and evil. Nor do we mean to assert that they are prepared to maintain even this in general thesis; but that they do assert it, that they everywhere imply it, and that without assuming it their whole system would be a baseless fabric, and their doctrines and speculations the sheerest absurdities.
A slight examination of the leading views of Transcendentalists on the origin and ground of ideas will sustain our assertion. Transcendentalists may be divided into three classes. They all agree in their antagonism to the doctrines of Locke, as set forth in his Essay on the Human Understanding, and in asserting for man the inherent ability to cognize intuitively non-sensible, spiritual, or immaterial facts or realities. We say intuitively ; for we do not understand Locke himself to deny absolutely our ability to cognize such realities, but simply to deny that we can do it intuitively, and to contend that we can do it only discursively, by reflection operating on sensible data. The peculiarity of the Transcendentalists is in holding that we cognize them intuitively, immediately, instead of discursively. But in explaining the principle and fact of intuition, and its modes or conditions, they differ somewhat among themselves, and may, as we have said, be divided into three classes.
1. The first class name the vis intuitiva the reason, and contend that the noemata, spiritual cognoscibles, or the immaterial realities capable of being known, are really exterior to and independent of the subject knowing, and are simply apprehended on occasion of the sensible phenomena by which they are rendered present. Thus, they contend that the ideas of cause, of cause in general, necessary cause, in a word, all the Kantian categories, are entertained by the mind and applied to sensible phenomena, by actual intuition of the objects of these ideas, not merely the ideas themselves really existing in the non-sensible world. Yet they call this non-sensible world reason, and represent these ideas, objectively considered, that is, as objects existing in re, not as mere mental conceptions, to be its constituent elements. Taking ideas in this sense, as the object, the reason may be termed the regio idearum, or world of absolute and necessary truth. It is impersonal and objective, and operates spontaneously, by an energy not human, but which is the energy of God, whose Word or Speech reason is. Containing in itself absolute ideas or absolute truth and goodness, the reason is a measure of truth and goodness; and as it is divine, it must be an exact measure. Whatever it pronounces true is true; whatever it pronounces beautiful is beautiful ; whatever it pronounces good is good.
But this reason, though declared to be impersonal and objective, is also assumed to be a faculty of human nature, a faculty of the human soul, its only light, that by virtue of which it is essentially intelligent, and knows all that it does know, whatever the sphere or degree of its knowledge. Hence, of two things, one, either man is identical with God, intellectually considered, and it is God that sees in man, which must plunge us, in the last analysis, into absolute Pantheism ; or reason is human, an attribute, if not of the human personality, yet of man. This class of Transcendentalists deny that they are Pantheists. Therefore, they must regard absolute reason as a human faculty ; and then, since reason is the measure of truth and goodness, man himself, taken in his totality, if not in his simple personality, as the same measure. If, however, it be denied that this reason is human, and it be assumed to be God, as M. Cousin also contends, then man and God become one ; and as God is unquestionably the measure contended for, man must also be it ; because it matters not which term you use, Man or God ; since, if identical, what may be predicated of the one term may equally be predicated of the other. Therefore, in either alternative, this class of Transcendentalists assume that man is the measure of truth and goodness.
2. The second class, in which we are disposed to rank the author of the volume before us, do not, perhaps, differ very essentially from the first class, but they state their views somewhat differently. They hold that the ideas we have mentioned, and others of a like nature, if others there are, are intuitive, indeed, but are intuitions because they are inherent in the soul, are the soul itself, or its original garniture, endowment, or patrimony. They are the types of the world without us. Hence we cognize the world without us by reason of its correspondence to the type or idea within us. The idea or type of all cognoscibles is in us, and it is by virtue of this fact that we are intelligent and they intelligible. Knowledge is the perception of the correspondence between the inward idea and the external object. " But these [material things]," says Mr. Parker, " are to us only a revelation of something kindred to qualities awakened in ourselves......We see out of us only what we are internally prepared to see ; for seeing depends on the harmony between the object without and your own condition within." *(footnote: * Excellence of Goodness, pp. 3, 4.) Hence we know that this or that is true, beautiful, or good, only because it corresponds to the idea or type of the true, the beautiful, or the good in the soul itself. Hence, then, the standard, or criterion, or measure of truth and goodness is assumed to be in the soul. Nothing can be assumed to be naturally in the soul but the soul itself. " By nature," says Mr. Parker, " there is nothing in man but man himself." Man and the soul are identical; at least, the term man covers all that can be covered by the term soul. Then man is the measure of truth and goodness. Therefore, this second class adopt the proposition in question.
3. The third class, at the head of which stand Ralph Waldo Emerson, A. Bronson Alcott, and several notable women, do the same. These may be distinguished into two subordinate classes. They all agree that the soul knows, and can know, nothing exterior to itself; but the first division of these hold that it knows only by reason of the identity of subject and object, and therefore knows, and can know, only what it is. " What we are," says Mr. Emerson, (Mature, p. 92,) " that only can we see." The soul knows not by seeing, apprehending, but by being ; and knows all, because it is all. The second division and these are the majority hold that the soul knows by containing, and that knowledge is the soul protending or projecting of itself. u Not in nature, but in man, is all the beauty and worth he sees. “Emerson, Essays, 1841, p. 120. Objects are cognoscibilia, because they are contained in the soul; and the soul knows all, because it contains all.' The outward or sense world is phenomenal, unreal, a shadow without a substance, and we abuse ourselves when we regard it, and the term knowledge, when we call perception of it by that name. Knowledge is incience, or science of what is within. The true sage never looks abroad, but closes the external apertures of the mind, shuts his eyes, stops his ears, holds his nose, opens the internal aperture through which he looks into the profound abyss of the soul itself. Look not, say they, upon this delusive, this vain show, which men call the world, but into the great soul, which conceals all things in itself, even the infinite and eternal God ! "lam God," said Mr. Alcott, one day to the writer of this, " I am God ; I am greater than God. God is one of my ideas. I therefore contain God. Greater is the container than the contained. Therefore I am greater than God." With the members of this class, it is a mark of weakness, of littleness, of shallowness, to be intelligible. Light is an enemy. It defines objects too sharply, and presents them in disagreeable outlines. It permits nothing to loom up or spread out in dim and awful infinity, allows the soul no scope to display its loftier powers and diviner instincts, to stand up and swell out in its sublime proportions into the infinite and eternal God !
These, evidently, in either division, hold that the soul is the measure of truth and goodness ; for it must needs be the measure of what it is, and of what it contains. If it be truth and goodness, or if it contain them, it must be their standard or measure. The soul and the man are the same, at least so far as concerns the present question, as we have just seen. Therefore, this third class, as well as the other two, adopts the proposition that man is the measure of truth and goodness.
That all the Transcendentalists, of whatever class, do adopt this proposition is still farther evident from the rule of faith and practice which they all avow and contend for. This rule, it is notorious, is that of unrestricted private judgment. They reject the authority of the Church, the authority of the Bible, of the Apostles, of Jesus, nay, all authority but that of the individual himself.
"Jesus," says Mr. Parker, " fell back on God, on absolute religion and morality, the truth its own authority; his works his witness. The early Christians fell back on the authority of Jesus ; their successors, on the authority of the Bible, the work of the ' Apostles and Prophets; the next generation, on the Church, the work of the Apostles and Fathers. The world retreads this ground. Protestantism delivers us from the tyranny of the Church and carries us back to the Bible. Biblical criticism frees us from the thraldom of Scripture, and brings us to the authority of Jesus. Philosophical spiritualism liberates us from all personal and private authority, and restores us to God, the primeval fountain, whence the Church, the Scriptures, and Jesus drew all the water of life wherewith they filled their urns." p. 483.
This is sufficiently explicit; for the concluding remark, about restoring us to God, simply means restoring us to ourselves, to God as he is immanent in each individual soul, as is evident from what Mr. Parker elsewhere says.
" To obtain a knowledge of duty, man is not sent away outside of himself to ancient documents, for the only rule of faith and practice ; the word is very nigh him, even in his heart; and by this word he is to try all documents whatever." p. 216. " Jesus is not the author of Christianity, .... its sanction and authority......We verify its eternal truth in our soul." p. 280.
The God to whom we are restored is, then, evidently, the God in the soul, and in each individual soul. If so, it is God in the soul, either naturally or supernaturally. Not supernaturally, because Transcendentalism denies the supernatural. Then naturally. But then identical with the soul ; for, as we have found by Mr. Parker's own concession, p. 191, there can be by nature nothing in the soul but the soul itself.
Furthermore, the appeal is always made to the individual reason, conscience, and sentiment. In the individual is the authority before which all must bow, the tribunal before which all claimants must plead. The Transcendentalist summons all religions to his private bar, and assumes his right to judge them all. The Bible he holds to be the word of God so far as he judges it to be true, and not his word where he judges it to be not true ; holding that he has the right to decide by his own reason, conscience, and sentiments, what is true and what not. In like manner he summons before him Jesus and the Apostles, makes them answer to him, and tells them when they speak wisely, truly, and when falsely and foolishly. Christianity itself is amenable to the same authority. " Christianity, then,
is a form of religion.....It is to be judged of as all other
forms of religion, by reason and the religious sentiment." p. 240. But the fact is notorious, and there is no need of proofs. We all know that the Transcendentalist denies the authority of the Church, of the Written Word, of Jesus, of Prophets and ¦ Apostles, of all inspired messengers, and of the common assent or belief of mankind, claiming for each all that may be claimed for the whole. What Adam had, what Caesar could, you have and may do." If they speak respectfully of Jesus, it is as a model-man, because in their view he spoke out from his own mind, acknowledging no external authority, and in this set an example we all should follow. Their leading doctrine is, that each man may and should be a Christ, and speak from his own proper divinity.
But, if our Transcendentalists recognize the unrestricted right of private judgment in all cases whatever, they must, in order to have a basis for that right, assume that each man is the measure of truth and goodness. Every judgment involves three terms, the matter, judged, the judge, and the rule or measure by which the judge judges. Now', the rule or measure must be identical with the matter, with the judge, or distinct from both. The first is inadmissible ; for, though the matter must needs be the measure of itself, yet its measure is unascertainable, if measured only by itself. The third is denied by the denial of all authority out of the individual reason, conscience, and sentiment, to which the judge is bound to conform his judgments. Then, the second must be adopted, namely, that the individual is his own yardstick of truth and goodness, not only the judge, but the rule or measure of his judgment ; which is what the proposition in question asserts.
This will not be denied. The right of private judgment, as the Transcendentalists assert it, is the denial of all rules, measures, or standards, out of the individual reason, conscience, and sentiments, to which he is obliged to conform his judgments. Then either man judges without any rule, measure, or standard by which to judge, or he assumes himself as the standard. The first is absurd ; for a judgment which has no
rule, which is by no standard, is no judgment at all. Then the last must be assumed, or private judgment is impossible, and the right of private judgment utterly baseless. Rights are not ultimate. They must have some foundation, or they are not rights ; and there is no foundation of the right of the individual to judge for himself, in all cases whatever, without regard to any external rule, but his right to judge by himself; and there is no foundation of his right to judge by himself, but in the fact that he himself is the rule, standard, or measure of the matter to be judged. The assumption of the right of private judgment, in the sense explained, then, necessarily involves the assumption of the fact, that man is the measure of truth and goodness. But the Transcendentalists do assume the right, as is well known ; therefore they assume that man is the measure of truth and goodness. This, in fact, is expressly avowed. We quote a few sentences from a pamphlet written in defense of Mr. Parker, by one of his friends, and which has been published since we commenced writing this article. The author is giving, ex professo, the views of the sect, and on the very point before us.
"We believe," says the author of the pamphlet, "the truths that Jesus uttered in no degree because of the miracles he wrought; we believe them because our mind recognizes their intrinsic truth,.....and this we hold to be good ground of faith for all men.....God has given to all men the power to attain to a religious faith that needs no external evidence to support it.....The deepest, truest religious faith is not capable of support from any outward evidence whatever.....Men have recourse to outward evidence through the weakness of their faith.....The most deeply religious minds never, in any stage of their progress, have any thing to do with such gross outward helps to their belief. To tell them to believe on the evidence of signs and wonders, to offer to prop up their faith by argument and logic, is to do violence to all their deepest and most sacred feelings. With hearts overflowing with love, and reverence, and gratitude to God, seeing him in all that is glorious and beautiful around them, feeling him within and about them everywhere, walking in his presence daily, as with a 'Father and a Friend,' what care such men for logic and cunning reasoning, what care they for signs and wonders? All around them is wonderful, for they see God in all.....Tell them a deep religious truth, and they cannot but believe it, though all evidence were against it. For truth is native to their souls. God has made them of that nature that they cannot be deceived. Their minds arc touchstones whereon to try all words and thoughts." Remarks on an Article from the Christian Examiner, entitled, " Mr. Parker and his Views" pp. 6, 7.
This is as express as language can well be. Men are so made that they cannot be deceived, and their minds are touchstones on which are to be tried all words and thoughts. Do not imagine that the writer means to assert this only of a few gifted or singularly privileged individuals. No such thing. He intentionally asserts it of all men, for he continues :
" What these men are all ought to be. What these men are all can be. For God has made men of one nature, and has not left himself without a witness in any heart. It is within the capacity of all men to reach this point of faith.....We have a religious nature, an inborn capacity for receiving truths of God, and heaven, and immortality, and all unearthly things. This is not intellect; it is not reasoning. It has nothing whatever to do with these. It cannot depend upon them. It is faith, the power of apprehending the unseen and invisible, the power of rising from earth to heaven. We hold that this [faith] is most peculiarly a faculty of man as man. It is that which makes him man, that which raises him above and separates him from all other creatures." lb. p. 7.
The fact that the writer calls the power by which we are enabled to affirm the truth in religious matters faith, and distinguishes it from intellect and reasoning, affects not our position ; for he calls it a faculty of man, the constituent element and distinctive characteristic of man as man. It is therefore human, is man himself, under a given aspect, and inseparable from his nature. His testimony is, therefore, all we could ask. Mr. Parker may not admit his authority, but that is nothing to us. He is a Transcendentalist ; and it is Transcendentalism, not Mr. Parker, we are mainly concerned with.
The writings of Mr. Emerson, who is as high authority on any point of Transcendentalism as we can quote without going abroad, contain not a little to the same effect. He teaches expressly that the soul is the source and measure of truth ; that a man is never to look abroad, but to consult in all cases only his own soul, the tendencies of his own nature, and in all his judgments of truth and goodness to listen to himself, and to take himself as their rule or standard.
" Whoso," he says, " would be a man must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.....What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? .... But these impulses may be from below, not from
above.....They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, 1 will live from the devil. No law is sacred to me but the law of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to this or that; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only ivrong is what is against it." Essays 1841, pp. 41, 42.
" That which I call right or goodness is the choice of my constitution ; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire to, is the state or circumstance desirable to my constitution ; and the action which I in all my years tend to do is the work for my faculties." lb. p. 114. "In the book I read the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought, which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it off. We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing and every man. For the Maker of all things stands behind us, and casts his dread omniscience through us over things." lb. pp. 231, 232. " Let man, then, learn the revelation of nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells with him.....If he would know what the great God speaketh.... he must greatly listen to himself. .... The soul makes no appeal. The faith that stands on authority is no faith.....Great is the soul.....It believes always in itself. .... It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to and dependent on its own. Behold, it saith, I am born into the universal mind ; I, the imperfect, adore my own perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and stars.....Thus viewing the soul, ....man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle the soul worketh."-lb. pp. 243-245.
These passages, taken almost at random, and to which many-others may be added, equally to our purpose, require no comment. The standard is assumed to be in man, to be man, man's constitution ; and all a man has to do, in order to be in conformity with truth and goodness, is to conform to himself, to his own constitution, his own thoughts, tendencies, and impulses. Hence the celebrated maxim of the Transcendental school, " Obey thyself." All this expressly asserts or necessarily implies that man is the measure of truth and goodness.
Mr. Parker also assumes this as the ground of his argument from the existence of the sentiment in man to the existence of the object which it demands, out of man. He defines religion to be a sentiment natural to man, that is, springing from man's nature. But this sentiment, as its object, requires God to love, reverence, and adore. Therefore, God exists. His argument drawn out in form is, whatever natural want man experiences, for that want there is an external supply. Man wants an object to love, reverence, and adore ; therefore, such object is. He wants truth, therefore there is truth ; God, therefore God is. You may always conclude from the internal want to the external supply. " This general rule," he says, " may thus be laid down ; that for each animal, intellectual, affectional, and moral want of man there is a supply,'- and what may be well to bear in mind, " a supply set within his reach, and a [natural] guide to connect the two." pp. 188, 189.
It is on this ground that he holds sentiment to be as authoritative, if not even more so, than reason. Detect in man a sentiment or a want, no matter what, and you may at once say that that which will supply it really exists and is within his reach. Now, this conclusion is valid only on condition, so to speak, of the truthfulness of human nature. It assumes that human nature conforms in all things to eternal and unalterable truth, and is in itself a test or touchstone of what is true and good ; that is, as we have said, man is the measure of truth and goodness. Truth is what conforms to my nature. " Right or goodness," says Mr. Emerson, " is that which is after my constitution ; wrong, that which is against it." If this does not make man the standard, the measure, we know not what would. Hence, Mr. Parker says again, " the truth of the human faculties [that is, conscience and sentiment, as well as intellect and reason] must be assumed in all arguments ; and if this be admitted, we have then the same evidence for spiritual facts as we have for the maxims or the demonstrations of geometry." p. 20, note.
But it may be objected that Mr. Parker does not make man the measure, for he holds up absolute religion and morality as the standard. " Religion," he says, " is the universal term, and absolute religion and morality its highest expression. Christianity is a particular form under this universal term ; one form of religion among many others. It is either absolute religion and morality, or it is less ; greater it cannot be, as there is no greater." p. 240. Here evidently the standard is assumed to be not man, but absolute religion and morality.
But the objection is invalid ; for Mr. Parker makes man the measure of absolute religion and morality. Absolute religion and morality are declared by Mr. Parker to be " something inward and natural to man," p. 241, " religion as it exists in the facts of man's soul,"" the law God made for man and wrote in his nature," p. 243, in a word, that which " answers exactly to the religious sentiment, and is what the religious sentiment demands," p. 239. If it be asked, then, What is absolute religion and morality ? the answer is, That which answers exactly to the moral and religious sentiments, wants, or facts of the soul. Conceding, then, that absolute religion and morality are the standard by which particular forms of religion and morality are to be judged, yet man is himself the standard or measure of absolute religion and morality ; which not only answers the objection, but confirms our general assertion, ‘that man is assumed to be the measure of truth and goodness.
That man is assumed to be the measure of absolute religion and morality is also certain from the fact that they are assumed to be matters of intuition. Man is the measure in all cases of intuitive knowledge, as Mr. Parker concedes, p. 263. But the great truths of absolute religion, or absolute religion and morality, (for Mr. Parker uses the two phrases as equivalent,) are declared to be " matters of direct personal experience," " matters of intuition," p. 247. Therefore man is assumed to be their measure.
This conclusion would follow from the ordinary and proper sense of intuition, that of knowing by immediate apprehension of the object known ; in which sense it is distinguished from science, which is discursive, and from faith, which depends on testimony. But it follows a fortiori from intuition as understood by the Transcendentalists. They understand by it, as near as we can seize their sense, the sentiment, feeling, or want of the soul, regarded, not as the characteristic of the subject, but as the intimation or indication of the object which will satisfy it. The sentiments are wants, but wants are indications of something wanted. What is thus indicated is said to be known by intuition, or to be a matter of intuition. The religious sentiment, for instance, is a want; hut, as a want, it demands God for its supply. It is therefore in itself an intimation, an indication, of God. Therefore the existence of God is a matter of intuition. To say that any given object is a matter of intuition is, then, simply saying it is what is demanded by an internal want or sentiment, and what answers to that sentiment or want. The intuitions depend, then, entirely on the wants of the soul, and are determined by them. The objects are known to be, not because intellectually apprehended, but because the internal sentiments demand them and are satisfied by them. Ascertain, then, the sentiments or wants, and what will satisfy them, and you have ascertained what is matter of intuition. The sentiments are, then, the measure of the truth and goodness of the objects, that is, the authority we have for saying the objects are, and that they are good. The sentiments are admitted to be facts of the soul, permanent, unalterable, essential ; therefore the soul itself; therefore man, under a given aspect. Consequently, the assertion, that absolute religion and morality are matters of intuition, not only invalidates the objection we are considering, but also confirms our assertion, that the Transcendentalists hold man to be the measure of truth and goodness.
But we have not yet seized the precise sense in which the Transcendentalists hold man to be the measure of truth and goodness. They distinguish, or attempt to distinguish, between man as person, and man as impersonal soul or nature, and predicate the measure of man in the latter sense, not in the former. This is an important fact, and must not be overlooked, if we would attain to a right understanding of Transcendentalism.
According to the Transcendental view, man is twofold : personal, as Peter, James, or John ; impersonal, as simple human nature, a force, or aggregate of forces, underlying the personality. Of the first they make no great account. It is the latter which they call " Impersonal Reason,'' " Spontaneity," "Instinct," "Nature," "the Soul," " the great Soul," " the Over-Soul," " the Divine in Man," and which is supposed to enlarge its proportions as it frees itself and recedes from the restrictions and limitations of personality, and to expand at last into the infinite God, the background of all being, the substantiality of all existences, whether material or immaterial to which they refer when they speak in such lofty terms, and predicate such glorious attributes of man. Man, as mere person, is weak, and falls into the silliest errors, the grossest absurdities, the most degrading and debasing superstitions ; but as the impersonal soul, as freed from all personal restrictions and limitations, he is great, grand, noble, sublime, a god, walking the earth in majesty, and the master of all things. If we will but sink our mean and contemptible personality, abandon ourselves to the soul, to its intuitions, spontaneous utterances and suggestions, to the great unconscious nature that underlies us, we shall find ourselves one with the Universal Mind, one with the Great Soul of All, whose dread omniscience and almightiness flow into and through us, opening all things to our intuitions, and subjecting all things to our power. Then are we the measure of all things, because one with their Maker, and do contain the source and law of all things in ourselves. Hence, Mr. Emerson says :
" Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose and the air and the sun." Essays, 1841, p. 114.
And again,
" All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the vast background of our being, in which they lie, an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call manv the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect; but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the great Soul have its way through us ; to engage us to obey [that is, the impersonal soul " lb. pp. 224, 225.
" The heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. For in ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our remote station on the circumference, instantaneously, to the center of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect......Persons themselves
acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two persons, a tacit reference is made to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal ; is God." lb. pp. 228, 229.
All this is express enough ; but here is another passage, still more express, if possible.
" It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power, as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tide to roll and circulate through him ; then he is caught up into the life of the universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or * with the flower of the mind '; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life, or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with the intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveler, who has lost his way, throws his reins on the horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find the road, so must we do with the divine animal we ride through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration." Essays, 2d Series, 1844, pp. 28-30.
These quotations sufficiently establish the fact that Transcendentalism does distinguish, in man, between the personal and the impersonal, and makes the impersonal, to the exclusion of the personal, the measure of truth and goodness. What, then, do Transcendentalists mean by the impersonal man, the great soul, the unconscious energy, of which they speak with so
much awe and emphasis, and to which they exhort us to abandon ourselves without reserve? Whatever they may mean by it, this much, we think, is certain, that they include it in the definition of man, and that the distinction they make is a distinction between what they regard as the personal and the impersonal in man, not between man and something not man. They can, then, mean nothing more by it than simple human nature minus human personality. Ascertain, then, what in man is constitutive, or the essential characteristic, of personality, eliminate that from the conception or definition of man, and what remains will be at least all they do or can mean by the impersonal soul.
A person, in ordinary language, is a rational being, according to Locke " a thinking and intelligent being "; according to the Schoolmen, after Boetius, rationalis naturae individua substantia, an individual substance of rational nature, and personality is defined by philosophers to be " the last complement of rational nature." A person must be an individual substance or being, because, in the language of the Schoolmen, a singular, not a universal, a whole, not a part, subsisting in and acting from itself as subject, not in and from another, and incommunicable, not held or shared in common ; and of rational nature, because individual substances not rational by nature or essence are never regarded as persons. We may have individual substances not rational by nature, as the stone, the plant, the tree ; and even individual substances which are up to a certain degree intelligent, as the dog, the ox, the horse, to which it would be rash to deny at least an imperfect degree, or the rude beginnings, of intelligence, without having persons, because these are not of rational nature. That, then, in man, which is constitutive of personality, its distinctive mark or essential characteristic, is not substantiality, nor individuality, although, if these, or either of them, be wanting, there is no person, but the rational nature. The rational nature is expressed by the word reason, therefore the essential characteristic of personality is reason. Where reason is, there is personality, and where reason is wanting, personality is wanting; and, as we shall soon see, where personality is wanting, the reason also is wanting.
But personality is the last complement of rational nature, that is, rational nature brought to its terminus, fulfilled, or, if you please, realized. Man, regarded as the genus, as abstract human nature, is, no doubt, rational nature, but without its last complement, rational nature unfulfilled, a metaphysical rational nature, a possible, but not a real, rational nature. It becomes real, is fulfilled, receives its last complement, only in individual men and women, beyond which it has no existence in re. It is impersonal, and, properly speaking, void. ^ Hence, we may say human nature attains to personality only in individualization, is personal only as individualized because it is only as individualized that it receives its last complement, or becomes a real being.
There are, then, three points of view from which we may consider personality, and distinguish the personal from the impersonal. 1. We may consider the person as subject, and wish to note the fact that the person subsists in and operates from himself. In this case, we make, under this point of view, the mark of personality substantia, substance. 2. We may wish to denote by person, not abstract human nature, man in general, but human nature as fulfilled, realized, having its last complement ; and then, under this point of view, we add individua, make the mark of personality individuality. 3. But if we wish to distinguish persons from all beings or subsistences not persons, and to express the essential quality of personal natures, we make its characteristic reason.
Now it is only from these three, or some one of these three points of view, that it is possible to distinguish between the personal and impersonal. The Transcendentalists cannot adopt the first, because the impersonal of which they speak is to be taken as a substantive existence ; since they regard it as subsisting in and operating from itself as subject, not as an attribute, a function, an operation, or phenomenon of some other subject on which it is dependent.
Do they adopt the second? They have frequently the air of doing so, and we are not sure but, to a very considerable extent, they really do intend by the impersonal soul the generic man, or man in general, as distinguished from the individual man. This is the most natural interpretation of their language. But, if this is their meaning, if by sinking personality they. mean sinking the individual and falling back on human nature as abstract human nature, they require us to fall back on human nature unfulfilled, wanting its last complement, in which sense it is a mere essentia metaphysica, and has no real existence, is no entity, and can be the subject of no act or operation : for, as we have said, human nature is real only as individualized in men and women. Out of individuals it is an abstraction, existing, if you will, in conceptu, but not in re. It is the simple genus; and genera are real, active, operative, only in substance, as they become substantia, and these, again, only as fulfilled, as they receive their last complement in becoming subsistentiae. To sink individuality and fall back on generic man, or man in general, would be to fall back on a metaphysical abstraction, practically on nothing, and to take a nonentity for our sovereign guide or teacher.
We are not ignorant that the humanitarian division of the Transcendentalists exhort us to sink the individual and to fall back on our common humanity, and seem to teach that this common humanity is not merely that which each individual man realizes, but that it is, as it were, a mighty entity, a vast reservoir of wisdom, virtue, and strength, which individuals do not and cannot exhaust. We ourselves, especially during the interval between our rejection of Eclecticism and our conversion to Christianity, following Plato, the Neo-Platonists, Le-roux, and the Saint-Simonians, and some half glimpses of the teachings of the old Realists, whose doctrines we did not understand, fell into this absurdity, and sought to make it appear that humanity, not as the collective mass of individuals, but as genus, as out of all individuals, has a real, an entitative existence, and can operate as subject ; and that in this sense humanity is not what is common to all individuals, but a somewhat that transcends all individuals, and makes all individuals, manifesting itself in various degrees, in one individual under one aspect, in another under another, and so on. An individual we regarded as a particular manifestation of a particular aspect or phase of humanity, as a particular act of an individual manifests some particular aspect or phase of the individual; and the mission of the individual we declared to be, through his whole life, the realization in his own thoughts, words, and deeds of that particular phase or aspect of humanity he represents. It was in this way we solved the old question of individuation, and found, as we supposed, a basis for the state, and legitimated, so to speak, individual liberty. Taking this view, we necessarily held humanity to be greater than the individual, nay, greater than all individuals together. Substantially, all Transcendentalists, so far as they admit a human existence at all, do the same. They all say man is greater than men.
The common source of all our errors on this point is easily discovered; it is in the well known doctrine of the Transcendentalists, that the possible exists, not merely as possible, but in point of fact as real, and that what is possible is altogether more perfect than the actual. What you conceive is possible; then it is possible. Then you affirm that it exists, though not yet realized, is real in potentia, and what is real in potentia is superior to what is in actu. Therefore, regard not the actual, but fall back on the possible. To conceal the absurdity, we gave to the possible the name of the ideal, and then said, live not in and for the actual, but in and for the ideal. All very fine, no doubt, and admirably calculated to make old men see visions, and young men and maidens dream dreams, and, what is worse, tell their dreams.
But what is in potentia is no more in re than in actu, for it is a contradiction in terms to call the potential real. Moreover, the ideal, the possible, is always below the real, the actual, be-. cause it has never in itself the force to realize or actualize itself. The power to act is below act, because it must receive what it has not, before it becomes act, or is reduced to act. Here is the fundamental error, in denying this, and assuming potentia to stand above actus, which is the terminus or last complement of potentia. Now, humanity in abstracto is at best only man in potentia. To assume, then, its superiority over individuals, who are its terminus, or last complement, or that, in sinking individualized humanity and falling back on humanity as abstracted from all individuals, or rather as emancipated from all individuality, we fall back on something higher, broader, and richer, is precisely the error of placing potentia above actus, the possible above the actual. Potentia is void ; actus is full. Void is therefore superior to full, emptiness to fulness!
Transcendentalism, or latest Form of Infidelity-Part II
Part II of II
Following the old Buddhists and generalizing this important fact into a principle, Leroux, instructed also by the Nihilism of the Hegelians, represents God to be Infinite Void seeking to become full ; and since God is infinite void seeking to become full, and since the full or plenum is the actual universe, the universe as a whole and in all its parts must needs be eternally progressive. Hence, a solid and imperishable foundation for the sublime and kindling doctrine of progress, around which gathers “la Jeune France," “das Junge Deutschland," " Young England," "Young Ireland," and “Young America," - young indeed, and even green / But how can void become plenum, potentia actus, possibility real, without a reality to realize it ? God given as Infinite Void is given as infinite possibility, that is, merely as a metaphysical existence which no real existence contradicts. But a possibility cannot act, because it is not in re, is a nonentity, and therefore no subject. How, then, can God seek to realize himself in the universe? For the tendency to reality must itself be from a reality, since what is not cannot seek or tend to be or to do. Yet into the absurdity here involved the Transcendentalists all fall in raising the ideal oyer the real, and telling us, as they do, that ideas are potent, active, and take to themselves hands and remake man and the universe to their own image and likeness. Nothing more untrue. What is not cannot act, and ideas existing only in conceptu are not and cannot be active. The whole doctrine of progress is an absurdity. Nothing contains in itself the force to be more than it is, and cannot be more than it is, save by the aid of what it is not ; for otherwise the stream could rise higher than the fountain, the effect exceed the cause, that is, be an effect without a cause. Man may advance by the aid of his Maker, but is not and cannot be inherently progressive. It will not, then, answer to contend that the possible man is greater than the actual man, humanity in the abstract superior to humanity concreted in individuals.
It may be replied to us, that the transcendentalists do not mean by humanity simply humanity as abstracted from all individuals, but as common to all individuals. We see no real difference between the one and the other. But if it be humanity as common to all individuals on which they exhort us to fall back, then it is included in each and individualized in each. Each, individual, then, has it all in himself, and affirms it in every one of his individual acts; for if wanting, he himself would not be. Hence, the distinction between man as an individual and man as humanity, if this be the distinction contended for by the transcendentalists, can avail them nothing; for, in the first place, to sink the personal and fall back on the impersonal would be to sink the actual and fall back on the potential, the real and fall back on the unreal, on nothing ; in the second place, it would be to fall back on what the individual already is, for he is all the human nature there is for him to fall back upon.
There remains, then, the third distinction we pointed out, namely, the distinction between men as persons and existences not personal, in which sense the essential characteristic of personality is reason. The distinction here is properly a distinction between rational and irrational. The distinction, we must remember, is in man, not out of him, and therefore implies in man a personal subject and an impersonal subject. But
this is impossible ; for man is one subject, one ego, one me, not two, and human nature in him is one and the same identical nature. He may be affected on one side, so to speak, of his being, by bodily organs, and on the other by God and truth; and he may differ, morally, very widely, as he acts from the one affection or the other; but he is, in either case, always the one identical subject or agent. The distinction, then, in man, of a personal and impersonal subject is impossible.
But we will not now insist on this. The distinction is between personal subject and impersonal subject, and the impersonal is included in the definition of man; therefore as properly man as the personal. What can this impersonal subject be? It can be only what is left after the personal is eliminated. What, in eliminating personality, do we then necessarily eliminate? or rather, on what conditions is the elimination of personality possible? Man must be retained in his substantiality and individuality, because he is to be retained as subject active and operative. But if to man in his substantiality and individuality you add rational nature or reason, he is a person. Then you can possibly remove personality only on condition of removing rational nature, either in itself or in operation. Hence, to sink personality is, practically at least, to sink reason; for the active presence of reason necessarily and per se constitutes the personality. This assumed, the elimination of personality is possible only by eliminating reason. The transcendental distinction, then, between the personal and impersonal in man is virtually a distinction between the rational and irrational, and the exhortation to escape from personality is virtually an exhortation to escape from the restraints of reason. To sink our personality is to sink our reason, to refuse to reason; and to refuse to reason is to reduce ourselves, practically, to the condition of brutes,- at the very best, to that of children and the insane.
We can now catch some slight glimpse of the real character of Transcendentalism. If it adopts this last view, it represents the irrational as superior to the rational, reverses all our common notions of things, declares the imperfect more perfect than the perfect, that the less of a man one is the more of a man he is, the less he knows the more he knows, that the child is wiser than the adult, the madman more to be trusted as a guide than the sane man,- which, extravagant as it may seem, is actually admitted by our transcendentalists, whom we have often heard contend that the unintelligible is more intelligible than the intelligible, that nothing is less known than the known, that only the unknown is known, that more is to be seen by night than by day, in the dark than in the light. We exaggerate nothing. We have heard all this said, and seriously maintained.
It has been seriously maintained that the child is far wiser than the man. We have, or had quite recently, before us a remarkable book, called Conversations on the Gospels, held by a teacher with his children, in which he affects to learn and prove the Gospel, that is, the Gospel according to the transcendentalists, from the mouth of childhood, from what he calls its simple, unconscious utterances. Strange as it may seem, it has actually been maintained by serious persons in our good city of Boston, and, for aught we know to the contrary, is yet, that the teacher is to learn what he teaches from the child ; that teaching is merely " tempting forth " what is in the child; in a word, that more wisdom is to be learned by sitting down by the cradle and looking into baby's eyes, than by listening to the profoundest discourses of the sage or the saint. Even no less a man than the poet Wordsworth seems to hold the same:
" Heaven lies about us in our infancy;
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy; The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended ;
At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day."
There is no mistaking the philosophy which underlies the whole of the beautiful Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, from which we have taken this passage,- beautiful, we mean, so far as the mere poetic sentiment and expression are concerned. It is a sort of apotheosis of childhood, as the ballad of The Idiot Boy is, one is half tempted to say, that of idiocy. All proceeds from the assumption of the superiority of man minus personality over man with the last complement of his nature.
Nor do our transcendentalists shrink from maintaining the superior sanity of the insane over the sane. " The poet," says Mr. Emerson, in a passage already quoted, " knows that he speaks adequately, then only, when he speaks somewhat wildly,.....not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from service (that is, from the governance of reason) and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life;...not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar.” And in the following he is still more explicit:
" The poets are liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, 'Those who are free throughout the world. They are free, and they make free. An imaginative work renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterwards, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the author and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That, also, is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems: how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence." Essays, 2d Series, pp. 35, 36.
This reminds us of the conversation of a gentleman walking through Bedlam with one of its inmates, with whom he had been previously acquainted.
" Ah, Tom, you here! How is this?" " O, I was outvoted." "Oh, I was outvoted.” “Outvoted, how so?" "I said the world was mad; they said I was mad, and being the majority, they outvoted me, and sent me here." Tom, according to the transcendentalists, was in the right, the world in the wrong. He had merely broken loose from routine, and made himself “a new witness."
The same philosophy at bottom, though different in form, and apparently less extravagant, runs through our own former writings, and was adopted by us as the basis of our theory of art and of religion. We hope we may be pardoned the egotism of quoting a paragraph or two in this connection; for it cannot be denied, that, in a history of American transcendentalism, the Editor of the Boston Quarterly Review should not be forgotten, pronounced as he was by Blackwood's Magazine the Coryphaeus of the sect, and by M. Victor Cousin one who promised to be "a philosophical writer of the first order," &c. In a review of Wordsworth's poetry, we took occasion to bring out a theory of art in general, and of poetry in particular, a theory which had the good fortune to meet Mr. Parker's entire approbation, if we may credit his personal assurances to the writer, although he differed somewhat from us in its application to Wordsworth's poetry.
"The poet is always a seer; and it is worthy of note that the common-sense of mankind, which makes languages, frequently calls the poet and seer, or prophet, by the same name. Thus, in Latin, vates is either a prophet or a poet. The poet is not, strictly speaking, a maker, as the Greek name implies. He does not create, - he finds; hence poetry has, with justice, been made to consist in invention, in discovering, seeing, finding, that which ordinary men heed not, see not, or do not imagine to exist. He catches glimpses, more or less perfect, of the infinite reality which lies back of the phenomena observed by the senses, or which shines out through them, whether under the aspect of truth, of beauty, or of goodness; and his sensibility is agitated, his soul takes fire, and he utters what he sees in words that burn, in tones which make those who hear him feel as he feels and burn as he burns. This he may do, because the spontaneous reason, by means of which he obtains the glimpses which fill his soul with so much joy, is in all men, and thus lays the foundation of a secret but entire sympathy between him and them, making them capable of recognizing the infinite he recognizes, and of joining their voices with his in sublime chorus to the God of truth, beauty, goodness.
" The poet, we have said, is a seer. He is a spectator. He stands before the spiritual universe, and merely sees what is before him. He does not make that universe; nay, he has not sought to behold it. It has risen in its majesty, or in its loveliness, before him. He does not seek his song; it comes to him; it is given him. He is, to a certain extent, a passive, though not an unmoved, recipient of it. To this fact he always bears witness. It is not he that sings; it is his Muse :
*Musa, mihi causas memora.'
Apollo, or some God, inspires him. The power he feels, the beauty he sees, he cannot ascribe to himself. The song he sings is a mystery unto himself, and he feels that it must have been given him from abroad, from above. A spirit glows within him, a mind agitates him, which he feels is not his spirit, is not his mind, but the mind of his mind, the spirit of his spirit, the soul of his soul. In this he is right. The spontaneous reason, spontaneity, from which his song proceeds, is, as we have said, the divine in man, and it acts without being put into action by the human will. We may by effort, by discipline, place ourselves in relation with it, bring ourselves within the sphere of its action; but it is impersonal and divine......It follows from the view now taken, that there is always truth in poetry. Of all known modes of utterance, poetry is one of the truest; for it is the voice of the spontaneous reason, the word of God, which is in immediate relation with truth. It is truer than philosophy j for in poetry God speaks, whereas in philosophy it is only man that speaks. The reflective reason, which gives us philosophy, is personal, subject to all the infirmities of the flesh, short-sighted, and exclusive; but the spontaneous reason, of which poetry is one of the modes of utterance, is impersonal, broad, universal; embracing, as it were, the whole infinitude of truth. Hence the confidence mankind have universally reposed in their sacred prophets, in the inspired chants of their divine bards, and the distrust they have pretty uniformly manifested for the speculations of philosophers......Poetry, if it be poetry, is always inspired. It is inspiration clothing itself in words. And inspiration is never referred to ourselves; we always refer it to God. ' In inspiration,' says Cousin,' we are simple spectators. We are not actors; or at best, our action consists merely in being conscious of what is taking place, This, doubtless, is activity, but not a premeditated, voluntary, personal activity. The characteristic of inspiration is enthusiasm; it is accompanied by that strong emotion which forces the soul out of its ordinary and subaltern state, and calls into action the sublime and divine part of its nature. Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo.' " Boston Quarterly Review, April, 1839, Vol. II., pp. 142- 144.
There is no mistaking this. It is genuine transcendentalism, and differs from it as set forth by others only in the fact, that they make the whole of human nature, minus the personality, the measure of truth and goodness; whereas we, in our exposition, take merely a part, the faculty of reason, minus its last complement. This, in reality, amounts to nothing, and constitutes no fundamental difference. The theory we bring out is, the more effectually a man abandons himself to spontaneity, to his impersonal nature, and the less he interferes in its operations, that is, the less he exercises reason and volition, the more in accordance with truth are his views, and the more worthy of confidence are his words. This abandonment is, so to speak, a sort of voluntary or premeditated insanity; and the more complete it becomes, the more nearly do we approach the state of insanity. The only difference between a man voluntarily placing himself in the state required and the actually insane is, that the former has the power of resuming the reins, and recovering himself when he chooses, whereas the latter has not. But while in, and so far as in, this state, the resemblance, the identity, is complete. Hence, the nearer we approach to the state of insanity, the more divine do we become, the more open is the universe to our view, and the more trustworthy are our utterances. Mr. Parker, as we shall have occasion hereafter to show, adopts the same general doctrine, and makes the man who comes nearest to God, who stands in the most immediate relation with absolute truth, beauty, and goodness, a sort of maniac.
" There is a new soul in the man, which takes him, as it were, by the hair of his head, and sets him down where the idea he wishes for demands......It takes the rose out of the cheek, and turns the man in on himself, and gives him more of truth. Then in a poetic fancy, the man sees visions; has wondrous revelations; every mountain thunders; God bums in every bush; flames out in the crimson cloud ; speaks in the wind; descends with every dove; is all in all. The soul deep-wrought, in its intense struggle, gives outness to its thought, and on the trees and stars, the fields, the floods, the corn ripe for the sickle, on man and woman, it sees its burden writ. The spirit within constrains the man. It is like wine that hath no vent. He is full of God. While he muses the fire burns; his bosom will scarce hold his heart. He must speak, or he dies, though the earth quake at his word. Timid flesh may resist, and Moses say, I am slow of speech. What avails that? The soul says, Go, and I will be with thy mouth, to quicken thy tardy tongue......Then are the man's lips touched with a coal from the altar of Truth, brought by a Seraph's hand. He is baptized with the spirit of fire. His countenance is like lightning. Truth thunders from his tongue; his words eloquent as Persuasion: no terror is terrible; no foe formidable. The peaceful is satisfied to be a man of strife and contention, his hand against every man to root up, pluck down, and destroy." Discourse, pp. 223, 224.
This is a tolerable description of a madman, whose frenzy has taken the turn of religious reform. It is designed as the description of an inspired man, not supernaturally, but naturally inspired, by the "great Soul, wide as yesterday, today, and forever," which seizes and overpowers the man; and is a very good proof that the transcendentalists regard the insane as better measures of truth and goodness than the sane ; which is what they ought to do in order to be consistent with themselves.
Something of this same doctrine seems to have spread far and wide. The prevailing notion in our community of the prophet seems to be borrowed from the insane or drunken Pythoness, and the man whom God chooses to communicate his word is looked upon as one possessed. The man is not himself, but beside himself. Thus Washington Allston, in his picture of Jeremiah, seeks to indicate the prophetic character by giving to the prophet the eyes of a maniac. The poet, painter, sculptor, artists of all sorts, it seems to be believed, in order to have genius, to be what their names imply, should be a sort of madmen, doing what they know not, and do not will, mastered and carried away by a power they are not, and comprehend not; and attain to excellence, gain a right to immortal fame, only by abandoning themselves without resistance to its direction.
We are not disposed to undertake the refutation of this theory, which may be termed the demoniacal, or madman's theory, for none but a madman will attempt to reason a madman out of his crotchets. The characteristic of the madman is that he has lost the power to reason, and therefore, to be reasoned out of error or into truth. Nevertheless, though not entirely ignorant of the class of facts which are or may be appealed to in support of this theory, we believe every scholar or literary man is able from his own experience to refute it. The man is always greatest, sees the farthest, and produces the most effect on others^ when he himself is most self-collected, self-possessed. The most eloquent passages of your most eloquent orators are produced when the orator is intensely active, indeed, but when he has the fullest command of himself, and is the most perfectly conscious and master of his thoughts and words. The orator who would command his audience must first command himself. If he allows them, or his own thought, passion, or imagination, to master him, he fails. So your poets, so far as genuine, write not with " eyes in a fine frenzy rolling," but with a calm, quiet self-possession, perfectly master of what they are saying, and of the mode or manner in which they say it. We need but read Shakspeare to be satisfied of this. Shakespeare inflames your passions, makes you rave, rant, weep, laugh, love, hate, sigh, muse, philosophize, at will ; but he himself is in no passion, never loses the command of his verse, nor of his tears, laughter, loves, hates, or musings. You never dream of identifying him with any one of his characters. He is himself no more Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, than he is Iago, King Lear, or Jack Falstaff. They are his creatures, not himself. And herein is the test of genius, which holds itself always distinct from and above its productions, sends them forth, yet conceals itself. Great power is always sedate and silent. The ancients represented their gods as asleep, and spread over their features an air of ineffable repose. Real majesty
" Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm."
We feel this in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and even Goethe. They are all remarkable for their self-possession, their easy grandeur and simple majesty, and hence the command they have over men. When one loses his self-possession, -loses, as it were, his personality, and suffers himself to be carried away by his thoughts, his passion, or his imagination, you feel that he is internally weak, that he is but a child, with whom indeed you may amuse yourself for a moment, if in playful mood, but to whom you can surrender neither your heart nor your judgment. Mr. Emerson himself, in his own character, is a striking proof of the falseness of his theory, and the contrast between him and Mr. Parker forcibly illustrates the comparative worth of that theory and its opposite. In the very tempest and whirlwind of his passion, in the very access of his madness, uttering the most incoherent ravings, the wildest extravagances, Mr. Emerson is eminently himself, perfectly cool and self-possessed, and proceeds as deliberately as a mathematician solving his problems, or a stone-cutter in squaring his block of granite. We dissent from his doctrines, we shrink from his impiety and his blasphemy, but we see and feel his intense personality, that he is master of his thought, that he knows what he says, and intends it. No man can listen to the silvery tones of his voice, mark his quiet composure, or read his exquisitely chiseled sentences, and not say,- Here is a man to whom Almighty God has given ability and genius of the first order, and of whom he will demand a large account. No man is more intensely personal, or practices more contrary to the rule he lays down; none can demand of all books, all thoughts, words, deeds, that pass under his observation, a more rigid account of what they are, and of their right to be. And yet he is the first poet of his country, and has written passages unsurpassed for true poetic conception, sentiment, and expression, by any living poet, with whose productions we are acquainted, whether in England, France, or Germany. The man wants but faith, faith in the Son of God, to be the glory of his country, and a blessing to his race. But, alas! wanting this, he wants all. His splendid talents, his keen, penetrating insight, his deep and probing thought, his patient study, and his rich and creative genius avail him nothing. May we not take the wail that now and then escapes him as an indication that he himself is not altogether unconscious of this? O, would that he could bow lowly at the foot of the cross, and consecrate himself, his talents and genius, to the service of the Crucified! May the infinite God, whose goodness is over all, and unto all, bestow upon him the inestimable gift of faith, and enable him to worship the God who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, instead of seeking to make to himself a god from the unconscious energies of Nature!
Mr. Parker is a very different man from Mr. Emerson. We see that he has read much, that he has a burning thirst for knowledge, that he has wit, fancy, imagination, passion, but that he is not their master. They, each by turns, overpower him, and carry him whithersoever they will. He mounts, indeed, the whirlwind, he rides on the tempest, but he does not direct it; it directs him, and whirls and tosses him as it pleases. He, to no inconsiderable extent, sinks himself, and abandons himself to his instinctive nature. But we feel, as we read him, that he is weak. He has no simple grandeur, no quiet strength, no sedate command. His brow is not imperial. He soars not with ease and grace, as one native to the higher regions, on wings fitted to sustain him, and we fear every moment that they will prove insufficient. His conclusions inspire no confidence, for we see he knows not whence he has obtained them, and has come to them simply as borne onward by the winds and clouds of passion. Never does the man stand above his thought and command his speech. He whirls and tosses with all the whirlings and tossings of his discourse, and we feel that he is not one of those great men whose lives serve to chronicle the ages."
We think it not difficult now to comprehend the essential character of transcendentalism. It exhorts us to sink our personality, and abandon ourselves to the impersonal soul, the unconscious energy that underlies it. The essential characteristic of personality is reason, and therefore to sink personality is, as we have seen, practically to sink reason itself. If we discard reason, we must also discard will, for will is not simply acting from one's self as subject, nor from one's self as subject to an end; but from one's self as subject propter finem, to an end and on account of it, which is not possible without reason. Eliminate from man, that is, from what comes properly within the definition of man, reason and will, and nothing remains of man but passion, or, if you will, passion and phantasy, or imagination. At most, then, we have for the impersonal nature, on which to fall back, only passion and imagination ; for passion and imagination, together with reason and will, are the whole man, all that can be covered, in any sense; by the word man, or by the term human nature. But, in order to be as liberal as possible, we will gratuitously suppose, after reason is discarded, will remains; it can remain only as a simple executive force, for that is all it is at any time. Reason discarded, it can remain only as the executor of the suggestions of passion and imagination. The plain, simple transcendental doctrine, then, is, passion and imagination are superior to reason. Give loose reins to passion and imagination, and your head will be filled with wilder dreams and stranger fancies than if you subject them to the surveillance and restraints of reason; and these dreams and fancies are to be regarded as superior to the dictates of reason, because these are spontaneous and the dictates of reason are personal!
Passion and imagination, or what remains of man, after the elimination of reason, are precisely what the Schoolmen call the inferior soul, and hold to be the seat of concupiscence. What Christian theology calls the superior soul is the rational nature as distinguished from the sensitive soul, or, as termed by some modern psychologists, internal sensibility, or principle of the sentiments or feelings as distinguished from sensations, or perceptions of sense. It has three faculties, will, understanding, and memory. To make passion and imagination the superior is simply asserting the superiority of the sensitive nature over the rational. The subject now begins to open, and we approach a territory very well known. The distinction contended for is now quite intelligible, and though not properly a distinction between the personal and impersonal, yet a very real distinction, and one not now noted for the first time. It is the distinction which renders possible and intelligible that spiritual conflict which has been noted in all ages, and which every man experiences who undertakes to live a Christian life. The impersonal soul of the transcendentalists is the “carnal mind " of the Sacred Scriptures, the inferior nature, which, according to Christian faith, has been disordered by the Fall, and become prone to evil and that continually, that " old man of sin," the seat of all inordinate desires and affections,- “the flesh," which our religion commands us to " put off," to " mortify with its deeds," and to bring into subjection to the law of Christ Jesus after the inner man. This is what it is, and all that it is, and under these names it is no new acquaintance.
Now, the peculiarity, we cannot say the originality, of transcendentalism consists precisely in declaring the flesh superior to the spirit; this inferior soul, or what Christianity pronounces the inferior soul, superior to the rational soul, or what Christianity declares to be the superior soul; in giving as its higher nature, noble soul, spirit, instinct, spontaneity, the divine in man, to which we are to abandon ourselves, and which we are to take as the infallible revelation of the will of our Maker, and the measure of truth and goodness, this very carnal mind, flesh, corrupt nature, against which the saint wars, which he mortifies, and through his whole life labors incessantly to subdue, to subject to reason and will, healed of the wounds of the fall, elevated and purified by the infusion of supernatural grace. It makes this struggle not only unnecessary, but wrong; and requires us, as the rule of life, to give up reason, and abandon ourselves to the solicitations of the flesh!
The mist now vanishes; and this transcendentalism, which has puzzled so many simple-minded people, becomes as plain and as unmistakable as the nose on a man's face. It has revealed no mystery, has detected no new facts or elements in human nature, but has simply called higher what the Gospel calls lower, that true and good which the Gospel calls false and evil, and vice versa. It would simply liberate us from the restraints of reason, and deliver us to the license of passion and imagination, free us from the struggle, and permit us to follow nature instead of commanding us to crucify it. It merely gives the lie to our blessed Saviour; and where he says, " Deny thyself," it says, " Obey thyself." It ridicules the notion, that a holy life must be a life of incessant warfare against one's self, and teaches that we are to gain heaven by swimming with the current, not against it; a pleasant doctrine, and, if universally adopted and acted on, would, no doubt, produce some effects.
People who do not believe much in the modern doctrine of progress, and who are not aware that we live in the age of light, may be strongly inclined to believe that we misrepresent the transcendentalists; but they should bear in mind that it was foretold thousands of years ago, that there would come a race of men who would call the churl liberal, evil good, and bitter sweet. The doctrine we charge upon the transcendentalists is but a necessary logical inference from the principles they lay down in the passages we have quoted from their writings. Absolute religion and morality are, we presume, the highest expression of truth and goodness; and absolute religion and morality, Mr. Parker tells us, are "religion as it exists in the facts of man's nature," " what answers exactly to the religious sentiment." By sentiment, we presume also, he means sentiment, for he so calls it, defines it to be a want, and distinguishes it from cognition, discursive reason, and volition; if a sentiment, then a fact of the sensitive or inferior soul, which is the seat or principle of all the sentiments, whether good or bad. If absolute religion and morality answer exactly to the religious sentiment, or if that which answers exactly to the religious sentiment is absolute religion and morality, then the sensitive soul is their measure, and then the measure of truth and goodness.
The transcendentalists, moreover, claim to be spiritualists, and they call their doctrine spiritualism. Their impersonal soul, it is well known, they term spirit, and distinguish, on the one hand, from reason, and on the other from external sense. They pretend to have detected here an element in man, or a faculty of man's soul, which is overlooked by the rationalists and the materialists, as also by the supernaturalists, whom Mr. Parker classes with the materialists. This element or faculty is the principle of their doctrine, and that which characterizes their school. In their view it transcends reason and external sense, and hence their name of transcendentalists. They are pneumatici, differing from those of the old Gnostic stamp only in claiming for all men what the old Gnostics claimed for merely a select few.
Now strike out reason and external sense, and you have nothing left of man but this very sensitive soul to which you can possibly apply the term spirit; for these and it are the whole man. Therefore the transcendentalists must mean this, if they mean anything, by the spirit; for there is nothing else in man they can mean.
That they do mean this is evident enough from the fact that they deny the necessity, nay, the propriety, of struggling against it. There is, as most men know, an internal opposition between the rational soul and the sensitive, and in order to be virtuous, it is generally held that we should make the latter yield to the former; but this the Transcendentalists deny.
" In some men," says Mr. Parker, " religion is of a continual growth. They are always in harmony with God. Silently and unconscious, erect as a palm-tree, they grow up to the measure of a man. To them reason and religion are of the same birth. They are born saints, the aborigines of heaven. Betwixt their idea of life and their fact of life there has at no time been a gulf. But others join themselves to the armada of sin, and get scarred all over as they do thankless battle in that leprous host. Before these men become religious, there must be a change,- a well defined, deeply marked- a change that will be remembered. The saints who have been sinners- tell us of the struggle and desperate battle that goes on between the flesh and the spirit. It is as if the devil and the archangel contended. Well says John Bunyan, 'The devil fought with me weeks long, and I with the devil.' To take the leap of Niagara, and stop when half-way down, and by the proper motion reascend, is no slight thing, nor the remembrance thereof like to pass away. The passage from sin to salvation, this second birth of the soul, as both Christians and heathens call it, is one of the many mysteries of man. Two elements meet in the soul. There is a negation of the past; an affirmation of the future. Terror and hope, penitence and faith, rush together, and a new life begins." Discourse, p. 151.
This, though vaguely expressed, is intelligible enough. It evidently recognizes no corrupt nature to be warred against, and by the help of divine grace reduced to subjection. Many never know any struggle at all; and those who are subjected to a momentary struggle, in consequence of past misbehavior, have to struggle, not against their own nature, but simply against their past deeds. The sin is simply in the fact that there is a gulf between their fact of life and their idea of life,- that is, a discrepancy between the actual and the ideal. The sinner is one who has not realized his ideals. The wrong is entirely in the fact that his actual conduct does not satisfy or please himself. Let him leap the gulf which separates his actual from his ideal, or let him by a bold effort satisfy his interior longings, and be pleased with himself, recover self-complacency, and the sin is removed, the evil is done away, and the man stands on the mountain-top of life, that is, has got to the top of his ideal. “Absolve yourself," says Mr. Emerson, " and you shall have the suffrage of the world."
" Two elements meet in the soul." What are these two elements? Reason and concupiscence,- the spirit and the flesh ? Not at all. They are no elements of human nature, but simply the fact of life and the idea of life, that is, the actual and the ideal. The man, somehow, one day, as leaping down Niagara at his leisure, and admiring the spray, the current, the rainbow, suddenly comes to see that he is leaping away from his ideal, falling below it, and, comparing one with the other, says to himself, "This will never do," and therefore arrests himself, turns a somerset, and with his proper motion reascends and grasps his ideal. A difficult feat, no doubt, for ordinary mortals; but within the natural power of all men, and quite easy to a transcendentalist, who is thoroughly exercised in all spiritual ground-and-lofty tumbling. But be this as it may, the only struggle is between the man's actual and his ideal. Is this actual the creature of the inferior soul? Nothing says so. Is this ideal the revelation of the superior soul, of reason divinely strengthened or illuminated? Nothing proves it; and, for aught that appears, it may itself be nothing but the longings, cravings, of the inferior soul itself.
A struggle of a different kind Mr. Parker, indeed, admits, and a struggle which the man wages not in becoming a saint, but in being one. But this is not against the inferior or sensitive soul. It is a struggle against old ideas and institutions. The man is to do brave battle, but not against himself,- win immortal victories, but not over himself. He is to stand erect against existing moral, religious, and social institutions, and wage war to the death against whatever may impose a restraint on the soul, or hinder it from acting out itself. So, he says, did our blessed Saviour, whom, in his more compliant moods, he permits to be taken as a model; so did Peter, and Paul, and Stephen, and so all the prophets and sages of all times past, and so should we. But this implies no condemnation of any part of human nature, nor does it require the rational soul to be placed above the sensitive.
Mr. Emerson, the real chief, or sovereign pontiff, of transcendentalism, denies in plain terms the struggle.
" People," says he, "represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs on their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed, when a noble nature is commended. Whether the man is not better who strives with temptation? But there is no merit in the matter. Either God is there, or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. . . . .When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel, and say, ‘Crump is a better man with his resistance to all his native devils.'” Essays, p. 109
This is conclusive. Now, since the Transcendentalists avowedly contemn personality, whose basis is reason, and do not condemn in any respect the sensitive soul, and since they call upon us to obey the soul, and since the sensitive soul, after personality is discarded, is all the soul there is left for us to obey, it follows necessarily, that they do, intentionally or unintentionally, raise the sensitive soul over the rational, as we have alleged.
1. It may be objected to this, that the transcendentalists also call their impersonal soul reason, and therefore do not intend to distinguish it from the rational nature. They distinguish between reason and understanding. Understanding is the intellectual principle of sensation; reason, of spiritual cognition, and is above understanding. Reason, as understanding, they discard; reason, as the principle of spiritual cognition, of intuition, they do not discard, because it is precisely what they mean by spirit. We deny the validity of this distinction, which is supported by no facts alleged, or which can be alleged. Reason is the principle of understanding, and without reason man would cease not only to be rational, but to be intelligent,- for intelligence in man is not the intelligence of animals plus reason, but reason itself, as is affirmed when man is affirmed to be of a rational nature. There is not in man an intelligent nature and a rational nature; but the intelligent nature in man is essentially and integrally rational nature. The intelligent principle is, then, one and the same, whatever the conditions of its operation, or the sphere or degree of knowledge.
2. But we may be told, again, that the transcendentalists contend that man's whole nature should be retained and exercised, and that his supreme good consists in the harmonious development and action of all his faculties; therefore they cannot assert the superiority of the sensitive soul alleged. We deny the conclusion; for they contend, that, though man's whole nature is to be retained and exercised,- which, by the way, is hardly consistent with what else they say,- yet all is to be retained and exercised in subordination to the instinctive nature, which we have identified with the sensitive soul. " We love characters," says Mr. Emerson, "in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous.” " Absolute religion," says Mr. Parker, " is that which answers exactly to the religious sentiment." Instinctive, sensitive nature is evidently, then, placed above personal nature, which is identical, as we have seen, with rational nature,- and this is all our argument asserts.
That all man's faculties, although said to be retained, are to be retained and exercised in subordination to the sensitive or inferior soul is maintained even in general thesis by not a few of our modern speculators and reformers. The Fourierists all place, confessedly, the passional nature, which corresponds exactly to the impersonal nature of the transcendentalists, at the summit of the psychical hierarchy, and contend that man's good consists not in controlling his passions, but in harmonizing them, and that they are to be harmonized not by being crucified, but by having all things so arranged as to secure their free and full satisfaction. They expressly make the passional nature legislative, and the rational simply ministerial; and their writings and discourses are filled with tirades against philosophers, moralists, theologians, and legislators, for having sought to make reason legislative, and the passions subservient. Fourierism is nothing but a form of transcendentalism, as may be inferred from the fact that nearly all the Transcendentalists are either avowed Fourierists or very favorable to them. Fourierism is simply an attempt to realize in society the leading principles of transcendentalism; and if some transcendentalists reject it, it is not because they question the philosophy on which it rests, but because they doubt its competency, as a practical scheme of social organization, to secure the end proposed.
The same doctrine lies at the basis of the ethical system of the French eclectic school. He must be a tyro indeed in philosophical studies, who does not perceive at a glance that the instinctive and spontaneous nature of the transcendentalists, the passional nature of the Fourierists, and the primitive facts or instinctive tendencies of human nature, as set forth by M. Jouffroy, are all only so many different names for one and the same thing. In Jouffroy, the tendencies, notwithstanding some pretences to the contrary, reveal and impose the law; reason and will are merely ministerial, and have for their mission simply the realization of the end to which the tendencies aspire; that is, their full and perfect satisfaction. And what is this but raising the instinctive nature, that is, the sensitive soul, over the rational?
Substantially the same doctrine is inculcated by Gall and Spurzheim and their followers. The primitive faculties of the phrenologists are, according to M. Jouffroy himself, identical with what he calls the primitive or instinctive tendencies; and these every one at all acquainted with such matters can identify, saving some difference of detail and terminology, with the passional nature of the Fourierists, and the impersonal soul of the transcendentalists. The primitive faculties, according to the phrenologists, are all instinctive and legislative, and reason and will are to accept them, develop and harmonize them by obeying them.
We might go further, and show that every moral code ever promulgated, not resting on positive law, human or divine, rests on the same basis; for, aside from positive law, human or divine, it is not possible, in the nature of things, to find any other basis for a moral code.
If we leave the philosophers, and consult the more popular modern theologians and preachers, we shall find again the same doctrine. The dominant tendency of our age and country is to place the essence of religion in sentiment. The appeal is rarely to reason,- almost always to the feelings. The rational conviction, the firm resolve, count for little. Religion is expressed by the word theophilanthropy, love to God and love to man. So says Dr. Channing, so says Mr. Parker, and Come-outers of all sorts and sizes. And by love they mean the natural sentiment of love, a fact of the sensitive soul, not an affection of the will inflamed by supernatural grace, exalting the affection into the supernatural virtue of charity. We know of no popular preacher among liberal Christians who contends that man should possess and practice supernatural virtues. With the great mass, religion is not something to be believed, something to be done, but something to be felt. Its office is to cherish kindly sentiments, humane and generous feelings, to war with whatever restrains the sentiments and hinders the development of the soul, and to harmonize and perfect human nature, by stimulating its faculties and subordinating all to the law imposed by the simple feeling or sentiment of love.
The characters most approved by the transcendentalists are such as appeal with the most success to our sensitive nature. " We love characters," says Mr. Emerson, " in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous." Thomas Carlyle, a leading English transcendentalist, who found his earliest and warmest admirers among our American transcendentalists, ridicules without mercy poor Robespierre, not because his aims were bad, his views false, his means unjustifiable and cruel, but because he knew what he was about, had a " formula," and acted after a preconceived plan; but lavishes the warmest praise upon such men as Mirabeau and Danton, because they had large impulsive natures, and acted from natural impulse and suggestion, not from rational design. In his Heroes and Hero Worship, he everywhere labors to show that the more a man sinks his personality, and resolves himself into pure nature, makes or suffers himself to be a mere conduit to the stream of natural forces, the more heroic and divine he becomes. In general, the tendency of transcendentalists is to admire characters in whom sentiment or passion predominates. Miss Fuller, in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, patronizes several renowned courtesans; and the chief ground of her complaint against our masculine social order seems to be, that it imposes undue restraints on woman's nature, and does not permit her to follow her natural sentiments and affections. A sweet young lady gave us one day as her reason for joining what is now a Fourier community, that she was disgusted with conventionalism, and wished to be free from its galling restraints, and to live in the simplicity of nature. Poor girl! we will not relate her history; nor that of the young Adonis who was willing to aid her in her struggles for freedom. It is not always safe jesting with Nature. She sometimes cracks practical jokes, which are a little too expensive.
In most of our more popular educational schemes we may detect the same doctrine lurking at the bottom. Intellect is cried down, and the sentiments are cried up. The sentiment of love is to be always our guide and motive. Duty is an ugly word, and not to be named. We have heard parents in public and private protest against any restraint being laid on children, that the child should never be required to act from a sense of duty; for what is done from a sense of duty is worthless, unmeritorious. We should act, say they, always from love, and never do or exact what love does not prompt. We should leave our children free, and not interfere with their natures. To exact obedience, where they are not inclined to yield it, is to interfere with the free development of their natures,- will mar the beauty of their pure, sweet, and gentle natures, and destroy their integrity;- a pleasant doctrine, no doubt, to the pretty dears, and, judging from the number of graceless urchins one everywhere meets, not seldom acted upon.
These considerations, and many more of the same kind, which could be adduced, may tend to confirm the position we have taken, and satisfy our readers that we have not mistaken or misrepresented transcendentalism, when we have charged it with raising the inferior soul over the superior, and making the sensitive nature, instead of the rational, the measure of truth and goodness.
But can it be possible that men of ordinary capacity, and not without some claims to personal decency and morality, do really advocate such glaring absurdity in doctrine, and what would prove, and is already beginning to prove, such gross license in practice? We own it appears hardly credible, and we are sure would not be possible, if they looked upon the subject as we do, or as do the great majority of our readers. But many of the inevitable consequences which would flow from their doctrine they do not regard as evil, but as good and desirable. We have in our possession a pamphlet written with no mean ability, and brought out from England by some English transcendentalists, which boldly controverts the Christian doctrine of chastity and marriage, and in the sacred name of God and humanity, in the name of morals, " universal brotherhood," and social progress, advocates a promiscuous sexual intercourse, contends that games and amusements should be instituted for the express purpose of inflaming passion, and that our public halls and theatres should be surrounded with private apartments, fitted up in the most luxurious style, and with the most exquisite taste, for the special purpose of affording an easy and speedy opportunity of satisfying desire before it abates. We have met in public and in private, we have entertained in our own house, the men who circulate, if they do not write such books, and advocate similar doctrines; and when we have opposed them, have been assured that we opposed them because we had too much of the devil in us to understand them, or to appreciate and relish the pure teachings of the spirit! Nor should this surprise us. These men are no new phenomena. We have known them well in all ages of the world, and especially under the names of Carpocratians, Priscillianists, and Manichaeans or Albigenses. They differ not essentially from the Pantheistic sect which gathered, in the thirteenth century, around what was called the “Eternal Gospel." Mr. Emerson, a man of great personal purity and rigid morals, does not hesitate to avow the legitimate consequences of transcendentalism. Speaking of the transcendentalist, he says: "In action he easily incurs the charge of Antinomianism, by his avowal that he who has the Lawgiver may with safety not only neglect, but even contravene, every written commandment." Dial, Vol. III., p. 300.
They cannot avoid this conclusion. They assume nature as the standard; and as in that which is instinctive and spontaneous it is nature that operates, they must conclude that whatevever is instinctive and spontaneous, whatever is natural, or prompted by the permanent and essential nature of man, is true and good, and will be accepted as such by the brave man, let the world say or do what it will.
But whence the evidence that nature is the standard, the measure of truth and goodness? What right have the transcendentalists to make this very important assumption with which they set out? On this point they are far from being explicit, and far from being agreed among themselves. But generalizing their views as much as we can, and premising that what we allege must be understood not in all cases of the whole school, but some portion of one section and some of another, we find them alleging in its support,-
1. That God, who is wise and good, is the author of nature, and must have made nature wise and good,- and therefore the expression or revelation of his will. If the revelation of his will, we have the right to assume it as the standard or measure of truth and goodness.
But they have no right to this conclusion; 1. because none of them admit that God is in reality the author or creator of nature; and, 2. because they call God wise and good only because they hold him to be what their own nature reveals him to be. This last is a plain begging of the question. For, according to their mode of reasoning, their natures must be assumed to be wise and good, as the condition of demonstrating the wisdom and goodness of God. Whence the proof that God is wise and good? In the fact that he is what our natures reveal him to be. On what condition is this a proof of his wisdom and goodness? Obviously, only on the condition that our natures themselves are wise and good. Moreover, 3. because, for aught they show, and as the whole Christian world believes, it may be that nature is not now in its normal state, but has fallen, and is cursed. Admitting nature was wise and good as it came from the hands of its Maker, it must still be shown to be what it was then, before they can have the right to assume it as the standard. But if nature be in its origin wise and good, and there has been no change, no fall, no curse, how will they account for the innumerable evils, the multiplied wrongs, which afflict the human race, and which force even them to become reformers, and to declaim against nearly all that has been or is in human life?
2. But, secondly, the moment man sinks his personality, he becomes absorbed, as it were, in universal nature, which, in the unity of its force, is God. It is, then, God that acts in what is instinctive and spontaneous, and, in obeying our instinctive nature, we are really and literally obeying God. He who obeys God obeys the Highest, and of course what he ought to obey. It is with a view like this, that Mr. Emerson says :
" His [man's] thought is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded center in himself, center alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as subjective and relative to that unknown existence, relative to that aforesaid center of him." Dial, supra. p. 299.
This is perhaps somewhat enigmatical, but may be grasped if we bear in mind that Mr. Emerson's philosophy recognizes no distinct substantive existences, no distinct natures; but under, within, over, and through all forms or modes of existence, all of which are representative and phenomenal, it asserts one and the same mighty nature, which, as it touches us, he calls Over-Soul, and as it recedes from us and loses itself in the darkness, God, or the Unnamable. We, in our personality, represent it, as the bubble represents the ocean on whose surface it floats. As from the bubble's own point of view the whole ocean underlies it, is its substantiality, so each man, from his own point of view, represents the universal nature, which is his substance, being, force, or whatever of reality he hath. Millions of bubbles may rise, but each has the whole ocean as the center of itself; so millions of men may be born, but each has the universal center in himself. This nature, force, substantiality, being of man, strictly and essentially one, is identical in all men and in all phenomena. It is the one to on of the Alexandrian philosophers. It works always according to its own laws, and is all that we can conceive of the divine. To sink the phenomenal and rise to the one permanent universal nature is to lose men in man, and to become one with God,- the highest consummation conceivable. All that is real is this one nature. It is the only doer, the only thinker, the only speaker, the only builder. It is the Universal Artist. Hence, in verse worthy of a nobler philosophy, Mr. Emerson breaks forth :
" Not from a vain and shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought:
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic Oracle :
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,__
The canticles of love and woe.
The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity.
Himself from God he could not free :
He builded better than he knew.
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
" Know'st thou what wove yon wood-bird's nest
Of eaves, and feathers from her breast ?
Or how the fish out-built her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell!
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads ?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone ;
And morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye :
For out of Thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air,
And nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.
" These. Temples grew as grows the grass.
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast Soul that o'er him planned
And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost
Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting quires,
And through the priest the mind inspires.''
Dial, Vol. I., No. 1., pp. 122, 123.
There is no mistaking the doctrine here set forth. It is the identity of all natures with the one nature, of all causes with the one cause, and of this one nature, this one cause, with the impersonal Soul, or God, unfathomed Centre and being of each individual.
But, 1. This doctrine is asserted, not proved. No evidence of its truth is adduced, or attempted to be adduced. The transcendentalists must pardon us, if we question their infallibility, and find it not easy to believe on their bare assertion, that all apparent individual substances are but one substance, and all apparently different natures are but one nature, and that that one nature is God. God is the sovereign cause of the universe; but where is the proof that he is the substance, the nature, of the universe?
But, 2. Admitting this, we must either say man is this one nature, or that man as a real being is not. If the latter, there is no further question of man, for it is idle to talk of that which is not. If the former, then God is man, and nothing more nor less than man. Then there is and should be no further question of God.
The attempt, then, to identify impersonal nature with God effects nothing in favor of that nature as a measure of truth and goodness ; for, grant its perfect identity, you have gained nothing, for you have nothing but man; and the right to take man as the measure of truth and goodness is the point in question. Man is the same, whether you call him man, or call him God. Call him which you will, your measure remains always the instinctive nature; and that nature is simply what it is, neither less nor more.
Again, if you assume the identity of human nature with all natures, and of these with the one nature, and this one nature with God ; and if you assume God to be the universal operator, operative in all phenomena, and operative as essentially true, beautiful, and good; how do you account for evil, for the existence of so much you are obliged to condemn and war against? You cannot ascribe it to personality, because personality, according to you, is purely representative, unreal, unsubstantial, phenomenal, and therefore - though you seem not to be aware of it - necessarily uncreative, unproductive either of good or evil; for what is no substantive existence can be no cause, produce no effect. All force is in nature, and then none in personality. Then you must say one of two things: 1. All that is and all that appears - for what appears depends wholly on what is, as there can be no shadow without a substance - is true, wise, and good; and then you condemn and refute yourselves, for you are warring against almost all that is. This warring is right, or it is wrong. If right, then that which you war against is wrong, and so there is evil; if wrong, then is there evil, because the warring itself is an evil. Or, 2. You must say there is something which has no cause; that is to say, there are effects without causes, which is impossible and absurd.
3. Thirdly, Reason itself has two modes of activity, one personal, the other instinctive or spontaneous. As personal, it is human; as impersonal, spontaneous, it is God, or the word of God. Being absolute, it is one; therefore essentially one in the personality and out of it. If we confine ourselves to its personal modes of activity, which are finite, we are misled, involved in error; if we sink our personality and fall back on it in its spontaneous and impersonal activity, it becomes to us a perennial stream of truth, beauty, goodness, from God himself. This spontaneous activity of reason, Mr. Parker, after Cousin and the Editor of the Boston Quarterly Review, makes the principle of inspiration, which, according to him, if we would yield to it, would give us all we need.
This view, in the first place, is only another form of the one just dismissed, and differs from it only in name; and is therefore open to all the objections we have urged against that.
In the second place, reason has and can have no instinctive, or spontaneous, or impersonal activity; because reason is the essential characteristic of personality, which is the last complement of rational nature. Instinct or spontaneity is necessarily irrational; for the characteristic of reason is to operate propter finem, and, therefore, is possible only in a voluntary or personal agent. Reason is inconceivable without rational nature. Assume rational nature with its last complement, and it is a person; without its last complement, it is impersonal, indeed, but unreal, and gives you no actual reason, at best only reason in potentia, which is inactive, for only what is real is active. Therefore reason has and can have no instinctive or spontaneous activity.
Again, if you assume reason as distinct from human personality, you must assume it as a reason above man or as below him. Below him it cannot be, because man's is the lowest order of rational natures; and moreover, if below man, it would not serve the purpose. If above man, it is either actual reason or merely possible reason. If merely possible, it is unreal and inactive; properly speaking, not reason at all. If actual, it is a higher personality, as angel or God, and then separated from man by a difference of order, and incapable of acting instinctively in man; for that would imply the absorption of the higher personality in the lower, which is impossible.
Man has naturally the last complement of his nature, since he is naturally a person. He has, then, naturally all the rational nature, and therefore all the reason, that belongs to rational nature of his order. His rational nature is full; therefore his reason is full. Nothing can be more than full. Then man is not naturally susceptible of a higher reason than his own. He can receive even the aid of a higher reason only supernaturally. The higher reason is a higher person. The higher person is incommunicable to him save by hypostatic union, which absorbs his personality in the higher personality, as in the case of the Divine Word. For a hypostatic union, as really existing, in the case of all men, the transcendentalists will not contend ; 1. because they deny it even in the case of our Saviour; 2. because they deny the supernatural; and 3. because they admit no union of man and the divine Word which absorbs human personality, for they find human personality still existing as the enemy to be warred against.
Beyond the hypostatic union, only two ways are conceivable in which it is possible for the higher reason, even God himself, to instruct the lower, in regard to what lies not within the plane of the lower nature; 1. by supernatural revelation to faith, which takes the truth on the word of the revealer, and believes without seeing or knowing; or 2. by the supernatural elevation of our nature itself, as is looked for in the beatific vision, the reward Almighty God has promised hereafter to them that love and serve him here.
This doctrine of impersonal and instinctive reason is, then, unfounded and impossible in the nature of reason itself. And here is the refutation of M. Cousin's doctrine of spontaneity, and of Mr. Parker's doctrine of natural inspiration, or inspiration by a natural influx of God into the soul, on which his whole system depends for its religious character. Here we may see the source of all Mr. Parker's theoretical errors. He assumes that man and God stand in immediate natural relation, and that so much of God flows naturally into man as man's wants demand. This he asserts over and over again; and this is what he means by looking up to God alone, with nothing between the worshipper and the great Father of all; and it is his honest belief of this, we suppose, that has concealed from his view the real character of the doctrine he inculcates.
That man may express his wants to God naturally and directly in prayer, we do not question; and that God will hear and supernaturally answer our prayers, we most firmly believe ; but the assumption of a natural communion between man and his Maker is absurd. God may inspire individuals, may inspire all individuals, he may enlarge and elevate their natures so as to take in a higher order of truth than they now can; but he can do it only supernaturally; for naturally there is no communion between beings of a different nature. Man is not a possible God, nor a possible angel. He is man, with a fixed and determinate nature, and tied down to that nature and what it is capable of, save so far as his Maker is pleased to grant him supernatural assistance through faith or the infusion of grace. God is infinite reason, if you will; then he must be infinite rational nature with its last complement, and then infinite personality, that is to say, infinite person. The natural influx of God into human reason demanded by Mr. Parker's theory would, then, be the natural influx into the human reason of the divine personality. Is this possible? The human reason is confessedly finite. Is the finite naturally susceptible of the infinite? Not even Mr. Parker will pretend this. Then this theory of natural inspiration, of a natural " supply of God," as it is called, proportioned to our wants, must be abandoned as untenable.
But it may be alleged that we are reasoning upon a false supposition, namely, that the divine reason and the human are different in kind. This is not admitted. The divine reason and the human are essentially one and the same. " Man," says Dr. Channing, " has a kindred nature with God." If this be so, nothing hinders the divine from flowing naturally into the human, as is contended. We deny that the divine reason and the human are essentially the same. They are essentially different. The human reason is a likeness, or an image, of the divine, we admit, according to the Christian doctrine, that "man was made to the image and likeness of God." But likeness presupposes a difference of nature between itself and that which it is like. The thing imaged and its image cannot be of the same nature; for, if so, the image would be absorbed in the imaged. The child images the father, but only in that wherein he is different from the father. Moreover, God is uncreate, independent, infinite; man is created, dependent, finite, and therefore necessarily of a nature different from the divine nature.
But assume the divine reason and the human are essentially one and the same reason, the rational nature of which this reason is the expression either has its last complement in man, or it has not. If the latter, you deny human personality, the very thing you are fighting against; if the former, you deny the personality of God, therefore, the actual existence of God as divine reason, and therefore make the divine reason itself below that of man ; for the smallest reality is above the greatest conceivable possibility. Assume, then, natural inspiration to be possible, it would be worthless; for it could give less than man is and possesses without it. The in-coming and in-streaming God could bring you nothing you have not already.
Mr. Parker seeks to sustain his theory of natural inspiration by alleging that God is immanent in his works, the causa immanens of nature, not merely the causa transiens; and being immanent in all, and therefore in man, is necessarily present in man to supply all man's deficiencies. But we must distinguish. If immanent as creator and sustainer of man and all beings, each in the distinctive nature he gives them, we concede his immanence; if immanent in each being as subject, we deny it. To assume that God is immanent in his creatures as the subject which acts in them and produces what are called their acts is Spinozism, a doctrine which admits no existence but God and his modes,- and which, though unquestionably implied by transcendentalism generally, we understand Mr. Parker expressly to disavow. Moreover, it is a doctrine neither he nor the other transcendentalists can admit, without falling into gross contradictions, and refuting themselves; for they find little in the actual world they do not condemn; and yet, if they admit this doctrine, they cannot condemn anything without condemning God. If they admit God can do wrong, then they gain nothing in favor of the impersonal soul as the measure of truth and goodness by identifying it with God.
If they concede that God is not immanent in his creatures as subject, but simply as cause, creator, and sustainer, then his immanence merely creates and sustains them in their several natures,- that is, each order of being, and each individual being, in its being and distinct nature. In this case, his immanence is no pledge of the natural influx of divinity assumed. For then nothing could be received naturally of God but the nature itself. Whatever more may be received must be supernaturally received, through faith or elevation of nature, which the transcendentalists cannot admit.
Mr. Parker's doctrine on this point seems to be, that man's faculties open on God, and in proportion as he opens them God flows in, and man may thus be strong with the strength of omnipotence, wise with the wisdom of omniscience, and good with the goodness of infinite goodness, and all this as naturally as the lungs inhale the atmosphere, or the stomach secretes the gastric juice. But this is absurd; for it implies that the finite subject may appropriate infinite attributes, the infinite God himself, and live and act with infinite power, wisdom, and goodness. It would imply that the infinite is communicable, and communicable to the finite, without absorbing the finite, leaving it finite still, and a finite personality! The immanence of God in his works is a pledge that they will be upheld, and is a ground of hope, since it implies that he is ever present to afford us the supernatural aid we need, and in a supernatural manner, if we seek this aid in the way and through the channels he has appointed; but this is all, and it is nothing to the purpose of the transcendentalists.
These three different considerations are all we find adduced in support of the proposition, that man is the measure of truth and goodness. They all show that the transcendentalists would fain establish their doctrine if they could, and that they would do it by identifying, in some way, the human and divine natures; for, after all, there is a secret feeling that God is above man, and that truth and goodness are what conforms to God, rather than what conforms to man. Their talk about man's natural relation to God, and the divinity of human nature, &c, may serve to conceal the deformity of their doctrine from their own eyes, but it amounts to just nothing at all; for all the divinity they are able to predicate of man is merely what is constitutive of human nature as human nature, leaving human nature simply what it is, nothing more, nothing less. Then, when they abandon themselves to this as the only divinity, they abandon themselves to simple human nature, and are obliged to say man is the measure of truth and goodness, just as much as if they said or believed nothing of God at all.
We shall not undertake to refute the doctrine itself, because they who affirm a proposition must bring forward affirmative proofs before they can require us to accept it, or to adduce negative proofs. It is a sufficient refutation to say, as we have shown is the fact, that it is not proved. The assertions of the transcendentalists may be very good assertions, but they are not proofs, especially of a proposition denied by the common sense of all men, and affirmed by none but mere theorists, who make little account of reason, and professedly none of logic. Moreover, those who do not see the falsity and danger of the doctrine, on its bare enunciation, are not likely to be reached by any reasoning we could offer. Those who reason at all see what it is; those who cannot or will not reason are not to be reasoned out of error or into truth. We have merely wished to state the doctrine in its true character, and establish the fact that it is a fundamental doctrine of transcendentalism. This we think we have done.
We know now the transcendental rule of faith and practice. We have ascertained its method; and knowledge of this rule, of this method, throws no little light over the whole subject of transcendentalism. The more difficult part of our labor is accomplished; we shall be able to dispose of the two remaining propositions with comparative ease. But we must reserve the consideration of these to a future occasion.