New England
Transcendentalism

Backdrop to Events

  The increasing interest in Transcendentalism in New England was given a pronounced further boost by two publications, (an American edition of) Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" and Emerson's "Nature" in 1836.

  In September 1836 when Emerson, George Ripley and Frederic Henry Hedge were attending the bicentennial celebration of their alma mater, Harvard College, they found their own discussions on Transcendentalist themes more interesting than the bicentennial activities. So interesting in fact that they decided to meet regularly "with a few like-minded seekers" in private homes for further discussions. The first such meeting took place the following week in the home of George Ripley. Subsequent meetings, which were mostly held at Emerson's home in Concord over the next seven or eight years, took place often to coincide with Hedge's visits to Boston from his pastorate in Bangor, Maine. Thus the group became known as the "Hedge Club."
  Hedge, who was conversant in German, and in German philosophy, had actually been a crucial figure in the early emergence of interest in Transcendentalism and had formerly held a church ministry in West Cambridge between 1829 - 1835.
  The club remained informal, electing no officers and having no constitution. Its membership varied from meeting to meeting for several years. It was also sometimes referred to as "the Symposium" but was eventually generally known as "the Transcendental Club." Emerson in particular, however, continued to refer to the "Hedge Club."

  According to the emerging viewpoint authentic religion is "an intuition [that] cannot be received at second hand". The importance Emerson placed upon a direct relationship with God and nature derived from the concept of the Over-Soul, described in his essay "The Over-Soul" (1838) as


  that great nature in which we rest, ... that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other...

  ...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 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 fasade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide...

  ...one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed...

  An anonymous pamphlet, (thought to be written by Charles Mayo Ellis, 1818-1878) , which was entitled An Essay on Transcendentalism, stated the most commonly held principles of the group.

  "Transcendentalism... maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses, or the powers of reasoning, but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world," and "it asserts that man has something besides the body of flesh, a spiritual body, with senses to perceive what is true, and right and beautiful, and a natural love for these, as the body for its food." ( this spirit was called the Over-soul, the conscience or the inner light.)

  The following quote from Emerson's "The Transcendentalist" (1842) may be not entirely consistent with the actual views of Kant. Any lack of consistency being related to the spiritual adaption made to Kant's original philosophy by such persons as Schelling, Coleridge, Carlyle, and by Emerson himself.

  "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism... It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental."

  The Transcendental Club published a magazine, The Dial, (from a base in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's bookshop) and some of the club's members (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Sullivan Dwight) participated with several other persons in an idealistic experiment in communal living at Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, during the 1840s. Similarly Bronson Alcott, and others, were involved with the smaller scale Fruitlands community at Harvard.