Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/771

-i9oc] Emerson and the Transcendentalists. 739 Unitarians were disposed to be as logical in their inferences from the assumption that man is made in the image of God as their Calvinistic forefathers had been in their inferences from the dogma of total depravity. The strength of the formal hierarchy in New England prevented this new individualism from revealing its disintegrating force for about a generation. It was not until 1832 that Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had succeeded to the pulpit which, a century before, had been held by the Mathers, resigned his office on the ground that the sacrament, which the Church expected him to administer, no longer interested him. The pitilessly individualistic idealism with which, for the rest of his long and admirable life, he prophetically replaced the teachings of orthodoxy j provoked, on the one hand, enthusiasm and, on the other, alarm. The enthusiasts, almost without exception believers in ideal philosophy, were apt at first to accept the name of Transcendentalists ; freed from all restraint of dogma they sought truth, each for himself, in those refreshing regions of the mind where the range of speculation can never be limited by the troublesome intervention of observation or experiment. Their different vagaries are recorded in the Dwl^ in the history of the unsuccessful socialistic experiment at Brook Farm, in the absurdities of Bronson Alcott, in the fantasies of Henry David Thoreau, and in numberless utterances which are less generally remembered. Their tendency to idealism was the natural consequence of that intense ancestral idealism which had characterised Puritan theology ; their remarkable innocence of life was the natural consequence of the simplicity which had characterised Puritan society; and their general optimism was widely acceptable to the temper of a continent which, throughout their time, was swiftly submitting to the theoretical authority of the self-satisfied generalisations of republican commonplace. The very names of Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau suggest what soon followed. Ideal individualism, unfettered like theirs, could not but express itself in practical efforts to reform the world. The rather comical aspect of these efforts, in their earlier manifestations, is ad- mirably set forth in the opening pages of Lowell's essay on Thoreau. A little later they began to concentrate in the growing reform movement for the abolition of slavery, which ultimately so far harmonised with the inevitable progress of political history that the Abolitionists are now held, by a new and pious tradition generally accepted throughout the North, to have been almost inspired prophets. The matters on which we touch here carry us beyond our range. They belong to the history not of American character but of American conduct. It is enough for the present to point out that a movement so deep and so complex as that which resulted in the Civil War was bound to involve great numbers of people by no means disposed to accept the philosophical freedom of thought amid which the chief utterances of practical reform had their origin. Such freedom, as we en. xxiii. 472