These considerations, urged by those whose characters and whose fortunes are yet to be formed, must needs command the sympathy of all reasonable persons. But beside that charity which should make all adult persons interested for the youth, and engage them to see that he has a free field and fair play on his entrance into life, we are bound to see that the society, of which we compose a part, does not permit the formation or continuance of views and practices injurious to the honour and welfare of mankind. The objection to conservatism, when embodied in a party, is, that in its love of acts, it hates principles; it lives in the senses, not in truth; it sacrifices to despair; it goes for availableness in its candidate, not for worth; and for expediency in its measures, and not for the right. Under pretence of allowing for friction, it makes so many additions and supplements to the machine of society, that it will play smoothly and softly, but will no longer grind any grist. and puts out from himself the whole ap-ligion is just as bad; a lozenge for the sick; paratus of society and condition extempore, a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper; as an army encamps in a desert, and where mitigations of pain by pillows and anoall was just now blowing sand, creates a dynes; always mitigations, never remedies; white city in an hour, a government, a pardons for sin, funeral honours, -never market, a place for feasting, for conversa- self-help, renovation, and virtue. Its social tion, and for love. and political action has no better aim; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the week and year about, and make the world last our day; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to sink the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent creation; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades whatever it touches. The cause of education is urged in this country with the utmost earnestness,-on what ground? why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are not instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading, trading, and governing class, inspired with a taste for the same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth itself, and new distribute the land. Religion is taught in the same spirit. The contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore, some years ago, found the Irish labourers quarrelsome and refractory, to a degree that embarrassed the agents, and seriously interrupted the progress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the police, and build a Catholic chapel, which they did; the priest presently restored order, and the work went on prosperously. Such hints, to be sure, are too valuable to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath, or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about maintaining them. They have already acquired a market value as conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should fail, the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the banks, the very innholders and landlords of the county, would muster with fury to their support. The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical would talk sufficiently to the purpose, if we were still in the garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is right, but he makes no allowance for friction; and this omission makes his whole doctrine false. The idealist retorts, that the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other extreme. The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue. Now that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped itself in the human generation, and misers are born. And now that sickness has got such a foothold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box; the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved itself into a Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine. If any man resist, and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good against the general despair, society frowns on him, shuts him out of her opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread, and will serve him a sexton's turn. Conservatism takes as low a view of every part of human action and passion. Its re Of course, religion in such hands loses its essence. Instead of that reliance, which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth and duty, men are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the moment they cease to be the instantaneous creations of the devout sentiment, are worthless. Religion among the low becomes low. As it loses its truth, it loses credit with the sagacious. They detect the falsehood of the preaching, but when they say so, all good citizens cry, Hush; do not weaken the state, do not take off the strait-jacket from dangerous persons. Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can; must patronize providence and piety, and wherever he sees anything that will keep men amused, schools or churches or poetry, or picture-galleries or music, or what not, he must cry, Hist-a-boy," and urge the game on. What a compliment we pay to the good SPIRIT with our superserviceable zeal! hold himself responsible: he will say, all the meanness of my progenitors shall not be reave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever But not to balance reasons for and against streams of power and commodity flow to the establishment any longer, and if it still me, shall of me acquire healing virtue, and be asked in this necessity of partial organi- become fountains of safety. Cannot I too zation, which party on the whole has the descend a Redeemer into nature? Whosohighest claims on our sympathy? I bring it ever hereafter shall name my name, shall not home to the private heart, where all such record a malefactor, but a benefactor in the questions must have their final arbitrament. earth. If there be power in good intention, How will every strong and generous mind in fidelity, and in toil, the north-wind shall choose its ground,-with the defenders of be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with the old? or with the seekers of the new?a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am Which is that state which promises to edify a great, brave, and beneficient man; to throw him on his resources, and tax the strength of his character? On which part will each of us find himself in the hour of health and of aspiration? primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good-will at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engage ments; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to me. Wherever there is worth I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love. Sooner or later all men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I cannot thank your law for my pro I understand well the respect of mankind for war, because that breaks up the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the personal merits of all men. A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected. In the civil wars of France, Mon-tection. taigne alone, among all the French gentry, kept his castle gates unbarred, and made his personal integrity as good at least as a regiment. The man of courage and resources is shown, and the effeminate and base person. Those who rise above war, and those who fall below it, it easily discriminates, as well as those who, accepting its rude conditions, keep their own head by their own sword. But in peace and a commercial state we depend, not as we ought, on our knowledge and all men's knowledge that we are honest men, but we cowardly lean on the virtue of others. For it is always the virtue of some men in the society, which keeps the law in any reverence and power. Is there not something shameful that I should owe my peaceful occupancy of my house and field, not to the knowledge of my countrymen that I am useful, but to their respect for sundry other reputable persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtues still keep the law in good odour ? I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me. It is my business to make myself revered. I depend on my honour, my labour, and my dispositions, for my place in the affections of mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of yours. But if I allow myself in derelictions, and become idle and dissolute, I quickly come to love the protection of a strong law, because I feel no title in myself to my advantages. To the intemperate and covetous person no love flows; to him mankind would pay no rent, no dividend, if force were once relaxed; nay, if they could give their verdict, they would say, that his self-indulgence and his oppression deserved punishment from society. and not that rich board and lodging he now enjoys. The law acts then as a screen of his unworthiness, and makes him worse the longer it protects him. In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial views, to the high platform of universal and necessary history, it is a hap piness for mankind that innovation has got on so far, and has so free a field before it It will never make any difference to a hero The boldness of the hope men entertain what the laws are. His greatness will shine transcends all former experience. It calms and accomplish itself unto the end, whether and cheers them with the picture of a simp they second him or not. If he have earned and equal life of truth and piety. And this his bread by drudgery, and in the narrow hope flowered on what tree? It was not and crooked ways which were all an evil law imported from the stock of some celestial had left him, he will make it at least honour-plant, but grew here on the wild crab of able by his expenditure. Of the past he will conservatism. It is much that this old and take no heed; for its wrongs he will not vituperated system of things has borne so ra child. It predicts that, amidst a planet opled with conservatives, one Reformer ay yet be born. 'HE TRANSCENDENTALIST. A LECTURE READ AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, JANUARY, 1842. HE first thing we have to say respecting hat are called new views here in New ngland, at the present time, is, that they e not new, but the very oldest of thoughts ist into the mould of these new times. he light is always identical in its composion, but it falls on a great variety of objects, nd by so falling is first revealed to us, not 1 its own form, for it is formless, but in neirs; in like manner, thought only appears n the objects it classifies. What is popurly called Transcendentalism among us, is dealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. is thinkers, mankind have ever divided into wo sects, Materialists and Idealists; the rst class founded on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning o think from the data of the senses, the econd class perceive that the senses are not inal, and say the senses give us representaions of things, but what are the things hemselves, they cannot tell. The maerialist insists on facts, on history, on the orce of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist, on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on ndividual culture. These two modes of hinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses epresent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; acts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, Hegrading these into a language by which he first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to liscern. Every materialist will be an idealist; out an idealist can never go backward to be materialist. The idealist, in speaking of events, sees hem as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the pre sence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which merely concerns him. This manner of looking at things transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say "Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into "the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive." What more could an idealist say? The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says, is certain, and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication-table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone. In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his is poured like melted wax. The mould is consciousness, and reckons the world an ap-invisible, but the world betrays the shape of pearance. The materialist respects sensible the mould. You call it the power of circummasses, Society, Government, social art, and stance, but it is the power of me. Am I in luxury, every establishment, every mass, harmony with myself? my position will seem whether majority of numbers, or extent of to you just and commanding. Am I vicious space, or amount of objects, every social and insane? my fortunes will seem to you action. The idealist has another measure, obscure and descending. As I am, so shall which is metaphysical, namely, the rank I associate, and so shall I act; Cæsar's hiswhich things themselves take in his conscious-tory will paint out Cæsar. Jesus acted so, ness; not at all, the size or appearance. because he thought so. I do not wish to Mind is the only reality, of which men and all overlook or to gainsay any reality; I say, ! other natures are better or worse reflectors. make my circumstance: but if you ask me, Nature, literature, history, are only subjective Whence am I? I feel like other men my phenomena. Although in his action over- relation to that Fact which cannot be spoken powered by the laws of action, and so, warmly or defined, nor even thought, but which co-operating with men, even preferring them exists, and will exist. to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect labour, or the products of labour, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, that 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 centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him. From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is, to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude. Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the self-existence of Deity. All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will go well. You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy. I-this thought which is called I-is the mould into which the world The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of any thing unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own. 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. In the play of Othello, the expiring Desdemoma absolves her husband of the murder, to her attendant Emilia. Afterwards, when Emilia charges him with the crime, Othello exclaims, "You heard her say herself it was not I." Emilia replies, "The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil." no other reason than that I was fainting for lack of food. For, I have assurance in myself, that, in pardoning these faults according to the letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the majesty of his being confers on him; he sets the seal of his divine nature to the grace he accords." * In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment; any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist who thanks no man, who says, "Do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist. You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a Transcendental party; that there is no pure Transcendentalist; that we know of none but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels' food; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. Only in the instinct of the lower animals, we find the suggestion of the methods of it, and something higher than our understanding. The squirrel hoards nuts, and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace. Shall we say, then, that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish? Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow. Man owns the dignity of the life which throbs around him in chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in the involuntary functions of his own body; yet he is balked when he tries to fling himself into this enchanted circle, where all is done without degradation. Yet genius and virtue predict in man the same * Coleridge's Translation. absence of private ends, and of condescension to circumstances, united with every trait and talent of beauty and power. This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers; falling on despotic times, made patriot Catos and Brutuses; falling on superstitious times, made prophets and apostles; on popish times, made protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of Faith against the preachers of Works; on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers, and falling on Unitarian and commercial times, makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we know. It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the sceptical 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. Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them at least in our creed all authority over our experience, has deeply coloured the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency. It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the closest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labours and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! What they do, is done only because they are overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and |