Transcendentalism in New England: A History. Frothingham Octavius Brooks
the French translation of the "Transcendental Idealism" was not announced till 1850, when the movement in New England was subsiding. His system was too abstract and technical in form to interest any but his countrymen. Coleridge was fascinated by it, and yielded to the fascination so far as to allow the thoughts of the German metaphysician to take possession of his mind; but for Coleridge, indeed, few English-speaking men would have known what the system was. Transcendentalism in New England was rather spiritual and practical than metaphysical. Jacobi and Fichte were both; it can scarcely be said that Schelling was either. His books were hard; his ideas underwent continual changes in detail; his speculative system was developed gradually in a long course of years. But for certain grandiose conceptions which had a charm for the imagination and fascinated the religious sentiment, his name need not be mentioned in this little incidental record at all. There was, however, in Schelling something that recalled the ideal side of Plato, more that suggested Plotinus, the neo-Platonists and Alexandrines, a mystical pantheistic quality that mingled well with the general elements of Idealism, and gave atmosphere, as it were, to the tender feeling of Jacobi and the heroic will of Fichte.
Schelling was Fichte's disciple, filled his vacant chair in Jena in 1798, and took his philosophical departure from certain of his positions. Fichte had shut the man up close in himself, had limited the conception of the world by the boundaries of consciousness, had reduced the inner universe to a full-orbed creation, made its facts substantial and its fancies solid, peopled it with living forces, and found room in it for the exercise of a complete moral and spiritual life. In his system the soul was creator. The outer universe had its being in human thought. Subject and object were one, and that one was the subject.
Schelling restored the external world to its place as an objective reality, no fiction, no projection from the human mind. Subject and object, in his view, were one, but in the ABSOLUTE, the universal soul, the infinite and eternal mind. His original fire mist was the unorganized intelligence of which the universe was the expression. Finite minds are but phases of manifestation of the infinite mind, inlets into which it flows, some deeper, wider, longer than others. Spirit and matter are reverse aspects of being. Spirit is invisible nature, nature invisible spirit. Starting from nature, we may work our way into intelligence; starting from intelligence, we may work our way out to nature. Thought and existence having the same ground, ideal and real being one, the work of philosophy is twofold – from nature to arrive at spirit, from spirit to arrive at nature. They who wish to know how Schelling did it must consult the histories of philosophy; the most popular of them will satisfy all but the experts. It is easy to conjecture into what mysterious ways the clue might lead, and in what wilderness of thickets the reader might be lost; how in mind we are to see nature struggling upward into consciousness, and in nature mind seeking endless forms of finite expression. To unfold both processes, in uniform and balanced movement, avoiding pantheism on one side, and materialism on the other, was the endeavor we shall not attempt, even in the most cursory manner, to describe. God becomes conscious in man, the philosophic man, the man of reason, in whom the absolute being recognizes himself. The reason gazes immediately on the eternal realities, by virtue of what was called "intellectual intuition," which beholds both subject and object as united in a single thought. Reason was impersonal, no attribute of the finite intelligence, no fact of the individual consciousness, but a faculty, if that be the word for it, that transcended all finite experience, commanded a point superior to consciousness, was, in fact, the all-seeing eye confronting itself. What room here for intellectual rovers! What mystic groves for ecstatic souls to lose themselves in! What intricate mazes for those who are fond of hunting phantoms! Flashes of dim glory from this tremendous speculation are seen in the writings of Emerson, Parker, Alcott, and other seers, probably caught by reflection, or struck out, as they were by Schelling himself, by minds moving on the same level. In Germany the lines of speculation were carried out in labyrinthine detail, as, fortunately, they were not elsewhere.
Of Hegel, the successor in thought of Schelling, there is no call here to speak at all. His speculation, though influential in America, as influential as that of either of his predecessors, was scarcely known thirty-five years ago, and if it had been, would have possessed little charm for idealists of the New England stamp. That system has borne fruits of a very different quality, being adopted largely by churchmen, whom it has justified and fortified in their ecclesiastical forms, doctrinal and sacramental, and by teachers of moderately progressive tendencies. The duty of unfolding his ideas has devolved upon students of German, as no other language has given them anything like adequate expression. Hegel, too, was more formidable than Schelling; the latter was brilliant, dashing, imaginative, glowing; his ideas shone in the air, and were caught with little toil by enthusiastic minds. To comprehend or even to apprehend Hegel requires more philosophical culture than was found in New England half a century ago, more than is by any means common to-day. Modern speculative philosophy is, as a rule, Hegelian. Its spirit is conservative, and it scarcely at all lends countenance to movements so revolutionary as those that shook New England.
Long before the time we are dealing with – as early as 1824 – the philosophy of Hegel had struck hands with church and state in Prussia; Hegel was at once prophet, priest, and prince. In the fulness of his powers, ripe in ability and in fame, he sat in the chair that Fichte had occupied, and gave laws to the intellectual world. He would "teach philosophy to talk German, as Luther had taught the Bible to do." A crowd of enthusiasts thronged about him. The scientific and literary celebrities of Berlin sat at his feet; state officials attended his lectures and professed themselves his disciples. The government provided liberally for his salary, and paid the travelling expenses of this great ambassador of the mind. The old story of disciple become master was told again. The philosopher was the friend of those that befriended him; the servant, some say, of those that lavished on him honors. Then the new philosophy that was to reconstruct the mental world learned to accept the actual world as it existed, and lent its powerful aid to the order of things it promised to reconstruct. Throwing out the aphorism, "The rational is the actual, the actual is the rational," Hegel declared that natural right, morality, and even religion are properly subordinated to authority. The despotic Prussian system welcomed the great philosopher as its defender. The Prussian Government was not tardy in showing appreciation of its advocate's eminent services.
The church, taking the hint, put in its claim to patronage. It needed protection against the rationalism that was coming up; and such protection the majesty of Hegel vouchsafed to offer. Faith and philosophy formed a new alliance. Orthodox professors gave in their loyalty to the man who taught that "God was in process of becoming," and the man who taught that "God was in process of becoming" welcomed the orthodox professors to the circle of his disciples. He was more orthodox than the orthodox; he gave the theologians new explanations of their own dogmas, and supplied them with arguments against their own foes. Trinity, incarnation, atonement, redemption, were all interpreted and justified, to the complete satisfaction of the ecclesiastical powers.
This being the influence of the master, and of philosophy as he explained it, the formation of a new school by the earnest, liberal men who drew very different conclusions from the master's first principles, was to be expected. But the "New Hegelians," as they were called, became disbelievers in religion and in spiritual things altogether, and either lapsed, like Strauss, into intellectual scepticism, or, like Feuerbach, became aggressive materialists. The ideal elements in Hegel's system were appropriated by Christianity, and were employed against liberty and progress. Spiritualists, whether in the old world or the new, had little interest in a philosophy that so readily favored two opposite tendencies, both of which they abhorred. To them the spiritual philosophy was represented by Hegel's predecessors. The disciples of sentiment accepted Jacobi; the loyalists of conscience followed Fichte; the severe metaphysicians, of whom there were a few, adhered to Kant; the soaring speculators and imaginative theosophists spread their "sheeny vans," and soared into the regions of the absolute with Schelling. The idealists of New England were largest debtors to Jacobi and Fichte.
III.
TRANSCENDENTALISM IN THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE
One of the earliest students of the German language in Boston was Dr. N. L. Frothingham, Unitarian minister of the First Church. Among the professional books that interested him was one by Herder, "Letters to a Young Theologian," chapters from which he translated for the "Christian Disciple," the precursor of the "Christian Examiner." Of Herder, George