Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890

by Octavius Brooks Frothingham

George Ripley had a passion for literary excellence. From his boyhood he possessed a singularly bright intelligence, a clear appreciation of the rational aspect of questions. He was not an ardent, passionate, enthusiastic man, of warm convictions, vehement emotions, burning ideas. His feelings, though amiable and correct, were of an intellectual cast. They sprang from a naturally affectionate heart, rather than from a deeply stirred conscience, or an enchanted soul. If he had been less healthy, eupeptic, he would scarcely have been so gay; a vehement reformer he was not; a leader of men he could not be. He had not the stuff in him for either. The element of giving was not strong in him. He was not an originator in the sphere of thought; not a discoverer of theories or facts; not an innovator on established customs. But mentally he was so quick, eager, receptive, that he seemed a pioneer, an enthusiast, a saint; his quickness passing for insight, his eagerness for a passionate love of progress, his receptivity for charitableness. He appeared to be more of an image-breaker than he really was. In fact, the propensity to iconoclasm was not part of his constitution. But his mind was wonderfully alert. He had his antipathies, and they were strong ones, his likes and dislikes, his tastes and distastes, but these were instinctive rather than the expression of rational principle or a deliberate conclusion of his judgment. In one instance that I know of, he threw off a man with whom he had been associated for many years, and in connection with whom he labored daily for a time, a very accomplished and agreeable person to whom he was indebted for some services, because he thought that the individual in question had been unjust to some of his friends; but that this was not entirely a matter of conscience would seem to be indicated by the fact that he sent a message of affection to this man, as he neared the grave. In the main, so far as he was under control, intellectual considerations determined his course. He was prevailingly under the influence of mind; he acted in view, a large view, of all the circumstances; as one who takes in the whole situation, and has himself under command. This is not said in the least tone of disparagement, but entirely in his praise, for the supremacy of reason is more steady, even, reliable than the supremacy of feeling however exalted in its mood. He that is under the control of mind is at all times under control, which cannot be said of one who is borne along by the sway of even devout emotion. I have in memory cases where passion might have betrayed Mr. Ripley into conduct he would have regretted, had it not been for the restraining power of purely rational considerations. His early religious training may have produced some effect on his character, but this is more likely to have operated at first than at the later stages of his career. The love of old hymns, the habit of attending sacred services, the fondness for Watts' poems, a copy of whose holy songs always lay on his table, showed a lingering attachment to this kind of sentiment up to the end of his life; but it existed in an attenuated form, and at no period after his youth exerted much sway over him. His predominating bent was intellectual, and this caused a certain delicacy, fastidiousness, aloofness, which kept him in the atmosphere of love as well as of light.

From his youth this was his leading characteristic. As a boy he was ambitious of making a dictionary, a sign of his carefulness in the use of words, and an omen of the value he was to set on definitions and on exactness in the employment of language. At school he was an excellent scholar, at college he stood second, but was graduated first owing to the "suspension" of a brilliant classmate who might have excelled him but for the mishap of a college "riot" in which he took part. In the languages and in literature he was unusually proficient, while in mathematics,—that most abstract, severe, precise of pursuits,—his success was distinguished. In later-life his devotion to philosophy marked the man of speculative tastes. His early letters to his father, mother, sister, reveal a consciousness of his own peculiarities. Here are extracts:

The course of studies adopted here [Cambridge], in the opinion of competent judges, is singularly calculated to form scholars, and moreover, correct and accurate scholars; to inure the mind to profound thought and habits of investigation and reasoning.

The prospect of devoting my days to the acquisition and communication of knowledge is bright and cheering. This employment I would not exchange for the most elevated situation of wealth or power. One of the happiest steps, I think, that I have ever taken was the commencement of a course of study, and it is my wish and effort that my future progress may give substantial evidence of it.

I know that my peculiar habits of mind, imperfect as they are, strongly impel me to the path of active intellectual effort; and if I am to be at any time of any use to society, or a satisfaction to myself or my friends, it will be in the way of some retired literary situation, where a fondness for study and a knowledge of books will be more requisite than the busy, calculating mind of a man in the business part of the community. I do not mean by this that any profession is desired but the one to which I have been long looking. My wish is only to enter that profession with all the enlargement of mind and extent of information which the best institutions can afford.

These quotations are enough to show what was the prevailing impulse of the man. An intellectual nature like this, calm, studious, accomplished, eager, is subject to few surprises and experiences rarely, if ever, marked by crises, cataclysms, eruptions, in passing from one condition of thought to another at the opposite extreme of the spiritual universe. A process of growth, gradual, easy, motionless, takes the place of commotion and violent uproar such as passionate temperaments are exposed to. In 1821 he writes to his sister from Harvard College: "We are now studying Locke, an author who has done more to form the mind to habits of accurate reasoning and sound thought than almost any other." On the 19th of September, 1836, the first meeting of the Transcendental Club was held at his house in Boston. In 1838 he replied to Andrews Norton's criticism of Mr. Emerson's Address before the Alumni of the Cambridge Divinity School. In 1840 he said to his congregation in Purchase Street:

There is a faculty in all—the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure—to perceive spiritual truth when distinctly presented; and the ultimate appeal on all moral questions is not to a jury of scholars, a conclave of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common-sense of the human race.

But this substitution of the intuitive for the sensational philosophy—a change which affected all the processes of his thought and actually caused a revolution in his mind—was made silently, quietly, without agitation, without triumph, in a sober, conservative manner, very different from that of his friend Theodore Parker, who carried the same doctrines a good deal further, and advocated them with more heat like the burly reformer he was.

In religion, Mr. Ripley's position was the same that it was in philosophy. In fact the intellectual side of religion interested him more than the spiritual or experimental side. It was mainly a speculative matter, where it was not speculative it was practical; in each event it concerned the head rather than the heart, as being an opinion rather than a feeling. He was instructed in the school of orthodoxy, and, as a youth, was strict in his allegiance to the old system of belief; but he became a disciple of Dr. Channing, and later a rationalist of the order of Theodore Parker, a friend of Emerson, an adherent of what was newest in theology. Yet, in this extreme departure from the views of his early years, he betrayed no sign of agitation, no trace of internal suffering. He wished to go to Yale instead of Harvard, because "the temptations incident to a college, we have reason to think, are less at Yale than at Cambridge." He preferred Andover to Cambridge, being "convinced that the opportunities for close investigation of the Scriptures are superior to those at Cambridge, and the spirit of the place, much relaxed from its former severe and gloomy bigotry is more favorable to a tone of decided piety." Still, he goes to Cambridge, is "much disappointed in what he had learned of the religious character of the school," and, on more intimate acquaintance is impressed by "the depth and purity of their religious feeling and the holy simplicity of their lives"; "enough to humble and shame those who had been long professors of Christianity, and had pretended to superior sanctity." In 1824 a bold article in the Christian Disciple, a Unitarian journal, the precursor of the Christian Examiner, excited a good deal of comment, not to say apprehension. He writes to his sister about it as follows: