"Christ was commissioned by God to speak to us in His name, and to make known to us, on His authority, those truths which it most concerns us to know; and there can be no greater miracle than this. No proof of His divine commission could be afforded but through miraculous displays of God's power. Nothing is left that can[Pg 124] be called Christianity, if its miraculous character be denied. Its essence is gone; its evidence is annihilated."... "To the demand for certainty let it come from whom it may, I answer that I know of no absolute certainty beyond the limit of momentary consciousness; a certainty that vanishes the instant it exists, and is lost in the region of metaphysical doubt."... "There can be no intuition, no direct perception of the truth of Christianity, no metaphysical certainty."... "Of the facts on which religion is founded, we can pretend to no assurance except that derived from the testimony of God from the Christian revelation."
A pamphlet defending the discourse contained passages like the following: "The doctrine that the mind possesses a faculty of intuitively discovering the truths of religion, is not only utterly untenable, but the proposition is of such a character that it cannot well bear the test of being distinctly stated. The question respecting the existence of such a faculty is not difficult to be decided. We are not conscious of possessing any such faculty; and there can be no other proof of its existence. Its defenders shrink from presenting it in broad daylight. They are disposed to keep it out of view behind a cloud of words."... "Consciousness or intuition can inform us of nothing but what exists in our own minds, including the relations of our own ideas. It is therefore not an intelligible error, but a mere absurdity to maintain that we are conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge of the being of God, of our own immortality, of the revelation of God through Christ, or of any other fact of religion."... "The religion of which they (the Transcendentalists) speak, therefore, exists merely, if it exist at all, in undefined and unintelligible feelings, having reference, perhaps, to certain imaginations, the result of impressions communicated in childhood or produced by the visible signs of religious belief existing around us, or awakened by the beautiful and magnificent spectacles which nature presents."
Mr. Norton spoke with biting severity of the masters of German philosophy, criticism, and literature, and exhausted his sarcasm on the address of Mr. Emerson delivered the previous year. To Mr. Norton, Mr. Ripley made prompt and earnest, though temperate, reply in three long and powerful letters, devoted mainly to a refutation of his adversary's accusations against Spinoza, Schleiermacher, De Wette, and the philosophic theologians of Germany. Not till the end does he take issue with the fundamental positions of Mr. Norton's philosophy; then he brands as "revolting" the doctrine that "there can be no intuition, no direct perception of the truth of Christianity;" that "the feeling or direct perception of religious truth" is an "imaginary faculty;" and affirms his conviction that "the principle that the soul has no faculty to perceive spiritual truth, is contradicted by the universal consciousness of man."
"Does the body see," he asks, "and is the spirit blind? No, man has the faculty for feeling and perceiving religious truth. So far from being imaginary, it is the highest reality of which the pure soul is conscious. Can I be more certain that I am capable of looking out and admiring the forms of external beauty, 'the frail and weary weed in which God dresses the soul that he has called into time,' than that I can also look within, and commune with the fairer forms of truth and holiness which plead for my love, as visitants from Heaven?"
The controversy was taken up by other pens. In 1840, Theodore Parker, speaking as a plain man under the name of Levi Blodgett, "moved and handled the Previous Question" after a fashion that betrayed the practised thinker and scribe. Mr. Parker occupied substantially the same ground that was taken by James Walker in 1834.
"The germs of religion, both the germs of religious principle and religious sentiment, must be born in man, or innate, as our preacher says. I reckon that man is by nature a religious being, i. e. that he was made to be religious, as much as an ox was made to eat grass. The existence of God is a fact given in our nature: it is not something discovered by a process of reasoning, by a long series of deductions from facts; nor yet is it the last generalization from phenomena observed in the universe of mind or matter. But it is a truth fundamental in our nature; given outright by God; a truth which comes to light as soon as self-consciousness begins. Still further, I take a sense of dependence on God to be a natural and essential sentiment of the soul, as much as feeling, seeing and hearing are natural sensations of the body. Here, then, are the religious instincts which lead man to God and religion, just as naturally as the intellectual instincts lead him to truth, and animal instincts to his food. As there is light for the eye, sound for the ear, food for the palate, friends for the affections, beauty for the imagination, truth for the reason, duty for conscience—so there is God for the religious sentiment or sense of dependence on Him. Now all these presuppose one another, as a want essential to the structure of man's mind or body presupposes something to satisfy it. And as the sensation of hunger presupposes food to satisfy it, so the sense of dependence on God presupposes his existence and character."
From these premises Mr. Parker proceeds to discuss the questions about miracles, inspiration, revelation, the character and functions of Jesus, the Christ, and kindred matters belonging to the general controversy. The year following, he preached the sermon on the "Transient and Permanent in Christianity," which brought out the issues between the "Sensationalists" and the "Transcendentalists," and was the occasion of detaching the latter from the original body.
The first series of Emerson's "Essays" containing "Self Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "The Over Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," was published during that year, and was followed almost immediately by "The Transcendentalist," a lecture read in Masonic Temple, Boston. In this lecture occurs the following allusion to Kant:
"The Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant of Königsberg, 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 Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracles, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration and ecstasy. He[Pg 128] 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 anything unspiritual, that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal."
From what has been said it may be inferred that Transcendentalism in New England was a movement within the limits of "liberal" Christianity or Unitarianism as it was called, and had none but a religious aspect. Such an inference would be narrow. In 1838, Orestes Augustus Brownson started "The Boston Quarterly Review," instituted for the discussion of questions in politics, art, literature, science, philosophy and religion. The editor who was the principal, and almost the sole writer, frankly declares that "he had no creed, no distinct doctrines to support whatever;" that he "aimed to startle, and made it a point to be as paradoxical and extravagant as he could, without doing violence to his own reason or conscience." This avowal was made in 1857, after Mr. Brownson had become a Roman Catholic. The pages of the Review prove the writer to have been a pronounced Transcendentalist. A foreign journal called him "the Coryphœus of the sect," a designation which, at the time, was meekly accepted.