The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavored to transcend, that is, to pass beyond, the range of human sense and experience. We are all in a measure transcendentalists when we try to pierce the unseen, to explain existence, to build a foundation of meaning under the passing phenomena of life. To the old Puritan, the unseen was always fraught with deeper meaning than the seen. Sarah Pierrepont and Jonathan Edwards (p. 51) were in large measure transcendentalists. The trouble was that the former Puritan philosophy of the unseen was too rigid and limited to satisfy the widening aspirations of the soul.
It should be noted that in this period the term "transcendentalist" is extended beyond its usual meaning and loosely applied to those thinkers who (1) preferred to rely on their own intuitions rather than on the authority of any one, (2) exalted individuality, (3) frowned on imitation and repetition, (4) broke with the past, (5) believed that a new social and spiritual renaissance was necessary and forthcoming, (6) insisted on the importance of culture, on "plain living and high thinking," and (7) loved isolation and solitude. An excellent original exposition of much of this philosophy may be found in Emerson's Nature (1836) and in his lecture on The Transcendentalist (1842).
THE ECSTASY OF THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS.—Any age that accomplishes great things is necessarily enthusiastic. According to Emerson, one of the articles of the transcendental creed was a belief "in inspiration and ecstasy." With this went an overmastering consciousness of newly discovered power. "Do you think me the child of circumstances?" asked the transcendentalist, and he answered in almost the same breath, "I make my circumstance."
The feeling of ecstasy, due to the belief that he was really a part of an infinite Divine Power, made Emerson say:—
"I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind."
The greatest of the women transcendentalists, MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850), a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her sex, believed that when it was fashionable for women to bring to the home "food and fire for the mind as well as for the body," an ecstatic "harmony of the spheres would ensue."
To her, as to Emerson, Nature brought an inspiring message. On an early May day she wrote:—
"The trees were still bare, but the little birds care not for that; they revel and carol and wildly tell their hopes, while the gentle voluble south wind plays with the dry leaves, and the pine trees sigh with their soul-like sounds for June. It was beauteous; and care and routine fled away, and I was as if they had never been."
[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER]
The transcendentalist, while voicing his ecstasy over life, has put himself on record as not wishing to do anything more than once. For him God has enough new experiences, so that repetition is unnecessary. He dislikes routine. "Everything," Emerson says, "admonishes us how needlessly long life is," that is, if we walk with heroes and do not repeat. Let a machine add figures while the soul moves on. He dislikes seeing any part of a universe that he does not use. Shakespeare seemed to him to have lived a thousand years as the guest of a great universe in which most of us never pass beyond the antechamber.