Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott

Margaret Fuller

“A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.”

Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) was a pioneer of women’s rights in thought and practice, and spent her adult life advocating the idea that women’s lives might not have to be shaped entirely by the lives of the men around them.  Her own life had been dramatically altered by the death of her father when she was a young adult leaving her responsible for the emotional and economic welfare of her family.  She argued that women needed the freedom to grow and develop through education, reading, conversation, and friendship.  Fuller was powerfully influenced by Emerson and other Transcendentalists, but she found herself influencing men’s thinking as well.  Fuller met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1835, falling into a deep friendship with him that would last the rest of her life. Dazzled by her eloquence, he introduced her to his circle of educators, writers, and ministers; the next year, several of them formed the Transcendental Club, to discuss new ideas in theology, literature, education, and beyond.

In 1838 Emerson invited Fuller to join meetings of the Transcendentalist circle, and she rose to greater prominence when Emerson asked her to edit The Dial, a journal devoted to transcendentalist views in 1840.  She found herself writing large portions of the influential journal in her own words, as well as corresponding with, and editing the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Channing and others. Fuller became a contributor from the first issue and its editor. Her first book, based on a trip through the Midwest, was Summer on the Lakes (1844) and this led to an invitation by Horace Greeley to be literary critic at the New York Tribune that same year. She published her feminist classic, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in 1845. In addition to writing a solid body of critical reviews and essays, she became active in various social reform movements. In 1846 she went to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, and in England and France she was regarded as a serious intellectual and met many prominent people. The first to publish Henry David Thoreau, it also gathered poetry, essays, and anything else that Emerson classified as “an antidote to all narrowness.”

In 1840, she conducted her famous “Conversations,” discussion groups at which educated women discussed the big questions: “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” One enraptured attendee compared Fuller’s leadership to “the sun shining upon plants and causing buds to open into flowers.” Fuller was sufficiently forward thinking and frank enough to link the topic of sexuality to not only the rights of women, but to men's rights as well.  She alienated some people because of a personality that was variously described as strident, energetic and intense. Fuller's most original and influential professional activities were her organized "Conversations" for women where two dozen women attended the first meeting, and where many other women soon found a new intellectual outlet. These dialogues led Fuller to her most influential work, Women in the 19th Century.

By the mid 1840's Fuller moved to New York to become a critic for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, where she had the foresight to champion Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Emerson’s lecture entitled Woman which he delivered to the Women’s Rights Convention in Boston in 1855 is clearly a result of her influence on him. 

Louisa May Alcott

“My book came out; and people began to think that
topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all ...”

Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) reminds us that Transcendentalism was often a family affair.  Her upbringing was as unconventional as it was intellectual, and as a young child she referred to her father and his friends Theodore Parker, Emerson and Thoreau as “the modern Plato.”  An influential member of the Transcendentalists Louisa May Alcott never joined an organized church, but instead she practiced a Transcendental form of personal religion, especially unusual for a woman at the time, and could describe a spiritual morning in Thoreau’s woods near Concord. She also went to hear Theodore Parker preach his secular sermons.  Alcott’s career as a writer made her influential among her Transcendentalist friends and a woman with widespread public influence.  Her closeness to the Emerson family led to her first book, Flower Fables written for Ellen, Emerson’s daughter.

Her most famous work Little Women was perhaps sentimental, but it also presented a new version of the American family and a new set of American family values linked to Transcendentalist ideals such as self-awareness, resourcefulness, and resilience. Alcott gave much of her energy to practical social reforms such as nursing, women’s rights, and temperance.  Her contribution during the Civil War was her service as an army nurse.  Her social conscience was also evident when she attended the 1875 Women’s Congress in Syracuse New York, and like many women of the time she helped to establish the value of community activism.

Only a follower of Transcendentalist principles was likely to be a famous writer, a social activist, the sole supporter of her family, and also a woman in the second half of the 19^th century.

William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker

1.         William Ellery Channing, a theologian and minister not only changed the history of Unitarianism, but provided a new version of liberal American theology.  While Channing helped to found the Transcendental Club, and died during the height of the Transcendentalist movement, his views had a direct impact on philosophers and theologians who followed.  In his ground breaking sermon Unitarian Christianity, Channing said the Bible was a book “written for men, in the language of men, whose meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.” This and other claims in Channing’s sermon embodied the impulse behind Emerson’s Divinity School Address and Transcendentalism in general.

            Excited by transcendental ideas of the German Romantics and Emerson's Nature, he began sending Emerson his poems, and Emerson obligingly published them in The Dial.  As a poet, Channing could be fluent and pictorial, and his early poems were full of Transcendental abstractions.  Although Channing participated in some of the earliest meetings of the Transcendental discussion groups he eventually decided that their views were too extreme for him.   His theology developed into Unitarian Universalism, which is still active today. 

            The central views of Transcendentalism were soon linked to this liberal form of Unitarianism, and its connection to social reform movements.  Many Transcendentalists developed an even more liberal version of Unitarianism that led to later ideas o secular individualism.  Among New England Unitarians Channing was accepted and debated by radical Transcendentalists and their conservative critics.  Some referred to themselves as “Channing” Unitarians.  His influence continues in the modern denomination.

2.         Theodore Parker was one of the most practical and active of the Transcendentalist group in causes ranging from the reform of parish ministry to widespread social activism.   Parker’s own theological evolution paralleled that of many Transcendentalists.  He helped turn Unitarianism away from its strict Calvinist origins toward a liberal theology that encouraged social activism.  Parker’s theology fit well with ideas of early Transcendentalist thinkers.  Included in the first gatherings held by the Transcendental Club, he contributed regularly to The Dial the most important Transcendentalist periodical.

            In 1840 Parker published a pamphlet, The Previous Question which he wrote in the voice of a fictitious ordinary Unitarian believer named "Levi Blodgett." Here he vigorously laid out the Transcendentalist position on inspiration, miracles, and religious authority.  Parker emerged as a major Transcendentalist spokesman in May 1841, when he delivered A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity at an ordination in South Boston. 

Thoreau

            Henry David Thoreau is one of the most read and most influential American authors; his writings have been reprinted countless times, both in English and in translation into many foreign languages. Thoreau's strong individualism, rejection of the conventions of society, and philosophical idealism all distanced him from others.  He had no desire to meet external expectations if they varied from his own sense of how to live his life.

            His contemporary literary reputation began with the publication between 1840 and 1844 of some of his poetry, essays, and translations in the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial. Publication in The Dial identified Thoreau as a member of the Transcendental circle, however, it did not do much to establish a reputation beyond those directly involved with the magazine. The esoteric Dial had a very limited circulation.

            Thoreau reached a broader audience through the more popular magazines that proliferated during the nineteenth century.  Titles directed at the general reader such as Godey's, Graham's, Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, Knickerbocker, and The United States Magazine and Democratic Review gave considerable exposure to the work of many writers, Thoreau included.  In 1843, Thoreau published "A Walk to Wachusett" in the Boston Miscellany and two pieces in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. His article "Thomas Carlyle and His Works" was published in Graham's Magazine in 1847.  

            Having delivered lyceum lectures based on his travels to various places, Thoreau knew that the popular appeal of such material was far greater than that of more abstract subjects.  He consequently adapted his experience in the lecture hall to the literary world and submitted travel pieces to periodicals likely to publish them. His "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods" (initially presented in lecture form) appeared in The Union Magazine in 1848.  Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, whom Thoreau had met in New York in 1843, had taken a special interest in him and helped Thoreau to find a publisher for the piece. "Excursions to Canada" appeared in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1853, "Cape Cod" in Putnam's in 1855, and "Chesuncook" in Atlantic Monthly in 1858. Although the appearance of these pieces did not create great demand for Thoreau's work, the general magazines provided a venue that allowed him to write with reasonable expectation of seeing at least some of his material brought before an audience.

            Although Thoreau sometimes complained in his journals of the level of comprehension of his lecture audiences, he nevertheless continued to lecture and to work lecture material into publishable form. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, he was presenting material that would be incorporated into Walden (1854). In 1852, he published "The Iron Horse" and "A Poet Buying a Farm" — both of them parts of Walden — in two issues of Sartain's Union Magazine. When it finally appeared, then, Walden had already received what amounted to significant advance publicity.

            The book was published in an edition of two thousand copies in August of 1854 by the Boston firm of Ticknor and Fields.  As the premier literary publisher in America in the mid-nineteenth century, the company was in a position to see that Thoreau's work was well promoted and distributed.  A sufficient number of notices and reviews appeared to assure broad interest in the book, which sold well.  Walden was praised not only by those who knew Thoreau and his writings, but also in a variety of newspapers and magazines around the United States and in England.   This reception of the book gave Thoreau greater recognition as an author between 1854 and his death in 1862 than his earlier literary efforts had brought him.

            In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau presented his ideas about the individual's responsibilities in relation to government.  In the twentieth century, this work powerfully affected Mohandas Gandhi, who applied the principle of nonviolent resistance in the struggle for independence in India, and Dr. Martin Luther King, in his leadership of the American civil rights movement.

            Thoreau’s contribution affected Unity and me in that in his writings he exhorts his reader to begin a new, higher life.  He points out that we restrict ourselves and our view of the universe by accepting externally imposed limits, and urges us to make life's journey deliberately, to look inward and to make the interior voyage of discovery.  According to Thoreau our proper business is to seek the reality the absolute beyond what we think we know. This higher truth may be sought in the here and now in the world we inhabit.  Our existence forms a part of time, which flows into eternity, and affords access to the universal.  Thoreau points out that if we attain a greater closeness to nature and the divine, we will not require physical proximity to others.    He comments on man's dual nature as a physical entity and as an intellectual spectator within his own body, which separates a person from himself and adds further perspective to his distance from others.  Thoreau urges us to face life as it is, to reject materialism, to embrace simplicity, serenely to cultivate self, and to understand the difference between the temporal and the permanent. He ends Walden with an affirmation of resurrection and immortality through the quest for higher truth.

Nature

The main themes in Emerson’s Nature are: Nature, Commodity, Beauty, Language, Discipline, Idealist, Spirit and Prospects.

            Nature expresses Emerson's belief that each individual must develop a personal understanding of the universe.  According to Emerson, people in the past had an intimate and immediate relationship with God and nature, and arrived at their own understanding of the universe.  All the basic elements that they required to do so exist at every moment in time.  

            Emerson's rejection of received wisdom is reinforced by his repeated references throughout Nature to perception of familiar things, to seeing things anew.  For Emerson, each moment provides an opportunity to learn from nature and to approach an understanding of universal order through it.  The importance of the present moment, of spontaneous and dynamic interactions with the universe, of the possibilities of the here and now, render past observations and schemes irrelevant. Emerson focuses on the accessibility of the laws of the universe to every individual through a combination of nature and his own inner processes.

            In Language, he states that the relation between spirit and matter "is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men."  In his discussion of "intellectual science" in Idealism, he writes that "all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion" into higher realms of thought.  And at the end of the essay, in Prospects, he exhorts, "Know then that the world exists for you.  For you is the phenomenon perfect."  Each man is capable of using the natural world to achieve spiritual understanding.

            In Discipline, Emerson discusses the ways in which each man may understand nature and God — through rational, logical "Understanding" and through intuitive "Reason." Although the mystical, revelatory intuition leads to the highest spiritual truth, understanding, too, is useful in gaining a particular kind of knowledge, but whichever mental process illuminates a given object of attention at a given time, insight into universal order always takes place in the mind of the individual, through his own experience of nature and inner powers of receptiveness.

            In Idealism, Emerson stresses the advantages of the ideal theory of nature.  Idealism makes God an integral element in our understanding of nature, and provides a comprehensively inclusive view - Idealism sees the world in God; it beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

            Emerson writes in Prospects: "The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.  He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit."  By drawing upon our latent spiritual capabilities and seeking evidence of God's order in nature, we will make sense of the universe.

            In Beauty, he describes the way in which the structure of the eye and the laws of light conspire to create perspective: “By the mutual action of [the eye's] structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character so ever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical.”

            In discussing the similarities between natural objects and between natural laws in Discipline, Emerson reiterates and expands the image, making it more complex and comprehensive: “It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens [that is, being or entity] seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.”

            In Beauty, Language, and Discipline, Emerson examines Reason's revelation to man of the larger picture behind the multiplicity of details in the material world.  In Beauty, he describes the stimulation of the human intellect by natural beauty.  He offers artistic creativity as the extreme love of and response to natural beauty.  In Language, he describes the symbolism of original language as based on natural fact, and the integral relationship between language, nature, and spirit.  

            In Prospects, Emerson implores his readers to trust in Reason as a means of approaching universal truth.   Emerson puts forward examples of intuition at work — the "traditions of miracles," the life of Jesus, transforming action based on principle, the "miracles of enthusiasm, as those . . . of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers," "animal magnetism" "prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children..

            Emerson explores at length the difference between Understanding and Reason, both serve to instruct man, however, Understanding is tied to matter and leads to common sense rather than to the broadest vision.  Emerson grants that as man advances in his grasp of natural laws, he comes closer to understanding the laws of creation, but Reason is essential to transport man out of the material world into the spiritual.  In Idealism, Emerson asserts that intuition works against acceptance of concrete reality as ultimate reality, thereby promoting spiritualization.

            In Spirit, Emerson presents the notion of the mystical and intuitively understood "universal essence" which, expressed in man through nature's agency, confers tremendous power: “Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man?  Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.”

            Emerson stresses throughout Nature that nature exists to serve man, and explains the ways in which it does so.  In Commodity, he enumerates the basic material uses of nature by man.  Emerson then goes on to point out the fact that man harnesses nature to enhance its material usefulness. In Beauty, Emerson discusses the power of natural beauty to restore man when exhausted, to give him simple pleasure, to provide a suitable backdrop to his glorious deeds, and to stimulate his intellect, which may ultimately lead him to understand universal order.  Man's artistic expression is inspired by the perception and translation in his mind of the beauty of nature.

            In Language, Emerson details language's uses as a vehicle of thought and, ultimately, through its symbolism and the symbolism of the things it stands for, as an aid to comprehension and articulation of spiritual as well as material truth.  A person effectively expresses himself, Emerson notes, in proportion to the natural vigor of his language.  Nature both exists for and intensifies man's capabilities.

            In Discipline, he introduces human will, which, working through the intellect, emphasizes aspects of nature that the mind requires and disregards those that the mind does not need.  Thus man imposes himself on nature, makes it what he wants it to be.  

            Emerson develops this idea in Idealism, in discussing the poet's elevation of soul over matter in "subordinating nature for the purpose of expression" — giving emphasis and drawing connections as suits the message he wishes to convey.  Nature is thus "fluid," "ductile and flexible," changeable by man.

            Emerson asserts throughout Nature the primacy of spirit over matter.  Nature's purpose is as a representation of the divine to promote human insight into the laws of the universe, and thus to bring man closer to God.  Emerson writes of nature in Spirit as "the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it."  He explores the relationship between matter and spirit extensively in Language, in which he discusses the correspondence between material and moral laws, and in Idealism, in which he presents the concept of nature as a projection by God on the human mind, as opposed to a concrete reality.

            Emerson's discussion in Language is based on three premises: that words — even those used to describe intellectual or spiritual states — originated in nature, in an elemental interaction between mind and matter; that not only do words represent nature, but, because nature is an expression of the divine, the natural facts that words represent are symbolic of spiritual truth; and that the whole of nature — not just individual natural facts — symbolizes the whole of spiritual truth. Emerson writes: “The world is emblematic.  Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.”

            Moral law, as he suggests in Discipline, "lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference." At the end of Language, Emerson works toward the ideal theory in presenting all the particulars of nature as preexisting "in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by preceding affections, in the world of spirit." He writes that a fact is "the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world." Matter thus issues from and is secondary to spirit.

            In Idealism and Spirit, Emerson takes a philosophical leap in asking whether nature exists separately, or whether it is only an image created in man's mind by God.  Although he says that the answer cannot be known, and that it makes no difference in man's use of nature, he suggests that idealism is preferable to viewing nature as concrete reality because it constitutes "that view which is most desirable to the mind."  Emerson supports the ideal theory by pointing to the ways in which poetry, philosophy, science, religion, and ethics subordinate matter to higher truth, but he also acknowledges that idealism is hard to accept from the commonsensical point of view — the view of those who trust in rationality over intuition.

            In various ways in Nature, Emerson appears to suggest that the natural world does, in fact, exist separately from spirit.  For instance, he carefully distinguishes between man's inner qualities and his physical existence, between the "ME" and the "NOT ME," which includes one's own body.  His progressive argument is marred by this seeming contradiction, and by his hesitancy to state outright that nature is an ideal, even while he discusses it as such.  Emerson concludes the essay by asking his readers to open themselves to spiritual reality by trusting in intuitive reason. 

The Transcendental Club

The purpose of the Transcendental Club was to protest the present state of philosophy, religion, and literature in America.  It was to protest the rather arid intellectual climate of Harvard and Cambridge.  The Transcendental Club was a gathering of individuals who were generally suspicious of organized religion; in fact, they were skeptical of organizations of any kind.

On September 8, 1836, the day of the Harvard bicentennial celebration and the day before the publication of Nature, Henry Hedge, George Putnam (the Unitarian minister in Roxbury), George Ripley, and Waldo Emerson met at Willard's Hotel in Cambridge to plan a symposium or periodic gathering of persons who, like themselves, found the present state of thought in American "very unsatisfactory."  What came to be called the Transcendental Club was thus born "in the way of protest" on behalf of "deeper and broader views" than obtained at present.

More specifically, the impulse behind the Transcendental Club was a protest against the arid intellectual climate of Harvard and Cambridge. President Quincy had his eye on the past.  His commemorative speech soon grew into a two-volume history of Harvard University.  Andrews Norton, the leading theologian of the school, was about to bring out the first volume of his Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (1837), a huge, shallow, tendentious volume that takes the novel approach of simply ignoring the vast majority of serious work on the subject for the preceding seventy-five years.  No one at Harvard was equipped or inclined for modern thought in this area.  "There is," said Hedge," a rigid, cautious, circumspect, conservative tang in the very air of Cambridge which no one, who has resided there for any considerable time, can escape."  

The club never met in Cambridge.  Harvard at this time had a president, eleven professors, and seven instructors.  An average meeting of the club drew eleven members; on occasion it could draw seventeen.  The intellectual and literary candlepower of the club easily exceeded that of the college.

Eleven days after the first meeting at Willard's Hotel, the group held a second meeting, this time at Ripley's house in Boston.  Ten persons attended: besides Hedge, Ripley, and Emerson, there were Bronson Alcott, James Clarke, Orestes Brownson, Convers Francis, and several divinity students.   The Club, as it was sometimes called, was now a reality.

It should be noted that the symposium, or club, of whatever it was (Emerson called it something different almost every time he mentioned it--Hedge's Club, the Aesthetic Club, the Transcendental Club), was gathered at a pivotal moment, just as a number of its members were breaking into print. The club was a forum for new ideas, a clearinghouse, full of yeast and ferment, informal, open-ended, far from the usual exclusive social clique conveyed by the word club.  The meetings often centered on a single topic; any list of their subjects conveys the tone of the group.  On October 3, 1836, at Alcott's in Boston the topic was "American Genius--the causes which hinder its growth, and give us no first rate productions."  On October 18, 1836, at Brownson's house in Boston it was "Education of Humanity."  On May 29, 1836, at Ripley's in Boston it was "What is the essence of Religion as distinct from morality?" In the summer of 1837 at Emerson's house it was "Does the species advance beyond the individual?"  On May 20, 1838, at Stetson's house in Medford it was "Is Mysticism an element of Christianity"?  In June of 1838 at Bartol's house in Boston it was "On the character and genius of Goethe"; in December of 1838 at the same place it was "Pantheism." On May 13, 1840, at Emerson's it was on "the Inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and the causes of sterility of poetic Inspiration in our Age and country.”

"The life of a man is a self-evolving circle," Emerson says in "Circles," "which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outward to new and larger circles, and that without end." The Transcendental Club, so-called, served its members in this manner. The club had been Hedge's idea.  Emerson, who attended at least twenty of the thirty meetings over the next four years, was always a leading spirit, but the group contained a number of other remarkable and forceful individuals, whose lives were now deeply intertwined with Emerson's.

George Ripley was one year older than Emerson, a native of Greenfield, Massachusetts, and now a Boston minister.  Above all, Ripley is the great American translator, commentator, and disciple of Schleiermacher, whom he regarded as "the greatest thinker who ever undertook to fathom the philosophy of religion.”  Then there was Orestes Brownmson, the same age as Emerson, born in Stockbridge, Vermont, and self-educated.   He was ordained a Universality minister in 1826, but he became too liberal for the Universalists and went on to take up the radical free thought and socialism of Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright.  Convers Francis, then forty-one, was the oldest of the club regulars before Caleb Stetson of Medford became a steady member. Francis was a minister at Watertown.  The year the club was gathered, he published a Life of John Eliot and a short tract called "Christianity as a Purely Internal System."  He was a moderate Unitarian, a liberal trusted by most radical sand most conservatives. For his diplomatic skills and his seniority, he was chosen moderator of the new club.

The gathering certainly filled a need.  There were three more meetings the fall of 1836 and five or six a year for the next four years.  The group expanded rapidly.  There was Theodore Parker, son of a Lexington farmer, just graduated from Harvard Divinity School.  There was John S. Dwight, later a Brook Farmer, and after that a well-known music critic whose mission was bringing Beethoven's music to Americans.  There was Caleb Stetson, an older man, a wit, the minister at Medford; he hosted the club twice.  There was Chandler Robbins, Emerson's successor at Boston's Second Church.  Margaret Fuller attended, as did Elizabeth Hoar.  Charles Emerson's "widow," now a close friend of Emerson's and an intellectual in her own right.

Membership was not rigidly defined. The "members" of the club were those who attended.  A list of the people who attended reads like a who's who of the liberal intellectuals of the time. These included Ephraim Peabody, Boston minister and later editor of The Western Messenger, Sarah A. Ripley, an accomplished classicist and teacher from Watertown, Sarah Clarke, an artist, sister of  James Clarke, and Elizabeth Peabody, later publisher of The Dial.  Over time at least twenty-three others came to a few meetings; these included Jones Very the poet, Charles Follen, teacher of German at Harvard, Henry Bellows, leader of the anti-Emersonian institutional Unitarians and Melville's New York pastor later in life.  There was William Adams, visiting from his mission in Calcutta.  William Ellery Channing, grand old man of Unitarianism, came once.  Still others included George Bancroft the historian, Shobal Clevinger the sculptor, Christopher Cranch, a poet (famous later for his witty satirical cartoons of Emerson), Samuel Ward, a friend of Fuller's, Henry Thoreau, Edward Taylor the sailor-preacher, and Sophia Ripley, married to George and author of the brilliant and stirring piece "Woman" in The Dial.

These people came from a variety of backgrounds and educations, but they came together because they were in general if not complete agreement on a number of points. They were dissatisfied, individually and as a group, with the present state of philosophy, religion, and literature in America. They looked for hope to Europe, especially to Germany, to Kant in philosophy, to Schleiermacher in religion, and to Goethe in literature.  They were mostly anti-Lockean; most believed in intuition. They were romanticists, not classicists or philosophers.  They were radicals or liberals rather than conservatives in politics and almost all followed the logic of their belief in freedom and autonomy into one or another arena of social action.  Margaret Fuller ended up in newspaper journalism, the women's movement, and the Roman revolution.  Parker devoted his life to antislavery work.  Peabody was active in the kindergarten movement and in the movement for American Indian rights.  Emerson and Thoreau came out strongly for abolition, Ripley founded Brook Farm, Brownson became a powerful voice first for labor, then for Catholicism.

No one knows who first called the group the Transcendental Club, but the name stuck despite a hundred and fifty years of qualification, refinement, and hindsight.  Emerson's 1842 piece "The Transcendentalist" is still the defining statement: "It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant." Emerson goes on to praise Kant's profundity and precision and notes that Kant's influence has become so pervasive "that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day transcendental." Few of those assembled in 1836 would have disagreed with this or with Alcott's saying that transcendentalism "means that there is more in the mind than enters it through the senses."  They would also have agreed with what Nathaniel H. Whiting, a mechanic from South Marshfield, Massachusetts, told a Bible convention in 1842: "Truths which pertain to the soul cannot be proved by any external testimony whatsoever.