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.