Transcendentalism in New England: A History

Front Cover
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1876 - 395 pages

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Contents

II
14
PAGE
78
14
99
VI
105
PRACTICAL TENDENCIES
142
IX
218
X
249
XI
284
XII
302
XIII
322
XIV
335
XV
357
Very
367
Porter
387
Copyright

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Page 242 - THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think ; what a saint has felt, he may feel ; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind, is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
Page 239 - Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.
Page 91 - ... on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had "inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.
Page 77 - A sublime man ; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood ; escaping from the black materialisms, and revolutionary deluges, with ' God, Freedom, Immortality' still his : a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer : but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this du-sky sublime character ; and sat there as a kind ot Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove...
Page 93 - ... which would never do. Besides, it was talk not flowing anywhither like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to...
Page 83 - ... those flights of lawless speculation which abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as transcendent.
Page 242 - This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.
Page 178 - What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.
Page 100 - But the imagination is conscious of an indestructible dominion ; — the Soul may fall away from it, not being able to sustain its grandeur; but, if once felt and acknowledged, by no act of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished. — Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.
Page 85 - The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common, as the common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the spirit of...

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