THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
zur Geschichte der alten Kirche, vol. i., Schloss Chemnitz, 1875; T. Keim, Rom und das Christenthum, Berlin, 1881; H. Schiller, Geschichte der ramischen Kaiserzeit, vol. i., part 2, Gotha, 1S83; V. Duruy, Hist, of Rome and the Roman People, 6 vols., London, 1883-86: T. Mommsen, The Roman Provinces, ib. 18S7; F. Arnold, Studien zur Geschichte der plinianischen Christenverfolgung, Konigsberg, 1SS7; P. Allard, Hist, des persecutions pendant les deux premiers siicles, chap, iii., Paris, 1892; W. E. Addis, Christianity and the Roman Empire, pp. 69-71, London, 1893; W. M. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire, passim. New York, 1893; E. G. Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government, pp. 102-124, London, 1894: .■8chaff, Christian Church, vol. ii., chap, ii., and in general works on the history of the Church and the history of the Empire of the period; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. iii.
TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND.
Philosophical Background (§ 1). Preparatory Movements (§ 2). The " Transcendental Club " (§ 3). The " Atmosphere of Reform " (§ 4). Relation to Reforms and Religion (§ 5). Influence of Transcendentalism (§ 6).
Toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a strong reaction took place against materialism. As philosophy, it began in Germany. Voltaire brought from London to Paris the ideas of Hume. From Paris they i. Philo- went with him to the court of Fredersophical ick, king of Prussia, and became ruling Background, principles of thought. Kant subjected them to searching analysis in his famous Critique of Pure Reason, and became the leader in a great philosophical reform. Materialism took no deep root in the German mind. The great names in German idealism are Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel ; and the sequence of their doctrine, so far as it can be conveyed in few words, is as follows: Kant sounded the depths of the human mind; Fichte imparted reality to the idea of the human person; Schelling combined the inward and the outward by supposing an Absolute, which he called reason ; Hegel transformed what was to him the unsubstantial reason into a being, thus completing, as is claimed, the fundamental " categories " of Kant. The word " transcendentalism " is of Kantian origin. It means that which is valid beyond the experience of the senses, though present to the knowledge of the mind. It describes a form of idealism. In the judgment of James Hutchison Stirling, " The transcendental philosophy is a philosophy of the merely speculative pure reason; for all moral practise, so far as it involves motive, refers to feeling, and feeling is always of empirical origin." Again: " I call all cognition transcendental which is occupied not so much with objects as with the process by which we come to know them, in so far as that process has an a priori element. A system of such elements would be a transcendental philosophy." In France, materialism was represented by Condillac, Cabanis ('author of the saying that " brain secretes thought, as the liver secretes bile "), and others; idealism, by Marie de Beran, Destutt de Tracy, Cousin, Jouffroy, and others. In England, not to mention the poets who are always idealistic, Coleridge reflected Schelling, and Carlyle, Goethe and Richter. Coleridge's Aids to Reflection and Friend were early reprinted in America. The writings of Carlyle — articles, re-
views, essays (produced from 1827 onward), Signs of the Times, Characteristics, later, Sartor Resartus — were eagerly read in American editions. So far as this goes, Transcendentalism was of foreign extraction, an invasion of the German intellect.
It would be a serious and unpardonable mistake, however, " to regard the transcendental movements as a simple importation from abroad, a servile imitation of English, French, or German 2. Prepara- ideas. It was," says a somewhat recent tory writer on the subject, " at the last re- Movements, move from this, and was full of the sap of a spontaneity and freshness all its own. Nine-tenths of the early transcen-
dentalists rubbed but slightly against Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Schelling; but it was fructifying pollen they bore away from the contact, and by it their own minds were vitally impregnated." The whole movement was a spiritual outburst, a vital sense of newness, a local or New England renaissance, the roots of which reached far back into the past, but its flowers bloomed with a richness and a fresh luxuriance such as were possible nowhere else so well as on the shores of this new world. The soil for it had been carefully prepared. Materialism was abroad in New England, sometimes implicitly, sometimes by formal statement. Unitarianism, from which transcendentalism was an offshoot, if not indeed an outgrowth, was itself a protest, on the ground of common sense, against " Orthodoxy " and " Evangelicalism," and was infected with the metaphysics of John Locke. It was a system of rationalism— prosaic, critical, unimaginative. Its teaching, like most of the religious teaching of the day, was formal, and its worship at the time was becoming uninspiring. It was, in the main, a negative system, its forms mechanical, its beliefs traditional, its associations conventional. The elder men, like Channing and Lowell, retained the sentiments of piety which they had brought with them from the faith they had left, but the new movement had begun to lose something of its original enthusiasm. Meanwhile a spirit of individualism was in the air, running occasionally into deism and even atheism. In 1832 Abner Kneeland founded The Investigator; in 1836 he was prosecuted for blasphemy. There was a general interest in clairvoyance, mesmerism, and kindred doctrines. As early as 1824 F. H. Hedge, a Unitarian minister, raised the banner of revolt (in The Christian, Examiner for November) against the materialism implied in phrenology, which even then was getting possession of the public mind. There was a rage for the expositions of Gall. The popular lectures of Spurzheim were attended by crowds. Later, Combe's book on the " Constitution of Man " was hailed as a gospel. Regeneration by bread was proclaimed in the name of Graham. Every kind of medicament was called in to do the work of the Holy Spirit.
At this juncture, idealism appeared in the shape of a protest against the drift of the time toward animalism and externalism. The soil was prepared by orthodox mystics, who proclaimed " the life of God in the soul of man " ; by the spiritualism taught by Jonathan Edwards; by the Reformed Quakers, with their doctrine of an all-sufficing " inner light ' ;