It has been held by countless persons who have never
heard of the word Transcendentalism. We need go no further back
than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we find declaring: "I
am so certain of the soul's being immortal that I seem to feel it
within me, as it were by intuition." Pope's friend Swift, a dean
of the Church of England and assuredly no Transcendentalist,
defined vision as seeing the things that are invisible.
Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a
disciple of Emerson, maintained that "the mistake is to make the
everlasting things subjects of argument instead of sight."
Theodore Parker declared to his congregation:
"From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of
instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of
God, of justice and futurity . . . . I found most help in the
works of Immanuel Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the
world, though one of the worst writers, even in Germany; if he
did not always furnish conclusions I could rest in, he yet gave
me the true method, and put me on the right road.
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