'"
One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten
Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman.
"No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
But, leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!"
It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this
"revulsion against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is
highly dangerous to second-class minds. If one habitually prints
the words Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with
capitals, and relegates equally useful words like senses,
experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it because
he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is
neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had
its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable
visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was probably
bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of staid
New England had its humorous side.
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