It is something more than the bodily hand
that gropes in the darkness and touches God's hand. To commune with a
Divine Power, we must transcend the experience of the senses. We are now
prepared to understand what a transcendentalist like Thoreau means when he
says:--
"I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight."
The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavored to transcend, that is, to
pass beyond, the range of human sense and experience. We are all in a
measure transcendentalists when we try to pierce the unseen, to explain
existence, to build a foundation of meaning under the passing phenomena of
life. To the old Puritan, the unseen was always fraught with deeper meaning
than the seen. Sarah Pierrepont and Jonathan Edwards (p. 51) were in large
measure transcendentalists. The trouble was that the former Puritan
philosophy of the unseen was too rigid and limited to satisfy the widening
aspirations of the soul.
It should be noted that in this period the term "transcendentalist" is
extended beyond its usual meaning and loosely applied to those thinkers who
(1) preferred to rely on their own intuitions rather than on the authority
of any one, (2) exalted individuality, (3) frowned on imitation and
repetition, (4) broke with the past, (5) believed that a new social and
spiritual renaissance was necessary and forthcoming, (6) insisted on the
importance of culture, on "plain living and high thinking," and (7) loved
isolation and solitude.
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