The Transcendentalists: An Anthology

The author stated that the works of Emerson and Thoreau were omitted due to limitations of space. However since Emerson is a central character who is referred to frequently, the reader needs some support. I recommend reading the Emerson biography, Robert Richardson's "The Mind on Fire" either before or in conjunction with Miller's book. This book, like Miller's, does a great job of telling the Transcendentalist story . Together, a clear picture emerges. Having Wikipedia nearby is also very helpful as there are extensive references to authors and philisophical terminology. With Wikipedia you will probably have no trouble and will stay engaged regardless of your background.

Like its model, Miller's classic "The American Puritans," "The Transcendentalists" takes all the major texts of the Transcendentalist movement, excerpts out the most important parts, and frames them with Miller's brilliant comments to the subjects. As in his books on the Puritans, Perry Miller rides the subject like nobody before or since. Still the basic introduction to the writings, "The Transcendentalists" will serve anybody wanting to move beyond Emerson or Thoreau to the lesser-known members of the movement. While the ellipses can come to annoy those who want the complete texts, Miller's anthology is still worth reading, if only because this man was the century's greatest American intellectual historian. If you haven't read Miller, you're in for a long, difficult, rewarding journey, especially in his books on the Puritans. Without a doubt, an indispensable historian.

Perry Miller's Transcendentalists: An Anthology is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the American Transcendentalist movement, its roots, and its growth. Essays by Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their influential contemporaries are included. Among them are William Ellery Channing, Orestes A. Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peadbody, Amos Bronson Alcott, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Theodore Parker, Jones Very, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, and Sophia Dana Ripley. This book is a classic.

Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists. . .The Unitarian reliance on miracles can be expressed through an Aristotelian syllogism: a. miracles occur b. nature cannot produce miracles * c. a supernatural force must exist. To Unitarians, that supernatural force must be God. George Ripley does not doubt that miracles occur, he simply says that whether miracles occur or are "new development[s] of nature" (p. 132) mistaken for the supernatural is irrelevant to whether God exists. After all, to the 19th century observer, magnetism and electricity seemed supernatural. To Ripley, it was better not to preface one's argument for the existence of God on an unprovable premise. He therefore calls for a "better mode of examining the evidence of Christianity" (p. 132) than is employed by the Rationalist Unitarians. Instead of premising a rational argument for the existences of God on miracles, Ripley states that the "better mode" is "the study of the human consciousness" (p. 132). He suggests that a more appropriate discussion is one which discusses the meaning of the "expression, often used, but little pondered,- the Image of God in the Soul of Man" (p. 132). From a multitude of other writings, one can surmise that the existence of God need not be proven logically or externally. We carry the answer with us everyday. By immersing oneself in nature, the eternal will be discovered. Miller sees this controversy as a "crisis in modern liberalism" (p. 129). To Miller, the question was one of sincerity and true meaning of Christian doctrine. The Unitarians had rejected Original Sin; man was no longer burdened by guilt, and he was free to have dignity. But, the Unitarians said man was free to hold onto his dignity only through supernatural intervention (p. 130). Miller sees this as intellectual duplicity. While protesting a belief in its dignity, ultimately Unitarians did not trust humanity. Ripley issued a doctrinal challenge to the Unitarians to follow their own philosophy to its necessary conclusion. The Unitarian Martin Luther Hurlbut expresses the larger implications of these competing philosophies. Without ruling miracles unreal, by simply challenging their historicity, Transcendentalism challenged faith itself, and it raised a host of questions that skirted, and in the hands of the mischievous Emerson, leapt over, the line of heresy. If miracles are mere "`natural facts'" (p. 173), then what purpose is there in faith? If physical science and reason banish Christ's miracles to the dustbin of mythology, then was Jesus indeed the Messiah; was He the Saviour? Was He the Son of God? Without the miracles, Jesus becomes a wise man, even a prophet according to Emerson (p. 192), but not the Messiah, not the Son of God any more than the rest of us. More importantly, and absolutely essential to understanding the revolution in New England, is the logical conclusion of such a line of investigation: do the