Orestes Augustus Brownson, a Transcendentalist philosopher and journalist, was born in Stockbridge, Vermont. He had little formal education. Until 1822 he belonged to the Congregationalist Church; he then joined the Presbyterians but was quickly repelled by their depreciation of human reason and by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. In 1824 he became a Universalist, being ordained a minister in 1826. Three years later he abandoned Christianity and joined the socialist sect of Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright; at this time he wrote in behalf of the Workingmen's Party. He was reconverted to the Christian religion in 1832, when he joined the Unitarians.

Brownson was introduced to philosophy in 1833, through the works of Victor Cousin, whose disciple he remained for ten years. Cousin was warm in his praise of Brownson as a philosopher. Though Brownson later criticized Cousin's philosophy for its eclecticism and psychologism, he always...