This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what was then seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products.  But some very solid matters have also been precipitated, some crystals of poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring.  The immediate practical outcome was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed into some form of orthodoxy.  In the eyes of the conservative, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost.  Nevertheless the movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual conscience.  Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque extremes.  Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder out-croppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights, Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time.  There is in him that mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee shrewdness, which characterizes the race.  The practical, inventive, calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made sufficiently obvious.  But the deep heart of New England is full of dreams, mysticism, romance: 

  “And in the day of sacrifice,
    When heroes piled the pyre,
  The dismal Massachusetts ice
    Burned more than others’ fire.”

The one element which the odd and eccentric developments of this movement shared in common with the real philosophy of transcendentalism was the rejection of authority and the appeal to the private consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right.  This principle certainly lay in the ethical systems of Kant and Fichte, the great transcendentalists of Germany.  It had been strongly asserted by Channing.  Nay, it was the starting-point of Puritanism itself, which had drawn away from the ceremonial religion of the English Church, and by its Congregational system had made each church society independent in doctrine and worship.  And although Puritan orthodoxy in New England had grown rigid and dogmatic it had never used the weapons of obscurantism.  By encouraging education to the utmost, it had shown its willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest discussion and had put into the hands of dissent the means with which to attack them.

In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a departure from conservative Unitarianism, as that had been from Calvinism.  From Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theodore Parker, there was a natural and logical unfolding; not logical in the sense that Channing accepted Edwards’s premises and pushed them out to their conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing’s premises, but in the sense that the rigid pushing out of Edwards’s