great catholicity in his reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way of appropriating what he read.  But he read transcendentally, not historically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might have felt before him.  And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a poet, is still to starve.  Books can help him to acquire form, or to avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to have any.  Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of vacancy.  It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent.  It was a play of intra-mental rhymes.  Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes and quaint fancies.  These fancies expressed their personal genius sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies in comparison with what a real observer would have said in the premises.  Their manner, in a word, was subjective.  In their own persons they escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied nothing to supplant it in other minds.

The churches, likewise, although they modified their spirit, had no philosophy to offer save a new emphasis on parts of what Calvinism contained.  The theology of Calvin, we must remember, had much in it besides philosophical Calvinism.  A Christian tenderness, and a hope of grace for the individual, came to mitigate its sardonic optimism; and it was these evangelical elements that the Calvinistic churches now emphasised, seldom and with blushes referring to hell-fire or infant damnation.  Yet philosophic Calvinism, with a theory of life that would perfectly justify hell-fire and infant damnation if they happened to exist, still dominates the traditional metaphysics.  It is an ingredient, and the decisive ingredient, in what calls itself idealism.  But in order to see just what part Calvinism plays in current idealism, it will be necessary to distinguish the other chief element in that complex system, namely, transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in Germany, and independently, I believe, in America also.  Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set of dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe regarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts.  It is a method, a point of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain, could be approached by a self-conscious observer.  Transcendentalism is systematic subjectivism.  It studies the perspectives of knowledge as they radiate from the self; it is a plan of those avenues of inference by which our ideas of things must be reached, if they are to afford any systematic or distant vistas.  In other words, transcendentalism is the critical logic of science.  Knowledge, it says, has a station, as in a watch-tower; it is always seated here and now, in the self of the moment.  The past and the future, things inferred and things conceived, lie around it, painted as upon a panorama.  They cannot be lighted up save by some centrifugal ray of attention and present interest, by some active operation of the mind.