ese
times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about
1840-41 in the establishment of the _Dial_ and the Brook Farm
Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in
his little volume entitled _Nature_, 1836, his Phi-Beta Kappa address
at Harvard on the _American Scholar_, 1837, and his address in 1838
before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882) was the prophet of the sect, and {435} Concord was its
Mecca; but the influence of the new ideas was not confined to the
little group of professed Transcendentalists; it extended to all the
young writers within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil
that it had loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure,
not merely Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but
Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes.

In its strictest sense Transcendentalism was a restatement of the
idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion,
nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more
outward manifestations which drew popular attention most strongly, it
was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal
inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of
this century in America, and especially in New England. The movement
was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe and with the
preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science,
education, medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the
Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, Second
Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, some of whom believed in
trances, miracles, and direct revelations from the divine Spirit;
others in the quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of
the seals and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse; and still
others in the reorganization of society and {436} of the family on a
different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the
writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The
pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and
Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy,
hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many
disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham
and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as injurious not
only to health but to a finer spirituali