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.

This is hardly the occasion for developing or explaining this delicate
insight; suffice it to say, lest you should think later that I
disparage transcendentalism, that as a method I regard it as correct
and, when once suggested, unforgettable. I regard it as the chief
contribution made in modern times to speculation. But it is a method
only, an attitude we may always assume if we like and that will always
be legitimate. It is no answer, and involves no particular answer, to
the question: What exists; in what order is what exists produced; what
is to exist in the future? This question must be answered by observing
the object, and tracing humbly the movement of the object. It cannot
be answered at all by harping on the fact that this object, if
discovered, must be discovered by somebody, and by somebody who has an
interest in discovering it. Yet the Germans who first gained the full
transcendental insight were romantic people; they were more or less
frankly poets; they were colossal egotists, and wished to make not
only their own knowledge but the whole universe centre about
themselves. And full as they were of their romantic isolation and
romantic liberty, it occurred to them to imagine that all reality
might be a transcendental self and a romantic dreamer like themselves;
nay, that it might be just their own transcendental self and their own
romantic dreams extended indefinitely. Transcendental logic, the
method of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of
evolution in nature and history. Transcendental