and happiness of men by removing so far as possible all
restraints upon their natural freedom; and whether this is to be
accomplished with Tolstoi, by reducing wants to a minimum and
abolishing money; or by establishing clubs for the promotion of
culture and organizing a social army which shall destroy poverty by
making money plenty, appears a mere matter of detail--at all events
to dreamers and to novelists. But to men who are in hard earnest with
themselves, men who "have not taken their souls in vain nor sworn
deceitfully," either to their neighbor or about him, certain other
truths concerning human nature besides that of its essential goodness
are sure to make themselves evident, soon or late. And among these is
that of its radical insufficiency to its own needs. It is a rational
nature, and it seeks the Supreme Reason, if only for its own
self-explication. It is a nature which, wherever found, is found in
the attitude of adoration, and neither in the individual man nor in
humanity at large is there any Divinity which responds to worship.

It is impossible to say just when Isaac Hecker's appreciation of this
truth became intensely personal and clear, but it is easy to make a
tolerable approximation to the time. He went to Brook Farm in
January, 1843, rather more than eight years after his first meeting
with Dr. Brownson. It was by the advice of the latter that he made
this first decisive break from his former life. From the time when
their acquaintance began, Isaac appears to have taken up the study of
philosophy in good earnest, and to have found in it an outlet for his
energies which insensibly diminished his absorption in social
politics. We have a glimpse of him kneading at the dough-trough with
Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ fastened up on the wall before him,
so that he might lose no time in merely manual labor. Fichte and
Hegel succeeded Kant, all of them philosophers whose mother-tongue
was likewise his own, and whose combined influence put him farther
off than ever from the solution of that fundamental doubt which
constantly grew more perplexing and more painful. We find him hiring
a seat in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, where Orville Dewey
was then preaching, and walking every Sunday a distance of three
miles from the foot of Rutgers Street, "because he was a smart
fellow, and I enjoyed listening to him. Did I believe in
Unitarianism? _No! I believed in nothing."_

His active participation in l