by German
and English philosophers, it meant for Emerson and his friends simply
this: whatever transcends or goes beyond the experience of the senses.
It stressed intuition rather than sensation, direct perception of
ultimate truth rather than the processes of logic. It believed in man's
ability to apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness.
It resembled the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced
this to a supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the
Transcendentalist believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a
natural endowment of the human mind. It had only to be trusted. Stated
in this form, it is evident that we have here a very ancient doctrine,
well known in the literature of India and of Greece. It has been held by
countless persons who have never heard of the word Transcendentalism. We
need go no further back than Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, whom we
find declaring: "I am so certain of the soul's being immortal that
I seem to feel it within me, as it were by intuition." Pope's
friend Swift, a dean of the Church of England and assuredly no
Transcendentalist, defined vision as seeing the things that are
invisible.

Now turn to some of the New England men. Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple of
Emerson, maintained that "the mistake is to make the everlasting things
subjects of argument instead of sight." Theodore Parker declared to his
congregation:

"From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of
instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God,
of justice and futurity.... I found most help in the works of Immanuel
Kant, one of the profoundest thinkers of the world, though one of the
worst writers, even in Germany; if he did not always furnish conclusions
I could rest in, he yet gave me the true method, and put me on the right
road. I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, which
depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of
consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I
will mention only the three most important which pertain to Religion.
1. The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the consciousness that there
is a God. 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a
consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent of our will,
which we ought to keep. 3. The Instinctive Intuition of the Immortal,
a consciousness that the Essential Element of man, the pr