self that all science is
fiction he proclaims some fairy-tale to be the truth. The episodes of
experience, not being due to any conceivable machinery beneath, might
come of mere willing, or at the waving of a dialectical wand. Yet apart
from this ulterior inconsistency and backsliding into credulity,
transcendentalism would hear nothing of causes or grounds. All phenomena
existed for it on one flat level. We were released from all dogma and
reinstated in the primordial assurance that we were all there was, but
without understanding what we were, and without any means of controlling
our destiny, though cheered by the magnificent feeling that that destiny
was great.

[Sidenote: Its constructive importance.]

It is intelligible that a pure transcendentalism of this sort should not
be either stable or popular. It may be admired for its analytic depth
and its persistency in tracing all supposed existences back to the
experience that vouches for them. Yet a spirit that finds its only
exercise in gloating on the consciousness that it is a spirit, one that
has so little skill in expression that it feels all its embodiments to
be betrayals and all its symbols to be misrepresentations, is a spirit
evidently impotent and confused. It is self-inhibited, and cannot fulfil
its essential vocation by reaching an embodiment at once definitive and
ideal, philosophical and true. We may excuse a school that has done one
original task so thoroughly as transcendentalism has thing could be
said of it, would be simply an integral term in the discourse that
described it. And this discourse, this sad residuum of reality, would
remain an absolute datum without a ground, without a subject-matter,
without a past, and without a future.

[Sidenote: Its futility.]

It suffices, therefore, to take the supposed negative implication in
transcendentalism a little seriously to see that it leaves nothing
standing but negation and imbecility; so that we may safely conclude
that such a negative implication is gratuitous, and also that in taking
the transcendental method for an instrument of reconstruction its
professors were radically false to it. They took the starting-point of
experience, on which they had fallen back, for its ultimate deliverance,
and in reverting to protoplasm they thought they were rising to God. The
transcendental method is merely retrospective; its use is to recover
more systematically conceptions already extant and inevitable. It