Transcendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in
Germany, and independently, I believe, in America also.
Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set
of dogmas about what 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.
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