Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/127

Rh recognize that this experiment was a natural result of his environment and his complex nature. Thus regarded, the episode loses much of that outré look which, according to some critics, explains the real interest in his life.

The intellectual revolution in New England, succeeding the movements of progress in politics and literature in Europe during the early decades of the nineteenth century, had two sequential forms, Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Distinct as was each in direct aim and result, they were allied with that great world-movement of liberty which transformed all the broader aspects of life. Channing preached a new, fearless gospel of mental freedom in religion, an appeal to reason and individual conscience rather than formulas. Transcendentalism, with relevant changes from the doctrines of Kant, Coleridge and Carlyle, sought to gain freedom for intellect,—to discover verities by reason and intuition, not by dogmas. As Unitarianism became dogmatic at times and suffered from divergent and extreme teachings tending towards agnosticism, so Transcendentalism, still more susceptible to emotional excess, often submerged its simpler, nobler ideals beneath much extravagance and mysticism. In the application of idealism to moral conduct and in the emphasis of the unity of