Patterns in Literary Religion: The Orient and the Second Cycle of Transcendentalism

Abstract In his book Recollections and Impressions, Octavius Brooks Frothingham the first historian of Transcendentalism and a participant as well-said of his friend Samuel Johnson: “He was a Transcendentalist-that is to say, he believed in the intuitive powers of the mind.”1 Despite the inadequacy of this definition, intuitionism does link Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Frothingham, Johnson, Weiss, Clarke, Peabody, Child, and many Transcendentalists, for they all thought intuition capable of penetrating the world’s religious traditions. In Emerson and Thoreau, this intuitionism resulted in a remarkable fusion of literature and religion, but in late Transcendentalism it resulted in Unitarian Transcendentalism, universal religion, and anthropotheism, each of which represented the transformation of early Transcendentalism by means of the dogma of “progress” or “universal evolution.”