Alcott Memoirs (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915. Excerpt: ... A other things is distinguished as the founder of the first American School of Philosophy. He was "vera causa" of the MOS BRONSON ALCOTT above all New England School of Transcendentalism, and the most earnest advocate of its religio-philosophical ideas. He enlisted for it the sympathies and active support of his personal friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. This philosophy had little in concord with Kantism despite the latter doctrine is generally classified as transcendentalistic. Mr. Alcott's mental and philosophical attitude, and a distinguished authority's definition of New England Transcendentalism, are one: "characterized by the absence of a formal system of belief, a somewhat mystical phraseology, the exaltation of the spiritual in a general sense over the material, a tendency to synthesis of God, Nature and man, an acceptance of all human manifestations as natural and not immoral, an apotheosis of Nature, and a belief in the self-sufficiency of the individual and individual insight." Mr. Alcott aimed at a construction of substances, elements, and average mentalities into new forms, and had the sublime courage of his convictions to such an extent as to make an earnest effort to bring them about. This pure, good, impractical dreamer literally carried his head in the heavens until his dying day. He was as firmly convinced of the practicality of his philosophy after a disastrous experiment, as before it. But he was a true philosopher nevertheless. Long ere his death he realized in a spirit of rare humor his fame would go down to posterity not as an expounder of the science of principles but as his daughter's father. After the phenomenal success of "Little Women," while he was traveling in the middle West, he wrote home to his wife: "I am having a ...