But the philosophers may wrap their notions in very unusual language and still occasionally coin words the vulgar will learn to handle. Kant used this word to denote intuitions which the descendants of Puritans had already analyzed before Emerson made the word transcendentalism familiar in New England as Carlyle did in old England. Thus it was not left for the Yankee shoe-worker to dig it out of the Critique.
A little before the Civil War broke out, in the late forties and early fifties, the lyceum system became popular in America, especially in New England. Courses of lectures were instituted in the small towns as well as in the large cities, and the latest thoughts in science, art, literature, politics, and philosophy were given to the people. How democratic these audiences were was shown in results. Now transcendentalism in both religion and politics began to flourish. The working people were ready to believe something in religion that released them from the pain and cramp of a long-preached doctrine of inherent total depravity. The “rise of man” was being substituted for the “fall of man” and the cramp in the brain and the ache in the heart were letting go their clutch.
Much earlier than this the intellectual world had revolted from the Calvinistic “plan of salvation.” William Ellery Channing had done such work in Boston that Lyman Beecher left his parish in Eastern Massachussetts in 1823 to go to Boston to “confront and stay the movement”; and he shortly wrote in a letter that “all the literary men of Boston, the
