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Michael J. Frederick

Transcendental Ethos: A Study of Thoreau’s Social Philosophy
and Its Consistency in Relation to Antebellum Reform

A Thesis in the Field of History for the Degree of Master of Liberal
Arts in Extension Studies (Harvard University, November 1998)

Abstract

This study investigated the consistency of Henry David Thoreau’s social philosophy in relation to Antebellum reform. Some critics have argued that Thoreau was influenced by radical Abolitionism to such an extent that it led him to defend John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry Virginia in 1859 on the eve of the American Civil War. Many believe "A Plea for Captain John Brown" is an indication of just how far Thoreau departed from his earlier views on reform, especially those expressed in his essay on "Resistance to Civil Government." A close examination of Thoreau’s writings reveals that he was not, however, a pacifist as is commonly assumed. "A Plea," which uses the phrase, "resistance to tyranny," is remarkably consistent with the epistemology and moral sentiment of Thoreau’s earlier views on reform including "Resistance to Civil Government." Thoreau’s reform essays are structured on the basis of Transcendentalist principles and do not necessarily represent a radical break with tradition. Kantian idealism, French Eclecticism, and Unitarian ethics are underlying aspects of Thoreau’s Transcendental ethos. An understanding of these and their subsequent influence on New England Transcendentalism helps to elucidate some of the apparent contradictions in Thoreau’s political essays. Apart from various influences and qualifiers, Thoreau’s reform essays are remarkable consistent contextually as well.

To Stacia Frederick

Acknowledgment
        Special thanks to Thomas Blanding for referring me to the works of C. G. Jung.

Table of Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter I.  Introduction: Thoreau Historiography in Retrospect
Chapter II.  Antebellum Reform
Chapter III.  Transcendental Ethos
Chapter IV.  Early Thoreauvian Themes
Chapter V.  Later Thoreauvian Themes
Chapter VI.  Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography

I.
Introduction: Thoreau Historiography in Retrospect

        Popular perceptions of Henry David Thoreau may shape the way that scholars interpret or wish to interpret his ideas, which are often associated with the 1960's, the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protestors. Members of both movements referred to his essay on "Resistance to Civil Government." Martin Luther King, Jr., gives specific credit to the essay and its subsequent influence on his civil rights campaign. Protestors of the Vietnam War could easily refer to such passages in Walden as: "Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist." Or: "Patriotism is a maggot in their heads."1 Thoreau at other times has been associated with radical politics and anarchism. Many adherents believe his ideas are universally applicable over time. Today he is regularly associated with the environmental movement and such popular culture movements as rock-singer Don Henley’s Save Walden Woods Project.
        While he has gained popular recognition, Thoreau was relatively unknown to the general public during his own lifetime. Perhaps the greatest boon to his popularity in our own time has been his association with Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance campaign, known as Satyagraha, against the British government in South Africa and in India where it reached full fruition. Gandhi cited Thoreau as one of the foremost influences in his life. He had read "Resistance to Civil Government" as it appeared posthumously under the title of "Civil Disobedience" in an 1866 anthology of Thoreau’s excursions and political essays entitled A Yankee in Canada, and borrowed the term civil disobedience as an English equivalent of his own term Satyagraha. While Gandhi gave him full credit for the term, scholars cannot establish with certainty whether Thoreau ever used the term himself or whether it was an anonymous editorial addition to his essay.
        The title, too, is an important consideration that should not be entirely overlooked or misjudged in its importance. In the term civil disobedience, the word civil can refer to citizens who resist an unjust law either violently or nonviolently, or it can mean polite and non-violent disobedience. If the phrase resistance to civil government is used, the ambiguity is removed. All governments are civil in this sense as they govern citizens; but not all governments are polite or nonviolent. Historians, however, often refer to it by its 1866 title, "Civil Disobedience," rather than by its 1849 title, "Resistance to Civil Government," as it appeared in its only publication during Thoreau’s lifetime in Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers.
        Because many scholars have specifically linked Thoreau to Gandhi’s political movement it presents a challenge to review his ideas in their historical context detached from predetermined critical perceptions, as in any field is so often the case. Arthur M. Schlesinger, for instance, in his well-received book The American as Reformer, refers to Thoreau’s doctrine of "inner regeneration," as a doctrine of passive resistance. Schlesinger concluded that Thoreau’s view on "‘Civil Disobedience’ had more influence on modern India than on his countrymen. . . ."2 Nor is he alone in his appraisal. Walter Harding, perhaps the best known Thoreau scholar and biographer, wrote of Gandhi: "We know of no other who so well carried out the principles of Thoreau."3 True, Gandhi tried to live a virtuous life; however, Thoreau never attempted, nor ever considered, leading a national politically based movement.
        When Wendell Glick, the editor of the Princeton edition of Thoreau’s reform papers, decided on the 1849 title, "Resistance to Civil Government," rather than the 1866 title, "Civil Disobedience," he was criticized by Harding, the former editor-in-chief. Harding argued that Thoreau changed the original title of the essay before his death in 1862. He defends his position by noting that such stylistic changes are consistent with Thoreau’s writing process. True enough, perhaps, yet this assumption nonetheless ignores the historical context in which the essay was first published. Glick defends his position by arguing that his decision was in accordance with standard editorial practice, the Greg theory of copy-text editing.4 While the Princeton edition of Thoreau’s work is historically accurate, several other anthologies still carry the title "Civil Disobedience."
        While Gandhi may have found Thoreau’s essay insightful, he never gave it full credit for influencing all aspects of Satyagraha. He called it a "masterly treatise" on the duty of civil disobedience, but recognized that Thoreau confined his disobedience to non-payment of his poll tax. Satyagraha distinctly covered all forms of civil disobedience against an unjust law and was not limited to non-payment of taxes. Also, Gandhi recognized that "Thoreau was not perhaps an out-and-out champion of non-violence," and determined that his position represent only "a branch of satyagraha."5 Elsewhere, Gandhi wrote: "The statement that I had derived my idea of civil disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong."6 He explains his resistance efforts were well on their way in South Africa before he had read Thoreau’s essay.
        This is not to say that he did not admire Thoreau, and, in this respect, Harding is correct. Gandhi ranked Thoreau among the greatest of several influences in his life. He admired his courage and practical ideals, his virtue, and refers to them often in his own writings. Yet to imply that Thoreau’s notions of civil disobedience are analogous to Satyagraha, a national collective political movement, is simply not true. Rather than helping us better to understand Thoreau, such notions may, instead, detract from it.
        Much of the debate on Thoreau’s consistency has focused on his essays defending John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. On the eve of the Civil War in 1859, Brown and his band of men used physical force in a failed attempt to arm and liberate Southern slaves. In "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau unmistakably sanctions the use of forcible resistance, writing: "I do not wish to kill or be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable."7 While heroism is a constant theme, either on or beneath the surface of his writing, Thoreau never before gave such a pointed remark on the use of physical force. In discussing this episode, Harding wrote: "The same Thoreau who has so often been associated with the nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., clearly went beyond his earlier views of reform in his championing of Brown."8
        Scholars wishing to compare Thoreau and Gandhi should keep in mind that Gandhi’s notion of nonviolence was as an active rather than a passive force. "It has no room for cowardice, or even weakness," wrote Gandhi, "there is hope for a violent man to be some day non-violent, but there is none for a coward. . . . if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by the force of suffering, i.e. non-violence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting."9 Thoreau and Gandhi would have both agreed on this point.
        At other times, Thoreau has been associated with dangerous politics—radicalism and anarchy. Some critics have tried to show that his principles and tactics were subject to change with little or no basis. Vincent Buranelli, one of Thoreau’s staunchest critics, charged him with practicing radical, if not dangerous politics. In "The Case Against Thoreau," Buranelli wrote of Thoreau’s political theory: "It points forward to Lenin, the ‘genius theoretician’; whose right it is to force a suitable class consciousness on those who do not have it, and to the horrors that resulted from Hitler’s ‘intuition’ of what was best for Germany."10 Buranelli cites Thoreau’s defense of John Brown as evidence attesting to his radicalism and criticizes him for his "allegiance to inspiration rather than to ratiocination and factual evidence"; and concludes, "Thoreau’s commitment to personal revelation made him an anarchist."11
        Referring to him as an anarchist, solely, presents some difficulties, however, as it ignores the variegated aspects of Thoreau’s social philosophy. His desire for self-cultivation and a better government, a free and enlightened State, if you will, is not entirely anarchical. In purely political terms, too, the designation does not seem to suit him well either. Myron Simon’s essay on "Thoreau and Anarchism," for example, argues convincingly that Thoreau was not an Anarchist. And today most historians agree with this appraisal. Simon wrote: "One may believe, as such opposed figures as Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius did, in a Higher or ‘Natural’ Law to which civil laws are subordinate, and not be in any sense an anarchist. And one may be an anarchist, as Godwin and Tucker surely were, without subscribing to any manner of Higher Law."12 Tucker, a New Englander, and other contemporary individualistic anarchists, he points out, do not refer to Thoreau in their writings. Simon adds, the fact that Thoreau "adhered to no recognizable political position made him in his purity an easily appropriated, modifiable symbol of conscientious protest as available to the civil rights and student movements of the 1960's as he had been to Gandhi."13
        Nor is anarchism a useful term to apply to nineteenth-century American politics. This is because libertarian politics were confined to adopt the term socialism for their left-wing political movements. George Woodcock noted that "Proudhon was the first man voluntarily to adopt this name of ‘anarchy’ for the form of society he envisaged, and actually to mean by that word—philological stickler that he was—a society without government."14 Proudhon’s work was not translated into English until 1876.
        Others have tried to link Thoreau exclusively to the image of a solitary individualist contentedly residing at Walden Pond or confining himself to nature excursions free from societal cares. Mark Van Doren, the first to offer an extensive study of Thoreau’s journal, concluded: "certainly the troubles of mankind caused him no disturbance."15 James Goodwin, in "Thoreau and John Brown: Transcendental Politics," argues that Thoreau did not act from "any widespread historical precedents," nor did he "advocate revolution in any understanding of the term commonly held in his time."16 Goodwin believes Thoreau followed, what he terms, a politics of "separation and seclusion," and that Thoreau was not a social reformer as is commonly assumed. Nevertheless, his ideas were not formed in a vacuum. Such interpretations ignore Thoreau’s lifelong commitment to reform. His association with the Lyceum for over twenty-three years is enough to illustrate at least a commitment if not an interest in society, we must grant, and certainly an interest in his hometown of Concord, the political hotbed of New England Yankees and Antebellum reformers.
        The most comprehensive study of his consistency is Wendell Glick’s 1950 Ph. D. Dissertation, "Thoreau and Radical Abolitionism: A Study of the Native Background of Thoreau’s Social Philosophy." Glick argues that Thoreau’s consistency can be judged by his connection with Northern Abolitionism, a nineteenth-century political movement that was essentially nonviolent. The study was perhaps ground breaking in its day, but the debate on Thoreau’s consistency needs to be reexamined under the light of recent scholarship.
        Glick says he agrees with Amos Bronson Alcott in calling Thoreau the "‘best sample of an indigenous American;’ in other words, a synthesis of various native influences which his environment supplied him."17 His personal feeling is that Thoreau was influenced by radical abolitionism to such an extent that it led him to defend John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. He argues "A Plea for Captain John Brown" is an indication of just how far Thoreau had departed from his "long-cherished faith in the adequacy of the Moral Law to satisfy all man’s individual and collective needs"; and writes: "There are no two ways about it; in defending Brown Thoreau sacrificed the ‘truths’ of his ‘reason’. . . ."18
        Still, his conclusion is largely undisputed. It is true that Thoreau, like Emerson, refused to be intimidated by "foolish" consistencies. Walter Harding, in The New Thoreau Handbook, writes:

Thoreau . . . never claimed to be a systematic philosopher, and he made no attempt to resolve the many competing ideas and attitudes he recorded during his lifetime. Like most of the Transcendentalists, he was essentially eclectic, and as his reading indicates, he was fully capable of adapting ideas from various sources that seemed to be mutually exclusive. In addition, like most other people, he sometimes changed his mind as he grew older or as issues evolved.19

Elsewhere, however, Harding alludes to a possible basis for consistency in Thoreau’s thought. In The Days of Henry Thoreau, Harding writes: "Whether he was experimenting in life at Walden Pond, going to jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, or defending John Brown’s action at Harper’s Ferry, he was operating from a base of Transcendentalist principles."20
        1). Is Glick’s assessment of Thoreau accurate? Thoreau’s defense of John Brown may not be entirely inconsistent with the epistemology or moral sentiment of his earlier works. Native influences, I agree, played an important role in the development of his social philosophy. Certainly, he was exposed to radical abolitionism. His mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, and several of his aunts were members of Abolition societies. Thoreau, however, never joined an Abolition society himself. And this was not due to any abstract eccentricities on his own part, but because he was committed to individual reform and motivated by an idealism distinct from Garrison’s Abolitionism.
        2). What constitutes Transcendentalist principles and how do they apply to Thoreau’s social philosophy and his attitude toward reform in practice, if at all? Several indigenous influences, for instance, Unitarianism and Scottish Common Sense taught at Thoreau’s alma mater, Harvard College, and French Eclecticism, popular then among Unitarians, suggest that Abolitionism was not the sole influence on his political thought. French Eclecticism, which was generally adapted to New England thought, and Unitarianism in particular were springboards to Transcendentalism and are a key to understanding Transcendental principles. Although Thoreau renounced involvement with the church during his lifetime, he was baptized a Unitarian and buried in a Unitarian cemetery. Concerning Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "He was a born protestant. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief."21
        3). Is Thoreau’s social philosophy consistent? Thoreau was not content to withdraw himself completely from society and saw himself as an active citizen committed to individual reform. Various cross currents were at work during the Antebellum period. One can note hints of republican themes, themes of Jacksonian Democracy, and the ideas of manifest destiny, Abolitionism and nonviolence in his writing. Thoreau works these themes into a spiritual or religious context that reflect his special breed of practical idealism and attempts to embrace natural paradoxes over a less real, more artificial model. For this reason, it is difficult to classify him or even speak of his ideas as political doctrines. It is the consistency of his ideas, their internal coherence, and their relation to Antebellum society that concern us, and not a political theory as such.
        4). Does Thoreau’s defense of John Brown necessarily contradict the earlier political views of his work, most notably his essay "Resistance to Civil Government?" If we are to understand Thoreau, we must try to understand his relation to Antebellum society and why, if he was indeed committed to nonviolence, he changed so completely by 1859. Again, his connection to Unitarianism will help to elucidate this point. According to James Duban, "Conscience and Consciousness: The Liberal Christian Context of Thoreau’s Political Ethics," Thoreau seems to have accepted "a rather conservative notion—but one nonetheless espoused by Unitarians . . . that the dictates of conscience correspond to universally prescribed standards of morality."22 Nonviolent or active, even violent resistance measures are consistent with Unitarian ethics.
        The following chapters generally follow the outline of my questions, which are in no way mutually exclusive inquiries.

II.
Antebellum Reform

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        Thoreau lived during a period of unprecedented change, a time of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and geographic mobility. Slavery was expanding and becoming more profitable in the South.23 The first factory systems were introduced in towns just outside his hometown of Concord. At Waltham, the Boston Manufacturing Company utilized a power loom, turning southern cotton into valuable products for sale in the North and abroad. In Boston, population estimates between 1790 and 1830 roughly tripled as renewed opportunities and prosperity after the Revolutionary War and the need for workers increased.
        It was a time of great optimism. There was a renewed sense of confidence in the American system of government. By 1845, when Thoreau began his sojourn at Walden, the Republic had survived for nearly sixty years, a mark of its durability. The uncertainty of the early Republic diminished as states learned to legislate on local and national levels. New industrialization, along with internal improvements, the building of roads, canals, and railways, promised an expansive America.
        The decades preceding the Revolutionary War marked a period of intense theological speculation that produced an ever-widening chasm within the Calvinist Orthodoxy. The period produced the first of two Great Awakenings in American history. No other figure had a more lasting influence than did Jonathan Edwards. He determined the future course of theology. Concerned with doctrinal heresies of Arminianism and apathy among the clergy, Edwards wrote a number of treatises directed at rejuvenating spiritual awareness in the colonies. The Freedom of the Will challenged the Arminian contention that Christ died on the cross for the redemption of all humanity, not for an exclusive elect. Edwards applied the philosophy of John Locke in rejecting the idea of distinct faculties such as the reason, the will, and the appetites.24 This was also an area of speculation that would later engage New England Transcendentalism. By denying the existence of free will, Edwards wanted to undermine the Arminian heresy and preserve the doctrines of Determinism, the Elect, and human Depravity.
        He confronted apathy among New England clergymen by demonstrating the importance of emotion or "affections" in religious devotion and by reasserting the ideas of divine perfection and human depravity.25 His work was instrumental in bringing about the first Great Awakening. Edwards’ clerical descendants, the New Calvinists, continued his debate. Gradually, with passage of time, and with America’s spirited victory over the British, Orthodox ideas lost some of their appeal. Doctrinal disputes continued as conservative and liberal strains within the clergy forced a gradual schism out of which Evangelical Protestantism and Unitarianism emerged.
        The Cane Ridge revival in 1801 marked the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, and the first of a series of camp meetings that were to follow. These meetings have been noted for their vast displays of emotional and religious fervor, and for the extraordinary role they played in motivating Antebellum reformers. In 1818, Adin Ballou, then age 15, participated in a revival near his hometown in Rhode Island. Years later, he recorded his youthful conversion. "Whatever my folly or imperfection, I have never regretted the step I then took, but have been devoutly thankful to the author of all good that thus early in life I committed myself to His service under the leadership of Jesus Christ."26 Ballou went on to found the community of Hopedale based on the principles of universal salvation, Christian socialism, and nonresistance and was the most persistent advocate of pacifism during the Antebellum period.
        Evangelical ministers and theologians challenged the old Calvinist doctrines. New Haven’s Nathaniel Taylor, a theologian at Yale University, attacked the doctrines of Original Sin, Determinism, and Infant Damnation. Because he accepted the notion of free will, Taylor argued sin was voluntary not predetermined. Revivals, he believed, united people within the spiritual and ecumenical context of the Christian community and helped to lead the way to salvation. Congregationalism prevailed at Yale while its rival, Harvard College, embraced the more liberal doctrines of Unitarianism.
        The paragon of frontier revivalism was the great evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. Without having had any formal theological training, he was ordained a Presbyterian minister and later was elected president of Ohio’s Oberlin College from 1851 to 1856. He was a fierce opponent of slavery, and Oberlin disseminated numerous amounts of anti-slavery propaganda throughout the region. Paul E. Johnson, an historian of Finney’s Rochester revival, argues convincingly that Finney’s 1831 revivals had an indelible effect on Antebellum reform.27 Revivals propagated the ideas of moral perfection and the coming biblical age of human perfection—the millennium.
        Rapid expansion and new problems associated with industrialization and slavery prompted concern for many Americans. New England became the center of Antebellum reform. The rich Puritan tradition of the region provided impetus for a reform impulse that was reinforced by current optimism and a belief in perfectibility. The temperance movement led by Lyman Beecher gained national attention. Drunkenness was often tolerated in an agrarian society, but an industrial one necessitated punctuality and sobriety. Horace Mann led the movement for educational reform, believing childhood education could prepare the young for responsible adulthood and citizenship. Of all reform movements, Abolitionism led by William Lloyd Garrison had the greatest sense of immediacy. Garrison called for nothing less than the immediate, non-compensatory, and complete abolition of slavery.
        Lockean thought continued its influence during the Antebellum period with the opposite results of Edwards’ era. Most reformers believed human behavior was malleable. They believed temperate parents would raise temperate children. Early childhood development and education would mold law-abiding citizens. Abolition of slavery would lead to peace and equality. And benevolent institutions would encourage benevolence. Charles Dickens while visiting Boston in 1842 commented on the phenomenon of the city’s alms houses, prisons, juvenile facilities, and hospitals: "I sincerely believe that the public institutions and charities of this capital of Massachusetts are as nearly perfect, as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make them."28 Reformers generally stressed the connection between the individual, the environment, the importance of collective involvement, and institutional reform.
        The old Calvinist triangle was turned on its head. Alexis de Tocqueville while visiting America in 1831 wrote: "It is hard to realize how much follows naturally from this philosophic theory of the indefinite perfectibility of man and what a prodigious influence it has even on those who, concentrating solely on action to the exclusion of thought, act according to this theory of which they know nothing."29 Most reform movements sought mass appeal. They appealed to the impetuosity of perspective converts. Religiosity they wanted, yes, but not a nation of philosophers. The old Calvinist notions of human depravity were superseded by a typical belief in human perfection.
        Antebellum reformers generally relied on scriptural authority in support of their proposed projects. Abolitionists were no exception. Arthur Tappan, Lyman Beecher, and Charles Gradison Finney were all evangelicals and leading members of Abolitionism. Tappan controlled the movement’s programs in the southwesterly portion of the northern United States, disseminating pamphlets in that region and into the southern Border States. Finney conducted frontier revivals in the emerging West. Beecher served in the eastern portion of the country. The prevalence of evangelical thought within Abolitionism should not be denied, overlooked, or misjudged, for Transcendental thought follows its own distinct category.
        In Boston, Beecher was a commanding figure appealing mostly to middling and lower classes. His Boston was not the Brahmin Boston of William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson. While at Yale, Beecher befriended Nathaniel Taylor whose pro-revival theology kindled the flames of Finney’s revivalism. Beecher’s Hanover Street congregation was also the site of several revivals, which never gained much favor among the city’s Unitarian population. In 1829, when Garrison first came to Boston, he was inspired by Beecher and not the Unitarians. He referred to Channing’s "icy system" and noted enthusiastically, "Beecher has no equal."30 It was Beecher’s evangelical simplicity that moved young Garrison.
        While it is true that his pertinacious insistence on immediacy and the disparaging and sensationalistic language of the Liberator led to an eventual cooling of relations between himself and many denominationalists including Beecher, Garrison’s commitment to the Gospels of Christ as the touchstone of his own moral philosophy persisted unabated. Nothing illustrates this more than his relationship with John Humphrey Noyes of Vermont, beginning in 1837 when the two men met for the first time. Noyes went beyond the perfectionism of Finney by proclaiming that he himself had reached perfection. Believing Christ to be the supreme authority in the world, he explained: "My hope of the millennium begins where Dr. Beecher’s expires—viz., AT THE TOTAL OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION."31 Shortly after their meeting, Garrison wrote his devoted disciple Henry Wright, a Connecticut farmer, to proclaim the good news.

The remedy . . . will not be found in anything short of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Human governments will remain in violent existence as long as men are resolved not to bear the cross of Christ, and to be crucified unto the world. But in the kingdom of God’s dear Son, holiness and love are the only magistracy. It has no swords, for they are beaten into plough shares—no spears, for they are changed into pruning-hooks—no military academy, for the saints cannot learn war any more—no gibbet, for life is regarded as inviolate—no chains, for all are free. And that kingdom is to be established upon earth, for the time is predicted when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ.32

        Transcendentalists were also optimistic; however, their optimism was generally tempered by a sense of a gradual progressiveness and an unfolding of the ideal in history, which, as many of them well recognized, could be facilitated or hindered in its material manifestation. Maintaining the autonomy of the individual, Thoreau was inclined to assert the purity of the soul along with other Transcendentalists, agreeing that individuals should act in the moment according to their nature, without succumbing to the vogue of opinion. Garrison, on the other hand, asserting the fundamental importance of the Gospels, soon united Abolitionism to Ballou’s New England Nonresistance Society with absolute, albeit admirable, material designs in mind.
        The two movements were united in common cause shortly after the 1837 slaying of Elijah P. Lovejoy. Lovejoy was gunned down by an angry pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois, while protecting his printing press. Garrison and Ballou were determined to keep Abolitionism free from violence. Their credo was the words spoken by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. "Ye resist not evil" and "turn the other cheek" became the watchwords of the united movement.
        Garrison set the agenda for Abolitionism at the 1838 Peace Convention held in Boston. Desiring a peaceful solution to slavery, he delivered his "Declaration of Sentiments" address, a manifesto outlining the goals of the his movement.

The Prince of peace, under whose stainless banner we rally, came not to destroy, but to save, even the worst of enemies . . . We register our testimony, not only against all wars, whether offensive or defensive, but all preparations for war . . . We believe that the penal code of the old covenant, An eye for an eye, [sic] and a tooth for a tooth, has been abrogated by Jesus Christ; and that, under the new covenant, the forgiveness, instead of the punishment of enemies, enjoined upon all his disciples, in all cases whatsoever.

Clearly favoring nonviolence, Garrison goes on to explain: "We shall employ lecturers, circulate tracts and publications, form societies, and petition our state and national governments in relation to the subject of Universal Peace."33 In the aftermath of the convention, Ballou published "Non-Resistance in Relation to Human Governments," another exemplary pacifist tract in addition to Garrison’s. Ballou wrote: "Non-Resistants are required by their principles not to resist any of the ordinances of these governments by physical force, however unjust and wicked; but to be subject to the powers that be, either actively or passively."34
        Thoreau never joined Abolitionism or the Peace Society. The reason is simple: he never accepted their view of the Moral Law and was moved by a subtle, nonetheless distinct, difference in principle. Transcendentalism will be examined in the next chapter to discuss Thoreau’s connection with it, as indeed he was, and to distinguish him from other reformers of the time who fell outside the Transcendental fold. And there were differences. Ballou himself was incensed with Transcendentalism. Referring to its "pernicious" errors, he wrote:

I had to withstand . . . an incoherent Transcendentalism which made every individual his own prophet, priest, king, and God; a rabid anti-bibleism, which treated the scriptures of the two Testaments indiscriminately as a jargonic mass of pseudo-sacred rubbish, of no divine authority whatever; and a gross anti-Sabbatarianism, which left no use for any sort of Sabbath, even for the moral and religious improvement or physical comfort of needy humanity.35

        Antebellum reform was an outgrowth of Enlightenment ideas. Calvinism gave way to a liberated theology after the Revolutionary War. Evangelical Protestantism was the birthchild of the Second Great Awakening. Unitarianism was distinct from Evangelical Protestantism, as we will see, in rejecting the Trinitarian nature of Christ and in embracing a far more speculative theology. It was limited geographically and scarcely embraced revivalism. Thoreau himself once noted that "a camp-meeting must be a singular combination of a prayer-meeting and a pic-nic."36 Transcendentalism developed out of Unitarianism, while Abolitionism was essentially a product of Evangelical Protestantism.
        Garrison embraced the doctrine of nonviolence based on his reading of the Gospel of Christ. His "Declaration of Sentiments" address, and his cooperation with Ballou clearly demonstrate his early commitment to the peace movement. Thoreau, who is often associated with pacificism, never attended the Peace Convention. He, and other Transcendentalists, essentially rejected revivalism, a fundamentalistic interpretation of scripture, and defined perfectionism and the Moral Law according to their own unique transcendental idealism.

III.
Transcendental Ethos

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        Wendell Glick writes: "Transcendentalism and radical Abolitionism were in so many respects twin movements, based upon the same presuppositions and having the same altruistic aims, that it is difficult to avoid making the generalization that a consistent radical Abolitionist was, in the broad interpretation of the term, a Transcendentalist."37 By classifying Garrison and Thoreau together, Glick is led to believe that each of them was philosophically alike in defining their conception of the Moral Law. He writes: "There was simply no way to reconcile the methods of Brown with their faith in the irresistibility of the Moral Law the keystone of their early philosophy."38 His general argument, however, avoids some important particulars that divided the two movements.
        New England Transcendentalism was yet another reform-oriented movement. Unlike other reform movements of the time, Transcendentalism is not easily defined, and by itself represents a significant challenge to properly understanding Thoreau. The movement was interested in all areas of reform as Abolitionism was also concerned with temperance, education, and slavery. Loosely defined, it was as much a philosophy as it was a religion. Some Transcendentalists, like Bronson Alcott, who derived surprising answers from his young students on the nature of Christ using the Socratic method, appealed to the Gospels more than others, but without subscribing wholly to scriptural authority. One thing is certain; Transcendentalism was never an Evangelical movement.
        To understand Transcendentalism, it is necessary to understand that it was an offshoot of New England Unitarianism, which in turn, was a reaction against Calvinism and distinct from Evangelical Protestantism. The majority of Transcendentalists were Unitarians or those, like Emerson and Thoreau, who were dissatisfied with the Church and officially left organized religion. It may also be of some interest to note, as Harold Clarke Goddard did in his book on Transcendentalism, that New England Unitarianism differed from the English Unitarianism of Priestley in that "it exhibited practically none of his materialistic and Socinian tendencies."39
        Unitarians rejected Calvinism on moral and speculative grounds. They objected to the idea of determinism because without some concept of free will it is difficult to hold individuals accountable or responsible, morally, for their actions. In rejecting the Trinitarian character of God’s nature, they stressed a peculiar religious doctrine that went against the current of evangelical thought, believing, instead, in the oneness or Unitarian character of His nature. This was an important speculative idea for Transcendentalism as well because Emerson predicated his notion of the "Oversoul"on a similar assumption.
        Within the Unitarian clergy, some argued that Religious dogma, the Old and New Testaments, and Jesus were not infallible. For example, in his "Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity," Theodore Parker writes: "If Christianity were true, we should still think it was so, not because its record was written by infallible pens, nor because it was lived out by an infallible teacher. . . . If it rest on the personal authority of Jesus alone, then there is no certainty of its truth."40 Parker was a Transcendentalist and a practicing Unitarian minister. Although his view is representative of the most liberal branch of Unitarianism and its clergy at that time, his remark, here, illustrates just how far a Unitarian could go in rejecting scriptural authority. Unitarianism was generally less inclined to fundamentalism than Evangelical Protestantism, and Transcendentalism, further still.
        Emerson agreed with Parker’s view and described like no one before him an interpretation of Christ that took by storm the religious community of Boston. He likened Jesus Christ to a true prophet who "saw with open eye the mystery of the soul." Audiences were stunned to hear Emerson say that Christ "saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World."41 Christ recognized the divinity incarnate in all persons. "The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man;—indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology."42 This should not be confused with pantheism. The individual has a divine nature, according to Emerson, but is not the divinity itself.
        Questioning scriptural authority was important for Transcendentalism because on either side of the slavery controversy proponents of slavery or abolitionism could refer to scripture as the ultimate authority for defending their cause. Since the Reformation, Protestantism has generally encouraged individual interpretation of the Bible. Transcendentalism did not necessarily make a radical break with tradition. After all, most of the founding fathers were deists in rejecting Biblical authority over natural laws. Transcendentalists were well aware of the implications of the new science and wanted to reaffirm revelation against uncertainty but also outside the traditional religious understanding. Philosophically, they were interested in confronting the extreme skepticism of Hume against the existence of the mind, and the sensualism of Locke, and the current wisdom of Scottish realism. They wanted to establish the existence of inherent knowledge and the validity of, what can be termed, their conscience theory.
        Certain Unitarian ministers helped pave the way. William Ellery Channing, the Federal Street Church minister from 1803 until 1842, whose "icy system" it was that displeased young Garrison, is an important transitional figure. He was the chief spokesperson for Unitarianism during his time and a forerunner of Transcendentalism. Channing, in his later years, was present at the earliest of the informal gatherings of the Transcendentalists. The "Hedge Club," as the group came to be known, typically met when Fredric Henry Hedge, a Bangor minister, came to town. Hedge said Channing "could from the spiritual height on which he stood, by mere dint of gravity, send his word into the soul with more searching force than all the orators of the time."43 Emerson called him "our bishop" and continually stressed his importance to Transcendentalism. It should be emphasized that, while Channing was progressive among Unitarians, he was not, however, a Transcendentalist.
        Channing went against the logic of most Unitarian and evangelical ministers by questioning the philosophy of John Locke. His ideas ripened the future appeal of German Idealism and French Eclecticism for Transcendentalism. In Human Understanding, Locke had argued that the mind is tabula rasa, a blank slate, until sense experience records its events. Most followers of Locke believe that our knowledge is derived solely from our observation of the material world. Channing, on the other hand, argues that knowledge is derived from "our own soul," that "the divine attributes are first developed in ourselves, and thence transferred to our Creator." He is close to suggesting that all persons have a "spark of divinity." But he also adds "an important caution" against "extravagance" cautioning his listeners to reverence human nature and not to do it violence. He writes: "Our proper work is to approach God by the free and natural unfolding of our highest powers—of understanding, conscience, love, and the moral will."44
        During the Antebellum period, the Scottish Common Sense philosophy of Dugald Stewart and Sampson Reid was taught at most universities, including Thoreau’s Harvard, as the prevailing model. Edward H. Madden, an historian of civil disobedience, explains that while Kantian idealism and French Eclecticism gained some favor during the 1840's and 1850's the prevailing wisdom of the time was Scottish realism.45 Few academics outside the fold of Transcendentalism embraced Kantian Idealism. While reformers and Transcendentalists alike subscribed to some concept of Moral or Higher Law of conscience, the Transcendentalists, and particularly Thoreau, supported their view according to the dictates of transcendental reason.
        Scottish realism was an attempt to defend Locke against the scepticism of Hume. Stewart, in Dissertation: Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, argued that Locke’s theory on the role of the senses was misunderstood by Gassendi, Condillac, and Diderot, all of whom were followers of Locke who adopted and simplified his method. Stewart shows that Locke accepted the validity that knowledge arises from both the senses and reflection, and quotes his position on the latter:

The other function, from which experience furnishes the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got: which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without.46

Stewart brought Locke’s philosophy back on his own terms. Emerson was impressed by his emphasis on individual consciousness, the power of memory, and his belief that nature exists independent from the mind and consists of eternal laws.
        Stewart’s system on the whole, however, did not offer a tenable solution to Hume’s skepticism in the view of most Transcendentalists. It affirmed consciousness and a sense of universal morality but lacked a satisfying concept of free will. In favoring Locke, it dismissed Kant and diminished the importance of Eastern, especially Hindu, thought, and pure idealism. More importantly in their view, Stewart’s system offered no moral basis to dispute the existence of the institution of slavery.
        Channing’s view that knowledge is derived from "our own soul" represents an important bridge for Transcendentalism to Immanuel Kant’s theory of subjective reasoning. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his later Critique of Practical Reason were viewed by rationalists as important works because they confronted the sensualism of Locke and the skepticism of Hume.
        Kant had asserted that transcendental knowledge is known a priori. A proposition is known a priori if it is known independent of experience. Most followers of Kant would say that mathematics is known in this way. For example, it is not necessary to know that 2+2=4 through observation. Such propositions are known inherently without the aid of observation. Moreover, this had a certain significance for the Transcendentalists. A priori knowledge is the same in every individual, and yet it is also independent of every individual. It exists of its own accord. Kant’s theory supported the use of reason-based intuitionism and helped to verify the use and validity of inherent concepts in practical ethics for the Transcendentalists.
        They received the philosophy of Kant second-hand through the Englishman Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emerson in his essay on Transcendentalism admits that the Idealism of his time "acquired the name Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant," but failed to mention in it the profound importance of Coleridge to the movement.47 Elsewhere, however, Emerson refers to Coleridge as one of the few who "cannot be matched in America."48 The reason for Emerson’s high estimation of him is because Coleridge made the distinction between the faculties of Reason and Understanding for Transcendentalism in his Aids to Reflection, published by 1826 in America.
        Coleridge defends idealism against the skepticism of a Hume and upholds the use of Reason or intuitive knowledge over that which is based on observation or reflection alone. When Jonathan Edwards was rethinking Calvinism, he determined the Will was passive. His conclusion is not surprising when it is remembered that he was working under the influence of Locke who had concluded the mind is passive, a blank slate. Coleridge argues something quite different. He believes the mind has the active powers of Reason and Understanding. He writes: "Now as the difference of a captive and enslaved Will, and no will at all, such is the difference between the Lutheranism of Calvin and the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards."49 As Coleridge offered a satisfying concept of free will, the Transcendentalists found a viable philosophy to dispute morally the institution of slavery.
        Coleridge believes the "knowledge of spiritual Truth is of necessity immediate and intuitive: and the World or Natural Man possesses no higher intuitions than those of the pure Senses, which are the subjects of Mathematical Science."50 For him, the difference between the Understanding and the Reason is that the first is discursive while the latter is fixed. The Understanding is the faculty of reflection while the Reason exists of its own accord and is known a priori. Mathematical equations and spiritual truth, as he terms it, are known through the faculty of the Reason. But the Understanding must refer to "some other Faculty as its ultimate authority."51 By the phrase, some other faculty, he means the various faculties of the senses such as sight, touch, taste, smell, or hearing. For example, the Understanding can reflect on a subject categorically by looking at the qualities of an object, and ask, is it red, blue, or green or some combination of shades? It can ask what relation the object has to time and place. Or it can ask if the object is acting or affected. The Understanding cannot, however, know an object outside of its attributes. Coleridge’s approach is ratiocinative and Aristotelian in its method. In this sense, Reason is distinguished from the lowercase reason of the Enlightenment, which referred to a process of intellection rather than to inherent concepts. Together, the Reason and the Understanding form an intuitive and an intellective process.
        Thoreau read most of Coleridge’s works including Aids to Reflection.52 This was one of many books belonging to the self-education or self-cultivation genre stemming from the German concept of Bildung that had gained many adherents in New England during the 1830's and 1840's, especially among the Transcendentalists. Thoreau was undoubtably impressed by any book that belonged to this genre. He also seems to have readily accepted Coleridge’s epistemology when he wrote: "The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form."53 In relation to a single virtue, the scales of justice can serve as an emblematic illustration of his ideal.
        Thoreau may have been an idealist, but his nature study reveals that he was methodical and careful to base knowledge of a "spiritual truth" on the observation of the actual world. Robert Richardson, in Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, wrote of Thoreau’s nature work: "It is a huge undertaking, a major effort, the general purpose of which seems to have been the distillation of ten years’ observations into an archetypal year, not impressionistic, but statistically averaged, combining the accuracy of a Darwin with the descriptive flair of a Pliny and the eye of a Ruskin."54
        Self-cultivation is perhaps the single most important idea governing Transcendentalism, and the concept is especially evident in Thoreau’s social philosophy. While some Transcendentalists, such as Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and George Ripley, believed in collective reform toward individual self-improvement, others, such as Thoreau and Emerson, stressed the importance of individual reform. Alcott started his ill-fated Fruitlands experiment in communal living and was a member of Garrison’s Abolitionist society. Parker remained an influential Unitarian minister. Ripley founded the Brook Farm community in Roxbury, Massachusetts. When asked to join Brook Farm, Emerson declined. In his journal, he wrote: "To join this body would be to traverse all my long trumpeted theory, and the instinct which spoke from it, that one man is a counterpoise to a city,—that a man is stronger than a city, that his solitude is more prevalent & beneficent than the concert of crowds."55 Thoreau simply replied: "As for these communities—I think I had rather keep a bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven."56
        For Thoreau, the implications of individual reform were clear. On January 6, 1841, he wrote a letter to Concord’s First Parish declaring himself to be non-member of the Church. His journal for that year specifically approaches the question of religion: "The religion I love is very laic. The clergy are as diseased, and as much possessed with a devil as the reformers—They make their topic as offensive as the politician—for our religion is as unpublic and incommunicable as our poetical vein—and to be approached with as much love and tenderness." For Thoreau, religion was a private affair and intimately connected to his reform ideal. "True reform can be undertaken any morning before unbarring our doors. It calls no convention. I can do two thirds the reform of the world myself. . . . When an individual takes a sincere step, then all the gods attend, and his single deed is sweet."57
        Thoreau’s lectures, essays, and books, it is well to remember, are always personal accounts. He begins Walden by noting: "I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well." But he also addresses the larger significance of what he is trying to establish: "If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself, and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement."58 His lectures followed from his excursions to Cape Cod, Canada, the Maine Woods, Walden Pond, and general sauntering in and about Concord. Thoreau usually presented a topic publically in lecture format before it appeared in print. While he may seem to distance himself from society by advocating individual rather than collective reform, he keeps society close at hand in his overall view.
        "Economy," the first chapter of Walden, is a long digression on the state of society, if not civilization, as Thoreau saw it. He finds most of his neighbors are occupied with material pursuits. This is why, in his estimation, most people live lives of "quiet desperation." Thoreau argues the individual should pursue spiritual ends as well. He writes:

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.59

He is quick to announce that he knows this much through experimentation. Thoreau is able to objectify an abstract concept such as the life worth living through his experiment in living while at Walden Pond. Walden can, of course, also be read as part of the self-culture genre; its thesis reads: Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!
        The self-cultivation ethic stemmed from Puritanism and influenced both Unitarianism and Evangelical Protestantism. For Transcendentalism, self-culture took on an even more important role because, as Parker asserted, there is no certainty of truth if it is based on scriptural authority alone. Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson’s "Self-Reliance," Alcott’s "Conversations with Children," and Elizabeth Peabody’s aesthetic principle all deal with self-cultivation. Although progressive for the time, these works do not necessarily indicate a radical break from Unitarianism.
        Channing echoes Transcendentalism in his essay on "Self-Culture." In a Thoreauvian vein, he writes: "A man who rises above himself looks from an eminence on nature and providence, on society and life. . . . Duty, faithfully performed, opens the mind to truth, both being of one family, alike immutable, universal, and everlasting." And in a Transcendental vein, he goes on to say: "In a word, one man sees all things apart and in fragments, whilst another strives to discover the harmony, connection, unity of all. . . . In looking at our nature, we discover, among its admirable endowments, the sense or perception of beauty."60
        The Transcendentalists believed that self-education through meditation, contemplation, reflection, and observation cultivates the higher perceptive powers of the mind and can lead to a greater consciousness of ultimate reality. Their rejection of Lockean wisdom was essential on this point. Transcendentalists argue that nature is a reflection of inherent ideas, and that the individual has some idea of truth, justice, goodness, beauty, love, or mathematics without the aid of observation. For them, we could say, the mind is not analogous to a computer’s hard drive where observations of empirical data is simply stored and processed. Rather, there is an intimate connection, unity, between subject and object, between the knower and the thing known, each emanating from a single source and reflecting the ideal. Emerson calls it the Oversoul. Thoreau uses the expression "sympathy with intelligence."
        Sherman Paul, in Shores of America, wrote of the Transcendentalist belief in "intuitive apprehension":

Not only did its synthesizing powers account for the way in which experience becomes meaningful, but being an imaginative faculty as well, it could directly seize reality. And this apprehension of reality, though mystical in the epistemological sense of making the knower one with the thing known, was not the vaporous emotional state usually ascribed to mysticism; it was a cognitive experience, the liberating power of which came from possessing Ideas—not the mere Lockean representative idea, but the Idea in the mind of God, the Idea in the Platonic sense of being the correlative of Reality itself.61

Most Transcendentalists claim to have had intuitive apprehensions or mystical experiences. Alcott has been described as the movement’s mystic.62 Emerson speaks of the "transparent eyeball." Margaret Fuller claims to have been overwhelmed by a sudden bodily infusion of light. Elizabeth Peabody walked into a tree on Boston Common while having a similar experience. Thoreau records a childhood experience in an 1851 journal entry:

There comes into my mind or soul an indescribable infinite all absorbing divine heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation & expansion—and have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself—I speak as a witness on the stand and tell what I have perceived. The morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I lead a life aloof from society of men. I wondered if a mortal had ever known what I knew. I looked in books for some recognition of a kindred experience—but strange to say, I found none. Indeed I was slow to discover that other men had had this experience—for it had been possible to read books & to associate with men on other grounds.63

        While these experiences do not satisfy our understanding objectively in purely scientific terms, they were unequivocally an important aspect of Transcendentalism that has received little attention from scholars. Yet, subjective vision is as much a part of human existence as is our objective perception of the phenomenal world. Consciousness is proportionate to the balance of the two elements. Experiences similar to those of the Transcendentalists have been recorded for centuries in the works of mystics from several cultures. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were interested in them as well and referred to Emanuel Swedenborg, whose work was much admired by the Transcendentalists. Emerson included him in "Representative Men." Kant also mentions him whom he calls "very sublime."64
        Intuitive apprehensions gave religious certainty, not of truth per se, but of existence. The Transcendentalists were optimistic about human nature and feared little the possibility of philosophical anarchism or nihilism. They saw unity in variety. Everything was part or parcel of the higher good, the Godhead, "the Oversoul," or "Universal Intelligence." They were realistic, however, recognizing the possibility of human error. Thoreau wrote: "Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad."65 For Transcendentalism, religious certainty was not only intuitively but also philosophically and historically based on the literature of the past and confirmed further through daily experience in nature and society. Emerson specifically illustrates this point in the "The American Scholar," telling his audience to enrich themselves in nature, the literature past, and to affect the progress of society. His emphasis is on self-culture and the American destiny. He writes: "A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."66
        Where evangelicals referred to scripture, the Transcendentalists actively turned to nature wishing to break with the shackles of the past and to assert new direction. They saw God everywhere manifest in nature, the epiphany of moral perfection and truth. In his "Nature" address, Emerson proclaims nature is a symbol of ultimate reality. "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." The ultimate reality underlying nature is symbolically illustrated by the qualities of nature. He explains how this symbolism is manifest in all language. "Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow." Elsewhere, he writes: "We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind." For Emerson, nature conforms to the "premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience."67
        Thoreau sees a similar relationship between nature and language as well. His analogies are not without their ethical implications:

This termination cious adds force to a word like the lips of browsing creatures which greedily collect what the jaw holds- -as in the word tenacious the first half represents the jaw which holds the last the lips which collect—It can only be pronounced by a certain opening & protruding of the lips so avaricious—These words express the sense of their simple roots with the addition as it were of a certain lip greediness. hence capacious & capacity—emacity When these expressive words are used the hearer gets something to chew upon.[sic] To be a seller with the tenacity & firmness & of the jaws which hold & the greediness of the lips which collect. The audacious man not only dares—but he greedily collects more danger to dare. The avaricious man not only desires & satisfies his desire—but he collects ever new browse in anticipation of his ever springing desires—what is luscious is especially tasted by the lips.
        The mastiff mouthed are tenacious. To be a seller with mastiff—mouthed tenacity of purpose—with moose-lipped greediness—To be edacious & voracius is to be not nibbling & swallowing merely—but eating & swallowing while the lips are greedily collecting more food.[sic]68

        In Walden, Thoreau writes: "I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight."69 Nature was the reality that he craved. The hound, bay horse, and turtle dove that he tracks represent the esoteric qualities in nature. Walden Pond is a place of magic, mystery, and wonder. Thoreau through his use of rich symbolism, wit, and metaphor invites his readers to see the world through the writer’s eyes. His poetic prose abounds in archetypal symbolism. Ponds represent the inner-depth of a man or a woman depending on one’s perspective. Mountains represent aspirations or the sublime; rivers, stream of consciousness or time; the seasons, rebirth and renewal; and a seedling, the wonders of creation. Pickerels, loons, moles, woodchucks, ants, minks, and muskrats all take on qualities mythic in proportion. Nature is the home of Pan, the forest god, who ranks high in Thoreau’s pantheon. A place of wild men "who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped."
        Thoreau compares himself with chanticleer bragging on his roost if only to wake up his neighbors, and writes: "Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep."70 He wants his readers to be conscious of the reality manifest in nature. He asks: "May we not see God? . . . Is not nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?" At the summit of Mount Ktaadn, rising high above the secluded woods of Maine, Thoreau exclaimed: "What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"71 Thoreau’s experience of the sublime at the summit of Mt. Ktaadn indicates with sufficient force his belief in the awesome presents of an ineffable something, God, in nature. Perfection is not ultimate; existing in moments of becoming, it is derived accordingly from consciousness.
        The belief that nature is symbolic of higher spiritual laws—that it reflects the inner-consciousness of an individual and their conscience—was not confined solely to Transcendentalism. Channing expresses similar views in his work, writing: "Scriptures continually borrow from nature and social life illustrations and emblems of spiritual truth."72 Unitarians everywhere tended to exalt human nature over sinfulness and many stressed conscience as an ethical imperative. In so doing, however, they also cautioned against excess. Andrews Norton, Dexter Professor of Biblical Literature at Harvard, was incensed by Emerson’s "Divinity" address and with the light-handedness in which Transcendentalism generally viewed the Gospels. Channing was more favorably inclined to the Transcendentalists and their view of nature than his conservative counterparts, but most would not have disagreed with him when he wrote: "I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not cower to human opinion, which feels itself accountable to a higher tribunal than man’s, which respects a higher law than fashion, which respects itself too much to be the slave or tool of the many or the few."73 Unitarian ministers such as Levi Fresbie, Henry Ware, and James Walker continually stressed the importance of conscience.74
        The Transcendentalists seem to have accepted a Kantian imperative to judge the acceptability of moral action. The logic dictates that men and women should will for themselves only those principles that can be willed for all humanity. In 1843, Thoreau wrote of instances in which the "individual genius" consents "with the universal" that is found in "the scripture of all nations," and that "all expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form."75 He sees a correspondence between the inner-most feelings of an individual to the universal laws of scripture as indicating a profound empathy of the human race or, in Jungian terms, a correlation between the collective unconscious and its archetypal symbols. The Transcendentalists did not reject tradition altogether on this account. In fact, history functioned as a corrective measure of their conscience theory. Because they accepted the fixity of natural laws, that transcendental reason, "spiritual truths" and "mathematic formulas," is the same in every individual at all times, they looked to history to find the correlation between the ideas of the past and present, and their universality. This explains not only Thoreau’s fascination with the scripture of several nations but with myth as well.
        Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers has recently been recognized as a significant contribution to the so-called "new views" controversy that arose within the Unitarian clergy when Transcendentalism began to voice its dissatisfaction with the old theology.76 Thoreau rejects historical Christianity and Church dogma but not the universality or the applicability of scripture to moral concerns. He writes:

All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all. All men are children, and of one family.

The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. . . . In the mythus a super human intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.

All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences. Suddenly and silently the eras which we call history awake and glimmer in us, and there is room for Alexander and Hannibal to march and conquer.77

History functions as a standard or as a reference point for Transcendentalism. This is why Emerson wrote his "Representative Men," and why Thoreau searched the annals of history for figures representative of his heroic ideal. Emerson referred to Plato, Shakespeare, and Napoleon while Thoreau made reference to Aristotle, Chaucer, and the heroic qualities of Cromwell and Raleigh.
         The book that produced the greatest stir among Unitarians, especially those who later made the transition to Transcendentalism, was Victor Cousin’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of History available by 1832 in America. Cousin argues all history can be combined into a single system known as eclecticism. He gives an outline of the history of philosophy and its general effect by describing his idea of the Useful, the Just, the Beautiful, the Godhead, and the Reflection. The first relates to the physical sciences and political economy; the second to civil society and jurisprudence; the third to art; the fourth to religion; and the fifth to necessity. Humanity has debated these five ideas throughout history using philosophy. Hence, he concludes: "Philosophy is the source of all light."78
        Cousin believes history follows a pattern according to four prehistoric archetypal ideas: sensationism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism.79 Philosophy began in the East—in India, China, and Persia—as an abstract philosophy and continued to develop as its influence spread westward. His position is not Eurocentric, however. He writes: "History has no golden age."80 While he admits philosophy became more concentrated and concrete as it underwent further development in the West, the earlier mythos of the East was retained. He finds truth, equally, in all philosophy at all times. "Philosophy in the East," he writes, "was, generally speaking, the reflected light of religion."81
        Emerson and Thoreau were both particularly moved by the story of Krishna’s council to Arjuna, the reluctant warrior of the Bhagavad-Gita. Cousin recounts the episode as one of sublime mystery. The warrior is told that he must "fight the battle," otherwise he would fall into disgrace as a coward. Krishna explains to Arjuna that "nothing exists but the eternal principle; being, in itself. . . . We are compelled to do, but as if we did it not, and without concerning ourselves about the result, interiorly motionless, with our eyes fixed unceasingly upon the absolute principle which alone exists with a true existence."82
        Cousin supports the idea of individual consciousness—that individuals are conscious of their powers of reason—and believes reason is independent of the individual and exists of its own accord. He does not make a distinction between the faculties of Reason and Understanding, as Coleridge does, but writes, "reason does not modify itself to suit our pleasure; we do not think as we wish to think; our understanding is not free."83 Instead, he makes a distinction between, what he terms, the me and the not me. Kant in Cousin’s opinion led to skepticism; he so proposed a solution by distinguishing between spontaneous and reflective reason. "Reason," he writes, "is not subjective; what I call a subject, is me; it is person, liberty, will. Reason has not any characteristic mark of individual personality, and of liberty. . . . Whoever said my truth your truth?"84 For Cousin, reason differs little from what is commonly termed the truth, which is fixed or absolute. Our capacity for understanding truth is, however, limited and subjective.
        Cousin’s book influence the earliest works of Transcendentalism, including Emerson’s "Nature," Theodore Parker’s "A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity," and Orestes Brownson’s New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church. Perry Miller called Brownson the "self-appointed apostle" of Cousin in America. When Thoreau took leave for a semester to teach in Canton, he stayed with Brownson.        
        Harvard records show Thoreau borrowed Cousin’s Introduction to the History of Philosophy from the library of the Institute of 1770 in June 1837 and renewed it again in July.85 In a June college essay entitled "Barbarities of Civilized States," Thoreau uses the phrase not me in reference to nature.86 He seems to have used the distinction between the me and the not me as a distinction between consciousness and conscience as well. In a sublime passage from Walden, he wrote: "However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you."87 In his "Nature Address," Emerson uses the not me phrase to denote nature, art, the body, and all persons other than the self.
        It is not scriptural authority that establishes truth, per se, but rather the universal forms that are suggested by scripture. Cousin writes: "Faith cannot but be the consent of reason to that which reason comprehends as true. This is the foundation of all faith. Take away the possibility of knowing, and there remains nothing to believe; for the very root of faith is removed."88 In Walden, Thoreau writes: "There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once—for the root is faith—I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say."89 Whether it is a belief in religious dogma or a belief in the absolute precepts of reason, in each case, the keystone is faith, which is needed in order of consent.
        Thoreau and Emerson were not eclectic philosophers in the strictest sense. Unlike Cousin, they never wanted to systematize philosophy. They were enthusiastic about his approach to history and with its emphasis on recurring archetypal symbols. Cousin essentially reaffirmed Kantian idealism within an eclectic system that had some of the same tendencies and inclinations as those inherent to Transcendentalism. Emerson had already been engaged in his own exhaustive study of philosophy having read Locke, Hume, Stewart, and Coleridge as well as Plato and the Stoics before he came to Cousin.90 The importance of French Eclecticism to Transcendentalism was in its affirmation of consciousness and conscience through archetypal symbols found in scripture, myth, and philosophy that recur at all times and in all nations.
        Transcendentalism began as a reform movement within the Unitarian Church. The Transcendentalists wanted to revive religious sentiment outside the traditional conventions and dogma of the Church. When Emerson asserted that the individual partakes in the divinity of God, he was not advocating the perfectionism of Finney or Noyes. Instead, Emerson believes every individual has a so-called "spark of divinity," but that this is realized by an acceptance of the inner-self or "Oversoul," as he terms it, and not by an acceptance, per se, of the Holy Spirit or Christ. Emerson’s belief, in this respect, is more akin to Buddhism or Hinduism, which also stresses a belief in the divine perfection of the soul. Using the language of Cousin, Emerson refers to the soul as the me and the body as the not me. Evangelicals, and particularly Noyes, emphasized the material and utilitarian qualities of perfectionism far more than did Emerson or Thoreau.
        Orestes Brownson was probably the greatest advocate of perfectionism among the Transcendentalists. He does not speak in terms of overthrowing the "nation" as Noyes does, but rather of reexamining certain principles. He writes:

Spiritualism and Materialism presupposes a necessary and original antithesis between Spirit and Matter . . . This antithesis generates perpetual and universal war. It is necessary then to remove it and harmonize, or unite the two terms. Now, if we conceive Jesus as standing between Spirit and Matter, the representative of both—God-Man—where both meet and lose their antithesis, laying a hand on each and saying, ‘Be one, as I and my father are one,’ thus sanctifying both and marrying them in a mystic and holy union, we shall have his secret thought and the true Idea of Christianity.91

By giving Spirit and Matter equal attention, Brownson believed an individual could balance the competing elements and realize their true nature, which consists equally of the two principles. Brownson, in fact, recognizes the proportional importance of the subject and the object. In order to facilitate their balance, he bespeaks his rather unorthodox plan of revising the Protestant work ethic and reversing the Biblical equation of a week. Instead of one day, an individual should devote six days to reverencing God and one day to work. Impractical or extravagant, perhaps, but Thoreau said as much in his commencement address, writing:

Let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead manly and independent lives; let them make riches the means and not the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial spirit. The sea will not stagnate, the earth will be green as ever, and the air as pure. This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful—it is more to be admired and enjoyed then, than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed,—the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.92

Notice, too, his subversion; Thoreau uses lowercase sabbath and uppercase Nature. The tone and emphasis that Brownson and Thoreau use are quit different from the sentiment conveyed by Garrison and Noyes, and yet they give as good a picture as any as to how the Transcendentalists believed society could be improved through self-culture.
        To suppose that Thoreau relished in languor would be to misjudge the man. He, in his 44 years, left behind a 2.5 million-word journal, 3,000 pages of notes on the American Indian, a 354-page manuscript on The Dispersion of Seeds, a 631-page manuscript on Wild Fruits, more than 700 pages of notes and charts on the natural history of Concord, and the Cape Cod, Maine Woods, and A Yankee in Canada manuscripts, and several essays, published or otherwise, on literature, history, nature, and reform, et al., as well as A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. These, his "sabbath" works, are testimony to his fecundity. As for earning his living by the "sweat of his brow," Thoreau was a land-surveyor, lecturer, freelance journalist, and a manufacturer of pencils, which rivaled the best European imports.
        Because of their emphasis on the individual, the Transcendentalists wanted some assurance, philosophically, that an individual was capable of free moral judgment. They referred not to the Enlightenment notion of reason based on intellection but to an intuitionism based on Kantian idealism and explained in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. Coleridge was not the only source for Transcendentalism, but his view illustrates well the kind of reasoning process in which they themselves engaged. Some intellectual process was necessary if they were to break with scriptural authority. The break was not necessarily complete, however, as the Transcendentalists often referred to the Bible as well as the scripture of several nations for universal notions of the Moral Law. They, no doubt, placed great emphasis on the affections, but without subscribing to the same kind of emotionalism and religious fervor that marked the Second Great Awakening. Nor was Transcendentalism predicated on a strict belief in nonviolence as was Abolitionism under the tutelage of Garrison, but on transcendent idealism, which found perhaps its greatest expression in Thoreau’s rich transcendental metaphor.

IV.
Early Thoreauvian Themes

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        Wendell Glick writes of the consequence of Thoreau’s defense of Brown: "It meant that he was admitting that he had been wrong in his life-long estimate of both man and the sort of universe in which he lived, and that, in the final analysis ‘expedients,’ and not ‘principles,’ were the determining agents in the governance of human affairs."93 Glick deduces his conclusion from the premise that Thoreau was content to allow "natural forces," which are inherently omnipotent, good, and universal, to decide the fate of slavery. Thoreau never recognized Brown’s raid as one of expediency but one of principle. He favored Brown’s "cause." Nor did he ever really advocate delay. As early as 1843, he wrote: "The true reformer does not want time, nor money, nor cooperation, nor advice. What is time but the stuff delay is made of?"94 Thoreau immediately championed the historical, heroic, and natural import of the Harper’s Ferry raid as the embodiment of liberty and justice, a view that was eventually almost universally recognized among Transcendentalists and Abolitionists alike, including Garrison.
        Thoreau did not remain aloof from the practical cares of society. For example, while at Harvard, he participated in the school’s oldest debating society, the Institute of 1770. He was elected a member, July 3, 1834, and participated in the debates over the next three years of his college career with a good attendance record.95 His involvement with the Institute connected him with the majority of his classmates and illustrates his early commitment to debating contemporaneous issues.
        He had a reputation among his fellow students as the man from Concord. In his "Class Book Autobiography," Thoreau wrote: "To whatever quarter of the world I may wander, I shall deem it my good fortune that I hail from Concord North Bridge."96 He was proud of the involvement of his town in the War for Independence. Reportedly, Charles Theodore Russell once burst into Thoreau’s dorm to harass him and a newly arrived Concord freshman because of their town pride. The incident was all in good fun; Russell was closely acquainted with Thoreau. Both were interested in the revolutionary history of their towns and often debated the subject at the club.97 North Bridge, as Emerson later wrote, and Thoreau quotes him in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was the site of "the shot heard round the world." Thoreau recorded his feelings after passing beneath the bridge on his river journey.

Ah, ’t is in vain the peaceful din
That wakes the ignoble town,
Not thus did braver spirits win
A patriot’s renown.98

        Thoreau’s patriotism, his "Concord pride," is often underestimated by those wishing to label him as a pacifist. His essay "Walking" praises westward expansion and American manifest destiny. He writes: "To Americans I hardly need to say,—
        "Westward the star of empire takes its way.’
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country."99
        His role as a reformer is also sometimes underestimated. Shortly after graduation, Thoreau was elected five times to office in the Concord Lyceum and from 1838 to 1839 served as Lyceum Secretary.100 He remained an active member of the lecture circuit for the next twenty-three years of his life, which proved to be the cynosure of his lifetime activity in all areas of reform. Like Emerson, Thoreau in his own right was a prodigious lecturer.
        Glick suggests that as a young adult Thoreau would not have supported John Brown’s raid because, in 1840, he made "such assertions" with the "blandest confidence" as "‘the strongest is always the least violent.’"101 Thoreau, no doubt, was essentially nonviolent. But he says the strongest is "least violent," not nonviolent. This is clear when we consider another quotation from his 1840 journal: "Let not ours be such nonresistance as the chaff that rides before the gale."102 Moreover, most scholars recognize that he had an early fascination with war and soldiers rather than an aversion for them, and it was only later that he toned down his language or advocated passive resistance. Linck Johnson, in "Contexts of Bravery: Thoreau’s Revisions of ‘The Service’ for a Week," for example, remarks that "the idealized soldier of Thoreau’s youthful dreams of glory had thus been superseded by a grotesque, nightmarish figure conjured up by the injustices of the Mexican War."103
        The Peace Convention initiatives that Garrison and Ballou spoke of were well known to Concordians. In 1841, the Concord Lyceum records show that non-resistance was a hot topic. On the 13^th and 27^th of January, the Lyceum held two successive debates on "Is It Ever Proper to Offer Forcible Resistance."104 The 13^th shows Frost and Hoar argued the affirmative and Alcott the negative. On the 27^th, John and Henry Thoreau argued the affirmative and, again, Alcott the negative. Following the debates a month later, Adin Ballou lectured on "Non-Resistance."
        Thoreau’s early writings show he did not reject violence out of principle. One of his earliest biographers, Frank Sanborn, who knew him personally, believed the "Service" was written, in part, as a response to the tactics of the peace movement. While scholars have sometimes questioned the accuracy of some of Sanborn’s claims, the evidence, here, supports the validity of his particular assertion. Thoreau concluded the essay: "Of such sort, then, be our crusade, which, while it inclines chiefly to the hearty good will and activity of war, rather than the insincerity and sloth of peace . . . earnestly applying ourselves to the campaign before us."105 Again, in his 1840 journal, Thoreau wrote: "I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul."106
        Thoreau’s epistemology differed from that of Garrison and Ballou. He believes religious certainty can be attained without a strict adherence to the Gospels. The Transcendentalists go to great pains to show that moral certainty is necessary because individuals have free will. The moral faculties are cultivated through self-reliance, self- education, and intuitive apprehensions of reality. Conscience is reliable. Individuals can increase the effectiveness of intuitionism by observing the correspondence between nature, society, and the past. These assumptions were based largely on Kantian Idealism and Coleridge’s distinction between the Reason and the Understanding. Thoreau believes through faith, conjecture, and empirical evidence that the idealism of Transcendentalism is not only representative of the ideal, the real world as he believes, but the apparent or actual world as well. His political essays are directed toward practical ends and are patterned on these same Transcendental ideals, which are consistent throughout his political essays.
        In a college essay written in 1835 entitled "The Comparative Moral Policy of Severe and Mild Punishments," Thoreau writes: "The end of all punishment is the welfare of the state,—the good of community at large,—not the suffering of an individual." By taking the end of all punishment as his ideal, Thoreau wants to understand the means to realize the ideal. He reasons the good of the individual is the good of society. In actual practice, lawgivers often lose site of the ideal, considering what is merely expedient. "It matters not to the lawgiver what a man deserves. . . ." In principle, the means should be just. There is a "higher tribunal" than the civic judge.107 He does not discount the possibility of there being "some advantage" to severe punishment, however. He writes: "It would seem then, that the welfare of society calls for a certain degree of severity; but this degree must bear some proportion to the offence. If this distinction be lost sight of punishment becomes unjust as well as useless—we are not to act upon the principle, that crime is to be prevented at any rate, cost what it may; this is obviously erroneous."108 To Thoreau, accordingly, severe punishments do not always discourage crime and in their severity may be unjust. The end of all punishment, then, can never be attained through injustice.
        Justice is best served through peaceful means as violence begets violence, and establishing the welfare of the individual or the state through its continuance is impossible. As long as injustice persists it must be resisted. In "Resistance to Civil Government," Thoreau writes of certain instances in which "an individual, must do justice, cost what it may." In college, he believed it was "erroneous" to assume that crime should be prevented "cost what it may" because in so doing an injustice may result. He is concerned with the preservation of justice above all in both cases, and elsewhere argues: "We do all stand in the front ranks of the battle every moment of our lives; where there is a brave man, there is the thickest of the fight, there the post of honor."109 To do justice is to battle with injustice, armed or otherwise, and in either case the hero willingly submits to its cause.
        By examining the past, Thoreau found examples of virtuous action. His 1843 essay on "Sir Walter Raleigh" can serve as an example. Thoreau writes of Raleigh: "He was a proper knight, a born cavalier, and in the intervals of war betook himself still to the most vigorous arts of peace, though as if diverted from his proper aim."110 Knighthood is a recurring theme in Thoreau’s political essays, and still more, rather a peculiar theme for a supposed pacifist. Thoreau writes: "Men claim for the ideal an actual existence also—but do not often expand the actual to the ideal."111 Instead, they follow what is expedient. The hero expands the actual to the ideal; he lives for its principle. Although the ideal may never materialize in actuality, society may never be free from all punishments; the hero nevertheless recognizes the reality and the inherent goodness of the ideal and strives toward its fulfilment through intermediate goals resisting injustice.
        Nature and history illustrate the heroic principle. In an 1851 journal entry Thoreau writes:

The story of Romulus & Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a mere fable; the founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar source. It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.
        America is the she wolf today and the children of exhausted Europe exposed on her uninhabited & savage shores are the Romulus & Remus who having derived new life & vigor from her breast have founded a new Rome in the West.
        It is remarkable how few passages comparatively speaking there are in the best literature of the day which betray any intimacy with nature.112

Thoreau reworks the fable illustrating a spiritual truth. The hero above all must show courage. His vigor is derived from nature. Not that geography is a determinate factor in the growth and progress of a civilization, but individuals feasting at the wellspring of life, so to speak, derive sustenance for new life, a beginning. Movement and activity continually overturn static and sedentary habits. The primitive facilitates the lofty; the hero is their relationship. He writes: "Bravery and Cowardice are kindred correlatives with Knowledge and Ignorance Light and Darkness—Good and Evil."113
        In Thoreau’s estimation, truth is absolute insofar as it derives its meaning from the principle of change. Truth for him is a verb and consists of relationships. As he wanted to find a balanced approach to severe and mild punishments, so also he wanted a balanced life overall. His diet was almost exclusively vegetarian, but he sometimes ate flesh. He almost never drank alcohol, tea, or coffee, but he had been known, on occasion, to have drunk fermented cider. He says he is "naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room," if his business called him thither. As a naturalist he never shot his specimens, yet as a boy he owned a fowling piece and enjoyed sport, although he says if he were to live in the wilderness he "should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest." He compares the individual in youth to a voracious caterpillar and in adulthood to the transformed butterfly, whose diet is significantly less ravenous. While his habits were chaste and temperate, he found in himself "an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one." And, he wrote: "I reverence them both."114
        Thoreau’s habits are consistent with Western ascetic practice and the literature of the past. Socrates was temperate, yet, he too, reportedly, could "sit out" the sturdiest Athenian. Thoreau is not ascetically austere. He is sympathetic about human foibles and chooses for himself the path of moderation. Virtue must coexist and harmonize with and consist of the higher and lower laws of his nature. Equanimity cannot be sacrificed for one virtue over another without detriment to both. The savage quality that produced Sparta, Rome, and America was active and vigorous. As Plato’s Republic recommends gymnastics to cultivate vigor and music, the sensibilities, so too, Thoreau seeks to cultivate his lower and higher natures. He believes that "the brave warrior must have harmony if not melody at any sacrifice," and writes: "Ever since Jerico fell down before a blast of ram’s horns, the martial and musical have gone hand in hand. —If the soldier marches to the sack of a town he must be preceded by drum and trumpet, which shall identify his cause with the accordant universe."115
        Reform movements were well established in America by 1837, the year Thoreau graduated from college. Garrison’s Abolition movement had gained national recognition along with Mann’s educational reforms and Beecher’s temperance movement. Robert Owen had founded New Harmony in Indiana in 1825 based on the socialistic teachings of Charles Fourier. The decade of the 1840's witnessed the growth of similar collective organizations. George Ripley organized his voluntary association, Brook Farm, in 1841 desiring an intellectual ret