means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on
British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long
after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an
American edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, including his essays on
German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In
1838 Ripley began to publish _Specimens of Foreign Standard
Literature_, which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of
translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected, he was
helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, and others who had
more or less connection with the transcendental movement.

The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his lecture on the
_Transcendentalist_, 1842, is as follows; "What is popularly called
transcendentalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism of the
present day acquired the name of transcendental from the use of that
term by Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of
Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was
not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there
was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not
come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that
these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated them
_transcendental_ forms." Idealism denies the independent existence of
matter. Transcendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the
soul a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the
outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the "noble
doubt" of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a dream, "this
great apparition." "It is a sufficient account of that appearance we
call the world," he wrote in _Nature_, "that God will teach a human
mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent
sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade.