But, leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!"

It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this
"revulsion against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is
highly dangerous to second-class minds. If one habitually prints
the words Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with
capitals, and relegates equally useful words like senses,
experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it because
he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is
neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had
its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable
visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was probably
bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of staid
New England had its humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson
Alcott. It is also true that the glorious affirmations of these
seers can be neither proved nor disproved. They made no
examination and they sought no validation of consciousness. An
explorer in search of the North Pole must bring back proofs of
his journey, but when a Transcendentalist affirms that he has
reached the far heights of human experience and even caught sight
of the gods sitting on their thrones, you and I are obliged to
take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such a man gladly, but it
depends upon the man, not upon the trustworthiness of the method.
Finally it should be observed that the Transcendental movement
was an exceedingly complex one, being both literary, philosophic,
and religious; related also to the subtle thought of the Orient,
to mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Platonists; touched