for those definite religious doctrines of the old New England
theologians. For almost two centuries, Emerson's mental and
spiritual muscles had been in training for him in the moral and
intellectual contentions, a part of the religious exercise of his
forebears. A kind of higher sensitiveness seems to culminate in
him. It gives him a power of searching for a wider freedom of
soul than theirs. The religion of Puritanism was based to a great
extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma
of its theology--a search for a path, so that the soul could
better be conducted to the next world, while Emerson's
transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the
unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast
bounds of innate goodness, as it might be revealed to him in any
phenomena of man, Nature, or God. This distinction, tenuous, in
spite of the definite-sounding words, we like to believe has
something peculiar to Emerson in it. We like to feel that it
superimposes the one that makes all transcendentalism but an
intellectual state, based on the theory of innate ideas, the
reality of thought and the necessity of its freedom. For the
philosophy of the religion, or whatever you will call it, of the
Concord Transcendentalists is at least, more than an intellectual
state--it has even some of the functions of the Puritan church--
it is a spiritual state in which both soul and mind can better
conduct themselves in this world, and also in the next--when the
time comes. The search of the Puritan was rather along the path
of logic, spiritualized, and the transcendentalist of reason,
spiritualized--a difference in a broad sense between objective
and subjective contemplation.

The dislike of inactivity, repose and barter, drives one to the