institution was effective in a most opportune way in establishing culture and wisdom in New England once and for all time on a broader and firmer basis.

Boston, the joint-editor of The Harbinger, and a frequent contributor to The Dial.

C. P. Cranch, graduate of the Divinity School at Cambridge, then a Unitarian clergyman, and finally a landscape painter and author.

Jones Very, of Salem, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard, traveled abroad, was the personal friend of Clarke, Channing, and others, and became a poet of almost highfalutin tendencies.

C. A. Bartol, of Freeport, Maine, a graduate of Bowdoin College, and the Cambridge Divinity School; became pastor of West Church, Boston, and was early a member of the Transcendental Club.

IV. CONCLUSION

GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FRENCH INFLUENCE ON NEWENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM

THE

HE office of bringing to a close this thesis on French Philosophers and New-England Transcendentalism" now faces us. In Part I, an attempt was made to define Transcendentalism, to sketch miscellaneous precursors of the movement, and to trace the beginnings of the philosophy in New England. In Part II, French expositors of the movement were taken up, the way in which the movement was in part transmitted into France was pointed out, Victor Cousin's and Théodore Jouffroy's exposition of the philosophy set forth, and a few words in general were added concerning the aspect of Transcendentalism in French dress. In Part III, the New-England phase of the phenomena was dealt with, especially George Ripley's, Margaret Fuller's, A. Bronson Alcott's, and R. W. Emerson's affirmation of Transcendentalism, and the relation which obviously exists in greater or less degree between what the New-England Transcendentalists thought and said and what was uttered by French exponents of the movement. And now, finally, in Part IV, it is in order for us to round off the dissertation by drawing up some general conclusions concerning the significance of French influence, such as it is, in its relation to the New-England movement.

The similarity of the precursors of both the New-England Transcendentalists and the French philosophers is one of the facts which at once makes impression. Both the New-England Transcendentalists and the French philosophers, whom we have under consideration, frequently refer, as has been cursorily evinced, to such figures in the history of philosophy as the writers of the Vedas, as Plato, Pythagoras, Plotinus; as Fichte, Kant, and Hegel. Elements

of idealism, more or less Transcendental in nature, appear, indeed, to have flourished widespread and intermingled throughout ancient and modern philosophy; and New-England Transcendentalists derived impetus quite apparently not only from the writings of French philosophers, but as well from the same sources in ancient and modern philosophy as the French philosophers turned to for inspiration.

French influence on New-England Transcendentalism was, then, it is evident, one among various more or less similar and correlated philosophical influences. In considering them, however, we find that the influence of French philosophy was not particularly predominant. In comparing the number of times that such representative New-England Transcendentalists as George Ripley, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson refer to such miscellaneous philosophers as Menu, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Pythagoras, Plotinus, Jamblichus, Boehme, Swedenborg, Berkeley, Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others, with the number of times they refer to the French philosophers, Cousin, Jouffrey, and the socialist Fourier, we find that the number of times the French philosophers are mentioned appears in truth small. In the sixteen volumes of The Dial,1 for instance, the chief organ of New-England Transcendentalism, the French philosophers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Fourier are referred to only about fifteen times; whereas Plato, the Greek philosopher, is mentioned over thirty times, and Fichte, the German idealist, is mentioned over twenty. In the "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature," too, the editor, George Ripley, informs us in the Preface that "among the writers whom it is proposed to give translations are Cousin, Jouffroy, Guizot, and Benjamin Constant in French; and Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, Richte, Novalis, Uhland, Korner, Voltz, Mentzel, Neander, Schleiermacher, De Wette, Olshausen, Ammon, Hase, and Twesen, in German."2 Thus we see that the amount of attention devoted to French influence, Transcendental in nature, in the "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature" as well as in The Dial, is, in proportion even to German influence alone, slight.

Somewhat disappointing, we must acknowledge, seems the slenderness of French influence. The eclectic philosophers Cousin and Jouffroy being in a measure the successors in France of the German Transcendentalists, their idealistic philosophy of the Restoration Period being admirably inclusive and pointed, and the French language itself in which they wrote being somewhat easier to comprehend by English speaking people than the German, one might naturally infer at first blush by exercising deductive reasoning that French influence in the early nineteenth century on New-England Transcendentalism would be not less, but greater, than the German influence. The case, however, turns out to be quite otherwise. The greater surge, boldness, originality of the German idealists apparently appealed more strongly to the young idealistic philosophers of New England than did the more rational, urbane, compromise philosophy of the French Eclectics. Nobly valorous, wittily discursive, sanely sociable as they are, the French Eclectics, nevertheless, strike one as being more notable for manners and convention, for graces and accomplishments, for sophistication and cosmopolitanism than for anything highly flavored of the Transcendental; yet the highly flavored Transcendental, such as is characteristic of the philosophy of the German idealists of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was just what the New-England idealists of the early nineteenth century experienced especial affinity for. The French philosophers, Cousin, Jouffroy, and the socialist Fourier, we have found, nevertheless, were well known to the Transcendentalists of New England; their writings were widely read in the original and in translation; and their influence on the New-England Transcendentalists, although not especially profound or extensive, is yet distinctly appreciable.

The wide learning of the French philosophers, Cousin and Jouffroy, exerted, we must believe, considerable influence. The French Eclectics helped, in other words, to extend the intellectual horizon of the New-England Transcendentalists, were efficacious in familiarizing them with the names of world-great philosophers, and in acquainting them with the gist of world-great philosophical systems. Cousin's comprehensive eclectic exposition of the history of philosophy and Jouffroy's summary eclectic exposition

of the history of ethics - both of which, we have seen, were familiar through various editions in the original and in translation to the New-England Transcendentalists are nothing short of masterly. "La philosophie," writes Cousin in his telling way, "dans tous les temps, roule sur les idées fondamentales du vrai, du beau, et du bien. L'idée du vrai, philosophiquement développée c'est la psychologie, la logique, la métaphysique; l'idée du bien, c'est la morale privée et publique; l'idée du beau, c'est cette science qu'en Allemagne on appelle l'esthétique, dont les détails regardent la critique littéraire et la critique des arts, mais dont les principes généraux ont toujours occupé une place plus ou moins considérable dans les recherches et même dans l'enseignement des philosophes, depuis Platon et Aristote jusqu'à Hutcheson et Kant." 1

The rationality and urbanity for which the French are illustrious, too, must have been, in some measure at least, communicated to the New-England Transcendentalists and been more or less appreciably influential among them. The reputation of French men of letters in general and of the French Eclectics of the nineteenth century in particular for rationality and urbanity is generally recognized. Comme il faut is the watchword of the French. To make no noise, to be serene, to avoid the crass and the brusque, to be adaptable to society and externals, are their characteristics. French genius, in short, strives to achieve finished form, gracious manners, polished periods; it tends to manifest in the realm of literature and philosophy the fruit and flowers of the thoughts and feelings of the human race rather than the more basic grain or trunk. The men-of-letters spirit incarnated by George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson was, we confidently aver, attributable in no small measure to the influence of the nineteenth century philosophers of the race of Madame de Staël, with whose writings these three New-Englanders were so patently familiar. It is interesting to note in this connection, as we have already pointed out, that A. Bronson Alcott, the only one among the New-England Transcendentalists guilty in his utterances of a Carlylean Germanic excess, is the very one Discourse d'ouverture, 1827. Cf. book review

1 Le Vrai, le Beau, le Bien notes in The Dial, October, 1842.