The Concord School of Philosophy [pp. 49-71]

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.
LL people interested in the state of opinion know that
there met at Concord, in the middle of July last, a company of very high-souled men and women who held high converse with one another, and with high theories, till the middle
of August. I was politely asked to join them, albeit they knew
I was not one of them. With great delicacy of feeling they
proposed to me a theme in which it was supposed I would be
specially interested, the Scottish philosophy, in which I was
reared and to which I adhere, not, however, in all its doctrines,
but simply in its method, which discovers truths prior in their
nature to the induction which discovers them, and which indeed
could not discover them unless they were already there in the
mind. I regarded it at the time, and still regard it, as a misfortune to me that, owing to an old standing obligation to go elsewhere, I was not able to accept their invitation.
Those who met were drawn together by a common faith and
sentiment not easily defined (the school is not much inclined to
lay restraints on itself by definition), yet noticeable by all. They
constitute a school quite as much so as the ancient Pythagoreans, the Platonists, and Neoplatonists, with whom they have
certain interesting affinities. They believe in mind as infinitely
higher than matter,-some of them believe in matter simply as
a veil thrown over mind. They are sure that in mind there is
vastly more than sense, than sight or touch or hearing. Some
of them would burst the bounds of space and time, which do so
hem us in, and go out into the eternal, the infinite, the absolute.
They are seeking to mount to a sphere far above the mundane,
and if they do not rise to the sky, which is apt to become ever
more remote as we ascend, they at least, as in a balloon, reach
4