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

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.
the clouds, whence, as the traveller in the Alps, they gain grand
views of the heavens above them and lovely views of the green
vales below them.
They are all aspiring after an excellence which they do not
find in the busy pursuits and attractive fashions of the world;
nor even in its literature and its science, in its newspapers and
its novels, which seem to them to have too much of the clay of
the earth sticking to them, and to be all too much held down
by terrestrial gravity. They are longing and seeking for something higher and better for themselves and for the community.
All of them are utterly opposed to materialism under every
form. A number are driven to Concord under the influence of
a recoiling wave opposed to the whole secular spirit of the age.
They feel that even physical science, as the mere co-ordination
of material and ever-changing objects, cannot satisfy the cravings of the soul. Most of them adopt the Christian religion on
the same ground as many of the Platonists did in the second
century, as in consonance with their lofty philosophic ideas.
Others rather turn away from it as the Neoplatonists in Alexandria did, because (as shown so graphically in Kingsley's
"Hypatia") it is too definite in its precepts and statements
of fact and doctrine. Some of them, in accepting it, adapt it
to their tastes and make it a cloud lowered from heaven to
earth, and embracing in it Buddhism and all religions with their
acknowledged errors because containing so much truth. A few
of them are disposed to believe in spiritual media and ropetying-just as their prototypes among the Alexandrian Neoplatonists did in magic and necromancy, as bringing heaven into
close connection with earth.
Most appropriately the association met at Concord. The
place, with its three thousand dwellers, is in the level country
as it swells towards the mountain country to which it looks up.
It is a characteristic New England village, only it has been associated with more men and women of real genius than any like
place in America: with Hawthorne and his weird fancies; with
Margaret Fuller' and her enthusiastic and fascinating talks;
1 Julia Ward Howe tells us "Margaret Fuller once said that she accepted the
universe, and Carlyle laughed heartily on hearing it, and said,'I think she'd
better."'
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