My Friends at Brook Farm | Page 6

contributors to The Dial were Horace Greeley, William Page, afterward President of The National Academy of Design, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and my father, Charles Sears. Their acknowledged leader was the Rev. George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm.
I do not know anything more about this old time Transcendentalism than I do about the Pragmatism of our day, and that is not much. I believe the two schools of thought were alike in this, they both held that modern civilization has gone sadly and badly astray in the pursuit of wealth. Not money but the love of money is, now as ever, the root of all evil. The first work of the makers of America was necessarily the creation of property, the accumulation of the means of life, but we have pushed this pursuit too far, have gone money mad not knowing when we should stop trying to get rich and give our time and attention to higher things.
There is another matter to be noted as of some significance namely that leading Transcendentalists were, and leading Pragmatists now are, scholars and university men. It is true America was not turning out university men in the '40's and it might perhaps better be said that the Transcendentalists were college men, but as several of them were educated in Germany the connotation may be allowed to stand. It was said of these learned students that at their meetings they read Dante in the original Italian, Hegel in the original German, Swedenborg in the original Latin, which language the Swedish seer always used, Charles Fourier in the original French, and perhaps the hardest task of all, Margaret Fuller in the original English. Margaret was an honored member of the illustrious company and was held in high esteem; but her writings are mighty hard reading. I can quite understand James Russell Lowell's judgment in his "Fable For Critics" where he condemns a certain literary offender to severe punishment, sentencing him to 30 days at hard labor, reading the works of Margaret Fuller.
It was, as above said, after one of his visits to Boston that my father came home with the suggestion of sending Althea and myself to school at Brook Farm. The idea met with a good deal of opposition from the Dutch side of the house, which was my side for all I was worth, but I suppose father opined that it was time some of the provincialism of the Old Colonie should be rubbed off. Through his acquaintance with Thurlow Weed he came to know Mr. Greeley and through Mr. Greeley was introduced to Dr. Ripley and the Transcendentalists, gaining, by the way, broader views and a wider range of ideas than those which had prevailed in Beaver Street for two hundred years. Such, I take it was the sequence of events, not as noted by a little boy but as partly imagined and partly reasoned out at a later time. Partly imagined, too, is the presumption that my father was attracted by the philosophic ideals presented by his Boston friends. A tired business man might well be impressed by the Transcendental teaching that our civilization has gone wrong in forcing all human energy into the one pursuit, that of getting riches. They held that while hard work rarely harms any one, the monotonous grind in the money making mills results in arrested development. Work as hard as you please, spend all the energy, all the talent, all the skill you have but not in seeking wealth. That is not worth while, and it prevents the doing of what is worth while. Do your best in the world; give all you can, but be sure to get a fair return, not in money but in better things. Seek culture, seek knowledge, seek character, seek friendship, good will, good health, good conscience, and the peace that passeth understanding shall be added unto you. Be content with a small measure of this world's wealth and do not crave costly luxuries to make a show withal. To this end, go out into the country; raise what you need as far as possible with your own hands, and enough more to exchange for such things as you cannot produce. Abandon the world, the flesh and the Devil and go back to the soil and find the Garden of Eden.
My father accepted these teachings in good faith and gave in his testimony with those who in The Dial and through other agencies were propagating the new philosophy. His engagements with others were such that he could not break away at the time to put these novel ideas to the test of actual experiment but no doubt he thought it wise and well to give his children an early initiation into the new life that was to regenerate the