150 A Century of Science 



or the divine authority of Scripture, was held by 

 a number of eminent persons of strong prosaic 

 common sense and feeble spirituality, among whom 

 may be named Franklin and Jefferson and John 

 Adams. This phase of free thought was of con- 

 siderable importance, but the dominant influence 

 in New England down to the rise of the transcen- 

 dental movement .was that which could be traced 

 back to Edwards. 



In the early part of the present century, the 

 most advanced phase of liberal thought, repre- 

 sented by the Unitarians in Massachusetts, was 

 trying to hold an utterly untenable position, half- 

 way between narrow orthodoxy and untrammelled 

 free thinking, when the ground began to be cut 

 from under it by the transcendentalists, whose 

 native temperaments, not wanting in kinship with 

 that of Edwards, were stimulated by a brief con- 

 tact with Kantian and post-Kantian speculation in 

 Germany. In Emerson's poetic soul the result was 

 a seminal influence upon high thinking, in America 

 and in the Old World, the power of which we 

 cannot but feel, but which it is as yet too soon 

 to estimate. In the middle of the century some 

 wholesome destructive work still needed to be 

 done, and it was well done. When German criti- 

 cism, with the other weapons in the powerful hands 



