It is Sun Day, and it is time for my regular walk to the beach. But it is cloudy and I would not be surprised if it rains for a few minutes until the Sun burns off the overcastting, therefore I shall take an hour to jot out a few thoughts I had earlier this morning over coffee while perusing someone else's thoughts, namely those of Orestes Brownson, published 1836 in The Christian Examiner under the heading 'Cousin's Philosophy.'

Orestes Brownson, editor of his own organ, The Boston Quarterly Review, was one of the leading lights of the broad movement known as New England Transcendentalism. He was the American disciple of Victor Cousin, a popular French philosopher who exposed the ideas of Plato, Locke, Kant, Hegel and other great thinkers to laymen in a smooth and clear manner. Cousin culled what he felt were the best ideas from the various philosophical schools and presented them as a philosophy he referred to as Eclecticism. His worst critics called him mediocre and unoriginal as a philosopher, but conceded he was an excellent expositor and smooth talker.

Cousin did not claim originality for Eclecticism except to say its originality was in exposing truth. He said that if a classification of his philosophy were wanted, "Spiritualism" would do nicely. However, Cousin's sort of spiritualism was tempered by "down to earth" common sense and by the materialism and sensationism he objected to as the sole explanation of reality. Many of his admirers ignored that aspect, which he did find some truth in, because they were sick and tired of the competitive pursuit of property rationalized by intellectual resort to Locke's primary notion of the nature of all knowledge: sense impressions, derived from sensation, and reflections on same.

Whereas Locke by temperament was a pious man in direct contradiction to his apparently atheistic philosophy, others not so pious resolved the contradiction by full resort to the greedy pursuit of private property. Of course many Christians were in effect doing the same thing, for their God for all intents and purposes was to be found only in heaven. Wherefore a number of Christians in the United States were disgruntled by the hypocrisy supported by the leading authorities, and were eager to put the Holy Spirit back into God and Nature. Spiritualists were also troubled by Hume's deduction from Locke, that there is no logical reason to believe there is an objective law corresponding to the notion of cause and effect; hence doubt was cast not only upon God as Supreme Cause, but also upon the free will of his likeness - Man - not to mention mechanical science which until then could not do without cause and effect relations.

The modern philosophical notion that Victor Cousin's admirers liked best was the "transcendental" notion of Kant, which many of them interpreted to mean that everyone has intuitive access or immediate consciousness of facts which are not derived from sense perception and reflection thereupon. The New England Transcendentalists, after reading some of Victor Cousin's eloquent lectures as well as Samuel Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, used the transcendental notion as their launching pad to supernatural heights far removed from Kant's stable neighborhood; for example, last evening I perused an exalted tract written by an anonymous Transcendentalist who paused during a wonderful fight of imagination to apologetically confess he (or she) had never read Kant.

So untethered had Transcendentalists become, the term took on a pejorative connotation. Just as many thinkers over a century later at first denied they were Existentialists and then took advantage of the term's growing popularity, the so-called Transcendentalists disassociated themselves with Transcendentalism, and then were pleased to have it. Brownson made an early effort to avoid the term. In Volume II of his The Boston Quarterly Review, we find his following statement:

"There manifested a singular pertinacity in confounding M. Cousin with certain persons among ourselves, who, for some reason not known to us, have received the appellation of Transcendentalists... We say again that M. Cousin is not a Transcendentalist, as the term appears to be understood in this community. It is not easy to determine what people mean by the term Transcendentalist; but we suppose they mean to designate by it, when they use it as a term of reproach, a man who, in philosophizing, disregards experience and builds on principles obtained not by experience, but by reasoning a priori. In this sense Cousin is no Transcendentalist. Nor, indeed, was Kant."

Brownson stated later that Transcendentalism is "the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing intuitively, or of attaining to a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the sense..." The pre-eminent Transcendentalist, Emerson, jokingly declared it was anything non-traditional, and later, in a serious vein, he claimed it was the American Idealism of 1842, acquiring its name from Kant's use of the term, "transcendental."

Now then, either to avoid confusion, or, if I fail to make myself perfectly clear, to mystify my audience to no certain end, I shall try to cram Kant into a nutshell - my belief in the miracle of Free Will inspires me to make the attempt. Kant postulated an Understanding that imposes certain categorical or necessary forms on Sensibility; for instance, time and space are prerequisite to experience. Those forms, which we intuit and become more fully aware of as concepts are prior to and independent of Sensibility, hence they are transcendental. Therefore human consciousness is not a mere passive victim of Sensibility, but plays an active role via Understanding - concrete perceptions are converted into abstract thought.

Now over and above Sensibility and Understanding stands Reason in two aspects: Pure Reason and Practical Reason. The pure or theoretical function is to analyze, clarify, unify, and systemize concepts. Pure Reason regulates but it does not constitute thought, and since it deals with concepts alone, to the exclusion of objects of experience, Pure Reason proves nothing - it cannot prove the existence, for example, of God. But Practical Reason, which is morality or Reason in action, can certainly postulate what Pure Reason cannot demonstrate, and we can act accordingly; that is, reasonably. For example, to resolve the enmity between individuals, Kant issued his pragma or famous Categorical Imperative, his version of the universal Golden Rule commanding each of us to act as a universal legislator for humane ends as if we each are a king of a humane kingdom. Since desire stands in the way of performing that duty, and our immediate failures may cause us to lose faith in the long term project, we need to gird ourselves with a few assumptions to help regulate our desires to our mutual goal of peace, happiness and prosperity on Earth.

1. We can probably do it; 2. We have the time to do it; 3. We have the conditions to do it. In other words: 1. We have the free will to act rationally; 2. We have plenty of time to achieve our goal; 3. The structure of the universe is meaningful to us because it permits us to realize our objective; In fewer words, for the purposes of our grand experiment, we may assume the existence of: 1. Free Will; 2. Immortality; 3. God.

As this point I must declare an intermission since my hour is up and the Sun is glancing at the beach. I shall soon pick up here where I left off.