Americian Unitarianism,Thoreau and the Vital force

* As stated in the English Social Review "Americian Romanticism differed from British in its close relationship to both Unitarianism and frontier individualism. The debt to the Unitarians resulted in a spirtual immanentism, belief in a God present throughout the world, which later reappeared in the idea of socialim as a new religion.The debt to frontier individualism resulted in an ideal of self sufficency what later reappeared in the idea of socialism as involving a personal life"(878,79).
*"While British Romantics typically thought nature could inspire the imaginative faculty within men or at most point to the divine, Americian Romantics typically believed God and nature to be actually coextensive" (880)
*"The immanentism of the American Romantics encourged them to argue that people come to know God through direct intuition of an absolute being rather than a miraculous revelation embodied in either the Bible or the Incarnation" (880).
*"American Romantics believed that personal intuitions have moral authority because individuals contain the divine within themselves"(880).
*"Thoreau proclaimed the individual conscience, not the law, as the supreme moral ariter: 'political obligation depends on the moral judgement of the individual and the best governement is one which does not govern'(880).

*In London Unitarians stood for a rational and liberal approach to Christiantiy: "They opposed what they considered to be the irrational concept of the Trinity, arguing instead for the single personality of God and they rejected what they considered to be immoral dogmas of eternal punishment, inherited guilt, and vicarious atonement. Therefore Unitarian theology opened the way to a belief in a single spiritual deity existing within nature, rather than a transecendent God standing outside nature....The immanentism of the American romantics appears in their view of God as present throughout the world, realizing his divine purpose through natural processes.....Everything contains the divine spirit so everything is united in a single whole. Because the divine dwells in everything, each thing contains the laws and meaning of the universe within itself"(879,80).

*"The Americian Romantics saw their ideal as something which was being realized through the action of the divine purpose in history". Thoreau "drew inspiration from Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic theory, which stated the eighteenth century belief in the perfectibility of mankind, a belief which fitted well with Americian immanentism. Just as the democrats described the American polity as part of God's design, the Romantics could take the American ideal to be the summit of the immanent working out of the divine will"(881).

*"American Romantics inherited the ideal of a democratic republic composed of self sufficient farmers". They believed in the virtue of the 'rough life' spent working the land. "True some British Romantics called for the simplification of life and the rejection of unnatural wants created by an industral society, as when Ruskin used the example of Gotheic architecture to illustrate how mechanism had replaced skill in the workplace. But while Ruskin wanted to return to skilled craftmenship which he thought produced artisitc goods, Thoreau wanted people to minimize their possessions. Whereas Ruskin wanted workers to be able to exercise their creative implulses free from the regime of the machine, Thoreau wanted people to become self sufficient. Whereas Ruskin established new guilds and revitalized the handmade-linen industry in Langdale, Thoreau lived alone in a hut at Walden Pond where he tried to 'simplify, simplify', to obtain spirtual wealth by living close to nature, reducing his material wants and satisfying any residual needs by his own manual labour"(881).


Bevir, Mark. Britism Socialism and Americian Romanticism. English Historical Review. Longman Group Limited. 1995.
(www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/)

Thoreau Quotes:

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business".

"In Wildness is the preservation of the world"

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify. Simplify"