Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890

This cordial sympathy with science, this absence of all savor of a polemical spirit, this hearty welcoming of every fact of anatomy and chemistry, is very noble and inspiring. It is very wise, too, though the noble, hearty side was alone attractive to him. He had in view no other, being a single-minded lover of truth. But, nevertheless, he could not have adopted a more politic course. For thus he propitiated the scepticism of the age, struck in with the prevailing current, disarmed opposition, and erected his own principles on the eminence which scientific men have raised and which they cannot build too high for his purposes. He doubles on his pursuers, and fairly flanks his foes. This throws the labor of refuting him on the idealists, who may not care to become responsible for his positions, and may demur to conclusions he arrives at, while they cannot but applaud his general aims, and wish they could give positive assent to all his specific doctrines. There was always this discrepancy between his sentiment and his logic; but it came out most conspicuously in his elaborate arguments.

The burden of his exposition was the existence of an ideal sphere, quite distinct from visible phenomena; facts of consciousness attesting personality, a moral law, an intelligent cause, an active conscience, a living heart; order, beauty, harmony, humanity, self-forgetfulness, self-denial. As he states it:

I claim, against a strictly logical empirical method, three classes of facts: first, the authentic facts of the Moral Sense, whenever it appears as the transcender of the ripest average utility; second, the facts of the Imagination, as the anticipator of mental methods by pervading everything with personalty, by imputing life to objects, or by occasional direct suggestion; third, the facts of the Harmonic Sense, as the reconciler of discrete and apparently sundered objects, as the prophet and artist of number and mathematical ratio, as the unifier of all the contents of the soul into the acclaim which rises when the law of unity fills the scene. Upon these facts, I chiefly sustain myself against the theory which, when it is consistently explained, derives all possible mental functions from the impacts of objectivity.

If Mr. Weiss had stopped with this general thesis, he would probably have carried most Rationalists, certainly the mass of Transcendentalists, with him. They would have been only too glad to welcome so clear and brilliant a champion. But he insisted on gathering up these conceptions into two points of doctrine – God and Immortality. On these points his arguments become strained, and too subtle for ordinary minds. Indeed, many will be inclined to suspect his whole exposition, which would be a misfortune of a very grave character. Mr. Emerson avoided all definite assertion of personality carried beyond the limits of individuality in the present state of existence. Mr. Weiss is more daring, and proclaims a God who arranges creation as it is, and an immortality that drops what to most people constitutes their highly valued possessions – namely, their "animalities" of various kinds. What will most men think of a God who "takes his chances," who "in planet-scenery and animal life is at his play," who puts up in his divine laboratory "curare and strychnine," and cannot "recognize the word disaster," though he makes the thing? To how many will an immortality be conceivable that can "belong only to immutable ideas," that only "springs from the vital necessity of their own souls," that is a clinging "to the breast of everlasting law"?

To tell the truth, the arguments themselves for this rather questionable result of idealism are somewhat unconvincing, not to say fanciful. They are chiefly of a dogmatic kind, that may be met with counter affirmations, equally valid. Many of them are stated in a symbolical or poetical or illustrative manner, the most dangerous of all methods. Examples of this might be multiplied indefinitely. I had marked several for confirmation, but they were too long for quotation. One instance of his mode of reasoning may be given4:

It is objected that no thought and feeling have ever yet been displayed independently of cerebral condition; they must have brain, either to originate or to announce them. If brain be source or instrument of human consciousness, what preserves it when the brain is dead? But there would have been no universe on such terms as that. What supplied infinite mind with its preliminary sine qua non of brain matter?

But, surely, if this is an argument at all, if it does not beg the very question in debate – namely, whether there is an infinite mind, – is it not an argument for atheism? For either the existing universe fully expresses Deity, in which case Deity is something less than infinite; or Deity must be conceived as very imperfect, and a progressive, tentative Divinity is no better than none.

To be sure, he says: "We attribute Personality to the divine Being, because we cannot otherwise refer to any source the phenomena that show Will and Intellect." That is to say, we yield to a logical necessity. To argue that materialism "reeks with immortality" because "the baldest negation is not merely a verbal contradiction of an affirmation, but a contribution to its probability, – for it testifies that there was something previously taken for granted," – is really a play upon words, inasmuch as the denial is simply an affirmation of certain facts, and by no means a categorical declaration involving all the facts at issue. By claiming none but relative knowledge, the antithesis is removed.

One is conscious of a suspicion that the author's tremendous overflow of nervous vitality had much to do with the vehemence of his persuasions. He himself countenances such a suspicion. "I confess," he declares, "to an all-pervading instinct of personal continuance, coupled with a latent, haunting feeling that there is a point somewhere in human existence, as there has been in the past, where animality controls the fate of men. Where is that point? We recoil from every effort to draw the line." He had a very strong sense of personality, with its inevitable reference of persistency. "To us, perhaps," he cries, in a kind of anguish, "no thought could be so dreadful, no surmise so harrowing, as that we might slip into nonentity. We impetuously repel the haunting doubt. We shut the eyes, and cower before the goblin in abject dread until it is gone. With the beauty-loving and full-blooded Claudio, we cry, —

Oh, but to die, and go we know not where."

and he quotes the rest of the famous passage in "Measure for Measure," adding for himself: "Put us anywhere, but only let us live; and we could feel with Lear, when he says to Cordelia, —

Come, let's away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage."

Then, too, there come to us the tender and overpowering moments when we can no longer put up with being separated from beloved objects, who tore at the grain of our life when they went away elsewhere, with portions of it clinging to them. We must have them again. Shall life be stabbed and no justice compensate these sickening drippings of the soul in her secret faintness? The old familiar faces have registered in our hearts a contempt for graves and burials. Not so cheaply can we be taken in, when the lost life lies quick in memory still, and cries against the insults which mortality wreaks on love.

Is not this an exclamation of temperament?

John Weiss was essentially a poet. His pages are saturated with poetry. His very arguments are expressed in poetic imagery. To take two or three examples:

One who rides from South-west Harbor to Bar Harbor in Mt. Desert will see a grove in which the pines stand so close that all the branches have withered two-thirds of the way up the trunks, and are nothing but dead sticks, broken and dangling. But every tree bears close, each to each, its evergreen crown; and they seem to make a floor for the day to walk on. This pavement for the feet of heaven, more precious than the fancied one of the New Jerusalem, stretches all round the world, above the thickets of our spiny egotism, where people run up into the only coherence upon which it is safe for Deity to tread.

Or this about the poet's inspired hour:

Through flat and unprofitable moments, a poet is waiting for the next consent of his imagination. The bed of every gift, that lately sparkled or thundered as the freshet of the hills sent its surprises down, lies empty, waiting for the master passion to open the sluice when it hears the steps of coming waves. The poet's nature strains against the dumb gates of his body and his mood. With power and longing he hears them open, and is brim full again with the rhythm that collects from the whole face of Nature, – the hillside, the ravine, the drifting cloud, the vapors just arrived from the ocean, the drops that flowers nod with to flavor the stream, the human smiles that colonize both banks of it. All passions, all delights hurry to possess his thought, crowd into the precincts of his person, pain him with the tumult in which they offer him obedience, remind him of his last joy in their companionship, and will not let him go till he ennobles them by bursting into expression. Relief flows down with every perfect word; the congested soul bleeds into the lyric and the canto; the poet's burden becomes light-hearted, and the supreme moment of his travail, when it breaks in showers of his emotion, cools and comforts him; he must die or express himself. All the blood in the earth's arteries is running through his heart; all the stars in the sky are set in his brain's dome. This light and life must be discharged into a word, and the poet restored to health and peace again.

Or the following rhapsody about health:

What a religious ecstasy is health! Its free step claims every meadow that is glad with flowers; its bubbling spirits fill the cup of wide horizons and drip down their brims; its thankfulness is the prayer that takes possession of the sun by day and the stars by night. Every dancing member of the body whirls off the soul to tread the measures of great feelings, and God hears people saying: "How precious also are thy thoughts, how great is the sum of them! When I awake, I am still with thee." Yes, – when I awake, but not before; not while the brain is saturated with nervous blood, till it falls into comatose doctrines, and goes maundering with its attack of mediatorial piety and grace; not while a stomach depraved by fried food, apothecary's drugs, and iron-clad pastry (that target impenetrable by digestion) supplies the constitution with its vale of tears, ruin of mankind, and better luck hereafter. When all my veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of my eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore; when the roaming gifts come home from Nature to turn the brain into a hive of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of the earth beneath and the heavens above, – then I am the subject of a Revival of Religion.

Or these passages about music, of which he was always a devoted lover, a passionate admirer, an excellent critic. My first extract is used to illustrate the doctrine of evolution, and suggests Browning's poem of "Abt Vogler." It should be said, by the way, that Weiss was a great student of Browning, whose lines in "Paracelsus," prophetic of the evolution doctrine, was often on his lips. He even understood "Sordello."

The divine composer, summoning instrument after instrument into his harmony, climbed with his theme from those which offered but a single note to those that exhaust the complexity of thought and feeling, to combine them into expression, kindling through hints, phrases, sudden concords, mustering consents of many wills, releases of each one's felicity into comradeship, till the sweet tumult becomes his champion, and bursts into an acclaim of a whole world. "I ought – so then I will." The toppling instruments concur, become the wave that touches that high moment, lifts the whole deep, and holds it there.

When perfect music drives its golden scythe-chariot up the fine nerves, across the bridge of association, through the stern portcullis of care, and alights in the heart of man, there is adoration, whether he faints with excess of recognition of one long absent, and lies prostrate in the arms of rhythm, feeling that he is not worthy it should come under his roof, or whether he mounts the seat and grasps the thrilling reins; God's unity is riding through his distraction, brought by that team of all the instruments which shake their manes across the pavement of his bosom, and strike out the sparks of longing.

In calling Mr. Weiss essentially a poet, I am far from implying that he was not a thinker. Perhaps he was more subtle and more brilliant a thinker for being also a poet – that is, for seeing truth through the medium of the imagination, for following the path of analogy. At any rate, his being a poet did not in the least interfere with the acuteness or the precision of his thinking, as any one can see who reads his chapters – those, for example, which compose the volume entitled "American Religion." I had marked for citation so many passages that it would be necessary to quote half the book to illustrate my thesis. When I first knew him, he was a strict Transcendentalist. Dr. Orestes Brownson, no mean judge on such matters, spoke of him as the most promising philosophical mind in the country. To a native talent for metaphysics, his early studies at Heidelberg probably contributed congenial training. His knowledge of German philosophy may well have been stimulated and matured by his residence in that centre of active thought; while his intimacy, on his return, with the keenest intellects in this country may well have sharpened his original predilection for abstract speculation. However this may have been, the tendency of his genius was decidedly toward metaphysical problems and the interpretation of the human consciousness. This he erected as a barrier against materialism; and this he probed with a depth and a fearlessness which were truly extraordinary, and would have been remarkable in any disciple of the school to which he belonged. No one that I can think of was so fine, so profound, so analytical. His volume on "American Religion" was full of nice discriminations; so was his volume on the "Immortal Life"; so were his articles and lectures. His "Life of Theodore Parker" abounded in curious learning as well as in vigorous thinking. He could follow, step by step, the great leader of reformatory ideas, and went far beyond him in subtlety and accuracy of mental delineation. He could not rest in sentiment, must have demonstration, and never stopped till he reached the ultimate ground of truth as he regarded it. Ideas, when he found them, were usually, not always, expressed in symbolical forms. His alert fancy detected likenesses that would have been concealed from common eyes; and often the splendor of the exposition hid the keenness of the logical temper, as a sword wreathed with roses lies unperceived. But the tempered steel was there and they who examined closely felt its edge.

He was a man of undaunted courage, being an idealist who lived out of the world, and a living soul animated by overwhelming convictions, which he was anxious to convey to others as of immense importance. He believed, with all his heart, in the doctrines he had arrived at, and, like a soldier in battle, was unconscious of the danger he incurred or of the wounds he received, being unaware of his own daring or fortitude. He was an anti-slavery man from the beginning. At a large meeting held in Waltham in 1845, to protest against the admission of Texas as a slave State, Mr. Weiss, then a minister at Watertown, Mass., delivered a speech in which he said: "Our Northern apathy heated the iron, forged the manacles, and built the pillory," declared that man was more than constitutions (borrowing a phrase from James Russell Lowell), and that Christ was greater than Hancock and Adams. To his unflinching devotion to free thought in religion, he owed something of his unpopularity with the masses of the people, who were orthodox in opinion, though his failure to touch the general mind was probably due to other causes. The class of disbelievers was pretty large in his day and very self-asserting. Boldness never fails to attract; and brilliancy, if it be on the plane of ordinary vision, draws the eyes of the multitude, who are on the watch for a sensation.

The chief trouble was that his brilliancy was not on the plane of ordinary vision, but was recondite, ingenious, fanciful. He was too learned, too fond of allusions – literary, scientific, historical, – too swift in his mental processes. His addresses were delivered to an audience of his friends, not to a miscellaneous company. They were of the nature of soliloquies spoken out of his own mind, instead of being speeches intended to meet the needs of others. His lectures and sermons were not easy to follow, even if the listener was more than usually cultivated. Shall it be added that his sincerity of speech, running into brusqueness, startled a good many? He was theological and philosophical, and he could not keep his hands off when what he considered as errors in theology or philosophy came into view. His wit was sharper than he thought, while the laugh it raised was frequently overbalanced by the sting it left behind in some breasts. It was too often a "wicked wit," barbed and poisoned, which one must be in league with to enjoy. They who were in sympathy with the speaker were delighted with it, but they who were not went off aggrieved. No doubt this attested the earnestness of the man, who scorned to cloak his convictions; but it wounded the self-love of such as were in search of pleasure or instruction, and interfered with his general acceptableness. A broad, genial, good-natured, truculent style of ventilating even heresies may not be repulsive to people of a conventional, believing turn; in fact, it is not, as we know. But the thrusts of a rapier, especially when unexpected, are not forgiven. Mr. Weiss drew larger audiences as a preacher on religious themes than he did as a lecturer on secular subjects, where one hardly knew what to look for, because he was known to be outspoken and capable of introducing heresies on the platform.

Then he was in all respects unconventional. His spontaneous exuberance of animal spirits, which led him to roll on the grass, join in frolicsome games, play all sorts of antics, indulge in jokes, mimicry, boisterous mirthfulness, was inconsistent with the staid, proper demeanor required by social usage. How he kept himself within limits as he did was a surprise to his friends. Ordinary natures can form no conception of the weight such a man must have put upon his temperament to press it down to the level of common experience. Temptations to which he was liable every day do not visit average minds in their whole lifetime, and cannot by such minds be comprehended. The stiff, upright, careful old man cannot understand the jocund pliability of the boy, who, nevertheless, simply expends the superfluity of his natural vigor, and relieves his excess of nervous excitability. On thinking it all over, remembering his appetite for life, his joy in existence, his nervous exhilaration, his love of beauty, his passionate ardor of temperament, I am surprised that he preserved, as he did, so much dignity and soberness of character. I have seen him in his wildest mood, yet I never saw him thrown off his balance. With as much brilliancy as Sydney Smith, he had, as Sydney Smith had not, a breadth of knowledge, a depth of feeling, a soaring energy of soul that kept him above vulgar seductions, and did for him, in a nobler way, what ambition, love of place, conventional associations did for the famous Englishman.

The difficulty was that he was too far removed from the common ground of sympathy. He could not endure routine, or behave as other people behaved, and as it was generally fancied he should. If Sydney Smith's jocularity interfered with his promotion, how much more did he have to contend with who to the jocularity added an enthusiastic devotion to heresy, a partiality for metaphysical speculation, and a poetic glow that removed him from ordinary comprehension! With an unworldliness worthy of all praise, but fatal to the provision of daily bread, he left the ministry, a fixed income, a confirmed social position, ample leisure for study and for literary pursuits, and launched forth on the uncertain career of lecturer. He was not the first who failed in attempting to harness Pegasus to a cart, in the hope of making him useful in mundane ways. Neither discharged his full function. The cart would not run smoothly, and the steed was not happy. The old profession has this advantage: that to all practical purposes, the wagon goes over the celestial pavement where there is no mud nor clangor, and Pegasus can seem to be harnessed to a chariot of the sun.

Weiss simply disappeared from view. His books were scattered; his lectures and sermons were worked over and over, the best of them being published in his several volumes. A few relics of the author remain in the hands of his widow, who is grateful for any recognition of his genius, any help to diffuse his writings, and tribute to his memory. They who knew him can never forget him. Perhaps the very vividness of their recollection makes them indifferent to the possession of visible memorials of their friend.

Samuel Johnson should be known as the apostle of individualism. The apostle I say, for this with him was a religion, and the preaching of individualism was a gospel message. He would not belong to any church, or subscribe to any creed, or connect himself with any sect, or be a member of any organization whatever, however wide or elastic, however consonant with convictions that he held, with beliefs that he entertained, with purposes that he cherished, with plans that were dear to him. He never joined the "Anti-Slavery Society," though he was an Abolitionist; or the "Free Religious Association," though its aims were essentially his own, and he spoke on its platform. He made it a principle to act alone, herein being a true disciple of Emerson, whose mission was to individual minds. He wrote a long letter to me on the occasion of establishing the "Free Religious Association," of which I wished him to become a member, that recalls the letter written by Mr. Emerson in reply to George Ripley when asked to join the community of Brook Farm, and whereof the following is an extract:

My feeling is that the community is not good for me, that it has little to offer me which with resolution I cannot procure for myself… It seems to me a circuitous and operose way of relieving myself to put upon your community the emancipation which I ought to take on myself. I must assume my own vows… I ought to say that I do not put much trust in any arrangements or combinations, only in the spirit which dictates them. Is that benevolent and divine, they will answer their end. Is there any alloy in that, it will certainly appear in the result… Nor can I insist with any heat on new methods when I am at work in my study on any literary composition… The result of our secretest attempts will certainly have as much renown as shall be due to it.

Johnson ended by discarding the church entirely. In 1881 he wrote:

For my part, every day I live the name Christian seems less and less to express my thought and tendency. I suspect it will be so with the Free-thinking world generally.

In a sermon, "Living by Faith," he says:

There is no irony so great as to call this "flight out of nature" and the creeds that come of it, "faith." The purity of heart that really sees God will have a mighty idealization of humanity at the very basis of its creed, and act on it in all its treatment of the vicious, the morally incapable and diseased. It is time Christendom was on the search for it.

In the paper on "Transcendentalism," he says:

Christianity inherited the monarchical idea of a God separate from man, and a contempt for natural law and human faculty which crippled its faith in the spiritual and moral ideal. It became more and more a materialism of miracle, Bible, church. Even its essay to realize immanent Deity yielded a more or less exclusive, mediatorial God-man; and it treated personality as the mere consequence of one prescriptive, historical force, just as philosophical materialism treats it as mere product of sensations.

Mr. Johnson abhorred the monarchical principle. It was his endeavor to track it from its origin, through all its forms of institution, ceremonial, dogma, symbol, from the earliest times to the latest, through the whole East to the farthest West. This was the burden of his studies in Oriental religions, the sum of his criticism, the aim of his public teaching. He was profoundly, intensely, absorbingly religious, but the form of his religion was not "Christian" in any recognized sense, Romanist, Protestant, or Unitarian. The most radical thought did not altogether please him. His was a worship of Law, Order, Cause, Harmony, impersonal, living, natural; a recognition of mind as the supreme power in the universe; a cosmic, eternal, absolute faith in intellectual principles as the substance and soul of the world. God was, to him, a spiritual being, alive, vital, flowing in every mode.