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himself at the fountain-head of its doctrines as set forth in the speculations of
Kant,
Spinoza, and
Schelling, he early began the study of
German; and by the time he left college had sufficiently mastered that language to regard himself as competent to teach it. Many years afterwards, during the war between the States, as
Major-General Carl Schurz,
Mr. Dana, and I were riding from
Knoxville to
Chattanooga, those two distinguished dialecticians beguiled the weary hours in conversation carried on indifferently in both German and English.
In one of the pauses
Dana remarked:
General Schurz, you speak English with greater purity and precision than any man I have ever known.
Whereupon
General Schurz rejoined:
Well, Herr Dana
(which he pronounced with the broad a), “you speak German better than any man I ever heard speak it who was not born and educated in
Germany.”
The compliment in each case seems to have been fully justified.
The Brook Farm Association was undoubtedly a Transcendental movement, inasmuch as it was the outgrowth of pure idealism.
The germ of the plan may have sprung from the Neuhof of Pestalozzi, who was a Transcendentalist, but
Ripley always insisted that it was an evolution of “pure idealism.”
It was organized tentatively in the winter of 1840, at which time
Ripley decided to buy the farm from which the organization took its name, and to “make himself responsible for its management and success.”
In April of the next year, with his wife and sister and some fifteen others, he took possession of the farm-house and out-buildings already on the estate.
The first six months were spent in “getting started,” and in organizing the “Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and education,” which constituted the special attraction
