Philosophemes
AUTHOR: Alcott, Amos Bronson
---. The Journals of Bronson Alcott
---. New Connecticut
---. “Orphic Sayings”
---. Tablets
Alcott, Louisa May. “Transcendental Wild Oats”
Alcott, William. “He's None the Worse for That”
Allen, James Madison. Essays: Philosophical and Practical
Carleton, George Washington. The Philosophers of Foufouville
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “English Reformers”
---. Essays: First Series
---. “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England”
---. Journals
---. “Man the Reformer”
---. “The Method of Nature”
---. “Nature”
---. “New England Reformers”
---. Poems
---. “Thoreau”
Emerson, Ralph Waldo and Thomas Carlyle. Correspondence
Greeley, Horace. “The Bases of Character”
---. Recollections of a Busy Life
HAM. A Brief Account of the First Concordium, or Harmonious Industrial College
Hecker, Isaac Thomas. Aspirations of Nature
---. Questions of the Soul
Lane, Charles.
---. “James Pierrepont Greaves”
---. “Social Tendencies”
---. “The Third Dispensation”
Lane, Charles and A. Bronson Alcott. "The Consociate Family Life"
Moore, J. Howard. Ethics and Education
---. High School Ethics
---. “The Martyrs of Civilization”
---. The Universal Kinship
Parker, Theodore. “Of Conscious Religion as a Source of Joy”
Smith, Ellen Goodell. Our Educators: For War or Peace – Which?
Thoreau, Henry David. Faith in a Seed
---. Journals
---. Walden
SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen):
Much like Alcott's “Orphic Sayings,” this essay provides context for Alcott’s veganism and Abolitionism, without speaking directly to the issue of ethical veganism. As in his other writings, here Alcott repeats the themes of Nature as the manifestation of spirit and the human as the ideal of creation and the image of God: “Nature is the physiognomy of spirit, and man the image of God's personality” (10). The unity between the human and the divine underlies Alcott's lengthy references to the relations between humans and other animals. As a human departs from the Ideal the status of "brute" approaches closer: “through Man all descend by degradation of his essence into their corresponding organizations – animal, plant, mineral, material atoms ... And the lower man himself descends, the more he resembles the brutes; the higher the brute, the more he assumes the human likeness” (10). Alcott makes clear that the spiritual quality of brutishness is thus quite distinct from the category of animality. “Certainly there are some animals whose gifts (and virtues especially), as designated by human names, transcend those of some men of the degraded types, and we may await their transitions into the near and the next in the living economy” (11).