Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... vii. religious and social reformers. New and untested circumstances make the mind restless and speculative. A man who finds himself for the first time in a strange country feels an impulse to cut loose from the habits of his previous life, and try strange experiments. He wishes to make a new interior world, to answer to the new external one. After America had taken her place among the nations of the earth, a restlessness of this kind began to be manifested by a certain class of the population. It must be borne in mind that America a America represented a fresh departure in the direcnew depar-tion of civil and religious freedom. It was not simply an aggregation of people in a remote geographical region: it was the incarnation of a great spiritual idea. And, since one advance or reform suggests others, it is not surprising that America should have become the arena of numerous social and religious theorists. Moreover, a spirit of change had, for a good many years past, begun to disturb the atmosphere of Christendom in Europe. The French Revolution, at the close of the last century, had attempted virtually to uproot nearly all human beliefs and traditions, and to make the world over new. A reaction followed with proportionate swiftness; but not a few of the ideas then struck out continued to live, and exert an influence. One French philosopher, Fourier by name, published his views in several elaborate Utopias volumes, going over the whole ground of human civilization, proposing radical reforms and casting the horoscope of the future. These books found readers in the United States, and not a few of the readers became disciples also. Coleridge, in England, had a scheme of communistic life, which he called "Pantisocracy," and in which he...