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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
To a degree incomprehensible today, when we have been surfeited by holocausts and are haunted by the notion of entropy, the first generation of transcendentalists – that of Emerson and Ripley, as opposed to that of Thoreau and Whitman – grew up in the certainty that progress was consubstantial with history and shared in the untroubled sureness of history's course. In 1823 Emerson noted in his journal:
The lively fancy of some men has induced them to entertain fanciful anticipations of the progress of Mankind, and of radical revolutions in their manners, passions and pursuits … But the quiet wisdom of History as she winds along her way through sixty centuries, speaks of no wonders, and of little glory … The most rapid progress of civilization in a community is so gradual that it is unmarked.
Author's note: Most of this essay was originally published in somewhat different form in French in Rivista di Studi Americani 2–3 (1983). The English translation is by Lawrence Rosenwald.
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