purveying cultural currency in various forms: the Chatauquas and popular
lectures for non-academic audiences without examinations, degrees, or ad-
vanced courses; the colleges; as well as a movement for compulsory state-sup-
ported elementary schools (since the 1830s) and secondary schools (largely
between 1870 and 1890). There was a good deal of rivalry among these forms,
and as yet no clear sequence which led from one to another. Emerson, the
leader of the Transcendentalists, disliked schools; his famous call for “self-re-
liance” was no Nietzschean anti-moralism, but reflected his preference for
going his own way as a writer and popular lecturer. The Transcendentalists
were products of declining religious orthodoxy; when the Unitarians took
control of Harvard divinity teaching and of the once-establishment Congrega-
tionalist Church in New England in the 1820s, some of the more flamboyant
preachers such as Emerson split off on their own and successfully purveyed a
more emotional religion than was provided by rationalistic Unitarianism.
On the western frontier, the high proportion of un-churched population
provided opportunities for new sects of all kinds,^49 religious and educational
alike. The St. Louis Hegelian Society, which flourished in the 1860s and 1870s,
was one of many culture-seeking adult societies in the fast-growing frontier
cities (see Figure 12.2). Its eminence above the others was due to its establishing
a wider institutional base (founding the first American philosophical journal,
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which survived from 1867 to 1893), and
the leadership of its members in educational reform. William Torrey Harris,
founder of the St. Louis Hegelians, was a school administrator and became
U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1886–1906, using Hegel as a scheme for
planning the topics of the curriculum (Pochmann, 1948: 68–72, 113; Kuklick,
1977: 157). Here Idealism was limited to rote schemata, oriented toward
popular audiences and secondary schooling.
More original Idealist philosophy was created where the German-style
secular disciplines and graduate research faculties were introduced into the
colleges. The main loci were the universities which led the reform: Harvard,
with its new graduate department in 1872; even more trend-setting, Johns
Hopkins (founded 1874) and Chicago (1892) stressed original research and
set off a wave of competition to hire eminent professors. In the late 1870s
Harvard considered appointing one of the St. Louis Hegelians, Harris or
Howison, but the position fell to Royce, a protégé of the founding president
of Johns Hopkins.^50
Royce’s Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) built systematically from a
consideration of error and doubt. Again an Idealism was constructed on the
moves of Descartes and Hume, seen through the lens of Kantian uncovering
of presuppositions. The intentionality of picking out objects implies that one
possesses pre-cognitive knowledge of them. Even doubting something implies672 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths