| Basic Concept: The Romantic Theory
of the Intuition
Like their European counterparts, Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the American romantic philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his close friend and fellow Concordian, Henry David Thoreau, the place of the "intuition" was central to their interpretation of human nature. Coleridge had distinguished between two faculties of reasoning: "The Understanding" and "Reason." The higher faculty, "Reason," features the "Intuition" through which the individual participates in the knowledge of "Ideal Forms," "Laws of Nature," and the abstract knowledge of God. For Emerson, the "intuition" was that divine faculty that he referred to as the "soul" in "Self Reliance." It is that natural faculty that unites the individual with the Godhead, the agency through which we perceive our own divinity. Thoreau references the "moral sense" in "Civil Disobedience" to chastise blind obedience to the "state" at the expense of conscience that is common to all reasoning people. William Cullen Bryant implies the faculty of the intuition in poems like "To a Waterfowl" in which the observer can interpret from patterns in nature certain lessons for moral living in human life. . Online Connections To better understand the broad concept of "romanticism," see "The Romantic Era." For an informative interpretation of Emerson's concept of the "individual" and the role of the "intuition," see "Emerson and Romantic Individualism." Read "Words and Seeds: Henry David Thoreau and the Language of Investigation" for an introduction to the relationships between Thoreau and Emerson. For a concise introduction to the primary writers of the American romantic movement, see "The Romantic Period: 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets." . Our Course Connections The "intuition" is key to much of the poetry and philosophical essays of writers like William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. (Also read notes on the "Transcendentalists.") .  |