Walden

The root of the problem was the eighteenth-century philosophical view of man that had molded the character of the Unitarian church. It was the "common sense," or "sensational," philosophy popularized by John Locke. One of its major tenets was that the mind at birth is like a blank tablet and that all knowledge results from filling this tablet with ideas and impressions as they are received through the five senses. Hence, to change the metaphor, the mind was seen as a sort of mechanical organizer limited to the function of receiving information through sensory channels and classifying it into proper categories. (For those to whom this concept is new, it might help to visualize the Lockean mind in two other ways: as a sort of file cabinet in which ideas are placed and stored for future use; or, as a camera within which impressions from the external world are received and preserved.) With such an image of man's mind as a passive receptor of impressions and limited to what knowledge comes through sensory experience, the Unitarian church formulated a common-sense religion whereby being religious was simply a matter of learning (receiving) God's laws through reading the scriptures (sensory experience), listening to the sermons (sensory experience), and seeing God's handiwork in nature (sensory experience). It was thought that since man's knowledge is limited by his senses, he can never directly experience or know the supersensory (the supernatural) God; as a result, man's only possible religious activity is to learn and believe what his senses reveal to him about God, and his only duty is to conform to what scripture and the church teach as God's will. Hence, one can see the dry, rule-book nature of Unitarianism: God was "out there," removed from the sensory experience of man; the miraculous aspect of Christianity was played down since miracles cannot be verified by common sense; and the emphasis on man being a rational creature precluded concern for the irrational nature of an emotional or intuitive experience of God. To the transcendentalists, the vitals had been removed from Christianity, and they revolted.