Louis Agassiz and the Platonist Story of Creation at Harvard, 1795-1846
David K. Nartonis
Boston, Massachusetts

An earlier version of this paper was read at the 2002 Congress of the History of the Philosophy of Science Working Group, in Montreal, June 21-23. I am indebted to those who commented on the paper there and especially to George A. Reisch who made a number of helpful recommendations.

In 1846, naturalist Louis Agassiz took Harvard College by storm with his idealist approach to nature. In his initial lectures, repeated in New York the following year, Agassiz announced, "We have that within ourselves which assures us of participation in the Divine Nature and it is a particular characteristic of man to be able to rise in that way above material Nature, and to understand intellectual existences." He then made it clear that by intellectual existences he meant a divine plan of creation. "What naturalists intend when they speak of what they call 'types' ... may be easily understood by comparison. We all know that architects construct our dwellings according to plans conceived by them before the erection of the edifice."1 There is no doubt that Agassiz valued the careful collection of observational data. "It has only been step by step that man has acquired an insight into this plan."2 But his empiricism, if that is the right term, was entirely subordinate to apprehension of divine ideas, which alone deserved to be called science. In one recent account, The Metaphysical Club, which contains an excellent discussion of Agassiz's American career, author Louis Menand accurately describes this dual emphasis on observation and intuition. But Menand leaves unstated the problem of Agassiz's welcome at Harvard, attributing his instant popularity to force of character.3

A fuller explanation of Agassiz's welcome is to be found in the Scottish textbooks that dominated the Harvard philosophy curriculum prior to his arrival.4 Like Agassiz, textbook authors Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown recognized observation and intuition as twin sources of human knowledge. According to them, we observe our own moral tendencies and interpret them in the light of intuited ethical principles that even God must obey. Similarly, we observe nature and interpret its workings with the aid of intuited principles of common sense.5 There is no doubt that this dual emphasis on observation and intuition was entirely consistent with Agassiz's idealist biology. But his definition of species and genera as intellectual existences in the divine mind was not to be found in the official Scottish texts. In fact, Dugald Stewart, who governed the philosophy curriculum after 1820, insisted that there are "no existences in nature corresponding to general terms, and the objects of our attention in all our general speculations are not ideas but words."6 This was "long misunderstood by philosophers, who imagined that a generic word expresses an actual existence distinct from the individuals of which the genus is composed."7 Similarly, Thomas Brown lamented, "One fundamental error ... as long as it retained its hold of the understanding, must have rendered all its energies ineffectual, by wasting them in search of objects, which had no real existence ... I allude to ... the various orders of universals."8 In this one respect, Stewart and Brown were in agreement with Alexander Pope when he counseled his many American readers "presume not God to scan" and ridiculed those who would "soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere."9

But Harvard students and faculty were also reading books that promoted the intellectual existences that Agassiz saw behind nature and the Scots did not. Chief among these books were Plato's Works (ca. 360 BCE), Philo's De Opificio Mundi (20 BCE to 50 CE), Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the World (1678), and John Norris's An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intellectual World (1701-04). These combined with such widely popular literature as John Milton's Paradise Lost (1668) and the prose works of Samuel Coleridge to form a kind of unofficial curriculum that ultimately made Agassiz's idealist view of nature especially welcome at Harvard.10 Modest at first, Harvard interest in intellectual existences bloomed with the appearance of books by Romantic writers on campus. In order to illustrate this long development, I will bolster my explanation with data from Harvard College library borrowing records-handwritten lists of the books borrowed by each library user during a one- or two-year period, which are nearly complete after 1770.

Harvard College library records show that the most borrowed intellectual philosophy books, during the half-century prior to Agassiz's arrival, mirrored the official philosophy curriculum. These were Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), between 1795 and 1820, and Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792-1827), between 1820 and 1845. Reid's book appears 256 times on lists dated 1795-96 through 1818-19, a period during which Harvard graduated 1,283 students. Stewart's book appears 159 times on lists dated 1822-23 through 1844-45, when Harvard graduated 1,555.11 However, these same library records show that students and faculty were also borrowing books that promoted a Platonist creation story for more than half a century before Agassiz's arrival. Of course, the mere borrowing of these books does not prove that their contents were adopted or even read. But one study of eighteenth-century Harvard found that books not in the official curriculum, but taken out of the library, were reflected in student Commencement theses.12 An 1829 graduate recalled that his classmates were generally more interested in books they found in the college library than in the prescribed curriculum. He also recalled that they shared what they learned from library books.13 Another early nineteenth-century graduate recalled that he and his classmates did not have easy access to the College library and this would seem to weigh against the frivolous borrowing of books.14 Thus, I assume that library activity is useful evidence of a Platonist theory of creation at Harvard between 1795 and 1846.

Platonist Books at Harvard, 1795-1820

For at least half a century prior to Agassiz's arrival at Harvard, students and faculty were reading books, outside the curriculum, that presented much the same Platonist theory of creation that Agassiz did. The ultimate source of this theory was Plato's Timaeus, where a superhuman craftsman consults a purely intelligible set of patterns in creating the natural world.15 Elsewhere in Plato's Works we find that things as mundane as a couch, a table, or a weaver's shuttle are made according to just such patterns or ideas. Reference to couches and tables is in Book X of the Republic. Reference to a weaver's shuttle is in the Cratylus. In the Parmenides, Socrates is reluctant to correlate Platonic ideas to hair and dirt but his interlocutor ascribes this to his philosophical immaturity. It seems to follow that every object in the material world was created from an ideal plan and, in Book IX of the Republic, Plato suggests that it is only in knowing this plan that humans can gain a true and scientific knowledge of nature.16 Surveyors of the Harvard library found Plato's Works in the college collection in 1723, 1773, and 1790.17 But Harvard students and faculty did not read much of Plato before an English translation was finished in 1804. In fact, only a small number of Harvard students borrowed Plato's works prior to 1820, although one of the earliest student borrowers would later be a Harvard philosophy professor. In addition, during a quarter century when twenty-nine individuals served as college tutors and twenty-four as professors or instructors of subjects other than law, medicine, dentistry, or mining, one of the tutors and a divinity professor also borrowed Plato's Works.18

Because Harvard faculty and students read little of Plato before 1820, they were more familiar with an ancient adaptation of his creation story. During the first century of the Common Era, the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria collected a number of interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2 in his book, De Opificio Mundi.19 In this collection, Philo included an interpretation of Genesis 1 as God forming the plan of the world, in his own mind. In this interpretation, by the fourth verse of Genesis 2, God is creating material objects following his preconceived plan.20 Some Bible scholars find evidence of this Platonist view in the New Testament.21 But it was St. Augustine and not the New Testament writers who effectively passed the notion of an intelligible then material creation to the medieval West.22 There it had a long career in Bible-interpretive literature. By the end of the medieval period, rival interpretations based in the natural philosophy of Aristotle relegated Philo's interpretation of Genesis to second place in Western thinking and both Luther and Calvin rejected it.23 The Philonic interpretation, however, enjoyed resurgence with the Renaissance interest in Plato, and entered into a variety of literary productions-some of which were widely read in nineteenth-century New England.24 Surveyors of the Harvard library found editions of Philo's Works in 1723 and in 1790.25 But library records do not show Harvard faculty and students borrowing his works until about 1820.26

It was largely through their choice of popular literature that New Englanders kept Philo's interpretation of Genesis alive through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.27 For example, in his History of the World, first published in 1614 and widely read in New England, Sir Walter Raleigh remarked that "the pattern or image of the world may be said to be eternal [and] That ... samplar of the visible world, the first work of God." Not too many pages later he wrote approvingly of "The example and pattern of these his creatures, as he beheld the same in all eternity in the abundance of his own love."28 In Paradise Lost, another New England favorite, John Milton also described the creation of the world as modeled after ideas in the divine mind.29 Matthew Henry in his Bible Commentary, published in stages between 1706 and 1721, and widely consulted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, told his readers "there was light, such a copy as exactly answered the original idea in the Eternal Mind."30 In his Night Thoughts (1741), Edward Young asked God, "When shall I see far more than charms me Now? Gaze on Creation's Model in Thy Breast."31 Also keeping the Platonist creation story alive in New England was a popular poem that Mark Akenside first published in 1744.32 Most eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century students would have read these popular works prior to arriving at college. In addition, between 1795 and 1820, Harvard students borrowed Milton from the college library about a third as often as Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, the most borrowed intellectual philosophy text during that quarter century.33 Students and faculty would also have been familiar with passages in the King James Bible that have a Platonist ring. Among these passages would be John 1, verses 1 through 5, and Romans 1, verse 17, which reads, "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."

Ralph Cudworth was one of two scholarly authors who reinforced the Platonist creation story already familiar to Harvard faculty and students through popular literature. He was a professor at Cambridge, England, who promoted a revival of Plato's philosophy there. In The True Intellectual System of the World, Cudworth described, "The archetypal world ... as Philo calls it, the world that is compounded and made up of ideas-and containing in it all those kinds of things intelligibly, that are in this lower world sensibly." In later pages, Cudworth vigorously promoted a proof of the existence of God as the Mind in which this archetypal world exists.34 The compliers of the library lists of 1723, 1773, and 1790 found Cudworth's Intellectual System in the Harvard collection. Library records for 1773 also show that the Intellectual System was highlighted as part of the "smaller library for the more common use of the College."35 Only a handful of students borrowed Cudworth's book between 1795 and 1820, but one professor of divinity borrowed Cudworth's book in both 1793 and 1798. Another divinity professor, a philosophy professor, and a college tutor who would become a philosophy professor also borrowed the Intellectual System between 1795 and 1820.36

Another Englishman, John Norris, drew from the Platonist creation story definite implications for the study of nature.37 Norris expounded these implications in An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intellectual World, where he followed French philosopher, Pere Malebranche, in asserting that humans have not only empirical knowledge of nature but also direct access to ideas in the divine mind. Like Cudworth, Norris held that it is in the divine mind that we find such objects as the ideal triangle and the law of the excluded middle. But Norris goes on to argue that direct access to the divine Mind gives us our best knowledge about the natural world. "Tho' the Natural World be the object of sense, yet the Ideal World is the proper object of knowledge, as well as intelligible Vision or Perception."38 Norris called this direct access to the mind of God "spiritual sense," a term that was subsequently popularized by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and an avid promoter of the Ideal World.39 Locke's empiricism, Norris argued, can only give us information about material objects, which imperfectly reflect God's plan. But our spiritual sense acquaints us directly with the ideal plan of the world and nothing but this higher knowledge deserves to be called science.40 Thus, the proper method of science is to turn from the images of sense to our own clear ideas, naturally informed by direct access to divine archetypes.41 Among his predecessors, Norris listed "Plato, Philo ... [and] St. Austin."42 Those who surveyed the Harvard library in 1790 found Norris's Ideal World there along with an English translation of Malebranche's Search after Truth (1674-75).43 Library records show a small number of students borrowing Norris's book, some as early as 1768. On the faculty side, a philosophy professor borrowed Norris's Essay when he was a college tutor in 1795 and again during the 1800-1801 school year.44

The Quarter Century Prior to Agassiz's Arrival

In 1820, the Harvard faculty added The Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, by Scottish professor Dugald Stewart, to the curriculum. Seven years later, philosophy professor Levi Hedge abridged Thomas Brown's Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820) for the use of his students. Thereafter, Harvard students learned Locke's philosophy mainly through Stewart and Brown. In 1833, the faculty began to teach logic from a text by English writer Richard Whately, who differed from Stewart only in the greater role he gave to deduction in the study of nature.45 Not surprisingly, then, between 1820 and 1845, undergraduates borrowed Stewart's Elements more often than Reid's Inquiry or any other book on intellectual philosophy. At the same time, Harvard graduates began returning from study in Europe with an enthusiasm for Romantic writers. As with Cudworth and Norris, much of what these Romantic writers taught can be traced to the Renaissance interest in Plato and Philo and some promoted a Platonist theory of creation and a divine plan of nature. Schelling, for example, taught that, "The spirit world is the prototype of nature."46

In 1828, James Marsh published an American version of Samuel Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. Marsh was disillusioned with Locke's philosophy, as he had learned it from Stewart's text, and well read in the "Cambridge Platonists," Cudworth and Norris.47 His edition of the Aids quickly became a New England best seller and, from 1828 through 1845, Harvard undergraduates borrowed Coleridge's prose works nearly as often as they borrowed Stewart's Elements.48 As one student later recalled, "It was about the time of our senior year that Professor Marsh . . . was reprinting Coleridge's [writings]. These books I read from time to time during several years, and they gave, in a high degree, incitement and nourishment to my intellect.... Coleridge the philosopher confirmed my longing for a higher philosophy than that of John Locke and David Hartley."49 In the Aids and two collections of essays, Coleridge contrasted the lower knowledge gained through the five senses with a higher knowledge, gained from the ideal world.50 In support of this higher knowledge he wrote of "the Supreme Being, whose creative idea not only appoints to each thing its position but gives it its qualities, yea its very existence."51

As Romantic writers began to be read on campus, Harvard interest in the older Platonists also increased. Between 1820 and 1845, undergraduates borrowed Milton as often as Stewart-Raleigh and Plato a third as often. Graduates in the divinity school borrowed Plato nearly twice as often as the undergraduates. Also, during a quarter century when fifty individuals served as professors or instructors of subjects other than law, medicine, dentistry, or mining, eight of them borrowed Plato's Works a total of sixteen times and two borrowed the works of Philo, seven times between them. Thus, in 1827 and 1838, writers in The Christian Examiner, "the great organ of Unitarianism," discussed Philo's interpretation of Genesis.52 Also during the quarter century prior to Agassiz's arrival, Cudworth's book was more important to Harvard than ever. Six faculty members and a student who would become a history instructor borrowed Cudworth a total of nine times. Perhaps more significantly, from 1820 to 1845, a larger fraction of divinity school students borrowed Cudworth from the College library than undergraduates borrowed Stewart. This number might have been even higher had I also tallied the few remaining records from the Divinity School library.53 In addition, a philosophy professor borrowed Norris's book when he was a student, during the 1812-13 school year, and again in 1823-24. A divinity professor borrowed it during the 1837-38 school year.54

Prior to Agassiz's arrival, publishers also made both Cudworth and Norris more available for private purchase. Norris was republished in England in 1801 and Cudworth in 1820, 1829, and 1845. There was also an American edition of Cudworth in 1836 that was enthusiastically reviewed in The Christian Examiner.55 In 1835, recent Harvard graduate Ralph Waldo Emerson was reading Cudworth at home in Concord and "admiring its strong Platonism." At the same time, Emerson was reading Norris who "fights the battles and affirms the facts I had proposed to myself to do."56 In 1840, Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau was reading Cudworth's Intellectual System-probably one of Emerson's copies-along with Raleigh's History of the World.57 Further evidence of the growing importance of older Platonist writers is seen in a book written by Frederick Hedge after he became a Harvard professor. In this book, Hedge elaborated the Philonic interpretation of Genesis, citing just one source-Norris's Intellectual System.58

With this surge of interest in both Romantic writers and older Platonists, there was now open discussion of the creation story that had long been part of an unofficial curriculum. Thus, a Phi Beta Kappa speaker praised Agassiz' s French teacher, Georges Cuvier, for his attempts "to seek in the humblest zoophyte the expression of an idea of God." Less than a year before Agassiz's arrival, this speaker announced, "The attributes of God are the ultimate cause,--his ideas the archetypes of all things."59 Emerson took this emerging Harvard Platonism to an extreme. He rejected empiricism entirely; sought to put moral, religious, and natural knowledge all on an intuitional basis; and looked for a divine plan behind the complexity of nature.60 "There seems to be a necessity in spirit," he wrote, "to manifest itself in material forms [which] preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God."61 In reaction, Harvard Bible scholar Andrews Norton sought to base all knowledge in observation. According to him, morals should be founded in an empirical study of man and even religion was to rest on the empirical evidence provided by Bible miracles.62 The majority at Harvard, however, wished to pursue some combination of observation and intuition and merely looked for a way to supplement Locke's empiricism more fully than his Scottish interpreters did. This is what philosophy professor James Walker called for in a widely disseminated 1834 address.63 Similarly, a writer in the North American Review called for an amendment to Locke, concluding "the system of Locke is perhaps erroneous, not so much by what it teaches, as by what it denies."64

Why this desire to supplement Locke's empiricism in ways that were not in the official Harvard textbooks? The Scottish tradition of Reid, Stewart, and Brown was at least partially rooted in the theological voluntarism of Jean Calvin.65 In this view, God produces every event in the world, unconstrained by laws of nature or architectural plans.66 Over time, the Scots negated this voluntarist tradition by admitting intuitive moral principles that even God must obey and intuitive common sense principles such as the regularity of the divine action from day to day.67 But theological voluntarism was never totally crowded out of the Scottish texts and this Calvinist remainder became more visible when Stewart replaced Reid.68 As Stewart explained, the stability of the solar system is "only conditional" and the end of the solar system "is to be looked for . . . from the will of that Almighty Being" that created it.69 Furthermore, a God who will not be bound by laws of nature will not be bound by architectural plans either. Thus, Stewart denied that species and genera could be more than descriptive words for similar individuals. Conveniently, this left God free to act in miraculous ways.70 Ominously, it left major ways in which God was unpredictable and human knowledge of nature contingent and probabilistic. It was this lack of a fully intelligible Creator in the Scottish textbooks that scandalized Marsh when he read Stewart at Dartmouth.71 Surely it explains at least a part of Harvard's growing interest in supplementing the Scottish texts with a Platonist creation story, an interest that culminated in Agassiz's enthusiastic reception.

It was against this background that the philosophy of biology developed at Harvard. Starting in 1812, the faculty taught about living things from William Paley's Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearance of Nature (1802).72 In his book, Paley relied on divine purpose to explain the world of nature. About the same time, however, German writer, Johann von Goethe, proposed a shift in the explanation of living things from purpose to shape.73 Asa Gray, who became Harvard professor of botany in 1842, included a reference to this divine plan of natural shapes in his lectures on plants. Also, Jeffries Wyman lectured on this new biology of form well before becoming Harvard professor of anatomy and physiology in 1847. But it was Cuvier and Agassiz on the continent and Richard Owen in England that made shape their chief mode of biological explanation. For Agassiz, every material eye is modeled after an ideal eye just as every material triangle is modeled after an ideal triangle. Furthermore, Agassiz taught that the student of nature has direct access to these ideas in the divine mind.74 Thus we see that when Louis Agassiz arrived at Harvard, he reinforced the synthesis of observation and intuition found in Harvard's official textbooks but added to them a Platonist creation story that more fully negated the residual voluntarism in these Scottish texts and made God and creation more fully known.

Notes

1 Louis Agassiz, An introduction to the study of natural history, in a series of lectures delivered in the Hall of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New-York (New York, 1847), 5-6, 9; Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Baltimore, 1988), 127n16.
2 Louis Agassiz, Twelve lectures on comparative embryology, delivered before the Lowell Institute, in Boston, December and January, 1848-49 (Boston, 1849), 5.
3 The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York, 2001), 97-116, 121-28, 141.
4 Conrad Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagination, from Edwards to Bushnell (Philadelphia, 1980), 99-109.
5 Sir William Hamilton (ed.), The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart (10 vols.; Edinburgh, 1854), VI, 30-31; Edward H. Madden, "Stewart, Dugald (1753-1858)," Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London, 1998), 135-40; Torgny T. Segerstedt, "The Problem of Knowledge in Scottish Philosophy," no. 6 of Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, n.s. (1935), 58, 88; Jeffrey M. Suderman, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal, 2001), 84, 92-93, 102, 105.
6 The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, II, 173.
7 The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, II, 23.
8 Thomas Brown, A Treatise on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, abridged by Levi Hedge (Cambridge, Mass., 1827), 9-10.
9 The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. M. Mack (New Haven, 1951), 53, 57; J. R. Pole, "Enlightenment and the Politics of American Nature," The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge, 1981), 198.
10 Harvard Library Charging Records 1770-1845, UAIII 50.15.60.4 A, B, mfp and UAIII 50.15.60, Harvard University Archives.
11 Harvard Library Charging Records; Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates, 1636-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), 167-244. 12 Thomas J. Siegel, "Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1990), 317ff. 13 James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence, ed. Edward Everett Hale (Boston, 1891), 34-44. 14 Andrew P. Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences (Boston, 1888), 203.
15 On the "Timaeus, Phaedrus" myth, J. A. Stewart, The Myths of Plato, ed. G. R. Levy (London, 1970).
16 E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters (Princeton, 1961); Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 50-51.
17 W. H. Bond and Hugh Amory (eds.), The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, 1723-1790 (Boston, 1996), A27, A 114, B20, C18.
18 Harvard Library Charging Records; Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue, 39-62.
19 David T. Runia, "History of Philosophy in the Grand Manner: The Achievement of H. A. Wolfson," Philosophia Reformata, 49 (1985), 125-26.
20 Thomas H. Tobin, "Interpretations of the Creation of the World in Philo of Alexandria," Creation in the Biblical Traditions, ed. R. J. Clifford and J. J. Collins (Washington, D.C., 1992), 108-28; Thomas H. Tobin, The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation, (Washington, D.C., 1983), 119ff.
21 Fearghus O'Fearghail, "Philo and the Fathers: The Letter and the Spirit," Scriptural Interpretation and the Fathers: Letter and Spirit, ed. Thomas Finan and Vincent Twomey (Dublin, 1995), 51; Thomas H. Tobin, "The Prologue of John and Hellenistic Jewish Speculation," The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 52 (1990), 252-69.
22 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 147, 147n5.
23 Mary Nyquist, "The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost," Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. C. Kendrick (New York, 1991), 165-93; Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis, 15271633 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948).
24 Stewart, The Myths of Plato, especially 423-68; David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian literature: A Survey (Minneapolis, Minn., 1993), 326; Susan E. Schreiner, "Eve, the Mother of History: Reaching for the Reality of History in Augustine's later Exegesis of Genesis," Genesis 1-3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigue in the Garden, ed. G. A. Robbins (Lewiston, N.Y., 1988), 149; R. D. Crouse, "Intentio Moysi: Bede, Augustine, Eriugena and Plato in the Hexaemeron of Honorius Augustodunensis," Dionysius, 2 (1978), 137-57; J. C. M. van Winden, "The Early Christian Exegesis of 'Heaven and Earth' in Genesis 1,1," Romanitas et Christianitas, ed. W. den Boer et al. (Amsterdam, 1973), 377-80.
25 Bond and Amory, The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, A26, C18.
26 Harvard Library Charging Records.
27 Dennis H. Barbour, "God's Determinations and the Hexameral Tradition," Early American Literature, 16 (1981-82), 213-25.
28 The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, Kr. Now First Collected to which are Prefixed the Lives of the Author by Oldys and Birch (8 vols.; Oxford, 1829), II, lii, 3; Arnold Williams, "Commentaries on Genesis as a Basis for Hexaemeral Material in the Literature of the late Renaissance," Studies in Philology, 34 (1937), 191-208.
29 John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books by John Milton, with the Life of the Author (Baltimore, 1818), 209; George E Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton, 1964), 3-6; C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford, 1966), 26-53; Arnold Williams, "Milton and the Renaissance Commentaries on Genesis," Moderm Philology, 37 (1939-40), 263-78.
30 Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible ... (6 vols.; New York, 1706), I, Gen. 1:3-5; Steven J. Stein, editor's introduction to Notes on Scripture, by Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1998), Iff, 7.
31 Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Comford (Cambridge, 1989), 291.
32 Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem in Three Books, 2nd ed. (Portland, Me., 1807), 13; Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 263-64.
33 Harvard Library Charging Records.
34 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1820), 46, 402-15.
35 Joe W. Kraus, "The Harvard Undergraduate Library of 1773," College Research Libraries, 22 (1961), 247, 251.
36 Harvard Library Charging Records.
37 John Norris, An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (New York, 1978), 137. 38 Ibid., 61-62. 39 John C. English, "John Wesley's Indebtedness to John Norris," Church History, 60 (1991), 55-69; Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford, 1983), 156-79; David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (London, 1972), 1-7, 10-11.
40 Norris, An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, 131. 41 McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy, 38-39.
42 Norris, An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, 3.
43 Bond and Amory, The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, 264; McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy, 3-4.
44 Harvard Library Charging Records.
45 Benjamin Rand, "Philosophical Instruction in Harvard University from 1636 to 1900," Harvard Graduates Magazine, 37 (1928-29), 45-46; Edgeley W. Todd, "Philosophical ideas at Harvard College, 1817-1837," The New England Quarterly, 16 (1943), 66; Pietro Corsi, "The Heritage of Dugald Stewart: Oxford Philosophy and the Method of Political Economy," Nuncius, 2 (1987), 109-10, 124-37; James Van Evra, "Richard Whately and the Rise of Modem Logic," History and Philosophy of Logic, 5 (1984), 1-18.
46 Friedrich W. Von Schelling, The Ages of the World, tr. Frederick Bolman Jr. (New York, 1967), 176; Newsome, Two Classes of Men, 8-24; Philip E Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology (Madison, Wis., 1983), 17.
47 Marjorie H. Nicolson, "James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists," Philosophical Review, 34 (1925), 31; Henry Nelson Coleridge (ed.), Aids to Reflection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with a Preliminary Essay, by James Marsh, D.D., (Port Washington, N.Y., 1840, 1971), 48-49.
48 Harvard Library Charging Records.
49 Clarke, Autobiography, 39.
50 Catherine L. Albanese (ed.), The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau (Macon, Ga., 1988), 6-7.
51 Samuel Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (2 vols.; London, 1969), I, 459.
52 Frank. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines (5 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1938), II; "Translation from Philo Judaeus," The Christian Examiner, 4 [1827], 377-80; Theodore Parker, review of Histoire critique du Gnosticisme et de san influence sur les sectes religieuses et philosophiques des six premiers siecles de l'ere chretienne, by Par M. Jacques Matter, The Christian Examiner, 24 (1838), 117-18. On the popularity of the Philonic interpretation, Joseph Smith, "Book of Moses (1830)," The Pearl of Great Price Being a choice Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations ... (Salt Lake City, 1878), 6.
53 Library Charging Records, accession number 950913, box 9, Harvard Divinity School Archives.
54 Harvard Library Charging Records; Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue, 39-62.
55 The National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints, vols. 129, 421 (London, 1975); British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books, photolithographic edition to 1955, vol. 46 (London, 1966); Theodore Parker, review of The True Intellectual System of the Universe: wherein all the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is confuted, and its Impossibility demonstrated, by Ralph Cudworth, The Christian Examiner, 27 (1840), 289-319.
56 Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, 1995), 203-4; Daniel Walker Howe, "The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England," American Unitarianism, 1805-1865, ed. C. E. Wright (Boston, 1989), 104-5.
57 Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau's Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographic Catalogue (Princeton, 1988), 28.
58 Frederick H. Hedge, The Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition (Boston, 1870), 11. 59 Andrew P. Peabody, The Connection Between Science and Religion, An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, August 28, 1845 (Boston, 1845), 4-6, 24-25, 29.
60 Howe, "The Cambridge Platonists," 104-7.
61 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (12 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1971), I, 22.
62 Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 82-89.
63 Octavius B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (Gloucester, Mass., 1965), 120-21; James Walker, "Foundations of Faith," The Christian Examiner 17 (1834), 1-15.
64 George B. Cheever, "Coleridge," North American Review, 40 (1835), 332-39.
65 Alexander Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy: A New Perspective on the Enlightenment (Savage, Md., 1990), 1-11, 127-31; Roger L. Emerson, "Natural Philosophy and the Problem of the Scottish Enlightenment," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 242 (1986), 258-63; Stewart R. Sutherland, "The Presbyterian Inheritance of Hume and Reid," The Nature and Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Edinburgh, 1982), 143-47.
66 Jean Calvin, Institution de la Religion Chretienne (Paris, 1955), I, 16, 8, p. 155, quoted in J. E. McGuire, "Boyle's Conception of Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas, 33 (1972), 540-41; Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984); Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge, 1994).
67 Mark A. Noll, "The Rise and Long Life of the Protestant Enlightenment in America," Knowledge and Belief in America: Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought, ed. William M. Shea and Peter A. Huff (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 99-108; Knud Haakonssen, "Natural Law and Moral Realism: The Scottish Synthesis," Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 1990), 61-85; Howe, "The Cambridge Platonists," 90, 96-97; Segerstedt, "The Problem of Knowledge in Scottish Philosophy," 1-79.
68 George Davie, The Scotch Metaphysics: A Century of Enlightenment in Scotland (London, 2001), 107-08.
69 The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, III, 381. For additional examples of Stewart's voluntarism see ibid., II, 110-11; III, 386-88, 418; VI, 50-5 1; and A Short Statement of Some Important Facts Relative to the late Election of a Mathematical Professor in the University of Edinburgh; Accompanied with Original Papers and Critical Remarks, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1805), 84-85. For an alternative explanation of this residual Scottish nominalism, Segerstedt, "The Problem of Knowledge in Scottish Philosophy," 63.
70 Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 89-90; Henry Ware, Sr., Inquiry into the Foundation, Evidences, and Truths of Religion (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1842), I, 61-72; II, 107-11; Andrews Norton, Inaugural Discourse Delivered Before the University in Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1819), 8.
71 Peter Carafiol, Transcendent Reason: James Marsh and the Forms of Romantic Thought (Tallahassee, Fla., 1982), 44-45, 58-59, 76-79; Aids to Reflection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 9-58, 252, 289, 291, 304; David K. Nartonis, "Locke-Stewart-Mill: Philosophy of Science at Dartmouth College, 1771-1854," International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 15 (2001), 167-75.
72 Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 74.
73 Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists, 19.
74 Toby A. Appel, "Jeffries Wyman, Philosophical Anatomy, and the Scientific Reception of Darwin in America," Journal of the History of Biology, 21 (1988), 69-94; Roy Amundson, "Typology Reconsidered: Two Doctrines on the History of Evolutionary Biology," Biology and Philosophy, 13 (1998), 153-77; Edward Lurie, editor's introduction to Essay on Classification, by Louis Agassiz (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), ix-xxxiii.