ABSTRACT
In the realm of ideas the renaissance was largely dominated by old-world thought. The renaissance resulted from the impact of the romantic revolution upon the Puritan mind, and it issued in a form native to New England experience. Germany meant much to the awakening mind of New England, by reason of its spiritual and intellectual kinship. The renaissance was very much more than a transplanting of German idealism. In New England, perhaps more dramatically than elsewhere in America, the day of the middle class was dawning, aristocratic ideals were disintegrating, and the hopes of men were running high. From the abundant stores of European revolutionary doctrine the New England liberals drew freely— more freely perhaps from German idealism than from French Utopianism. To the sons of respectable Federalism it was the new romantic culture that appealed; to the militant conscience of Puritanism it was the inspiration of social Utopianism; to the emancipated intellectuals it was the metaphysical idealism.
