ABSTRACT
The introduction of German influences into American philosophy is traceable to the second decade of the nineteenth century, when, following the example of Coleridge in 1798, a group of New England students paid a visit to Germany and returned with authentic news of the new movements in thought that were there taking place. Their visit was to bear fruit later in translations from German writers of the Romantic movement in Frederick H. Hedge’s German Prose Writers—the American equivalent to Carlyle’s early work in this field. H. L. Linberg’s translation of Victor Cousin’s Introduction to the History of Philosophy appeared in 1832, and its readers were encouraged to content themselves with what they there found by George Ripley the transcendentalist “Man of Letters” and editor of Specimens of Foreign Standard Literatures. Traced to its source, the weakness of the Transcendentalist philosophy was the weakness of the Cousinian Eclecticism.
