These quotations are enough to show what was the prevailing impulse of the man. An intellectual nature like this, calm, studious, accomplished, eager, is subject to few surprises and experiences rarely, if ever, marked by crises, cataclysms, eruptions, in passing from one condition of thought to another at the opposite extreme of the spiritual universe. A process of growth, gradual, easy, motionless, takes the place of commotion and violent uproar such as passionate temperaments are exposed to. In 1821 he writes to his sister from Harvard College: "We are now studying Locke, an author who has done more to form the mind to habits of accurate reasoning and sound thought than almost any other." On the 19th of September, 1836, the first meeting of the Transcendental Club was held at his house in Boston. In 1838 he replied to Andrews Norton's criticism of Mr. Emerson's Address before the Alumni of the Cambridge Divinity School. In 1840 he said to his congregation in Purchase Street: There is a faculty in all--the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure--to perceive spiritual truth when distinctly presented; and the ultimate appeal on all moral questions is not to a jury of scholars, a conclave of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common-sense of the human race. But this substitution of the intuitive for the sensational philosophy--a change which affected all the processes of his thought and actually caused a revolution in his mind--was made silently, quietly, without agitation, without triumph, in a sober, conservative manner, very different from that of his friend Theodore Parker, who carried the same doctrines a good deal further, and advocated them with more heat like the burly reformer he was.