"To learn what I could about the spiritual faculties of man, I not only studied the sacred books of various nations, the poets and philosophers who professedly treat thereof, but also such as deal with sleep-walking, dreams, visions, prophecies, second-sight, oracles, ecstasies, witchcraft, magic-wonders, the appearance of devils, ghosts, and the like. Besides, I studied other works which lie out from the regular highway of theology; the spurious books attributed to famous Jews and Christians; Pseudepigraphy of the Old Testament, and the Apocrypha of the New; with the strange fantasies of the Neoplatonists and Gnostics." Very important reading all this for one who studied to qualify himself to instruct his fellow men in the natural history of the world's religions; but not so valuable as illustrating the "instinctive intuitions of human nature." Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Boehme, Eckardt, never worked by that method, which may properly be called the method of Sensationalism applied to Transcendentalism. Parker, on the religious side, was a pure Transcendentalist without guile, accepting the transcendental ideas with no shadow of qualification; stating them with the concrete sharpness of scientific propositions, and applying them with the exactness of mathematical principles. He took them as he found them in the writings of the great German thinkers; shaped them as he, better than any body else, could shape thought in form of words,--as he shaped the formula of republican government--"government of the people, by the people, for the people"--from the looser statement of Daniel Webster,--and laid them down as corner-stones of a new theological structure. The materials were furnished by Schleiermacher, Spinoza, Jacobi, Schelling; the architectural skill was his own. Consciousness he did not undertake to analyze; the "facts of consciousness" he took on others' verification; their spiritual import he perceived, developed and applied. Transcendentalism put into his hands the implements he was in special need of.