(meaning the Transcendentalists) "in identifying themselves a good deal with Cousin's crude system, have lost the life of an original movement. They are anxious to defend the soul's immediate connection with God, and are in danger of substituting private inspiration for Christianity." What he knew of Kant, Schelling and Fichte, through Mad. de Stael and Coleridge, he welcomed as falling in with his own conceptions of the grandeur of the human mind and will; but his acquaintance with them was never complete, and if it had been, he would perhaps have been repelled by the intellectual, as strongly as he was attracted by the moral teaching. In this matter the sentiment of Channing went beyond his philosophy. The following extracts taken at random from a volume of discourses edited in 1873 by his nephew, under the title "The Perfect Life," show that Channing was a Transcendentalist in feeling, whatever he may have been in thought. "The religious principle, is, without doubt, the noblest working of human nature. This principle God implanted for Himself. Through this the human mind corresponds to the Supreme Divinity." "The idea of God is involved in the primitive and most universal idea of Reason; and is one of its central principles." "We have, each of us, the spiritual eye to see, the mind to know, the heart to love, the will to obey God." "A spiritual light, brighter than that of noon, pervades our daily life. The cause of our not seeing is in ourselves." "The great lesson is, that there is in human nature an element truly Divine, and worthy of all reverence; that the Infinite which is mirrored in the outward universe, is yet more brightly imaged in the inward spiritual world." "They who assert the greatness of human nature, see as much of guilt as the man of worldly wisdom. But amidst the passions and selfishness of men they see another element--a Divine element--a spiritual principle." "This moral principle--the supreme law in man--is the Law of the Universe, the very Law to which the highest beings are subject, and in obeying which they find their elevation and their joy." "The Soul itself,--in its powers and affections, in its unquenchable thirst and aspiration for unattained good, gives signs of a Nature made for an interminable progress, such as cannot be now conceived."