Transcendental Ideas: Social Reform

Selections from Letters

George Ripley

A Letter Addressed to the Congregational Church in Purchase Street, 1840. [Written before he went to Brook Farm]

"I cannot witness the glaring inequalities of condition, the hollow pretensions of pride, the scornful apathy with which many urge the prostration of man, the burning zeal with which they run the race of selfish competition, with no thought for the elevation of their brethren, without the sad conviction that the spirit of Christ has well-nigh disappeared from tour churches, and that the fearful doom awaits us, 'Inasmuch as ye have not done it unto the least of these, ye have not done it unto me.'"

Letter
Any denial of private property, Ripley wrote, "would so far destroy the independence of the individual as to interfere with the great object of all social reform; namely, the development of humanity, the substitution of a race of free, noble, holy men and women instead of the dwarfish and mutilated specimens who now cover the earth."

Goals
"Our objects, as you know, are to ensure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated person, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can now be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutions."