NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM
Ralph Waldo Emerson is read by every generation of high school and college students, and is probably America's,
best known religious philosopher. He also has the distinction of being, the author that Unity founder Charles
Fillmore quoted most often. Along with the poet Whittier and the essayist Thoreau, Emerson led a movement known in
its day as New England Transcendentalism. A lesser-known transcendentalist, Phineas Quimby, provided the link
between Unity and that philosophy.
Quimby was a 19th-century hypnotherapist who noted that many of his, patients had fearful and rigid attitudes
regarding, religion; that damaged their responsiveness to treatment. He tried to ,teach them a different way of
looking at religion, one that he had gleaned from Emerson's writings. One of his patients, a Mary Patterson,
received successful treatment for chronic invalidism from Quimby. Later, under the name Mary Baker Eddy, she
founded Christian Science, incorporating some of Quimby's ideas.
Copyright Rev. Gregory Barrettte 1993
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