Transgressive Transcendentalism

Though rarely (if ever) recognized as an heir to Emerson, George Santayana was indeed one--but his relation to the Sage of Concord was that of a transitional figure from "old" or "original" Transcendentalism to "new" or "second wave" or (perhaps best of all) "transgressive" Transcendentalism.

Here, from Santayana's wonderful late-life memoir My Host The World (p. 4), is a fine description of the "philosophical religion" or "vital philosophy" that is Transgressive Transcendentalism:

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. A philosopher may perfectly well cultivate more than one Weltanschauung, if he has a vital philosophy of his own to qualify his adoption of each, so as to render them complementary and not contradictory. I had, and have, such a vital philosophy; and the movement of my mind among various systems of belief has tended merely to discover how far my vital philosophy could be expressed in each of them. My variations therefore never involved rejecting any old affection, but only correcting such absoluteness or innocence as there may have been about it, and reducing it to its legitimate function. So in 1900 I published the result of the gradual transformation of my religious sentiments. Religion was poetry intervening in life.