It is a rational nature, and it seeks the Supreme Reason, if only for its own self-explication.

It is a nature which, wherever found, is found in the attitude of adoration, and neither in the individual man nor in humanity at large is there any Divinity which responds to worship.
It is impossible to say just when Isaac Hecker's appreciation of this truth became intensely personal and clear, but it is easy to make a tolerable approximation to the time.

He went to Brook Farm in January, 1843, rather more than eight years after his first meeting with Dr.Brownson.It was by the advice of the latter that he made this first decisive break from his former life.

From the time when their acquaintance began, Isaac appears to have taken up the study of philosophy in good earnest, and to have found in it an outlet for his energies which insensibly diminished his absorption in social politics.

We have a glimpse of him kneading at the dough-trough with Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ fastened up on the wall before him, so that he might lose no time in merely manual labor.