CANTIDAD:

100

RESUMEN

James Elliot Cabot (June 18, 1821 – Jan. 16, 1903), transcendentalist, philosopher, and author, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Samuel Cabot, Jr., a wealthy merchant in the East Asian trade, and Eliza Cabot. The Cabots were archetypical “Boston Brahmins,” conscious of their social, economic, and intellectual prominence as the city’s “first families.” As expected, Elliot attended Harvard College, where he was a founder of the Natural History Society, a member of the Hasty Pudding and Porcellian clubs, and a keen rifleman. Guns were then banned at Harvard, so he concealed his rifle under his cloak.

He graduated Harvard College in 1840, and, like many of his class and cohort, planned to return to study law, after the requisite post-collegiate European tour. His discovery of German metaphysics while attending F.W.J. von Schelling’s famous lectures on the philosophy of revelation, in Berlin in 1841 and 1842, however, “dramatically altered the course of his life.” (Simmons, 366). A lackluster student as an undergraduate, he now devoted himself to a wide reading of German philosophy, focusing particularly on Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Steffens. When he returned to Boston from Germany in 1843, he sent one of his own essays on Kant to a writer and thinker he admired, Ralph Waldo Emerson. This exchange would set the foundation for their forty-year friendship. Soon after the poet’s death, Cabot was tasked with writing Emerson’s biography - a project to which he dedicated ten years of his life.

Cabot graduated from Harvard Law School in 1845, but he only practiced law for about a year as a senior partner at a Boston law firm before retiring from the profession. Soon after, he helped establish the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, where he used his German training to help found the new literary enterprise. Although that journal eventually folded, Cabot had greater success in other projects, namely a published volume of his expedition in 1850 to Lake Superior with the naturalist Louis Agassiz and his time as a partner in his brother’s architecture office. Elliot Cabot married Elizabeth Dwight on September 28, 1857. Together, they raised five sons.

Cabot delivered a series of lectures on the philosopher Immanuel Kant at Harvard, taught as an Instructor in Logic at the university, and served a six-year term as chairman of the examining committee of Harvard Overseers. His relationship with Harvard continued to the end of his life, including his support of the Harvard Summer School for Cuban Teachers in 1900, to which he and his wife donated $100.


James Elliot Cabot died on January 16, 1903, at the age of 82. His biographer Thomas W. Higginson summarized his life as follows: Cabot “seemed to himself to have accomplished nothing; and yet had indirectly aided many men by the breadth of his intellectual sympathy.” (Higginson, 655).


Further Reading

1. Higginson, T. W. “James Elliot Cabot,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Vol. 39, No. 24 (Jun. 1904): 649-655.

2. Simmons, Nancy Craig. “Philosophical Biographer: James Elliot Cabot and "A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson" Studies in the American Renaissance (1987): 365-392