Calvin Blanchard

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] LAST WORDS OF CALVIN BLANCHARD. Mr. Calvin Blanchard, recently deceased, aged 60, was a remarkable man. Thirty-five years ago, when he and we were journeymen printers in this City, he was currently nicknamed “Anti-Christ” by his associates—his creed being what most of us deemed infidelity, though he gave it a different designation. He afterward became an author, bookseller and publisher, giving currency to many works which were condemned as immoral as well as irreligious, though no one who knew him could doubt that he thought them otherwise. Dying, he left the […]

In 1854, Comte’s Positive Philosophy and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity fell under my observation. Many years before I had read Fourier. His system, by itself, however, seemed to me to lack foundation. But Comte furnished that foundation, and Feuerbach’s demonstration of the naturalness of “supernaturalism” precluded the possibility of my coming to any other conclusion in the premises than that the religious idea was the index to, and nature’s guaranty for, that Heaven on earth, of which Fourier was the prophet, but which he, unfortunately, attempted to minutely describe at too great a distance, and thus fell into vagaries, with respect to particulars, which did much to obscure, and bring into contempt, his most profound and transcendently brilliant discoveries.