Transcendentalists believed that intuition and the individual conscience transcend experience and were therefore better guides to truth than are the senses and logical reason. They respected the individual spirit and the natural world, believing that divinity was present everywhere. "Anti-Transcendentalists" like Hawthorne and his apprentice Melville, focused instead on the limitations and potential destructiveness of the human spirit, rather than on its possibilities. Hawthorne and Melville shared great admiration for one another and their relationship became a source of critique and interpretation that would ultimately influence each of their works. Both men were strongly influenced by the individualism represented in the works of transcendentalists such as Emerson. However, both men viewed evil as a dominant force in the world and focused on its' ubiquitous, and innate nature.
             The men's shared rejection of the transcendentalist view was based on the idea that the human condition can be paired into two poles: the happy ignorant and the suffering aware. Much of Hawthorne and Melville's work describes the human desire for knowledge and the alienation that such knowledge can bring. This theme is a familiar Biblical one: from the Genesis story of Adam and Eve; Hawthorne has written on the theme to varying degrees (most notably in "Ethan Brand" and "Rapucinni's Daughter").
             The title character in "Ethan Brand" carries within him a burden: the desire for knowledge of the Unpardonable Sin. Upon returning from a twenty-year search he watches a dog chase its tail. "Never was seen," writes Hawthorne, "such headlong eagerness in pursuit of an object that could not possibly be attained." (Hawthorne p 433) The dog chasing its tail is symbolic of the futility of the quest. Before Ethan Brand began his search for the Unpardonable Sin he was sympathetic toward the sufferings of h...