erican philosophers. Richard Francis has examined these two, as well as Walden (Thoreau's "Community of One") (218), in terms of Transcendental utopian thought. He gives an in-depth analysis of such themes as the relationship between individuality and community and between order and disorder. He first presents what he labels 'The Transcendental paradox' as a combination of the exaltation of the individual with the search for perfect community, or, put differently, its simultaneous affirmation of order and disorder (ix-x, 2). He defines Fourierism as the highly ordered type of communitarianism that Brook Farm adopted and posits that it was the best solution to the paradox the
             Transcendentalists could find. "In short, what Fourierism had to offer was not the replacement of poetry with substantiality ... but a substantial rendering of the poetic vision that was at the heart of Transcendentalism from its early days. It turns a mystical intuition of a patterned world into a practical program" (71). He believes that Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden were originally conceptualized through the Transcendentalist precepts and "what Fourierism did was to give a formal basis to the assumptions on which [the Brook Farmers] had been working all along" (88).
             Edward Wilson presents the observation that transcendentalism and religious thought is in opposition to empiricism and that the human mind and culture rose from millions of years of combined genetic and cultural evolution. He sets this as the "empiricist world view of the human condition" (30). He proposes that
             Transcendentalism will lose its followers and believers in the natural utopian order. He states, "I believe that the clear expression of the competition between the two hypotheses--transcendentalism and empiricism--will be the twenty- first century's version of the struggle for human souls. I believe also that the winner of this struggle will be empiricism, with the rec...