In the New England mind brute matter has tended to dissolve into thought, and during the very years that Mary Baker was growing up in Bow this tendency was gathering strength among a few young thinkers, to flower at last about 1836 into the Transcendentalist movement. 45 At the same time the nineteenth century was marshaling its energies for the tremendous achievements in geology and biology that were to challenge all transcendental interpretations of nature and to plant man squarely in an objective material world, the creature of natural forces that were clearly indifferent to specifically human values.