New England Transcendentalists

People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that "transcends" or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel.

Knowledge comes through

intuition and imagination not through logic or the senses

People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right

TRANSCENDENTALIST is a person who accepts these ideas not as religious beliefs but as a way of understanding life relationships

Individuals most closely associated with this new way of thinking were connected loosely through a group known as THE TRANSCENDENTAL CLUB, which met in the Boston home of GEORGE RIPLEY

New England transcendentalists were an offshoot of the romantics

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

"thought of transcendentalism as a philosophy whereby one would seek to transcend the mere physical world of the senses and elevate one's soul to a high and moral spiritual plane"

Accepted the philosophy of Plato, who espoused the belief that the real world is a mirror of a spiritual world

Tried to live close to nature and believed that man's best opportunity to discover the Divine was through nature

In contrast to the Puritans, they thought that human beings were divine in their own rights.

They scorned the rituals of organized religion

Reform-minded and tended toward radical ideas, including the establishment of experiments in communal living

Supported the enfranchisement of women and the increased availability of education

Very optimistic.

While, like the Puritans, they found their world full of meaning, unlike the Puritans the meaning they found was inevitably full of hope

Thoreau memorably wrote in his conclusion to Walden, "There is more day to dawn. The sun is yet a morning star"

Upcoming

• Ralph Waldo Emerson "Nature" "The American Scholar" "The Divinity School Address" "Self-Reliance"
• Complete assignments in calendar