The two major leaders in the movement of Transcendentalism are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But there were many other prominent figures, among them Amos Bronson Alcott, Sylvester Judd, Elizabeth Peabody, and Walt Whitman. This new movement in the Romantic tradition that burgeoned in New England held that every individual can reach ultimate truths through spiritual intuitions, which transcends reason and sensory experience. Their basic tenets were
- a belief that God is present in every aspect of Nature, including every human being
- the conviction that everyone is capable of experiencing and learning about God through the use of intuition
- the belief that all of Nature is symbolic of the spirit. (Emerson's concept was of the Over-Soul)
- an optimistic view of the world as good and evil as virtually nonexistent.
Transcendentalism arose as a protest against the general state of culture and society, particularly the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the Unitarian...
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doctrines taught at Harvard Divinity School. In his optimisim, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister, wrote particularly of the importance of Nature,
In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. nature says--he is my creature, and maugre (despite) all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me....In the woods too, a man casts off his years,...is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
In the presence of nature, Waldo contended, man loses his egotism, becoming more in tune with his better self, in harmony with eternal things:
I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Univeral Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
Henry David Thoreau, who also loved nature, stressed the exercise of one's individuality. Man must walk "deliberately" into the woods to learn what it offers and return just as "deliberately" and "walk to the beat of a different drummer." Thoreau expressed this individual thought many times in his life. Once, he went to jail rather than pay a tax that supported slavery. His passive resistance was inspirational to such leaders as Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
To me, the most important belief of the leaders of this movement is that people should act according to their own consciences. They believed that people were all pretty much connected to God on a personal level and that people could, therefore, know what was right on their own. They did not need a society telling them how they should act. Because of this, they believed that people should ignore the rules of society and act on their own beliefs.
A second important belief was that all people were connected to nature. This was a belief that said that people were just a part of the universe like everything else. People were part of nature and nature was part of people.
To me, these are the two most important beliefs of the Transcendentalists.