Important ideas

1. Its origin is traced to the relaxing of Puritan Calvinism into Unitarianism - a belief very much like Deism. From its early liberalism, Unitarianism developed, for some of the young intellectuals, into "a new orthodoxy of smug social conformity that denied the spiritual and emotional depths of experience - 'corpse-cold Unitarianism,' as Emerson was to call it."

2. German and English Romanticism provided some inspiration towards the search for some deeper 'truth.'

3. "Transcendentalism represented a complex response to the democratization of American life, to the rise of science and the new technology, and to the new industrialism - to the whole question, in short, of the redefinition of the relation of man to nature and to other men that was being demanded by the course of history."

4. Transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of both man and nature.

5. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions - particularly organized religion and political parties - ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.

The Big Three: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.

*"The spirit of the time is in every form a protest against usage and a search for principles." - Emerson

*"I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental." - Charles Dickens

*"I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations." – Thoreau.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences -- on the unique viewpoint of the individual.

American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero -- like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain's Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym -- typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-Reliance.