TRANSCENDENTALISM

Transcendentalism was a religious, philosophical, and literary movement centered in New England during the 19th century.  It was a reaction against the state of intellectualism at Harvard University, and against the Unitarianism taught at Harvard Divinity School.

The major figures in the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Margaret Fuller, and Amos Bronson Alcott.  They held that intuition was the only way to comprehend reality in a world where all natural phenomena possessed a spiritual truth. 

They believed that everything in our world is a microcosm of the universe, and therefore that there is an essential unity in all things.  And these things were ordered by a Supreme Mind or Over-Soul with which man’s soul is identical.  This belief in the divinity of man allowed the Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and tradition, relying instead on direct experience.

Transcendentalism was significantly influenced by Vedanta, as Thoreau in his book Walden directly evidences:

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal [sic] philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.

“I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug.  I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets, as it were, grate together in the same well.  The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”