American Transcendentalism
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to from only essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (Thoreau) American Transcendentalism was a literary and philosophical movement that emerged in New England around 1836 and flourished for ten years until 1846. This school of thought had a profound influence on American religion, philosophy, politics, literature, and art. The American Transcendentalist rejected this empiricism, asserting that wisdom is inherent in the soul of each human being. The root of the Transcendentalists' humanistic philosophy is that which exalts the individual as a reflection and integral part of God's divine universe. According to critics, American Transcendentalism was driven by the circumstances of nineteenth-century American life. American Transcendentalism is rooted in the American past. It owes its pervasive morality and the "doctrine of divine light" to such aspects of Puritanism and its concept of nature as a living mystery and not a clockwork universe which is fixed and permanent to the Romanticism age (Reuben 2). The American landscape inspired the Transcendentalists' rever
html> 22 April 1999 Richardson, Robert D. University of California Press, 1995. Perhaps the best known and most influential of Emerson's immediate disciples is Henry David Thoreau, noted for his book Walden; or Life in the Woods, which has been regarded as a nature study, spiritual autobiography, and philosophical abstract, for his "Civil Disobedience", a seminal essay outlining peaceful social protest. Philosophically, it crystallized the key ideas of American democracy and religion. Among American Transcendentalism's other key figures was Margaret Fuller, editor of the leading Transcendentalist periodical, The Dial, and author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, considered a primary document of American feminism. The Transcendentalist were a number of young Americans, most of them born into the Unitarianism of New England in the early nineteenth century, who in the 1830's became excited about the new literature of England, and who thereupon revolted against the rationalism of their fathers (Miller 1).
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