2. Dr. Marc D. Baldwin Transcendentalism Copyright © 2005 by Marc D. Baldwin, PhD

3. Introduction Sometimes called "Boston Transcendentalism," this philosophy is a Romantic reaction against Calvinism, rationalism, materialism, and Lockean empiricism.

4. Spiritual and Ideal Transcendentalists believe that reality is spiritual or ideal, rather than material. Since God is omnipresent, everything is a microcosm of the larger whole.

5. Correspondence The individual soul corresponds with the soul of the world or God, so that everyone comes to know Truth and Beauty intuitively. Through this intuition, which transcends reason and the senses, everyone can achieve their potential organically, not by design, but naturally.

6. Nature Transcendentalists believe that God is Nature, a living spirit, revealing himself everywhere and at all times. Nature is the revelation of God and intuition is the faculty by which man can transcend his senses and understand the ideal world. Transcendentalism encourages a sense of wonder about the natural world around and within us all.

7. Origins Quite apropos, transcendentalism itself grew organically from many sources. From Plato's idealism through Confucius and Buddha to the German philosophers, trans. first blossomed in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, where he stated that transcendental knowledge is "concerned not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori."

8. English Romantics Then came the Romantic poets in England, with Coleridge and his belief in the "esemplastic" powers of the imagination and Wordsworth, who knew that the "world is too much with us" and we'd be better off with nature's "crowd/A host of golden daffodils."

9. In America Transcendentalism swept America, with the great philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who are subjects of other Lectures. Quakers believe in an inner light, claiming to have visions. Even further back, America’s founding compulsion to settle the frontier smacks of a transcendent, optimistic spirit of self-reliance. Jonathan Edwards professed in 1734 a belief in the soul's direct correspondence to God's "Supernatural Light." And Ellery Channing's Unitarianism stressed the individual nature of man's relationship to God.