2. The universe and the individual are all connected in one Universal soul with people and human nature as good and pure. Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul. People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls.

3. Self- reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition. Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior to deliberate intellectualism and rationality.

4.  Transcendentalism was based partly on the philosophy of Idealism, which dated back to ancient Greece.  It was based also on the ideas of American thinkers ranging from the Puritans to the nineteenth-century Romantics.  Transcendentalists viewed nature as a doorway to a mystical world holding important truths.

5.  Man is inherently good.  Critical of government.  Were progressive thinkers of their time in terms of equality and rights.  Favored imagination, creativity, and the human spirit.

6. “Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

7. “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” Margaret Fuller

9. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” Henry David Thoreau

10. “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

11. God is always near. He reveals Himself everywhere and at all times in nature. In nature, we are able to find “the perpetual presence of the sublime.” In His presence we feel real delight in spite of sorrow. Nature gives us better, “higher” thoughts and emotions.

12. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.

13. To put it simply, the transparent eyeball is a metaphor for him seeing everything as a part of everything instead of as himself looking out. Emerson placed an emphasis on being one with nature and so as a transparent eyeball, he sees everything and exists as everything else exists around him.

17. How are you affected by nature? Do you find comfort in it? Do you reflect the moods of nature? What is the role of nature in your life? What is meant by an individual's spiritual side? How to you define it? Is there a connection between the individual's spirit and nature? If so, what is that connection? What does it mean to know something intuitively? For example, has a parent or a sibling ever known something was wrong with you without having talked with or seen you? What do we mean when we say "I just know it"? How do you demonstrate that you are an individual? Do you think independently of others or do you follow the crowd?