New England Transcendentalism 18301860

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New England Transcendentalism1830-1860

• Dr. M. Patterson

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Context

• A response to the Industrial Revolution in New
  England in the 1830s and 1840s
• Transcendentalists feared that increasing
  production in factories meant a decreasing sense
  of selfhence emphasis on nature.
• Met in Concord and nearby Boston
• Owed its development to the growth of democracy.
  T. centered on the divinity of the individual,
  but this divinity could be self-discovered only
  if the person had the independence of mind to do
  so. (At least 70 of registered voters
  participated in presidential elections.)
• They were active in the major reform movements of
  their day advocating abolition and womens
  rights improvements in education and conditions
  for the poor, insane and criminal.

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Origins

• Emerson traces its origins to Immanuel Kant, who
  showed that there were experiences that could be
  acquired through intuitions of the mind.
• In his essay, Nature, Emerson explained how
  every idea has its source in natural phenomena,
  and that the attentive person can see those
  ideas in nature. Intuition allowed the
  transcendentalist to disregard external authority
  and to rely, instead, on direct experience.
• God is energy, a force, not a separate being.
  God breathes through nature and man attempts to
  open himself up to this influx
• The oriental mind has always tended to this
  largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. .
  .The Buddhist. . .is a Transcendentalist--Emerson

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Religious Foundations

• Ts offered a critique of Unitarianism. The
  religion from which many of the Ts came, U.
  offered a rational or liberal theology stressing
  self culture and the human capacity for good.
• Unitarians, in turn, had offered a rationalist
  critique of Calvinist orthodoxy, rejecting such
  Puritan beliefs as
• 1. Innate depravity
• 2. PredestinationGod had decreed who would be
  saved and who would be damned from the beginning
  of the world
• 3. Irresistible graceregeneration was entirely a
  work of God, which cant be resisted and which
  the sinner contributes nothing
• 4.limited atonementChrist died for the elect
  only
• 5. Perseverance of the Saints. (Despite their
  backsliding, the elect cannot fall from grace)

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Who were they?

• Ralph Waldo Emerson was the spokesman of
  Transcendentalism
• Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden
• Margaret Fuller
• Walt Whitman (influenced)

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Some Definitions of Transcendentalism

• An intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual
  movement. It was a renaissance of conscious,
  living faith in the power of reason, in the
  reality of spiritual insight, in the privilege,
  beauty, and glory of lifeFrances Tiffany
• The transcendentalist adopts the whole
  connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in
  miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human
  mind to new influx of light and power he
  believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He
  wishes that the spiritual principle should be
  suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all
  possible applications to the state of man,
  without the admission of anything
  unspiritualRalph Waldo Emerson
• an assertion of the inalienable worth of manof
  the immanence of divinity in instinct, the
  transference of supernatural attributes to the
  natural constitution of mankindO. B.
  Frothingham

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Key Terms

• OversoulThe source of all creation, divine
  perfection
• Unitarianism
• Transcendentalism
• Calvinism