Transcendentalism

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Transcend verb to go beyond the limits of
exceed be above and independent of the physical
universe
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We will walk on our own feet we will work
with our own hands we will speak our own
minds...A nation of men will for the first time
exist, because each believes himself inspired by
the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
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Romanticism
Transcendentalism
Gothic
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Transcendentalism was a philosophical, spiritual
and literary movement that flourished in the US
in the decades before the Civil War the
antebellum period.
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• Philosophically
• Transcendentalists believed there was an inherent
  connection between all living elements and human
  beings.
• .

• They believed that through the attainment of
  knowledge, human beings could transcend the
  limitations of the physical senses and attain
  spiritual awareness and enlightenment.

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• They believed that this knowledge resided within
  an individual and could be accessed through
  meditation, self aware ness and communing with
  nature.

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Spiritually

• Personal belief and meditation was valued over
  organized worship and services.

• No mediator, such as a priest or minister, was
  necessary for a person to experience a connection
  with the divine.

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• They contended that there is a spark of the
  divine in all human beings, and that if we
  understand ourselves and are true to ourselves,
  then we are also true to God.

The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature
face to face wethrough their eyes. Why should
not we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe? -Emerson
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The Transparent Eyeball could simultaneously
absorb and observe information while being part
of that information was a symbolic representation
of these ideas.
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Literary

• Transcendentalists. Like their fictional
  counterparts, the Romantics, were trying to forge
  a distinctly American literature and philosophy
  that valued the power of the individual.

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The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection
of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in
the perpetual openness of the human mind 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 that
is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus,
the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth
of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he
resists all attempts to palm other rules and
measures on the spirit than its own....
- Emerson
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The Oversoul
Emerson espoused belief in a force called the
Oversoul.

• The Oversoul was the divine spirit or mind that
  was present in every man and in all of nature. It
  was an all-pervading, omniscient, supreme mind.
  Each part of nature or of humanity was a
  reflection of the divine mind.

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Our minds are connected to all other minds, all
of nature and therefore all of god. There is a
direct connection between this new spiritual
trinity, that ironically demands and defines a
unity between them.
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The whole of the cosmos could be extrapolated
from each particular. In each manifestation, or
creation of God, man could discover, in a simpler
form, all universal laws at work.
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• The most famous of American Transcendentalists
  are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
• The great American poet Walt Whitman also had
  transcendentalist tendencies.