1. Transcendentalism: The view that the basic truths of the universe lie beyond the knowledge we obtain from our senses.

2. Transcendentalism:Through our senses, we learn facts and laws of the physical world; but there is another realm of knowledge that TRANSCENDS (or goes beyond) what we learn, experience, or read about in books.They believed in the spiritual unity of all forms of being ~ with God, humanity, and nature sharing a universal soul called the Over-Soul.

3. Transcendental Values: inspiration, insight, education, sought sublime, individualism, THE SELF, intuition, self-reliance, simplicity, Nature, independent thinking, non-conformity, the interconnections between all living things, self-knowledge, wisdom, optimism, distrusted institutions, distrusted society, & distrusted big government

4. Transcendentalism:They believed physical facts of the natural world were the doorway to the spiritual world

5. Transcendental thought most clearly and forcefully expressed in Ralph Waldo Emerson and his disciple Henry David Thoreau. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 –1882)Emerson expressed better than others before him, America's freedom from customs, thoughts, and traditions of Europe, its energy, its opportunity to be great

6. The Transcendentalist ClubA club that met in Emerson's house every week: ministers, radical educators, abolitionists, feminists, vegetarians, and utopians (Brook Farm).

7. In his speeches and essays, Emerson emphasized the connections between humans, nature, and the spiritualEmerson’s ideas influenced Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and future generations of writers, thinkers, artists, students, activists, and also everyday people.

8. Emerson was born in 1803 to a poor, but educated family and followed in father's footstep's to be a minister -- entered Harvard Divinity School at the age of 14His academic record at Harvard was so weak that upon graduation he failed to get a teaching post in the prestigious Boston Public Latin School.

9. He married Ellen Tucker -- she died 16 months later ~ grief led him to disbelief his religious upbringingHe resigned, went off on an extended tour of Europe. Upon return, he married Lydia Jackson in 1834 back in America

10. He began to lecture on the philosophy of history -- distinctly American: he denied the importance of the past, stressed native literature and ideas1836 -- publication of "Nature," birth of his son Waldo, Transcendental Club

11. Divinity School Address -- "cast behind . . . all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with the Deity" ~ banned for three decades as resultConcord became a center for truth-seeking youth, sought out Emerson as a kind of guruAfter Waldo died in 1842 . . . Emerson never really emerged from his shell

12. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)Thoreau not easy to pin down: activist, poet, scholar, slacker, writer, hiker, environmentalist (fifty years before others), naturalist, abolitionist, prophet, conservative, liberal, carpenter, gardener, biologist, mason . . . Thoreau’s ideas and actions influenced Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Environmental movement, Civil Rights movement, Green Party, writers, students, activists . . .

13. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)Thoreau not easy to pin down: activist, poet, scholar, slacker, writer, hiker, environmentalist (fifty years before others), naturalist, abolitionist, prophet, conservative, liberal, carpenter, gardener, biologist, mason . . . Thoreau’s ideas and actions influenced Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Environmental movement, Civil Rights movement, Green Party, writers, students, activists . . .

14. Thoreau is famous for living Emerson’s ideas in a cabin in the woods for two yearsHe wrote Waldenwhich explains how and why he went to live as a recluse in a spartan cabin in the woods from 1845-1847.Walden is perhaps the most influential non-fiction book in American history.

15. Breaking the Law . . . He spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest of the Mexican War (which he thought was an attempt to extend American slave-owning territory; after this experience in jail he wrote “Civil Disobedience” in response.

16. Emerson said the following @ Thoreau’s funeral: “He seemed born for great enterprise and for command, and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. [Lacking] this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of the huckleberry party.”The statement is ironic, b/c Emerson said, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”Thoreau was never married