Skip to content
Unitive Knowledge Society
Search

Accents are optional; quotes find an exact phrase.
Menu

Movement

Transcendentalism

The New England movement of Emerson and Thoreau, which found the divine in nature and in the depths of each soul.

Also called American Transcendentalism, New England Transcendentalism

Introduction

Transcendentalism was a movement of thought, religion and reform in New England from the 1830s to the 1850s. Its members, many of them Unitarian ministers or their children, reacted against the cool rationalism of Unitarian religion and the empiricism of Locke, which derived all knowledge from the senses. Borrowing a word from Kant, through Coleridge and Carlyle, they called “transcendental” the knowledge of spiritual truth that comes by intuition, beyond the senses.

They taught that the divine is present in nature and in every human soul, so that each person can receive truth directly, without the mediation of church or scripture. Ralph Waldo Emerson called the universal mind in which all persons share the Over-Soul, and urged self-reliance, trust in the divine voice within. Nature, for them, was a symbol of spirit, to be read with attention and reverence.

The Transcendentalists were among the first Americans to read the scriptures of Asia: the Bhagavad Gītā, the Laws of Manu and the Confucian classics, in English and French translations. Their periodical, The Dial, printed selections from them. They were also reformers, active in the causes of abolition, women’s rights, education and communal living.

History

Historical

In 1836 Emerson published Nature, and a group of ministers and writers began meeting as the Transcendental Club. Emerson’s address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, which called on ministers to speak from their own experience of the divine rather than from tradition, caused a scandal. From 1840 to 1844 the movement published The Dial, edited first by Margaret Fuller and then by Emerson; Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) became a founding text of American feminism.

George Ripley founded the community of Brook Farm in 1841, and Bronson Alcott the short-lived Fruitlands in 1843. From 1845 to 1847 Henry David Thoreau lived alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, on land owned by Emerson, an experiment he described in Walden (1854). His essay on civil disobedience (1849) argued that conscience must take precedence over unjust law.

As a movement Transcendentalism faded in the 1850s, absorbed into the struggle over slavery. Its influence did not: Walt Whitman, whom Emerson greeted on the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, carried it into poetry, and Thoreau’s essay was read by Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

  1. 1836Emerson’s Nature; the Transcendental Club first meets
  2. 1838The Divinity School Address
  3. 1840–1844The Dial
  4. 1841Emerson’s Essays, including “The Over-Soul”; Brook Farm founded
  5. 1845–1847Thoreau at Walden Pond
  6. 1854Walden is published

Major thinkers

Key concepts

Important texts

Convergence and divergence

Resemblance and difference, given equal room. Each note is marked with the kind of statement it makes.

Areas of convergence

  • Ātman, with Vedānta

    Historical

    Emerson and Thoreau read the Bhagavad Gītā and other Indian texts in translation, and Emerson’s Over-Soul and his poem “Brahma” echo the Upaniṣadic identity of the self with the ultimate.

Areas of divergence

  • Self, with Advaita Vedānta

    Scholarship

    Transcendentalist self-reliance prizes the individual’s genius and conscience acting in the world; Advaita seeks the self beyond all individuality and action.

Cite this entry
Chicago (bibliography)

“Transcendentalism.” Tradition. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/transcendentalism.

Chicago (note)

“Transcendentalism,” tradition, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/transcendentalism.

MLA

“Transcendentalism.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/transcendentalism.

BibTeX
@misc{traditions-transcendentalism,
  title = {{Transcendentalism}},
  howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society},
  note = {Tradition. Last modified November 7, 2026},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/transcendentalism}
}

Parallels

Reading lists

Continue the inquiry