In 1832 a young Boston minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned his pulpit because he could no longer serve communion in good faith. He sailed to Europe, met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle, and came home convinced that God was to be found in nature and in every person directly, with no church in between. In September 1836 his first book, Nature, appeared without his name on it, and the same month he and a handful of friends began meeting in what a joker soon called the Transcendental Club.
The name was borrowed, half in mockery, from Kant. The place was Concord, Massachusetts, a village twenty miles from Boston where, for about twenty years, an unusual number of people decided to think for themselves and write it down. Henry David Thoreau built a cabin by a pond. Margaret Fuller edited the magazine. Bronson Alcott started a school and a commune, both of which failed, and raised the daughter who wrote Little Women.
Divinity runs through everything. Nature and every person carry it; Emerson called it the Over-Soul. You do not need a church to reach it.
Trust yourself. “Self-Reliance”: imitation is suicide, and a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Intuition over dogma. Some truths arrive whole, and no argument or scripture can improve on them.
Simplify. Thoreau went to the woods to find out what life required and reported that it was less than advertised.
Reform follows. If every person carries the divine, slavery is blasphemy and women’s silence is a waste. The Concord circle acted on both.
Read the world. The Gita, the Vedas and Confucius sat on the Concord shelves next to Plato and Coleridge.
Margaret Fuller edited The Dial before Emerson did, which made it the first American journal edited by a woman, and her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is the movement’s other great manifesto. Elizabeth Peabody published it from her Boston bookshop, the first woman publisher in the city.
The ideas themselves came a long way. Emerson’s poem “Brahma” (1857) is the Bhagavad Gita in sixteen lines, and Thoreau read the Gita at Walden in the mornings. The movement’s abolitionism put it beside Frederick Douglass, who spoke in Concord, and Thoreau’s last public cause was a defence of John Brown.
Transcendentalism is Romanticism’s American child, with an Eastern library. Its Over-Soul is Neoplatonism by way of Coleridge. Thoreau’s cabin is Cynic simplicity without the shamelessness. Emerson’s nonconformist is the ancestor of the Existentialist individual and of the Contrarian temperament described elsewhere on this site.
Every national park owes something to Walden. Civil disobedience as a named strategy runs from Thoreau to Gandhi to King. American self-help, at its best and at its worst, is Emerson thinned out.