Transcendentalism was an American movement centered in New England from the 1830s through the 1850s. Its thinkers believed that divinity flows through all of nature and every individual, that intuition reaches truths beyond the grasp of pure logic, and that self-reliance and time spent in nature are the surest routes to wisdom. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau's Walden remain its defining texts.