Excerpt from Emerson: A Statement of New England Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent

The term New England Transcendentalism is applied, first, to the various phases of idealism which found expression in New England during, roughly, the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But an examination of the attitude of that group of men who are recognized as the New England Transcendentalists soon reveals the fact that they themselves were not primarily concerned with philosophy for its own sake, but imported and modified the thought of Plato, of the Neo Platonists and Mystics, or of Kant and his successors, merely as a basis for their attitude toward religion and conduct; that they thought Of T ranscendentalism not only as a philosophy but as a movement; that however they might differ in theory, they were Transcendentalists by virtue of a common impulse. This spirit of the time, says Emerson in his manifesto in the opening number Of The Dial, is in every form a protest against usage, and a search for principles.1 This is a second meaning Of the term New England Transcendentalism. A third mean Ing, which has been the source of much confusion, may be summed up in the phrase Transcendental nonsense. The Transcendental move ment was attended by a general spirit of unrest and hostility to convention. Whims and absurdities of all sorts were in the air. Bran had its prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, _writes Lowell, in his delightful essay on Thoreau. Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business. N O brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. And in the same spirit Hawthorne, in his American N ote Books, 'speaks ofmargaret Fuller's refractory cow at Brook Farm as a transcendental heifer. The name New England Transcendentalism has been applied to cover all the wild vagaries of the time.

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