【正文】 Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Henry Hedge. From 1840, the group published frequently in their journal The Dial, along with other venues. The movement was originally termed Transcendentalists as a pejorative term, suggesting their position was beyond sanity and reason. The practical aims of the transcendentalists were varied。 some among the group linked it with utopian social change and, in the case of Brownson, it joined explicitly with early socialism, while others found it an exclusively individual and idealist project. Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842 lecture The Transcendentalist, Emerson suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice. 內(nèi)江師范學(xué)院本科畢業(yè)論文 5 By the late 1840s, Emerson believed the movement was dying out, especially after the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850. All that can be said, Emerson wrote, is that she represents an interesting hour amp。 group in American cultivation.1 Transcendentalism was rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German Idealism more generally), which the New England intellectuals of the early 19th century embraced as an alternative to the Lockean sensualism of their fathers and of the Unitarian church, finding the alternative in Vedic thought, German idealism, and English Romanticism. The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles: principles not based on or falsifiable by, sensuous experience, but deriving from the inner, spiritual or mental essence of the human. Immanuel Kant had called all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects. The transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German philosophy in the original, and relied primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Germaine de Stael, and other English and French mentators for their knowledge of it. In contrast, they were intimately familiar with the English Romantics, and the transcendental movement may be partially described as a slightly later, American outgrowth of Romanticism. Another major influence was the mystical spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenb. Thoreau in Walden spoke of the debt to the Vedic thought directly, as did other members of the movement. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romaine (1852), satirizing the movement, and based it on his experiences at Brook Farm, a shortlived utopian munity founded on transcendental principles. Edgar Allan Poe had a deep dislike for transcendentalism, calling its followers Frogpondians after the pond on Boston Common. He ridiculed their writings in particular by calling them metaphorrun, lapsing into obscurity for obscurity39。s sake or mysticism for mysticism39。s sake. One of his short stories, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, is a clear attack on transcendentalism, which the narrator calls a disease. The story specifically mentions the movement and its flagship journal The Dial, though Poe denied that he had any specific targets. Transcendentalists were strong believers in the power of the 內(nèi)江師范學(xué)院本科畢業(yè)論文 6 individual and divine messages. Their beliefs are closely linked with those of the Romantics. The movement directly influenced the growing movement of Mental Sciences of the mid 1800s which would later bee known as the New Thought movement. New Thought draws directly from the transcendentalists, particularly Emerson. New Thought considers Emerson its intellectual father. Emma Curtis Hopkins the teacher of teachers, Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science, The Fillmores, founders of Unity, and Malinda Cramer and Nona L. Brooks, the founders of Divine Science, were all greatly influenced by Transcendentalism. B. Some Important Comments on Transcendentalism Transcendentalism is an idealistic philosophy that in general emphasizes the spiritual over the material. By its very nature, the movement is hard to describe and its body of beliefs hard to define. Its most important practitioner and spokesman in the New England manifestation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called it the saturnalia or excess of faith. which is popularly called transcendentalism among us, he wrote, is idealism。 idealism as it appears in 1842.2 That description mentions two of the very elements, an emphasis upon heightened spiritual awareness and an interest in various types of philosophical idealism, that make transcendentalism so difficult to describe. In actuality, we cannot speak of a well anized and clearly delineated transcendentalist movement as such. Instead, we find a loosely knit group of authors, preachers, and lecturers bound together by a mutual loathing of Unitarian orthodoxy, a mutual desire to see American cultural and spiritual life freed from bondage to the past, and a mutual faith in the unbounded potential of American democratic life. Located in the Concord, Massachusetts, area in the years between 1835 and 1860, the transcendentalists formed not a tight group but, rather, a loose federation. Though a movement such as transcendentalism cannot be said to have had one distinct leader, Emerson was clearly its central figure. The publication of his Nature in 1836 is generally considered to mark the beginning of an identifiable movement. The next two decades were to see numerous new works from Emerson and poems, essays, and books from other transcendentalist figures, such as Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Bronson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Gee Ripley, and 內(nèi)江師范學(xué)院本科畢業(yè)論文 7 Theodore Parker. Never forming an official affiliation, these figures and others associated with them banded together for the formation of an informal discussion group called the Transcendental Club。 the publication of the transcendentalist literary and philosophical journal,