“ It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, always do what you are afraid to do.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Transcendentalism
• A literary movement in the 1830’s that established a clear “ American voice ”.
• Emerson first expressed his philosophy in his essay “Nature”.
• A belief in a higher reality than that achieved by human reasoning.
• Suggests that every individual is capable of discovering this higher truth through intuition .

• Unlike Puritans, they saw humans and nature as possessing an innate goodness.
“In the faces of men and women, I see God”
-Walt Whitman
• Opposed strict ritualism and dogma of established religion.

Transcendentalism: The tenets:
• Believed in living close to nature/importance of nature. Nature is the source of truth and inspiration.
• Taught the dignity of manual labor
• Advocated self-trust/ confidence
• Valued individuality/nonconformity/free thought
• Advocated self-reliance/ simplicity

The first transcendentalists
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Margaret Fuller
• Henry David Thoreau
• Bronson Alcott

“Self-reliance” -Emerson
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation in suicide…”
“Trust thyself…”
“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think…”
“…to be great is to be misunderstood”

“Nature”
• Thoreau began “essential” living
• Built a cabin on land owned to Emerson in Concord, Mass. near Walden Pond
• Lived alone there for two years studying nature and seeking truth within himself

“I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it has to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“Still we live meanly like ants.”
“Our life is frittered away by detail.”
“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand.”

Beauty in nature…

Individuality
“How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”

“Civil Disobedience”
• Thoreau’s essay urging passive, nonviolent resistance to governmental policies to which an individual is morally opposed.
• Influenced individuals such a Ghandi, Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez

“[If injustice] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be the friction to stop the machine.”