(Unitarianism) rather than through the intermediation of the ritualistic church. They held firmly that man was divine in his own right, an opinion opposed to the doctrines held by the Puritan Calvinists in New England, and they urged strongly the essential divinity of man and one great brotherhood. Self-trust and self-reliance were to be practiced at all times and on all occasions, since to trust self was really to trust the voice of God speaking intuitively within us (Emerson). The transcendentalists felt called upon to resist the "vulgar prosperity of the barbarian"; believed firmly in democracy, and insisted on an intense individualism. Some of the extremists in their number went so far as to evolve a system of dietetics and to rule out coffee, wine and tobacco all on the basis that the body was the temple of the soul and that for the tenant's sake it was well to keep the dwelling undefiled. And most of the transcendentalists were by nature reformers, though
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau. Literature of Abolitionism. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as a powerful exposure of slavery. Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest to the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both people and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions--particularly organized religion and political parties--ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly "selfreliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed. Transcendentalism was in many aspects the first notable American intellectual movement
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