Transcendentalism is a term rooted back to Plato, a Greek philosopher who first affirmed the existence of absolute goodness, which he characterized as beyond something of description and as knowable only through intuition. He laid the tracks down for others to build off of. The Scholastic philosophers were the first to add to Plato's theory during the middle ages. They came up with the transcendental concepts, which show the capabilities of all types of things. Essence, unity, goodness, truth, thing, and something were the six that they recognized. Still the term transcendentalist needed refining. Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Edmund Husserl formed a distinction between the terms transcendent, entities that are unknown and cannot be defined, and transcendental, signifying a priori forms of thought, innate principles w

The transcendental movement began to take shape in 1836 at the Transcendental Club in Boston, in which the most influence leaders of the movement came together and published a magazine known as The Dial which was expressed their ideas and brought them to the public. Some of the attendees included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Brunson Alcott, and William Willery Channing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet. He was born on May 25, 1803 and died on April 27, 1882. He graduated from Harvard in 1821 and was the youngest member of his freshmen class there at the age of 14. IN 1829, he was ordained as a Unitarian minister, and left three years later because of his differences with the religion. After traveling in Europe he published Nature, an outline of his transcendental views, in 1836. A major accomplishment of his life was the publishing of his two series of Essays, which the world-renowned Self-Reliance essay was published in 1841. "...That imitation is suicide" is a quote from Self-Reliance that shows the transcendental belief that individuality is better than conforming to society and being a follower. Another quote that shows the idea of transcendentalism, which looks at its possibilities for the human spirit and what it can achieve is, "The power which resides in him (referring to all humans) is new in nature, and non but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

ith which the mind gives form to its perceptions, and classified their views as transcendental.

Anti- transcendentalism, however, focused on the darkness of the human soul and was really just opposition to transcendentalism, as the name suggests. They believed that transcendentalism was just to optimistic and just overlooked the evil that plagues all men. They viewed mature as a two-sided force, having both a graceful side and a destructive side. They saw natu

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