Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes some of your favorites? They were Transcendentists. What's that?

Transcendentalism: A literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition. 2. The quality or state of being transcendental.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000

"Although Transcendentalism as a historical movement was limited in time from the mid 1830s to the late 1840s and in space to eastern Massachusetts, its ripples continue to spread through American culture. Beginning as a quarrel within the Unitarian church, Transcendentalism's questioning of established cultural forms, its urge to reintegrate spirit and matter, its desire to turn ideas into concrete action developed a momentum of its own, spreading from the spheres of religion and education to literature, philosophy, and social reform. While Transcendentalism's ambivalence about any communal effort that would compromise individual integrity prevented it from creating lasting institutions, it helped set the terms for being an intellectual in America."

Source: Martin Bickman, University of Colorado, Boulder