Self, Nature, and Conscience: What Concord Argued

The idea

Transcendentalism is the first American philosophy to produce a literature, and it can be stated in one proposition: an individual can reach the truth directly, through intuition and through nature, and every institution that offers to do it for them is in the way. The materials came from outside, from German and British Romanticism, from Kant and German Idealism, from the higher criticism of the Bible, and from a New England Unitarianism that had already softened Calvinism. What the Concord writers added was the insistence that the mind is active. Against Locke's tablet receiving impressions, they described an exchange between a mind and an animated nature that both receives and creates the sense of spirit, and gave that shared spirit the name Over-soul. Emerson wrote the movement's founding statement in Nature, told American thinkers to stop deferring to Europe in "The American Scholar", and gave self-trust its permanent formulation in "Self-Reliance", where society is a conspiracy against its own members and a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. He also produced the movement's most mocked and most durable image, the transparent eyeball that is nothing and sees all. Thoreau took the same doctrine and tested it by living: two years at Walden Pond compressed into one turning year, a cabin priced to the half-cent, and the claim that the cost of a thing is the life exchanged for it. His refusal of a poll tax over slavery and the Mexican war produced "Resistance to Civil Government", which outgrew its occasion entirely. Fuller edited the movement's quarterly and extended its principle to women, which is the application Emerson's own formulations imply and do not make. The movement's afterlife is larger than its doctrine: the individual against the crowd, nature as a source of truth, the essay as a form for thinking aloud.