Who+and+Where?

Transcendentalism was started by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In the 1830's in New England, Ralph Waldo Emmerson also began the trend of transcendentalism with the publication of his essay: //Nature//. Nature had been described as, "the first document of that remarkable outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground." [] Some other key players in Transcendentalist movement were "Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Convers Francis, Margaret Fuller, William Henry Furness, Frederick Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody, George Ripley, and Jones Very". ([]) Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Transcendentalism began as a radical religious movement, opposed to the rationalist, conservative, institution that Unitarianism had become. Many of the movement's early proponents were or had been Unitarian ministers who had found Unitarianism wanting both spiritually and emotionally, and, beginning in the late 1820s, had expressed the need for and conviction of a more personal and intuitive experience of the divine, one available to every person.

 The Transcendentalists assumed a universe divided into two essential parts, the soul and nature. Emerson defined the soul by defining nature: "all that is separated from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE."