A form of philosophy inaugurated in the 18th
century by Immanuel Kant and developed in the
USA in the mid-19th century into a mystical
and social doctrine. As opposed to
metaphysics in the traditional sense,
transcendental philosophy is concerned with
the conditions of possibility of experience,
rather than the nature of being. It seeks to
show the necessary structure of our `point of
view' on the world. Introduced to England,
transcendentalism influenced the writers
Samuel Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. In the
USA it was taken up in New England about
1840-60, influenced by European Romanticism,
by Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the
feminist Margaret Fuller (1810-50), and
Orestes Brownson, who saw God as immanent in
nature and the human soul. Transcendentalism
had religious, philosophical, and political
implications, shaping American ideals of
self-reliance, attitudes towards reform and
slavery-abolition, feminism, and various
forms of Utopian idealism displayed in the
movement's experimental community at Brook
Farm near Boston, Massachusetts. Emphasizing
the role of the poet and the need for an
original US literature, it also had literary
consequences, and out of it came Emerson's
essays and poems, Jones Very's poetry,
Thoreau's Walden 1854, and, less directly,
the novels and stories of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass
1855.