![]() Other members of the club included Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan. Transcendentalism became a coherent movement and a sacred organization with the founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1836, by prominent New England intellectuals, including George Putnam (Unitarian minister), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederic Henry Hedge. Thus, transcendentalism was not born as a counter-movement to Unitarianism, but as a parallel movement to the very ideas introduced by the Unitarians. Instead, they longed for a more intense spiritual experience. The transcendentalists were not content with the sobriety, mildness, and calm rationalism of Unitarianism. Transcendentalism was not a rejection of Unitarianism rather, it developed as an organic consequence of the Unitarian emphasis on free conscience and the value of intellectual reason. It started to develop after Unitarianism took hold at Harvard University, following the elections of Henry Ware as the Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805 and of John Thornton Kirkland as President in 1810. Transcendentalism is closely related to Unitarianism, a religious movement in Boston in the early nineteenth century. It was also strongly influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the Upanishads. Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism. Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume", and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism. The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related. It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time. Emphasizing subjective intuition over objective empiricism, its adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters. Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United States it is therefore a key early point in the history of American philosophy. Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly " self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States.
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