On Religious Doctrine 
In rejecting most religious doctrine, transcendentalists, on points of religion, placed more value on mystical communion with God, an experience of direct illumination and revelation open, they believed, to all people through a common faculty of "intuition."  With the rationalists of the eighteenth century and earlier, they relied on a combination of observation, reason, and intuition to authenticate their interpretations of such experiences.  Their observations of the natural world led them to recognize in "nature" various "correspondences" between the "God in man" and "God of the Universe." These correspondences functioned to "inform" the individual about his or her own spirituality and alignment with universal purpose.  Because such communion was essentially personal, no "transcendental churches" emerged.  
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On "Miracles" 
Spurning most religions' proprietary claims of unique truths and superiority, such universal principles put the "transcendentalists" at odds with most religions.  For example, they rejected what Emerson referred to as "petty and particular miracles" in deference to a sense of the one "universal miracle"--recognition of the existence and essentially spiritual character of the natural world and humanity's place within it.  Discernible through intuitive reflection, such insight constituted sufficient revelation from God, a revelation, they believed, that was open in the most natural sense to everyone, independent of the administration of any religious system and the library of its doctrines. 
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On Virtuous Action 
Other "transcendentalists" were deeply engaged in the social issues of the day.  Several were "abolitionists" who sought to eliminate slavery.  Others were pacificists who opposed American militarism and war.  Still others were educators who placed spirituality and its implications for a universal brotherhood at the seat of the educational experience and social engagement of any kind.  Protesting the United States military incursion into Mexico, for example, Henry David Thoreau, a Concord native, teacher,  and close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, refused to pay his Masschusetts poll taxes, even at the expense of arrest and incarceration (at least for one night).  In his essay, "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau called for people to follow their conscience (what he referred to as the "moral sense") rather than blindly to obey the "state" like "wooden men."  For Thoreau, it is more important to stand up for the truth against popular opinion and practice than to  be a party, through omission, to any injustice.  A simple survey of one's own concscience was sufficient to reveal any appropriate response, even when that response ran counter to the law itself.  Moral law, felt Thoreau, takes precedent to any social law legislated by a concensus of the state, for "any man more right than his neighbors," argues Thoreau, "already constitutes a majority of one."  Thoreau never questioned the consequences of courageous acts of civil disobedience.  He had complete confidence that even just "one honest man" in the state of Massachusetts, willing to act on conscience,  had the power to bring the whole abhorent system of slavery to its knees.  
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The European Connection 
Expressed in their own American contexts, the concepts of the New England transcendentalists drew support from European transcendentalism as well.  The writings of Thomas Carlyle, Victor Cousins, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England and the German transcendentals were most familiar to the Americans and a lively correspondence between them quickened and helped to refine their own insights. 
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Online Connections 
For a valuable, wide-ranging online resource, see "American Transcendenalism Web."
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Our Course Connections 
Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1840's essay, "Nature," is, arguably, the essential statement of the American transcendentalists on the principles of spirituality, reason, and humanity's condition in the universe.  Certainly, Emerson's colleagues acknowledged its central place within their deliberations, and Margaret Fuller published it first in their small journal, "The Dial."  Emerson continued to explore the same themes in such essays as "The Oversoul," "The Poet," and his "Harvard Divinity School Address."  Fully complementing Emerson's philosophical works are the more than 3 million-word volumes of Henry David Thoreau's journals and his essays on nature, particularly his world-acclaimed, "Walden," an essay derived from his two-years' experiences from his bean fields and little one-room cabin at Walden Pond just outside Concord.  In "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman celebrates in ecstatic vistas of illumination his own sense of the spiritual union of all things, complementing Emerson's definition of the relations between the individual mind and the universal spirit in his essay, "Self Reliance." 
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The philosophy and spirituality of the transcendentalists represent the culmination of the American Romantic Movement. 
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