transcendentalism a religious-philosophical viewpoint held by a group of New England intellectuals, of whom Emerson, Thoreau, and Theodore Parker were the most important. A distinction taken over from Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the only bond that universally united the members of the Transcendental Club, founded in 1836: the distinction between the understanding and reason, the former providing uncertain knowledge of appearances, the latter a priori knowledge of necessary truths gained through intuition. The transcendentalists insisted that philosophical truth could be reached only by reason, a capacity common to all people unless destroyed by living a life of externals and accepting as true only secondhand traditional beliefs. On almost every other point there were disagreements. Emerson was an idealist, while Parker was a natural realist – they simply had conflicting a priori intuitions. Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker rejected the supernatural aspects of Christianity, pointing out its unmistakable parochial nature and sociological development; while James Marsh, Frederick Henry Hedge, and Caleb Henry remained in the Christian fold. The influences on the transcendentalists differed widely and explain the diversity of opinion. For example, Emerson was influenced by the Platonic tradition, German Romanticism, Eastern religions, and nature poets, while Parker was influenced by modern science, the Scottish realism of Reid and Cousin (which also emphasized a priori intuitions), and the German Higher Critics. Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker were also bonded by negative beliefs. They not only rejected Calvinism but Unitarianism as well; they rejected the ordinary concept of material success and put in its place an Aristotelian type of selfrealization that emphasized the rational and moral self as the essence of humanity and decried idiosyncratic self-realization that admires what is unique in people as constituting their real value. See also EMERSON , THOREA. E.H.M.