ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The philosophy of transcendentalism arose in the 1830s in the eastern United States as a reaction to intellectualism. Its adherents yearned for intense spiritual experiences and sought to transcend the purely material world of reason and rationality.

Detailed explanation-2: -Transcendentalists added to the spirit of reform by urging people to question society’s rules and institutions. Do not conform to others’ expectations, they said. If you want to find God–and your own true self–look to nature and the “God within."

Detailed explanation-3: -The Transcendentalists believed in the Romantic vision of man that embodied “self-expression and self-cultivation [that] functioned as a form of sanctification."(Young 58) Each man was a god, and the mission of the Transcendentalist was to champion the self-reliant man; the movement embraced power in individualism.

Detailed explanation-4: -: a philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality or that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality. : a philosophy that asserts the primacy of the spiritual and transcendental over the material and empirical.