The philosophy of the eighteenth century Enlightenment in England and Europe was characterized by trust in reason, the elevation of the individual, the questioning and reform of religious, political, and social institutions, and more rigorous methods of scientific inquiry than had been practiced earlier. It emphasized progress, the improvement of society and of the individual, and tolerance. Enlightenment philosophers refused to accept tradition and authority on faith, thus paving the way for the later rise of Unitarianism in America and setting the stage for the subsequent Transcendental rebellion. But heirs though they were to this philosophical examination and evaluation of established beliefs and institutions, the New England Transcendentalists departed radically from their rationalist predecessors in their approach to the nature of knowledge and human understanding.
(English philosopher John Locke 1632–1704) was a major influence on the Enlightenment. Locke addressed many subjects, religion, politics, and society among them. In his epistemology (theory on the nature of knowledge), Locke had a significant impact on Transcendentalism, which arose partly in reaction to his philosophy. Locke asserted that ideas originated in the physical transmission of sensations to the tabula rasa — the blank slate — of the mind. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), he declared that all ideas capable of conscious understanding were derived from experience in its interaction with human physiology.
For Locke, the human mind at birth was devoid of conscience, moral understanding, and intuition, all of which developed through experience. He rejected the notion that a sense of God and of moral law was innate. Locke equated the process by which religious and moral concepts were understood with the process by which mathematics and the sciences were understood. Religious perception was essentially a material, not an idealistic, process. It did not transcend the physical world. Locke's rationalism appealed to the American Unitarians as they struggled to throw off the negative view of human nature held by their Calvinistic forebears. As the Transcendentalists were defining religious understanding for themselves, however, they were repelled by Locke's materialism and eager to embrace a more idealistic model of the human mind, one that would permit an innate understanding of God and morality. During the "miracles controversy" of the 1830s and 1840s, Locke's theory guided Unitarian leaders in viewing the New Testament miracles as empirically understandable evidence of Christianity, an approach that the Transcendentalists could not accept.
