The Transcendentalists found the ideas of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) more satisfying. In his theory of knowledge, Kant distinguished between the world of sense and that of understanding. He believed that sensory experience revealed things as they appeared, but understanding revealed them as they were. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant asserted that there were aspects of knowledge — God, morality, freedom, and immortality, for example — that could not be understood by reason, but that were rather innate within man and understood intuitively. The human mind was not the tabula rasa that Locke had claimed it was. Man was a fundamentally moral and godly being. The understanding of such ideas was transcendental — it transcended sensation and reason. Although the modern reader may be unaccustomed to pondering such philosophical concepts, an understanding of the differences between sensationalism (materialism) and idealism (transcendence) was central to Transcendental philosophy. The Transcendentalists recognized their debt to Kant and understood the points on which Kant and Locke disagreed. Emerson, in his 1841 lecture "The Transcendentalist," provided the following summary:
It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Königsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.
All else that came under the heading "New England Transcendentalism" was predicated on the acceptance of Kant's view of the nature of knowledge.
