New England Transcendentalism was a religious, philosophical, and literary movement that began to express itself in New England in the 1830s and continued through the 1840s and 1850s. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and others among the Transcendentalists lived to old age in the 1880s and beyond, by about 1860 the energy that had earlier characterized Transcendentalism as a distinct movement had subsided. For several reasons, Transcendentalism is not simple to define. Transcendentalism encompassed complex philosophical and religious ideas. Its tenets were tinged with a certain mysticism, which defies concise explanation. Moreover, significant differences of focus and interpretation existed among the Transcendentalists; these differences complicate generalizations about the movement as a whole.
Henry David Thoreau himself pointed out the difficulty of understanding Transcendentalism in his well-known journal entry for March 5, 1853:
The secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Science requests me . . . to fill the blank against certain questions, among which the most important one was what branch of science I was specially interested in . . . I felt that it would be to make myself the laughing-stock of the scientific community to describe to them that branch of science which specially interests me, inasmuch as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law. So I was obliged to speak to their condition and describe to them that poor part of me which alone they can understand. The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot. Now that I think of it, I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.
Transcendentalism clearly eluded succinct definition in Thoreau's time as much as it does in our own.
