The idea of the Oversoulhad roots in the ancient philosophy of Plato, whose writings the Transcendentalists read. To the Transcendentalists, the Oversoul was the divine spirit or mind that was present in each and every man and in all of nature. It was an all-pervading, omniscient, supreme mind. Each particular example of nature or of humanity was a reflection of the divine mind, and the whole of the cosmos could be extrapolated from each particular. In each manifestation of God, man could discover, in encapsulated form, all universal laws at work. The presence of the divine spirit in both nature and the human soul made a direct understanding of God and an openness to the natural world avenues to self-understanding. Self-understanding led to the perception of higher truth.
For some of the Transcendentalists, social activism was a direct consequence of this sense of cosmic unity. If man is intimately connected with and a reflection of God in the way that the Transcendentalists suggested, and if God is good and just, then man is also innately good and just. Evil exists only when man has an imperfect awareness of his essential goodness and godliness. This outlook gave dignity and importance to human activity, as manifestations of the divine, and fostered a belief in man's power to bring about personal improvement and social change in harmony with God's purposes. Out of this belief arose the Transcendentalists' involvement in a variety of reform activities and in social experiments like Brook Farm and Fruitlands, which were utopian communities established in Massachusetts.
As important as this interrelationship between the particular and the cosmic was to the Transcendentalists, the process by which the individual could understand the relationship was equally important. They felt that neither the received dogma of traditional systems of belief nor formal reasoning would give real insight into truth and morality as expressed in the multiple manifestations of the Oversoul. They looked rather to intuitive, as opposed to consciously rational, thought.
