Transcendentalism flourished at the height of literary and aesthetic Romanticism in Europe and America. Romanticism was marked by a reaction against classical formalism and convention and by an emphasis on emotion, spirituality, subjectivity, and inspiration. Transcendentalism, inspired by English and European Romantic authors, was a form of American Romanticism. Transcendentalism arose when it did for several reasons.
First, it was a humanistic philosophy — it put the individual right at the center of the universe and promoted respect for human capabilities. The movement was in part a reaction against increasing industrialization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and against the dehumanization and materialism that frequently accompanied it. In 1814, progressive mill owner Francis Cabot Lowell introduced the power loom into the American textile industry at his Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts. The New England Transcendentalists consequently grew to maturity at a time when the nature of work and the role of labor were undergoing tremendous change before their eyes, and very close to home.
Secondly, in the early nineteenth century, in the period preceding the rise of Transcendentalism, dissatisfaction with the spiritual inadequacy of established religion was on the rise. Some early Unitarian ministers — especially William Ellery Channing (who was the uncle of the Concord poet of the same name) — had turned away from harsh, unforgiving Congregational Calvinism and preached a more humanistic, emotionally expressive, and socially conscious form of religion. Channing and a few others among the early Unitarians had a formative influence on the Transcendentalists.
However, even the liberal Unitarians remained under the sway of the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke, who had explained knowledge as perceivable only by direct observation through the physical senses. Kant's later presentation of knowledge as intuitive was, of course, in direct opposition to Locke. In this sense, Transcendentalism was a reaction against the extreme rationalism of the Enlightenment.
