American Transcendentalism Transcendentalism as espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson is essen tially an idealist philosophy, derived from Kant's concept of the Tran scendental and opposed to the skepticism of Locke and the Empiricists. In the essay The Transcendentalist, Emerson wrote, "[Kant showed] that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which do not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and …showed first 75 words of 390 total…

…showed last 75 words of 390 total…which has a relationship of identiticality with man and nature. If man was somehow in touch with the Over-Soul, he would not see nature as separated into disjunctive parts, but as a unified whole capable of fusing the observer with the observed. There would be unity in variety. But, Emerson wrote in his treatise Nature, "The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself."3