Transcendentalists' emphasized the essential unity of all creation and the innate goodness of humanity, which they believed would manifest itself if given the freedom to do so. Their core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state, which transcends the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the logical deduction or the doctrines of established religions.
Like the Romantics, the Transcendentalists believed that subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as the empirical investigation which underlay both deism and the natural theology of the Unitarians.
Transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles which were not based on, or falsifiable by, the experience of the physical senses, but derived from the inner, spiritual or mental essence of the human.
Some important transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker.
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