A dear teacher friend of mine used to ask me to define "Transcendentalism" and I would give the stock, "I don't know how to define it but I know it when I see it." answer (poor Potter Stewart.) Here is Caroline Wells Healey Dall describing her transcendentalism...
"For myself, I am a Transcendentalist of the old New England sort. I believe myself to be a child of God; and if a child, then an heir, — a very condensed way of saying that the spirit within me is the breath of the creative spirit, and therefore infinite in its reach, in its possibilities, and its final destiny. The Over Soul is the Under Soul as well. Matter is immortal. No agency, human or divine, has so far been able to destroy one particle of it; and yet, the world over, we see matter not only plastic in the grasp of mind, but subordinate to the uses of the race or the individual solely through the spirit's power. Is the spirit less, then, than the flesh which it masters? If matter cannot be destroyed, it can be transformed. So can spirit."
I get it now...
Blessings
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