Romanticism Vs Transcendentalism

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Motivated by the tremendous appeal of the former hypothesis, Emerson attempted to extend the influence of beauty far beyond momentary occupancy. He reached the conclusion that everything is beautiful by contestation that peach derives from purposiveness. Emerson thought process of nature as a single, all-embracing system governed by immutable system constabulary. In such a system, everything has a purpose in relation to the whole and is rendered beautiful by that copulation. He proposed something similar in his Meditations. He said that even the foam at the mouths of ravening beasts proceeds on a certain beauty once its purpose is known. The argument that purposiveness confers beauty is plausible when purposes are present and when they are …show more content…

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 religionwas on the rise. A third reason for the rise of Transcendentalism was the increasing interest in and availability of foreign literature and philosophy after 1800. Americans were traveling and studying in Europe, and some of them brought books back to America when they returned