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Transcendentalism and anti-transcendentalism developed through out the years by the contributions of various writers. From these writers, Emerson,Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville , come the definitions of the New England transcendentalism and anti-transcendentalism. Derived from Immanuel Kant's concept of the Transcendental and opposed to the skepticism of Locke and the Empiricists, "Locke held that all human knowledge is derived empirically, through the experience of the senses" (Buell 4). 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 he denominated them Transcendental forms." According to Emerson's understanding of Kant,
Transcendentalism becomes a union of solipsism, under which the only verifiable reality is thought to be the self, and materialism, under which the only verifiable reality is the quantifiable external world of objects and sense data. Through this fusion of paradigms, Transcendentalism as a liiving and organic philosophy was transported to America. Emerson was the source of most of its poetry and mysticism, and fostered the growth of the New England variant (http://arts.usf.edu/art/trans.html).
Anti-transcendentalism was the opposite, in which they defy transcendentalism as "the universal and timeless." The development of the New England literature of transcendentalism was the bonding of several systems of beliefs of transcendentalism across the world to form one idea that is accepted today.
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