Modern Transcendentalists

"All knowledge transcendental, which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects."  
 --Emmanuel Kant, Philosopher


"The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. 
Yet how easy it is to show him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense.
The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, — a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. 

And this wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow — but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. 
They change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures, January 1842

"It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquires the name of Transcendentalism." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Whatever is unintelligible would certainly be transcendental." --Edgar Allen Poe

All true, still true today, the Modern Transcendentalist.

Exceeding the Usual Limits

Song of Myself
Verse 14

                                     ...The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,

Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.

The sharp hoofed moose of the north, the cat on the house sill,
the chickadee, the prairie-dog,
The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
The brood of the turkey-hen and 

she with her half-spread wings,
 

I see in them and myself the same old law.
The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred
affections, they scorn the best I can do to relate them.

I am enamor'd of growing out-doors,
Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
Of the builders and steer'rs of ships and the wielders of axes
and mauls, and the drivers of horses,
I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the
first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever... 

~By Walt Whitman~

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