First Wave Transcendentalism

The "Transcendental episode...was a struggle with ideas, a struggle in earnest under devastating handicaps. In the final reckoning, what counts is not what the people did, but what the ideas meant. They broached these ideas, and so gave them to the American tradition...Granted that their service to the ideas was hindered by their shortcomings, by their lack of scholarship and sophistication, by their ignorance of history and logic, and most of all by their precommitment to making literature a substitute for religion, and religion a substitute for philosophy--still, the Transcendental movement was the most energetic and extensive upsurge of the mind and spirit enacted in America until the intellectual crisis of the 1920's."

~Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (1950), pp. 14-15.