The "Transcendentalists" were a number of young Americans, most of them born into the Unitarianism of New England in the early nineteenth century They never constituted any organized movement- as we see Emerson making clear-but there were enough of them, and they came so spontaneously and vocally to their coincident persuasions, and their activities ( some of these a bit antic) seemed so to fit into a pattern, that outsiders could accuse them of being a "movement," in fact, of being a conspiracy. So, enlarging our perspective still further, we may also see in the Transcendentalists not so much a collection of exotic ideologues as the first outcry of the heart against the materialistic pressures of a business civilization. Protestant to the core, they turn their protest against what is customarily called the "Protestant ethic": they refuse to labor in a proper calling, conscientiously cultivate the arts of leisure, and strive to avoid making money.
