Transcendentalism is the belief that real knowledge comes from inside — from thought, intuition and the spirit — rather than from the senses and practical experience alone. Put simply: some truths are not learned by testing and measuring; you know them directly, and each person can reach them for themselves. With a capital T it names a specific movement in New England in the 1830s-1850s, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, which taught self-reliance, the goodness of nature, and distrust of institutions and crowds. Thoreau's 'Walden', the book about living alone by a pond, is its most famous product, and this is the sense American students almost always mean, because the movement is standard reading in American schools. With a small t it can point more generally to any philosophy that puts intuition above experience, including Kant's. The word is academic — it belongs to literature and philosophy classes, not to conversation.

超驗主義（美國文學史上的那一支，愛默生、梭羅）