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Transcribed Image Text:Transcendentalism
The Transcendentalist movement began with religious young people who emphasized moral teachings. The
Transcendentalist movement eventually centered on the belief that every person could connect with the
spiritual and natural world. Transcendentalists emphasized self-reliance, simplicity, and equality. In the
1800s, transcendentalists rejected the nation's growing riches and expansion.
Henry David Thoreau, a famous transcendentalist, wrote Walden, Or Life In the Woods after living in
solitude in nature for Ob years. Read an excerpt below.
"Still we live meanly, like ants...
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in
extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a
dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail...Simplify, simplify.
The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial,
is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps,
ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in
the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of
life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast.
Men think that it is essential that the ation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and
ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or
like men, is a little uncertain...
If we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon
us."
Source: Notional Park Service
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Section 5: Transcendentalism
1. How would Thoreau describe life in America?
2. What advice would Thoreau give to the President?
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