When Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friends hammered out the principles of Transcendentalism in the mid-1830s, the result was a fairly gossamer way of thinking. The movement included a sizable number of activists and reformers, but as theorists the Transcendentalists insisted that the world was a kind of shimmery projection of consciousness. No wonder the movement had its share of penniless eccentrics—the “queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s phrase, who thronged Emerson’s hometown of Concord, Mass., in search of enlightenment.
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