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Transcendentalism was a 19th century philosophical movement with adherents like Thoreau, Emerson and Fuller, based on the idea that people had divine truth within them.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life." Those famous lines from Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" have inspired generations of people including his biographer, Laura Dassow Walls.
The presiding scientific genius of the Romantic age, when science had not yet been dispersed into specialties that rarely connect with one another, Alexander von Humboldt wanted to know everything, and came closer than any of his contemporaries to doing so. Except for Aristotle, no scientist before or since this German polymath can boast an intellect as universal in reach as his and as influential for the salient work of his time. His neglect today is unfortunate but instructive.
Humboldt (1769–1859) undertook to disseminate the knowledge he acquired as rapidly and widely as possible, and initiated a network of correspondents among the world’s principal scientific specialists. Thus, Humboldt’s prodigious achievement ironically made it impossible for his scientific descendants to have a career so wondrously varied as his. Taking the entirety of nature and culture as his province, through the gathering and arrangement of all the particulars that one extraordinary mind could hold