anti-transcendentalism

Not everyone was enamoured of the Transcendental philosophy expounded by Emerson and Thoreau. To some of their contemporaries, Emerson and Thoreau were out of touch with reality and failed to account for human weaknesses, such as evil, greed, and selfishness. We can classify this wave of thinking as Anti-Transcendentalist because it directly opposed Transcendentalism. The most notable names are Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter and "The Minister's Black Veil," and Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. Unlike their more optimistic contemporaries, Hawthorne and Melville felt human nature to be contradictory, full of good and evil. They also believed rules to be a necessity to control the vices and impulses of our dissolute human society. The reader can discern elements of Puritanism because many of their characters seem to have in innate "sinful" nature, much like original sin, that affects their decisions and leads them astray; therefore, it would be unwise to suggest to the world to follow our instincts and intuition because our natural inclination is to follow selfish or evil urges and desires.