We ordinarily understand the term transcendentalism to mean a favoring of idealism over materialism, or an emphasizing of ideas rather than things. Yet for the American transcendentalists, at least, the term also denoted a transcendence of temporality. Consequently, their larger philosophic and literary project incorporated, especially in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, a probing critique of the nature, significance, and structure of time. During the decades in which the transcendentalists were active, the times themselves were ripe for raising such issues. The still-nascent republic's pervasive spirit of reform was proving receptive to all sorts of new ideas—even, or perhaps especially, those touching upon fundamental assumptions about how life was to be lived. Within their lengthy agenda for personal and societal improvement, then, Thoreau and Emerson included temporal reform, a term we might interpret as comprehending such allied concepts as change, memory, and history.
The transcendentalists' reconsideration of temporality received added impetus from contemporary scientific discoveries that were inevitably beginning to contradict traditional notions of chronology long promulgated by Christian orthodoxy. In a sense, the responsibility for determining the origin, duration, and meaning of time was gradually shifting away from the church to the sciences. This trend culminated in the 1859 publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, in which time was effectively transformed from a rationalization for man's being and development to a vast, directionless, and impersonal mechanism within which the twin cogs of accident and competition meshed to produce man, his predecessors, and potentially even his successors.
A new uncertainty about the earth's true age and doubts about whether time reflected any sort of telos tended to refocus the transcendentalists' attention upon the immediate moment. Rather than concerning themselves overmuch with a neat, linear sequence of past, present, and future, Emerson and Thoreau began reenvisioning time as an endless series of present instants, or what Carlyle, in Sartor . . .