Transcendentalists included extremely varied personalities, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higgins, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and William Henry Channing. Due to the variety of opinions they possessed, the movement is difficult to define.
However, some of their core components were the belief in the spiritual within the human body, the innate goodness of humans, the importance of the search for truth and right, and the importance of the beautiful and the natural.
John Brown embodied many of these ideas. Just like transcendentalists, he believed in the goodness of people, and that humans are only corrupted thorugh bad institutions, which in his case, referred to slavery. He also believed in the individual duty to live according to one's own values, and in the ability to discern which values are "good" and which are "bad" through individual reflection. These ideas motivated him to be such an active abolitionist.
