Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, or Life in the Woods, describes, among many other experiences, the transcendental life-style he experienced in his two-year experiment at Walden Pond. Although Thoreau did not consider himself, and would never have considered himself, a member of any group which confined his individualism and independence with any sort of dogma, his outlook on life, nature and man's primary concerns in life and nature coincided with many of the essential Transcendentalist principles. His experiences and writings in Walden reflect his alignment with the Transcendentalists.
Transcendentalism is seen by its critics as an abstract and idealized conception in which the world is a spiritual realm where real life is left behind: "See the holes made in the bank yonder by the swallows. Take away the bank, and leave the apertures, and this is Transcendentalism" (Bickman 8). While any spiritual philosophy in the abstract is vulnerable to such a sarcastic critique, such a snide attack is rendered meaningless by Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond because that experiment was not only rooted firmly in the real world, it was also recorded by a man at the heights of his mental and perceptual powers. His observations of nature, and his comparison of beasts and plants in nature, are used to critique human beings who live imprisoned by their own society, their fears, their habits, and their conformity:
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. . . . The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, take a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison . . . keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado only until a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone (Thoreau 264).
The experiment at Walden was for Thorea...