Thus Concord was a little community with a noble and dignified past and at the same time with the homely virtues, oddities, and weaknesses of a New England village. In these respects it was a fit dwelling place for the man who made it famous, for they were like the town in being both finely idealistic and very human. The contrast with the New York of these same years is vivid (see pp. 110, 113, 190 et al.). Centering about Concord, but by no means located within it, was a "Transcendental Movement" of which Emerson is considered the chief exponent. When the proper nouns "Transcendentalist" and "Transcendentalism" are used they are made to refer to this movement in eastern Massachusetts. In any critical sense, however, the thing that they stood for was only an expression of world thought and was one of the many out-croppings of the movement toward independence of spirit which had been developing for generations. The refusal of the nineteenth-century mind to submit to a philosophy which limited man's faith to the knowledge derived through the senses had already brought about in Germany, France, and England a reaction which insisted on the right of man to believe much which he could not prove. Thus developed transcendentalism, a system of thought "based on the assumption of certain fundamental truths not derived from experience, not susceptible of proof, which transcend human life, and are perceived directly and intuitively by the human mind." This stood in complete contrast with the faith of the Puritans and yet in strong resemblance to it. Like the Calvinists the Transcendentalists proceeded from a set of assumptions rather than a set of facts, but unlike the Calvinists the Transcendentalists drew these assumptions from their own inner conviction instead of from a set of dogmas which had been distorted out of the Scriptures. They believed in God, and they found his clearest expression in the spirit of man and in the natural surroundings in which God had placed him. They believed that in each man was a spark of divinity. They were assailed because they did not acknowledge an utter difference between Jesus Christ and the average man, though their sin lay not in degrading Christ to the level of man, but in exalting man potentially to the level of Christ. They insisted that it was the duty of each individual to develop the best that was in him on earth, thinking more of the life here than of the life hereafter. They were inspired by the love of God rather than threatened by his wrath, and so they "substituted for a dogmatic dread an illimitable hope."