1. Someone who believes that reasoning is the key to understanding reality: One of the most famous transcendentalists was Ralph Waldo Emerson who believed and wrote about the importance that everyone should be self-reliant or self-sustaining.
2. Anyone who asserts that true knowledge is obtained by faculties of the mind that go beyond sensory experiences: Margaret Fuller, a transcendentalist of the 19th-century, was one of the philosophers who advocated that the spiritual reality rises above the scientific and empirical facts and entities of this world.