Final answer:
Transcendentalists believed that knowledge comes through divine revelation, emphasizing the spiritual over the physical and placing importance on self-reliance and the individual. Their beliefs contrasted with the Enlightenment focus on empirical evidence and the scientific method.
Step-by-step explanation:
Transcendentalists believed that all knowledge came through divine revelation. They held a philosophical perspective that emphasized the importance of the spiritual over the physical or sensual. Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau viewed experience through the lens of self-reliance and were most concerned with the individual, distancing themselves from the conventional religious doctrine and social organization of the time.
The transcendental philosophy is often contrasted with the empirical methods advocated during the Enlightenment, where thinkers such as Francis Bacon and John Locke proposed that knowledge could only be obtained through scientific observation and experiment. However, transcendentalists sought to understand the world in a way that transcended the logical and sensory experience, aligning more with the belief in innate knowledge or intuition rather than relying solely on the evidence provided by the external world.
Therefore, the answer to the question is C. divine revelation. This stems from the idea that there's an inherent understanding that surpasses what we can derive from empirical or rational evidence, which can be seen as an extension of the romantic response to the Enlightenment. Transcendentalism became an American outgrowth of romanticism, promoting the view that truth goes beyond the physical experience and into the realm of spirituality and inner essence.