 The American transcendentalists embraced Plato and Platonism in general. They looked back fondly on the Platonists (more properly called Neoplatonists) of seventeenth-century Cambridge University in England. The Unitarian and transcendentalist intellectuals of nineteenth-century New England were aware of these Renaissance intellectuals and admired their reliance on individual freedom as the foundation for religious faith rather than intolerant coercion. The Cambridge Platonists rejected Calvinism and embraced a humanist form of Christianity focused on the proper development of human powers. They not only found Plato’s own philosophy congenial, but also that of the third-century Alexandrian Neoplatonist named Plotinus. Plotinus had developed a system for self-cultivation, seeking God within one’s own psyche. All of this heritage was invoked in the nineteenth century by William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller.