TRANSCENDENTALISM • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Transcendentalism

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noun

Transcendentalism n.

(Kantian Philos.) The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge. Note: As Schelling and Hegel claim to have discovered the absolute identity of the objective and subjective in human knowledge, or of things and human conceptions of them, the Kantian distinction between transcendent and transcendental ideas can have no place in their philosophy; and hence, with them, transcendentalism claims to have a true knowledge of all things, material and immaterial, human and divine, so far as the mind is capable of knowing them. And in this sense the word transcendentalism is now most used. It is also sometimes used for that which is vague and illusive in philosophy.

Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.

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Etymology of 'Transcendentalism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Transcendentalism" Quotes from Famous Books

... this is the pure Emersonian faith which has not only been applied to life in general, but to the arts. Anne Hutchinson was the mother of New England Transcendentalism. Self-consciousness is fatal to the art of expression; he who fixes his thought on the movements of his hands and feet is sure to get tangled up in them; good digestion does not require the attention of the party most interested; and ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... was named "Transcendentalism" by Kant's followers, because it included ideas which were beyond the range of experience. It became popular in Germany, as Platonism, to which it is closely related, became popular in ancient Greece. It has never been accepted in France, where scepticism still predominates, though we hear ...

— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... Schiller penetrated into the arcana of transcendentalism it is impossible for us to say. The metaphysical and logical branches of it seem to have afforded him no solid satisfaction, or taken no firm hold of his thoughts; their influence is scarcely to be traced in any of his subsequent writings. The ...

— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... them are likely to survive as long as Aristotle's Ethics and Metaphysics Sometimes our modern philosophers seem to forget their obligation to resemble human beings in their writings. We hear so much of mist and transcendentalism, problems, theories, essays, critiques that a book of Aristotle's dry but exact definition seems like the words of soberness after some nightmare. The man is not assaulting the air; his feet are on firm ground. This is how he proceeds. "Virtue is a mean between ...

— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... a German philosopher, born at Muenich; was patronised by the king of Bavaria, and became professor in Muenich, who, revolting alike from the materialism of Hume, which he studied in England, and the transcendentalism of Kant, with its self-sufficiency of the reason, fell back upon the mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and taught in 16 vols. what might rather be called a theosophy than a philosophy, which regarded God in Himself, and God even in life, as incomprehensible realities. ...

— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

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