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Transcendental   Listen
adjective
Transcendental  adj.  
1.
Supereminent; surpassing others; as, transcendental being or qualities.
2.
(Philos.) In the Kantian system, of or pertaining to that which can be determined a priori in regard to the fundamental principles of all human knowledge. What is transcendental, therefore, transcends empiricism; but is does not transcend all human knowledge, or become transcendent. It simply signifies the a priori or necessary conditions of experience which, though affording the conditions of experience, transcend the sphere of that contingent knowledge which is acquired by experience.
3.
Vaguely and ambitiously extravagant in speculation, imagery, or diction. Note: In mathematics, a quantity is said to be transcendental relative to another quantity when it is expressed as a transcendental function of the latter; thus, a^(x), 10^(2x), log x, sin x, tan x, etc., are transcendental relative to x.
Transcendental curve (Math.), a curve in which one ordinate is a transcendental function of the other.
Transcendental equation (Math.), an equation into which a transcendental function of one of the unknown or variable quantities enters.
Transcendental function. (Math.) See under Function.
Synonyms: Transcendental, Empirical. These terms, with the corresponding nouns, transcendentalism and empiricism, are of comparatively recent origin. Empirical refers to knowledge which is gained by the experience of actual phenomena, without reference to the principles or laws to which they are to be referred, or by which they are to be explained. Transcendental has reference to those beliefs or principles which are not derived from experience, and yet are absolutely necessary to make experience possible or useful. Such, in the better sense of the term, is the transcendental philosophy, or transcendentalism. Each of these words is also used in a bad sense, empiricism applying to that one-sided view of knowledge which neglects or loses sight of the truths or principles referred to above, and trusts to experience alone; transcendentalism, to the opposite extreme, which, in its deprecation of experience, loses sight of the relations which facts and phenomena sustain to principles, and hence to a kind of philosophy, or a use of language, which is vague, obscure, fantastic, or extravagant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Transcendental" Quotes from Famous Books



... speaking generally, have never had those foolish transcendental "romantics"—German, and still more French—on whom nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency to affect a change, but would still go on singing their transcendental songs ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky

... Yet the myths and the cult are older than the writing and are phases of primitive Japanese faith. The mystery of fatherhood is to the primitive man the mystery of creation also. To him neither the thought nor the word was at hand to put difference and transcendental separation between him and what ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... last instance is perhaps the worst. I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... to prove successfully that Shakspere, this true apostle of Nature, held it to be sufficient, ay, most godly, to be a champion of 'natural things;' that he advocated a true and simple obedience to her laws, and a renunciation of all transcendental dogmas, miscalled 'holy and reverent,' which domineer over human nature, and hinder the free development of ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... pointing to where she had paused. "I did not see you directly, but reflected in the glass. I thought, what a lovely creature! The design is for once carried out. Nature has at last recovered her lost union with the Idea! My thoughts ran in that direction because I had been reading the work of a transcendental philosopher last night; and I dare say it was the dose of Idealism that I received from it that made me scarcely able to distinguish between reality and fancy. I almost wept when I awoke, and found that you had appeared to me in Time, but not in ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... they are not. Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they do not exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not penetrate beyond the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the methexic, or transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the individual fact, it could never know the fact itself. The error of modern philosophers, or philosopherlings, is in supposing the principle is deduced or inferred from the fact, and in denying that the human mind has ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... when I first saw her, and I said it just before she left for California. She is to stand by my side and help me. How, God knows." He laughed, seeing the bewildered face of Septimus, who had never heard of this transcendental connection of Zora with the spread of Sypher's Cure. "You seem to think I'm crazy. I'm not. I work everything on the most hard and fast common-sense lines. But when a voice inside you tells you a thing day and night, you must ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... rather than a calm ardour in the cause of science; Kant's warmest admirers seemed to regard him more in the light of a prophet than of a mere earthly sage. Such admiration was of course opposed by corresponding censure; the transcendental neophytes had to encounter sceptical gainsayers as determined as themselves. Of this latter class the most remarkable were Herder and Wieland. Herder, then a clergyman of Weimar, seems never to have comprehended what he fought ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... and the precaution that Ashiel had taken that though it fell into the hands of his enemies it should convey nothing to them, it was that he considered the mystification of the uninitiated a matter of transcendental importance. It was plain he contemplated the possibility of the Nihilists knowing where to look for his message; and at the thought Gimblet shifted uneasily in his chair, remembering his ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... like a bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said something more—the poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without words which could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations of common words. He, by some wonder of vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language for narration, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... had no heart. When my turn came I should be served like the rest. I loved her, Duchess; who could help it? and the time came when we stood face to face, and I saw the woman shining out of her eyes, and the gates of Heaven were opened to me. Was there ever such transcendental folly as mine? I locked ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim

... and possessed of more power than a man can decently use, was a condition which excited in Delafield the same kind of contemptuous revolt that it would have excited in St. Francis. "Be not ye called master"—a Christian even of his transcendental and heterodox sort, if he were a Christian, must surely hold these words in awe, at least so far as concerned any mastery of the external or secular kind. To masteries of another order the saint has ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to the general movement of his Protestant pleadings, modulates too little in the transcendental key, sometimes he does so too much. For instance, at p. 69, sec. 35, we find him half calling upon Protestantism to account for her belief in God; how then? Is this belief special to Protestants? Are Roman Catholics, are those of the Greek, the Armenian, and ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... opportunities; and for my part, I should not like them to have greater means of knowing the world. I am not a reading man, by any means. My remarks about books are perfectly worthless, but I can only say that I think these verses very pretty. I don't know whether they are subjective or objective—transcendental or sentimental. In fact, between ourselves, I do not know what the three first words mean. I can give no ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... a lesson of transcendental philosophy. Hearken carefully, child. If one day you rise above your station and come to know yourself and the world about you, you will discover this, that men act only out of regard for the opinion of their fellows—and per Bacco! they are consummate fools for their pains. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France

... where the wealthy are all at this moment sipping their cocktails, and discussing how much harder labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity. This is what it means and all it means; and men are divided about it according to whether they believe in a certain transcendental concept called 'justice,' expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equality of men. So long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you are rich and really confident of remaining so, you can have Prohibition and be ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... period of his art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to be noted in his later style. The dwarfs, buffoons, the AEsop and the Menippus are the result of an effortless art. In the last manner the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as Dostoievsky would put it. The Topers, The Forge of Vulcan, are pictures that enthrall ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... a proposition that it had not entered into the minds of the trappers, even in their most transcendental efforts of abstruse meditation, to think of! They gazed at each ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... philosophy. According to their etymology, (from transcendere,) they signify that which goes beyond a certain limit; in philosophy, that which goes beyond, or transcends, the circle of experience, or of what is perceptible by the senses. Properly speaking, all philosophy is in this sense transcendental, because all philosophical investigations rise above the sensual, even if they start from that which is perceptible by the senses. But philosophical inquiries are to be distinguished according as they proceed from experience, or from principles and ideas not ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... and, I think, with justice. Pretending to deal with matters of pure reason, it constantly though surreptitiously proceeds on the methods of applied logic; its conclusions are as fallacious logically as they are experimentally. The laws of thought are formal, and are as binding in transcendental subjects as in ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... furnish the desired particulars; but his questioner could not long attend to them. She soared away to loftier topics; so that the second interview, though it lasted two or three hours, was all occupied by her mystical, theological, transcendental, necromantical discourse, in which she displayed the expressiveness, if not the glowing eloquence, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... all. He spoke well of Warburton, without insulting those whom Warburton despised. He suppressed not the imperfections of this extraordinary man, while he endeavoured to do justice to his numerous and transcendental excellencies. He defended him when living, amidst the clamours of his enemies; and praised him when dead, amidst the silence ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... that sort of thing," Malone said. "There's lots about astral bodies and ghosts, ectoplasm, Transcendental Yoga, theosophy, deros, the Great Pyramid, Atlantis, and other such pediculous pets. That's just silly, as far as I can see. But what they have to say about parapsychology and psionics as such does ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett

... that the introduction of additional sensation change into an interval lengthens it, we are led to the conclusion that psychological time (as distinguished from metaphysical, mathematical, or transcendental time) is perceived simply as the quantum of change in the sensation content. That this is a true conclusion is seemingly supported by the fact that when we wish to make our estimate correspond as closely as possible with external ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... "I'm never going to beat that if I dressmake till I'm a hundred." As for Diantha, her ecstasy implied that whatever the risks attached to the matrimonial venture, they were abundantly offset by the privilege of arraying one's self in habiliments of such transcendental charm. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... "the tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can simply accept and understand it—leaving the rest to the "Browningites," of whom Browning declared ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... Euclid, but it can give only an approximatively true account of the actual universe. These considerations do not at all affect the scientific value of the theory; but they will modify the tenour of such transcendental inferences as may be drawn from it regarding, the probable origin ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... myself, so profound is my contempt for this undignified and selfish habit, that I could as little condescend to it as I could to spend my time in watching a poor servant girl, to whom at this moment I hear some lad or other making love at the back of my house. Is it for a Transcendental Philosopher to feel any curiosity on such an occasion? Or can I, whose life is worth only eight and a half years' purchase, be supposed to have leisure for such trivial employments? However, to put this out ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey

... point. I have no transcendental idea of patriotism at all. Patriotism, as I interpret it, is a matter of curiosity. I believe that there is strength in Spain. If this strength could be led in a given direction, where would it get to? That is my form of patriotism; as I say, it is ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja

... in an excess of transcendental enthusiasm. "Blub-blub! And though I do not comprehend the exquisite simplicity of your primeval speech, I answer with ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... fills a great place in his novels; he approaches it with an unflinching boldness, and a most penetrating gaze; yet he never succeeds in giving a really satisfactory presentment of the highest of those relations—love. That eluded him: its essence was too subtle, too private, too transcendental. No one can describe love who has not the makings of a poet in him. And a poet was the very last thing that ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome, strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that defies analysis. One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy came past, very neatly attired, as ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... tone and substance of this discourse proved slightly startling to its hearer. They carried the conversation into regions transcendental; and to his blissful laziness, the rarefied air of those regions was unwelcome. To breathe it demanded ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... cultivate sciences which really placed lasting and verifiable truths within the reach of the understanding, such as mathematics and natural philosophy, geography and astronomy? Here were sciences which offered knowledge to the mind that could be turned to account in this earthly life, whereas those transcendental speculations were of no use at all.... Toward the end of the seventeenth century this spirit of indifference and scepticism toward theology, and sometimes even toward religion in general and the future world, formed a most important factor in the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... that the glosses would virtually overlay the text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine means, or what it is worth, but what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their character, their relations to one another, and what ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... these black Greek letters are becoming too much for my old sight. There now, dear reader, don't rush to the conclusion that this is just what you anticipated; you knew, of course, how it would be. You never had much faith in these transcendental enterprises of reviving Greek at the age of seventy-five, and you shook your incredulous head at the thought of an Academia of two honorary members at Kilronan. Now we have done a little. If you could only see the "Dream of Atossa" done into English pentameters by my curate, and ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... biographer says, "that the least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a socialistic community;" but although it is apparent that Hawthorne went to Brook Farm without any great Transcendental fervour, yet he had various good reasons for casting his lot in this would-be happy family. He was as yet unable to marry, but he naturally wished to do so as speedily as possible, and there was a prospect ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... life and for humanity, vague and uncertain in the beginning, but growing in clearness and uniformity. On the throne of the Roman emperors sat a bishop, whose power was increasing with the development of the new civilisation, and whom the final victory of the new transcendental world-principle had made master of the world. The building up of this new civilisation had absorbed the intellectual force of a thousand years; it had monopolised thought and every form of energy. The reward was great. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto' (Hawthorne). To the most intractable of Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour (1842-45). 'It was ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley

... to each other. Her reverie ran first into long, fascinating conversations about Space and Time and the Thing-in-itself, and the Transcendental Ego. He could tell you whether you were right or wrong; whether Substance and the Thing-in-itself were ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... repute, materialism, is no longer the black sheep in the flock that it was before the advent of modern transcendental physics. The spiritualized materialism of men like Huxley and Tyndall need not trouble us. It springs from the new conception of matter. It stands on the threshold of idealism or mysticism with the door ajar. After Tyndall had cast out ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... stets verneint." He roused men against the dogmatism of the schools, and he stimulated enormously the practical study of chemistry. These are his great merits, against which must be placed a flood of hermetical and transcendental medicine, some his own, some foisted in his name, the influence of which ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... must have for its necessity. They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humours affright me, like high and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of our sciences, those ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... written several poems as voluminous as the Fredoniad; which were unavailing for the present, but which he did hope that his 'country would not willingly let die;' added to this, some marches in double quick time, some intricate and inwoven harmonies in the transcendental style, stanzas set to music, thrown forth when the excitement was upon him, and fugitives from justice. Yet all these were nothing, to judge by dark and mysterious hints which were given out, of some GREAT WORK at which he was now laboring, which the world, (he said it with ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various

... experience made them unavoidable.[63] With great unanimity all over the globe primitive men followed the same line of thought. The dead were believed to live on as ghosts in another world just like this one. The ghosts had just the same needs, tastes, passions, etc., as the living men had had. These transcendental notions were the beginning of the mental outfit of mankind. They are articles of faith, not rational convictions. The living had duties to the ghosts, and the ghosts had rights; they also had power to enforce their ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... laxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely that it was due to a greater interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry. Many of his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here are two, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative phrase, and his transcendental bent: ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... child! Who COULD like it! Such transcendental stuff! And all that nonsense about the Soul! In these scientific ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... for deep damnation stands; But in the Motherland they still infest How shall we treat this matricidal pest? No torture, not the worst their patrons use On starving women or on shipwrecked crews, No pain however bitter would requite Their transcendental infamy aright. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various

... many myths. It is also necessary to subject to careful examination the simplest elementary acts of the mind, in their physical and psychical complexity, in order to discover in their spontaneous action the transcendental fact which inevitably involves the genesis of the same myth, the primary source whence it is diffused by subsequent reflex efforts in various ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... investigation, is as open to the utilitarian moralist as to any other. He can use it as the testimony of God to the usefulness or hurtfulness of any given course of action, by as good a right as others can use it for the indication of a transcendental law, having no connexion with usefulness or ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill

... usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some strange—we must call it—Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek, Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere—he uses it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades, void even ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... are always heroic and transcendental," said Mr. Shelby, "but I think you had better think before you undertake such a piece ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... and elaborate elucidations, and have given rise to a process of reasoning, the results of which can scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a very important degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be called transcendental physiology." ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... say; there is always a subtle, lurking something still unexpressed, which something is the real essence of the matter, and which your penetration is expected to divine. In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone to do, they write what I ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... chapel. The house was full of galleries, and they were full of portraits. Indeed there was scarcely a chamber in this vast edifice of which the walls were not breathing with English history in this interesting form. Sometimes more ideal art asserted a triumphant claim—transcendental Holy Families, seraphic saints, and gorgeous scenes by ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... conflicts of jurisdiction and power. But there is no reason for laying this down as a rule of universal application. It should never be made to override the plain and manifest dictates of the Constitution itself. We cannot yield to such a transcendental view of state sovereignty. The Constitution and laws of the United States are the supreme law of the land, and to these every citizen of every State owes obedience, whether in his individual or official capacity."[122] Three years earlier the Court, speaking also by Justice Bradley, ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... Alexandrian Jews endeavored to purify the idea of God from all admixture of the Human. By the exclusion of every human passion, it was sublimated to a something devoid of all attributes, and wholly transcendental; and the mere Being [Greek: όν], the Good, in and by itself, the Absolute of Platonism, was substituted for the personal Deity [[Hebrew: יהוה]] of the Old Testament. By soaring upward, beyond all created existence, the mind, disengaging itself from the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... a silence between them, but one of pure joy and transcendental happiness. Come what might, nothing could banish the memory of that moment. They were heart to heart and each knew that the other loved. There was no need of words. Giles felt that here was the one woman for him; and Anne nestled ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume

... mapping out of collegiate plans which was to precede his tour of Europe. Hence the directors, hearing no protests from intercessors, unanimously bestowed discretion upon the Colonel to replace the transcendental scientist with a juicier assistant at ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... thought-reading, of thought-transference, of clairvoyance, and the like, all of which are frequently manifested when the patient is brought into the higher mesmeric state; and we have thus experimental proof of the existence in ourselves of transcendental faculties the full development and conscious control of which would place us in a perfectly new sphere ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

... teaches the same lesson. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club into the fields and woods, she says to us, 'So ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Sufyism[FN248] a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man's hunger for "belief" which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... "Athenaeum", received this morning, and to be returned to-morrow morning. Who would have ever thought of the old stupid "Athenaeum" taking to Oken-like transcendental philosophy written in Owenian style! (This refers to a review of Dr. Carpenter's 'Introduction to the study of Foraminifera,' that appeared in the "Athenaeum" of March 28, 1863 (page 417). The reviewer attacks Dr. Carpenter's views in as much as they support the doctrine of Descent; ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, and lends to all work a secret charm of chivalry. It sustains that high anticipatory mood to which life is but a preparation, and the bees buzzing round the honey-flowers seem poor things toiling for an inessential gain. Because it is mystic and transcendental it is the predestined guide of all whom fate holds removed from earthly love. This is the old device of the world's failures, you say, to trick themselves out in Plato's mantle or the schoolman's cowl, and conceal their spite beneath ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... the precepts of orthodox Buddhism even as Taoism was opposed to Confucianism. To the transcendental insight of the Zen, words were but an incumbrance to thought; the whole sway of Buddhist scriptures only commentaries on personal speculation. The followers of Zen aimed at direct communion with the inner nature of things, regarding their outward accessories only as impediments ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... Tadpole said this; Lord Masque, on the contrary, said that: the truth lay perhaps between them; some result developed by the clear intelligence of Lady Firebrace acting on the data with which they supplied her. The duke listened with calm excitement to the transcendental revelations of his Egeria. Nothing appeared to be concealed from her; the inmost mind of the sovereign: there was not a royal prejudice that was not mapped in her secret inventory; the cabinets of the whigs and the clubs of the tories, she had the "open sesame" to all of them. Sir ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... consulted him upon the most difficult problems in chemistry, a science which was indebted to him for considerable discoveries, for in 1853 there had appeared at Leipzig an imposing folio by Otto Liedenbrock, entitled, "A Treatise upon Transcendental Chemistry," with plates; a work, however, which failed ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... How this man felt When he began to melt; Whether he wore his human form and face With any extraordinary grace; If many mortals fell As victims to the spell; Or if, As he stood, stark and stiff, With a bare broomstick in his arms, And not a trace of transcendental charms, That man of snow Grew wise enough to know That the Brook's hopes were but a Poet's dream, And well content to be again a stream, On the first sunny day, Flowed quietly away; Or what the end was—You must ask the Poet, I don't ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... owed its origin to the doctrine of natural rights, whose transcendental glory faded often into the light of common day during the discussions but still enhaloes a very practical and matter-of-fact statute. Economic reasons, both of eastern and western motive, were gathered under the banner of its idealism, till ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... voice parental Cry, "my youngster shall not row!" Then my wrath is transcendental, Then my words with vigour flow. Sires, with hearts of alabaster, Your stern "vetos" yet you'll rue, When ye see a sixth disaster, Overwhelm ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... not very much annoyed. So much transcendental science, so much knowledge of the world had been driven into me already, that I longed to go home to the company of the village sexton, who, still believed that anecdotes and ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... differs from you, do you differ from him; and that from his standpoint you are naturally as repulsive to him, as he, from your standpoint, is to you. So, leave all this talk of congeniality to silly girls and transcendental dreamers. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... a line of the transcendental poetry of Mary Baker G. Eddy). A journal is the large spectacle of life. A journal may be special or general. I know a man who keeps a journal of all cases of current superstition which he actually encounters. He began it without the slightest suspicion that ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett

... sense subtler refrains dread Mother, Preludes of intellect tallying these and thee, mind-formulas fitted for thee, real and sane and large as these and thee, Thou! mounting higher, diving deeper than we knew, thou transcendental Union! By thee fact to be justified, blended with thought, Thought of man justified, blended with God, Through thy idea, lo, the immortal reality! Through thy reality, lo, the ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... like one imprisoned in a sand drift, not to be crossed in any direction, but closing in and weighing down. She was in a pitfall, overpowered like Gratian had been, subjugated, soon to be put to the yoke and compelled to draw steadily the harrow of transcendental politics. Her caprices, faults, fancies, duplicities, wiles, caresses, impudence, conquests and delights were but straws out of which some great diplomatist would draw supplies for his cattle. It was humiliating to the superb creature, but logical. She ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... man who can characterize a vulgar pattern as immoral, plainly uses the term "morality" in some transcendental, non-natural sense, and therefore cannot be regarded as an exponent of the precise theory referred to. Still, as this larger idea of morality includes the lesser and more restricted, we may consider Mr. Ruskin ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... millions and millions are striving and struggling and failing to do at this very hour. We have achieved success! We have left on human souls the impress of our mastery! We are also all of us dog-tired and, I perceive, disinclined to listen to transcendental conversation." ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... reared in the midst of a desert of sentences. And Coleridge—than whom in the mines of mental science few have dug deeper, and though Xerxes-hosts of word-slaves waited on his pen—often wrote apparently mere bagatelle—the most transcendental nonsense. Yet he who takes the pains to husk away his obscurity of style will find solid ears of thought to recompense his labor. Bentham and Kant required interpreters—Dumont and Cousin—to make understood what was well worth understanding. These two kinds of authors—thought-creditors ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... Eternal World is really his own unconscious mind. Here man, at least in his great representatives—the persons of transcendent religious genius—seems to get beyond all labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art. If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived, as George Fox was ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... creeds of the past, as shown in the last chapter—whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and abstract—are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will catch at this, saying ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... the doctrine of recollection, derived from a previous state of existence, is a note of progress in the philosophy of Plato. The transcendental theory of pre-existent ideas, which is chiefly discussed by him in the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Phaedrus, has given way to a psychological one. The omission is rendered more significant by his having occasion to ...
— Philebus • Plato

... pareil [Fr.]; unparagoned^, unparalleled, unequalled, unapproached^, unsurpassed; superlative, inimitable facile princeps [Lat.], incomparable, sovereign, without parallel, nulli secundus [Lat.], ne plus ultra [Lat.]; beyond compare, beyond comparison; culminating &c (topmost) 210; transcendent, transcendental; plus royaliste que le Roi [Fr.], more catholic than the Pope increased &c (added to) 35; enlarged &c (expanded) 194. Adv. beyond, more, over; over the mark, above the mark; above par; upwards of, in advance of; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... anything in that ancient land. There is a green fringe of palm and prickly pear round the black mouth of the well; but nothing of the upper masonry remains except two bulky and battered stones standing like the pillars of a gateway of nowhere, in which some of the more transcendental archaeologists, in certain moods at moonrise or sunset, think they can trace the faint lines of figures or features of more than Babylonian monstrosity; while the more rationalistic archaeologists, in the more rational hours of daylight, see nothing but two shapeless ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... the world; but somehow my wife began to have a kind of idea of her own that all was not right. Do you know, Hamilton, the intuitions of that woman are something marvellous—marvellous, sir! Her perceptions are something outside herself, something transcendental, sir. So I telegraphed to my friend Clinton, and here we are, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy

... fare they, with whom the one idea is, the progress of society—the growth of thought. The Mississippi in its progress throws froth and scum on its surface, more conspicuous than the under-running current. So radical folly and transcendental nonsense is obtruded on the sight, from the sympathy of little minds with the deeper current of thought. To gauge the progress of mind from those who are most noisy on the matter, would be, like taking the direction and rapidity ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington

... he says amounts to this: the one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for carrying all things through in some shape that will serve—the other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit, which invited the presence thereof;—and hence results were attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What Yoshio ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... the material chemistry, astronomy and psychology (that is, the psychology in its phase of "brain-action") the ancients possessed a knowledge of transcendental astronomy, called astrology; of transcendental chemistry, called alchemy; of transcendental psychology, called mystic psychology. They possessed the Inner Knowledge as well as the Outer Knowledge, the latter alone being possessed by ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates

... the manner of his fellows from day to day and would resort to the use of his peculiar powers only when the necessity arose. But the hero of fiction has his duty always to perform, and he may well find that such transcendental gifts are apt to become a burden. He must for ever be turning them to account and finding new material to work upon. That the scope is limited anyone will at once discover who reads The Great Miracle (STANLEY PAUL). He may never ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various

... satisfied; but that is only a small part of marriage! It isn't only that I want this house to be a home—that's merely a sentimental feeling—but you need to love and be loved, and to have the anxious care of someone close to you. There is nothing like marriage. It probably is not quite as transcendental an affair as you think. That's the mistake which intellectual people so often make—it's a very natural and obvious thing—and of course it means far more to a woman than to a man. But life is not complete without it. It is the biggest fact which happens to us. I only want you just to keep ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the intellectual life of New England women to a degree never known before or since, and Miss White was one of those who came within the scope of her influence. [Footnote: Lowell himself speaks of her as being "considered transcendental."] She studied German, and translated poems from Uhland, who might be called the German Longfellow. Certain it is that from the time of their marriage his opinions not only changed from what they had been previously, but his ideas of poetry, philosophy, and religion became ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... in his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail, at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and effective, yet always ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... say, most potent lord, upon the other hand—as the mind, being altogether thing transcendental, is also thing incorruptible, so is it also a thing infinite, and being a thing infinite so are ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... that the room was full of company, consisting of young Crotchet, and some visitors whom he had brought from London. The Reverend Doctor Folliott was introduced to Mr. Mac Quedy, the economist; Mr. Skionar, the transcendental poet; Mr. Firedamp, the meteorologist; and Lord Bossnowl, son of the Earl of Foolincourt, and member for the borough ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... transcendental monad; thin And long and slim in the mind; and thus he mused: "Oh, vast, unfathomable monad-Souls! Made in the image"—a hoarse frog croaks from the pool— "Hark! 'twas some god, voicing his glorious thought In thunder music! Yea, we hear their voice, ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers

... somewhat opposed to that. It is however in the blending of diverse elements in the mental constitution of Plato that the peculiar Platonic quality resides. Platonism is in one sense an emphatic witness to the unseen, the transcendental, the non- experienced, the beauty, for instance, which is not for the bodily eye. Yet the author of this philosophy of the unseen was,—Who can doubt it who has read but a page of him? this, in fact, is what has led and kept to his pages many who have little or no turn for the sort of questions ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... from the nature of the subject, as from the metaphysical and abstruse manner in which it has been treated. We must follow Spinoza through the labyrinth of his Theological Politics and his Geometrical Ethics; we must follow Schelling and Hegel into the still darker recesses of their Transcendental Philosophy; for a philosophy of one kind can only be met and neutralized by a higher and a better, and the first firm step towards the refutation of error is a thorough comprehension of it. But having an assured faith in those stable laws of thought which are inwoven with ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... Editor: the remainder of the collection, which, under favourable circumstances, he hopes may hereafter see the light, is at least of equal value with what is now presented to the reader as a sample. In perusing the following pages, the reader will, in a few instances, meet with disquisitions of a transcendental character, which, as a general rule, have been avoided: the truth is, that they were sometimes found so indissolubly intertwined with the more popular matter which preceded and followed, as to make separation impracticable. There are very many to whom no apology will be ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... we know that the next generation would be better and stronger than we are? Moreover, I only give this to you as my idea. I do not say it is true; I believe it to be so, but I do not know anything whatsoever about it. I can't prove it, and it may be transcendental rubbish. I rather imagine you ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith

... the fixed and complex ways of life His earnest, transcendental soul rebelled; And chose the path that shunned the wasted strife, Ignored the sham, and ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp

... various ways, one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good reason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was fully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the universe.[139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that civilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count for an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well as by the spread of both rational and compassionate ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... "which, I need hardly say, we do not encourage; the young man, I believe, was a newcomer in the philosophy class. At any rate, he asked Dr. McTeague, quite suddenly it appears; how he could reconcile his theory of transcendental immaterialism with a scheme of rigid moral determinism. Dr. McTeague stared for a moment, his mouth, so the class assert, painfully open. The student repeated the question, and poor McTeague fell forward over his ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... physical danger whatsoever, I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for what ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen

... great thoughts; and there was a ferment of moral, transcendental, and aesthetical philosophy. Women met to discuss them in each other's parlours, prefiguring the era of clubs. Alice and Ph[oe]be Cary's receptions had grown to be quite the rage; and Anne C. Lynch was another figure in ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... (pretty arbor-like places, composed of green boughs, and baptized with that sweet name), half a dozen blue and red shirted miners, and one hatless hombre, in garments of the airiest description, reclining gracefully at the entrance of the Humboldt in that transcendental state of intoxication when a man is compelled to hold on to the earth for fear of falling off. The whole Bar is thickly peppered with empty bottles, oyster-cans, sardine-boxes, and brandied-fruit jars, the harsher outlines of which are softened off by the thinnest possible coating of radiant ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... to differ with the poet's thinking it an exalted symptom on his part to hate every thing he had loved before, out of supposed compliment the transcendental object of his affections and his own awakened merits. All the heights of love and wisdom terminate in charity; and charity, by very reason of its knowing the poorness of so many things, hates nothing. Besides, it is any thing ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... of causes of which that structure is the ultimate result. No wider or more extended field of inquiry could be found; but philosophical geology is not content with this. At all the confines of his science, the transcendental geologist finds himself confronted with some of the most stupendous problems which have ever engaged the restless intellect of humanity. The origin and primaeval constitution of the terrestrial globe, the laws of geologic action through long ages of vicissitude and development, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... me well in the scenes which immediately preceded the closing of the drama in which Brande was chief actor. It is doubtless the transcendental interest of the final situation which blunts my recollection of what occurred shortly before it. I did not abate one jot of my determination to fight my venture out unflinching, but my actions were probably more automatic than reasoned, as the time of our last encounter approached. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... of the composition itself?—certainly the effect which this cantata produced upon me was overwhelming. On the way home I confessed to David that I had never before been so struck with what I might call the transcendental power of music as during the performance on the lake. I seemed to hear the World-spirit speaking to my soul in those notes; and I seemed to understand what was said, but not to be able to translate it into ordinary Italian or English. At the same time ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo, and it is one of the two or three positive and painful prejudices with which Bernard Shaw began. A similar severity of outlook ran through all his earlier attitude towards the drama; especially towards the lighter or looser drama. His Puritan ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... zodiac of splendours corresponding to those of Milton in kind, however different in degree—after weighing him as a poet, as a philosophic politician, as a scholar, he will have to wheel after him into another orbit, into the unfathomable nimbus of transcendental metaphysics. Weigh him the critic must in the golden balance of philosophy the most abstruse—a balance which even itself requires weighing previously, or he will have done nothing that can be received for an estimate of the composite ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... S.C. de Soissons in a penetrating study of the Belgian's dramatic methods, "is a being whose sensuous life is only a concrete symbol of his infinite transcendental side; and, further, is only a link in an endless change of innumerable existences, a link that remains in continual communication, in mutual union with all the other links.... In Maeterlinck's dramas the whole of nature vibrates ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman

... Science," etc., etc., find their disciples chiefly amongst that not inconsiderable section of the public which has been aptly described as dominated by a "longing to combine a picturesque certainty devoid of moral discipline with unlimited transcendental speculations." All these cults combine a vague optimism with an extravagant subjectivity; all would have us believe that so far from things being what they are, they are whatever we may think them to be; all with one accord treat evil in its various manifestations as unreal, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... nature for a normal one. I suspect that the sexual emotions and even inverted ones have a more subtle significance than is generally attributed to them; but modern moralists either fight shy of transcendental interpretations or see none, and I am ignorant and unable to solve the mystery these ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Raphael, the melodies of Mozart, the language of Calderon, so that he may conjure up before his readers an Aphrodite of the Vistula. Liszt, bolder than Heine, makes the attempt to portray them, and writes like an inspired poet. No Pole can speak on this subject without being transported into a transcendental rapture that illumines his countenance with a blissful radiance, and inspires him with a glowing eloquence which, he thinks, is nevertheless beggared by ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... experiences, though what is sensuous is here tasked in the service of what is spiritual, and a commentary is added. The central idea of the whole is that where love is, there is Christ; and the Christ of this poem is certainly no abstraction, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of absolute charity, but very God and very man, the Christ of Nazareth, who dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. Literary criticism which would interpret Browning's meaning in any other sense may be ingenious, but it is not disinterested, and some side-wind ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... becoming. To say that all things have for their mother prakriti, undifferentiated substance, and for their father purusha, the creative fire, is vague and metaphysical, and conveys little meaning to our image-bred, image-fed minds; on the physical plane we can only learn these transcendental truths by means of symbols, and so to each of us is given a human father and a human mother from whose relation to one another and to oneself may be learned our relation to nature, the universal mother, and to that immortal ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... our Sackville Street regularity, that not so much nine o'clock announced this periodic event, as inversely this event announced nine o'clock. And I used to affirm, however shocking it might sound to poor threadbare metaphysicians incapable of transcendental truths, that not nine o'clock was the cause of revealing the breakfast urn, but, on the contrary, that the revelation of the breakfast urn was the true and secret cause of nine o'clock—a phenomenon which otherwise no candid reader will pretend ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... in an able article in the Dublin Review for October, 1871, contends that the uniformity of nature can not be proved from experience, but from "transcendental considerations" only, and that, consequently, all physical science would be deprived of its basis, if such transcendental proof ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... Liszt (1811-1886) was a pianistic miracle. He could play anything on site and composed over 400 works centered around "his" instrument. Among his key works are his Hungarian Rhapsodies, his Transcendental Etudes, his Concert Etudes, his Etudes based on variations of Paganinini's Violin Caprices and his Sonata, one of the most important of the nineteenth century. He also wrote thousands of letters, of which 260 are translated into English in this ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... Bronson Alcott, George Ripley and William Ellery Channing, who were absolutely unaware of the presence of these men. The most popular church in Concord today is the Roman Catholic. Theodore Parker fitted his environment and added his aura to the transcendental gleam. He was the lodestone that attracted the Brook-Farmers to West Roxbury. It is easy to say that if these Utopians had not selected West Roxbury as the seat of the new regime, they would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... our writers are devoted to what you would here term transcendental thought, a kind of literature which lies between poetry and music, which awakens a feeling of ecstasy, and gives, as it were, wings to ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.—That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine. I believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,—if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own. Did you ever see a case of catalepsy? You know what I mean,—transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Aristide is in debt. In the depths of the man's changeling and feckless soul is a principle which has carried him untarnished through many a wild adventure. If he ever accepted money—money to the Provencal peasant is the transcendental materialised, and Aristide (save by the changeling theory) was Provencal peasant bone and blood—it was always for what he honestly thought was value received. If he met a man who wanted to take a mule ride among the Mountains of the Moon, Aristide would ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... overcoat, the unshaven philosopher might be seen in a coffee-house or on an ale-house bench, scribbling at odd moments his profound essays on Transcendental Philosophy, the leaves flying about and losing themselves, and the thoughts as ill-arranged, for the Hebrew Talmudical manner still clung to his German writing as to his talking, so that the body swayed rhythmically, his thumb worked and his voice ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... muttered a quotation over the last remains of a veal-pie at a side-table. Once, and once only, the literary interest overcame the general. For C—— was riding the high German horse, and demonstrating the Categories of the Transcendental philosophy to the author of the Road to Ruin; who insisted on his knowledge of German, and German metaphysics, having read the Critique of Pure Reason in the original. "My dear Mr. Holcroft," said C——, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, "you really put me in mind of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... the predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner's operas among rocks and lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de Calderon by his epilepsy and insanity; ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... as they were priests in the same sense that the American Indian shaman is both magus and priest. That is, they were medicine-men on a higher scale, and had reached a loftier stage of transcendental knowledge than the priest-magicians of more barbarous races. Thus they may be said to be a link between the barbarian shaman and the magus of medieval times. Many of their practices were purely shamanistic, while others ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... the progress of humanity, and the end further progress. Some of the writers in this book will indicate the point at which in their view this progress is in contact with the infinite, with something not given in history; but, whatever our view of the transcendental problem may be, it is of the utmost importance for all of us to realize that we have given to us in the actual process of time, in concrete history, a development of humanity, a growth from a lower to a higher state of being, which ...
— Progress and History • Various

... true."—It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition—one shall be blessed because one believes.... But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"—how is that to be demonstrated?—The "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness—therefore, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... Wednesdays and the Wednesday men, and admirable notes of several choice conversations. There is a curious sketch in one of a little tilt between Coleridge and Holcroft, which must not be omitted. "Coleridge was riding the high German horse, and demonstrating the 'Categories of the Transcendental Philosophy' to the author of The Road to Ruin, who insisted on his knowledge of German and German metaphysics, having read the 'Critique of Pure Reason' in the original. 'My dear Mr. Holcroft,' said Coleridge, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, 'you ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... German accordeon, and Prince Assabdulla sings a Persian love-song; the leafy branches of poplar groves are whispering in response to a gentle breeze, and playing hide-and-seek across the golden face of the moon, and the mountains have assumed a shadowy, indistinct appearance. It is a scene of transcendental loveliness, characteristic of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... sentiment in which, amidst the innumerable varieties of inclination that nature or accident have scattered in the world, we find greater numbers concurring, than in the wish for riches; a wish, indeed, so prevalent that it may be considered as universal and transcendental, as the desire in which all other desires are included, and of which the various purposes which actuate mankind are only subordinate species ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... piece together, of words that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever shall be," to induce which is the property of the highest poetry. You will find nothing in classical poetry so poignant or ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... encircled by parterres of votive flowers, for the philosophic Buddhism of Ceylon and Siam gathers the moss and weeds of many an incongruous accretion in countless ages of pilgrimage through the Eastern world. The transcendental mysticism which spun the finest cobwebs of human thought, crystallises into concrete form when interpreted in the terms of China, where dim reminiscences of early Nature worship, and the terrors which upheld the authority of many obsolete creeds, have been incorporated into the vague ideals of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... primary value to us is that they are among the rare beings who have possessed "the vision and the faculty divine," who, to quote Ruskin, can "startle our lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment." There is about them nothing incomprehensibly transcendental, nothing "unpractical," nothing aloof from the life we live—if we live it fully—but wholly the contrary. Those who say otherwise are but exposing their own short sight, their own creeping imagination, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... partly imagined and partly reasoned out at a later time. Partly imagined, too, is the presumption that my father was attracted by the philosophic ideals presented by his Boston friends. A tired business man might well be impressed by the Transcendental teaching that our civilization has gone wrong in forcing all human energy into the one pursuit, that of getting riches. They held that while hard work rarely harms any one, the monotonous grind in the money making mills results in arrested development. Work as hard as you please, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears

... in "The History of Transcendental Magic," by Eliphas Levi (Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plate used to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes "had two aspects, one a physical and the other a moral one." The sexual, as well as the spiritual, ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... the other matter, or not self—takes place; and without this curdling or associating process no such notion or belief could have been generated. "The principle of substance," as an ultimate law of thought, is, therefore, to be regarded as a transcendental dream. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... of the word Transcendental? Disregarding for the moment the technical development of this term as used by German and English philosophers, it meant for Emerson and his friends simply this: whatever transcends or goes beyond the experience of the senses. It stressed intuition rather ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... on sea or land does not illuminate the writings of Mr. Trollope, there is generally plenty of that other kind of light with which, after all, the average reader is more familiar, and which not a few, perhaps, prefer to the transcendental lustre. There is no modern novelist who has more clearly than Trollope defined to his own apprehension his own literary capabilities and limitations. He is thoroughly acquainted with both his fortes and his foibles; and so sound is his good sense, that he is seldom beguiled ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... than we have been taught to believe. Mr. Waite is equally concerned with proving that there "is no traceable connexion between Masonry and Rosicrucianism," and he goes on to explain that Freemasonry was never a learned society, that it never laid claim to "any transcendental secrets of alchemy and magic, or to any skill in ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... me at lunch one day last winter, at Mrs. Ordeyne's," interrupted the lady, "and you talked to me of transcendental mathematics." ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... less malleable strata, to a public of higher class, and harder to please. It was requisite, therefore, that this new book should be written by a man of talent, whose style nevertheless should not be so transcendental as to scare folks. And it was an advantage that the writer should be very well known, so that his enormous editions might counterpoise ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... seceding from the slave States, and by nullifying within their limits any unjust laws passed by the nation. All governments, civil, ecclesiastical, and family, were to disappear, so that the divine law, interpreted by each one for himself, might have free course. To this fanciful, transcendental, and anarchical theory, Mr. Wright made sundry converts, more or less thorough, including Parker Pillsbury, Wm. L. Garrison, and Stephen S. Foster. That he took a good deal of pains to capture the subjects of our biography is evident. He attended their lectures, cultivated their acquaintance, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... where their ways separated, and, with his hat in his hand, and his heart full of an inexplicable, transcendental something, he stood under the trees and watched ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben

... the Jewish race—notwithstanding all anti-semitic calumnies the race of transcendental idealism—played in the struggle of the Old and the New will probably never be appreciated with complete impartiality and clarity. Only now are we beginning to perceive the tremendous debt we owe to Jewish idealists in the realm of science, art, and literature. But very little is ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... existences. Lao Tzu has already hinted at "the Whence, and oh, Heavens, the Whither." He said that to emerge was life, and to return was death. Chuang Tzu makes it clear that what man emerges from is some transcendental state in the Infinite; and that to the Infinite he ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... gift of God, and He gives His gifts to whomsoever and whensoever He will. This, my daughters, is perfect contemplation: this is supernatural prayer. Now this is the difference between natural and supernatural prayer: between mental and transcendental prayer. In ordinary prayer we more or less understand what we say and do. We think of Him to whom we speak; we think about ourselves and about our Surety and Mediator. In all this, by God's help, we can do something, so to speak, of ourselves. But in pure ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte

... is of about the same dimensions as Lake Geneva, and fairly rivals that Switzer gem in transcendental beauty. The Japs, with all their keen appreciation of the beauties of nature, go into raptures over Biwa Lake. Much talk is made of the "eight beauties of Biwa." These eight beauties are: The Autumn Moon from Ishi-yama, the Evening Snow on Hira-yama, the Blaze of Evening ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... numerous class of silly novels than the oracular (which are generally inspired by some form of High Church or transcendental Christianity) is what we may call the white neck-cloth species, which represent the tone of thought and feeling in the Evangelical party. This species is a kind of genteel tract on a large scale, intended as a sort of medicinal sweetmeat for Low Church young ladies; an Evangelical substitute ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... as heroes must believe themselves. He felt that the balance lay between his own life and death, and that he could turn the scale at his own choice; he could never have made himself forget life in the hope of victory, nor death in the fear of failure. Incapable of any transcendental belief whatsoever, his intelligence had deified free- agency, while his unacknowledged suspicion of a directing power asserted itself in his theories concerning nature's fatalism. He supposed that the machinery of the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk-pail. . . . I intend to convert myself into a milkmaid this evening, but I pray Heaven that Mr. Ripley may be moved ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... sentiment of extraordinary wisdom. But look more closely at it; try to apply it; and you will find that it is merely a trick of words. What flashed upon you as a profound distinction in morals, turns out to be nothing but a verbal antithesis. What was paraded, as a kind of transcendental analogy between things not before suspected of resemblance, discovered by the "spiritual insight" of the moral seer, is in fact no more than a grave clench,—a solemn quibble,—a conceit; arising not from the perfection ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various

... the stars, but it does nothing by jumps. As a Scientist, as well as a philosopher, I am accustomed to reaching the Transcendental by winding paths. It is characteristic of me that I should have consented to preface this remarkable Sonnet Cycle only after supreme deliberation, and that I should at last have determined to speak in behalf of the Car Conductor for the ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin



Words linked to "Transcendental" :   transcendentalism, supernatural, nonnatural, transcendental philosophy, preternatural, transcendental number



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