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Transcendental   /trˌænsəndˈɛntəl/  /trˌænsəndˈɛnəl/   Listen
Transcendental

adjective
1.
Existing outside of or not in accordance with nature.  Synonyms: nonnatural, otherworldly, preternatural.
2.
Of or characteristic of a system of philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical and material.



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"Transcendental" Quotes from Famous Books



... eloquent statesman, a man by no means inclined to a timorous policy, had declared that "no feeling of wounded pride, no motive of questionable expediency, nothing short of real and demonstrable necessity, should ever induce him to moot the awful question of the transcendental power of Parliament over every dependency of the British crown. That transcendental power was an ordinance of empire, which ought to be kept back within the penetralia of the constitution. It exists, but it should be veiled. It should not be produced on trifling ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... into their formation and prolation by the organs of speech, as a mechanick, anatomist, or physiologist; nor into the properties and gradation of sounds, or the elegance or harshness of particular combinations, as a writer of universal and transcendental grammar. I consider the English alphabet only as it is English; and even in this narrow disquisition I follow the example of former grammarians, perhaps with more reverence than judgment, because by writing in English I suppose my reader already ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson

... what supersensuous material she could reasonably have demanded of her heroine (unless it were the mythic "bombazine" that Ernest used to talk about, in his ignorant efforts to describe female apparel), or what transcendental form of cape would have satisfied ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... 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 ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin

... home. The people of this western Athens pride themselves upon the intellectual society and the number of eminent men which they possess, among whom may be named Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Dana, and Summer. One of these at least is of the transcendental school. I very much regretted that I had not more time to devote to a city so rich in various objects of interest; but the northern winter had already begun, and howling winds and angry seas warned me that it was time to join ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... "Joy Philosophy," "Christian 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... prey to objective 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 ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... 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, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... conduct on Snarley's part was by no means due to any transcendental contempt for money. I have myself offered him many a half-crown, which has never been refused; and Mrs. Abel, unless I am much mistaken, has given him many a pound. Still less did it originate from rustic contentment ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks

... assisted by certain old women, called catalonas, who had great authority among those deluded people, which they had acquired by deceitful and delusive tricks. The method of sacrificing cattle was the common and transcendental one among those natives. But irreligion was manifest in all their vain observances, and in the conservation of their traditions, rather than any active and positive religion. They observed those long-kept and sacrilegious customs, through fear of punishment if they omitted ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various

... Democrat, untroubled by transcendental scruples, goes on his way, rejoicing in the prospect of the Millennium, now close at hand. He does not much care what the universe is, but he knows what he wants to get out of it, and that is sufficient for his purpose. To be sure, he wants ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... found her mouth, his lips filled her with a hot flush like wine, a sweet, flaming flush of her whole body, most exquisite, as if she were nothing but a soft rosy flame of fire against him for a moment or two. That, she decided, was supreme, transcendental. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... novelist, launched into transcendental calculations, soaring with his enthusiasm ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... Zen proposes to call man Buddha-natured or Good-natured in a sense transcendental to the duality of good and bad. It conveys no sense to call some individuals good in case there is no bad individual. For the sake of convenience, however, Zen calls man good, as is exemplified by Shakya Muni, who was wont to address his hearers as 'good men and women,' ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... lent a most constructive hand in the framing of the Carlyle-transcendental question—a performance which he retailed to Mrs. Norris at the earliest moment, and which made the Assistant Professorship and Nancy ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis

... come to write about myself. As to my father, there is in his desk a yellow manuscript about Triplicity in Nature. I perused it, and it did not interest me. I only remember a comparison between the transcendental belief of Christianity in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the natural triplicity of oxygen, hydrogen, and ozone, with many other analogous triplicities from absolute truth, goodness, and ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... light that never was 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 into toiling with ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... 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 at once have ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... Gloriani declared in answer to Rowland's anxious query; "or rather I liked it a great deal better. I did n't say how much, for fear of making your friend angry. But one can leave him alone now, for he 's coming round. I told you he could n't keep up the transcendental style, and he has already broken down. Don't you ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... agony, its cacophony and cachinnation, is Life, such as you and I know it, not life in absolute deshabille, but enveloped in the iridescent upholstery of genius, sublimated by the wizardry of a transcendental polyphony. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various

... that man has enough to do in questioning his immediate surroundings, without going into the matter of transcendental inquiry." ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... Edgeworth, that had come a short time ago, alone and friendless to Mr. Rayne's house. And as she sped on leaving each dancing drifting snow-flake far behind, she became tangled up again in the web of fanciful reflections that had so often led her far far away into those transcendental regions of thought where Venus, and Cupid, and Calliope, and other sister muses bask in filmy clouds of golden maze. Here she realized among her ideal heroes and heroines, life as she wished it to be. Perhaps this was why her inclinations were just ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... 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 the very texture ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... herself in all seriousness as a genius, ran a dazzling career of a dozen years or so in Cambridge and Boston, and then her light seems to have gone out. She came to the surface, with other newness, in the Transcendental era; she was the priestess of its mysteries; when that movement ebbed away, her day was over. This is the impression one would gather, if he had only current ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... occasions, any constitution, order, degree, office, service, place, employment, custom, use, or other thing to the contrary notwithstanding.' From Henry VIII. to James I. were the high and palmy days of prerogative, when the authority of the Crown was something even more transcendental than that of Parliament itself, and when it was no doubt held that, while the Crown could dispense with the provisions of an Act of Parliament, an Act of Parliament could never bind the prerogative of the Crown; but ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... was 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 ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume

... the sphere of speculative activity. Philosophy was represented by the Scottish school whose watchword was common sense. Reid opposed the scepticism of Hume which would lead, as he held, to knocking his head against a post—a course clearly condemned by common sense; but instead of soaring into transcendental and ontological regions, he stuck to 'Baconian induction' and a psychology founded upon experience. Hume himself, as I have said, had written for the speculative few not for the vulgar; and he had now turned from the chase ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their being pronounced wholly incapable ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... never reach. Lourdes must make its way through denser and 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 those ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... 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

... Shint[o] are phallic myths explaining cosmogony. 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 he ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... 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, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... the Great was a monomaniac and 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 ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... was accustomed to look at his watch and remark conclusively, "Reason is the highest principle!" Reason! Never do I hear this word without recalling Dr. Saul Ascher, with his abstract legs, his tight-fitting transcendental-grey long coat, his forbidding icy face, which could have served as frontispiece for a textbook of geometry. This man, deep in the fifties, was a personified straight line. In his striving for the positive, the poor man had, by dint of philosophizing, eliminated all the splendid things ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... National Review for October, 1857, under the title of "The Ultimate Laws of Physiology". The title "Transcendental Physiology", which the editor did not approve, was restored when the essay was re-published ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... opening of the doors,) I say that, far deeper than these, what finally and only is to make of our western world a nationality superior to any hither known, and out-topping the past, must be vigorous, yet unsuspected Literatures, perfect personalities and sociologies, original, transcendental, and expressing (what, in highest sense, are not yet express'd at all,) democracy and the modern. With these, and out of these, I promulge new races of Teachers, and of perfect Women, indispensable to endow the birth-stock of a New World. For feudalism, caste, the ecclesiastic traditions, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... do you call transcendental knowledge, and what immanent? It is true these expressions are known to me, for my professor used them, but only as predicates of God, and as his philosophy had exclusively to do with God, their use was quite appropriate. For instance, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... considered, it is in this peculiarity, running through his whole system of thought, that all these short-comings, over-shootings, and multiform perversities, take rise: if indeed they have not a second source, also natural enough, in his Transcendental Philosophies, and humour of looking at all Matter and Material things as Spirit; whereby truly his case were but the more hopeless, the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... members of the Church the most unholy thing connected with it, and one which they have reason bitterly to regret. This fact, however, can never lessen the dignity of the Church—the greatest production of the human mind—but does it not destroy a number of transcendental theories which have ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... privileged to be irregular, yet such was 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 that ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... 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; over and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... not a criticism, for she might have been satisfied that the girl was a mass of fluent catch-words and yet scarcely have liked her the less. It was just as she was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia. With her bright, vulgar clothes, her salient appearance, she might have been a rope-dancer or a fortune-teller; and this had the immense merit, for Olive, that it appeared to make her belong to the "people," threw her into the social dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... fame. To understand the criticism thoroughly, one must first understand the philosophy. Will the unphilosophical English reader have patience with us for a few minutes while we endeavour to throw off a short sketch of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel? If the philosophical system of a transcendental German and Viennese Romanist, can have small intrinsic practical value to a British Protestant, it may extrinsically be of use even to him as putting into his hands the key to one of the most intellectual, useful, an popular books of modern times—"The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... far was this conception of The One, below the true transcendental conception of the One which Reason learnt to derive, so late with certainty, from the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... Dramatic Lyrics, can deny the less questionable qualities which characterized those remarkable poems—but can any of his devotees be found to uphold his present elaborate experiment on the patience of the public? Take any of his worshippers you please—let him be "well up" in the transcendental poets of the day—take him fresh from Alexander Smith, or Alfred Tennyson's Maud, or the Mystic of Bailey—and we will engage to find him at least ten passages in the first ten pages of Men and Women, some of which, even after profound study, he will not be able to construe ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... a matrimonial venture That will turn the cheek of Mrs. Grundy pale, Don't be lured by pretty faces or by dainty airs and graces That entrap the unsophisticated male. No, look out for what is vital, transcendental, And ask yourself, before you choose your wife, "Is she wholly unalluring, elemental But arresting in her attitude ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various

... dispose of the pradhana doctrine. As the reasons on which the refutation hinges are the same, there is no room for further doubt. Such common arguments are the impotence of reasoning to fathom the depth of the transcendental cause of the world, the ill-foundedness of mere Reasoning, the impossibility of final release, even in case of the conclusions being shaped 'otherwise' (see the preceding Sutra), the conflict of Scripture ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... of the danger of introversion (l. c., p. 175): "Now where in men of impure heart, through the destructive natural powers and evil spiritual relations, the deepest transcendental powers are aroused, dark powers may very easily seize the roots of feeling and reveal moral abysses, which the man fixed in the limits of time hardly suspects and from which human nature recoils. Such an illicit ecstasy ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... "From his transcendental height, the Superman of America shall ray forth in every direction the divine light, which shall mellow and purify the spirit of Nations and strengthen and sweeten the spirit of men, in this New World, I tell you, he shall be born, but he shall not be an American in the Democratic ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... truly regarded as the most intellectual of poets. No poetry in English literature, or in any literature, is more charged with discursive thought than his. But he is, at the same time, the most spiritual and transcendental of poets, the "subtlest assertor of the Soul in Song". His thought is never an end to itself, but is always subservient to an ulterior spiritual end—always directed towards "a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... the rules of discipline for the government of the Sangha, or Order; the second contains instructive discourses on ethics applicable to all; the third explains the psychological teachings of the Buddha, including the twenty-four transcendental laws explanatory of ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott

... grow sentimental, for that seemed to be my part, And I talked in transcendental fashion that might move her heart, Sighed to live in fairy grottoes with my Dora all alone, And I studied cracker mottoes, which I quoted as my own. Thus I strove to be romantic, but I failed upon the whole, And ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... that he must radically revise not only his ideas of celestial Cosmogony, but the order and significance of names and titles commonly applied to the Transcendental Brethren. The great provinces of Etheria are presided over by chiefs, chosen for their superior development in wisdom and love. For our solar system to cross one of these provinces requires about 3,000 years, and between them are belts of high Etherian light which take several ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... composition for the voice do not encourage the display of florid execution, a singer would be ill-advised indeed to neglect this factor, on the plea that it has no longer any practical application. No greater error is conceivable. Should an instrumental virtuoso fail to acquire mastery of transcendental difficulties, his performance of any piece would not be perfect: the greater includes the less. A singer would be very short-sighted who did not adopt an analogous line of reasoning. Without an appreciable amount ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... words of another, "as an occasion to be preceded by fears, and hopes, and love's stratagems, by love-letters, passionate vows, sudden crosses, and intense joys." It is to transform the individual subject to its power, to fill her with sensations, which she cannot now even imagine. With this transcendental view of that passion, a young woman is likely to conclude that, for herself, she shall never see the person whom she can love. No angelic being, in human form, will ever cross her path, and therefore she shall always remain single. Anon ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey

... opposed to 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 ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... 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 good,' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him in the wood-paths, or ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley

... metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... nay it is a transcendental one, overstepping all rules and experience; the crowning Phenomenon of our Modern Time. For here again, most unexpectedly, comes antique Fanaticism in new and newest vesture; miraculous, as all Fanaticism is. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... civilizations. What 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 says ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... essays as a (very big) set of program notes to accompany his second piano sonata. Here, he puts forth his elaborate theory of music and what it represents, and discusses Transcendental philosophy and its relation to music. The essays explain Ives' own philosophy of and understanding of music and art. They also serve as an analysis of music itself as an artform, and provide a critical explanation of the "Concord" ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant that from some very transcendental metaphysical height—the height, for instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy—it may be contended that none of our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true nature of Reality, we at all ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... the public through the columns of a newspaper, and gave the "reasons" of your vote for the Fugitive Slave Law. You had a high and recent example of the kind of logic suited to your case. You might have indulged in transcendental nonsense, and talked about the climate, soil, and scenery of New England and the wonders of physical geography, and, assuming that negroes were created free, you might have contended that, in voting ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock

... 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

... score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy. Their styles in writing also were very different; and Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of Hyperion, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with Nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands [an allusion ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... before we had completed our tenth year. We read it verbatim, from a copy now in our possession, and which we shall be happy to show at any moment to any of our inquisitive friends. We do not, ourselves, think the poem a remarkably good one: it is not sufficiently transcendental. Still it did well enough for the Boston audience—who evinced characteristic discrimination in understanding, and especially applauding all those knotty passages which we ourselves have not yet been ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... is happiness, only to be attained by wisdom, and I apprehend that by wisdom they mean a knowledge of the world in the broadest sense of the word. The world to them is a great repository of facts, physical and social, of which they propose to acquire a specific knowledge by transcendental methods. If that seems to you a contradiction of terms, I will try and express myself better. If you understand me, I am satisfied. Of course I use transcendental in the sense in which it is applied by Western mathematicians to a mode ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... 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

... Progressive Order of the Universe, I think it will help us to form a reasonable theory as to the reconstruction of the body. First of all, why have we any physical body at all? As a matter of fact we have one, and no amount of transcendental philosophizing will alter the fact, and so we may conclude that there is some reason for it. We have seen the truth of the maxim "Omne vivum ex vivo," and therefore that all particular forms of life ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward

... changeful narrative; the command of the grave and the gay, the severe and the lively; and a sympathy both with the bustling activities and the wild romance of human life, if not with its more solemn aspects, its transcendental references, and its aerial heights and giddy ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... could beat his speed, has taken the slopes of Parnassus by storm. He can play the Liszt Don Juan paraphrase faster than any machine in existence. (I refer to the drinking song, naturally.) But how few of us have attained such transcendental technic? None except Rosenthal, for I really believe if Karl Tausig would return to earth he would be dazzled by Rosenthal's performances—say, for example, of the Brahms-Paganini Studies and, Liszt, in his palmy days, never had such a technic as Tausig's; while ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... important of all, the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it. His processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept.' ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... liqueur—be it Curacoa, Kimmel, or old Glenlivet—after dinner, and end with the heterogeneous plum-pudding—that most English of realized ideas. Sydney Smith's book is one of rare excellence, and well worthy of the study of men and women, though perhaps not transcendental enough for our modern philosophers, male and female. It is really astonishing how much of the best of everything, from patriotism to nonsense, is to be found in this volume of sketches. You may read it ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... tempered his passionate enthusiasm into a sober zeal for the improvement of mankind by rational methods. We may also trace at this early epoch of his life that untamed intellectual ambition—that neglect of the immediate and detailed for the transcendental and universal—which was a marked characteristic of his genius, leading him to fly at the highest while he overleaped the facts of ordinary human life. "From his earliest years," says Mrs. Shelley, "all his amusements and occupations were of a daring, and in one sense ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... with the more intelligent portion of the working classes. Speculative questions are put comparatively in the background. His view of the gospel is just that plain practical view which an artisan could grasp without troubling himself about transcendental questions, on the nice adjustment of which divines disputed. 'Put all such abstruse matters aside,' Chubb says in effect to his fellow-workmen, 'they have nothing to do with the main point at issue, they are no parts of the true Gospel.' His rocks of offence, too, are ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... great name in the universal realm of letters, though out of Spain he is little more than a great name, except in Germany, that land so hospitable to famous wits, and where, to readers and critics of a mystical and transcendental turn, his peculiar genius strongly commended him. To form a notion of what manner of man Calderon was, we must imagine a writer hardly inferior to Shakespeare in fertility of invention and dramatic insight, inspired by a religious fervour ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... have had her pick of the junior officers in both branches. And there was a captain of engineers at the Presidio, a widower, but an awfully good fellow. And she has chosen a boy, full of transcendental moonshine, who climbs upon a horse as if it were a stone fence, and has mixed ideas which side of himself to hang a ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... like the lotus leaf after a shower of rain has passed over it; his character remained the same, passive, meditative, quiet, and thoughtful. A people of this peculiar stamp was never destined to act a prominent part in the history of the world; nay, the exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas in which they lived could not but exercise a detrimental influence on the active and moral character of the Indians. Social and political virtues were little cultivated, and the ideas of the useful and the beautiful hardly known to them. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... but he had one singular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with a brilliant literary movement. He had the luck to light upon it in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen. What an ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... of information given. Much of it is true; other assertions are unverifiable, which does not prove that they are untrue; others contain both truth and errors; finally, there are certainly some which are entirely untrue. For this reason these transcendental conversations very much resemble the conversations of incarnated human beings. Errare humanum est. And it would appear that the heavy corpse we drag about with us is not alone to blame when ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage

... won't be made to appear," said Jennie, settling herself at her knitting, "only in some transcendental, poetic sense, such as papa can always make out. Papa is more than half a poet, and his truths turn out to be figures of rhetoric, when one comes to apply ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... 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 hot? my ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... indicated it is no answer to say that sexual union is essentially physical, and that to regard it in any other way is transcendental. Among primitive men eating and drinking were merely animal. We have made them, in our meals, an accompaniment to social pleasures, and in our religious life we have raised ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly

... getting dark, though a band of transcendental green still burned upon the prairie's western edge when they finished supper and, sitting round the fire, took out their pipes. The hobbled horses were ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss

... 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 ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... he was struck with the manner in which Harrison evaded his questions, and the dexterity with which he threw his transcendental and fanatical notions, like a sort of veil, over the darker visions excited by remorse ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... 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; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... with the banker's wealthy heiress, the future mistress of Lone? If he were so unwise as to seek her acquaintance, the world would be quick to ascribe the most mercenary motives to his conduct. But like weaker minded lovers, he comforted himself by writing such transcendental poetry as "The Soul's Recognition," "The Meeting of the Spirits," "What Those Eyes Said," etc. He did not publish these. After having relieved his mind of them, he put them away to keep in his portfolio. So you see the handsome, "princely" Hereward was as much in love with our pale, gray-eyed girl ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... further," Seaman agreed. "To-night, in its small way, is a supreme example of the transcendental follies of democracy. England is being slowly choked and strangled with too much liberty. She is like a child being overfed with jam. Imagine, in our dear country, an Englishman being allowed to mount the platform ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... 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 ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German spirit, to which Romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet distinguish between "finding" and "inventing"! Above all a faculty for the "transcendental"; Schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally pious-inclined Germans. One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and eccentric movement (which was ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... he perceived it, and then she told him everything, even to the dread of his kisses, and she made him swear that he would respect her, and he did so. They spent long hours of transcendental love together, during which their souls alone embraced, and when they separated, they were enervated, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... enumerates all the virtues in order to explain them individually. They are Justice, Courage, Moderation, Magnificence ([Greek: megaloprepeia]), Magnanimity, Liberality, Gentleness, Reasonableness, and Wisdom. How different from the Christian virtues! Even Plato, without comparison the most transcendental philosopher of pre-Christian antiquity, knows no higher virtue than Justice; he alone recommends it unconditionally and for its own sake, while all the other philosophers make a happy life—vita beata—the aim of all virtue; and it ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... can call it by such a name, is not the optimism of theory; it is not the optimism of faith, far less is it that mystic and transcendental optimism which teases one, in these later days, with its swollen words and windy rhetoric. It is the optimism of simple, shrewd, sane common sense, the optimism of the poor, the optimism of sound nerves, the optimism of cab-men and bus drivers, of fishermen and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... is evident that there is something transcendental, and the Platonizing Christians, following the habit of the Greek philosophers, considered it as a mysterious doctrine; they spoke of it as "meat for strong men," but the popular current doctrine was "milk for babes." Justin Martyr, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... 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 ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... seemed at once to open, and they saw for the first time the beauty and holiness of his life. His death, therefore, did what his life had not done. We, misled by a false theology, imagine Paul to be speaking of some transcendental transaction in the spiritual world by which the death of Jesus acted on God's mind to make him placable; whereas, in truth, he is speaking of the simple historic fact that the death of Christ did draw men to his religion, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... only as a close observer left to his own surmises—and no more. He may, therefore, boldly state that during, and notwithstanding, his unfortunately rather too short stay with some adepts, he has by actual experiment and observation verified some of the less transcendental or incipient parts of the "Course." And, though it will be impossible for him to give positive testimony as to what lies beyond, he may yet mention that all his own course of study, training and experience, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... phenomena have received the most ingenious 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

... of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... say and you probably WILL say—"What does that matter to us? We do not care a jot for your 'experiences'—they are transcendental and absurd—they bore us to extinction." Nevertheless, quite callous as you are or may be, there must come a time when pain and sorrow have you in their grip—when what you call 'death' stands face to face with you, and when you will find ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... to hold back other people from bold investigations in regions which we have not reached as yet, owing to our great cautiousness and also to our moral timidity. Not being able to maintain that the human organism is utterly incapable of developing certain transcendental powers, which are rare, and observable only under certain conditions, unknown to science, we by no means wish to keep other explorers within the limits of our own ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... PHILOSOPHY.—The literature and thought of New England were profoundly modified by the transcendental philosophy. Ralph Waldo Emerson (p. 178) was the most celebrated expounder of this school of thought. The English philosopher, Locke, had maintained that intellectual action is limited to the world of the senses. The German metaphysician, Kant, claimed that the soul has ideas which ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... place. And, O best of the Kurus, it is the Yatis only who have access to it. And, O Pandu's son, (at that place) luminaries cannot shine by him; there that lord of inconceivable soul alone shineth transcendental. There by reverence, and severe austerities, Yatis inspired by virtue of pious practices, attain Narayana Hari. And, O Bharata, repairing thither, and attaining that universal Soul—the self-create and eternal God of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... be seen that this explanation of the deductive process completely turns the tables on the transcendental school. All reasoning is shown to be at bottom inductive. Inductions and their interpretation make up the whole of logic; and to induction accordingly Mr. Mill devoted his chief attention. For the first time induction was treated as the opus magnum of logic, and the fundamental principles ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other

... very ancient family indeed, and I scarcely thought that any specimen of it remained in the present day. Quite a museum bird; and in excellent plumage, too. Sir, I congratulate you." "You do not, then, consider, Professor," said the traveler, "that this bird has about it anything transcendental—that it is—in fact— not altogether—pardon me the expression—a terrestrial bird?" For he was afraid to say the truth, that the bird really came from beyond the sunset. The decorated personage was ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... glory's goal. His harp beneath that sky had rung Where sometime Goethe, Schiller sung, And at the altar of their fame He kindled his poetic flame. But from the Muses' loftiest height The gifted songster never swerved, But proudly in his song preserved An ever transcendental flight; His transports were quite maidenly, Charming ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... Balzac's personality differed from that of his contemporaries of the Romantic School—those transcendental geniuses of despairing temper, who were utterly hopeless about the prosaic world in which, by some strange mistake, they found themselves; and from which they felt that no possible inspiration for their art could be drawn. So little attuned ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... London, but was understood to represent in some occult way the thought and life of Young Oxford, and its contributors were mainly Oxford men. The first number contained an amazing ditty called "The Sun of my Songs." It was dark, and mystic, and transcendental, and unintelligible. It dealt extensively in strange words and cryptic phrases. One verse I ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... meditation, but action, impair the individual as to his normal usefulness, and thus diffuse by example a deteriorating influence upon the young, and misleading influence upon all, but it actually leads to false views of life, and an unsound philosophy such as transcendental idealism, pessimism, indolence, and the pursuit of visionary falsehoods which a well-balanced mind would intuitively reject. These follies are cultivated by a pedantic system of education, and by the accumulated literature which such education in the past has developed, feeble ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... to learn the right by experiment and induction, but intuitively and in advance of experiment; so, in addition to the experimental way whereby we learn justice from the facts of human history, we have a transcendental way, and learn it from the facts of human nature, and from immediate ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... poets almost as much as the transcendental philosophers. In her walks she always carried a book in her hand. One day when she had taken Tasso with her she met Patience, who, as was his wont, inquired minutely into both author and subject. Edmee thereupon had to give him an account of the Crusades. This was not the most difficult part ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... consequence of this state of things, Englishmen and women are looked upon as "quite impossible" from the Indian point of view, and a devout and educated Hindoo would no more think of discussing his transcendental ideas with such people than we should think of discussing delicate questions of Art—in its various branches—with the first village yokel we happened to meet in the road. I was confirmed in these ideas by noticing the difference in the welcome accorded to a charming ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates

... were 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 ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... significance 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. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... character, His character which was Himself: "And the Lord proclaimed the name for the Lord...the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth." Glory then is not something intangible, or ghostly, or transcendental. If it were this, how could Paul ask men to reflect it? Stripped of its physical enswathement it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, Beauty infinitely real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond

... The 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 of preaching ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... samurai is a transcendental and mystical God. So far as the samurai have a purpose in common in maintaining the State, and the order and progress of the world, so far, by their discipline and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... Guy Flouncey turned round, and assuring Lady Wallinger that the Prince and herself had agreed to refer some point to her about the most transcendental ethics of flirtation, this deeply interesting conversation was arrested, and Lady Wallinger, with becoming suavity, was obliged to listen to the lady's lively appeal of exaggerated nonsense and the Prince's affected protests, while Coningsby walked by her side, pale and agitated, and then offered ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson, impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence. Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... 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. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... such of the highest axioms of the subordinate sciences as were not special to one science, but common to several.[69] This first philosophy had also to investigate what are called the adventitious or transcendental conditions of essences, such as Much, Little, Like, Unlike, Possible, Impossible, Being, Nothing, the logical discussion of which certainly belonged rather to the laws of reasoning than to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various



Words linked to "Transcendental" :   supernatural



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