"Transcendental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said just what they would like to 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 will venture ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... why stickle upon such fine-drawn points as I reckon you are making? Why, sir, as I understand it, this is the only weak spot your action has shown; you have taken an inoculation of Quixotic conscience from our transcendental apothecary and perpetrated a lot of heroic behavior that would have done honor to four-and-twenty Brutuses; and now that you have a chance to do something easy and human, you shiver and shrink at the 'looks o' the thing.' ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... expected, has not hitherto been done at 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 of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... other science. It modestly confines its scope of research to what appears in finite and describable forms. It possesses no ladder by which it can transcend the empirical order, the fact-level. The religion which the psychologist reports upon is necessarily stripped of all transcendental and objective reference. Its wings are severely clipped. It is only one of man's multitudinous reactions in the presence of the facts of his time and space world. It is nakedly subjective and works, not because there is Something or Some One beyond, which answers it, and corresponds with ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 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, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... situated on an asymptote to the curve of cold. Ideas, in short, have all at once become plastic, and none more completely so than those relating to astronomy. The physics of the heavenly bodies, indeed, finds its best opportunities in unlooked-for disclosures; for it deals with transcendental conditions, and what is strange to terrestrial experience may serve admirably to expound what is normal in the skies. In celestial science especially, facts that appear subversive are often the most illuminative, and the prospect ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... 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
... seized certain discontented young women who studied "Science and Health" under the tutorage of its author, and they soon became too transcendental to perform the useful duties of life, posing as teachers of the "utterly utter." It monopolized the feeble intellects of some farmers' boys, who at once began to try to get a lazy living by sitting beside sick women with their hands over their eyes, ostensibly ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... before him. He felt a strange psychic presentiment as of things soon to be revealed. A sentiment akin to awe stole over him, as if he were standing in the presence of a great mystery—a mystery so transcendental that the groveling minds of mortals have never apprehended it. He turned again to the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... "a confirmation of the most transcendental questions of our true religion," for in Mansilatan he finds the principal god and father of Balda, "who descended from the heavens where he dwells, in order to create the world. Afterwards his only son Badla came down also to preserve ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... advance of years 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 of the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the presentation. In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the average novel of the third quarter of the century—in a more than average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential condition—Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be found. His talent is individual enough, but not too individual: system and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... 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 that ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... This ambiguity, which recurs in all the Neoplatonic systems and has continued to characterise all mysticism down to the present day, originates in the attempt to repel Stoic pantheism and yet to preserve the transcendental nature of the human spirit, and to maintain the absolute causality of God without allowing his goodness to be called in question. The assumption that created spirits can freely determine their own course is therefore a necessity of the system; ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... was the Athens of America, the hub of the universe. In Boston they worshipped culture, they lived in literature and art and the transcendental excellences; and by the way of showing that there was no snobbery in them, they opened the gates of their most august mansions to this soul-sick poet, and ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... we have are either not sufficiently defined, or not sufficiently proved, to become the foundation upon which to build so very important a branch of chemistry. This science of affinities, or elective attractions, holds the same place with regard to the other branches of chemistry, as the higher or transcendental geometry does with respect to the simpler and elementary part; and I thought it improper to involve those simple and plain elements, which I flatter myself the greatest part of my readers will easily understand, in the obscurities and difficulties which still ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... Pyrosoma, the 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
... 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 ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Where eulogy 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... Frederick 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 epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... reader as an almost awful, or as a very wonderful idea, that man has within himself, if he did but know it, tremendous powers or transcendental faculties of which he has really never had any conception. One reason why such bold thought has been subdued is that he has always felt according to tradition, the existence of superior supernatural (and with them patrician) ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... good in the Republic, or of beauty in the Symposium, or of the unity of virtue in the Protagoras, we should answer—The priority of the soul to the body: his later system mainly hangs upon this. In the Laws, as in the Sophist and Statesman, we pass out of the region of metaphysical or transcendental ideas ...
— Laws • Plato
... first studious age in puncto of "costumes," I mean as concerns morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival—laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world's history and as God's Merry-Andrews,—perhaps, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the above is orthodox Moslem doctrine, which utterly ignores the dictum "ex nihilo nihil fit;" and which would look upon Creation by Law (Darwinism) as opposed to Creation by miracle (e.g. the Mosaic cosmogony) as rank blasphemy. On the other hand the Eternity of Matter and its transcendental essence are tenets held by a host of Gnostics, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... 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; ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... aims at something visible (i.e. an effect that can be definitely assigned, whence it follows that the Sudra also is qualified for it, while he would not be qualified for an activity having an 'adrishta,' i.e. supersensuous, transcendental effect). The recital of the text of the Veda also and the like (are not indispensable means for bringing about cognition of Brahman, but) merely subserve the origination of the desire of knowledge. The desire of knowledge may arise ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... immortality of the soul is a theory of knowledge, and that in what has preceded Plato is accommodating himself to the popular belief. Such a view can only be elicited from the Phaedo by what may be termed the transcendental method of interpretation, and is obviously inconsistent with the Gorgias and the Republic. Those who maintain it are immediately compelled to renounce the shadow which they have grasped, as a play of words only. But the truth is, that Plato in his ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... Vienna! The phrase enchants like an entrance of the horns. The best caviare in Russia, the worst actor on Broadway, the most virtuous angel in Heaven! Such superlatives are transcendental. And yet,—so rare is perfection in this world!—the news swiftly follows, unexpected, disconcerting, that the best Pilsner in Vienna is far short of the ideal. For some undetermined reason—the influence ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... fall of man. Others have vindicated it in 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 considerations ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... appealed to 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 for a law to catch and enslave them, you had ...
— 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
... World's Neglected or Forgotten Leaders and Pioneers Social Conditions—Expenses at Harvard; European Wages; India as a Wheat Producer; Increase of Insanity; Temperance; Flamboyant Animalism Transcendental Hash Just Criticism Progress of discovery and Improvement—Autotelegraphy; Edison's Phonograph; Type-setting Eclipsed; Printing in Colors; Steam Wagon; Fruit Preserving; Napoleon's Manuscript; Peace; Capital Punishment; Antarctic Explorations; ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... Maria, appointed Sec. to Cardinal Palotta. About 1649 he went to Italy, and in the following year became a canon of the Church of Loretto. He d. the same year. C. is said to have been an eloquent preacher, and was a scholar as well as a poet of a high order in the ecstatic and transcendental style. His chief work is Steps to the Temple (1646), consisting mainly of religious poems somewhat in the style of Herbert; his Weeping of the Magdalen is full of the most extravagant conceits, a fondness for which is, indeed, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... long-ago Independent and I tried in vain to find it last winter. Houghton and Mifflin have recently published Bronson Alcott's "Fruitlands," compiled by Clara Endicott Sears, with "Transcendental Wild Oats" by Louisa M. Alcott, so it is brought to the notice of those who ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... besides the obloquy of having lived only in the best company in England, I was further disgraced by the discovery, that I am deplorably ignorant of metaphysics, and have never been enlightened by any philanthropic transcendental foreign professor of humanity. Profoundly humiliated, and not having yet taken the first step towards knowledge, the knowing that I was ignorant, I was pondering upon my sad fate, when Lady Olivia, putting her hand upon my shoulder, summoned me into the court of love, there in ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... some other spirit who is also guessing at things above him. He may be right, or he may be wrong, but he is doing his best to say what he thinks, as we should do in similar case. He believes that his transcendental chemists can make anything, and that even such unspiritual matter as alcohol or tobacco could come within their powers and could still be craved for by unregenerate spirits. This has tickled the critics to such an ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 we shall ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... no longer send armed bands beyond their bounds, and the disgraceful payments of tribute by the cities of Asia Minor came to an end. The Asiatic Greeks did not fail to repay the benefit—which was certainly felt as a general and permanent one—with golden chaplets and transcendental panegyrics. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... India is tat, an element, a principle, the essence of being; but it is almost amusing to hear an English Gipsy say "that's the tatto (or tat) of it," meaning thereby "the thing itself," the whole of it. And thus the ultimate point of Brahma, and the infinite depth of all transcendental philosophy, may reappear in a cheap, portable, and convenient form, as a declaration that the real meaning of some mysterious transaction was that it amounted to a sixpenny swindle at thimble-rig; for to such base uses have the Shaster and ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... these sublime intuitions, undivined by many of the greatest poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendental religion ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... the 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 are differentiations of the one Basic Life. This means a localizing of the Life-Principle in individual ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... beliefs of various races, and the obscure metaphorical sayings which gave birth to 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
... self-consciousness to which he has attained is not expressed in the language of philosophy, but in poetry, in a transcendental Fairyland. There is as yet no Greek language of philosophy; a long development will bring it forth however; Aristotle will deracinate the last image of Homer, and leave ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... to them as Catholics; for what makes them adopt the views of rationalistic historians is simply the fact that those views seem, in substance, convincingly true; and what makes them wander into transcendental speculations is the warmth of their souls, needing to express their faith anew, and to follow their inmost inspiration, wherever it may lead them. A scrupulous honesty in admitting the probable facts of history, and a fresh upwelling of mystical experience, these ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to a certain 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
... 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 accessories only as impediments to a clear perception ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... roast-beef that will expel any such humbug in the end); but these sprightly Frenchmen have relished the mystical doctrines mightily; and having watched the Germans, with their sanctified looks, and quaint imitations of the old times, and mysterious transcendental talk, are aping many of their fashions; as well and solemnly as they can: not very solemnly, God wot; for I think one should always prepare to grin when a Frenchman looks particularly grave, being sure that there is something false and ridiculous ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... evil 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. ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... 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 of question, I shall say one thing, ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... girl 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 was ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... readiness with which you tried—perhaps not very successfully—to initiate me into the mysteries of musical knowledge. You have at least taught me what difficulties and what labor genius must bury in those poems which procure us transcendental pleasures. You have also afforded me the satisfaction of laughing more than once at the expense of a ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... 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, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... would 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 ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... every respect but one, the most 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." Browning's conclusions, which harmonise so well with our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence. They occasionally ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... 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 the pretensions ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... which is not 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... students rose in his seat and asked a question. It is a practice," continued Dr. Boomer, "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
... 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 ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... and decree in which {68} a man 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
... Hampshire from New York and Philadelphia; and the islands which break the great roll of the Atlantic here cannot well be more nearly in "a state of nature" than were the Isles of Shoals, for example, in my college days, long after Mr. Lowell first wandered there with the transcendental Thaxters to celebrate the thunders of the surf ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... Ranke, nor any other "exact" anthropologist, has attempted to give any other natural explanation of the origin of man. They have either set completely aside this "question of questions" as a transcendental problem, or they have appealed to religion for its solution. We have to show that this rejection of the rational explanation is totally without justification. The fund of knowledge which has accumulated in the progress of biology in the nineteenth century ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... 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," ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... lingered reluctantly about the hollows, and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt of pine.—Up into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills,—but who can describe them? Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the outlines of a Greek Venus, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... Jesus from the purely human point of view, and yet surely this is the only legitimate thing to do when trying to get at the heart of the subject. It is what we should do in any other case of a like kind; we should never dream of doing anything else. We have no business to begin speculating upon transcendental questions until we have examined the purely human causes of such an event as the crucifixion of Jesus. When an adherent of the so-called orthodox view of the doctrine of the Atonement is pressed to say just what he supposes the death of Jesus to have effected ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... 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. ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... elementary geometry, a branch of pure mathematics: and the direction of the bombs, balls, and other projectiles, the necessary appendages of military works, although no part of their architecture, belong to the conic sections, a branch of transcendental geometry. Diderot and D'Alembert, therefore, in their Arbor scienciae, have placed military architecture in the department of elementary geometry. Naval architecture teaches the best form and construction of vessels; for which best ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... savage mental conditions, out of which, in part, the doctrine of "spirits" arose, the recent researches of French, German, and English psychologists of the new school. As to whether these researches into abnormal psychological conditions do, or do not, indicate the existence of a transcendental region of human faculty, anthropologists appear to be unconcerned. The only English exception known to me is Mr. Tylor, and his great work, "Primitive Culture," was written thirty years ago, before the modern psychological studies of Professor William ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... for thy subtler 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
... in an excess of transcendental enthusiasm. "Blub-blub! And though I do not comprehend the exquisite simplicity of your primeval speech, I answer with all my ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... 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 ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... 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
... (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
... 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 as ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... reality of that Presence, the consciousness of Whom is alike the beginning and the end, the motive and the reward, of the religious experience, is not altogether clear in an age that, for over two centuries, has more and more rejected the transcendental ideas of the human understanding. Yet the consequences of that rejection, in the increasing individualism of conduct which has kept pace with the growing subjectivism of thought, are now sufficiently apparent and the present plight of our civilization is already leading its more characteristic ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... 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 speak of memory as the ...
— Philebus • Plato
... thinking really 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 ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... will comply with the request of the two L. L.'s, they will have the immediate pleasure of joining the galaxy assembled to do honour to the patriotic conduct of a Pogram. It may be another bond of union between the two L. L.'s and the mother of the M. G. to observe, that the two L. L.'s are Transcendental.' ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... them as 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... general nature which some authors incline to ascribe to it, might not explain itself by some more general facts, and might not fit, as a particular case, into a more comprehensive frame. To be brief, this is very possible. I have not troubled myself about it, and I have made a transcendental use of this empirical law; for I have impliedly supposed it to be a first principle, capable of accounting for the development of the consciousness, but ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... discerners of the parts of such system which have been feebly rooted, or fancifully reared. Their attention should have been attracted both by clearness and kindness of promise; their impatience prevented by close reasoning and severe proof of every statement which might seem transcendental. Altogether void of such consideration or care, Lord Lindsay never even so much as states the meaning or purpose of his appeal, but, clasping his hands desperately over his head, disappears on the instant in an abyss of curious ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 gates ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... theorems of 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 and destiny ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... surmount the painted shrines 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 ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal. In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... powerfully excited. For I desire you to recollect, that the welfare of your immortal soul was not connected with your imaginings, your magnificent visions did not penetrate into the soul's doom. You were not submitted to the agency, of a transcendental power. You were, in a word, a poet, but not a fanatic. What comparison, then, could there be between the exercise of your free, manly, cultivated understanding, and my feelings on this occasion, with my thick-coming visions of immortality, that almost lifted me from the mountain-path I was ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... the Universe, and partakes of its Essence. It does not know what this Reality is, but it knows that it is Real, and something different from anything in the world of name, form, number, time, space, cause and effect—something Transcendental and surpassing all human experience. And knowing this, it knows that it cannot be destroyed or hurt; cannot die, but is immortal; and that there is Something which is the very essence of Good behind of, underneath and even in itself. And ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... our present Paradise Lost before us, we can see the very process of the gradual reinvention. In the epic Satan must not appear, as had been proposed in the drama, at once on our earth or within our universe. He must be fetched from the transcendental regions, the vast extra-mundane spaces, of his own prior existence and history. And so, round our fair universe, newly-created and wheeling softly on its axle, conscious as yet of no evil, conscious only of the happy earth and sweet human life in the midst, and of the steady ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... man: an expression which has been quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are. With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years, deliberately shaping them, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... impossible, and the impression, as in the Tintoretto, that of the suspended nude model, it would be safe to say that no modern painter would have employed such a figure. This touch of realism, even among the transcendental painters, denotes the clean-cut separations between the modern and ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... poem,—"Yarrow Revisited,"—and the sonnet which the occasion also produced. And even Scott, who was so little of a Wordsworthian, who enjoyed Johnson's stately but formal verse, and Crabbe's vivid Dutch painting, more than he enjoyed the poetry of the transcendental school, must have recurred that day with more than usual emotion to his favourite Wordsworthian poem. Soon after his wife's death, he had remarked in his diary how finely "the effect of grief upon persons ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... next 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
... professor, "says that man has enough to do in questioning his immediate surroundings, without going into the matter of transcendental inquiry." ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... as the three above mentioned defy classification, because they are not composed by any scientific method. Their authors pass from physiological sensualism to moralism, from imitation of nature to finalism, and to transcendental mysticism, without consciousness of the incongruity of their theses, at variance ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... one doubts that 'the modest blush which crimsons the cheek of beauty,' to use the author's words, is caused by a rush of blood to the skin; but how this produces 'a corresponding change in its angle of reflection,' and what such a change has to do with the result, are problems too transcendental for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... with us, are thought susceptible of positive proof (such as the taste and quality of cooking, or the mental abilities of a fellow-citizen) the Monomotapans establish their judgment in a transcendental or super-rational manner. The cooking in a restaurant or hotel is with them excellent in proportion, not to the taste of the viands subjected to it, but to the rental of the premises. And when a man desires the most delicious food he does not consider where he has tasted such food ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... men's eyes 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, and so to God; did, therefore, bring them to see God's forgiving ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... two modes of thought stand related the one to the other? Kant's answer is that they correspond to the distinction between two worlds, the world of sense and the transcendental or supersensible world. The pure and the practical reason are the faculties of man for dealing with these two worlds respectively, the phenomenal and the noumenal. The world which is the object of scientific investigation is not the actuality itself. This ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... quickness from one outline into another as square and triangle and spheres changed places. Their shiftings were like the transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing form was the suggestion of unfamiliar harmonies, of a subtle, a transcendental geometric art as though each swift shaping were ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... 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 direct and ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... The 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 with ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... admitted behind the scenes, saw, with wonder and mirth, the trumpery which they had admired as crowns, sceptres, and royal robes, when beheld at a distance—thus learning to estimate at their real value the affected airs of super-excellence and transcendental elegance assumed by the frequenters ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... general maxims by examining their application to the philosophy of space, for it is only in application that the meaning or importance of a method can be understood. Suppose we are confronted with the problem of space as presented in Kant's Transcendental sthetic, and suppose we wish to discover what are the elements of the problem and what hope there is of obtaining a solution of them. It will soon appear that three entirely distinct problems, belonging to different studies, and requiring different ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... 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 gods, high-souled ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... her. She alone was distinct among these shapes. She appeared dazzling; resplendent with a splendid calmness, and I braced myself to the shock of love, the love I had known, that all men had known; but greater, transcendental, almost terrible, a fit reward for the sacrifice of a whole past. Suddenly she spoke. I heard a sound like the rustling of a wind through trees, and I felt the shock of an unknown emotion made up of fear and of enthusiasm, as though she had been not a woman but only a voice crying ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... from the ancient root-faith of Transcendental Freudianism. The robot-confessor instructs children and adults alike. It hears their problems within the social matrix. It is their constant friend, their social mentor, their religious instructor. Being robotic, the confessors are able to give exact and unvarying answers to any question. This aids ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... 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, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete mixer for pouring one's soul in with some Portland Cement and making one's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them in one—just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep things moving, ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 'the wild joy of living,' but the strenuous joy of living in perfect accordance with nature, with the sanity of animals who have climbed to reason, and are content to be guided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with the transcendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise be compared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetry out of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from other soil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken the abstract, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... was a man well bred, He was up in Electricity, Fortification, Theology, aesthetics and Pugilicity; Celsus and Gregory he'd read; Knew every "dodge" of glove and fist; Was a capital curate, (I think I've said) And Transcendental Anatomist: Well up in Materia Medica, Right up in Toxicology, And Medical Jurisprudence, that sell! And the dead sell Physiology: Knew what and how much of any potation Would get him through any examination: With credit not small, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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 of the Mississippi, from the froth, which the wind blows ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... instead of earth. Philosophy, too, had failed to give complete satisfaction. Man had realised his utter inability to find knowledge in himself by his unaided efforts. He despaired to arrive at it without the help of some transcendental power and its kind assistance. Salvation was not to be found in man's own nature, but in a world beyond that of the senses. Philosophy could not satisfy the cultured man by the presentation of its ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... nature in its various distortions; the wisdom and the foolishness of man's aims, and the modes of pursuing them; the passions of the senses, the affections of the heart, the aspirations of the soul; the fine metaphysical experiences of the transcendental religionists; the semi-sensual, outward piety of the half-idolatrous Roman Catholic; the great and the little, the shallow and the deep of humanity in this its stage of action and development,—are delineated with the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... been appointed to give us a paper for our next gathering, and the subject chosen is, 'Christian Science and Its Transcendental Tendency.'" ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... 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
... Terry, a transcendental poet, who worked in the shop for many years, had quit it some time before he met Marie. The above letter shows, in a general way, the mood which finally brought about his social self-exile, so to speak. The letter which follows gives a specific instance of the kind ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... recollect that, after pursuing him through a 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 Coleridge. This astonishing man, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... will not be fit to eat. Butcher's meat, in this respect, has the advantage. Under the manipulation, however, of a skilful cook, game undergoes various modifications and transformations, and furnishes the greater portions of the dishes of the transcendental kitchen. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... a promptitude which did him credit, he replied, 'I am a transcendentalist.' Georgiana smiled bewitchingly. 'I am glad,' she said; 'so am I. You went to hear Paganini last week, of course. "The prayer of Moses"—ah!' She closed her eyes. 'Do you know anything more transcendental than that?' 'No,' said George, 'I don't.' He hesitated, was about to go on speaking, and then decided that after all it would be wiser not to say—what was in fact true—that he had enjoyed above all Paganini's Farmyard Imitations. The man had made his fiddle ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... my meaning: "When he had soared into a high region of speculative thought he took no note of objects close by. A few days after our first meeting we walked together on a road, a part of which was overflowed by a river at its side. Our theme was the transcendental philosophy, of which he was a great admirer. I felt sure that he would not observe the flood, and made no remark on it. We walked straight on till the water was half way up to our knees. At last he exclaimed, 'What's ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs |
