"Transcendental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a plea for the transcendental diet that drove Sydney Smith to that pathetic sigh, "Ah, I wish they would allow me even the wing of a roasted butterfly!" But perhaps it would not be amiss to conjure up a terror-demon from these bodies of ours, so that we should fear to violate laws ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... others, to be talking philosophy. She took 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 oral ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... imagination not only glorifies the philosophy of life and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols of material beauty. Though Dante's conception of the highest end of man was that he should climb through every phase of human experience to that transcendental and super-sensual region where the true, the good, and the beautiful blend in the white light of God, yet the prism of his imagination forever resolved the ray into color again, and he loved to show it also where, entangled and obstructed in matter, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... his investigation; for 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 ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 body operates practically as a machine for petrifying ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... were talking of the Postmaster-General. He postulates a God, and he postulates a region, and he postulates a communication, and then talks about all these postulates as if they were facts. I protest against this mystical, transcendental ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... 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 in the ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... crossed in any direction, but closing in and weighing down. She was in a pitfall, overpowered like Gratian had been, subjugated, soon to be put to the yoke and compelled to draw steadily the harrow of transcendental politics. Her caprices, faults, fancies, duplicities, wiles, caresses, impudence, conquests and delights were but straws out of which some great diplomatist would draw supplies for his cattle. It was humiliating to the superb creature, but logical. She gnashed her teeth, but she ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... equal to two right-angles, I should say that there is a virtual, though not a formal, fallacy in his presentation. For mathematical science being confessedly but of relative significance, any comparison between the degree of certainty attained by reasoning upon so transcendental a subject as the present, and that of mathematical demonstrations regarding relative truth, must be misleading. In the present instance, the whole strain of the argument comes upon the adequacy of the proposed test ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... activities of an amoeba or of a visceral ganglion cell, so our reason forces us to admit other possible mental existences may stand to us. But such an existence, inconceivably great as it would be to us, would be scarcely nearer that transcendental God in whom the serious men of the future will, as a ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... auditors to exercise "fiduciary" faith; the other, of a learned divine whose appointment in a certain village coincided with the visit of a travelling menagerie. "I perceive," he said, in sensational tones, "that a spirit of German transcendental ratiocination is creeping into the Church." The congregation, remembering the adjacent caravans, left at ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... 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 ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... be extremes and affectations, and Mary Lamb declared that Wordsworth held it doubtful if a dweller in towns had a soul to be saved. During the various phases of transcendental idealism among ourselves, in the last twenty years, the love of Nature has at times assumed an exaggerated and even a pathetic aspect, in the morbid attempts of youths and maidens to make it a substitute for vigorous thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... of organisation. Most of his illustrations were open to the demonstration of inaccuracy; and the language by which disciples of the kindred school of Schelling illustrated in the animal structure the transcendental idea of the whole in every part seemed little better than mystical jargon. With Cuvier, answerable parts occurred in the zoological scale because they had to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... blame Jasper for not wasting his time in correspondence with such an outrageous relative. But why didn't he write to me—a decent sort of friend, after all; enough of a friend to find for his silence the excuse of forgetfulness natural to a state of transcendental bliss? I waited indulgently, but nothing ever came. And the East seemed to drop out of my life without an echo, like a stone falling into a well ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... your objection?" asked De Burgh, disregarding his hostess. "Are you too radical, or too transcendental, or what?" ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... if you mean to predicate concerning the spiritual entity, I dwell in the temple of the infinite and I breathe the breath of truth." But when Emerson met us at the gate, things were not at all on a high transcendental plane. There was a hearty "Good-morning," significant from him as he stood among the syringas, and there were sandwiches and strawberries in profusion, a plain bread-and-butter atmosphere very pleasant ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... of an accident. In its original Greek form (aisthetikos) it means what has to do with sense-perception as a source of knowledge; and this is still its meaning in Kant's philosophy ("Transcendental Aesthetic''). Its limitation to that function of sensuous perception which we know as the contemplative enjoyment of beauty is due to A. G. Baumgarten. Although the subject does not readily lend itself to precise definition at the outset, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for a moment or two. She told herself that this was the most transcendental of follies. Yet it seemed as though there were something electrical in the atmosphere, as though something had come into the room unaccountable, stimulating, terrifying. All the languor of the last few days ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... replied Miss Biggs. "It is your bounden duty to put down such wicked iniquity as this;—not only for your own sake, but for that of morals in general. What in the world is there so beautiful and so lovely as a high tone of moral sentiment?" To this somewhat transcendental question Mrs. Furnival made no reply. That a high tone of moral sentiment as a thing in general, for the world's use, is very good, she was no doubt aware; but her mind at the present moment was fixed exclusively on her own peculiar case. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... evil hour you rashly 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, ...
— 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
... in "The History of Transcendental Magic," by Eliphas Levi (Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plate used to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes "had two aspects, one a physical ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... the Jewish race—notwithstanding all anti-semitic calumnies the race of transcendental idealism—played in the struggle of the Old and the New will probably never be appreciated with complete impartiality and clarity. Only now are we beginning to perceive the tremendous debt we owe to Jewish idealists in the realm of science, art, and literature. But very little is still known of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... galleries, and they were full of portraits. Indeed there was scarcely a chamber in this vast edifice of which the walls were not breathing with English history in this interesting form. Sometimes more ideal art asserted a triumphant claim—transcendental Holy Families, seraphic saints, and gorgeous scenes by Tintoret and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... had known Mr. Wilson! Partridge, a mere unsophisticated booby, thought simplicity the characteristic of Nature, and therefore out of place in Art. Mr. Wilson, a transcendental Partridge, thinks simplicity the characteristic of Art, and therefore out of place in Nature. He is more than ordinarily severe on Mr. Prescott for not having detected in Bernal Diaz these "striking marks of the counterfeit instead of the common soldier." "We differ," he says, "decidedly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... the real sins forbidden to man by an eternal law of right and wrong, revealed in his own conscience and authenticated by the Bible (for Milton did believe in such an eternal law, and, however it is to be reconciled with what we have just been saying, was a transcendental or a priori moralist at his heart's core), the field of human endeavour was overstrewn by a multiplicity of mere "scarecrow sins," one's duty in respect of which was simply to march up to them, one after another, and pluck them up, every ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... composition itself?—certainly the effect which this cantata produced upon me was overwhelming. On the way home I confessed to David that I had never before been so struck with what I might call the transcendental power of music as during the performance on the lake. I seemed to hear the World-spirit speaking to my soul in those notes; and I seemed to understand what was said, but not to be able to translate it into ordinary Italian or English. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to be noted in his later style. The dwarfs, buffoons, the AEsop and the Menippus are the result of an effortless art. In the last manner the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as Dostoievsky would put it. The Topers, The Forge of Vulcan, are pictures that enthrall ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... these sublime intuitions, undivined by many of the greatest poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendental ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... manner of caresses, stuffed with small cake, inundated with tea, of which beverage I hold the same opinion as Madame Gibou. I was assailed by romantic and transcendental dissertations, but possessing the faculty of abstraction and fixing my gaze upon the facets of a crystal flagon, my attitude touched the Marquise, who believed me plunged into ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... sculptured gateway, and 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 ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... finished novels, written in a style and from a point of view which will always render them dear to the studious and the book-centred. Upon the larger external rings of the book-reading multitude it is not probable that Gissing will ever succeed in impressing himself. There is an absence of transcendental quality about his work, a failure in humour, a remoteness from actual life, a deficiency in awe and mystery, a shortcoming in emotional power, finally, a lack of the dramatic faculty, not indeed indispensable to a novelist, but almost indispensable as an ingredient ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... of the Transcendental movement was Amos Bronson Alcott, born on a Connecticut farm in 1799, successively in youth a clockmaker, peddler and book-agent, and finally driven by dire necessity to teaching school. But there could be no success ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... future publication; some of our friends are already acquainted with one of the most important,—that, namely, entitled "THE PATHOLOGY OF SOCIAL LIFE, or Meditations mathematical, physical, chemical and transcendental on the manifestations of thought, taken under all the forms which are produced by the state of society, whether by living, marriage, conduct, veterinary medicine, or by speech and action, etc.," in which all these great questions are fully discussed. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... somewhat afflicted by a tete monte in this matter. I say afflicted, because, having imagination and ideality to lead him to high views, he had not a sufficient counterbalance in his firmness of character. If his father was too mundane, he was too transcendental. As for instance, he approved at the present moment, in theory, of the life of a parish clergyman; but could he have commenced the life to-morrow, he would at once have ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Paget of Christ Church within three months of his death: "Strangely enough for my time of life, I have begun to discover the truth of what you once wrote about logical processes not being the only means of research in regions transcendental."[8] In all this he was following, as he knew, in the steps of Pascal, who had devoted the whole of the first part of his treatise to the argument from the condition of man's nature without God, and then ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... as far as it goes, and real science is the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not. Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they do not exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not penetrate beyond the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the methexic, or transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the individual fact, it could never know the fact itself. The error of modern philosophers, or philosopherlings, is in supposing the principle is deduced or inferred from the fact, and in denying that the human mind ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... by reference to a transcendental religious ideal which demands that the physical shall be subordinated to the spiritual, and that the fetters of self should be ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... investigation, is as open to the utilitarian moralist as to any other. He can use it as the testimony of God to the usefulness or hurtfulness of any given course of action, by as good a right as others can use it for the indication of a transcendental law, having no connexion with usefulness or ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... the ease be high-bred and silent as possible—let it be the repose of the Transcendental—the death-like silence of the Exclusive in the perfumed atmosphere of the Exquisite; then begins the danger of going to sleep—desperate danger. In these high circles are to be found, apparently, the most sleepy of all animated beings. Apparently, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... whom more successful attempts might have been 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... in 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 ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... constant changes of Life-systems. They mean for him what is present within their spiritual content as a realisation as well as the More to which they still point. His teaching is not contradicted by anything in the neo-Kantian movement;[p.218] he accepts its transcendental reality and lifts it out of the realm of individuality and of history into a cosmic realm. After having followed the implications of the neo-Kantian movement so far, he feels compelled to take the next step. For ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... substance of this discourse proved slightly startling to its hearer. They carried the conversation into regions transcendental; and to his blissful laziness, the rarefied air of those regions was unwelcome. To breathe it demanded exertion. So he ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... class of men actually owe all their impulses and desires to the instinct of self-preservation. The struggle for existence is indeed the only spur in the case of such people. To them it matters not in what shape or condition man be preserved, provided only he survive. The transcendental maxim that "Life per se is precious" ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... within; though externally it may seem the same. Externally I may seem to have resumed the affections and the interests which occupied me before my illness and my remarkable recovery. Yet I am different. Certainly I have lost again the strange transcendental knowledge which was mine for a few instants. Certainly I have descended again to the earthly level. All those magic things have slipped away, except hope. In a sure hope, in a positive faith, I am waiting. I am waiting for all ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... the limit of our understanding, since it stimulates our faculty of reason, but does not satisfy its desire for knowledge. While all our knowledge may begin with sensible impressions or experience, there is an element in it which does not rise from this source, but transcends it. That knowledge is transcendental which is occupied not so much with mere outward objects as with our manner of knowing those objects, that is to say, with our a priori concepts of them. All our knowledge is either a priori or a posteriori. That is a posteriori knowledge which is derived from sensible experience as ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... verifiable truths within the reach of the understanding, such as mathematics and natural philosophy, geography and astronomy? Here were sciences which offered knowledge to the mind that could be turned to account in this earthly life, whereas those transcendental speculations were of no use at all.... Toward the end of the seventeenth century this spirit of indifference and scepticism toward theology, and sometimes even toward religion in general and the future world, formed a most important factor in the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... that Shakspere, this true apostle of Nature, held it to be sufficient, ay, most godly, to be a champion of 'natural things;' that he advocated a true and simple obedience to her laws, and a renunciation of all transcendental dogmas, miscalled 'holy and reverent,' which domineer over human nature, and hinder the free development of its ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... 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,' and by the Sixth Patriarch ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... 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. ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... is to an instruction received by her four years previously, but not in sleep, and not from Apollonius, though from a source no less transcendental. (Ed.) *** Remembering, on being told this dream, that "Eliphas Levi," in his Haute Magic, had described an interview with the phantom of Apollonius, which he had evoked, I referred to the book, and found that he also saw ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... now shows Nachiketas the process by which the transcendental vision can be attained. he out-going senses,—seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting; the restless mind and the intellect: all must be indrawn and quieted. The state of equilibrium thus attained is called the highest state, ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... P—— cried out, "That's game," and M. B. muttered a quotation over the last remains of a veal-pie at a side-table. Once, and once only, the literary interest overcame the general. For C—— was riding the high German horse, and demonstrating the Categories of the Transcendental philosophy to the author of the Road to Ruin; who insisted on his knowledge of German, and German metaphysics, having read the Critique of Pure Reason in the original. "My dear Mr. Holcroft," said C——, in a tone of infinitely provoking conciliation, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the voice parental Cry, "my youngster shall not row!" Then my wrath is transcendental, Then my words with vigour flow. Sires, with hearts of alabaster, Your stern "vetos" yet you'll rue, When ye see a sixth disaster, Overwhelm your ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... language of Calderon, so that he may conjure up before his readers an Aphrodite of the Vistula. Liszt, bolder than Heine, makes the attempt to portray them, and writes like an inspired poet. No Pole can speak on this subject without being transported into a transcendental rapture that illumines his countenance with a blissful radiance, and inspires him with a glowing eloquence which, he thinks, is nevertheless beggared ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... prosiness 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
... 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 suggest that wisdom of Gotham ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... realists in the fine arts, and even more so religious, moral, social and political concepts, etc.), the answer is easy: There are families of minds. They have a common ideal because, in certain matters, they have the same way of feeling and thinking. It is not a transcendental idea that unites them; but this result occurs because from their common aspirations the collective ideal becomes disengaged; it is, in scholastic terminology, a ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... angel, as the celestials see. He must be his own motive, path, and guide, his own priest, king, and law. The world may be his footstool, and may be his slough of despond, but is never his final end. His aims are transcendental, his realm is art, his interests ideal, his life divine, his destiny immortal. All the old theories of saintship are revived in him. He is in the world, but not of it. Shadows of infinitude are his realities. He sees only the starry universe, and the radiant depths of the soul. Martyrdom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... something still unexpressed, which something is the real essence of the matter, and which your penetration is expected to divine. In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone to do, they write what I ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... and 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
... the risk of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, should have found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... achievement, and shrewd 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 and unsupported assertions of the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 quietly grazing ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... that before these lines meet the eye of the readers they are intended for the world will be once again witnessing that function of the Roman Catholic Church which of all others makes the highest pretensions to transcendental spiritual significance, and is in reality the most utterly and grossly mundane—a conclave. In any case, it cannot be long before that singular spectacle is enacted on the accustomed stage before the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... jurisdiction and power. But there is no reason for laying this down as a rule of universal application. It should never be made to override the plain and manifest dictates of the Constitution itself. We cannot yield to such a transcendental view of state sovereignty. The Constitution and laws of the United States are the supreme law of the land, and to these every citizen of every State owes obedience, whether in his individual or official capacity."[122] ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... 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
... what we wanted to know, then I must make use of something other than physical means. Moreover, I gave him credit for an exceptional amount of insight. Call it super-instinct, or what you will, the fellow's intellect was transcendental. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Copperfield," or even "Bleak House." We never can have any Mr. Micawber but Phiz's indescribably jaunty Micawber. His Mr. Pecksniff is not very like a human being, but his collars and his eye-glass redeem him, and after all Pecksniff is a transcendental and incredible Tartuffe. Tom Pinch is even less sympathetic in the drawings than in the novel. Jonas Chuzzlewit is also "too steep," as a modern critic has said in modern slang. But in the novel, too, Mr. Jonas is somewhat precipitous. Nicholas Nickleby is a colourless sort ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... treated persons in this way. She saw them as God designed them,—omitting the loss from wear and tear, from false position, from friction of untoward circumstances. If we may be permitted to take a somewhat transcendental distinction, she saw them not as they actually were, but as they really were. This accounts for her high estimate of her friends,—too high, too flattering, indeed, but justified to her mind by her knowledge of their ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... a mind that, once set on a clue, must follow it, if need be, to the nethermost darkness, though he has chosen to restrict the operation of his own within certain limits; and to my mother a natural leaning to the transcendental side of an alternative, which has saved me so many a time when reason had thrown me into the abyss. But one's greatest debt to a ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... sympathy, a sense of the completeness of French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air, together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood should have descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in front of the cafe, in the mild October afternoon suffused with human sounds, is perhaps the most abiding thing I ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... 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 really youthfulness, notwithstanding that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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 events cannot get nearer to Reality than we are conducted by the judgements which ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... the cosmopolitan, a little reproachfully, "you ought to have sympathized with that man; tell me, did you feel no fellow-feeling? Look at his tract here, quite in the transcendental vein." ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... parting words of advice, but they fell on deaf ears. Even had Basil quite understood them, he would have asked how was it possible for a matter-of-fact, prosaic soldier like Colonel Mostyn, a man of the world, to understand such transcendental beings as Lady Amelie ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... think, with justice. Pretending to deal with matters of pure reason, it constantly though surreptitiously proceeds on the methods of applied logic; its conclusions are as fallacious logically as they are experimentally. The laws of thought are formal, and are as binding in transcendental subjects as in those which ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... of inspiration alone, following no man's lead, and obeying no voice but that which he heard in his own mystic soul. Though the most extraordinary literary genius of his age, he had practically no influence upon it. Indeed, we hardly yet understand this poet of pure fancy, this mystic this transcendental madman, who remained to the end of his ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... serve me well in the scenes which immediately preceded the closing of the drama in which Brande was chief actor. It is doubtless the transcendental interest of the final situation which blunts my recollection of what occurred shortly before it. I did not abate one jot of my determination to fight my venture out unflinching, but my actions were probably more automatic than reasoned, as the time of our last encounter ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Mann—a God intoxicated 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, and who ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... 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 fables ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... Wednesdays and the Wednesday men, and admirable notes of several choice conversations. There is a curious sketch in one of a little tilt between Coleridge and Holcroft, which must not be omitted. "Coleridge was riding the high German horse, and demonstrating the 'Categories of the Transcendental Philosophy' to the author of The Road to Ruin, who insisted on his knowledge of German and German metaphysics, having read the 'Critique of Pure Reason' in the original. 'My dear Mr. Holcroft,' said Coleridge, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... humanities would have adopted a different method, but my standpoint has always been dispassionate, anti-sentimental. My feelings towards the Wenuses were, incredible as it may seem, purely Platonic. I recognised their transcendental attractions, but had no desire to succumb to them. Strange as it may seem, the man who succumbs rarely if ever is victorious in the long run. To disguise my sex and identity—for it was a priori almost impossible that the inhabitants of Wenus had never heard of Pozzuoli—would ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... 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 of agilita, the performance ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... probably still, partly true and partly false: and I must bring to bear on the discovery of its truth or falsehood, just the same critical faculties that I should employ on any other problem of common life. That, I fancy, is no transcendental view of the matter; but just the plain common sense way of going to work. It was, at all events, right or wrong, the method I adopted to get at such results as I proceed to make public. I declined ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... 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, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can simply accept and understand it—leaving the rest to the "Browningites," of whom Browning declared ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... in the Apologia, for example, of Cardinal Newman. On what singular topics men's minds were bent! what queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools agitated them as they walked round Christ Church meadows! They enlightened each other on things transcendental, yet material, on matters unthinkable, and, properly speaking, unspeakable. It is as if they "spoke with tongues," which had a meaning then, and for them, but which to us, some forty years later, seem as meaningless as the inscriptions ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... and a turn for satire. He was fond of question and debate, an enemy to all illusion, impatient of dulness,[typo for dullness?] and not indisposed to alarm and bewilder it; and he had brought with him from Wittenberg a philosophy half stoical and half transcendental, with whose eccentricities he would torment the wisdom of the Court. He looked upon the machinery of power as part of the comedy of life, and would be more amused than impressed by the equipage of office, its chains and titles, the frowns ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... explanation of their meaning—any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended description—must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? Definitio est negatio. It may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism off from everything else—tell in a clause what it is not; but to add a positive ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... words; that on the whole, instead of considering—as he seems to do, and we do—the moral and the spiritual as identical, they have put them in antithesis to each other, and looked down upon "mere morality" just because it did not seem to them to involve that supernatural, transcendental, "mystic" element which they considered that they found in Scripture. From Luther to Owen and Baxter, from them to Wesley, Cecil, and Venn, Newton, Bridges, the great evangelical authorities would (not very clearly or consistently, for ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the astrochemist can find the means of pushing home their attack. It is true, of course, that the laboratory investigator has a great advantage in his ability to control his experiments, and to vary their progress at will. But by judicious use of the transcendental temperatures, far out ranging those of his furnaces, and extreme conditions, which he can only partially imitate, afforded by the sun, stars, and nebulae, he may greatly widen the range of his inquiries. The sequence of phenomena seen during the growth ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... 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
... resorts of Maine and New 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 ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... to ride down the Duke of Wellington) seems to be— not the translation of mutton, which would certainly find its way into human mouths even if riding boys were not,—but the improved geometry of transcendental curves. They ought to be numbered, ought these boys, and to wear badges—X 10, &c. And exactly the same evil, asking therefore by implication for exactly the same remedy, affects the Comets. A respectable planet is known everywhere, and responsible for ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... introduced in thought we have ideas. Perfection in all its aspects is an idea, virtue and wisdom in their perfect purity and ideas. Kant remarks ("Critique of Pure Reason," Meiklejohn's translation, p. 256): "It is from the understanding alone that pure and transcendental conceptions take their origin; the reason does not properly give birth to any conception, but only frees the conception of the understanding from the unavoidable limitation of possible experience. A conception formed from notions which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... divinities.[20] But the philosophers very seldom expounded foreign doctrines objectively and for their own sake. They embodied them in their systems as a means of proof or illustration; they surrounded them with personal exegesis or drowned them in transcendental commentaries; in short, they claimed to discover their own ideas in them. It is always difficult and sometimes impossible to distinguish the dogmas from the self-confident interpretations which are usually as incorrect ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... were above all things inspiring. Through them many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from any enthusiastic participation in ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 God together. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells |
