Transcendental

“ The feeling of extension and duration must hence be transcendental in man, for it is entirely independent of reason. Reality itself—Das Ding an sich—is inconceivable by reason and is transcendental. The very idea of a thing is transcendental and eternal. ”

“ The will is the effective cause, the living principle of the world of spirit, as motion is of the world of sense. The will is in itself a constituent part of the transcendental world. By my free determination I change and set in motion something in this transcendental world, and my energy gives birth to an effect that is new, permanent, and imperishable. ”

“ Shall we say, then, that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish. Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow. ”

“ Moreover, what is called nowadays analysis of human nature, belongs in reality to transcendental thought. 'Transcendent' is defined as designating that which lies beyond the bounds of all possible experience. So far as we know, it is beyond those bounds to enter into the intelligence of our neighbour, subjectively, to identify ourselves with him and to see and understand the world with his eyes and mind. ”

“ I apply the term transcendental to all knowledge which is not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our cognition of these objects, so far as this mode of cognition is possible a priori. A system of such conceptions would be called transcendental philosophy. ”

“ If these conceptions overstep experience, their employment is termed transcendent, a word which must be distinguished from transcendental, the latter being limited to the immanent use, that is, to experience. ”

“ How to assert the eternal and objective 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. ”

“ The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the present day Transcendental. ”

“ I have already pointed out in View Two that the Transcendental Personality, being Spiritual, and therefore akin to the Great Reality, may be said to have no free-will of itself. Its will or influence must always be working towards perfection in the form "Let Thy Will, which is also my will, be done"; the efficacy of its influence with the Great Reality depends on its growth or nourishment by the knowledge of the Good, Beautiful, and True ever bringing it more and more nearly into perfect touch or sympathy with the All-loving. ”

“ Both Being and Consciousness, however, are immediately known to us, as also the relation existing between them. By this Transcendental Synthesis he proposed to reconcile Realism and Idealism, and to destroy the traditional difficulty between transcendental, or pure, thought and “things in themselves.” ”

“ The science of all the principles of sensibility a priori, I call transcendental aesthetic.* There must, then, be such a science forming the first part of the transcendental doctrine of elements, in contradistinction to that part which contains the principles of pure thought, and which is called transcendental logic. ”

“ The farther margin of the subliminal field being unknown, it can be treated as by Transcendental Idealism, as an Absolute mind with a part of which we coalesce, or by Christian theology, as a distinct deity acting on us. ”

“ So, according to the Transcendentalist, the spiritual being of man—which apparently is a heap of lifeless ashes on the surface [Pg 200] of material existence—when graciously shone upon by knowledge and love, puts on divine attributes, glows with beauty, palpitates with joy, gives out flashes of power, distils odors of sanctity, and exhibits the marks of a celestial grace. ”

“ It arises from the free act of the subject, which enters the time-process as a discipline. "The self-conscious Ego is a projection of the transcendental subject, and resembles it." "We should regard this earthly existence as a transitory phenomenal form in correspondence with our transcendental interest." "Conscience is transcendental nature." ”

“ In one sense the power to hold any transcendental doctrine shows the soul to be still awake and therefore capable of achieving true transcendental doctrine, while those who lose the sense of the supernatural will be more difficult of approach. ”

“ Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency. ”

“ It taught that nature was an open book of the Lord in which he who runs may read a divine message; and in contrast with eighteenth-century philosophy (which had described man as a creature of the senses, born with a blank mind, and learning only by experience) , it emphasized the divinity of man's nature, his inborn ideas of right and wrong, his instinct of God, his passion for immortality,—in a word, his higher knowledge which transcends the knowledge gained from the senses, and which is summarized in the word "Transcendentalism." ”

“ TRANSCENDENTAL. Synonyms:
Intuitive truths are those which are in the mind independently of all experience, not being derived from experience nor limited by it, as that the whole is greater than a part, or that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. All intuitive truths or beliefs are transcendental. But transcendental is a wider term than intuitive, including all within the limits of thought that is not derived from experience, as the ideas of space and time. "Being is transcendental.... ”

“ Now, transcendental thinking is distinguished, moreover, from ordinary thinking in this: that whereas ordinary thinking is fixed, and, as it were, carried by something, which is separated and determined already in itself, transcendental thinking, on the contrary, has nothing for its object but itself, and hence, is fixed, separated, divided and determined only through itself. ”

“ Such, in the better sense of the term, is the transcendental philosophy, or transcendentalism. Each of these words is also used in a bad sense, empiricism applying to that one-sided view of knowledge which neglects or loses sight of the truths or principles referred to above, and trusts to experience alone; transcendentalism, to the opposite extreme, which, in its deprecation of experience, loses sight of the relations which facts and phenomena sustain to principles, and hence to a kind of philosophy, or a use of language, which is vague, obscure, fantastic, or extravagant. ”

“ Not till we know the high things shall we know how lowly they are. Meanwhile, the modern superior transcendentalist will find the facts of eternity incredible because they are so solid; he will not recognise heaven because it is so like the earth. ”

“ The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just. ”

“ Emerson says in his characteristics of transcendentalism:
“If there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment—an extravagance of faith—the spiritualist adopts it as highest in nature. ”

“ In the science of transcendental aesthetic accordingly, we shall first isolate sensibility or the sensuous faculty, by separating from it all that is annexed to its perceptions by the conceptions of understanding, so that nothing be left but empirical intuition. ”

“ I took my pen and reduced our conversation to writing. I hope by this time the reader has a very lucid answer to give to the question, What is Transcendentalism? It will be a miracle if he can see one inch farther into the fog-bank than before. I should like to take back the boast made in the beginning of this paper, that I could prove in five minutes any reasonable man a transcendentalist. ”

“ It is not as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them, then made words of the syllables and sentences of the words;—they actually followed the reverse order. So, the transcendentalists affirm, the complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and we finite creatures are only in so far as it owns us as its verbal fragments. ”

“ Common non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born. The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the whole basis on which Mr. ”

“ Meanwhile they leave transcendentalism to their poets and philosophers, and they busy themselves with preparing for heaven by practising the only part of their faith now intelligible to them-the Material. ”

“ I feel like other men my relation to that Fact which cannot be spoken, or defined, nor even thought, but which exists, and will exist.
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual ”

“ Comparing the modern transcendentalist and his pathway with that of the olden transcendentalist with his ascent of travail and pain, we find a profound satisfaction in the picture of power, peace and love of the modern supra-man. ”

“ It appears, therefore, that the efforts of the sublimest transcendentalists do not carry us one step farther than the conclusions of the commonest common-sense, viz. that there are certain fundamental conditions of thought, such as space, time, consciousness, personal identity, and freedom of will, which we cannot explain, but cannot get rid of. ”

“ Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent or the reverse, it makes no difference, so long as we don't differ about the nature of that exalted virtue's fruits—fruits for us, of course, humanistic fruits.
The transcendentalist believes his ideas to be self-transcendent only because he finds that in fact they do bear fruits. ”

“ But how dost thou transcend all? In what way dost thou transcend those beings which will have no end? Is it because they cannot exist at all without thee; while thou art in no wise less, if they should return to nothingness? ”

“ But the conception of transcendence is capable of taking two forms. It may be that of a God who passes beyond all the classes into which sensible phenomena are divisible, by virtue of His being pure Mind, cognizable only by mind ”

“ Through the power of Thy transcendent might lift me up unto the heaven of Thy holiness, O Source of my being, and by the breezes of Thine eternity gladden me, O Thou Who art my God! Let Thine everlasting melodies breathe tranquillity on me, O my Companion, and let the riches of Thine ancient countenance deliver me from all except Thee, O my Master, and let the tidings of the revelation of Thine incorruptible Essence bring me joy, O Thou Who art the most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden! ”

“ But the Absolute Experience and Will form, as we have asserted, one Unity of consciousness, one moment or instant of fulfilled life, over against which there is no external Other wherewith this whole could be contrasted. If I know myself by contrast with my neighbour or with my distant ideal, how can the Absolute, who has no neighbours, and no unfulfilled ideals, know such a contrast between himself and somebody else? In this sense, one would say, the Absolute must simply transcend self-consciousness. ”

“ He, nearest of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my soul.—I am Thee and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind, manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything, the eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. ”

“ He has traced the reality of everything unto the Lord, that centre, that Unity of everything, and that is Eternal Bliss, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Existence. Neither death nor disease, nor sorrow nor misery, nor discontent is there ... in the centre, the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to everyone what he deserves. ”