"Transcendental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physical danger whatsoever, I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for what we ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... to his landlord; he might be unable to pay the bootmaker before mentioned; his very tailor, like France herself, might at last show signs of disaffection. In short, he might have love and yet be poor. And poverty spoils a young man's happiness, unless he holds our transcendental views of the fusion of interests. I know nothing more wearing than happiness within combined with adversity without. It is as if you had one leg freezing in the draught from the door, and the other half-roasted by a brazier—as I ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... not very much annoyed. So much transcendental science, so much knowledge of the world had been driven into me already, that I longed to go home to the company of the village sexton, who, still believed that anecdotes and ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... to shine in the high aesthetic line, as a man of culture rare, You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind. And everyone ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... which characterize the poems he wrote before he reached his fortieth year, had bubbled up under the repressions of severe discipline and austerity. But the religion of Mohammed was soon exchanged by him, under the guidance of a famous teacher, for the wider and more transcendental system of Sufism. Within the area of this magnificent scheme, the boldest ever formulated under the name of religion, he found the liberty which his soul desired. Early discipline had made him a morally sound man, and ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... in the Nineteenth Century, known also in this country by her Papers on Literature and Art, occupied among her own people a station as notable as that of De Stael among the French, or of Rahel von Ense in Germany. Mystic and transcendental as she was, her writings teem with proof of original power, and are the expression of a thoughtful and energetic, if also a wayward and undisciplined, mind. One of the two compilers of these Memoirs (Emerson and W. H. Channing) ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... greater interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry. Many of his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here are two, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative phrase, and his transcendental bent: ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... peculiar scenery, or was it the beauty of the composition itself?—certainly the effect which this cantata produced upon me was overwhelming. On the way home I confessed to David that I had never before been so struck with what I might call the transcendental power of music as during the performance on the lake. I seemed to hear the World-spirit speaking to my soul in those notes; and I seemed to understand what was said, but not to be able to translate it into ordinary ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... speaking generally, have never had those foolish transcendental "romantics"—German, and still more French—on whom nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency to affect a change, but ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... lord, upon the other hand—as the mind, being altogether thing transcendental, is also thing incorruptible, so is it also a thing infinite, and being a thing infinite so are its ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... Dr. Bird when all had taken seats facing a miniature moving picture screen on one wall, "to-night I expect to show you some pictures which will, I am sure, astonish you. It marks the advent of a new departure in transcendental medicine. I will be glad to answer any questions you may wish to ask and to explain the pictures after they are shown, but before we start a discussion, I will ask that you examine what I have to show you. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... 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 of the mystic. But I answer that the causes ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Snarley's part was by no means due to any transcendental contempt for money. I have myself offered him many a half-crown, which has never been refused; and Mrs. Abel, unless I am much mistaken, has given him many a pound. Still less did it originate from ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... conscious mental existence of a man stands to the subconscious 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, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 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
... that beneath the material chemistry, astronomy and psychology (that is, the psychology in its phase of "brain-action") the ancients possessed a knowledge of transcendental astronomy, called astrology; of transcendental chemistry, called alchemy; of transcendental psychology, called mystic psychology. They possessed the Inner Knowledge as well as the Outer Knowledge, the latter alone being possessed by modern scientists. ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... 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
... unequalled, unapproached[obs3], unsurpassed; superlative, inimitable facile princeps[Lat], incomparable, sovereign, without parallel, nulli secundus[Lat], ne plus ultra[Lat]; beyond compare, beyond comparison; culminating &c. (topmost) 210; transcendent, transcendental;plus royaliste que le Roi[Fr], more catholic than the Pope increased &c. (added to) 35; enlarged &c. (expanded) 194. Adv. beyond, more, over; over the mark, above the mark; above par; upwards of, in advance ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... fashion of any other person's cape. Still, she had no idea what supersensuous material she could reasonably have demanded of her heroine (unless it were the mythic "bombazine" that Ernest used to talk about, in his ignorant efforts to describe female apparel), or what transcendental form of cape would ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... see 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humours affright me, like high and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he was ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... transcendental heights, however, comparatively few will be able to climb. To men generally it will still appear that Peter's love to Paul is not identical with Peter's love to Peter; and that Peter may act in such a way that, on the whole, he loses, while Paul gains. That the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... come to where their ways separated, and, with his hat in his hand, and his heart full of an inexplicable, transcendental something, he stood under the trees and ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... 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 ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... life is generally regarded as lying outside the range of legitimate scientific discussion. Yet while fully admitting this, one does not necessarily admit that the subject is one with regard to which we are forever debarred from entertaining an opinion. Now our opinions on such transcendental questions must necessarily be affected by the total mass of our opinions on the questions which lie within the scope of scientific inquiry; and from this point of view it becomes of surpassing interest to trace the career of Humanity within that segment of the universe which is accessible to us. ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... the gallery in which the fair sex were accommodated, among which handkerchiefs Queeker, by turning his head very much round, tried to see, and believed that he saw, the precious bit of cambric wherewith Fanny Hennings was accustomed to salute her transcendental nose. The chairman spoke with enthusiasm of the noble deeds accomplished by the Ramsgate lifeboat in time past, and referred with pride, and with a touch of feeling, to the brave old coxswain, then present (loud cheers), who had been ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... contrivance manipulated by a salesman could beat his speed, has taken the slopes of Parnassus by storm. He can play the Liszt Don Juan paraphrase faster than any machine in existence. (I refer to the drinking song, naturally.) But how few of us have attained such transcendental technic? None except Rosenthal, for I really believe if Karl Tausig would return to earth he would be dazzled by Rosenthal's performances—say, for example, of the Brahms-Paganini Studies and, Liszt, in his palmy days, never had such a technic as Tausig's; while the latter was far ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, but she began to ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... animal spirits. The New Englanders especially, set up, in their solemn way, to admonish the vices of the Republic, and to inoculate them with the virulent virtues of the Puritanical school. The good city of Boston alone teems with transcendental schemes for the total and immediate regeneration of mankind. There we find Peace Societies, and New Moral World Societies, and Teetotal Societies, and Anti-Slavery Societies, all "in full blast," each opposing to its respective ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Lucinda, in those early days found it difficult to live up to Miss Joe Hill's transcendental code she gave no sign of it. She laid aside her mildly adorned garments and enveloped her small angular person in a garb of sombre severity. Even the modest bird that adorned her hat was replaced by an uncompromising band. She foreswore meat and became a vegetarian. She stopped reading novels ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... much as it was a dream—one of the grandest and most suggestive in the history of thought. Its audacious disparagement of the whole scholastic method startled Europe, upon the dead air of whose philosophy it came as a refreshing breath of transcendental thought. Its suggestions and inspirations are traceable as a permanent enrichment, though its vast fabric swiftly dissolved. The early enthusiasm for it in French literary circles and among professors in the universities ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... declaration; and so expressions of devotion went on rising one above the other like biddings at an auction, and a conventional language of gallantry and theory of love came into being that in time permeated the literature of Southern Europe, and bore fruit, in one direction in the transcendental worship of Beatrice and Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which found exponents in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what Cervantes deals with in Don Quixote's passion for Dulcinea, and in no instance has he carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... won't be made to appear," said Jennie, settling herself at her knitting, "only in some transcendental, poetic sense, such as papa can always make out. Papa is more than half a poet, and his truths turn out to be figures of rhetoric, when one comes to apply ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Cervantes being the other two. He is also a great name in the universal realm of letters, though out of Spain he is little more than a great name, except in Germany, that land so hospitable to famous wits, and where, to readers and critics of a mystical and transcendental turn, his peculiar genius strongly commended him. To form a notion of what manner of man Calderon was, we must imagine a writer hardly inferior to Shakespeare in fertility of invention and dramatic insight, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... 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 brought ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... primevally old. That gets hold of one somehow. It's wonderful after sunset in the early spring, when the little cold wind is like wine, and it runs white to the horizon with the smoky red on the rim of it melting into transcendental green. When the wheat rolls across the foreground in ocher and burnished copper waves, it is more wonderful still. One sees the fulfillment of the promise, and ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... product of a nation dissolved by overwrought individualism. As Schumann assures us, his is "the proudest and most poetic spirit of his time." Chopin, subdued by his familiar demon, was a true specimen of Nietzsche's Ubermensch,—which is but Emerson's Oversoul shorn of her wings. Chopin's transcendental scheme of technics is the image of a supernormal lift in composition. He sometimes robs music of its corporeal vesture and his transcendentalism lies not alone in his striving after strange tonalities and rhythms, but in seeking the emotionally recondite. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... this sort, time would not permit me to discuss the points raised by my critic; I will, therefore, only observe in passing that Dr. Puluj has no authority for linking my theory of a fourth state of matter with the highly transcendental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... the principal of a business to knock respectfully or otherwise on the door of the outer office, but then it is not usual for an outer office to house a secretary of such transcendental qualities, virtue, and beauty as were contained in the person ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... transcendental philosophy the contradiction which arises when we carry the categories of the understanding above experience and apply them to the sphere ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the heart of man could desire? No; the heart of man can desire deaneries—the heart, that is, of the man vicar; and the heart of the man dean can desire bishoprics; and before the eyes of the man bishop does there not loom the transcendental glory of Lambeth? He had owned to himself that he was ambitious; but he had to own to himself now also that he had hitherto taken but a sorry path towards the object of his ambition. On the next morning ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... still under Spanish rule its Representative is to be appointed by the President. Congress is to deliberate on "all grave and transcendental questions, whose decision admits of delay and adjournment, but the President may decide questions of urgent character, giving the reasons for his decision in a message to Congress." The acts of Congress are not binding until approved by the President, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... things have for their mother prakriti, undifferentiated substance, and for their father purusha, the creative fire, is vague and metaphysical, and conveys little meaning to our image-bred, image-fed minds; on the physical plane we can only learn these transcendental truths by means of symbols, and so to each of us is given a human father and a human mother from whose relation to one another and to oneself may be learned our relation to nature, the universal mother, and to that immortal spirit which is the father of us all. We are given, moreover, the symbol ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... struck the 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) beings, by whose power and patronage he has been effectively restrained ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... surrounding hills, and gulfs opened at their feet, it could not have spread terror more quickly among the transient guests at the Villa Ariadne than this declaration. They were appalled; they stood like images, without the power to take their eyes off this woman. This transcendental folly simply paralyzed them. They knew that she was not the princess; and here, calmly and negligently, she was jeoparding their liberty as well as her own. Mad, mad! For imposture of this caliber was a crime, punishable by long imprisonment; and Italy always ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... moment of the work of this sublime artist. Imagine, therefore, how deeply moved and astonished I was, on the evening of the performance, to find that it was in this very part that I first realised the truly transcendental genius of this extraordinary woman. That anything so great as her interpretation of the character of the Swiss maiden could not be handed down to posterity as a monument for all time can only be looked upon as one of ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... blessed: therefore it is true."—It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition—one shall be blessed because one believes.... But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"—how is that to be demonstrated?—The "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness—therefore, it is true."... But this ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... railroads have superseded their use," answered I; "and as to these cowhide boots, I could show you quite as curious a pair at the Transcendental ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as they got them, and did not remember how they got them, and as long as the names according to their way of thinking indicated an essential and mystic rapport between each group and its name-giving animal. No more than these three things—a group animal name of unknown origin; belief in a transcendental connection between all bearers human and bestial of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions (the mystically sacred quality of the blood as life)—was needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... deserve or to prepare herself for such a rapture. It is the gift of God, and He gives His gifts to whomsoever and whensoever He will. This, my daughters, is perfect contemplation: this is supernatural prayer. Now this is the difference between natural and supernatural prayer: between mental and transcendental prayer. In ordinary prayer we more or less understand what we say and do. We think of Him to whom we speak; we think about ourselves and about our Surety and Mediator. In all this, by God's help, we can do something, ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... 'Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto' (Hawthorne). To the most intractable of Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus, he was never impatient, nor denied himself; nor did he ever refuse counsel where the case was not yet beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neighbour (1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, 'to meet him ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... between them, but one of pure joy and transcendental happiness. Come what might, nothing could banish the memory of that moment. They were heart to heart and each knew that the other loved. There was no need of words. Giles felt that here was the one woman for him; and Anne nestled in those ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... 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 ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... 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 ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... the new-opened sunbeams, while the wreaths and flakes of mist 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, as if ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... perdition. Young Goethe conceived his hero differently: not as a bad man on the way to hell, and not—at first—as a good man on the way to heaven. He thought of him rather as a towering personality passionately athirst for transcendental knowledge and universal experience; as a man whose nature contained the very largest possibilities both for good and for evil. It is probable that, when he began to write, Goethe did not intend to anticipate the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... his spirits. Since he had tumbled into the adventure of his life, by all means let him savour the full flavour of it! His companion's smiles had become more frequent, her eyes were more transcendental still. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... homesickness had also dimmed the clarity of my dreamlife. I slept little and badly, the tortured soul could not separate itself sufficiently from the restless body to attain to reintegration and transcendental perception. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... general than the arithmetical; yet he will not say that algebra preceded arithmetic in point of time. And again, having divided the calculus of functions into the calculus of direct functions (common algebra) and the calculus of indirect functions (transcendental analysis), he is obliged to speak of this last as possessing a higher generality than the first; yet it is far more modern. Indeed, by implication, M. Comte himself confesses this incongruity; for he says:—"It might seem that ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... quality of Sue's tone that her new and transcendental views lurked in her words; but all except their obvious meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella. The latter, after evincing that she was struck by Sue's avowal, recovered herself, and went on to talk with placid bluntness about "her" boy, for ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense, than the romantic or transcendental tradition, with its mysticism and obscurity. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the most lucid of philosophers, are scarcely easier to follow than John Stuart Mill, Huxley, and Leslie Stephen. But it is hardly necessary to enter a caveat against supposing ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... other, as being created, is contrasted with God. 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; in fact this assumption ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... 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
... of the brothers in the Transcendental movement, in all its phases, led them to propose to their father that he permit them to attend the school connected with the Brook Farm Association. Permission having been granted, they became boarders there in the ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer. At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound .. thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... sounds: in other words, of talking across his harp instead of singing to it. He acts on the supposition that, if the young want imagery, older men want rational thoughts. And his critic is declaring this a mistake. "Youth, indeed, would be wasted in studying the transcendental Jacob Boehme for the deeper meaning of things which life gives it to see and feel; but when youth is past, we need all the more to be made to see and feel. It is not a thinker like Boehme who will compensate us for the lost summer ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... sickness as much as I do at death. The scheme of existence does not appeal to me, at the moment, as the most perfect which a highly imaginative Creator could have invented. My transcendental philosophy seems a pretty good working article when things are going smoothly, but it is not quite equal to hard practical ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man he was given to printing Emersonian ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... settle nothing practically; no one can tell what it is. It is only of value as belonging to a very exalted and poetic conception of virtue, something that raises the imagination above common life into a sphere of transcendental existence. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... opposed to the precepts of orthodox Buddhism even as Taoism was opposed to Confucianism. To the transcendental insight of the Zen, words were but an incumbrance to thought; the whole sway of Buddhist scriptures only commentaries on personal speculation. The followers of Zen aimed at direct communion with the inner nature of things, regarding their outward ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... to promise that they would 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
... had been heard a few years previously in the Masonic Temple in Boston. It was the fashion among the gay to call him transcendental. Grave parents were quoted as saying, "I don't go to hear Mr. Emerson; I don't understand him. But my daughters do." Then came a volume containing the discourses. They were called Essays. Has our ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... in which things came at first into being out of the primal nothingness, and how the phenomena of nature continue to go on, "in stillness and quietness, without striving or crying." Lao Tzu is thus so far monistic, but he is also mystical, transcendental, even pantheistic. The way that can be walked is not the Eternal Way; the name that can be named is not the Eternal Name. The Unnameable is the originator of Heaven and earth; manifesting itself as the Nameable, it is "the mother of all things." ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... 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 ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... 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
... of the past, as shown in the last chapter—whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and abstract—are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will catch at this, saying ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... of short stories, and a few of the latest magazines. Spare-room books ought to be especially chosen for the expected guest. Even though one can not choose accurately for the taste of another, one can at least guess whether the visitor is likely to prefer transcendental philosophy or detective stories, and ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... 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 content to the definition—to tell what romanticism ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... recondite, cabalistic, inscrutable, secret, dark, mystic, transcendental, enigmatical, mystical, unfathomable, hidden, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... undignified and selfish habit, that I could as little condescend to it as I could to spend my time in watching a poor servant girl, to whom at this moment I hear some lad or other making love at the back of my house. Is it for a Transcendental Philosopher to feel any curiosity on such an occasion? Or can I, whose life is worth only eight and a half years' purchase, be supposed to have leisure for such trivial employments? However, to put this ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson, impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence. Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... repeated exhortations to use the senses and to trust them as furnishing the best kind of raw material for legitimate art. Hence also their protests against the bloodless abstractions of the Nazarene school of painting and to transcendental idealism in art and literature. They cultivated art, not for its own sake, but for the sake of a fuller, saner, and freer human life. In this sense they were didactic; but they were no more didactic than the Romanticists and the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was evidently inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable wilderness of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure—the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden—was the new or transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... necessary for the molecule to take so as to complete a full vibration for the note C{11}, which requires 1/16 of a second, and for other notes up to C''''', which only requires 1/4176 of a second, as when an orchestra is playing, is certainly beyond human comprehension, if it is not beyond the "transcendental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... where the wealthy are all at this moment sipping their cocktails, and discussing how much harder labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity. This is what it means and all it means; and men are divided about it according to whether they believe in a certain transcendental concept called 'justice,' expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equality of men. So long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you are rich and really confident of remaining so, you can have Prohibition and be as drunk as ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... scholar, and I fear these black Greek letters are becoming too much for my old sight. There now, dear reader, don't rush to the conclusion that this is just what you anticipated; you knew, of course, how it would be. You never had much faith in these transcendental enterprises of reviving Greek at the age of seventy-five, and you shook your incredulous head at the thought of an Academia of two honorary members at Kilronan. Now we have done a little. If you could only see the "Dream of Atossa" done into English pentameters by my curate, and my own "Prometheus"—well, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... civilizations. What he says amounts to this: the one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for carrying all things through in some shape that will serve—the other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit, which invited the presence thereof;—and hence results were attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the great ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... recognizing this as our necessary place in 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 ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... in the world; but somehow my wife began to have a kind of idea of her own that all was not right. Do you know, Hamilton, the intuitions of that woman are something marvellous—marvellous, sir! Her perceptions are something outside herself, something transcendental, sir. So I telegraphed to my friend Clinton, and here we are, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... man who can characterize a vulgar pattern as immoral, plainly uses the term "morality" in some transcendental, non-natural sense, and therefore cannot be regarded as an exponent of the precise theory referred to. Still, as this larger idea of morality includes the lesser and more restricted, we may consider Mr. Ruskin and his disciples ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the invention of hypotheses based on incomplete inductions, which he specially condemns, has proved itself to be a most efficient, indeed an indispensable, instrument of scientific progress. Finally, that transcendental alchemy—the superinducement of new forms on matter—which Bacon declares to be the supreme aim of science, has been wholly ignored by those who have created the physical knowledge ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... had, furthermore, lent a most constructive hand in the framing of the Carlyle-transcendental question—a performance which he retailed to Mrs. Norris at the earliest moment, and which made the Assistant Professorship and Nancy seem definitely within ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... to differ with the poet's thinking it an exalted symptom on his part to hate every thing he had loved before, out of supposed compliment the transcendental object of his affections and his own awakened merits. All the heights of love and wisdom terminate in charity; and charity, by very reason of its knowing the poorness of so many things, hates nothing. Besides, it is any thing but handsome or high-minded to turn round upon objects whom we have ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... multitudinous powers that throng in space. It was nourished by divine love, and all that great beauty thrilled through it and quickened it. But from this vision which the spirit had, it passed to climb to still greater heights—it was spiritual, it might attain divinity. The change from the original transcendental state of vision to that other state of being, of all-pervading consciousness, could only be accomplished by what is known as the descent into matter where spirit identifies itself with every form of life, and ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... the sensibilities of the wholly uninstructed observer. The profound investigations of the chemist into the ultimate constitution of material nature, the minute researches of the physiologist into the secrets of animal life, the transcendental logic of the geometer, clothed in a notation, the very sight of which terrifies the uninitiated,—are lost on the common understanding. But the unspeakable glories of the rising and the setting sun; ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... sorrows were many; [74] but he had one singular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with an impressive literary movement. He had the good luck to light upon it in its ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the display of florid execution, a singer would be ill-advised indeed to neglect this factor, on the plea that it has no longer any practical application. No greater error is conceivable. Should an instrumental virtuoso fail to acquire mastery of transcendental difficulties, his performance of any piece would not be perfect: the greater includes the less. A singer would be very short-sighted who did not adopt an analogous line of reasoning. Without an appreciable amount of agilita, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... pareil [Fr.]; unparagoned^, unparalleled, unequalled, unapproached^, unsurpassed; superlative, inimitable facile princeps [Lat.], incomparable, sovereign, without parallel, nulli secundus [Lat.], ne plus ultra [Lat.]; beyond compare, beyond comparison; culminating &c (topmost) 210; transcendent, transcendental; plus royaliste que le Roi [Fr.], more catholic than the Pope increased &c (added to) 35; enlarged &c (expanded) 194. Adv. beyond, more, over; over the mark, above the mark; above par; upwards of, in advance of; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... sought the enduring elements, the fundamentals of Science, in the constitution of the cognitive faculty itself. But very differently from Plato he discovered these in the categories or essential forms of intellective action,—the category of causality and dependence and the so-called forms of the transcendental aesthetic—Time and Space. Under these categories the indefinite data of sensation were thought to be organised into a ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... 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
... by misfortune, and rendered by it more highly and splendidly illustrious. When he has lost the love and reverence of his subjects, and is on the point of losing also his throne, he then feels with a bitter enthusiasm the high vocation of the kingly dignity and its transcendental rights, independent of personal merit or changeable institutions. When the earthly crown is fallen from his head, he first appears a king whose innate nobility no humiliation can annihilate. This is felt by a poor groom: he ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... sublime intuitions, undivined by many of the greatest poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendental ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... legislative power has been much discussed. It seems to be the general opinion, fortified by a strong current of judicial opinion, that, since the American Revolution, no state government can be presumed to possess the transcendental sovereignty to take away vested rights ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... succeeded in overthrowing a doctrine as old as the human mind, closely interknit with the entire texture of opinions, authority, politics, and religion, and establishing a theory flatly contradicted by the universal dictates of experience and common sense, and true only to the transcendental and interpretative Reason! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... even the assertion of it by the Sovereign himself. A leading Japanese statesman who has written an article on the subject of the Emperor and his place in the Constitution has asserted that he is "Heaven descended, sacred and divine." I do not think that the modern Japanese entertains this transcendental opinion nor, indeed, do I find that the Emperor himself has of late years put forward any such pretensions. For example, in the Imperial proclamation on the Constitution of the Empire on February 11, 1889, the Emperor declared that he had "by virtue of the glories ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Robert Simson, it may be observed, lived in Scotland," he asks the important questions:—"Did their proximity encourage the growth of this spirit? Or were their writings cultivated by some teacher of a village school, who communicated by a method, which genius of a transcendental order knows so well how to employ, a taste for these sublime inquiries, so that at length they gradually worked their way to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by his own individuality? But we must in justice ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... 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 ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... such was our Sackville Street regularity, that not so much nine o'clock announced this periodic event, as inversely this event announced nine o'clock. And I used to affirm, however shocking it might sound to poor threadbare metaphysicians incapable of transcendental truths, that not nine o'clock was the cause of revealing the breakfast urn, but, on the contrary, that the revelation of the breakfast urn was the true and secret cause of nine o'clock—a phenomenon which otherwise no candid reader will pretend ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of traditions, and, as I have said before, supernatural things. They live almost wholly in sentiment, and are little known save by a very few. I like them, yet I cannot tell why. When in their presence I feel a sort of transcendental charm, a something intangible, but restful to my soul. It's only with you and them, Dawn, that I ever feel thus, and that is ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... remained the same, passive, meditative, quiet, and thoughtful. A people of this peculiar stamp was never destined to act a prominent part in the history of the world; nay, the exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas in which they lived could not but exercise a detrimental influence on the active and moral character of the Indians. Social and political virtues were little cultivated, and the ideas of the useful and the beautiful hardly known ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... his son any tendency towards mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in common-sense, and he knew the value of the latter in curbing undue excursions into the fanciful and transcendental. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... sacred volume that he derives his theory that man is at present dead. The work appears likely to appeal to a limited circle of readers; it will be understood and appreciated by few. Though its style is clear, the abstruseness of the subjects discussed and the transcendental scope of its author, make the train of thought often difficult to follow. Possibly the fault is not in the book, but in the reader: possibly it may result from the book having been read rapidly and while ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... 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 ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... that the balance lay between his own life and death, and that he could turn the scale at his own choice; he could never have made himself forget life in the hope of victory, nor death in the fear of failure. Incapable of any transcendental belief whatsoever, his intelligence had deified free- agency, while his unacknowledged suspicion of a directing power asserted itself in his theories concerning nature's fatalism. He supposed that the machinery of the universe produced inevitable ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... presuppose, from the Cartesian point of view, certain aggregations of the primitive particles of matter. Descartes regards matter as uniform in character throughout the universe; he anticipates, as it were, from his own transcendental ground, the revelations of spectrum analysis as applied to the sun and stars. We have then to think of a full universe of matter (and matter extension) divided and figured with endless variety, and set (and kept) in motion by God; and any sort of division, figure and motion will serve ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... edited by George Ripley (1802-1880), the critic, which was the first of its kind in America. French ideas, as time went on, were also current, and the field of research extended to the Orient, the writings of which were brought forward especially in connexion with the Transcendental Movement to which all these foreign studies contributed. In New England, in other words, a close, serious and vital connexion was made, for the first time, with the philosophic thought of the world and with its tradition even in the remote past. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
