a. (sb.) [ad. med.L. transcendentāl-is (c. 1365, Wyclif, Materia & Forma (1902), 242), f. as prec. + -ālis, -AL. Cf. F. transcendental (18th c.), obs. -el (16th c.).]
1. Of transcendent quality or nature; surpassing; excelling; exalted: = TRANSCENDENT a. 1.
(In quots. 1790–1868, more or less ironical or sarcastic.)
1701. Grew, Cosm. Sacra, II. viii. 84. The Deity himself, tho’ he perceiveth not Pleasure nor Pain … as we do; yet must needs have a Perfect and Transcendental Perception, both of Pleasure, and Pain, and of all other things.
1727. Bailey, vol. II., Transcendental, exceeding, going beyond, surpassing.
1790. Burke, Fr. Rev., 10. All these considerations … were below the transcendental dignity of the Revolution Society.
1862. Merivale, Rom. Emp. (1865), VI. xlviii. 59. His [the Emperor’s] transcendental being was elevated above the restraints of all inferior existences.
1868. M. Pattison, Academ. Org., 6. It related to the transcendental parts of education.
2. Philos. a. orig. in Aristotelian philosophy: Transcending or extending beyond the bounds of any single category; = TRANSCENDENT a. 4 a. By 17th-c. writers often made synonymous with metaphysical.
By Wilkins used with special reference to his own classification of things and notions.
1668. Wilkins, Real Char., II. i. 25. The most Universal conceptions of Things are usually stiled Transcendental, Metaphysic-all. Ibid., xii. 29. The words sin, fault, trespass, transgression,… being compounded with the Transcendental Particle, Diminutive or Augmentative,… denote a Peccadillo or small fault, or an Enormity or heinous crime. Ibid., 318. Those Particles are here stiled Transcendental, which do circumstantiate words in respect of some Metaphysical notion; either by enlarging the acception of them to some more general signification,… or denoting a relation to some other Predicament or Genus, under which they are not originally placed.
1676. Glanvill, Ess., i. 3. So different they [body and spirit] are in all things, that they seem to have nothing but Being, and the Transcendental Attributes of that, in common.
1682. H. More, Annot. Glanvil’s Lux O., 177. The Current Doctrine of Metaphysicians, who define Transcendental or Metaphysical Truth to be nothing else but the relation of the Conformity of things to the Theoretical … Intellect of God.
1710. Berkeley, Princ. Hum. Knowl., § 118. Those transcendental maxims which influence all the particular sciences.
1734. Waterland, Diss. Exist. First Cause, ii. 51. This is that pure, simple, absolute, transcendental Necessity, which the later School-men and Metaphysicians speak of.
1751. Johnson, Rambler, No. 131, ¶ 1. The wish for riches; a wish … so prevalent, that it may be considered as universal and transcendental.
1807. J. Opie, in Lect. Paint., ii. (1848), 270. Learn to see Nature and beauty in the abstract, and rise to general and transcendental truth, which will always be the same.
b. In the philosophy of Kant (1724–1804): Not derived from experience, but concerned with the presuppositions of experience; pertaining to the general theory of the nature of experience or knowledge, a priori; critical (see CRITICISM 2 c).
1798. Willich, Crit. Philos., 65. The division of transcendental logic into transcendental analysis and dialectic. Ibid., 182. The transcendental is opposed to the empirical.
1801. Encycl. Brit., Suppl. II. 355. Kant … calls all knowledge, of which the object is not furnished by the senses, and which concerns the kind and origin of our ideas, transcendental knowledge.
1803. Edin. Rev., Jan., 258. Philosophy … is transcendental, when … it investigates the subjective elements, which … modify the qualities or elements of the object as perceived.
1842. Brande, Dict. Sc., etc., s.v., The transcendental he [Kant] defines to be that which, though it could never be derived from experience, yet is necessarily connected with experience, and which may be shortly expressed as the intellectual form, the matter of which is supplied by sense.
1872. Mahaffy, trans. Kant’s Prolegomena, 243. We must necessarily distinguish two sorts of idealism—transcendental and empirical. By the transcendental idealism of all phenomena, I mean the doctrine according to which we regard them all as mere representations, not as things per se.
1874. W. Wallace, Hegel’s Logic, § 42. 75. That unity of self-consciousness,… Kant calls transcendental…; and he meant thereby that this unity was only in our minds, and did not attach to the objects apart from our knowledge of them.
1877. E. Caird, Philos. Kant, II. v. 289. Transcendental is the word by which we have learnt to distinguish à priori ideas … so far as they enable us to know objects.
c. Used of any philosophy which resembles Kant’s in being based upon the recognition of an a priori element in experience.
1829. Carlyle, Misc. (1857), II. 74. The Idealist boasts that his Philosophy is Transcendental.
1842. Emerson, Transcendentalist, Wks. (Bohn), II. 283. It is well known … that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg.
1872. Minto, Eng. Prose Lit., II. ix. 596. German transcendental philosophy.
1878. Dowden, Stud. Lit., 47. The transcendental thinker [holds] that the mind contributes of its own stores ideas or forms of thought not derived from experience.
d. By Schelling ‘transcendental philosophy’ was used for the philosophy of mind as distinguished from that of nature.
1903. Adamson, Developm. Mod. Philos., I. 265. Philosophy of nature and philosophy of mind or transcendental philosophy are therefore at once parallel and complementary.
3. In uses derived from the philosophical sense: a. Beyond the limits of ordinary experience, extraordinary.
1831. Carlyle, Sart. Res., II. v. (1858), 87. Sometimes it is even when your anxiety becomes transcendental, that the soul first feels herself able to transcend it. Ibid. (1837), Fr. Rev., III. I. i. Very frightful it is when a Nation … becomes transcendental.
1856. Emerson, Eng. Traits, Wks. (Bohn), II. 104. This mental materialism makes the value of English transcendental genius.
1863. Geo. Eliot, Romola, xxxix. That bust of Plato had been long used to look down on conviviality of a more transcendental sort.
1868. Nettleship, Ess. Browning’s Poetry, i. 34. Views … which, while less transcendental … are perhaps of more practical value.
b. Super-rational, superhuman, supernatural.
1826. Scott, Woodst., xiv. The dexterity with which he threw his transcendental and fanatical notions, like a sort of veil, over the darker visions excited by remorse.
1841. Myers, Cath. Th., IV. xvi. 265. A revelation which may justly be termed Transcendental—wholly incapable of being explained, but yet not incapable of being believed.
1850. Whipple, Ess. & Rev. (ed. 3), I. 228. It [poetry] thus transcends the sphere of the senses, and is, in a measure, transcendental.
1858. Kingsley, Lett. (1878), II. 67. Below all natural phenomena, we come to a transcendental—in plain English, a miraculous ground.
1903. F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, I. p. xv. Transcendental vision, or the perception of beings regarded as on another plane of existence.
c. Vaguely, Abstract, metaphysical, a priori.
1835. I. Taylor, Spir. Despot., v. 212. Abstract and transcendental notions of an intolerant kind.
1840. Thackeray, Paris Sk.-bk., xv. (1872), 172. Having watched the Germans with their … mysterious transcendental talk.
1847. Emerson, Repr. Mers, Plato, Wks. (Bohn), I. 295. If he made transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained by orators and polite conversers.
1856. Carlyle, Sterling, I. xv. To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life, act magically there.
1853. Max Müller, Chips (1880), I. iii. 66. The exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas in which they [Hindus] lived.
1856. N. Brit. Rev., XXVI. 173. Proofs … that the most abstract and apparently transcendental truths in physical science will sooner or later add their tribute to supply human wants, and alleviate human sufferings.
1875. Jowett, Plato (ed. 2), I. 77. An unmeaning and transcendental conception.
1901. Edin. Rev., April, 427. He [Mill] rejected all transcendental conceptions.
d. Applied to the movement of thought in New England of which Emerson was the principal figure: see TRANSCENDENTALISM 1 b.
1844. Dickens, Mart. Chuz., xxxiv. Two literary ladies present their compliments to the mother of the modern Gracchi…. It may be another bond of union … to observe, that the two L.L.’s are Transcendental.
1887. Cabot, Mem. Emerson, I. vii. 249. [In the Boston or New England Transcendentalism] the transcendental was whatever lay beyond the stock notions and traditional beliefs to which adherence was expected because they were generally accepted by sensible persons.
4. Math. Not capable of being produced by (a finite number of) the ordinary algebraical operations of addition, multiplication, involution, or their inverse operations; expressible in terms of the variable only in the form of an infinite series.
The typical transcendental functions are sin x, ex, log x.
1706. Phillips (ed. Kersey), Transcendental Curves,… are such Curves, as when their Nature or Property comes to be express’d by an Equation, one of the Variable or flowing Quantities there, denotes a Curve or crooked Line.
1817. Hutton, Course of Mathematics, III. ix. 188. Transcendental or mechanical curves, are such as cannot be … expressed by a pure algebraical equation. Thus, y = log x, y = A . sin x,… y = Ax, are equations to transcendental curves.
1843. Penny Cycl., XXV. 120. The roots of equations of the fifth and higher degrees are … transcendental; there is no mode of expression except by infinite series.
1879. Cayley, in Encycl. Brit., IX. 818/2. The so-called circular functions … the exponential function … the logarithmic function … are all of them transcendental functions.
1882. Glaisher Ibid., XIV. 773/1. The small group of transcendental functions, consisting only of the circular functions … sin x, cos x, &c.,… ex, and log x.
1902. Encycl. Brit., XXXI. 287/2. There are numbers … which cannot be defined by any combination of a finite number of equations with rational integral coefficients. Such numbers are said to be transcendental.
B. sb. [the adj. used absol.] A transcendental conception, term, or quantity.
1668. Wilkins, Real Char., II. i. 24. The right ordering of these Transcendentals is a business of no small difficulty; because there is so little assistance or help to be had for it in the Common Systems.
1711. G. Hickes, Two Treat. Chr. Priesth. (1847), II. 165. Generical terms come so near to the nature of transcendentals, that they are seldom capable of … exact definition.
1726. Swift, Gulliver, II. vii. As to ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads.
1843. Penny Cycl., XXV. 120. The expression of the old transcendentals as recognised functions, and the writing of them accordingly, as log x, sin x, cos x, &c.
