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Webster 1913 Edition

Transcendentalism

Tranˊscen-den′tal-ism

,
Noun.
[Cf. F.
transcendantalisme
, G.
transcendentalismus
.]
1.
(Kantian Philos.)
The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.
☞ As Schelling and Hegel claim to have discovered the absolute identity of the objective and subjective in human knowledge, or of things and human conceptions of them, the Kantian distinction between transcendent and transcendental ideas can have no place in their philosophy; and hence, with them, transcendentalism claims to have a true knowledge of all things, material and immaterial, human and divine, so far as the mind is capable of knowing them. And in this sense the word transcendentalism is now most used. It is also sometimes used for that which is vague and illusive in philosophy.
2.
Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.

Definition 2024

transcendentalism

transcendentalism

English

Noun

transcendentalism ‎(countable and uncountable, plural transcendentalisms)

  1. The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.
  2. Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.
  3. A philosophy which holds that reasoning is key to understanding reality (associated with Kant); philosophy which stresses intuition and spirituality (associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson); transcendental character or quality.
  4. A movement of writers and philosophers in New England in the 19th century who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.

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