| 释义 |
transcendental, a. (n.)|trɑːnsɛnˈdɛntəl, træn-|
[ad. med.L. transcendentāl-is (c 1365, Wyclif Materia & Forma (1902) 242), f. as prec. + -ālis, -al1. Cf. F. transcendental (18th c.), obs. -el (16th. c.).]
A. adj.
1. Of transcendent quality or nature; surpassing; excelling; exalted: = transcendent a. 1.
(In quots. 1790–1868, more or less ironical or sarcastic.)
1701Grew 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. 1727Bailey vol. II, Transcendental, exceeding, going beyond, surpassing. 1790Burke Fr. Rev. 10 All these considerations..were below the transcendental dignity of the Revolution Society. 1862Merivale Rom. Emp. (1865) VI. xlviii. 59 His [the Emperor's] transcendental being was elevated above the restraints of all inferior existences. 1868M. 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.
1668Wilkins Real Char. ii. i. 25 The most Universal conceptions of Things are usually stiled Transcendental, Metaphysic-all. Ibid. xii. 291 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. 1676Glanvill 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. 1682H. 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. 1710Berkeley Princ. Hum. Knowl. §118 Those transcendental maxims which influence all the particular sciences. 1734Waterland Diss. Exist. First Cause ii. 51 This is that pure, simple, absolute, transcendental Necessity, which the later School-men and Metaphysicians speak of. 1751Johnson Rambler No. 131 ⁋1 The wish for riches; a wish..so prevalent, that it may be considered as universal and transcendental. 1807J. 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).
1798Willich Crit. Philos. 65 The division of transcendental logic into transcendental analysis and dialectic. Ibid. 182 The transcendental is opposed to the empirical. 1801Encycl. 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. 1803Edin. Rev. Jan. 258 Philosophy..is transcendental, when..it investigates the subjective elements, which..modify the qualities or elements of the object as perceived. 1842Brande 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. 1872Mahaffy tr. 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. 1874W. 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. 1877E. 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.
1829Carlyle Misc. (1857) II. 74 The Idealist boasts that his Philosophy is Transcendental. 1842Emerson 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. 1872W. Minto Eng. Prose Lit. ii. ix. 596 German transcendental philosophy. 1878Dowden 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.
1903Adamson 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.
1831Carlyle 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. 1837― Fr. Rev. III. i. i, Very frightful it is when a Nation..becomes transcendental. 1856Emerson Eng. Traits Wks. (Bohn) II. 104 This mental materialism makes the value of English transcendental genius. 1863Geo. Eliot Romola xxxix, That bust of Plato had been long used to look down on conviviality of a more transcendental sort. 1868Nettleship Ess. Browning's Poetry i. 34 Views..which, while less transcendental..are perhaps of more practical value.
b. Super-rational, superhuman, supernatural.
1826Scott 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. 1841Myers 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. 1850Whipple Ess. & Rev. (ed. 3) I. 228 It [poetry] thus transcends the sphere of the senses, and is, in a measure, transcendental. 1858Kingsley Lett. (1878) II. 67 Below all natural phenomena, we come to a transcendental—in plain English, a miraculous ground. 1903F. 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.
1835I. Taylor Spir. Despot. v. 212 Abstract and transcendental notions of an intolerant kind. 1840Thackeray Paris Sk.-bk. xv. (1872) 172 Having watched the Germans with their..mysterious transcendental talk. 1847Emerson Repr. Men, 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. 1851Carlyle 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. 1853Max Müller Chips (1880) I. iii. 66 The exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas in which they [Hindus] lived. 1856N. 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. 1875Jowett Plato (ed. 2) I. 77 An unmeaning and transcendental conception. 1901Edin. Rev. Apr. 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.
1844Dickens 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. 1887Cabot Memoirs of 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.
e. transcendental meditation: a method of relaxation and meditation based on the theory and practice of yoga popularized in the West by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; abbrev. TM (see T 6 a); hence transcendental meditator.
A proprietary term in the U.S.
1966C. F. Lutes in M. M. Yogi Sci. of Being & Art of Living 13 The system on which Maharishi's teaching is based—a simple method of transcendental meditation..—is indeed systematic and produces measurable and predictable results and is therefore scientific. 1973Times 30 June 14/3 Transcendental meditation is becoming popular as a way of coping with the stress of modern life. Ibid. 14/5 Transcendental meditators do not like to publicize the possible dangers inherent in mind-bending techniques. 1975Physics Bull. Sept. 397/2 The aim was to measure the breathing rate and lung ventilation of 15 transcendental meditators before, during and after meditation and compare the values with those obtained for 15 non⁓meditators. 1976Official Gaz. (U.S. Patent Office) 3 Aug. tm77/2 Class 41—Education and Entertainment. 1,045,673. World Plan Executive Council—United States, Los Angeles, Calif... Transcendental Meditation. 1976Early Music Oct. 467/1 The place of meditation and mantra made familiar to the West by the practitioners of Transcendental Meditation and similar Yoga techniques. 1980Times 27 May 1/8 Transcendental meditation, as taught by the Maharishi's World Government of the Age of Enlightenment..involves learning the techniques of meditating.
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.
1706Phillips (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. 1811Hutton 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. 1843Penny 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. 1879Cayley in Encycl. Brit. IX. 818/2 The so-called circular functions..the exponential function..the logarithmic function..are all of them transcendental functions. 1882Glaisher 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. 1902Encycl. 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. n. [the adj. used absol.] A transcendental conception, term, or quantity.
1668Wilkins 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. 1711Hickes 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. 1726Swift Gulliver ii. vii, As to ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads. 1843Penny 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. |