transcendentalist
Noun

transcendentalist (plural transcendentalists)

  1. One who believes in transcendentalism.
    • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 2:
      “I accept the universe” is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: “Gad! she'd better!”
  2. Any of a group of philosophers who assert that true knowledge is obtained by faculties of the mind that transcend sensory experience; those who exalt intuition above empirical knowledge and ordinary mentation. Used in modern times of some post-Kantian German philosophers, and of the school of Emerson.
Related terms


This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.002
Offline English dictionary