Tran`scen*den"tal*ism (?), n. [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.