traducianism See CREATION EX NIHILO, PREEXIS -. TENC. transcendence, broadly, the property of rising out of or above other things (virtually always understood figuratively); in philosophy, the property of being, in some way, of a higher order. A being, such as God, may be said to be transcendent in the sense of being not merely superior, but incomparably superior, to other things, in any sort of perfection. God’s transcendence, or being outside or beyond the world, is also contrasted, and by some thinkers combined, with God’s immanence, or existence within the world.
In medieval philosophy of logic, terms such as ‘being’ and ‘one’, which did not belong uniquely to any one of the Aristotelian categories or types of predication (such as substance, quality, and relation), but could be predicated of things belonging to any (or to none) of them, were called transcendental. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, principles that profess (wrongly) to take us beyond the limits of any possible experience are called transcendent; whereas anything belonging to non-empirical thought that establishes, and draws consequences from, the possibility and limits of experience may be called transcendental. Thus a transcendental argument (in a sense still current) is one that proceeds from premises about the way in which experience is possible to conclusions about what must be true of any experienced world.
Transcendentalism was a philosophical or religious movement in mid-nineteenth-century New England, characterized, in the thought of its leading representative, Ralph Waldo Emerson, by belief in a transcendent (spiritual and divine) principle in human nature.
See also EMERSON , IMMANENCE , KANT, PHI- LOSOPHY OF RELIGION , TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT , TRANSCENDENTALIS. R.M.A.