Lambert employs transcendent in
an even looser sense to signify concepts which represent what is common
to both the corporeal and the intellectual world.[325] We may, indeed,
assert that in Kant’s time the terms transcendent and transcendental,
while still remaining synonymous, and though used on the lines of their
original Scholastic connotation, had lost all definiteness of meaning
and all usefulness of application. Kant took advantage of this situation
to distinguish sharply between them, and to impose upon each a meaning
suitable to his new Critical teaching.
“Transcendental” is primarily employed by Kant as a name for a certain
kind of knowledge. Transcendental knowledge is knowledge not of objects,
but of the nature and conditions of our _a priori_ cognition of them. In
other words, _a priori_ knowledge must not be asserted, simply because
it is _a priori_, to be transcendental; this title applies only to such
knowledge as constitutes a _theory_ or _science_ of the _a priori_.[326]
Transcendental knowledge and transcendental philosophy must therefore be
taken as coinciding; and as thus coincident, they signify the science of
the possibility, nature, and limits of _a priori_ knowledge. The term
similarly applies to the subdivisions of the _Critique_. The _Aesthetic_
is transcendental in that it establishes the _a priori_ character of the
forms of sensibility; the _Analytic_ in that it determines the _a
priori_ principles of understanding, and the part which they play in the
constitution of knowledge; the _Dialectic_ in that it defines and limits
the _a priori_ Ideas of Reason, to the perverting power of which all
false metaphysics is due. That this is the primary and fundamental
meaning common to the various uses of the term is constantly overlooked
by Max Müller. Thus in A 15 = B 30 he translates _transcendentale
Sinnenlehre_ “doctrine of transcendental sense” instead of as
“transcendental doctrine of sense.” In transforming _transcendentale
Elementarlehre_ into “elements of transcendentalism” he avoids the above
error, but only by inventing a word which has no place in Kant’s own
terminology.