transcendentalism

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A literary and philosophical movement arising in 19th-century New England, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends empirical and scientific reality and is knowable through intuition.
• noun The quality or state of being transcendental.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The character of being transcendental. Specifically
• noun In philosophy, in general, the doctrine that the principles of reality are to be discovered by the study of the processes of thought.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun (Kantian Philos.) The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.
• noun Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.
• noun Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.
• noun A philosophy which holds that reasoning is key to understanding reality (associated with Kant); philosophy which stresses intuition and spirituality (associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson); transcendental character or quality.
• noun A movement of writers and philosophers in New England in the 19th century who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun any system of philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical and material