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2. ''The transcendent" may be used in a somewhat stricter, and yet still broad, sense as it is in a certain kind of interpretation of the region of experience, or the kind of discourse, that is, in the first sense, "transcendent," or "beyond" the strictly and properly empirical. I refer to the kind of metaphysical interpretation that affirms or necessarily implies the reality or existence of transempirical, metaphysical entities. Thus any interpretation that explicitly or implicitly affirms the reality or existence of entities other than those that can be affirmed or implied by the strictly and properly empirical warrants of the sciences may be said to have to do with "the transcendent" in this second sense of the term. And this may be said even of interpretations that hold that the only differences between actual entities or existents are merely specific differences – -- that deny, in other words, the reality or existence of any generically different or extraordinary actual entity or existent. Some such denial, I take it, is characteristic of any atheistic metaphysical interpretation – -- not only atheistic materialism, but also an atheistic idealism such as McTaggart's or an atheistic existentialism like Sartre's.

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