Recent Articles



































Immanent



         


Immanence is a religious and philosophical concept. It is derived from the Latin words, in and manere, the original meaning being 'to exist or remain within'.

In the most common religious usage, it is understood to mean that the divine force, or the divine being, pervades through all things that exist. Such a meaning is common in pantheism, and it implies that divinity is present in all things. In this meaning immanence is distinct from transcendence, the latter being understood as the divinity being set apart from or transcending the World.

Another meaning of immanence is that it is something that is contained within, or remains within the boundaries of a person, of the world, or of the mind.

The former understanding is often used in Hinduism to describe the relationship of Brahman or the divine power, to the World. The latter understanding of immanance is more common within Christian and other monotheist theology, in which the one God is considered to transcend his creation.

Thus, in Dennis Ritchie's foreword to the Lions Book on the Unix computer operating system, he refers to "concepts which are immanent in the comments to the code" (i.e., the concepts transcend his existing code implementation, and are further embodied in successive generations of the implementation code for Unix and its descendants).

[Top]




  View Live Article   This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License