Most of this chapter is devoted to distinguishing the characteristics of first immanentism and then transcendentalism. But while the former has often defined religious traditions in their entirety, the latter never has. The final section explains how and why all transcendentalist traditions have existed as an unstable synthesis with immanentism. 1 4 Many cognitive scientists argue that this is because the brain is an intricately related set of tools for carrying out specific tasks (summarised in Larson 2016).