Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Rationalism   Listen
noun
Rationalism  n.  
1.
(Theol.) The doctrine or system of those who deduce their religious opinions from reason or the understanding, as distinct from, or opposed to, revelation.
2.
(Philos.) The system that makes rational power the ultimate test of truth; opposed to sensualism, or sensationalism, and empiricism.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Rationalism" Quotes from Famous Books



... 60. RATIONALISM.—As the content of a philosophical doctrine must be determined by the initial assumptions which a philosopher makes and by the method which he adopts in his reasonings, it is well to examine with some care certain broad differences in this respect which characterize ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... an idea rather than an institution, and had to fit itself with armour of its own providing.' Such expressions sound very like the arguments of the Modernists; but Newman assuredly never contemplated that they would be turned against the policy of his own Church, in the interests of the critical rationalism which he abhorred. His attitude towards dogma is after all not very different from that of the older school. 'Time was needed' (he says) 'for the elucidation of doctrines communicated once for all through inspired persons'; his examples are purgatory and the papal supremacy. He insists that his ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... with crushing weight on woman; more sensitive, helpless, and imaginative, she suffered a thousand fears and wrongs where man did one. Lecky, in his "History of Rationalism in Europe," shows that the vast majority of the victims of fanaticism and witchcraft, burned, drowned, and tortured, were women. Guizot, in his "History of Civilization," while decrying the influence ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... work since the inception of Protestantism. By the very force of its dissolving power the primary elements of a supernatural religion have fast disappeared from the various creeds. One by one the different Churches have drifted away from their Christian moorings and taken to the high seas of Rationalism. Assailed by the storms of unbelief they are breaking on the rocks of religious indifference. Empty churches are the natural outcome of empty creeds. "The dominant tendencies are indeed increasingly identified with those currents of thought which are making way from the ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... astonished if he is abandoned by his pupils. The people must think according to rules of logic. And as in the mean while they must live, consequently they wish to get some consolation in this life. Masters of Zola's kind gave them only corruption, chaos, disgust for life, and despair. Their rationalism cannot prove anything else, and if it did, it would be with too much zeal, it would overstep the limits. To-day the suffocated need some pure air, the doubting ones some hope, tormented by uneasiness, some quietude, therefore they are doing well when they turn therefrom where the hope and peace ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,

... spirit of the volume is a desire to bring men's minds into contact with what is vital in religion, and this leads to many a sharp comment both on the dogmatism of sects and the rationalism of critics. Dr. Bushnell always seeks that in religion which not merely illumines the mind, but invigorates the will. It is not the form of a doctrine, but the force in the believer, which engages his attention. In pursuing this method he displays alternately ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... of a united Church. Men must hear again the voice which peals through the lapse of centuries bearing witness to the "faith once delivered to the saints," or else for many souls there will be only rationalism and unbelief—while this sad, weary world, so full of sin and sorrow, is pleading for help, it is a wrong to Christ and to the souls for whom He died that His children should be separated in rival folds. As baptised into Christ we are brothers. Notwithstanding the hedges of human ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple

... religious tenets handed down from father to son are adhered to without wavering, and at the same time without apparent enthusiasm. Catholics and Protestants live amicably side by side; but intermarriages are rare, and conversions from Rome to rationalism infrequent. The Sunday services of the little Protestant church are often attended by Catholics. Strangers passing through Osse, market-folk, peasants and others, never fail to inspect it curiously. The Protestant pastor is looked up to with respect and affection alike ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... still believe in God, and presently the witness is there again, but when you begin to read books that curtail the divinity of Jesus Christ and make your Heavenly Father just a natural force in the Universe, when you bud and blossom into rationalism, there is a good deal of mischief to pay. I do not say that Pendleton went this far, but the books he read and loaned to William did, and they unconsciously had a profounder effect upon William than they had on Pendleton, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... field of study for the specialist, only a name if even so much as that for the generality of us and valuable chiefly in showing what speculation may do when permitted at will to range earth and sky, with a spurious rationalism for pilot ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... answers to your questions, no short and easy method with modern scepticism. Inquiry must have its course in theology as in everything else. It is fatal to intelligence to talk of an infallible Church, and of all free thought in reference to religion as deadly rationalism to be shunned. Not to be rational in religion as in everything else is simply to be foolish, and to throw yourself into the arms of the first authority that is able to hold you. In this as in other respects you must "work out ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch

... theological faculties of Erlangen and Gottingen, succeeded Franz Reinhard (1753-1812) in 1813 as court preacher and member of the consistorial court at Dresden, retired from these offices in 1849, and died on the 21st of May 1850. Seeking to establish for himself a middle position between rationalism and supernaturalism, he declared for a "rational supernaturalism," and contended that there must be a gradual development of Christian doctrine corresponding to the advance of knowledge and science. But at ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... century had, for the most part, been interested in theology and government; and its preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism. Locke regarded his Human Understanding as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his Principles of Morals the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... afterward. Some of his friends traced to the same cause his low estimate of German literature and even his political aversion to the German Empire. He could not forget that Germany had been the fountain of rationalism, while German Evangelical Protestantism was more schismatic and further removed from the medieval church than it pleased him to deem the Church of England to be. He had an exceedingly high sense of the duty of purity of life ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce

... Bible and, as a matter of fact, resting on very vague grounds, to give hard outlines to these doctrines and to put a harsh construction on Christianity: the result of which is that his views offend us, and just as in his day Pelagianism arose to combat them, so now in our day Rationalism does the same. Take, for example, the case as he states it generally in the De Civitate Dei, Bk. xii. ch. 21. It comes to this: God creates a being out of nothing, forbids him some things, and enjoins others upon him; and because these ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... thought from the philosopher of the Academe to the Arcadian historian may be best illustrated by a comparison of the method by which each of the three writers, whom I have selected as the highest expressions of the rationalism of his respective age, attained to his ideal state: for the latter conception may be in a measure regarded as representing the most spiritual principle which they could ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... that we are almost bound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of "poetry" in contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry. Similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the Abode of Love as opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of Love as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-sense classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... Long Island, where my son Gerrit and his wife were domiciled. Here we read Captain Charles King's stories of life at military posts, Sanborn's "Biography of Bronson Alcott," and Lecky's "History of Rationalism." ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... conservation. A view so sharply opposed to the current belief could not have made way as it did without a penetrating criticism of the current theology. Such criticism was performed by Bayle. His works were a school for rationalism for about seventy years. He supplied to the thinkers of the eighteenth century, English as well as French, a magazine of subversive arguments, and he helped to emancipate morality both from theology ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... lofty minarets the philosopher may summon the faithful to prayer, and the priest and the sage may exchange altars without the compromise of faith or of knowledge.' Infidelity has shifted the battlefield from metaphysics to physics, from idealism and rationalism to positivism or rank materialism; and in order to combat it successfully, in order to build up an imperishable system of Christian teleology, it is necessary that you should thoroughly acquaint yourself with the 'natural sciences,' with dynamics, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... has a philosophy. Temperament is a factor in all philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The tender-minded and the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and religion. Empiricism gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives religion without facts. The layman's dilemma. The unreality in rationalistic systems. Leibnitz on the damned, as an example. M. I. Swift on the optimism of idealists. Pragmatism as a mediating system. An objection. Reply: philosophies ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... Indian Muhammadans can have a strong liking to the English Government, but this reforming party wishes to reconcile itself to the new order of things, and to identify itself with our rule so far as the Quran permits. In religious belief these reformers range from strict orthodoxy to rank rationalism. Their leader is an able and ardent advocate of Islam, though he has thrown off what he deems unauthorized and hurtful accretions, and many of his followers no doubt agree with him. A Bengalee Muhammadan, a graduate of Cambridge, has published a book entitled ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... images—tends to become concepts: such are vivified abstractions, allegorical beings, hereditary entities of spirits and of gods. In short, metaphysical mysticism is a transition-form towards metaphysical rationalism, although these two tendencies have always been inimical in the history of philosophy, just as ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... at the mention of Mrs. Maginnis. Since the death of Wilhelmina, two weeks before, her mind had been disturbed as to the substantial value of faith-cures. Dr. Beswick's rationalism on the subject rose to trouble her. Happily she had not been sent for to visit any new cases, the death of Wilhelmina, her first notable example, having a little spoiled the charm of her success, as Dr. Beswick had foreseen. Doubt had made her cowardly, and there lurked in her mind ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... was never really abrogated.... However, it is a practical fact that the partisans of one of the two sections which to-day divide the Reformed Church of France, not only do not consider themselves bound by the Confession of La Rochelle, but, tending more and more towards Rationalism, and seeing in Protestantism only the religion of free thought, have come to reject the great miracles of the gospel, and to demand for their pastors, in the bosom of the Church, unlimited freedom in teaching. While on the one hand ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... men less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation, is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have surprised the simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with each other. Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the art, through the life, conflicts of religious creeds, strifes between Protestantism and Catholicism, between Platonism, Mysticism, and Rationalism. In dealing with such delicate and serious topics I have avoided all controversy, and have ventured only on the simplest and briefest exposition. My effort has been to state the case fairly all round, to maintain an even balance, and, above all, to place the reader, whatever ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson

... her lips firmly, and wound with grim resolve. She was the very impersonation of that obstinate rationalism that grew up at the New-England fireside, close alongside of the most ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... has not attended the celebrations in the cathedral of Regensburg can fully measure what has been lost for mankind through the domination of human rationalism in the place of religious devotion. Here alone in Europe all who will may yet hear the great masters of the sixteenth century rightly performed with the ancient ritual, and Gregorian chant that belongs to it, without ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... fact it seemed to Thyrsis that his God had made the universe with relation to it—a heaven to reward him if he abstained, and a hell to punish him if he yielded. It was because of this that he clung to the church, and shrunk from any dallying with "rationalism". He disapproved of the theatre, because it appealed to these cravings; he disapproved of all pictures and statues of the nude human form, because the sight of them overmastered him. For the same reason he shrunk ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... freedom—freedom, at any rate, of thought and of speech. It is only when peace and freedom have been established that discussion is practicable or possible. A number of histories have been written in recent years describing the rise of rationalism, as it is called, and the role of discussion and agitation in social life. Draper's History of the Intellectual Development of Europe and Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe are ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... It was a religious society; among the peasants and the nobles, if not among the clergy, there still lingered something of the simple but profound faith of German Protestantism; they were scarcely touched by the rationalism of the eighteenth or by the liberalism of the nineteenth century; there was little pomp and ceremony of worship in the village church, but the natural periods of human life—birth, marriage, death—called for the blessing of the Church, and once or twice a year came the solemn confession ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... early stage in his growth he discovered and fed full upon Shakespeare. As a university student he also fell in love with the homely lore of German folk-poetry. In 1794 he came back to Berlin, and turned to rather banal hack-writing for the publisher Nicolai, chief of all exponents of rationalism. Significant was his early rehabilitation of popular folk-tales and chapbooks, as in The Wonderful Love-Story of Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence (1797). The stuff was that of one of the prose chivalry-stories of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... and withal unable to decide whether the sun revolved about the earth, or the earth about the sun, [13] Pre Labat was, nevertheless, no more credulous and no more ignorant than the average missionary of his time: it is only by contrast with his practical perspicacity in other matters, his worldly rationalism and executive shrewdness, that this superstitious navet impresses one as odd. And how singular sometimes is the irony of Time! All the wonderful work the Dominican accomplished has been forgotten by the people; while all the witchcrafts ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... If rationalism meant being rational (which it hardly ever does) he might at every stage of his life be called a red-hot rationalist. Thus, for instance, he very early became a Socialist and joined the Fabian Society, on the executive of which he played a prominent part for some years. But he afterwards ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... human, but in things Divine it is the subtle English form of rationalism. This is no time to explain, Phoebe; but human sense and intellect are made the test, and what surpasses them is only admired as long as its stringent rules do ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Berlin school,—sense in external matters and a remarkable degree of uncertainty and embarrassment in the discussion of great problems. At the Borckes', and also at the homes in Morgnitz and Dabergotz, she had been declared "infected with rationalism," but at the Grasenabbs' she was pronounced point-blank an "atheist." To be sure, the elderly Mrs. Grasenabb, nee Stiefel, of Stiefelstein in South Germany, had made a weak attempt to save Effi at least for deism. But ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... quality of Holmes is what we may call his rationalism, his habit of taking nothing for granted, of judging every matter by observation rather than by tradition or sentiment or imagination; and herein he is in marked contrast with Longfellow and other romantic writers of the period. We shall enjoy him better if we remember his ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... these facts, his story would never have been written, and he would have died in course of time with twenty children and a seat in the legislature; for, in spite of his ardent devotion to philosophy and its accompanying rationalism, he was a devout monarchist and a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... wholesome rag of four against one, carried him off under the cloud of horror created by this impropriety and so saved him, still only slightly wetted, not only from this indignity but from the experiment in rationalism that had ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... no more! He who for thirty-eight years has defeated the attacks upon the church from the side of rationalism and philosophy—who, through all the controversies among theologians in Germany, has remained true to the faith of his adoption, the pure and holy religion of Jesus Christ—Neander, the philosopher, the scholar—better, the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... of the relation and conflict of these two forces the rational with the mystical. Their later union in the greater men was to {x} form the art temperament of the Renaissance. The practical side gave it the firm foundation of rationalism and reality on which it rested; the mystical guided its endeavour to picture the unreal in ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci

... native judge in Bengal, one of the most distinguished leaders of the Hindu Revival, writes as follows: The beatitude which the new Radha-Krishnaites aspire to "is not the Nirvana of the Vedantists, the quiescence of Rationalism. Nirvana and quiescence are merely negatives. The beatitude [of the new Radha-Krishnaites] is a positive something. They do not aspire to unification with the divine essence. They prefer hell with its torments to such unification."[115] A few years ago, at a public meeting in Calcutta, the ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... really very interesting," resumed Michael slowly, "because I think in that case you would see a most singular effect, an effect that has generally been achieved by all those able and powerful systems which rationalism, or the religion of the ball, has produced to lead or teach mankind. You would see, I think, that thing happen which is always the ultimate embodiment and logical ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... secure in his definite orthodoxy, he finds himself indifferent on many points (on the reality of witchcraft, for instance) concerning which Browne's more timid, personally grounded faith might indulge no scepticism, forced himself, nevertheless, to detect a vein of rationalism in a book which on the whole much attracted him, and hastily put forth his "animadversions" upon it. Browne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himself committed to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition of the Religio Medici published at last ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... of mysticism, or theosophy, made comparatively little impression on Jewish writers. But at the beginning of the thirteenth century a great development took place in the "secret" science of the Kabbala. The very period which produced the rationalism of Maimonides gave birth to the emotionalism of the Kabbala. The Kabbala was at first a protest against too much intellectualism and rigidity in religion. It reclaimed religion for the heart. A ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... against crafty statesmanship. Even those people who now think that they are fighting in the name of civilization against us barbarians, will shortly discover their mistake, and recognize the German miracle which has come to save the world from the spirit of calculating rationalism.—O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various

... Divine Law was her particular business. Thus did she win to her side those who were too timid in constitution to forsake forms and ceremonies and stand alone on the broad ground of Rationalism. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... Lord" the Messiah is designated,—an explanation which we meet with so early as in the Chaldee Paraphrast ([Hebrew: bedna hhva ihi mwiHa dii lHdvh vliqr]), from which even Kimchi did not venture to differ, which was in the Christian Church, too, the prevailing one, and which Rationalism was the first to give up. The Messiah is here quite in His proper place. The Prophet had, in chap. iii. 12-15, in a very special manner, derived the misery of the people from their bad rulers. What is now more rational, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... can be done with it to rid the earth of its ancient evils. And do not be troubled if at the outset this book seems to be entirely "destructive". I assure you that I am no crude materialist, I am not so shallow as to imagine that our race will be satisfied with a barren rationalism. I know that the old symbols came out of the heart of man because they corresponded to certain needs of the heart of man. I know that new symbols will be found, corresponding more exactly to the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... a single century proved that, far from being able to govern other peoples, Spain was incapable of self-government on any rational principle. Whatever may have been the policy thrust upon the chief of Latin Christianity in the desperate struggle with militant rationalism, the repressive measures which it felt bound to adopt were eminently pernicious to a race like the Italians, who showed no disposition for religious regeneration, and who were yet submitted to the tyranny of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... have met Dr. Martineau. I should have visited the Reverend Stopford Brooke, who could have told me much that I should have liked to hear of dear friends of mine, of whom he saw a great deal in their hours of trial. The Reverend Mr. Voysey, whose fearless rationalism can hardly give him popularity among the conservative people I saw most of, paid me the compliment of calling, as he had often done of sending me his published papers. Now and then some less known correspondent would reveal himself or herself in bodily presence. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... so easy, it is supposed that the work of building up is equally so. Hence systems rise, as if the world were to begin anew. The pride of liberty and of human action becomes the principle of science; and, like all new principles, it pretends to exclusive and absolute dominion. Rationalism governs; abstract philosophy ignores the traditions and the requirements of the life of nations; and finds now in it, as in geometry, nothing but principles and deductions. The memory of recent oppression causes us ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... religion is typical of the limits of humanistic interests and perceptions. In making his division of reason into the theoretical and the practical, it is to the latter realm that he assigns morality and religion. Clearly this is genuine rationalism. I am not forgetting Kant's great religious contribution. He was the son of devout German pietists and saturated in the literature of the Old Testament. It is to Amos, who may justly be called his spiritual father, that he owes the moral absoluteness of his categorical imperative, the reading ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... French Revolution the Reformed Church in the United Provinces had become honey-combed with rationalism. The official orthodoxy of the Dort synod had become "a fossilised skeleton." By the Constitution of 1798 Church and State were separated, and the property of the Church was taken by the State, which paid however stipends to ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... point in the victory of radical empiricism would also be scored, for the relation between an object and the idea that truly knows it, is held by rationalists to be nothing of this describable sort, but to stand outside of all possible temporal experience; and on the relation, so interpreted, rationalism is wonted to make its ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... all interested in the human soul, and unwilling to sacrifice it to the demands of a rationalistic science or metaphysics. In seeking to rescue it, the great criticist, piloted by the moral law, steered his course between the rocks of rationalism, sentimentalism, and scepticism. It was his solution of the controversy between the head and the heart that influenced Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher. They differed from Kant and among themselves in many respects, but they all glorified the spirit, Geist, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... Montesquieu. They were, almost without exception, a group of second-rate and insignificant writers whose 'onslaught' upon current beliefs was only to a faint extent 'systematic and reasoned.' The feeble and fluctuating rationalism of Toland and Wollaston, the crude and confused rationalism of Collins, the half-crazy rationalism of Woolston, may each and all, no doubt, have furnished Voltaire with arguments and suggestions, but they cannot have seriously influenced his thought. Bolingbroke was a more important figure, and ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... theology. It has universities in which many of the professors have been graduated in Germany, having passed through the poison gas factory of the Berlin university, and under the camouflage department of "sacred literature" are sending out the mentally and spiritually asphyxiating poison of German rationalism, inoculating every fresh lot of newly made ministers and would-be missionaries with rank unbelief and Bible repudiation, distributing the poison into the back counties as well as municipal centers ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman

... the least of the ordinances of style knows not liberty. He is a slave; his dress betrayeth him and proclaims him base. There may be degrees of baseness. I am abject myself; but whensoever I revisit the haunts of men clad in the few light incommoding clothes that rationalism ordains, I rejoice and gloat over the slavery of those who have failed to catch even glimpses of the loveliness of liberty, who are yet afeared of opinion—"that sour-breathed hag." How can a man with ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of "union" with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... made to divert the treatment of disease from priestly hands the effort should be met with determined opposition. Quite naturally, too, the first gropings after a scientific theory of disease show a curious mixture of rationalism and superstition. Thus, in Greece, the temple hospitals devoted to the mythical AEsculapius, which were situated at Epidaurus, Pergamus, Cyrene, Corinth, and many other places, served as colleges, hospitals, and places of worship. Sufferers slept in the temples in the hopes of ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... Harvard as a member of the Baptist Church; but the transcendentalism and rationalism of the place quite swept him from his spiritual moorings. In a recent address before a literary society in Washington, D. C., he is represented to have maintained that Mohammedanism was better for the indigenous races of Africa than Christianity. Dr. John William Draper made a similar ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... absolutely incredible, for various reasons. Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions cannot wisely or safely be measured by the tests of pure reason. His sagacity discerned that the rationalism by which Bolingbroke and the deistic school believed themselves to have overthrown revealed religion, was equally calculated to undermine the structure of political government. This was precisely the actual course on which speculation was entering in France ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... only one fruit in the garden of which he might not freely eat, and that was the productions of modern rationalism. A story has come down which, though not mentioned by Dugald Stewart, is stated by M'Culloch to rest on the best authority, and by Dr. Strang of Glasgow to have been often told by Smith himself, to the effect that he was one day detected reading Hume's ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... necessity of toleration in the interest of religion itself, and nowhere was the monition more needed than in Frankfort, where the antipathy between those of the Reformed and the Lutheran communions was such as even to debar intermarriage. Rationalism and dogmatism are equally reprobated, and the sum of all true religion is found to consist in the love of God and of our neighbour. The strain of mystical piety which runs through the whole production doubtless proceeds from imaginative ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... having known her. He strove resolutely to refrain from applying conventional standards of judgment, with which, he assured himself, he had no sympathy, but little uneasinesses and awkward moments would obtrude. It was difficult to maintain the fine idea of rationalism. 'I won't have you bind the strange man you may be to-morrow with oaths,' Aurora had said; yet it was evident the change in him was a source of ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... In consequence of modern rationalism there is a tendency on the part of a considerable number of the Tinguian to consider these tales purely as stories and the characters as fictitious, but the mass of the people hold them to be true and speak of the actors as "the people who lived in the first times." ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole

... the expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries, of the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life. Such a moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what it is in intention. The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic rationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity is grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the pang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of salvation; it ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... judges in that city. He first studied theology and canon law, and later medicine and philosophy; thus, like Faust, covering the whole field of mediaeal science. His life was cast in the most brilliant period of Western Muslim culture, in the splendor of that rationalism which preceded the great darkness of religious fanaticism. As a young man, he was introduced by Ibn Tufail (Abubacer), author of the famous 'Hayy al-Yukdhan,' a philosophical 'Robinson Crusoe,' to the enlightened Khalif Abu Ya'kub Yusuf (1163-84), as a fit expounder ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... with these; and I think there will be little chance of him drifting into infidelity. I think on the contrary he will be far more devout. He will be let into such views of the wisdom, love and power of God as will more than offset any tendency to rationalism. ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio

... acquiescence in the received Christian system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most natural thing in the world that a young man of Elsmere's temperament should rally to the Church. The place was passing through one of those periodical crises of reaction against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with tolerable regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity. It had begun to be recognised with a great burst of enthusiasm and astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not said the last ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... feels the double influence of the religious reaction and the literary theories which marked the beginning of this century, and falls back to the middle ages and Gregory VII.; then, suddenly becoming a progressive Christian and a democrat, he gradually leans towards rationalism, and finally falls into deism. At present, everybody waits at the trap-door. As for me, though I would not swear to it, I am inclined to think that M. Lamennais, already taken with scepticism, will die in a state of indifference. He owes ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... with this lovable ascetic who fasted every day, torturing equally his texts and himself, this hopeless mystic for whom there could be no bridge to modern thought; all the Polish Jew in him revolted irrationally against the new German rationalism. No, no; it must be all or nothing. Jewish Catholicism was not to be replaced by Jewish Protestantism. These pathetic zealots, clinging desperately to the past, had a deeper instinct, a truer prevision of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... commonly understood, by aesthetic. The loveliness of the Christian legend—from that he started. He dealt with the New Testament very much as he had formerly dealt with the Elizabethan poets. He would have no appeal to the vulgar by aggressive rationalists. Let rationalism filter down in the course of time; the vulgar were not prepared for it as yet. It was bad that they should be superstitious, but worse, far worse, that they should be brutally irreverent, and brutal irreverence inevitably came of atheism preached ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... influences. On the one hand, he was in contact with such men as Jowett, Nettleship, and Thomas Hill Green: on the other hand, with Swinburne, Burne-Jones, and the pre-Raphaelites. Thus the awakened spirit felt the dominion both of a high spiritual rationalism, and of the beauty of flesh and the charm of the earth. A visit to Italy in company with Shadwell, and his study of the Renaissance there, made him an enthusiastic humanist. The immediate product of this second awakening ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... spiritual shadows, found other outlets for his energy during these years when he was establishing himself at the bar. He continued to be a voracious reader. And his reading had taken a skeptical turn. Volney and Paine were now his intimates. The wave of ultra-rationalism that went over America in the 'forties did not spare many corners of the land. In Springfield, as in so many small towns, it had two effects: those who were not touched by it hardened into jealous ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... in 'Fraser' attacking Manning, and criticising among other writings Mr. Lecky's 'Rationalism' (very favourably), and Professor Seeley's then anonymous 'Ecce Homo.' He thinks that the author is a 'sheep in wolf's clothing,' and that his views dissolve into mist when closely examined. I need not give any ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen



Words linked to "Rationalism" :   ism, philosophy, rationalistic, school of thought, theological doctrine, rationalist, philosophical theory, doctrine, philosophical system, freethinking, philosophical doctrine, free thought



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com