"Rationalist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however, a sentimentalist rather than a rationalist, an artist rather than a philosopher. He was not a learned man, but a bold thinker. He would root out all distinctions in society, because they could not be reconciled with his sense of justice. He preached a gospel of human rights, based not on Christianity but on instinct. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the book, Chesterton joyously refutes a few anti-Christian arguments by means of his extraordinary knack of seeing the large and obvious, and therefore generally overlooked things. He believes in Christianity because he is a rationalist, and the evidence in its favour has convinced him. The arguments with which he deals are these. That men are much like beasts, and probably related to them. Answer: yes, but men are also quite wonderfully unlike them in many important respects. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... peace and joy of a reconciled conscience. The advocates, then, of both theories the Calvinist asserting that Paul supposed sin to be the only reason why we do not live eternally in the world with our present organization, and the Rationalist asserting that the apostle never employs the word "death" except with a purely interior signification are alike beset by insuperable difficulties, perplexed by passages which defy their fair analysis ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... cannot mean much to us until it is interpreted by a concrete example, and I shall turn to such. It must, however, be borne in mind that the word "rationalism" is meant to cover a great variety of opinions, and we have said comparatively little about him when we have called a man a rationalist in philosophy. Men may agree in believing that the reason can go beyond experienced fact, and yet may differ regarding the particular truths which may ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... earthly kingdom for the supremacy of Judaism. Jesus was largely influenced by the Essenes, but he rejected their austerity. Hennell found a mixture of truth and error in the Gospels, and believed that many mythical elements entered into the accounts given of Jesus. A thorough rationalist, he claimed to accept the spiritual essence of Christianity, and to value highly the moral teachings of Jesus. In a later work on Christian Theism he finds an argument for belief in God mainly in nature. In his conclusions he is not far from ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... are published in cheap editions by the Rationalist Press, and may be had bound in one volume. The same press issues a cheap edition of the admirable Life by Dr. Moncure ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Rothenfels, a man a good deal older than herself, though not preposterously so, and whose ample possessions and old name gave social position of the highest kind. But he was a Protestant by education, a thinker by nature, a rationalist by conviction. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... step-uncle, the Lieutenant-General, was a great defender of Christianity as well as of the British Empire. The Lieutenant-General had even written a pamphlet against a ribald iconoclastic book published by the Rationalist Press Association, in which pamphlet he had made a sorry mess of Herbert Spencer. All the Lieutenant-General's relatives and near admirers went to church, and they all went to precisely the same kind of church, for no other kind would have served. Louis, however, had ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Allen. A common antipathy to sacerdotalism brought the two parties together in some directions, and the Protestant theory of the right of private judgment was in substance a narrower version of the rationalist demand for freedom of thought. Protestantism in one aspect is simply rationalism still running about with the shell on its head. This gives no doubt one secret of the decay of the evangelical party. The Protestant demand for a rational basis of faith widened ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... to her. She must be Phoebe's experience as far as her fifty years could teach her to deal with a little precocious rationalist in a wild travestie of Thekla. Ich habe geliebt und gelebet was the farewell laid on Bertha's table. What a Thekla and what a Max! O profanation! But Honor felt Bertha a charge of her own, and her aid was the more thankfully accepted that the patient was quite beyond Phoebe. She had ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their books they cannot define it satisfactorily. Both mystics and rationalists, however, are deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even if dialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist calls nonentity is the substrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality of matter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one who attempts to override it becomes to that ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Testament Apocrypha, of Josephus, and of the apostolic fathers, in illustration of the language of the New Testament. In 1826 he published Apologie der neuern Theologie des evangelischen Deutschlands. Hugh James Rose had published in England (1825) a volume of sermons on the rationalist movement (The State of the Protestant Religion in Germany), in which he classed Bretschneider with the rationalists; and Bretschneider contended that he himself was not a rationalist in the ordinary sense of the term, but ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... but malicious reproach and the betrayal of a secret—these things banish friendship beyond return. This was the end of his personal connection with the men whom he always contemptuously called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream divided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools became visibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... "The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... The rationalist view can therefore only be said to be feasible in certain limited spheres, outside of which it is grotesque ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... poetry are similar, as Pope, Joseph Warton, and many other critics and scholars have done. Judged by basic critical principles, method, or content there is a distinct difference between Rapin and Fontenelle. Rapin is primarily a neoclassicist in his "Treatise"; Fontenelle, a rationalist in his "Discours." It is this opposition, then, of neoclassicism and rationalism, that constitutes the basic issue of pastoral criticism in England during the Restoration and the early part of ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... relished reflective passages and could approve, more readily than Mrs. Manley, of "an Historian that amuses himself by Moralizing or Describing." D'Argens's list of the features to be found in good history and good fiction shows him to be a thoroughgoing rationalist and separates his ideal from that of young readers, who, according to the preface to The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia (1717), wish to hear of "Flame and Spirit in an Author, of fine Harangues, just Characters, moving Scenes, delicacy of ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... ridiculous, said he, to impute the victories of old Rome to the Religion of Numa and favor of the Gods,—when the strength and valor of the Roman soldier were quite enough to account for all. Thus he appears in the strange role of a rationalist. Christianity, he continued, was the one and only true religion; and all the rest—etc., etc., etc. Ambrose and his party were fighting towards a definite and positive end; knew what they wanted, and meant to get it. Of course they won. Symmachus and the senate ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... ages of the Penguins are too well-known for me to lay stress upon them. But what has not been sufficiently noticed is the way in which the rationalist theologians such as Canon Princeteau called into existence the unbelievers of the succeeding age. The former employed their reason to destroy what did not seem to them, essential to their religion; they only left untouched the most rigid article of faith. Their intellectual ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... to worship, cannot present to us a moral imperative, cannot, above all, either claim our love or give us its affection. It is really the identical difficulty, stated a little {76} more pretentiously, which the "rationalist" author of The Churches and Modern Thought presents to us by remarking that in all our experience that which makes up personality is "connected with nerve structures," so that we cannot attribute such a quality to "a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of Lords. Peers in their Parliament robes fill all the benches, and at their head sits the Regent,—Prince Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the representative Rationalist of the fifteenth century. He was no Papist, for he disliked and despised Romish superstitions; yet no Lollard, for he was utterly incapable of receiving the things of the Spirit of God. Henry the Fifth now lies entombed at Westminster, and on the throne is his little son of nine ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... no very definite political colour. The Journal professed to give a systematic survey of literary, scientific, and philosophical publications. For the scientific part Mill was helped by Thomson. His own contributions show that, although clearly a rationalist, he was still opposed to open infidelity. A translation of Villers' History of the Reformation implies similar tendencies. Other literary hack-work during this and the next few years is vaguely indicated. Mill was making about L500 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Hill in the chair of Greek. Had the offer definitely been made Page would probably have accepted, but difficulties arose. Page was no longer orthodox in his religious views; he had long outgrown dogma and could only smile at the recollection that he had once thought of becoming a clergyman. But a rationalist at the University of North Carolina in 1878 could hardly be endured. The offer, therefore, fortunately was not made. Afterward Page was much criticized for having left his native state at a time when it especially needed young men of his type. It may therefore be recorded ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... just fate by not professing, like the Christian martyrs, his real faith when delivering his 'very copious and eloquent' apology (De Civitate Dei, lib. viii. 19). In the Golden Ass of the Greek romancist of the second century, who, in common with his cotemporary the great rationalist Lucian, deserves the praise of having exposed (with more wit perhaps than success) some of the most absurd prejudices of the day, his readers are entertained with stories that might pretty nearly represent the sentiments of the ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... of his studies at home, he repaired, thirsting for deeper draughts of knowledge, to Paris; and became one of the most devoted scholars of Abailard; whose rationalist invasions of the domain of theological doctrine,—by which the supreme authority of the Church in matters of faith was threatened,—accorded with Arnold's tone of mind. In fact, he soon arrived, by the line of argument ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... justify them. For what else have I been arguing. The difficulty lies only in the rationalist's shallow and sensuous view of Nature, and in his ambiguous, slip-slop trick of using the word natural to mean, in one sentence, 'material,' and in the next, as I use it, only 'normal and orderly.' Every new wonder in medicine which this great ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... her and went with Edgar. Miriam and her brother were naturally antagonistic. Edgar was a rationalist, who was curious, and had a sort of scientific interest in life. It was a great bitterness to Miriam to see herself deserted by Paul for Edgar, who seemed so much lower. But the youth was very happy with her elder brother. The two men spent afternoons ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... more than he did, and on the other to many who believed less. In fact, the stigma of Socinianism was tossed about as a vague, general term of reproach in the eighteenth century, much in the same way as 'Puseyite,' 'Ritualist,' and 'Rationalist' have been in our own day. This very inaccurate use of the word Socinian may in part be accounted for by remembering that one important feature in the system of Socinus was his utter denial of the doctrine ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the "Historia Calamitatum" relates were the direct outcome of Abelard's uncompromising position as a rationalist, and the document is above all interesting for the picture it gives of the man himself, against the background of early twelfth century France. A few dates will help the general reader to connect the life ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... had been for months at my wit's end, forming plan after plan for the evangelisation of Erewhon, when by one of those special interpositions which should be a sufficient answer to the sceptic, and make even the most confirmed rationalist irrational, my eye was directed to the following paragraph in the Times newspaper, of one of the first days in ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... chapter in this book that is a reply to Mr. McCabe, an ex-Roman Catholic, who, being a keen logician, is now a rationalist. He accuses Chesterton of joking with the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of Calypso, he might come back with the same confession as the seeker for the wonders of Broceliande,—fol i alai. But there are other wonderful things in the Iliad and the Odyssey which are equally improbable to the modern rationalist and sceptic; yet by no means of the same kind of wonder as Calypso or the Sirens. Probably few of the earliest hearers of the Odyssey thought of the Sirens or of Calypso as anywhere near them, while many of them must have had their grandmothers' testimony for ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... To this chosen body belonged the late venerable and truly excellent as well as learned M. Groen van Prinsterer, and he exercised the usual right of examining in the light of his privileged position the views of a "liberal" and "rationalist" writer who goes to meeting on Sunday to hear verses from Dryden. This does not diminish his claim for a fair reading of the "intimate correspondence," which he considers Mr. Motley has not duly taken ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thereby gave a new lease of life to the errors it was just outgrowing, so Paul reconstructed the old Salvationism from which Jesus had vainly tried to redeem him, and produced a fantastic theology which is still the most amazing thing of the kind known to us. Being intellectually an inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding the irrational real thing for the unreal but ratiocinable postulate, he began by discarding Man as he is, and substituted a postulate which he called Adam. And when he was asked, as he ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Josephus was a wavering rationalist, as is shown by his acceptance of the story of Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt, "I have seen the pillar," he adds (though again he may be blindly copying), "and it remains to this day." It is ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... comprehensive and more thorough than the Baconian. Descartes disputed only the certitude of the knowledge previously attained, not the possibility of knowledge—for of the latter no man is more firmly convinced than he. He is a rationalist, not a skeptic. The intellect is assured against error just as soon as, freed from hindrances, it remains true to itself, as it puts forth all its powers and lets nothing pass for truth which is not clearly and distinctly known. Descartes demands the same thing ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and admittedly most questionable action, the promotion of the group of martyr saints of the third century to thrones of uncontested dominion in heaven, had better be distinctly understood, before we debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Rationalist. This apotheosis by the Imagination is the subject of my present lecture. To-day I only describe it,—in my next lecture I ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... every man his own suicide; that hell begins in this life, and death begins before we die: —do not say that: because we cannot help believing it; for our own consciousness and our own experience tell us it is true.' No wonder that the preacher who tells men that is hated, is called a Rationalist, a Pantheist, a heretic, and what not, just because he does set forth such a living God, such a justice of God, such a wrath of God as would make the sinner tremble, if he believed in it, not merely once in a way, when he hears a stirring sermon about the endless torments: but all ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... even further than this: he attempted to harmonize philosophy with religion, as Abelard did afterwards. He brought all theological questions to the test of dialectical reasoning. Thus the ninth century saw a rationalist and a pantheist at the court of a Christian king. Like Democritus, he maintained the eternity of matter. Like a Buddhist, he believed that God is all things and all things are God. Such doctrines were not to be tolerated, even in an age when theological speculations ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... well known as an author, he, like myself, worshipping philosophy and hoping to contribute to intellectual progress. Carl von Bergen was a self-confident, ceremonious Swede, who had read a great many books. At that time he was a new Rationalist, which seemed to promise one point of interest in common; but he was a follower of the Bostroem philosophy, and as such an ardent Theist. At this point we came into collision, my researches and reflections constantly tending ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... stamp-collector, an engager of lady-helps instead of servants, an amateur reciter and skirt dancer, an owner of a lock of Paderewski's hair—torn fresh from the head personally at a concert—an admirer of George Bernard Shaw as a thinker but a hater of him as a humourist, a rationalist and reader of Punch, an atheist and table-turner, a friend of all who think that women don't desire to be slaves, a homoeopathist and Sandowite, an enemy of babies—as if all women didn't worship them!—a lover of cats—as if all women didn't hate ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... structure, especially as regards the external genital organs, by means of mutual inspection. Such childish curiosity may be, and often is, altogether independent of the awakening of the sexual life; the real motive is then the rationalist one, if the expression be permitted. But in other instances the curiosity is determined, or increased, by the awakening of the sexual life. Similar considerations apply to the observation of the sexual acts of animals, for which opportunities occur more especially in the country, but sometimes ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... pylorus—the physicians of Montpelier prophesied it would be hereditary in our family." He also gave directions to the priest Vignali as to the manner in which he wished his body to be laid out in a chambre ardente (a state-room lighted with torches). "I am neither an atheist," said Napoleon, "nor a rationalist; I believe in God, and am of the religion of my father. I was born a Catholic, and will fulfil all the duties of that church, and receive the ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... the world but loyalty to a dead father and memory of his attitude toward religion, without knowledge of his arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. Ward has hit on the only possible persona. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character. Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... critical side of him was what in reality told least upon his pupils. He was reserved, he talked with difficulty, and his respect for the immaturity of the young lives near him was complete. So that what he sowed others often reaped, or to quote the expression of a well-known rationalist about him: 'The Tories were always carrying off his honey to their hive.' Elsmere, for instance, took in all that Grey had to give, drank in all the ideal fervour, the spiritual enthusiasm of the great tutor, and then, as Grey himself would have done some twenty ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the pageant of heroism, the glory of sacrifice, and the presence of Death, and not be moved to a contemplation of the fountain-head of these sublime mysteries. But it is the upper class which in particular has returned to the Church. Before the war, rationalist and genial skeptic, the educated Frenchman went to church because it was the thing to do, and because non-attendance would weaken an institution which the world was by no means ready to lay aside. This same educated Frenchman, brought face to face with the mystery of human ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... tough tribal God that could survive worshippers of this temper. An ancient Midrash taught that in the Temple there were seventy sacrifices offered for the seventy nations. For the mediaeval and rationalist Maimonides the election of Israel scarcely exists—even the Messiah is only to be a righteous Conqueror, whose success will be the test of his genuineness. And Spinoza—though he, of course, is outside the development of the Synagogue proper—refused ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... substantially accomplished, though the last plates of the Encyclopedie were not issued until 1772. When all was finished, the scientific movement of the century was methodised and popularised; a barrier against the invasion of the past was erected; the rationalist philosophy, with all its truths and all its errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... basis of a "system of truth." Other parts of the Bible must be interpreted, to be sure (so the theory would run); but these statements mean just what they say, and whoever meddles with them is carnally minded and a rationalist. ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case against the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediaeval Church it might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the devotional side of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... indeed forms a constitutive element of such subjective criterion. It suffices to read any book of history to discover at once the point of view of the author, if he be a historian worthy of the name and know his own business. There exist liberal and reactionary, rationalist and catholic historians, who deal with political or social history; for the history of philosophy there are metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist, and spiritualist historians. Absolutely historical historians do not and cannot exist. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... time the opposite though allied peculiarity of childhood—the absence of the emotional developments of puberty which deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later—is also making itself felt. Extravagant as his beliefs may appear, the child is an uncompromising rationalist and realist. His supposed imaginativeness is indeed merely the result of his logical insistence that all the new phenomena presented to him shall be thought of in terms of himself and his own environment. His wildest notions are based ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... doubtfully. Wullie thought it was. But she found her father's religion even more difficult than any of his other obsessions. It made him eager and pathetic. He had never tried to make drunkards of people; Marcella he had impatiently tried to make a rationalist; but now he spent all his time trying to convert them. His household was veneered with evangelism. The kindly desire to save brands from the burning sent him to the village praying and quoting the Word to those who once thought him a king, later a terror, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... gifted sons reared by Oxford for the service of the church of England, hurling at her head the hottest bolts of the Vatican; and along with this strange deflexion on one side, a not less convulsive rationalist movement on the other,—all ending in contention and estrangement, and in suspicions worse than either, because less ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... agreement with reality mean? It means verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us prosperously through experience. Completed verifications seldom needful. 'Eternal' truths. Consistency, with language, with previous truths. Rationalist objections. Truth is a good, like health, wealth, etc. It is expedient thinking. The past. Truth grows. Rationalist objections. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... in his catalogue of engraved Portraits, mentions four of orator Henley: two of which are inscribed, one by Worlidge "The Orator of Newport Market;" another (without engraver's name) "A Rationalist." There is a floating story which I have heard of Henley. He gave out that he would shew a new and expeditious method of converting a pair of boots into shoes. A great concourse of people attended, expecting to see something very marvellous; when Henley mounted his "tub," and, holding up a boot, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... freedom, and neither, likewise, are justly liable to be burdened by an unqualified responsibility. It is the duty of the community to draw on the powers of the fit and equally its duty to care for the unfit. In this way, Perrycoste, whose attitude is that of the Rationalist, is led by science to a conclusion which is that of the Christian. We are all members each of the other, and still more are we members of those who went before us. The generations preceding us have ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... themselves are proud and supercilious, they are bold enough to suppose Wolfgang Goethe is like them. I hope you will not visit the very learned Herr Nicolai, the insipid prosaist, the puffed-up rationalist, who believes that his knowledge permits him to penetrate every thing, and who is a ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... malevolent rationalist might note that the name of the railway station where this miracle befell was nowhere mentioned. Was it not open to him to go and make ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... though the young man could not—fortunately—see his own brain, others might by opening his skull, and that no dissection of brains or examination of stars has ever shown us God. This is exactly the point where our easygoing rationalist misses the mark. Brains and stars do show God to those who have developed the faculties wherewith to ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the very powerful and exceedingly well-written anti-Semitic papers, of which Drumont's "Libre Parole" was long the chief. You have the Single-tax papers. You have the Teetotal papers—and, really, it is a wonder that you have not yet also had the Iconoclasts and the Diabolists producing papers. The Rationalist and the Atheist propaganda I ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... and the doctrines of Confucius were in honour: the first Emperor ordered a general burning of books, burning at the same time between 400 and 500 of the followers of Confucius, and persecuting the men of letters. A rationalist philosophy succeeded, and this again gave way to the introduction of the religion of Buddha or Fo, just about the time of our Lord's Crucifixion. At later periods, in the fifth and in the thirteenth centuries, the country was divided into ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... course of events and the working of natural causes, in a minority, would abandon their vain hopes of nationality."[8] It was in this spirit that his successor endeavoured to govern the French section in Canada. Being both rationalist and utilitarian, like others of his school he minimized the strength of an irrational fact like racial pride, and, almost from the first he discounted the force of French opposition, while he let it, consciously or unconsciously, influence his behaviour towards his French subjects. "If ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... manage to re-write the last two lines; but the contrast of the two securities, his and the rationalist's, is plain enough. The rationalist sees safe conditions. But Mr. Blood's revelation, whatever the conditions be, helps him to stand ready for a life among them. In this, his attitude seems to resemble that of Nietzsche's amor fati! "Simply," he writes ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... that the cause of death was the boar. But you would assuredly be mistaken. The real cause of death was again a sorcerer, who pounded up the soul-stuff of his victim with a boar's tooth. Again, suppose that a man is bitten by a serpent and dies. A shallow rationalist might say that the man died of the bite; but the Kai knows better. He is aware that what really killed him was the sorcerer who took a pinch of his victim's soul and bunged it up tight in a tube along with the sting of a snake. Similarly, if a woman dies ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... rationalist in his religion. He obeys implicitly, and without question, the ritual of his ancestors and finds no interest in the scrutiny or analysis ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Germany?" asked the baroness, mournfully. "You see all the horrors, the shame, the degradation that Germany, and especially Prussia, have to suffer! The calamities of our country, then, my friend, have transformed you into a believer, and made of the rationalist a mystic, believing in miracles? You know I was hitherto pious, and a faithful believer, but now I begin to doubt. Now I ask myself anxiously whether there really is a God in heaven, who directs and ordains every thing, and yet permits us to be ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... promised—deep, quiet, sustaining—was stealing into her heart as the dawn turns night into day. Simple-minded Ida Mayhew believed that Jesus Christ had kept his word, for that was all faith meant to her. The rationalist practically maintains that such effects are without causes, and the materialist explains that they are physical conditions to be accounted for, by the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... l. 5. To prove Divinity from the works of nature.—A traditional argument of the Stoics like Cicero and Seneca, and of rationalist theologians like Raymond Sebond, Charron, etc. It is the argument from ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... motto, Ad summa, with an inscription expressive of the genius of this new adventurer, Inveniam viam aut faciam! There was a snake in the grass; it is obvious that Henley, in improving literature and philosophy, had a deeper design—to set up a new sect! He called himself "a Rationalist," and on his death-bed repeatedly cried out, "Let my notorious enemies know ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli |
