"Rationality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have meant it, but for that sub-vigorous element in his character, that saving strain of practical rationality, which had brought him thus far in life without sheer overthrow. An hour after receiving Alma's enigmatical note, he was oppressed by inertia; another hour roused him to self-preservation, and supplied him with a project. That night he took ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... meaning. To take an example, the term 'man' applies to certain things, namely, all the members of the human race that have been, are, or ever will be: this is its quantity in extension. But the term 'man' has also a certain meaning, and implies certain attributes—rationality, animality, and a definite bodily shape: the sum of these attributes ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... brain. And if we can trust our intuitions so far, the perverted believing process is thus more a motor than a sensory process, more a disorder of expression than a disorder of impression, more a perversion of the WILL TO BELIEVE than a matter of the rationality of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... unacquainted with the Platonic notion of eternity as a fixed state out of time, which has no past, present, or future, and is simply that which "always is"—an everlasting now. The soul, in its elements of rationality and freedom, has existed anterior to time, because it now exists in eternity.[608] In its actual manifestations and personal history it is to be contemplated as a "generated being," having ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and he of the green gaban went theirs. All this time, Don Diego de Miranda had not spoken a word, being entirely taken up with observing and noting all that Don Quixote did and said, and the opinion he formed was that he was a man of brains gone mad, and a madman on the verge of rationality. The first part of his history had not yet reached him, for, had he read it, the amazement with which his words and deeds filled him would have vanished, as he would then have understood the nature of his madness; but knowing ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact as the potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... who could argue so fiercely without personal innuendo. But, on the other hand, he was both triumphant and sarcastic. There was an occasion at a later date when he advanced some highly contestable points as assumptions, and my aunt, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, in an agony of rationality, said to him, "But these things are surely matters of argument, Hugh?" To which Hugh replied, "Well, you see, I have the misfortune, as you regard it, of belonging to a Church which ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity, vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say, Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling vestments of poetry and ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... precepts that have been enumerated in the preceding chapters. Surely sufficient evidence has been noted to convince a thinking being that reason is a better guide than theism. Belief is the antithesis of reason; reason is rationality; religious ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... rationalis that the word in question is derived. Now this word is good enough in itself, for it signifies what is conformable to reason, that which possesses the attributes and methods of reason. Man is a rational animal, and it is his rationality that distinguishes him from all other animals. So much for this part of the word Rationalism. Now for the barbarous part of it, the -ism. This termination belongs to another language, the Greek -ismos, and is derived ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... actually bolstered up by the following subterfuge: "He who cannot help himself in this matter is beyond help, is not yet ripe for our standpoint" (p. 436). How differently, and with what intensity of conviction, did the ancient Stoic believe in the All and the rationality of the All! And, viewed in this light, how does Strauss's claim to originality appear? But, as we have already observed, it would be a matter of indifference to us whether it were new, old, original, or imitated, so that it were only more ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... expect to go out among the people of this country, people of different churches, of many different religious factions, and tell them that they must become atheists before they can become Socialists? That would be nonsense. We must first get these men convinced of the rationality of our economic and political program, and then after we have made Socialists of them and members of the Socialist Party, we can talk to them inside of our ranks, talk of the higher philosophy and of the logical consequences of our explanation ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... his senses into rationality, they told him that he was in the presence of some fatal and soul-sickening tragedy, yet this horror that had dashed into the hollow privacy of his house was at least real to him. Overwhelmed as he was by the frightful ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... not, however, necessary for Christianity that any such view should prevail. Man, according to the old scholastic definition, is "a rational animal" (animal rationale), and his animality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though inseparably joined, during life, in one common personality. This animal body must have had a different source from that of the spiritual soul which informs it, from the distinctness of the two orders to which ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Intellect. — N. intellect, mind, understanding, reason, thinking principle; rationality; cogitative faculties, cognitive faculties, discursive faculties, reasoning faculties, intellectual faculties; faculties, senses, consciousness, observation, percipience, intelligence, intellection, intuition, association of ideas, instinct, conception, judgment, wits, parts, capacity, intellectuality, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... would be, by the time he got to about our years, a very rational sort of a companion.—But you see, parson, just now, he thinks too much of small follies; such as man- of-war discipline.—Now there is rationality in giving a fresh nip to a rope, or in looking well at your mats, or even in crowning a cable; but damme, priest, if I see the use—luff, luff, you lubber; don't ye see, sir, you are steering for Garmany!—If I see the use, as I was saying, of making a rumpus about the time when a man ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... destructive. You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry. You keep Noah's Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only, sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... formations (as held by Boutroux, William James and Bergson). From this side, Darwin's ideas, as well as the analogous ideas in other domains, incite us to renewed examination of our first principles, their rationality and their value. On the other hand, his theory of the struggle for existence challenges us to examine the conditions and discuss the outlook as to the persistence of human life and society and of the values that belong to them. It is not enough to hope (or fear?) the rising of new forms; we have ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... me away. "Let's try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was—is, I should say, since of course it still exists—that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth through Time, operated by a Robot. Call it that. A pseudo-human monster fashioned of metal in ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... What if there be something in it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and formulate. Don't you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and that should in itself fully account for my predisposition ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... far more cheaply, my charming Rosalind, if you thought anything else; for of course I am. I wanted to settle myself, you conceive, and as an accomplice you were very eligible. I now comprehend it is beyond the range of rationality, dear stranger, that we should ever marry each other; and so we must not. We must not, you comprehend, since though we lived together through ten patriarchal lifetimes we would die strangers to each other. For you, dear clean-souled girl that you are, were born that ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... such writers, after conceding the mechanical explanations as far as these have been proved, take their stand upon the more intricate phenomena of Nature where, as yet, the mechanical explanations are not forthcoming. Whether it be at the origin of life, the origin of sentiency, of instinct, of rationality, of morality, or of religion, these writers habitually argue that here, at least, the purely mechanical interpretations fail; and that here, consequently, there is still room left for a psychical interpretation. ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... disposed to make trouble, the legal proofs of Constance's identity would be so easily forthcoming. Barnes was dead; her mother had passed away many years before; the child had been born in London—where?—the marquis' rationality, just before his demise, was a debatable question. In fact, since he had learned Saint-Prosper was in the city, the attorney's mind had been soaring among a cloud of vague possibilities, and now, regarding his companion with a most ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... reason. He gets rid of the crux by taking the aesthetic faculty away from the jurisdiction of Kant's rather mysterious 'judgment', and turning it over to the 'practical reason'. His argument is that the practical reason demands freedom, just as the 'pure' or theoretic reason demands rationality. Freedom is the form which the practical reason instinctively applies upon presentation of an object. It is satisfied when, and only when, the object is free, autonomous, self-determined. He then propounds ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... solid and salutary idea that no good morals are to be found outside religion, and that the maxims of the philosophers, who pretend to institute a natural morality, are nothing but whims and babblings of foolish trash. The rationality of good morals is not to be found in nature, which in itself is indifferent, ignorant of good or evil. It is in the divine word, which is not to be trespassed against without after regret. The laws of humanity are based on utility, and ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... experience that the best and rarest of natures may begin by the proper mistrust of the more ordinary results of reasoning when employed in such investigations as these, go on to an abnegation of the regular tests of truth and rationality in favour of these particular experiments, and end in a voluntary prostration of the whole intelligence before what is assumed to transcend all intelligence. Once arrived at this point, no trick is too gross—absurdities are referred to 'low spirits,' ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... metaphysical system of teleology. Distinction between "inconceivability" in an absolute and in a relative sense. Final judgment on the attitude of mind which it is rational to adopt towards the question of Theism. The desirability and the rationality of tolerance ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... Down or at home. Clara was in a perfect transport at being admitted into the number of the archeresses, and had struck up one of her eternal friendships with Louisa, the second Miss Faulkner; and Marian might very fairly be provoked at seeing how entirely her mind was diverted from all the rationality which she and Caroline had been endeavouring—and as they had hoped, not without success—to infuse into her during the past year. To get Clara to settle quietly down to anything was an utter impossibility; her wisest employment was the study of Elizabethan costumes, her most ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... sentiments, conduct, or even dress, or situation;—but the greatest of all possible incongruity is vice, whether in the intention itself, or as transferred to, and becoming more manifest in action;—it is inconsistent with moral agency, nay, with rationality itself, and all the ends and purposes of our being.—Our author describes the natural ridicule of vice in his MEASURE for MEASURE in the strongest terms, where, after having made the angels weep over the vices of men, he adds, that with our spleens they might laugh themselves ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... wound, instead of being dusted, has the corrosive sublimate applied in the form of a plug. In each case the preliminary irrigation with the corrosive sublimate solution is dispensed with. This, however, should on no account be omitted. In our opinion it constitutes the very essence of the rationality ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... frequently reverted to the unhappy couple of whom she had told Leighton when he first spoke to her of marriage. She was possessed to describe the man—his dull, filmy, unsympathetic black eyes, his methodical life and hard rationality, his ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... poverty he frankly prefers imagination to study. In art he demands instinctiveness, and has a profound suspicion of anybody who is conscious of possessing the artistic temperament. As a guide to truth he always would follow poetry in preference to logic. He is never tired of attacking rationality, and for him anything which is rationalised is ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... parties, by which young people lose themselves in mysterious ways, and get into wrong boats and carriages, and generally contrive to upset the plans of their elders, when these plans have been framed with a deeper regard for rationality than for romance. Mrs Masterman belonged to this class, which doubtless has its uses, though those uses are not plainly evident on the surface of life; she spent the day in gloomy hints, and mysterious shakes of the head, and insinuations that no good was ever known to spring from a superabundance ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... This is not a region in which human thought can live; and the symbolical eschatology of religion supplies us with forms in which it is possible to think. The basis of the belief in future judgment is that deep conviction of the rationality of the world-order, or, in religious language, of the wisdom and justice of God, which we cannot and will not surrender. It is authenticated by an instinctive assurance which is strongest in the strongest minds, and which has nothing to do with any desire for spurious ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... flicker of rationality, the miser fell back, sputtering, into his previous gibberish, but it took now an arithmetical turn. Eyes closed, he lay muttering ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... parties, and in their relations to each other and to government. It may be remembered that all the governors of the period agreed in reprobating the factiousness and pettiness of Canadian party politics. Even Elgin had been unable to see very much rationality in their methods. There was, he held, little of public principle to divide {294} men, apart from the fundamental question of responsible government.[1] But it is possible to underestimate the reality and importance of the party system as it existed down to 1847. To have admitted that men differed ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... the writings of most philosophers. Most philosophers—or, at any rate, very many—profess to be able to prove, by a priori metaphysical reasoning, such things as the fundamental dogmas of religion, the essential rationality of the universe, the illusoriness of matter, the unreality of all evil, and so on. There can be no doubt that the hope of finding reason to believe such theses as these has been the chief inspiration of many life-long students of philosophy. This hope, I believe, ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... to the schooner, when the door of the cabin opened softly, and a rather good-looking young Spaniard approached my cot on tiptoe. Seeing that my eyes were open, and probably detecting a look of rationality in them, he smiled as his fingers closed gently upon my wrist ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... great reason why our religion has gradually become more rational. The rationality of the universe constantly presented to our thought has developed a rationality in our thoughts about the universe. The mind, like the dyer's hand, is subdued to what it works in. The response of primitive man to the pressure of Nature upon him was a response of wonder and ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... the complete rationality that would have bidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they still remembered the pact of the mirages. And since never both beheld the same lake, they held each other from the fatal ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... wound so fresh that the stain still was damp; nor for the sword which Joseph had buckled about his waist within Blentz's forbidding walls; nor for the arms and ammunition he had taken from the dead brigands—all of which he had before him as tangible evidence of the rationality of the past ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... adversaries, the relativists, are perfectly right, and accomplish a progress. However, the initial rationality of their thesis becomes in its turn a false theory. Repeating the old adage that there is no accounting for tastes, they believe that aesthetic expression is of the same nature as the pleasant and the unpleasant, which every one feels in his own way, and as to which there is no disputing. But we ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... of God is Jesus of Nazareth. Religious and philosophical are here closely related. If the Christian philosophers gain on the one hand the divinity of the Son of God, on the other hand they retain the rationality of the created universe. That "the ALL is Logos, is Word or Reason," was at that time as much the battle cry of the prevailing philosophy as the contrary has now become the battle cry of the Darwinians, who seek to explain ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... walks, Scott would frequently pause in conversation to notice his dogs and speak to them, as if rational companions; and, indeed, there appears to be a vast deal of rationality in these faithful attendants on man, derived from their close intimacy with him. Maida deported himself with a gravity becoming his age and size, and seemed to consider himself called upon to preserve a great degree of dignity and decorum ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... art are not indefinite in number, variable in their characteristics, or determined by the casual taste or arbitrary will of authors: they exist in nature; they are dependent upon those fixed laws of intellectual being, of spiritual affection, and moral choice, which constitute the rationality of man. And the actual, positive merit of a poetical production—that real merit, which consists in native vitality, in inherent capacity to live—does not lie in the glitter or costliness of the decorations with which it is invested—nor in the force with which ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... proportional to the experience acquired. Practical reason or rationality is the ration or portion of experience allotted ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... thumb), "or else you'd never turn rabid about that dirty little country called England; for rabid, I see you are; I read Anglophobia in your looks, and hear it in your words. Why, mademoiselle, is it possible that anybody with a grain of rationality should feel enthusiasm about a mere name, and that name England? I thought you were a lady-abbess five minutes ago, and respected you accordingly; and now I see you are a sort of Swiss sibyl, with high Tory and ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... unfair in you to withhold them from that prince by WHOSE NOD ALONE THEY WERE PERMITTED TO DO ANY THING." This is toryism with a witness! Here is idolatry even without a mask: And he who can calmly hear, and digest such doctrine, hath forfeited his claim to rationality an apostate from the order of manhood; and ought to be considered as one, who hath not only given up the proper dignity of man, but sunk himself beneath the rank of animals, and contemptibly crawl through the world ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... matrimonial engagements; no penniless lovers selfishly and indissolubly linked together to propagate large families Of starving children. Ail the arrangements of the insect tribe, though prompted by sheer instinct are conducted with a degree of rationality that in some cases raises the mere instinct of the creeping thing above the assumed "reason" ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the figure's hand be'—and spots that down, meaning to reach it naturally from the other end of his canvas,—and leaving off tired, there you see the spectral disjoined thing, and nothing between it and rationality. I intended to shade down and soften off and put in and leave out, and, before I had done, bring Italian Poets round to their old place again in my heart, giving new praise if I took old,—anyhow Dante is out of it all, as who knows but I, with all of him in ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... that of the devil, by whom hell in its entirety is meant. Hell is in the human form inasmuch as those who are in it were born human beings too; they also possess the two human faculties of liberty and rationality, though they have misused liberty by willing and doing evil, and rationality by thinking ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality, 317. In pluralistic empiricism our relation to God remains least foreign, 318. The word 'rationality' had better be replaced by the word 'intimacy,' 319. Monism and pluralism distinguished and defined, 321. Pluralism involves indeterminism, 324. All men use the 'faith-ladder' in reaching ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... and her shadow is common-sense." Yet Codman speaks with certainly no more authority than Prote, when the latter, in his Origins of Fable, declares this epos is "a parable of ... man's vain journeying in search of that rationality and justice which his nature craves, and discovers nowhere in the universe: and the shirt is an emblem of this instinctive craving, as ... the shadow symbolizes conscience. Sereda typifies a surrender to life as it is, a giving up of man's rebellious self-centredness and selfishness: ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell |
