"Rationalistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like Vanini, and the Catholics held him as dangerous as Luther or Calvin, there were zealous adherents who ventured to prove the theory of vortices in harmony with the book of Genesis. It was this rationalistic treatment of the sacred writings which helped to confound the Cartesians with the allegorical school of John Cocceius, as their liberal doctrines in theology justified the vulgar identification of them with the heresies of Socinian and Arminian. The chief names in this advanced ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Buddhism is essentially rationalistic and ethical, while Brahmanism is a pantheistic tendency to polytheism, and ritualistic even to the most offensive sacerdotalism. The Brahman reminds me of a Dunstan,—the Buddhist of a Benedict; the former ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... old. And thus, for a long time, Christianity had been wrongly conceived as history, beginning with what to Paul and the Jews was an historical event, the allegory of the Garden of Eden, the fall of Adam, and ending with the Jewish conception of the Atonement. This was a rationalistic and not ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The rationalistic objection to this suppression of what seems to be of the essence or integrity of matrimony is obvious enough, and yet finds many a retort even in the realm of nature, where the passage to a higher grade ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... basis would aim at doing away with the conditions that have been mentioned: in the place of the privileges of birth it would put those of personal merit; in the place of the national religion, the results of rationalistic inquiry, and so on. However agreeable to reason this might all prove, the change could not be made; because a natural basis would lack that certainty and fixity of definition which alone secures the stability of the commonwealth. A constitution which embodied abstract right ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... stronger hold of the religious consciousness of mankind than the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul, or that this doctrine is plainly taught by St. Paul. All attempts to turn his eschatology into a rationalistic (Arnold) or a materialistic (Kabisch) theory must ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... no less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno. His assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for society, is made on a transcendental plane. It is not the argument of liberty against authority—which can be easily answered on the rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its turn the liberty of the social or collective being, a higher, more complex, and longer-living "individual" than the individual pure and simple. It is rather the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Empedocles took a long step in the direction of rationalism. His conception is paralleled by that of another physician, Alcmaeon, of Proton, who contended that man's ideas of the gods amounted to mere suppositions at the very most. A rationalistic or sceptical tendency has been the accompaniment of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... expect. I mean the things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have been noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted. Thus I had heard a thousand things about Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heard rhapsodies and disparagements of every description. Modern rationalistic critics, with characteristic consistency, had blamed it for its accumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquated superstition and its up-to-date vulgarity. But somehow the one impression that had never pierced through their description ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... held was the same I was using; as for the phial, might it not be some old compound that I had known him or the daguerrotypist use, now casually spun out of the past and woven in with my present pursuits? Nevertheless, I was glad to shove aside this rationalistic interpretation: on the verge of drowning, I magnified the straw to a lifeboat, and caught at it. I pardoned myself for going to the shelves which still held my father's medicines, and examining each of the phials there. But when I turned away without finding one which at all answered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... sacred formulae, and the like. H. 239. — MOLLITER: here 'gently', 'with resignation', though molliter ferre often has another meaning, viz. to bear pain or trouble in an unmanly fashion. Cf. facillime ferre below. — QUID EST ALIUD etc. The words perhaps imply the rationalistic explanation of myths which the Greeks had begun to teach to the Romans during Cato's lifetime. Trans 'what else but resistance to nature is equivalent to warring against the gods, and not 'what ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., Nature's influence on man, moral and aesthetic, became, as we have already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and rationalistic circles[5]; but there are few traces ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... infiltration into minds that begin by being Catholic and wish to remain so of two contemporary influences: one the rationalistic study of the Bible and of church history, the other modern philosophy, especially in its mystical and idealistic forms. The sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is creditable to them ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... come to a mystical moment of his life, when one apple may rob him of all others. This is the profound morality of fairy-tales; which, so far from being lawless, go to the root of all law. Instead of finding (like common books of ethics) a rationalistic basis for each Commandment, they find the great mystical basis for all Commandments. We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. The ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... any rate, has no claim to be considered either as legend or as myth. It is merely one of the odd circumstances of these times, and I have no doubt it can easily be "explained away." In fact, the rationalistic explanation of the whole thing is patent and on the surface. There is only one little difficulty, and that, I fancy, is by no means insuperable. In any case this one knot or tangle may be put down as a queer coincidence and ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... foundation for the man of outside culture. The pursuit of philosophy must have menaced the attachment to Judaism and challenged the authority of the Bible at Alexandria. A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories, which were propagated respectively by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, was made the excuse for indifference to the law. Then as now the advanced Jew would mask his self-indulgence under the guise of a ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... judge the opinions of his age, with an intellect that was invigorated but not enslaved by knowledge; and to contemplate the systems of the past, without being dazzled by the reverence that had surrounded them. He was the first great representative of the modern secular and rationalistic spirit. The strong predisposition of Montaigne was to regard witchcraft as the result of natural causes, and therefore, though he did not attempt to explain all the statements which he had heard, he was convinced that no conceivable improbability could be as great as that which would be involved ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Beauty is the one. To-day these abstractions, even when written with a capital initial, have no power to turn the heads of any but a few of the hyperaesthetical. For Schiller's contemporaries, aweary of rationalistic narrowness and reaching out after new sources of inspiration, the Religion of Art had the great advantage of novelty. It laid hold of them powerfully, remaining, however, a dignified intellectual cult which was quite compatible with plain surroundings. It was a very ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Ferrier, Royce, although differing widely in their theories, all have expressed as a fundamental truth the Unity of Life—a One Life underlying. The basic teachings of the Vedas are receiving confirmation at the hands of Modern Science, which while calling itself Rationalistic and inclining to a Materialistic conception of the Universe, still finds itself compelled to say, "At the last, All ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the state, ethical and political naturalism. Nevertheless, the empirical tendency of his nation has a certain power over him; he holds fast to the position that all ideas ultimately spring from experience. With his energetic but short-breathed thinking, he did not succeed in fusing the rationalistic elements received from foreign sources with these native tendencies, so as to produce a unified system. As Grimm has correctly shown (Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems), there is an unreconciled contradiction ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... belief:—the metaphysical emancipation and enlightenment of Germany, and the materialistic positivism of France, are then, as I have indicated, nowhere so practically and yet laughably illustrated as by the Gipsy. Free from all the trammels of faith, and, to the last degree, indifferent and rationalistic, he satisfies the demands of Feuerbach; devoted to the positive and to the memory of the dead, he is the ideal of the greatest French philosophy, while as a wanderer on the face of the earth—not neglectful of picking up things en route—he is ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... in consequence of the doubts which its own limited powers sometimes suggest, impairing its own sense of the truth; and lastly, because wanting the knowledge of many details and circumstances, about which it can form no judgment, the intellect cannot construct a complete rationalistic system of moral theology. Whereas, on the other hand, emanating as they do from the infinite wisdom and mercy of God, formulated in the shape of positive precepts, and corroborated by the portentous manner of their promulgation, those principles acquire an undisputed authority, ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... of the permanent division of the Empire, the church life of the East was disturbed by a series of closely connected disputes known as the First Origenistic Controversy ( 87), in which were comprised a conflict between a rationalistic tendency, connected with the religious philosophy of Origen, and a traditionalism that eschewed speculation, a bitter rivalry between the great sees of Alexandria, the religious and intellectual capital of the East, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic; yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost every direction to ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... in the breach between philosophers and poets on this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... which in so emphatic a manner enunciates the doctrine, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word;'" and so our supposed critic will exclaim, "See what abundant proof that these Fathers had 'never even seen' the Fourth Gospel;" and according to all rules of Rationalistic criticism they had not, or, at least, they thought nothing of its authenticity; whilst all the time this same Gospel was open before them, and they devoutly reverenced every word as the word of the Holy Ghost, and would have summarily anathematized any ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... dogmatic assumption that the human conception of existence should be absolutely adequate. But he seems to be quite sure that the thing-in-itself works constantly, and consequently always gives us only what our powers can master. This assumption was a consequence of Kant's rationalistic tendency, but one for which no warrant can be given. Evolutionism and systematism are opposing tendencies which can never be absolutely harmonised one with the other. Evolution may at any time break some form which the system-monger regards as finally established. Darwin himself felt a great ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... did not enjoy the hunt. Let it be acknowledged—for the sake of the argument—that he was tortured by the hounds rather than elated by the triumphant success of his own manoeuvres. Lord Hampstead "ventured to say,"—this he would put forward in the rationalistic tone with which he was wont to prove the absurdity of hereditary honours,—"that in the infliction of all pain the question as to cruelty or no cruelty was one of relative value." Was it "tanti?" Who can doubt that for a certain maximum of ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... question raised by Dr. Newman's work, on which, if our limits did not absolutely prevent, we should be glad to enter. We mean the present position of the Church of Rome with that great rationalistic movement with which we, too, are called to contend. Everywhere in Europe this contest is proceeding, and the relations of the Church of Rome towards it are becoming daily more and more embarrassed. Mr. Ffoulkes tells us that "the 'Home and Foreign Review' is the only publication professing ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the things which are not, to bring to nought the things which are.—His heart, hungry of all martyrdom, all saintly doings, went forth to welcome the idea. But then, he asked himself almost awed, in this sceptical, rationalistic age, are such semi-miraculous moral examples still possible? And answered, with strong exultation—as one finding practical justification of a long, though silently, cherished conviction—yes, that even now, nineteen centuries after the death of that divine Saving Victim to whose ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Franche-Comte (including the Departments of Le Doubs, Haute Saone, and Jura), offer a striking contrast; in the first we find the priest absolute, and consequently superstition, ignorance, dirt, and prejudice the prevailing order of the day; in the last we have a Protestant spirit of inquiry and rationalistic progress, consequently instruction making vast strides on every side, freedom from bigotry, and freedom alike from degrading ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Luther defend the gospel from the attacks which came from every quarter. The word of God proved itself a weapon mighty in every conflict. With that Word he warred against the usurped authority of the pope, and the rationalistic philosophy of the schoolmen, while he stood firm as a rock against the fanaticism that sought to ally itself with ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... inclined to give to the life of Christ a rationalistic interpretation have often pointed out that the therapeutic effects described in the Gospels might also be understood as effects of suggestion by word and tactual impressions, produced especially on hysterics, epileptics, paralytics, and ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... imperfect and largely at second hand—of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the Aufklaerung, i.e., against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... second of frantic unreasoning terror he received a conviction of God that no rationalistic training in later years was ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... utilitarian standpoint. "Will it make the people better citizens?" it enquires. "Will it lesson crime and promote honesty, thrift and loyalty?" These questions still remain unanswered, and in the midst of so much rationalistic teaching, and especially with the example of the noble lives of many rationalists before it, the State believes that there is room for much difference of opinion, and therefore it cannot move in the matter. The advocates of religious education seem to take it for granted that their ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met the same fate. Authors and books were arbitrarily sent by lettres de cachet to the Bastille or Vincennes. Yet in spite of all repression, a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in Paris was elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal doctrine that cut at the very roots of the old regime. "I care not whether a man is good or bad," says the Deity in Blake's prophetic books, "all I care, is whether he is a wise man or a fool." While France was in ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... to evolve a satisfactory creed by some process of logical legerdemain out of theosophical moonshine; and amiable and intelligent persons labouring hard to prove that the old mythology could be forced to accept a rationalistic interpretation— whether in regard to the inspection of entrails or prayers for fine weather; and philosophers framing systems of morality entirely apart from the ancient creeds, and sufficiently satisfactory to themselves, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... struggle, of course; nor need we question some real effect produced by it upon the cheerfulness of the participants. The more rationalistic of the smaller species, we may be sure, find it hard to reconcile the existence of hawks and owls with the doctrine of an all-wise Providence; while even the most simple-minded of them can scarcely fail to realize that a world in which one ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education upon a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least after the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused it to be resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge (that is to say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and modes of application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for lending greater "interest" to barren symbols. There ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Delianuova some seven years ago, but soon injured by frosts; it has lately been refashioned. The original structure may be due to the same pious stimulus as that which placed the crosses on Monte Vulture and other peaks throughout the country—a counterblast to the rationalistic congress at Rome in 1904, when Giordano Bruno became, for a while, the hero of the country. This statue does not lack dignity. The Saviour's regard turns towards Reggio, the capital of the province; and one hand is upraised in calm ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... step by step before her to the hearthrug, where he now stood shivering, with the fire hot at his back, and his kettle still singing on undismayed. He made no attempt to account for her presence there on any rationalistic theory. A statue had suddenly come to life, and chosen to pay him a nocturnal visit; he knew no more than that, except that he would have given worlds for courage ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... 1860. (Sunday).—I heard this morning a sermon on the Holy Spirit—good but insufficient. Why was I not edified? Because there was no unction. Why was there no unction? Because Christianity from this rationalistic point of view is a Christianity of dignity, not of humility. Penitence, the struggles of weakness, austerity, find no place in it. The law is effaced, holiness and mysticism evaporate; the specifically ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... possessed of the doctrine. His readers now no longer share it with the poet. In Addison's time (1712) some of the imaginary persons in Paradise Lost were beginning to make greater demands upon the faith of readers, than those cool rationalistic times could meet. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... acquainted with a little out-of-the-world Danish town. The priest and his wife were an interesting and extraordinary couple. The priest, the before-mentioned Pastor Ussing, a little, nervous, intelligent and unworldly man, was a pious dreamer, whose religion was entirely rationalistic. Renan's recently published Life of Jesus was so far from shocking him that the book seemed to him in all essentials to be on the right track. He had lived in the Danish West Indies, and there he had become acquainted with his wife, a lady with social triumphs ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... making an effort to express belief in more than I can believe, nor, again, refuse to record my honest belief in some "fact of religion" because it will not be thought creditable for me, or because certain people will think me superstitious and unreasonable, just as other people will think me too rationalistic. I will yield nothing to the demand, "You cannot possibly believe this, when you have just said that you don't believe that. The two things must hang together. You cannot pick and choose like ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form. Postulating more unity than the first experiences yield, we also discover more. But absolute unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff. "Ever not quite" must be the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it. After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the various 'points ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... which complied with the first condition of all the religions that have ever taken hold of humanity: namely, that it must be, first and fundamentally, a science of metabiology. This was a crucial point with me; for I had seen Bible fetichism, after standing up to all the rationalistic batteries of Hume, Voltaire, and the rest, collapse before the onslaught of much less gifted Evolutionists, solely because they discredited it as a biological document; so that from that moment it lost ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... short musical sentences; they only have ear and hand for very broad periods, yard-long fortes, pianos and crescendos. By far the greater part of the older chamber-music of the eighteenth century has for our ear something soberly rationalistic. Such imitative music in that age compares with modern imitative music as the painted allegories of the Pigtail age compare with the symbolical paintings of Kaulbach. Johann Jacob Frohberger, court ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... to sympathize with such a mentality as this; but it must be remembered that the science was very youthful, and had all the inexperience and the arrogance of youth. As time went on, however, this argument began to disappear, except in very elementary rationalistic manuals, as the fact became evident that while this or that particular religion had one or more identities with Christian doctrines, Christianity possessed them all; that Christianity, in short, had all the principal doctrines of all religions—or at least all ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... brought him into many a combat with his rationalistic friends, some of whom could hardly believe that he took his doctrine seriously. Such was the fact, however; indeed, I have heard that he once stopped near an open-air assembly which an atheist was haranguing, and, in the freedom of his incognito, gave strenuous battle ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... were two Hegels, just as there were two Voltaires; and the later, or more conservative Hegel, had developed his All-godhead till it had become a compromise with the Christian view. And so Father Uriel, who never wanted to be behind the times, became a rationalistic Christian, who was given the thankless task of combating Rationalism and himself. (Pause.) I'll shorten the whole sad history for Father Uriel's sake. In 1850 he again became a materialist and an enemy of Christianity. In 1870 he became a hypnotist, in 1880 a theosophist, and ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... philanthropic association, however rationalistic and suspicious of emotional appeal, can hope to help a girl once overwhelmed by desperate temptation, unless it is able to pull her back into the stream of kindly human fellowship and into a life involving normal human relations. Such ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... say, as some do, that the French mind has very little of the religious element. The very sweetest and softest, as well as the most austere and rigid type of piety has been given by the French mind; witness Fenelon and John Calvin—Fenelon standing as the type of the mystic, and Calvin of the rationalistic style of religion. Fenelon, with his heart so sweet, so childlike, so simple and tender, was yet essentially French in his nature, and represented one part of French mind; and what English devotional writer is at all like him? John Newton had his simplicity ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in the Protestantism of to-day—a Protestantism full of worldliness, having a form of godliness, a great religious profession, but denying its only power (the Holy Ghost), repudiating doctrine and listening to every fable of rationalistic philosophy sooner than to the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman |
