RATIONALIST • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Rationalist

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Rationalist

noun

Someone who emphasizes observable facts and excludes metaphysical speculation about origins or ultimate causes. Synonym: positivist.

adjective

Of or relating to or characteristic of rationalism.

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Etymology of 'Rationalist'

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"Rationalist" Quotes from Famous Books

... was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain ...

— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

... shows was Orator Henley, a clergyman and clergyman's son, and a member of St. John's, Cambridge. He had come to London about this time, and instituted a series of lectures on universal knowledge and primitive Christianity. He styled himself a Rationalist, a title then more honourable than it is now; and in grandiloquent language, 'spouted' on religious subjects to an audience admitted at a shilling a-head. On one occasion he announced a disputation among any two of his hearers, offering to give an impartial hearing and judgment to ...

— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... 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 ...

— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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 Being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure." ...

— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The same things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference, was gone!—The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring back past ages, to present "a royal ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

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