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More "Rationalist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... harmonize perfectly with the political complications that precede. We seem to have come suddenly into another world; and so we have in truth,—the world of medieval mysticism. That which begins as a drama of conflicting political passions, ends as a drama of mystical edification. The rationalist does not see how the divine order can be vindicated by the triumph of gross injustice; nevertheless he recognizes that the ways of God are inscrutable, and he knows that such ideas, of the winning of peace through blood-atonement, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... points may be disappointing to the reader who hopes to find in Scot a scientific rationalist. That, of course, he was not; and his leaning towards superstition on these points makes one ask, What did he really believe about witchcraft? When all the fraud and false testimony and self-deception were excluded, what about the remaining cases of witchcraft? ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... carrying them out to their logical ends with a sincerity and devotion quite unknown to her teacher. Thenceforward her conception of things—of which, however, she seldom spoke—had been actively and even vehemently rationalist; and it had been one of the chief sorenesses and shames of her life at Mellor that, in order to suit his position as country squire, Richard Boyce had sunk to what, in her eyes, were a hundred mean compliances with things orthodox ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... representatives. But the people, notwithstanding all the prejudices instilled into them by the government and the Church, have in their best representatives long outgrown that crude stage of understanding, a fact which is proved by the springing up everywhere of the rationalist sects with which Russia is swarming to-day, and on which Churchmen are now carrying on an ineffectual warfare. The people are advancing to a consciousness of the moral, living side of Christianity. And then the Church comes forward, not borrowing from the people, but zealously instilling ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... 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
... throughout life, although she soon left behind her the tenets and creeds of the church in which she was born and for which she had so strong an affection. In later life, although placing herself entirely outside of historic Christianity, and becoming a rationalist of the rationalists, the fervor of strong religious feeling never left her, and to her latest days she loved to read the Scriptures and to feel the glow of devotional feeling which belonged to her nature. The strong ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the Brethren were not controversialists. Instead of arguing with the rationalist preachers, they employed more pleasing methods of ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... is no 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
... theories, brings his faith to the test of action, not of intellect, lives what he believes, and has no sympathy for those who waver or question—a thoroughly admirable, practical, and extremely irritating man. Adrian is the fascinating dilettante, the philosophic doubter, a sort of romantic rationalist with a taste for art. Of course, Rhona marries the brother who needs conversion, and their gradual influence on each other is indicated by a few subtle touches. Then we have the curious story of Olga, Adrian Mowbray's first ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... often seek to enlighten one another as to differences in bodily 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 ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... 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 into account, and of the other letters to be found ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... equipped a modern printing plant, organized a staff of translators, and spread broadcast one hundred and fifty thousand copies of modern scientific and sociologic works, not to forget the large quantity of rationalist text books. Surely none but the most methodical and efficient organizer could have accomplished such ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Squire, and then replaced the more apt and alliterative word "Bible" by the general word "superstition." He was himself a robust rationalist, but he went to church to set his tenants an example. Of what, it would have ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. 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
... and Justice, is a serious matter with him; and he finds it necessary to tell us in several instances why he chose to treat a given topic under the one or the other heading. In spirit and temperament he is a thoroughgoing rationalist. Brief and succinct to the point of obscurity, he betrays neither partiality nor emotion, but fearlessly pushes the argument to its last conclusion and reduces ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... it. But when we get rid of this illusion and go back to the more primitive activities through which our mental kitchen gets its supplies, we see that the distinction between mystic and non-mystic is not merely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, between intellect and intuition. The question which divides them is really this: What, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon—with what aspects of the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... 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
... variously with religion in the wide and vital sense of the word, holding it a divine presence, the rule of life, and the inspirer of all noble work. I should judge he was not dogmatic in creed, nor rigid in ceremonial. He was philosophic, but had too much heart to be a rationalist; too much imagination for an anti-supernaturalist. He was a mystic pietist; religion blending with poetry coloured his whole mind; revelation, nature, and art, were for him one and indivisible. And this I believe to have been the mental state of the son ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... of the books which has made a turning-point in many men's lives. It specially affected Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, and many of those who sympathised more or less with Wesley's movement. Law was driven by his sense of the aspects of the rationalist theories to adopt a different position. He became a follower of Behmen, and his mysticism ended by repelling the thoroughly practical Wesley, as indeed mysticism in general seems to be uncongenial ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... he said, "is perennial! History, in fact, is the great rationalist; and the Catholic conscience is scandalised by her. And so we have these pitiful little books—" he laid his hand on the volume beside him—"which simply expunge history, or make it afresh. And we have a piece of Jesuit apologia, like this paper of ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with nothing left her in 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, being a true picture, it is a symbolic index to the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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, ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... 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 ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... The division of his investigation into the two parts, Unity and Justice, is a serious matter with him; and he finds it necessary to tell us in several instances why he chose to treat a given topic under the one or the other heading. In spirit and temperament he is a thoroughgoing rationalist. Brief and succinct to the point of obscurity, he betrays neither partiality nor emotion, but fearlessly pushes the argument to its last conclusion and reduces it ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... convenances to her cousin, Count Bruno von 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 ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... 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
... unchivalrous, how 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 ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... school of Kant, and imbued with the antagonism of the age against constituted authorities, it is natural that Schiller should be a rationalist in his religious views. It has been justly said of him that while Goethe's system was an apotheosis of nature Schiller's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... no rationalist in his religion. He obeys implicitly, and without question, the ritual of his ancestors and finds no interest in the scrutiny ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... 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 extent an irrelevant rhapsodist, dealing with thin after-images of being. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... struggle, the marks of which broke out on the young man's forehead in cold beads. But he was a rationalist among rationalists, and in the end his reason subdued his demon. Therefore, the little knot of linotypers and helpers who had stood wonderingly by while the two adversaries stared at each other, through a tense half-minute, now ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 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 ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... of the regeneration of society—the improved education of youth and the necessity for the rich to open their purses for its accomplishment. Then, his wanton spirit as usual getting the better of him, he turned the torrent of his eloquence in another direction. A thorough-going rationalist, his pet aversion was the dogma of the Trinity, and on that dogma he now directed his batteries, with the effect of horrifying his audience, most of whom had come to be edified by the pious exhortations of Lavater. Lavater mildly expostulated; Goethe endeavoured ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... unsparing terms. Instead of doing Jansenism any good these so-called miracles, utterly unworthy as they were of divine wisdom and holiness, served only to injure its cause, and indeed to injure the Christian religion generally, by placing a good weapon in the hands of its rationalist adversaries. ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... A RATIONALIST is not entitled to the term, because he is often more innocent of reasoning than his opponents. Reason is not opposed to revelation. We believe in an inspired revelation, because it is reasonable to do so. Rationalism is another ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed to him, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Spirit, its regnancy in human life, whilst the mind is alert and supple: and so to teach and impress it, that it is woven into the stuff of the mental and moral life and cannot seriously be injured by the hostile criticisms of the rationalist. Remember, that the prime object of education is the moulding of the unconscious and instinctive nature, the home of habit. If we can give this the desired tendency and tone of feeling, we can trust the rational mind to find good reasons with ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Bacchanal. If you were a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not a Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded. There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... upon which he had to congratulate himself was, that the Brianite preacher denounced him in chapel next Sunday as a German Rationalist, who impiously pretended to explain away the Lord's visitation into a carnal matter of drains, and pipes, and gases, and such like; and that his rival of another denomination, who was a fanatic on the teetotal question, denounced him as bitterly for supporting the cause of drunkenness, by ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... desire to glorify Emmanuel, the necessity to labour for his household—that blessed industry left him no opportunity for weaving a web of unmeaning casuistic subtilties, in which to entangle and engulph his soul, like a Puseyite or a German Rationalist. The thunders and lightnings of Sinai had burnt up all this wood, hay, and stubble, and with child-like simplicity he depended upon the Holy Spirit, while drawing all his consolations and all his spiritual supplies ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially possible that the key of all social evolution may be found ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... that the peace 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 state of the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... beneath his eyes that it is wonderful they were not scorched into recognising it? Where was he when, but for superstitions grosser than those of the negroes on the Niger banks, he might have saved the living heart and centre of his little world? Where was the rationalist when, but for superstitions sucked in with his mother's milk, he would have gone to a certain studio, seen a certain picture which would have sent him on the wings of the wind to find and rescue ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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 ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... accustomed to writers who have not faced reality at all; just as the saints, with that Obscure Night of the Soul, which fell so certainly that they numbered it among spiritual states, one among other ascending steps, seem morbid to the rationalist and the old-fashioned Protestant controversialist. The thought of journalists, like that of the Irish novelists, is neither healthy nor unhealthy, for it has not risen to that state where either ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... Marcella 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, and now could not ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the untruth may seem at first sight most expedient. Yet it is only these few who can be said to believe anything at all; the rest are simply unbelievers in disguise. Perhaps, after all, these last are right. They have numbers and prosperity on their side. They have all which the rationalist appeals to as his tests of right and wrong. Right, according to him, is what seems right to the majority of sensible, well-to-do people; we know of no safer criterion than this, but what does the decision thus arrived ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... of the spirit behind the form. Indeed man, spiritual as at base he is, can never rest finally satisfied with the outer semblance and form: just as the body craves sustenance, so does the spiritual part of him. No amount of physical satisfaction will ever allay the heart-hunger, and no flood of Rationalist thinking will ever put an end to the instinctive ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... country so long and so well. 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 into account, and of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... would now be generally admitted—that this could not be done. Hence he inferred the far more doubtful proposition that nothing could be known a priori about the connexion of cause and effect. Kant, who had been educated in the rationalist tradition, was much perturbed by Hume's scepticism, and endeavoured to find an answer to it. He perceived that not only the connexion of cause and effect, but all the propositions of arithmetic and geometry, are 'synthetic', i.e. not analytic: in all these propositions, ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... improperly applied on the one hand to many who really believed 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 of the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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 age discovers—what ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... House 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 ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... us 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... 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, being a true picture, it is a symbolic index to the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... NORMAN ANGELL incidentally deals with this greengrocery business. Nobody with knowledge of his shrewd and vigorous method will be surprised that without bluster or rhetoric he establishes a very clear verdict of acquittal. One has always the impression that the rationalist in him is deliberately repressing the mystic, lest his case be weakened by a suspicion of sentimentalism. For it must be obvious that not a cold, still less a squalid, but a generous purpose alone could inspire the fervour that flashes between the reasoned lines. When Mr. ANGELL ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... important, because they state the case for absolute rule, or "a strong government," as we call it to-day. Hobbes was frankly rationalist and secular. Holding the great end of government to be happiness, he made out that natural man lived in savage ill-will with his fellows. To secure some sort of decency and safety men combined together and surrendered all natural rights to a sovereign—either ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... 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 extent an irrelevant rhapsodist, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... thus be seen that Mrs. Dlimm was a rationalist as well as a believer, though not of the ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
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