"Rationalistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Truth, Beauty and Goodness are one, and that 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 ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... threshed over old theological straw. The same can hardly be said of Lodowick Muggleton, a seventeenth-century Dowie who would fain have been a prophet of a new dispensation. He put out an exposition of the Witch of Endor that was entirely rationalistic.[29] Witches, he maintained, had no spirits but their own wicked imaginations. Saul was simply the dupe ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... retired 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 to show ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... matter from other than a purely 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 beliefs ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... the rationalistic and the historical, are everywhere found face to face. They carry on an eternal warfare, which is renewed in every age, under new names and new forms. Accomplished facts and renovating thought divide the world between them. They at one time moderate ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... instinct and reason; in the eighteenth century, the opposition was drawn in favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau and the romantic movement instinct was given the preference, first by those who rebelled against artificial forms of government and thought, and then, as the purely rationalistic defence of traditional theology became increasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace to creeds which they associated with a spiritual outlook on life and the world. Bergson, under the name of "intuition," has ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had none that was permanent. He was Rossetti's antithesis, and in himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical. He was severely and uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all religious matters, while Rossetti, with all his irregularities, never could escape from his religious feeling, which was the part of his constitution ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... brilliant a writer as M. Renan says, "For myself I think that there is not in the universe any intelligence superior to that of man." In reading such expressions we are strongly reminded of the poem on the "rationalistic chicken," which would not admit that it ever came out of an egg. When the wisdom shown in the universe is so immensely beyond the comprehension of man, how can he assume his own to be ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the Lowland Scot, next door to the counties of the Northern Earls who rose against Elizabeth, flew to the opposite extreme and embraced Protestantism in its most pronounced form. To say that Calvinism, uncompromising and bare of adornment, appealed particularly to the dour, dry, rationalistic Scot, is at best but a half truth and at worst a begging of the question. The reasons why England became Anglican and Scotland Presbyterian are found immediately not in the diversity of national character but in the circumstances ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat." It is as if he said, Here you have direct and unmistakable experience. A man knows his sin as he knows himself. He may explain it in either one way or another way. He may interpret the universe accordingly in terms ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... radically different was the position of Kant (p. 545), who gave rise to a school of theologians that for a time flourished. This school made the essential thing in Christianity to be its morality. With Semler (1721-1791), the rationalistic Biblical criticism took its rise. From that day, a host of scholars have engaged in the investigation of the origin and interpretation of the Bible, and of the early history of Christianity. A middle position between the established orthodoxy and the Kantian ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... at issue here. It concerns in part the criteria of valuation in the field of the social life. The kind of cosmopolitanism and internationalism that demands the final abrogation of the sentiment of patriotism is, as we have intimated, a rationalistic doctrine. It is an attempt to extend objective principles into the realm of social values. Reason tells us, they say, that we ought to organize universally and obliterate national lines. Reason tells us we ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... personality in what appeared to be a mechanical universe, Kant gave voice to some of the deeper yearnings of the age. The German Enlightenment, the new humanism, mysticism, pietism, and the faith-philosophy were all interested in the human soul, and unwilling to sacrifice it to the demands of a rationalistic science or metaphysics. In seeking to rescue it, the great criticist, piloted by the moral law, steered his course between the rocks of rationalism, sentimentalism, and scepticism. It was his solution of the controversy between the head and the heart that influenced Fichte, Schelling, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 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 good a certain minimum of suffering ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... von Nostitz, inspires in me less confidence. It seems to me that he has at bottom a traditional inclination toward Prussia and its political system, which is nourished in part by a Protestantism that is more rationalistic than orthodox, and by his fear of Ultramontane tendencies. I believe, however,—and I should be glad to find that I do him an injustice,—that on the whole, personal interests take precedence with him over political interests, and that the suppleness of his character permits him to view ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... in the list of atheists 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... and again he is left alone but for the hem of the garment; for Christ has entered the lecture-hall of a rationalistic German professor, and into this He will not bid His disciple follow Him; but the interior of the building is open, as before, to the disciple's mental sight. The lecturer is refreshing his hearers' convictions by an inquiry into the origin of the Christian Myth ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... that, in our opinion, the whole difference between Buddhistic and Vedantic philosophies was that the former was a kind of Rationalistic Vedantism, while the latter might be regarded as transcendental Buddhism. If the Aryan esotericism applies the term jivatma to the seventh principle—the pure and per se unconscious spirit—it is because the Vedanta, postulating three kinds of existence—(1) the paramarthika (the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... had gone up to Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been influenced by ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... no denying the 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 is liable any day to be pursued by a boy with a shot-gun ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... whether the general opinion as to the ratio of marvels and ignorance is correct. The truth is that we have often very scanty evidence. If we take Athens in her lustre, we are, undeniably, in an age of enlightenment, of the Aufklarung. No rationalistic, philosophical, cool-headed contemporary of Middleton, of Hume, of Voltaire, could speak more contemptuously about ghosts, and about the immortality of the soul, than some of the Athenian gentlemen who converse with Socrates in the Dialogues. Yet we find that Socrates and Plato, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... 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
... downward, the rationalistic theories of the philosophers meant to the people simply that all the things which had been regarded as worthy of respect were now no longer worthy. Men being declared equal, the old masters need no ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the difficult adjustment of mental and spiritual outlook young people of Christian training must face as they enter college and university, or the shock to their Christian faith received through the contact with rationalistic ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... that the future of science belonged to that principle, which he had reached by his poetic intuition. Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a member of Divinity College, the theology taught was still a slightly rationalistic Unitarianism and the science qualified by it (though Agassiz would not admit miracle). Some of the students were finding their real professor in Concord. On one evening we went out, travelling the seventeen miles in sleighs, to hear a lecture that was to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... another deeply interesting 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' ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Mohammedans lived under Chinese rule, conditions were far from being as the Chinese desired. The Chinese, a fundamentally rationalistic people, regarded religion as a purely political matter, and accordingly required every citizen to take part in the official form of worship. Subject to that, he might privately belong to any other religion. To a Mohammedan, this ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... reading books of travel and the lives of great men, which stirred him to emulation. In 1817 he went to the University of Giessen. Here he kept aloof from the political agitations among the students. Neither was he affected by the rationalistic teachings of the professors. His shy, retired nature aided him in this course, and his leisure hours were passed in reading the writings of the Reformers. The jubilee festival of the Reformation occurred in 1817, and the lives of the heroes of the faith were brought freshly home to him. Their ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... Laou-tsze. That teaching became mixed with wild speculations. Then certain Buddhistic rites and tenets were added to it. The result, finally, was a compound of knavery and superstition. Taouism is at once mystical and rationalistic in its tone. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... movement; the leader was Herr von Thadden, who lived at Triglaff, not many miles from Kniephof. He was associated with Herr von Semft and three brothers of the family of Below. They were all profoundly dissatisfied with the rationalistic religion preached by the clergy at that time, and aimed at greater inwardness and depth of religious feeling. Herr von Thadden started religious exercises in his own house, which were attended not only by the peasants ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam |
