"Rationalistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great delight. He was fond of 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 ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... 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 ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... respects on a smaller scale. Now, as then, we can find mystical philosophers trying 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, while hopelessly ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic. Or, again, we see nothing "dogmatic" in the inspiring, but certainly most startling, theory of physical science, that ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... forte and piano and melodic expression in such 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 organist to the Emperor Ferdinand III., portrayed the dangers which he incurred crossing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... definite pleasure in the immediate proximity of one's own kind. Only this coarse, rank, real love of men seems to be entirely lacking in those who propose the love of humanity as a substitute for all other love; honourable, rationalistic idealists. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 one who ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... 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
... formation of the clouds, which Constantine by an optical illusion mistook for a supernatural sign of the cross, besides smacking of the exploded rationalistic explanation of the New Testament miracles, and deriving an important event from a mere accident, leaves the figure of Christ and the Greek or Latin inscription, 'By this sign thou shalt conquer!' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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
... forms of the science, as found in Locke and Helvetius. Leibnitz and Wolf taught pure Idealism, as did Bishop Berkeley in England. It remained for Kant to create a new era in modern philosophy. His system vas what has become known as the Rationalistic, or what we can know by pure reason. Kant was followed by Lessing, Herder, Hegel, Fichte, and ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... independent linked commonwealths, called upon for matricular contributions in money and grain but otherwise left severely alone. [Footnote: A very interesting proof—and one that has never been properly exposed—of the astoundingly rationalistic principles on which the Chinese polity is founded is to be seen in the position of priesthoods in China. Unlike every other civilization in the world, at no stage of the development of the State has it been necessary for religion in China ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... apple tree should be a reminder that he has 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 vetoes are indeed ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... which are despised—yea, and 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 History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... 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 travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... 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
... with the facts, the venerable institutions of the past—with the lives of the saints. By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial condition of rationalistic Geneva. "Philosophy," he says, "can never replace religion." Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a religion such as his: a religion, after ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... his 'good'. It saw that man can determine his end, and may well choose pain in preference to pleasure. This saved the school from a great deal of that false schematization which besets most forms of rationalistic psychology. Secondly, it did build up a system of thought on which, both in good days and evil, a life can be lived which is not only saintly, but practically wise and human and beneficent. It did for practical purposes solve the problem of living, without despair ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... natural; the glass plate which he had 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... noises, unexplained movements of objects, one doubts 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 ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... 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 its hold, and left literate Christendom faithless. My own Irish eighteenth-centuryism ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 behind her, whose charms ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... he, evidently still dependent on the old rationalistic supernaturalistic conception of miracle and providence, claims to find that as the result of modern knowledge of the world and nature a special providence is no longer conceivable, and no other hearing of prayer is possible than a subjective psychological ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... is symbolical, and mentions various explanations of the allegory. He rejects, at once, the rationalistic explanation, which turns these gods into eminent men,—sea-captains, etc. "I fear," says he, "this would be to stir things that are not to be stirred, and to declare war (as Simonides says), not only against length of time, but also against many nations and families of mankind, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of all values to immediate appreciations, to sensuous or vital activities, is so inevitable that it has struck even the minds most courageously rationalistic. Only for them, instead of leading to the liberation of aesthetic goods from practical entanglements and their establishment as the only pure and positive values in life, this analysis has led rather to the denial ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... 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 ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... resurrection of the whole man has taken a far 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
... evaporated in so much reasoning." As she grows older the tone of seriousness is more perceptible. "If I could only live two hundred years," she writes, "it seems to me that I might be an admirable person." The rationalistic tendencies of Mme. de Grignan give her some anxiety, and she rallies her often upon the doubtful philosophy of her PERE DESCARTES. She could not admit a theory which pretended to prove that her dog Marphise had no soul, and she insisted that if the Cartesians had any desire to go to heaven, it ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... 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 ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Creation," had committed himself warmly against it, but Emerson felt certain 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 have been given ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... points, indeed, M. Renan has laid himself open to severe criticism, and on other points he has furnished good handles for his orthodox opponents. His views in regard to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel and the Acts are not likely to be endorsed by many scholars; and his revival of the rationalistic absurdities of Paulus merits in most instances all that Mr. Rogers has said about it. As was said at the outset, orthodox criticisms upon heterodox books are always welcome. They do excellent service. And with the feeling which ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... finds its counterpart 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
... 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 ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... to say this man might not repent and turn to Godliness yet, by your ladyship's influence, or Parson Dunage's." This introduction of the incumbent of Chorlton was an afterthought. The fact is, Granny Marrable was endeavouring to suggest a rationalistic interpretation of her sister's undisguised mysticism; fever-bred, no doubt, but scarcely to be condemned as delusion outright without impugning devils, who are standard institutions. Good influences, brought ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Bel-Princess was equivalent to saying he would not marry at all; for these brothers' wives knew she lived in the fairy country, and that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the prince to find her, and take her from it." But this seems to be merely a rationalistic view of the matter. Some mystery seems to underlie these suggestions of, or desires for, unions with unfamiliar beings. They occur not unfrequently in Russian tales. In one of Afanasief's skazkas (vol. vii., ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... sufficed to prove that Burke's view of the present possibilities of social change was right, and the view of the Rousseauites and too sanguine Perfectibilitarians wrong. As we have seen, Burke's very first niece, the satire on Bolingbroke, sprang from his conviction that merely rationalistic or destructive criticism, applied to the vast complexities of man [v.04 p.0832] in the social union, is either mischievous or futile, and mischievous exactly in proportion as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... avoided by Dumouriez, the Belgians had not attempted to rebel. Exhausted by the Brabanconne revolution, divided among themselves, they had merely shown a passive resistance to Republican propaganda and to the efforts made by their masters to induce them to take part in rationalistic worship. This last measure, however, provoked a rising among the peasantry. Many young men, liable to conscription, preferred to die fighting for their liberty than for the French. The movement was quite desperate. It could expect ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... man he would certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw's love of music (which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early, if not first, in his story) may itself be considered in the first case as the imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic Irishman. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... be called a skeptic? [1] He never impugned the validity of mathematical reasonings, nor experimental truths concerning matters of fact; in regard to the former his thought is rationalistic, in regard to the latter it is empirical or, more accurately, sensationalistic. His attitude toward the empirical sciences of nature and of mind is that of a semi-skeptic or probabilist, in so far as they go beyond the establishment of facts to the proof of connections ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... 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 ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... example of the enemy's activities alone should be sufficient to give us that zeal and aggressiveness. The Dominion is flooded with the literature of the Methodist Social Service, of the Bible Society, of the Christian Science, of the Rationalistic Press Association. Their activities should act on our apathetic Catholics as the gust of wind that scatters the ashes and fans the smouldering embers to ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... Scandinavia, as Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the noted Danish theologian, historian, and poet (born September 8, 1783; died September 2, 1872). He made a name for himself early by historical, mythological, religious, and poetical writings. He successfully opposed the rationalistic thought of the earlier nineteenth century with his simple exposition of Christianity according to the pure teachings of Jesus. His effort was to present to Scandinavia Christianity in a popular form, closely connected with the ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... must be added that the Rome which survived after the conquest by Justinian only lived by the Primacy of which it was the seat. Two historians[186] of the city, writing from quite opposite points of view, one a Catholic Christian, the other a rationalistic unbeliever, unite in witnessing that from the time of Narses the spiritual power of the Primacy was the spring of all action. Not only such new buildings as arose were churches and the work of the Popes; St. Gregory ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... and moral condition of man which were the outstanding feature of the eighteenth century in France, and began about 1750, were the development of the intellectual movement of the seventeenth, which had changed the outlook of speculative thought. It was one continuous rationalistic movement. In the days of Racine and Perrault men had been complacently conscious of the enlightenment of the age in which they were living, and as time went on, this consciousness became stronger and acuter; it is a note of the age of Voltaire. In the last ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for the Stuarts. It ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... society. For two hundred years the followers of Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the secular clergy. Their own hour had now struck. The rationalistic historian has seldom done justice to the services which this great Order rendered to European civilisation. The immorality of many of their maxims, their too frequent connivance at political wrong for the sake of power, their inflexible malice against opponents, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley |
