United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I thought I was following a great light, but I discovered there was nothing in it, that I was following an ignis fatuus. Rationalism has indeed proven the "Exit" to multitudes, from the peace, joy and moral security that accompany faith in evangelical Christianity into the desert of doubt, darkness and despair. But not even here did I find a staying-place.
The first blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc. Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as Jesuitism averred, as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's Imperial horse.
Rationalism is a kind of builder's bias which the impartial public cannot share; for the dead walls and glass screens which may have no function in supporting the roof are yet as needful as the roof itself to shelter and beauty. So the incidental filling of experience which remains unclassified under logical categories retains all its primary reality and importance.
Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the Kulturkampf did not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I call the final finality is the real hontôs hon.
By his rationalism, and his indifference to the prejudice of custom and the claim of possession; by his maxim that every man may be presumed to understand the things in which his own interest and responsibility are involved; by his zeal for democracy, equality, and simplicity, and his dislike of intermediate authorities, he belongs to a generation later than his own.
They consisted largely in calling attention to that which rationalism had overlooked. Kant's idealism, however, met the intellectual movement on its own grounds. It triumphed over it with its own weapons. The others set feeling over against thought. He taught men a new method in thinking. The others put emotion over against reason.
How feeble every form of dissent as a truly renovating power when it has become triumphant! What have the fashionable court religions of Europe done towards the real regeneration of society? Protestantism in Germany, when it was protesting, had a mighty life. When universities and courts accepted it, it became a poisonous rationalism, or a dead formula.
Men must hear again the voice which peals through the lapse of centuries bearing witness to the "faith once delivered to the saints," or else for many souls there will be only rationalism and unbelief while this sad, weary world, so full of sin and sorrow, is pleading for help, it is a wrong to Christ and to the souls for whom He died that His children should be separated in rival folds.
VII, ch. xv, two excellent chapters on natural science, 1648-1788, by Paul Tannery; Sir Oliver Lodge, Pioneers of Science ; Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3d ed., 2 vols. , an interesting account of the English Deists and of the new political and economic theorists, and, by the same author, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century ; Edmund Gosse, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, 1660-1780 ; J. M. Robertson, A Short History of Free Thought, 3d rev. ed., 2 vols. , a sympathetic treatment of deism and rationalism; C. S. Devas, The Key to the World's Progress , suggestive criticism of the thought of the eighteenth century from the standpoint of a well- informed Roman Catholic.
From that shadowy line of incidents which marks the twilight boundary between the spiritual world and the present life she drew legends of peculiar clearness, but invested with the mysterious charm which always dwells in that uncertain region; and the shrewd flash of her eye, and the keen, bright smile with which she answered the wondering question, 'What do you suppose it was? or, 'What could it have been? showed how evenly rationalism in her mind kept pace with romance.
Word Of The Day