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"You can believe in a sanity which is not merely your sanity. And you're right enough about humanity, about peasants and people like that jolly old innkeeper. But you're not right about Renard. I suspected him from the first. He's rationalistic, and, what's worse, he's rich. When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich."
But while welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and direct and fertile return on nature, that is a very bad reason why we should disparage poetry so genial, so simple, so humane, and so perpetually pleasing, as the best verse of the rationalistic century.
The pursuit of philosophy must have menaced the attachment to Judaism and challenged the authority of the Bible at Alexandria. A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories, which were propagated respectively by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, was made the excuse for indifference to the law.
George Eliot in her earlier books would have given us shrewd authentic scraps of the real dialect of Trabb's boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic scraps of the real talk in a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given us highly rationalistic explanations of Trabb's boy; which we should not have read.
Finally, a clerical periodical had published three articles on Giovanni's complete works, summing up some partial and grudging praise, and some equally partial and biting censure in a very severe judgment on the character of the works themselves, which the critic pronounced rationalistic, and on the intolerable audacity of the author, who, equipped solely with worldly learning, had dared to publish writings in which the lack of theological knowledge was painfully evident.
Three pairs of thoughts captivate him and incite him to think them through: first, the rationalistic belief in the power of the human spirit to possess itself of the truth by pure thought, together with confidence in the omnipotence of the mathematical method; second, the concept of substance, together with the dualism of extension and thought; finally, the fundamental mechanical position, together with the impossibility of interaction between matter and spirit, held in common with the occasionalists, but reached independently of them.
Those who are inclined to give to the life of Christ a rationalistic interpretation have often pointed out that the therapeutic effects described in the Gospels might also be understood as effects of suggestion by word and tactual impressions, produced especially on hysterics, epileptics, paralytics, and psychasthenics.
Such a statement could not be made by any one who had read the theological articles, whether the more or the less important among them. Whether Diderot had himself advanced definitely to the dogma of atheism at this time or not, it is certain that the Encyclopædia represents only the phase of rationalistic scepticism.
Peter's faith having failed him he may have procured the money from some other source, and that thus the miracle, though undoubtedly intended, was never actually performed. How unnecessary therefore as well as presumptuous are the Rationalistic interpretations which have been put upon the event by certain German writers!
That any one who claims to believe the Bible should give his time to teaching innocent and uninformed children and adults the conclusions of rationalistic criticism seems almost too absurd to believe; and when it is done under the pretense of honoring the Bible, it is but another illustration of how our moral and intellectual vision can be warped and distorted when we look through the colored glasses of rationalism and bias.
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