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Ambrose's argument, too, is illuminating: like the King of Hearts', it was in the main that "you were not to talk nonsense." How ridiculous, said he, to impute the victories of old Rome to the Religion of Numa and favor of the Gods, when the strength and valor of the Roman soldier were quite enough to account for all. Thus he appears in the strange role of a rationalist.
For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope.
The group of eminent men who made Edinburgh a philosophical centre was thoroughly in sympathy with the rationalist movement of the eighteenth century. The old dogmatic system of belief could be held very lightly even by the more educated clergy. Hume's position is significant.
Hume argued correctly, as 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.
White shook his head over these pencilled fragments. He was 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 to him, a posthumous betrayal.... One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon Benham.
The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact to which we have already paid so much attention. In our world, namely, abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated, one verification serves for others of its kind, and one great use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates, especially to human talk about them.
When you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renan, the rationalist, could not make any sense out of Christ's most public acts, he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of His private thoughts.
Youth always has its periods of unrest sometimes more, sometimes less. Spinoza had made the acquaintance of Van den Ende, a teacher of Greek and Latin, an erratic, argumentative rationalist, who had his say on all topics of the time, and fixed his place in history by being shot as a revolutionary, just outside the walls of the Bastile.
There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue.
Double negation is the only form of affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal. Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for empiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do to every accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt.
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