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Updated: May 1, 2025
There have been obstructionists in all times, not merely the lethargic masses, but the moralists, the rationalizing theologians, and most of the philosophers, all busily if unconsciously engaged in ratifying existing ignorance and mistakes and discouraging creative thought. Naturally, those who reassure us seem worthy of honor and respect.
Against the discovery that things can neither be rightly judged nor wisely reformed except by examining how they came to be what they are, the whole eighteenth century, and in it Johnson as well as Rousseau and Voltaire, stands naked. And the abstract rationalizing of that century was soon to have another enemy in alliance with history, the new force of science.
Was Numa Pompilius, a real person? By no means, says modern criticism. I will quote you Mr. Stobart: "The Seven Kings of Rome are for the most part mere names which have been fitted by rationalizing historians, presumably Greek, with inventions appropriate to them. Tomulus is simply the patron hero of Rome called by her name.
And now the astonishing and perturbing suspicion emerges that perhaps almost all that had passed for social science, political economy, politics, and ethics in the past may be brushed aside by future generations as mainly rationalizing. John Dewey has already reached this conclusion in regard to philosophy.
He begins, in a manner fitted to make old Homer smile, with a rationalizing account of the girdle of Venus, the girdle which Venus lends to Juno when the latter wishes to excite the amorous desire of Jove. Venus, we are told, is pure beauty as it comes from the hand of nature. Her girdle makes her 'winsome'. So winsomeness is something distinct from beauty; something transferable, movable.
There is no room for progress in philosophic, thoroughgoing Buddhism. In the Greek view the universe is subject in part to the rationalizing process; but only in part. The effort at ethicization is entirely futile. The Greek view, equally with the Buddhistic, is at a loss to understand change. It does not brand it as unreal, but change produced by man is branded as a departure from nature.
The Minotaur was the Sun; Pasiphae, 'the very bright one, wife of Minos, was the Moon; and the Labyrinth was the tower on whose walls the astronomers of the day traced the wanderings of the heavenly bodies, 'an image of the starry heaven, with its infinitely winding paths, in which, nevertheless, the sun and moon so surely move about. Among rationalizing explanations this must surely hold the palm for cumbrousness and complexity, and we may be thankful that the explorer's spade has demolished it along with other theories, and given back to us, as we shall see, at least the elements of a romance such as that which was so dear to the Athenian public.
The terrible fear of falling into mere rationalizing is gradually extending from the so-called natural sciences to psychology, anthropology, politics, and political economy. All this is a cheering response to the new situation. But, as has been pointed out, really honest discussion of our social, economic, and political standards and habits readily takes on the suspicion of heresy and infidelity.
Isaac Israeli and Gabirol discuss special questions in Physics and Metaphysics without bringing them into relation with Judaism or the text of the Bible. Saadia takes cognizance of philosophical doctrine solely with a view to establishing and rationalizing Jewish dogma, and only in so far as it may thus be utilized.
It has seemed worth while to linger a moment over these two rather unimportant productions for the sake of the light they throw on Schiller's general attitude. One sees that remote antiquity has lost in his eyes something of its old poetic glamour. He is content to explain it like any rationalizing professor.
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