Animism. By Edward Clodd , author of The Story of Creation . Pantheism. By James Allanson Picton , author of The Religion of the Universe . The Religions of Ancient China. By Professor Giles , LL.D., Professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge. The Religion of Ancient Greece. By Jane Harrison , Lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge, author of Prolegomena to Study of Greek Religion . Islam. By the Rt. Hon. Ameer Ali Syed , of the Judicial Committee of His Majesty’s Privy Council, author

Early Greek Philosophy. By A. W. Benn , author of The Philosophy of Greece, Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century . Stoicism. By Professor St. George Stock , author of Deductive Logic , editor of the Apology of Plato , etc. Plato. By Professor A. E. Taylor , St. Andrews University, author of The Problem of Conduct . Scholasticism. By Father Rickaby , S.J. Hobbes. By Professor A. E. Taylor . Locke. By Professor Alexander , of Owens College. Comte and Mill. By T. Whittaker , author of The Neoplato

The names ‘rationalist’ and ‘rationalism’ have been used in so many senses within the past three hundred years that they cannot be said to stand quite definitely for any type or school of philosophic thought. For Bacon, a ‘rationalist’ or rationalis was a physician with a priori views of disease and bodily function; and the Aristotelian humanists of the Helmstadt school were named rationalistas about the same period by their opponents. A little later some Continental scholars applied the name to

The usages being so, most of us who can answer to the term ‘rationalist’ may reasonably let its general force be decided for us by the stream of tendency in ordinary speech; and, recognising the existence of other applications, one may usefully seek to give a philosophic account of what its adoption seems to involve. That is to say, the present treatise does not undertake to present, much less to justify, all the views which have ever been described as ‘rationalistic,’ but merely to present curr

It is fitting, then, at the very outset to make a critical scrutiny of the implications of our term. Rationalism, broadly, implies the habitual resort to reason, to reflection, to judgment. The rationalist, in effect, says, ‘That which I find to be incredible I must disbelieve, whatever prestige may attach to its assertion; that which I find to be doubtful or inconceivable I will so describe. Finding the practice of prayer to be incompatible not only with any sincere belief in natural law, but w

But we have now clearly imported into the rationalist philosophy a principle or factor which ostensibly rivals or primes reason. The rationalist avows a moral bias—an attitude towards his fellows, a moral ‘taste,’ let us say—which partly determines his reasoned judgment. He has a conception of goodness in virtue of which he finds ‘revelation’ frequently repellent and the popular ‘God’ a chimera; even as the believer finds them satisfactory because they are in part conformable to his moral and sp

The philosophic issue under this head has been usefully cleared for English readers by Mr. A. J. Balfour in his Defence of Philosophic Doubt ; and, in another sense, very usefully for rationalists by the same writer in his work The Foundations of Belief . The gist of the former treatise is an expansion of the proposition of Hume that all moral judgments, on analysis, are found to root in a sentiment or bias. In particular, Mr. Balfour argues that all scientific beliefs so-called, however immedia

The problem as to ‘the sphere of Reason’ could not be more effectually raised. Mr. Balfour clearly implies that there is a sphere of Reason, but forces a perplexed query as to when he believes himself to enter it. Evidently, by his own definitions, his whole political life is lived outside it. Alike his generalisations from past history, and his predictions of the future, are such as afford ‘no ground for believing them to be even approximately true’: those of his opponents, of course, coming fo

It may have been observed, with or without perplexity, that Mr. Balfour specified a ‘need for religious truth ’ as his ground for holding his unspecified ‘theological beliefs,’ this after bracketing Religion and Science as alike ‘unproved systems,’ consisting (by implication) of a body of propositions as to which we have not ‘any ground for believing them to be even approximately true.’ The skeptico-religious conception of truth being thus found to be as nugatory as that of ‘reason’ put forward

To a surprising degree, the philosophic disputes of the ages turn upon the same problems; and to an extent that is nothing short of sinister, they resolve themselves for most of the onlookers, if not of the participants, into the question of the maintenance of the popular religion. Thus academic theists in our own day are found resenting the tendency of ancient freethinkers to discredit and disestablish the Gods of Olympus, who for the academics themselves, as for everybody else, are a set of ch

Ideals, obviously, are part—the best part—of our bias: to that admission we may unhesitatingly revert. By his bias the rationalist can afford to be tried. Intellectually he makes truth his paramount consideration, and morally he insists upon the same sincerity in things intellectual as men profess to practise in honourable intercourse. I have heard a distinguished Christian scholar denounce these canons as commanding such an outrage as telling a child of its mother’s shame. The charge is an illu