—though here again the item ‘pluralistic’ does not chime with the common conception, and ‘pessimistic’ is hardly less open to challenge. ‘Intellectualistic’ appears to be aimed at Hegelians, but would be understood by many as describing the tendency to set up ‘reason’ against ‘authority’; and Professor James’s ‘rationalists,’ who would appear to include thinkers like his colleague Professor Royce, would not be so described in England by many university men, clergymen, or journalists. The name ‘rationalist,’ in short, has come to mean for most people in this country very much what ‘freethinker’ used to mean for those who did not employ it as a mere term of abuse. It stands, that is to say, for one who rejects the claims of ‘revelation,’ the idea of a personal God, the belief in personal immortality, and in general the conceptions logically accruing to the practices of prayer and worship.
Perhaps the best name for such persons would be ‘naturalist,’ which was already in use with some such force in the time of Bodin and Montaigne. Kant, it may be remembered, distinguished between ‘rationalists,’ as thinkers who did not deny the possibility of a revelation, and ‘naturalists’ who did. But though ‘naturalism,’ has latterly been recognised by many as a highly convenient term for the view of things which rejects ‘supernaturalism,’ and will be so used in the present discussion, the correlative ‘naturalist’ has never, so to speak, been naturalised in English. For one thing, it has been specialised in ordinary language in the sense of ‘student of nature,’ or rather of what has come to be specially known as ‘natural history’—in particular, the life of birds, insects, fishes, and animals. And, further, the term ‘naturalism,’ like every other general label for a way of thinking, is liable to divagations and misunderstandings. Some thinkers (known to the present writer only through the accounts given of them by others) appear to formulate as a philosophic principle the doctrine that the best way to regulate our lives is to find out how the broad processes of ‘Nature’ is tending, and to conform to it alike our ideals and our practice. The notion is that if, say, Nature appears to be making for the extermination of backward races, we should try to help the process forward. It is doubtful whether more than a very small number of instructed men have ever entertained such a principle. It is certainly not the expression of the philosophy of those ancients who sought to ‘live according to Nature’; and it would certainly not have been assented to by such modern ‘naturalists’ as Spencer and Huxley and Mill. But if the principle is current at all, it makes the name of ‘naturalist’ as ambiguous philosophically as ‘rationalist’ can be.[2]
And similar drawbacks attach to another set of terms which have much to recommend them—‘positive,’ ‘positivist,’ and ‘positivism.’ They stand theoretically for (1) the provable, (2) the attitude of the seeker for intelligible proof in all things, (3) the conviction that the rights of reason are ultimate and indefeasible. But here again, to say nothing of the equivoque of ‘positive,’ we are met by a claim of pre-emption, the claim of Comte to associate the ‘ism’ specifically with his system, theoretic and practical. And for the majority of men with positivist proclivities, the gist of the ‘practical application’ of Comte is incompatible with the positive spirit. Positivism with a capital P is thereby made for them, as it was for Littré, something alien to positivism as the free scientific spirit would seek to shape it. And a wrangle over the ownership of the word would be a waste of time.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See A Full Answer to a late View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, in a Dialogue between a Rational Christian and his Friend. London, 1777. The orthodox writer deals severely with some lines of Christian apologetics which have since had vogue.
[2] The somewhat awkward term ‘naturalistic,’ which is sometimes useful, is hereinafter used in relation to the sense above given for ‘naturalism.’
§ 2. THE PRACTICAL POSITION
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 current rationalism in the broad sense indicated, as on the one hand an outcome of tendencies seen at work in the earlier movements so named, and on the other hand as apparently committing its representatives to a certain body or class of conclusions. For there is this capital element in common for all the stirrings known by the name of rationalism, that they stand for ‘private judgment’ as against mere tradition or mere authority. Early ‘rationalists’ might indeed seek to put a quasi-rational form upon tradition, and to give reasons for recognising authority. But in their day and degree they had their active part in the evolution of the critical faculty, inasmuch as they outwent the line of mere acquiescence; and views which to-day form part of uncritically accepted creeds were once products of innovating (however fallacious) reasoning. There is no saltum mortale in the evolution of thought. The very opponents of the rationalist often claim to be more rational than he, and must at least use his methods up to a certain point. This is done even by the quasi-skeptical school, of whom some claim to subordinate reason to some species of insight which they either omit to discriminate intelligibly from the process of judgment, or do not admit to need its sanction.