"Rationality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with brutes. But, should it then appear, that like the brutes they were principally created for the use of man, he will let them patiently bite the bridle, and not mock them with empty praise; or, should their rationality be proved, he will not impede their improvement merely to gratify his sensual appetites. He will not with all the graces of rhetoric, advise them to submit implicitly their understandings to the guidance of man. He will not, when he treats of the education of women, assert, that they ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... experience itself, it only means that it is very difficult to mint it into the universal coinage of the world. The recovery of faith, after some catastrophic bankruptcy of spiritual values, as with Job or Dante or Faust, cannot be described in analytic steps. The loss of faith in the rationality of the universe, the collapse of the "beautiful world" within, can be told step by step; the process of integration and reconstruction, on the other hand, always remains somewhat of a mystery, though it is plain enough that a new and richer inner world has been found. So, too, with ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... books, all the standard works on hypnotism, mind-cure, faith-cure, new thought, etc. I was deeply imbued with the truths they contained. I became greatly opposed to the so-called "materialism" of medical science. The rationality and philosophical truth of the mind-cure systems ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... peculiarities of its now extinct predecessors—and this in the exact historical order of their succession in geological time. The more that we think about this antithesis between the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic interpretations, the greater must we feel the contrast in respect of rationality to become; and, therefore, I need not spend time by saying anything further upon the antecedent standing of the two theories in this respect. The evidence, then, which I am about to adduce from the study of development in the life-histories of individual ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... salutary idea that no good morals are to be found outside religion, and that the maxims of the philosophers, who pretend to institute a natural morality, are nothing but whims and babblings of foolish trash. The rationality of good morals is not to be found in nature, which in itself is indifferent, ignorant of good or evil. It is in the divine word, which is not to be trespassed against without after regret. The laws of humanity are based on utility, ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... replenished with such numbers of monstrous, wicked and unhappy women, who hide their wickedness and ill natures under their powdered locks, and flattring looks; and like a Camelion, in their Maiden estate, will be agreeable to all things that are propounded to them; but being married, they abandon all rationality, make their own passions their masters, and cannot understand by any means the pleasures of their husbands. Though they certainly know, and have daily experience, that there is nothing under the Sun, which hath a bewitchinger power ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... leaning—are on the same side; and Diestel, [8] in his full discussion of the subject, remorselessly rejects the universality doctrine. Even that staunch opponent of scientific rationalism—may I say rationality?—Zockler [9] flinches from a distinct defence of the thesis, any opposition to which, well within my recollection, was howled down by the orthodox as mere "infidelity." All that, in his sore straits, Dr. Zockler is able to do, is to pronounce a faint commendation upon a particularly absurd attempt ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his own mind that, if the other were disposed to make trouble, the legal proofs of Constance's identity would be so easily forthcoming. Barnes was dead; her mother had passed away many years before; the child had been born in London—where?—the marquis' rationality, just before his demise, was a debatable question. In fact, since he had learned Saint-Prosper was in the city, the attorney's mind had been soaring among a cloud of vague possibilities, and now, regarding his companion with a most kindly, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... is wise in the measure of the contents of his memory, and who had stored up many things in their memory, speaking almost solely from the memory, and therefore not from themselves but from others, and their rationality had not been at all perfected by means of the things in their memory. Some of these were stupid and some sottish, not in the least comprehending whether a truth is true or not, and seizing upon all ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... there will be people, who will read what I have just written in an agony of rationality, and say that it is all rubbish. But I am describing an experience of ecstasy which is not very common perhaps; but just as real an experience as eating or drinking. I have had the experience before. I shall have ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... for the sword which Joseph had buckled about his waist within Blentz's forbidding walls; nor for the arms and ammunition he had taken from the dead brigands—all of which he had before him as tangible evidence of the rationality ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... like—otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings, and show themselves more commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to put up with. The self-confident visions that had beguiled her were not of a highly exceptional kind; and she had at least shown some rationality in consulting the person who knew the most and had flattered her the least. In asking Klesmer's advice, however, she had rather been borne up by a belief in his latent admiration than bent on knowing anything ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... I've clean dished them! Loard, Loard! once more I can believe in the rationality of Thy world. (Gathers up again his cloak, hat, etc.) And to think—to think—I was on the very act of going ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... dementia, alienation of mind, madness, lunacy, craziness, derangement, frenzy, delirium, mania, hallucination, aberration of mind, bedlamism; paranoia, monomania. Antonyms: sanity, rationality, lucidity. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... ignores essentials and magnifies trifles; theory which, applied to structures which have failed from their own weight, shows them to be perfectly safe and correct in design; half-baked theories which arrogate to themselves a monopoly on rationality. ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... education; and let a due proportion of fit minds enter the professions, the posts of office, and commercial pursuits; let a few even live by mere work of thought; but let all enjoy the luxury of a degree of thought and rationality that shall forbid their richest blessing turning to their rankest curse. That such must be the result of a true education, our faith in a wise Providence forbids us to doubt. Such an education being real, and appealing to all the faculties, does not eventuate in vain aspirings; but fits each ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of domestic service have always been exempt from manual labor, and therefore constantly impose exacting duties upon employees, the nature of which they do not understand by experience; there is thus no curb of rationality imposed upon the employer's requirements and demands. She is totally unlike the foreman in a shop, who has only risen to his position by way of having actually performed with his own hands all the work of the men he directs. ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative—design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske quotes a quaint observation of Kepler's illustrating this very point, which we may ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... root is ratio, but it is directly from rationalis that the word in question is derived. Now this word is good enough in itself, for it signifies what is conformable to reason, that which possesses the attributes and methods of reason. Man is a rational animal, and it is his rationality that distinguishes him from all other animals. So much for this part of the word Rationalism. Now for the barbarous part of it, the -ism. This termination belongs to another language, the Greek -ismos, and is derived ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Christ, where the spirit of Christ is not, are yet in some esteem with men: But THESE, when the spirit of delusion has left them, are abhorred, both skin and bones: For in themselves they are without any sense, or rationality (Eze 20:25,26); yea, they look as parts of things which are used to conjure up devils with: These were prefigured by the ordinances that were NOT good, and by the judgments whereby one should not live. For what is there, or can there be of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... interest at a distance, for one nearer, though of less consideration; if this be the whole of the case, all that can be said is, that strong passions, some kind of brute force within, prevails over the principle of rationality. However, if this be with a clear, full, and distinct view of the truth of things, then it is doing the utmost violence to themselves, acting in the most palpable contradiction to their very nature. But if ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... creed, of the poorer sort of self-esteem, of futile contentiousness, and so to seek and again seek with undeviating singleness of mind the right interpretation of our experiences—here is the genuine seal of intellectual mastery and the true stamp of a perfect rationality. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... ease A sonnet for the Album, while I put Bold face on, best foot forward, make for house, March in to aunt and niece, and tell the truth— (Even white-lying goes against my taste After your little story). Oh, the niece Is rationality itself! The aunt— If she's amenable to reason too— Why, you stooped short to pay her due respect, And let the Duke wait (I'll work well the Duke). If she grows gracious, I return for you; If thunder's in the air, why—bear your doom, Dine ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... I understand the rationality of her purpose. She could easily get De Beer's confidence. She had known him when a child. Her father had been his business partner, presumably his friend. And I saw her now cleverly altering her status here. She had been ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... very fond of me, almost too fond. I could do with less caressing and more rationality. I should like to be less of a pet and more of a friend, if I might choose; but I won't complain of that: I am only afraid his affection loses in depth where it gains in ardour. I sometimes liken it to a fire of dry twigs and branches compared with one of solid coal, very bright ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... (which since first telling of the 'Tower of Babel' story has somewhat fallen from grace as a symptom of unity among mankind), or rather, subsuming it as one of the most essential exhibitions of rationality, and indeed its chief instrument, we come to Man's unity as a creature possessed of reason, and expressing this reasoning habit in specific modes of living, under whatever external surroundings. These being almost infinitely various, it is not always easy to compare examples ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... her shadow is common-sense." Yet Codman speaks with certainly no more authority than Prote, when the latter, in his Origins of Fable, declares this epos is "a parable of ... man's vain journeying in search of that rationality and justice which his nature craves, and discovers nowhere in the universe: and the shirt is an emblem of this instinctive craving, as ... the shadow symbolizes conscience. Sereda typifies a surrender to life as it is, a giving up of man's rebellious ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... unfortunate story that gave rise to my printed poem, "The Lament." This was a most melancholy affair, which I cannot yet bear to reflect on, and had very nearly given me one or two of the principal qualifications for a place among those who have lost the chart, and mistaken the reckoning of rationality. I gave up my part of the farm to my brother; in truth, it was only nominally mine; and made what little preparation was in my power ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... it. The myth of the Phoenix typifies the life of reason "eternally preparing for itself," as Hegel says, "a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it; but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life." That the power of negativity enters constitutively into the rationality of the world, nay, that the rationality of the world demands negativity in it, is Hegel's most original contribution to thought. His complete philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and everything it contains manifests ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... like the Ark of Noah, is worth saving: not for the sake of the unclean beasts that almost filled it, and probably made most noise and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality, that was as much distressed by the stink within as by ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... it, but for that sub-vigorous element in his character, that saving strain of practical rationality, which had brought him thus far in life without sheer overthrow. An hour after receiving Alma's enigmatical note, he was oppressed by inertia; another hour roused him to self-preservation, and supplied him with a project. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... of perverted intellects. Never was a man versed in books more ignorant of mankind; never did a lover of scientific precision better succeed in changing the character of facts. It was he who, two days before the 20th of June, amidst the most brutal public excitement, admired "the calmness" and rationality of the multitude; "considering the way people interpret events, it might be supposed that they had given some hours of each day to the study of analysis." It is he who, two days after the 20th of June, extolled the red cap ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... after this Gregory, in silence, looked down at the grass between them, clasping his knees; for he now sat upright. Then, controlling his anger to argumentative rationality, he said, while again wrenching away at the strongly rooted tufts: "If she did refuse, what reason could she give for refusing? As I say, there's absolutely ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Almanack of Poor Richard, which, besides the Pilgrim's Progress and the Book of Martyrs, I whiles read on the week-days for a little diversion, I see it is set down with great rationality, that "we should never buy for the bargain sake." Experience teaches all men, and I found that to my cost in this matter; for, cheap as the coat and waistcoat seemed which I had bought from the auld-farrant Welsh flunkie with the peaked hat and the pigtail, I made no great shakes of them after all. ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... he isn't a good sort of chap," said Sir Isaac, with that same note of almost superhuman rationality, "only—he isn't going ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... vibration of energy pass in a beam through my head, throbbing, throbbing ... darkness engulfed me. It was a darkness that was a black whirlwind of emotion. The sense of the desertion by humankind, by God and mercy and rationality swept through me and overwhelmed my inner self. I will never forget the utter agony of shrieking pain and loss that formed a whirling ocean of darkness into ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... by the rose-bush, looked at Mother Binning. "I suppose we call it 'wisdom' when two feel alike. Now that's just what I feel about Alexander Jardine! It's just feeling without rationality." ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... is impossible to retract. An advance must not subvert its own basis nor revoke the interest which it furthers. While hunger subsists the art of ploughing is rational; had agriculture abolished appetite it would have destroyed its own rationality. Similarly no state of society is to be regarded as ideal in which those bodily functions are supposed to be suspended which created the ideal by suggesting their own perfect exercise. If old age and death were abolished, reproduction, indeed, would become unnecessary: ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... exercises were going on Cavor seems to have experienced a considerable relaxation of his confinement. "The first dread and distrust our unfortunate conflict aroused is being," he said, "continually effaced by the deliberate rationality of all I do.... I am now able to come and go as I please, or I am restricted only for my own good. So it is I have been able to get at this apparatus, and, assisted by a happy find among the material that is littered in this enormous store-cave, I have contrived to despatch ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon the average man. Some values, such as existence, persistence, and rationality, are assumed to be 'real'; others are relegated to the 'ideal' Under the influence of natural science, special emphasis is laid on those values with which that science is engaged. But our world changes with us. It rises as we rise, and falls as ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Church, like the Ark of Noah, is worth saving; not for the sake of the unclean beasts that almost filled it and probably made most noise and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality that was as much distressed by the stink within as by ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... principle, both being driven into essentially differing directions by this opposition of the theoretical and practical. Even with this began the downfall of scholasticism; its highest point was also the turning point to its self-destruction. The rationality of the dogmas, the oneness of faith and knowledge, had been constantly their fundamental premise; but this premise fell away, and the whole basis of their metaphysics was given up in principle the moment Duns Scotus placed the problem of theology in the practical. ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... periods of control, for there are times when the mind wearies of rationality, and, as it were in self-defense, in obedience to the instinct of progressive life, craves a specious comfort. It seemed undeniable that Mr. Warricombe regarded him with growth of interest, invited his conversation more unreservedly. He began to understand Martin's ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... all sorts to such tempting markets; and it was not long before the goods, not the money, were in excess. Prices came down, as sailors say, by the run, and Spain and San Francisco were reduced once more to rationality and comfort. These were exceptional cases, but they illustrate the general principle, that the increase of money raises prices, and the decrease of money lowers them, which is all we wish to state. In ordinary cases, however, when the currency is in its normal condition, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... to those who are unacquainted with the Platonic notion of eternity as a fixed state out of time, which has no past, present, or future, and is simply that which "always is"—an everlasting now. The soul, in its elements of rationality and freedom, has existed anterior to time, because it now exists in eternity.[608] In its actual manifestations and personal history it is to be contemplated as a "generated being," ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... rash matrimonial engagements; no penniless lovers selfishly and indissolubly linked together to propagate large families Of starving children. Ail the arrangements of the insect tribe, though prompted by sheer instinct are conducted with a degree of rationality that in some cases raises the mere instinct of the creeping thing above ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... about him, which, added to his then quietude of demeanour, insensibly interested in his favor, those even who were most forward to condemn the vice to which he was invariably addicted. Not, be it understood, that in naming seasons of rationality, we mean seasons of positive abstemiousness; nor can this well be, seeing that Sampson never passed a day of strict sobriety during the last twenty years of his life. But, it might be said, that his three divisions of day—morning, noon ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... regard any collective being, such as a college or a regiment—and Nature is a collective being—as a true person. But their arguments are unconvincing. They allow that "I" am a person because "I" possess rationality and self-consciousness. But "I" am a system or organisation of innumerable beings—electrons, groupings of electrons, groups of groupings in rising complexity. "I"—the body and soul which makes up ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... show, I can testify that it was truly magnificent, though the introductory portion was somewhat spoilt by the too great prevalence of the bicycle, which is daily increasing its ubiquity, nor do I see the rationality of engaging a sais in topped boots to attend upon each machine, under the transparent pretentiousness of its belonging to the equine genus, since it can never become the similitude of a horse ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... most delicate tints in the lights, and faintness of shadow joining with the most delicate and pearly grays of color harmony; while the subject of the design being in nearly all cases reduced to mere intricacy of ornamental line, might be colored in any way the architect chose without any loss of rationality. Where oak-leaves and roses were carved into fresh relief and perfect bloom, it was necessary to paint the one green and the other red; but in portions of ornamentation where there was nothing which could be definitely construed into either an oak-leaf or a rose, but a mere ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... detect in Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann. Goethe illustrates a union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism, [227] in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty—that marriage of Faust and Helena, of which the art of the nineteenth century is the child, the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe conceives him, on the crags, in the "splendour of battle and in harness as for victory," his brows ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... just like her. Her conversation is not merely like that of a woman already, but like that of a most uncommonly informed, cultivated, and sagacious woman; and at the same time that her understanding is thus wonderfully premature, she can, at pleasure, throw off all this rationality, and make herself a mere playful, giddy, romping child. One moment, with mingled gravity and sarcasm, she discusses characters, and the next, with schoolgirl spirits, she jumps round the room; then, suddenly, she asks, "Do you know ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... would frequently pause in conversation to notice his dogs and speak to them, as if rational companions; and, indeed, there appears to be a vast deal of rationality in these faithful attendants on man, derived from their close intimacy with him. Maida deported himself with a gravity becoming his age and size, and seemed to consider himself called upon to preserve a great degree of dignity and decorum in our society. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... applies to certain things, namely, all the members of the human race that have been, are, or ever will be: this is its quantity in extension. But the term 'man' has also a certain meaning, and implies certain attributes—rationality, animality, and a definite bodily shape: the sum of these attributes constitutes its quantity ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... judgment will soon come to the supreme test, Dr. Higgins. She is simply numbed and dazed from coming through the Spot." Charlotte had already described to him the girl's arrival. "The mystery is that she was permitted an hour of rationality before this came upon her. I wonder if Hobart's vitality had anything to do with it?"—half to himself. "As for the Rhamda"—he smiled—"he is merely interested in the Spot; that is all. He would never harm the Aradna; he had nothing whatever to do with her condition. We were ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... very many forms—in some the imagination, though strong, scarcely passes beyond the first stage, always retains its youthful, almost childish form, hardly modified by a minimum of rationality. Let us note that it is not a question here of the characteristic ingenuousness of some inventors, which has caused them to be called "grown-up children," but of the candor and inherent simplicity of the imagination itself. This exceptional form is hardly reconcilable except with esthetic creation. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and formulate. Don't you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and that should in itself fully account for ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... this life and this death, to be regarded as a common movement on behalf of a deep and heart-fretting Hebrew patriotism, which was not the less sincere, because it ran headlong into the unamiable form of rancorous rationality and inhuman bigotry? Were they a wild degeneration from a principle originally noble? Or, on the contrary, this life and this death, were they alike the expression of a base mercenary selfishness, caught and baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... learn so much nor so rapidly as those of the second class, but their whole being is permeated by what they know. They are constantly studying the relations of the things that they learn to each other and to life; and are endeavoring to form themselves in accordance with the rationality they thus acquire; for their Affections have fastened themselves upon it, and it is therefore becoming a ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... not easy to reply with rationality, or even gravity, to a supposition, which appears to be based on the conception that a sudden and entire subversion of the deepest of those elements on which human, and even animal, life on the globe is based, is possible from so inadequate a cause: and it might ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... or at home. Clara was in a perfect transport at being admitted into the number of the archeresses, and had struck up one of her eternal friendships with Louisa, the second Miss Faulkner; and Marian might very fairly be provoked at seeing how entirely her mind was diverted from all the rationality which she and Caroline had been endeavouring—and as they had hoped, not without success—to infuse into her during the past year. To get Clara to settle quietly down to anything was an utter impossibility; her ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... unlocated, added to the irritation of the natives, and multiplied the agents of destruction. Land unfenced, and flocks and herds moving on hill and dale, left the motions of the native hunters free; but hedges and homesteads were signals which even the least rationality could not fail to understand, and on every re-appearance the natives found some favorite spot surrounded by new enclosures, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. Here, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. So in the course of progress all earlier reality becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality, peaceable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death without a struggle, forcible when it strives against this necessity. And so the Hegelian statement through the Hegelian dialectic ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... alternating flicker of rationality, the miser fell back, sputtering, into his previous gibberish, but it took now an arithmetical turn. Eyes closed, he lay ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... rational who carefully suspended his judgement, I conclude that if this course is departed from, neither the metaphysical teleologist nor the scientific atheist has any perceptible advantage over the other in respect of rationality. For as the formal conditions of a metaphysical teleology are undoubtedly present on the one hand, and the formal conditions of a speculative atheism are as undoubtedly present on the other, there is thus in both cases a logical vacuum ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... away. "Let's try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was—is, I should say, since of course it still exists—that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth through Time, operated by a Robot. Call it that. A pseudo-human monster fashioned of metal in the ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... suggestive moralist, has written a book, Les Fonctiones mentales dans les societes inferieures, in which he seeks to distinguish between a primitive pre-logical rationality, not subject to the law of contradiction, and a later logical rationality, which refuses to admit contradictions. He points out how much wider and more fruitful ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... made very tight, you know, for some time,' the tailor said, 'but the newest fashion is loose sleeves.' 'Loose sleeves, ah? Well, they will be a great deal more comfortable than these. Make mine loose.' What do you think of that, uncle? Do you see no rationality there?" ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... itself good and pleasant to the good man; now the fact of living, so far as animals are concerned, is characterised generally by the power of sentience, in man it is characterised by that of sentience, or of rationality (the faculty of course being referred to the actual operation of the faculty, certainly the main point is the actual operation of it); so that living seems mainly to consist in the act of sentience or exerting rationality: now the fact ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... great cause is left, is to tell us that we have reached the final stage of human progress, and turned over the last leaf in the volume of human improvements. The day when this is said and believed marks the end of a nation's life. Is it possible that, after all, our old protestant spirit, with its rationality, its austerity, its steady political energy, has been struck with something of the mortal fatigue that seizes catholic societies after ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... dangerous contemplation; though, at the same time, Anne could believe, with Lady Russell, that a more equal match might have greatly improved him; and that a woman of real understanding might have given more consequence to his character, and more usefulness, rationality, and elegance to his habits and pursuits. As it was, he did nothing with much zeal, but sport; and his time was otherwise trifled away, without benefit from books or anything else. He had very good spirits, which never seemed ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... institutions as they concretely exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each in its time and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as they are, individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and nurture, consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... sees, serves, and loves after a colossal fashion, but is as natural in his large life as a lesser man is in his meager life. "Caliban upon Setebos" is a hint of the man's immense movement of soul and his serene rationality. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... yield him food and shelter, and his material requirements generally. The enormously important and far-reaching range of facts here brought to view have largely determined the chequered course of industrial and social evolution. But even so, weighty reservations must be made. There is the element of rationality (implicit in external phenomena) which has responded to the workings of human reason. There are the manifestations of something deeper than physics in the operations of so-called natural laws, and all the moral influences those laws have brought to ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the relativists, are perfectly right, and accomplish a progress. However, the initial rationality of their thesis becomes in its turn a false theory. Repeating the old adage that there is no accounting for tastes, they believe that aesthetic expression is of the same nature as the pleasant and the unpleasant, which every one feels in his own way, and as to which ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... a psychiatric production would seem craziness. A script-writer might have trouble writing out a psychiatrist's prescription, or he might not. But producing it would be out of all rationality! No camera, the patient would be the star, and most lines would be ad libbed. Cochrane viewed such a production with extreme distaste. But of course, if a man wanted only to be famous, it might be handled as a straight public-relations ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... so rational, and then so convivial, at length permitted its conviviality to destroy its rationality. Men who spoke and thought like heroes one hour, the next spoke what they did not think, and made me think what I did not speak. No one got drunk except the purser, who is always a privileged person; yet they ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... this last for ever?' She felt so feminine and illogical, and the masculine, masterful rationality of his appeal touched her so intimately, that she had discovered in the woe and the indecision of her situation a kind of happiness. And she wished to keep what she had got. At length a certain courage and resolution visited her, and summoning all her sweetness she said to him: 'Don't press ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... respect of the end constitutionally indicated,—here only the avenues of temptation, by which alien elements come in to array the man against himself in a terrible conflict, so sublime that it is a spectacle to heavenly powers. It is only as this rationality is clearly developed, and is allotted its just place in Moral Science, that the universal structure to which we have already alluded, and which, as we saw, culminated in the will, assumes its peculiar sublimity. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... well there was but one; and he named her. From her future husband Lucy Apsley received that praise of exceptions wherewith women are now, and always will be, praised: "Mr. Hutchinson," she says, "fancying something of rationality in the sonnet beyond the customary reach of a she-wit, could scarcely believe it ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox Spanish thinker, Miguel ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... whom I visited," would hardly be proper; that would here be better. When such nouns are strictly of the neuter gender, which may represent them; as, "The committees which were appointed." But where the idea of rationality is predominant, who or whom seems not to be improper; as, "The conclusion of the Iliad is like the exit of a great man out of company whom he has entertained magnificently."—Cowper. "A law is only the expression of the desire of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... essays, and debate the kittle points of divinity and other hidden knowledge, in the Cross-Keys monthly, denying the existence of the soul of man, as Dr Sinney told me, till they were deprived of all rationality by foreign or British spirits. In short, I was perplexed when I heard of the design, not knowing what to do, or what might be expected from me by government in a case of such emergency as the setting up of a newspaper so declaredly adverse to every species ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... powerful and yet sweet and tender voice, and with a fervor and exaltation that caught the heart of the riotous crowd. The two ministers in the throng beneath took up the strain; Master Pory added a husky tenor, eloquent of much sack; presently we were all singing. The audacious suitors, charmed into rationality, fell back, and the broken line re-formed. The Governor and the Council descended, and with pomp and solemnity took their places between the maids and the two ministers who were to head the column. The psalm ended, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... in fact, to envisage from within and without the confused hurly-burly of life's drama; and to give to this contradictory and complicated spectacle the aesthetic rationality or imaginative inevitableness of a rhythmic work ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... quietly. Somehow to Bezdek he gave the impression of remorseless rationality. "Oh, yes, these fantasy movies—we're a little ...
— Reel Life Films • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... one took it comically, and the other seriously. They were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died. But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics and their subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed at the thing with the shameless rationality of another race. ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... — N. intellect, mind, understanding, reason, thinking principle; rationality; cogitative faculties, cognitive faculties, discursive faculties, reasoning faculties, intellectual faculties; faculties, senses, consciousness, observation, percipience, intelligence, intellection, intuition, association of ideas, instinct, conception, judgment, wits, parts, capacity, intellectuality, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... idolatry. You keep Noah's Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only, sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely death, which could not be excluded ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Hon. H. S. Conway, July 1.-Bruce's Travels. French barbarity and folly. Grand Federation in the Champ de Mars. Rationality of the Americans. Franklin and Washington. A great man wanted in France. Return of Necker. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... start from her eyes. What she had seen, and what she had heard of the new existence which he was organizing for himself made her feel sick with pity. But mingled with her pity was a sharp disdain. The idea of Julian talking about cleanliness, dust-traps, and rationality gave her a desire to laugh and cry at once. All the stolid and yet wary conservatism of her character revolted against meals at odd hours, brown bread, apples, orange-sucking, action of the skin, male cooking, camp-beds, the frowsiness of casual charwomen, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... feeling injustice gave me a claim to justice. Whoever has the moral sense to claim rights is by that very endowment vested with rights. "The true brotherhood between us rational animals," said this party, "is founded in our rationality and in our sentiments of justice and piety, and not in our animal nature. But this Batrachian, although belonging to the lower orders of animal nature, partakes with us of reason and of the sentiments ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Newman once wrote, "like opinions to be brought to them, rather than to be at the pains to go out and seek for them." But Newman himself was cast in another mould; rationality, consistency, were an imperative craving with him; and feeling that the popular religious creed lacked these things, he went in search of them and started, as it were, on a journey. A memorandum, written down at the age of twenty-eight, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... channels, flowing broadly apart through unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity, vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say, Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling vestments of poetry and philosophy and ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... it would be a rather less reasonable step than suicide, and I have always declined to discuss suicide. One must see some glimmer of rationality in a project to be able to discuss it, and in this notion of yours I can see ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... shalt not suffer a witch to live," and the various precepts that have been enumerated in the preceding chapters. Surely sufficient evidence has been noted to convince a thinking being that reason is a better guide than theism. Belief is the antithesis of reason; reason is rationality; religious belief ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... rational being must proceed according to some law. They cannot succeed each other at hap-hazard. The notion of rationality is conditioned upon this regular procedure; if this be wanting, the essential character of rational action is wanting. But to say that rational processes are determined by law, and conditioned upon a regular procedure, is simply to assert that the steps in ratiocination ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... trembling and unnerved. He tried to persuade himself that the woman whom he had just left was ill, and laboring under some sudden aberration of mind; yet, in spite of himself, he realized a terrible rationality in it. Little as he had been among the village people of late, and little as he had heard of the village gossip, he knew the story of Richard Alger's desertion of Sylvia Crane. Was he not like Richard Alger in his own desertion of Charlotte Barnard? and had not ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... than a mere unmeditated expression of emotion, as in the crowd. The public is never ecstatic. It is always more or less rational. It is this fact of conflict, in the form of discussion, that introduces into the control exercised by public opinion the elements of rationality and of fact. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... pierced the thick terror with a shaft of rationality. Alice. He must survive for Alice's sake. He must find the way ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... one must want nothing which is not an expression of rationality. The State is the world which the spirit has made for itself; it has therefore a determinate and self-conscious course. One often speaks of the wisdom of God in nature, but one must not believe that the physical world of nature is higher than the world of spirit. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... they first began to take on the qualities of their species they have survived and won success by the fury of their assault. In almost all our breeds of dogs this primal ferocity has been overlaid by the various motives of rationality, sympathy, and conventional demeanor, until one may live half a lifetime with well-bred dogs without a chance to see the demon which we have buried in their breasts, as we have in our own, beneath a host of civilizing influences. It is rare indeed in our day that ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... bagpipe; will stir my blood, and fill me with a mixture of melancholy and respect for courage; with pity for an unfortunate and superstitious regard for antiquity, and thoughtless inclination for war; in short, with a crowd of sensations with which sober rationality has ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... universe to be eternal. There is nothing extra, or antemundane. There is but one substance, and that substance is matter. Matter, however, has an active and passive principle. Life and rationality are among its attributes or functions. The universe, therefore, is a living whole pervaded by a principle not only of life but of intelligence. This hylozoic doctrine, some modern scientific men, as Professor Tyndall, seem inclined to adopt. They tell us that matter is ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... a narrow-minded, or a stupid woman, cannot feel nor understand the rationality, the propriety, or the beauty of this relation; and she it is, that will be most likely to carry her measures by tormenting, when she cannot please, or by petulant complaints or obtrusive interference, in matters which are out of her sphere, ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... warlike; and the Iron, violent; together with the Heroic, nobly aspirant, between the third and fourth. In archeology, three—the Stone Age, the Bronze, and the Iron. In history, the Middle and Dark, between the Ancient and the Modern. In Fichte, five—of Instinct, of Law, of Rebellion, of Rationality, of Conformity to Reason. In Shakespeare, seven—Infancy, Childhood, Boyhood, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sentiment of disgust, of anger, or of pity. Is there a single passion, tell me, that you have experienced, or that you are acquainted with, except through your books? Your soul is like your cravat, which is always tied precisely the same way, and has such an air of repose and rationality about it, that it is perfectly insufferable to me. Yes, the bow of that cravat exasperates me; the two ends are always exactly the same length, and have an effect of INDERANGEABILITY which nearly drives ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... Empirical proofs of larger mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality, 317. In pluralistic empiricism our relation to God remains least foreign, 318. The word 'rationality' had better be replaced by the word 'intimacy,' 319. Monism and pluralism distinguished and defined, 321. Pluralism involves indeterminism, 324. All men use the 'faith-ladder' in reaching their decision, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... that our chance is to persuade the jury that the man was insane or mendacious—in a word, to impeach his rationality or his truthfulness, one or the other; we must decide which stand we are to ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... problem of "Faith" and "Knowledge," or more plainly, of instinct and reason—the question whether, in respect to the valuation of things, instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants to appreciate and act according to motives, according to a "Why," that is to say, in conformity to purpose and utility—it is always the old moral problem that first appeared in the person of Socrates, and had divided ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... with which it works. If any preference or precept were declared to be ultimate and primitive, it would thereby be declared to be irrational, since mediation, inference, and synthesis are the essence of rationality. The ideal of rationality is itself as arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In spite of the verbal propriety ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... wise man. The world of sense is the province of vulgar opinion, while that of reason is the absolute truth revealed only to the philosopher. The truth has no concern with appearance, but is answerable only to the test of rationality. That world is real which one is able by thinking to make intelligible. The world is what a world must be in order to be possible at all, and the philosopher can deduce it directly from the very conditions of thought which it must satisfy. He who would know reality may disregard ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry |
