RATIONALIST • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Rationalist

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Rationalist

noun

Someone who emphasizes observable facts and excludes metaphysical speculation about origins or ultimate causes. Synonym: positivist.

adjective

Of or relating to or characteristic of rationalism.

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Etymology of 'Rationalist'

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"Rationalist" Quotes from Famous Books

... doubt," he said, "that the French, when once placed, by the legitimate course of events and the working of natural causes, in a minority, would abandon their vain hopes of nationality."[8] It was in this spirit that his successor endeavoured to govern the French section in Canada. Being both rationalist and utilitarian, like others of his school he minimized the strength of an irrational fact like racial pride, and, almost from the first he discounted the force of French opposition, while he let it, consciously or unconsciously, influence his behaviour towards his French subjects. "If it were ...

— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison

... beliefs. He who believes that sentiment disappears with enlightenment is the true cynic, the true pessimist. He who believes that intelligence and knowledge should guide instinct and that happiness is thus more certain is better than an optimist; he is a rationalist, a realist. ...

— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... the Penguins are too well-known for me to lay stress upon them. But what has not been sufficiently noticed is the way in which the rationalist theologians such as Canon Princeteau called into existence the unbelievers of the succeeding age. The former employed their reason to destroy what did not seem to them, essential to their religion; they only left untouched the most rigid article of faith. Their intellectual successors, being ...

— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... who was her Mother's daughter in this as in other respects, had made it her own. They were deep in literature, these two Royal Ladies; especially deep in French theological polemics, with a strong leaning to the rationalist side. ...

— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great--Birth And Parentage.--1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... been rather ceremoniously religious, for his step-uncle, the Lieutenant-General, was a great defender of Christianity as well as of the British Empire. The Lieutenant-General had even written a pamphlet against a ribald iconoclastic book published by the Rationalist Press Association, in which pamphlet he had made a sorry mess of Herbert Spencer. All the Lieutenant-General's relatives and near admirers went to church, and they all went to precisely the same kind of church, for no other ...

— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

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