RATIONALISM. § 1. lleamng and Usage of the Word.
By Rationalism is meant the system or theory which assigns un- due authority to reason in matters of reh'gion. • By reason is not to be understood the Logos as revealed in man, as held by some of the Fathers, and by Cousin and other modern philosophers, nor the intuitional faculty as distinguished from the understanding or the discursive faculty. The word is taken in its ordinary sense for the cognitive faculty, that which perceives, compares, judges, and infers.
Rationalism has appeared under different forms. (1.) The Deistical, which denies either the possibility or the fact of any su- pernatural revelation, and maintains that reason is both the source and. ground of all religious knowledge and conviction. (2.) That which while it admits the possibility and the fact of a supernat- ural revelation, and that such a revelation is contained in the Chris- tian Scriptures, nevertheless maintains that the truths revealed are the truths of reason ; that is, truths which reason can comprehend and demonstrate. (3.) The third form of Rationalism has received the name of Dogmatism, which admits that many of the truths of revelation are undiscoverable by human reason, and that they are to be received upon authority. Nevertheless, it maintains that those truths when revealed admit of being philosophically ex- plained and established, and raised from the sphere of faith into that of knowledge.
Rationalism in all its forms proceeds on the ground of Theism, that is, the belief of an extramundane personal God. When, therefore. Monism, which denies all dualism and affirms the identity of God and the world, took possession of the German mind, Ra- tionalism, in its old form, disappeared. There was no longer any room for the distinction between reason and God, between the nat- ural and the supernatural. No class of men, therefore, are more contemptuous in their opposition to the Rationalists, than the advo-