"Nor is it less strange that any should ever have been afraid of their understandings, and should have sought goodness through prejudice, and blindness, and folly.”—­For some time past the words “Rationalism” and “Rationalistic” have been freely used as terms of reproach by writers on religious subjects; the 73d No. of the “Tracts for the Times” is entitled, “On the introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Religion,” and a whole chapter in Mr. Gladstone’s late work on Church Principles is headed “Rationalism.”  Yet we still want a clear definition of the thing signified by this name.  The Tract for the Times says, “To rationalize, is to ask for reasons out of place; to ask improperly how we are to account for certain things; to be unwilling to believe them unless they can be accounted for, i.e. referred to something else as a cause, to some existing system, as harmonizing with them, or taking them up into itself....  It is characterised by two peculiarities;—­its love of systematizing, and its basing its system upon personal experience, on the evidence of sense.”—­P. 2.  Mr. Gladstone says more generally, “Rationalism is commonly, at least in this country, taken to be the reduction of Christian doctrine to the standard and measure of the human understanding.”—­P. 37.  But neither of these definitions will include all the arguments and statements which have been called by various writers “rationalistic;” and while the terms used are thus vague, they are often applied very indiscriminately, and the tendency of this use of them is to depreciate the exercise of the intellectual faculties generally.  The subject seems to deserve fuller consideration than it has yet received; there is a real evil which the term Rationalism is meant to denounce; but it has not been clearly apprehended, and what is good has sometimes been confounded with it, and denounced under the same name.

I cannot pretend to discuss the subject fully in a mere note, even if I were otherwise competent to do it.  But one or two points may be noticed, as likely to assist the inquiry, wherever it is worthily entered on.

1st.  It is important to bear in mind the distinction which Coleridge enforces so earnestly between the understanding and the reason.  I do not know whether Mr. Gladstone, in the passage quoted above, uses the word “understanding” as synonymous with reason, or in that stricter sense in which Coleridge employs it.  But the writer of the Tract seems to allude to the stricter sense, when he calls it a characteristic of rationalism “to base its system upon personal experience, on the evidence of sense.”  If this be the case, then it would seem that rationalism is the appealing to the decision of the understanding in points where the decision properly belongs not to the understanding, but to the reason.  This is a great fault, and one to which all persons who belong to the sensualist school in philosophy, as opposed to the idealist school, would be more or less addicted.  But then, this fault consists not in an over-estimating of man’s intellectual nature generally, but in the exalting one part of it unduly, to the injury of another part; in deferring to the understanding, rather than to the reason.