Continental scholars applied the name to the Socinians and deists; and later still it designated, in Britain, types of Christian thinkers who sought to give a relatively reasoned form to articles of the current creed which had generally been propounded as mysteries to be taken on faith. The claim to apply ‘reason’ in such matters was by many orthodox persons regarded as in itself impious, while others derided the adoption of the title of ‘rationalist’ or ‘reasonist’ by professing Christians as an unwarranted pretence of superior reasonableness. Used in ethics, the label ‘rationalism’ served in the earlier part of the eighteenth century to stigmatise, as lacking in evangelical faith, those Christians who sought to make their moral philosophy quadrate with that of ‘natural religion.’ Later in the century, though in England we find the status of ‘rational’ claimed for orthodox belief in miracles and prophecies as the only valid evidence for Christianity,[1] rationalism became the recognised name for the critical methods of the liberal German theologians who sought to reduce the supernatural episodes of the Scriptures to the status of natural events misunderstood; and several professed histories of modern ‘rationalism’ have accordingly dealt mainly or wholly with the developments of Biblical criticism in Germany.

New connotations, however, began to accrue to the terms in virtue of the philosophical procedure of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, though his Religion within the Bounds of Simple [blossen] Reason went far to countenance the current usage; and when Hegel subsequently proceeded to identify (at times) reason with the cosmic process, there were set up implications which still give various technical significances to ‘rationalism’ in some academic circles. In the brilliant work of Professor William James on Pragmatism, for instance, the term is represented as connoting, in contrast to the thinking of ‘tough-minded’ empiricists, that of a type or school of ‘tender-minded’ people who are collectively—

Yet it is safe to say that in Britain, for a generation back, the name has carried to the general mind only two or three of the connotations in Professor James’s list, and much more nearly coincides with his contrary list characterising ‘the tough-minded’:—

—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.