Word: rationalist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...England Courant, married, formed the "Junto," an intellectual self-improvement club of like-minded Philadelphians, and brought out the first three of the famed Poor Richard's Almanacks. Franklin also set down his basic religious outlook, a kind of deism that made him a logical child of the rationalist Enlightenment. Instinctively a yea-sayer to life, Franklin came very close to believing that whatever is is good. In "Articles of Belief" he offers up a characteristically benign prayer, "O Creator, O Father, I believe that thou art Good, and that thou art pleas'd with the Pleasure...
...Queen's nannies couldn't put Bertrand's faith together. By the time he left Cambridge in 1894, a philosopher and high Wrangler (the university's term for top mathematicians), he was close to what his father had wanted him to be, and since then, Rationalist Russell has frequently attacked religion. All the more notable is his conclusion that science can never say what ought to be done. In this view, the reader can find a reproach to the hubris of today's vociferous army of scientist-prophets, notably the late Albert Einstein...
...When I wrote that chapter about being a pagan, I had the attitude of an 18th century rationalist: humanity was sufficient unto itself. Now I have come to the realization that humanity is never sufficient unto itself. Man needs something greater outside himself, a sense of unity with God, the knowledge that he is part of a greater whole...
...philosophers-Plato, Descartes, Kant, Spinoza and Hegel. Their particular enemy is Hegel, for his insistence that all reality can be encompassed in a rational structure. It was this that inspired the melancholy Dane, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-55), to raise the flag of philosophic revolt against all purely rationalist and positivist systems, and to declare that reality and truth are within man himself and his actions, whether they be rational or no. Kierkegaard argued that the central, all-important fact about man is the simplest one: his existence. But because man is the only creature who is self-conscious...
...Potting Shed is that most truly dramatic of detective stories, a what-done-it, a shadowy trek backward from an effect to a cause. James Callifer is divorced from a wife who loved him, is unwelcome in his implacably rationalist family. Incapable of loving, of really feeling alive, he is equally incapable of understanding why. Everything earlier than a moment in the family potting shed when he was 14 is blotted out of his mind, has been carefully blacked out of his family's, and offers not a chink of light to his psychoanalyst. The journey back-Greene ingeniously...