same period by their opponents. A little later some 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--

'Rationalistic (going by "principles")
Intellectualistic
Idealistic
Optimistic
Religious
Free-willist
Monistic
Dogmatical.'

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 c