RATIONLISM, the philosophy that regards reason as the chief instrument and test of knowledge. It has taken two principal forms, depending on the kind of rival it has had to oppose. In religion its main rival has been the appeal to authority, hence the prime concern of religious rationalism has been to criticize claims of supernatural revelation. In philosophy its chief rival has been empiricism, against which rationalists have sought to show that our most certain and significant knowledge comes not from sense experience but from reason.

理性主义，将理性视为知识的主要工具和检验的哲学。它拥有两种形式，取决于它不得不反对的竞争对手的种类。 在宗教方面，它的主要竞争对手是对权威的诉求，因此宗教理性主义的主要关注是批评超自然启示的主张。在哲学方面，它的主要竞争对手是验经验主义，反对理性主义者试图证明我们最为确定和最重要的知识不是来自感官经验，而是来自理性。

Religion. Rationalism in religion has had two great periods: the 18^th century in England and France and the early 19^th century in Germany. By the beginning of the 18^th century, the earlier conclusion of Rene Descartes as well as Sir Isaac Newton that nature is a mechanical system governed by law had gained wide acceptance. The result was that miracles, conceived as intrusions into nature from a supernatural realm, had become more and more difficult for thoughtful persons to accept. Furthermore, if natural events could be explained in terms of law, must not this apply also to the origins of religion, the writing of Scripture, and the growth of the church? The rationalists thought that it did. These were purely human achievements, to be explained by purely natural causes. At first the rationalists were deists who believed that, although God did not interfere in the workings of nature, belief in God was necessary to account for its origin and order. This was the view of John Tolland and Matthew Tindal in England and of Voltaire in France. But in both countries the rationalist argument turned in the end against this natural religion itself. David Hume in Britain and Baron Paul d’Holbach in France argued that there was no ground in reason for belief in God at all.

宗教。宗教中的理性主义有两个重要时期：18世纪的英格兰和法国，以及19世纪初的德国。到了18世纪初，勒奈·笛卡尔和艾萨克·牛顿爵士的早期结论为，自然是由获得普遍承认的法则所支配的一个机械系统。结果是被设想为从超自然领域的入侵体进入自然的奇迹，这对有思想的人们愈来愈难以接受。此外，如果用法则可以解释自然事件，这难道不也适用于宗教的起源、圣典的写作以及教会的成长？理性主义者认为，确实如此。这些都是纯粹的人类成就，可用纯粹的自然原因来解释。首先，这些理性主义是自然神论者，他们相信，尽管上帝不干涉自然的运行，但信仰上帝对于解释其起源和秩序是必要的。这是英格兰的约翰·托兰和马修·廷德尔的观点，以及法国的伏尔泰的观点。但在这两个国家中，理性主义者的争论最终都反对这一自然宗教本身。英国的大卫·休谟和法国的保罗·霍尔巴赫男爵论证，信仰上帝根本没有理性的基础。

A second wave of religious rationalism occurred in the early 19^th century and spread outward from Germany. Its leading spirit was Georg W. F. Hegel. Under his influence a group of theologians, notably David Friedrich Strauss and Ferdinand Christian Baur, developed a “higher criticism” of the Bible in which its supernatural elements were systematically explained away as products of mythology. Strauss’ Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (2 vols., 1835—1836)—translated in 1846 by George Eliot as The Life of Jesus, Critically Treated—raised storms of controversy throughout the Christian world by its methods and conclusions. Strauss’ train of thought was continued by Ludwig Feuerbach, who explained the very idea of God as a projection of man’s desire and need, and by the French scholar Ernest Renan, whose famous Vie de Jesus (1863) represented Jesus as a peasant of moral genius who suffered from grave illusions. Rationalist criticism of the biblical account of creation was greatly strengthened by the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s Origin of Species, in which the appearance of man on earth is explained by natural causes.

宗教理性主义的第二波浪潮发生在19世纪初，并从德国向外传播。其主要人物是格奥尔格W·F· 黑格尔。在他的影响下，一群神学者，尤其是大卫·弗里德里希·施特劳斯和斐迪南德·克里斯汀·鲍尔，对《圣经》发展了一种“更高级的批评”，其中，其超自然的元素被系统地解释为神话产物。斯特劳斯的《批判性审视耶稣的一生》（两卷本，1835至1836年）--由乔治·艾略特于1846年翻译成《批判性对待耶稣的生平》—以其方法和结论引发了整个基督教世界争论的风暴。路德维希·费尔巴哈延续了施特劳斯的思路，他将最佳的上帝观念解释为人类欲望和需要的投射，并通过法国学者欧内斯特·勒南著名的《耶稣传》将耶稣描绘为一位遭受了严重幻觉，拥有道德天赋的农夫。理性主义对圣经中创造天地描述的批评由1859年出版达尔文的《物种起源》而极大地得到了加强，该书阐明，人类出现在地球上是凭借自然的原因。

Philosophy. Rationalism in philosophy is primarily a theory of knowledge. As opposed to empiricism, which holds that all knowledge comes from perception, rationalism maintains that the most important part of our knowledge comes from intellectual insight. The clearest cases of such insight are to be found in logic and mathematics—the knowledge, for example, that a thing cannot be both square and not square, or that 2+2=4. Such knowledge is certain. It is necessary, in the sense that we not only see it to be true but also see that it could not be otherwise. And it is universal, in the sense that it holds everywhere and always. Such insights provide the framework of all our knowledge.

哲学。哲学中的理性主义主要是一种知识的理论。与经验主义相对比，它认为知识来自感知，理性主义者主张，我们知识的最重要的部分来自智慧的洞察力。在逻辑和数学中就发现了这种洞察力最明显的例子—例如，一个物体不能既是正方形，又不是正方形，或者2+2=4，又不等于4这样的知识。这种知识就是确定的。从某种意义上説，我们不仅看到它是真实的，而且看到它不可能是别的什么。而且它是普遍原则，从某种意义上説，它无处不在，总是存在。这样的洞察力为我们提供了所有知识的构架。

The first exponent of this rationalism in modern times was the 17^th century philosopher Rene Descartes. A distinguished mathematician himself, he sought to reform philosophy on the model of geometry. Euclid started from axioms that he took to be self-evident. Descartes took as his starting point the existence of his own thought. To doubt that was self-contradictory: one could not consistently doubt the fact of one’s own doubting. From this starting point Descartes sought to deduce with mathematical rigor a system of propositions about God, the world, and mankind. An even more IMPRESSIVE attempt of the same kind was made in the Ethica (1663—1675) of Baruch Spinoza, in which the geometrical form of deduction is maintained through five books of definitions, postulates, and theorems. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz held that with sufficient intelligence one could see that every fact in the world is entailed by every other.

在现代这种理性主义的第一个代表人物就是17世纪的哲学家勒奈·笛卡尔。他本人就是一位杰出的数学家，他试图借助几何模型改造哲学。欧几里德从其不言自明的公理开始。笛卡尔把他自己的思想存在当作起始点。怀疑是自相矛盾的：一个人不能始终怀疑他自己怀疑的这个事实。从这一起始点，笛卡尔试图用数学的严密性来演绎有关上帝、世界和人类命题的体系。在巴鲁赫·斯宾诺沙的《伦理学》（1663年至1675年）中进行了相同类型更加令人印象深刻的尝试，其中，通过定义、假设和定理的5本书来维护演绎的几何形式。戈特弗里德·威廉·冯·莱布尼茨认为，只要具有了足够的智慧，人们就会看到世界中的每一个事实都是由其它所有事实导致的。

This view of the world as a completely rational system was developed with unexampled thoroughness by Hegel, who is the outstanding rationalist of history. His model in explaining the world, however, is not a mathematical system but an organism or a mind, whose parts are so related that none of them can be understood except through their relation to the whole. Hegel’s method, then, was to start with a concept as thin and bare as possible (he took that of mere being) and to show how, in the attempt to grasp it, we inevitably pass beyond it to their concepts, and from these to still others, until we reach that absolute whole that is the universe itself. Hegel conceived this whole as a mind or intelligence. His rationalism was thus combined with idealism, a union that appeared again in the most notable of his successors, such as Francis Herbert Bradley in Britain and Josiah Royce in the United States.

这种将世界视为一个完全理性系统的观点是由黑格尔以无可比拟的彻底性发展起来的，他是历史上杰出的理性主义者。然而，他解释世界的模型并不是数学系统，而是有机体或一种思维方式，它们的各部分是如此的相关联，以至于除非通过它们与整体的关系，否则就无法理解它们。总之，黑格尔的方法是以尽可能薄弱且无遮盖的概念开始（他只接受那个存在）并揭示，在试图掌握它的时，我们是如何不可避免地超越它而进入它们概念的，并且从这些到其它的，直至我们达到那个宇宙本身的绝对整体。黑格尔将这个整体视为一种思维方式或智慧。因此，他的理性主义与唯心主义相结合，一个在其最著名的继任者中再次出现的联合，诸如英国的弗朗西斯·赫伯特·布拉德利和美国的约西亚·罗伊斯。

Rationalism in philosophy went into eclipse after World War I. The notion of rational insight was subjected to sharp criticism by the school of logical positivism, which insisted that the insights of which the rationalists made so much were tautologies—that is, mere statements of what we meant by our terms—and therefore revealed nothing about the nature of things. “2+2“=4 is true and certain, but all it tells us is that what we mean by “2+2” is the same as what we mean by “4”. If this criticism is valid, the kind of thinking on which rationalism has relied loses most of its significance. Whether the charge is valid is still a matter of debate.

第一次世界大战后，哲学中的理性主义黯然失色。理性洞察力的概念遭受到逻辑实证主义学派的尖锐批评，坚持认为理性主义者所做的如此多的洞察力就是重言式---换言之，仅仅是我们所说的术语陈述—因此，并没有揭示事物的本质。“2+2”=4 是真实且确定的，但它告诉我们的一切就是我们所说的“2+2”与我们所说“4”的相同而已。如果这种批评是有效的，那么理性主义依赖的那种思维则失去了它的大部分意义。该指责是否有效依然是一个有争议的问题。

                                     BRAND BLANSHARD

                               Author of “The Nature of Thought”

                                        布兰德·勃兰夏

                                    《思想的本质》作者

                                                                     2024年5月3日译

（译者注：该词条位列《大美百科全书》1985版，第23卷，第268页）