ABSTRACT

The pure rationalism of Spinoza involved a monism 'in which every part implies every other part and is logically deducible from wider generalizations'. John Lewis considers the broad patterns of rationalism to be moving in opposite directions. Lewis notes that irrationalism as a social force strongly supports what is, as against what is becoming. The problem involves both a shift in Lewis's usage of the term rationalism, and the social role of rationalism with the advent of empirical philosophies. In modern philosophy, rationalism comes not merely to signify a belief that nature and man develop according to laws, but it comes to be a theory of knowledge, a way of understanding the world primarily through the organizing powers of the mind rather than observation of the material world. The author faced the theoretical dilemma to operate within a framework of traditional rationalism instead of twentieth-century naturalism.