RAT

From Philosopedia.org

RAT

McCabe, Joseph. Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (London: Watts, 1920). Written in 1920 when he was in his forties, the book is a study of modern rationalists up until the 1910s. The word “rationalist” first appeared in English letters about the middle of the seventeenth century, he states, denoting a sect of people who follow “what their reason dictates to them in Church or State.” Somewhat earlier, Bacon applied the term “Rationals” to the philosophers who sought to attain truth by deductions from the first principles which reason was supposed to perceive rather than by induction from the observed facts of nature. “In neither sense,” McCabe writes, did the term pass into general currency at the time; but in the course of the nineteenth century it was adopted as the most fitting name for those who uphold what is vaguely called the supremacy of reason in the discovery and establishment of truth.”