But obviously you can rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.
They called for a philosophy that would bolster up authority and rationalize their desire to impose a legal yoke upon society.
Thus they had no call torationalize dogmas of not enforcing promises made as business transactions.
The need was to rationalize men's desire to be governed by fixed rules and to reconcile, in appearance at least, the change and growth which are inevitable in all law with the need men felt of having a fixed, unchangeable, authoritative rule.
In spite of reason we are compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to rationalize thought.
Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself.
And he wishes, unhappy man, to rationalizethe irrational and irrationalize the rational.
That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after a fashion.
And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of living.
They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God rebelled against them.
But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves, we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt to rationalize God.
Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, chap.
These organs were selected probably on account of their prominence--the heart also because it was the receptacle of the blood.
When it is prescribed that a bone shall not be broken this may be for fear of giving offense to the animal kin and thus insuring failure in further hunting.
The tendency appears to be to minimize, under the influence of general enlightenment, the crude supernatural parts of such combinations, to exalt the moral and spiritual, and to allegorize or rationalize the rest.
It has been set aside not by religion as such but by all the influences that have tended to rationalize religion.
The IMF cannot rationalize spending in Russia because its control mechanisms are flawed: they rely too heavily on local, official input and they are remote (from Washington).
To idealize and rationalize the universe at large is after all a confession of inability to master the courses of things that specifically concern us.
But the Greek cleavage of men into separate kinds on the basis of their position within or without the city-state was used to rationalize this harsh intolerance.
Even theoretically, the only way to stop such a disastrous selection of the unfit would be to rationalize reproduction--so that nobody shall reproduce the species through sheer ignorance of how to evade or avoid it.
Plato was right when he refused to rationalize the myths, and when, by his own use of myths, he showed their proper nature as the vehicle for thoughts as yet incapable of more exact expression.
A fourth way of dealing with mythology is to rationalize it, by assuming that all the marvellous stories told about the gods and heroes had historical foundation in the past.
The need for military efficiency had always been used by the services to rationalize racial exclusion and segregation; later it became the primary consideration in the decision of each service to integrate its units.
Anarchists and atheists naturally rationalize their reasons for dissent, but, for all that, they are not so much intellectual pioneers as rebellious little boys who have forgotten to grow up.
Others adhere to their ritual practices in the spirit of use and wont, as Emerson found when he sought to rationalize in his own Church the usage of the eucharist.
His story of how the father of St. Foix cured the youth of the desire to rationalize his creed is not suggestive of conviction.
His own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism.
The True System is hostile alike to priesthoods and to the accommodating theologians, whose attempt to rationalize Christianity on historical lines it flouts in Lessing's vein as futile.
Herodotus of Heraclea struggled to rationalize mythology, and established chronology on a solid basis.
But only at their peril can men rationalize about so practical a matter as health.
To do this is to rationalizethe happiness, and therefore to destroy it.
For, while the scheme of Paganism, and of all the philosophies that sought to rationalize Paganism, was cosmic and static, the scheme of Christianity was historical.
They delayed the creation of a framework in which men could find a common reasonableness, an ideology sufficient to rationalize all interests and to sublimate all frustrations.
One attempt to rationalize them, or assimilate them, or take them into the scientific fold, has been the notion that they were toys of prehistoric children.
I expect some day to rationalize demonology, but just at present we are scarcely far enough advanced to go so far back.
The attempt to rationalize the conception of deity as embodied in the Jehovah of the Old Testament gave rise to the class of opinions described as Gnosis, or Gnosticism.
Attempting to rationalize that which is not an "absolute" has always been one of man's delights and obsessions; my speculations have brought peace to my mind in a chaotic world.
Man has a mind for a purpose; to think, to inquire into the unknown, to rationalize the meaning of this complex universe.
I must simply let go and guard my sanity; it is not worth tearing yourself into emotional rages and tatters, however, I've never been able to rationalize having nice things if one doesn't care for them.
Attempting to rationalize that which cannot be rationalized is a cruel and purposeless task that shall not be mastered; it is like digging a foundation through unyielding stone with a paper shovel.
It is only too easy for all of us to rationalize what we want to believe, and to consider those leaders we like responsible and those we dislike irresponsible.
Some scholars,[291] both ancient and modern, have attempted to rationalize this tradition by interpreting it as a reference to the glow-worms that settle on the plant!
No break is too great to be bridged by this instinctive impulse to rationalize the products of diverse experience.
His account of it seems an attempt to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before the Fall and Rousseau's primitive "state of nature.
On the other hand, we have now a scientific doctrine of the effects of great fluctuations of the ground-water upon the production of telluric miasmata, which may be used to rationalize the theory of emanations adopted by Sydenham and Boyle.
But we should rationalize it wherever we can; and there are some obvious considerations that may be used to explain why smallpox, throughout a whole epidemic, had so high an average fatality in some years or in some localities.
Later an elaborate theory was constructed in order to rationalizethis living and real thing.
It is an apparently inevitable inference from our Christian experience, when we attempt to rationalize it, that "our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.
In so far as it remains purely symbolic and does not attempt to rationalize its symbolism, a dogmatic religion must always contain within the circle of its creed many profound and illuminating secrets.
Where a dogmatic religion becomes dangerous to any human symbol is when it tries to rationalize it and interpret it according to a premature metaphysical synthesis.
