Continental Rationalism : Rationalism
Continental Rationalism is a philosophical creed that human reason is the source of knowledge. It originated with Rene Descartes and spread during the 17th and 18th centuries, primarily in continental Europe. In contrast, its contemporary rival, the British Empiricists held that all knowledge comes to us through experience or through our senses. At issue is the fundamental source of human knowledge, and what the proper techniques are for verifying what we think we know. (See Epistemology.)Rationalists argued that starting with intuitively-understood basic principles, like geometry, one could deductively derive what was true. Descartes, with his mathematical background, was naturally drawn toward this method, and famously claimed to derive his own existence from pure reason (cogito, ergo sum). On the heels of his work came continental philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz who sought to enlarge and refine the fundamental theory of rationalism.
Immanuel Kant started as a rationalist, but after being exposed to David Hume's works which "awoke [him] from [his] dogmatic slumbers", Kant arguably synthesized the rationalist and empiricist traditions.
And infinite hungers leap no more
And love.html">love.html">love has changed to kindliness.
To fire.html">fire their limbs of lead,
Stand pandar to their bed;
Drunk on the dead, and medicined
In a short night.html">night.html">night they reeled to find
Stuffed love's infinity,
To rarify ecstasy.
Helen's the hair.html">hair shuts out from me
Gypsy the lips I press.html">press; and see
Lie with us in this place,
Close face.html">face to straining face;
Their blood.html">blood is wine along our limbs;
Savage forgotten drowsy hymns
The night wherein we press;
Your flaming nakedness.
For the uttermost years have cried and clung
And hair long dust was caught, was flung,
All Time's uncounted bliss,
Love, that our love be this!
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
Shapes all his universe to feel
Closes his memory.html">memory, glooms his dream.html">dream.html">dream,
Superb on unreturning tides.
A fluctuant mutable world and dim,
Mysterious, and shape.html">shape to shape
And form and line and solid follow
Fantastic down the eternal stream;
Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,
Or serene slidings, or March narrows.
And weed and mud. No ray of sun,
(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);
The hyaline of drifting glooms;
Drowned colour there, but black to hues,
Red darkness of the heart of roses,
And gold that lies behind the eyes,
That is the essential flame of night,
The myriad hues that lie between
Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,
Perpetual curving. Only -- grows
A knowledge from the gloom, a calling
The dark fire leaps along his blood;
The intricate impulse works its will;
Sans providence, sans memory,
Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.
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