or the
extermination of backward races, we should try to help the process
forward. It is doubtful whether more than a very small number of
instructed men have ever entertained such a principle. It is certainly
not the expression of the philosophy of those ancients who sought to
'live according to Nature'; and it would certainly not have been
assented to by such modern 'naturalists' as Spencer and Huxley and
Mill. But if the principle is current at all, it makes the name of
'naturalist' as ambiguous philosophically as 'rationalist' can be.[2]

And similar drawbacks attach to another set of terms which have much to
recommend them--'positive,' 'positivist,' and 'positivism.' They stand
theoretically for (1) the provable, (2) the attitude of the seeker for
intelligible proof in all things, (3) the conviction that the rights of
reason are ultimate and indefeasible. But here again, to say nothing of
the equivoque of 'positive,' we are met by a claim of pre-emption, the
claim of Comte to associate the 'ism' specifically with his system,
theoretic and practical. And for the majority of men with positivist
proclivities, the gist of the 'practical application' of Comte is
incompatible with the positive spirit. Positivism with a capital P is
thereby made for them, as it was for Littre, something alien to
positivism as the free scientific spirit would seek to shape it. And a
wrangle over the ownership of the word would be a waste of time.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See _A Full Answer to a late View of the Internal Evidence of the
Christian Religion, in a Dialogue between a Rational Christian and his
Friend_. London, 1777. The orthodox writer deals severely with some
lines of Christian apologetics which have since had vogue.

[2] The somewhat awkward term 'naturalistic,' which is sometimes useful,
is hereinafter used in relation to the sense above given for
'naturalism.'

Sec. 2. THE PRACTICAL POSITION

The usages being so, most of us who can answer to the term 'rationalist'
may reasonably let its general force be decided for us by the stream of
tendency in ordinary speech; and, recognising the existence of other
applications, one may usefully seek to give a philosophic account of
what its adoption seems to involve. That is to say, the present treatise
does not undertake to present, much less to justify, all the views which
have ever been described as 'rationalistic,' but merely to present
current rationalism in the broad sense