expressed in the pair of terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,'
'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety,
'rationalist' meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal
principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and
principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds
antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the
emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily
convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking
their universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the
'rationalist' temper. These terms make the contrast simple and
massive.

More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms
are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is
possible in human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully
what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by
adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying
characteristics, I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain
extent arbitrary. I select types of combination that nature offers
very frequently, but by no means uniformly, and I select them solely
for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of
characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the terms
'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of
'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most
frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic
tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly
materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional
and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes
and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism
starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection-is not