Life & Wisdom Quote by Lyman Abbott

Rationalism, in Abbott's telling, isn’t just a method; it’s a temperament that crowns the mind and demotes everything else. The line lands like a gentle indictment. By calling it the "very essence", he turns rationalism from a respectable tool into an ideology with a power problem: reason becomes "lord", the other human faculties become subjects.

Abbott’s intent is less anti-intellectual than anti-monarchical. The word choice matters. "Assumes" implies an unexamined premise, a quiet act of faith hiding inside a philosophy that prides itself on skepticism. And "highest faculty in man" nods to the 19th-century habit of ranking the soul’s parts - intellect over emotion, conscience, imagination, tradition - then treating that hierarchy as destiny. Abbott is warning that rationalism can smuggle in a kind of pride: the belief that if an argument is airtight, it is therefore complete.

The subtext is pastoral and cultural. Abbott, a prominent religious writer shaped by a Protestant moral universe, is pushing back against a modernizing age that increasingly trusted science, systems, and administrative logic to solve human problems. In that climate, "reason" wasn’t merely personal; it was institutional - the authority behind social reforms, theological critiques, and political rationalization. Abbott doesn’t deny reason’s value, but he challenges its imperial ambitions: a human being is not a courtroom where logic alone renders verdicts. When reason rules as "lord", the messy faculties that make us humane - empathy, moral intuition, reverence, even doubt of our own cleverness - get treated as obstacles rather than checks.