deist's Usage Examples:

He dwells much more pronouncedly than Herbert on the view, afterwards regarded as a special characteristic of all deists, that much or most error in religion has been invented or knowingly maintained by sagacious men for the easier maintenance of good government, or in the interests of themselves and their class.

Their sanguinary violence was combined with an anti-religious policy, not atheistical, but inspired by mistrust of the clergy, and by a civic and deistic creed that was a direct outcome of the federations.

"Viret," note D), though the deistic standpoint had already been foreshadowed to some extent by Averroists, by Italian authors like Boccaccio and Petrarch, in More's Utopia (1515), and by French writers like Montaigne, Charron and Bodin.

Even then Rousseau did not settle at once in the anomalous but to him charming position of domestic lover to this lady, who, nominally a converted Protestant, was in reality, as many women of her time were, a kind of deist, with a theory of noble sentiment and a practice of libertinism tempered by good nature.

Of the so-called deists Shaftesbury was probably the most important, as he was certainly the most plausible and the most respectable.

A theology consisting of a few vague generalities was sufficient to sustain the piety of the best of the deists; but it had not the concreteness or intensity necessary to take a firm hold on those whom it emancipated from the old beliefs.

Kant's distinction of " deist " and " theist " may be found in the Critique of Pure Reason, " Transcendental Dialectic," Book II.

The Analogy, on the contrary, did not directly refer to the deists at all, and yet it worked more havoc with their position than all the other books put together, and remains practically the one surviving landmark of the whole dispute.

The second is the typical deist of Locke's school, improved as regards his philosophy, and holding that the only possible proof of God's existence was a posteriori, from design, and that such proof was, on the whole, sufficient.

Diderot was for a time heartily in sympathy with deistic thought; and the Encyclopedie was in its earlier portion an organ of deism.

Before passing on to a summary of the deistic position, it is necessary to say something of the views of Conyers Middleton, who, though he never actually severed himself from orthodoxy, yet advanced theories closely analogous to those of the deists.

His standpoint was that of the English deists, and he investigated, without hesitation, the evidence for the miracles recorded in the Bible.

Though to some extent anticipated by the English deist Thomas Morgan, Semler was the first to take due note of and use for critical purposes the opposition between the Judaic and anti-Judaic parties of the early church.

Synonyms:

deistic,

Antonyms:

religious person,