If we designate as rationalism the conviction that all reasonable knowing must be rational whether purely rationally, in the thinking that investigates the essential relations between the purely rational concepts (or rather, the thinking that investigates, in terms of laws, everything that is possible, insofar as it stands under purely rational ideas, or is thought in an exactly determinate way) or else in such a way that it measures the empirical against the pure ideals through methods of approximation and other norms for judging the empirical according to corresponding pure ideas then the whole modern conviction is rationalistic.