DEIST (Deus, God).—(1) Properly the Latin form, identical in significance with the Greek form, Theist (θεός, God); (2) technically distinguished from Theist, Deist being used to designate one who believes in an Eternal Being as the source of all finite existence, but denies his Personality, or, at least, his personal government of the universe;
| Theist, to describe one who believes in God’s direct personal government in accordance with fixed laws, and for righteousness,—popularly, one who admits natural, but denies revealed religion; (3) antagonism of meaning so complete that «Deistic» has been made equivalent to denial of the «Theistic» position, by acceptance of a materialistic (atheistic) scheme of existence, although the term is etymologically the contradiction of unbelieving, and especially of atheistic thought. |
Granting a distinction between Transcendental Theology and Natural Theology, Kant takes Deist to describe the believer in the former—Theist as the name for the believer in the latter. «If by the term Theology I understand the cognition of a primal being, that cognition is based either upon reason alone (theologia rationalis) or upon revelation (theologia revelata). The former cogitates its object either by means of pure transcendental conceptions, as an ens originarium, realissimum, ens entium, and is termed transcendental theology; or by means of a conception derived from the nature of our own mind, as a supreme intelligence, and must then be entitled natural theology. The person who believes in a transcendental theology alone is termed a Deist; he who acknowledges the possibility of a natural theology also a Theist» (Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of all Theology, Transcendental Dialectic, bk. II. ch. III. sec. 7; Meiklejohn, 387.
The term Deist was used, towards the close of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, as descriptive of unbelievers united by their opposition to revealed religion (Leland’s View of Deistical Writers; Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy, II. 371; L. Stephen’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century; Lecky’s History of Rationalism).
