Vico's idea that early humans were nonrational and childlike prefigured Rousseau's primitivism and his conception of human development (see below The background and influence of naturalism); and the importance Vico accorded to imagination foreshadowed the place that feeling was to have in 19th-century Romantic thought.
The declared goal of Surrealist writers and artists was to free man's unconscious impulses from the distorting controls of rational reflection; creativity, they said, came from deep nonrational drives.
The philosopher Bergson attacked scientific dogmatism and exalted humankind's nonrational drives notably a creative force that he called élan vital, which he held distinguishes heroic individuals and nations from the plodding herd.
Like the French intuitionist Henri Bergson, they may hold that this flow can be grasped only by nonrational intuition.
The divine truth was at times revealed to the mystic in visions, auditions, and dreams, in colours and sounds, but to convey these nonrational and ineffable experiences to others the mystic had to rely upon such terminology of worldly experience as that of love and intoxication often objectionable from the orthodox viewpoint.
Florensky's chief contribution to Russian Orthodox theology is his 1914 essay on theodicy entitled "The Pillar and the Ground of Truth," in which he argued that only through nonrational, intuitive experience could a person become consubstantial with all of creation and thus encounter God's reality and understand God's truth.
Their acceptance is justified as nonrational solutions to problems that have no rational answers.
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche provided for the 19th century a new, nonrational conception of human nature, and they viewed the mind not as open to rational introspection but as dark, obscure, hidden, and deep.
Leeuw proposed that a nonrational (mystical) tradition underlies the evolution of religious manifestations.
The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes proposed the concept of mind-body dualism, which implied that human behaviour could be understood as resulting from both a free, rational soul and from automatic, nonrational processes of the body.
His proposition that nonrational, mechanistic processes of the body could motivate behaviour under some circumstances led to the development of the concept of instinct and provided a counterpoint to Aristotle's emphasis on learning as the most important concept in the control of behaviour.
