"A prerequisite for a fruitful study of the rationalist, then, is a readiness to be open-minded, and a willingness to discard some of the caricatures from which 'rationalism' has sufferde in our own time. Many of the distortions arise from a tendecy to see rationalism as a kind of seamless web, so that any philosopher whose thought contains rationalist elements is seen as being committed to the wildest excesses of speculative metaphysics. What should by now be starting to emerge is that 'rationalism' stands not for a monolithic philosophical doctrine, but rather for a cluster of overlapping views and ideas."