1808 in A. Ramsay Gentle Shepherd (new ed.) II. 434 The whole is elucidated, and enriched..with many new, and beautiful phrases and words, no where else to be found; such as..‘unreasonings’.]

a1871 A. De Morgan Budget of Paradoxes (1872) 317 He is..the ablest head at unreasoning,..of all who have tried in our day to attach their names to an error.

1889 ‘M. Twain’ Connecticut Yankee xvii. 209 It was the stubborn unreasoning of the time.

1942 C. Mytinger Headhunting in Solomon Islands xiii. 98 By some process of unreasoning this [sc. deferring two-thirds of his wage] is supposed to give the boy something to take home to the village with him.

1975 Hudson Rev. 28 131 There is an urgent need to accept these contradictions at face value, to embrace them as true falsehoods, logical illogicalities, sensible nonsense, reasonable unreasonings.

1677 J. Nalson Common Interest of King & People iv. 111 Having resigned themselves to the first violences of unreasoning Despair.

1728 Bp. P. Browne Procedure Human Understanding 22 I have troubled the Reader with these empty Outcries and Sarcasms here, in order to prevent this loose and unreasoning way of speaking upon this Subject for the future.

1812 L. Hunt in Examiner 11 May 289/2 The caprices of an unreasoning resentment.

1935 A. MacLeish Let. 27 Feb. (1983) 274 Any man who is foolish enough to put on a verse play in the present theatre needs the unreasoned and unreasoning support of his friends.

2007 A. Theroux Laura Warholic xxxiii. 535 He himself had a deep, chronic, unreasoning, blind fear of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen-year-old girls.

1682 E. Settle Absalom Senior 33 Were he that Monster his new Foes would make Th' unreasoning World beleive,..Knowing him guilty they could prove him so.

1772 J. H. Wynne Choice Emblems xl. 159 Surely it is more ridiculous in a rational creature to indulge this pride [sc. vanity] than in an unreasoning animal.

1800 S. T. Coleridge tr. F. Schiller Piccolomini iv. vii. 170 I cannot traffic in the trade of words With that unreasoning sex.

1916 Science 5 May 630/2 Research is sometimes looked upon as a remote, postponable, and especially exacting undertaking, well suited for martyrs of science and unreasoning optimists.

2004 Express (Nexis) 11 Aug. 33 She could be incredibly difficult: wilful, spoilt, unreasoning.

1783 H. C. Jennings Summary & Free Refl. 128 Let the Unreasoning persist in seeking for..a primary Cause.

1892 Hamilton (Ohio) Daily Democrat 7 Mar. 2/3 The rowdies, the turbulent and the unreasoning were there and failed to act like gentlemen.

1984 Amer. Jrnl. Econ. & Sociol. 43 465 Complexity..makes it comparatively easy to palm off on the unreasoning all sorts of absurdities as political economy.

2005 Globe & Mail (Toronto) 24 Aug. a14 I hereby confess my membership in the ranks of the unreasoning.

1835 C. F. Partington Brit. Cycl. Nat. Hist. I. 106/2 We do not..use the word ‘vulgar’, in an offensive sense, but merely as expressive of ‘the herd of authors, who follow their leaders as unreasoningly as sheep do the “bell-bearer”’.

1940 T. B. Crumpler & J. H. Yoe Chem. Computations & Errors x. 189 An experimenter who unreasoningly discards a discordant value as ‘obviously wrong’ is dishonest and a poor scientist.

1993 Harper's Mag. Sept. 30/2 No Colonel Blimp could have been more nationalistic, more money-fixated, more hang-'em-and-flog-'em, more unreasoningly racist.