United States or São Tomé and Príncipe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They do so in most things: why should they not in the highest matters of all? If the one set of opinions is anti-rational and the other anti-emotional, as we see practically that they are, is not this in itself an antecedent presumption against either of them?
And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements of worth never rationalizable they are anti-rational.
Gladstone that the role played by the orthodox anti-rational and wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art," so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder! I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the theological literature of the last century.
Take a northern stock, sound in mind and body; infuse into it a perverse disrespect for the human frame and other anti-rational whimsies; muddle the whole, once more, by a condiment of Hellenistic renaissance and add, as crowning flavour, puritan "conscience" and "sinfulness" mix up, in a general way, good nourishment with ascetic principles and you will attain to a capacity of luxuriance in certain matters that may well be the envy and despair of poor primitives like the Arabs.
What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be? The immortality of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of the Universe. And what is its moral proof?
Thus Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith, exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom of this abyss Unamuno builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory?
It is, rather, to illustrate and drive home the point with which I began, that the intellect has its rights, that it enters into every creed, and that it undermines, in every creed, all elements of mere irrational or anti-rational faith; that this fact can only be disguised by a conscious or unconscious predetermination, not to let the intellect have its say; and that such predetermination is a very serious error and vice.
For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.
Word Of The Day