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They walked back through the room which was now in almost lunatic confusion forms being locked; galleys being lifted in; editors, compositors, boys, rushing to and fro in a fury of activity. Again the phenomenon of the news-room, the individual faces calm but their tense expressions and their swift motions making an impression of almost irrational excitement. "Why such haste?" asked Marian.

Other children feel themselves forced to utter certain words or to go through certain rhythmical movements. They fully understand that the fear in their mind is irrational and devoid of foundation, but they are unable to expel it. Often it is hugged as a jealous secret, so that the childish suffering is only revealed to others years afterwards, when adult age has brought freedom from it.

But ignorance and prejudice and irrational violence spread as easily as disease or crime. Knowledge is not secure until it is widespread; and civilization perishes, which is segregated in a world of barbarism. Therefore education also, in its widest sense, must be contrived in common.

Wise and good men have been of opinion that they are nothing but devils, who, under the form of pretty and amiable spirits, would fain allure poor human beings; I see nothing irrational in the supposition.’ ‘Do you believe in devils, then?’

However, it is irrational and poor-spirited not to seek conveniences for fear of losing them, for upon the same account we should not allow ourselves to like wealth, glory, or wisdom, since we may fear to be deprived of all these; nay, even virtue itself, than which there is no greater nor more desirable possession, is often suspended by sickness or drugs.

It is a curious subject, this usurpation of the reasoning faculties by the irrational, which is permitted when religion becomes emotional, either in the revolutionary condition of the revivalist or that of the conservative and decorous ecclesiastical forms.

"God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world," is seemly only to minds drugged with an irrational creed. "If there is a God, he is quite careless of human well-being or human suffering. The deaths of a hundred thousand men mean no more to him than the deaths of a hundred thousand ants.

The heroine of Outlaw and Lawmaker differs from Gretta only in being more emphatic in her preference for the doubtful stranger, and irrational in her objections to her tried Australian lover, Frank Hallett. Why was Frank so stolid, so good, so commonplace?

As is well known, the chief tenets of the Stoics were temperance and self-denial, which Zeno himself practiced by living on uncooked food, wearing very thin garments in winter, and refusing the comforts of life generally. To the Stoics pleasure was irrational, and pain a visitation to be borne with ease. Both Stoicism and Epicureanism flourished among the Romans.

Those who have watched and studied closely the habits of those irrational animals, who live in communities, as the ant, the bee, and the beaver, have observed not only a settled system and subordination, but the existence of some wonderful faculty, like articulate speech, by which communication takes place from one to another; a power essential to order.