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The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise. True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of the facts.

For not only has it become ever a more prominent motive in the music of the poets, and not only are all rationalizations of Christianity more or less transparent disguises of Pantheism, but I may safely appeal to those ordinary members of intelligent society who are neither poets, nor divines, nor philosophers, whether the freest and most confidential interchange of religious thought does not continually verge on a faith which merges everything in God.

To remain steadfast in their commitment to this insight required of these early believerson whose sacrifice of self much of the foundation of the present-day Bahá’í communities both in the West and many other lands were laidthat they resist not only family and social pressures, but also the easy rationalizations of the world-view in which they had been raised and to which everything around them insistently exposed them.

Indeed, it seems to me inevitable that just as the various sciences of nature were, before the opening of the seventeenth century, largely masses of rationalizations to suit the religious sentiments of the period, so the social sciences have continued even to our own day to be rationalizations of uncritically accepted beliefs and customs.

Reason was for so long servile to idle theology, it is not at all surprising that a work exemplifying reason to such high degree as does the Ethics, should receive scant respect from intrepid empiricists. It is so easy to confuse the rationalizations of reason with the nature of reason itself.

Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind a cloud of small rationalizations? There was a difference in the air in the lavatory, and in the sound the undifferentiated background sound which came from nowhere. Nowhere? It came through a window.

Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. While these words, to some extent, were the rationalizations of an old man, Bessemer's career showed that his philosophy had a practical foundation; and, if this was indeed his belief, the episode explains in large measure Bessemer's later insistence on the legal niceties of the patent procedure. The effect of this will be seen.