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Updated: May 18, 2025
So freedom of the will consists in this that reason impels men to the right and irrationality to the left and according to this parallelogram of forces the true direction is that of the diagonal.
It runs, in the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural irrationality, they were not any the more artificial.
Indeed, it could not be so, neither the former nor the latter could fail to see the irrationality of their conduct, if the complexity of government organization did not obscure the unnatural senselessness of their actions. So many instigate, assist, or sanction the commission of every one of these actions that no one who has a hand in them feels himself morally responsible for it.
But this assumption, if applied to the principles of thought, speech or action, would equally prove thought to be irrational, speech unintelligible, moral action absurd; and evolution would be the process by which this fundamental irrationality, unintelligibility and absurdity was worked out.
The dread irrationality of the whole affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to forget. "Oh, why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can we not all be happy and devote ourselves to play?" And when children do philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.
He had yielded himself to that perverse frenzy which impels a man to acts and utterances most wildly at conflict with reason. His sense of the monstrous irrationality to which he was committed completed what was begun in him by the bitterness of a great frustration.
But no small part of the irrationality of the actual social will must be set down, in the last instance, to that peculiar form of irrationality in the individual or in groups of individuals which we call selfishness. That some degree of inequality should be necessary in communities of men, in view of the differentiation of function implied in cooperative effort, may be admitted.
Is it not the height of irrationality to bow down before an unexplained and mysterious impulse and allow it to sway our conduct without knowing why?
He could rebuild the puzzle; his understanding of it, therefore, must be the true one. The irrationality of the defence was a final proof that the lawyer had played him false. "Hutchings sold himself most likely for place. He didn't fear a quarrel with me that was evident; perhaps he wishes to get rid of me evident, too.
"But that is all nonsense!" he tried to assure himself, as he took his binoculars from the rack and sighted at the forbidding, mysterious range. "Am I responsible for a Moslem's superstitions, or his fanatic irrationality?" The Master's own narrow escape from death disturbed him not at all. He hardly even thought of it. All he strove for, now, was to exculpate himself for Rrisa's death.
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