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Updated: May 10, 2025
We can generally trust non-rational inferences in ordinary life because they do not give rise to conscious opinions until they have been strengthened by a large number of undesigned coincidences. But conjurers and others who study our non-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us form absurd beliefs.
And it is most of all genius, and therefore most inaccessible to us ordinary mortals, in the domain of religion. Mysticism. Even “pronounced individuality” “has an element of mysticism” in it—of the non-rational, which we feel the more distinctly the more decidedly we reject all attempts to make it rational again through crude or subtle mythologies.
So a planet-wide habit of non-rational response had formed and was not seen to be irrational because almost everybody had it. The volunteer who'd discovered the tragedy on the ship from Orede was safe, though. He'd made a completely conscientious survey of the ship he'd volunteered to enter and examine. For his courage, he'd have been doomed but for Calhoun.
On the other hand, the relations which science presents are causal relations; and, when properly taught, are understood as such. While language familiarises with non-rational relations, science familiarises with rational relations. While the one exercises memory only, the other exercises both memory and understanding.
He lived in a markedly non-rational age given over to mystical speculation; and Alexandria especially, by her cosmopolitan character, "furnished the soil and seed which formed the mystic philosophy that knew how to blend the wisdom and folly of the ages."
A philosophy which should unify the sum-total of human experience, including the supernatural facts of Christianity, is impossible; but even excluding these facts there is always need of some kind of non-rational assent, which, however reasonable and prudent in the very interests of thought, is not necessitated by the laws of thought is not, in the strictest sense philosophical.
Abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very unsatisfactory, they always work injustice; but in this case those of you who are familiar with the literature will see immediately what I have in mind; and to the others, if there be any here, it will suffice to say that what I am trying so pedantically to point out is only the fact that monistic idealists after Kant have invariably sought relief from the supposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking forward toward an ens rationis conceived as its integration or logical completion, while he looked backward toward non-rational dinge an sich conceived as its cause.
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