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Something pre-rational and monstrous often peeped out behind their serenity, as it does beneath the human soul, and there was certainly no lack of wildness and mystic horror in their apparitions. The ideal must needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all, it rests; but reason exists to exorcise their madness and win them over to a steady expression of themselves and of the good.
Its benevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional well-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity which, being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation and looks to spiritual freedom and peace. Protestantism was therefore attached from the first to the Old Testament, in which Hebrew fervour appears in its worldly and pre-rational form.
It is the purpose of this study to consider a phase of social life in which there can be traced a persistence into modern times of a primitive form of control which in a pre-rational stage of group life made possible the comparatively harmonious interplay of antagonistic forces. This form of control is called Taboo.
It would seem, at first glance, as if the development of reason should make conscience unnecessary. When we are able to discern the consequences of our acts, formulate and weigh our motives and aims, what need of these vague pre-rational promptings and inhibitions? Why not train men to supplant a blind sense of duty by a conscious insight, a rational valuation of ends and means?
Such a position may be turned dialectically by invoking whatever positive hopes or convictions the critic may retain, who while he lives cannot be wholly without them. But the position is specious and does not collapse, like that of the intuitionist, at the first breath of criticism. Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are not pre-rational but post-rational.
But this fabulous background given to life was really inconsistent with what was best in the new morality; just as in Christianity the post-rational evangelical ideals of redemption and regeneration, of the human will mystically reversed, were radically incompatible with the pre-rational myths about a creation and a political providence.
The impulse to laugh is comparatively unimportant in politics, but it affords a good instance of the way in which a practical politician has to allow for pre-rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate effect of the recognition of the incongruous, just as trembling is of the recognition of danger.
Up to the present we have been assuming that the material of language reflects merely the world of concepts and, on what I have ventured to call the "pre-rational" plane, of images, which are the raw material of concepts. We have, in other words, been assuming that language moves entirely in the ideational or cognitive sphere. It is time that we amplified the picture.
Another consequence of combining, in the Christian life, post-rational with pre-rational motives, a sense of exile and renunciation with hopes of a promised land, was that esoteric piety could choose between the two factors, even while it gave a verbal assent to the dogmas that included both.
By these notions, so crudely pre-rational, we are allowed to interpret and discount the pantheistic sublimities with which in most places we are regaled; and in order that a morality, too weak to be human, may not wither altogether in the fierce light of the Absolute, we are led to humanise the Absolute into a finite force, needing our support against independent enemies.
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