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Updated: May 9, 2025
If they are bent on acting in a certain way they have to reconceive the environment, they have to censor out, to rationalize. But if in their presence, there is an insistent fact which is so obtrusive that they cannot explain it away, one of three courses is open. They can perversely ignore it, though they will cripple themselves in the process, will overact their part and come to grief.
It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply "for those moments' sake." To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
The Karaites are less scrupulous; and as they were the first among the Jews to imitate the Muʿtazila in the endeavor to rationalize Jewish doctrine, they adopted their views in all details, and it is sometimes impossible to tell from the contents of a Karaite Muʿtazilite work whether it was written by a Jew or a Mohammedan.
The case worker knows that the power of the human mind to "rationalize" anti-social conduct is infinite; and that, besides the few "justifiable deserters," there are many who have succeeded in convincing themselves that their action is warrantable.
To the output of this quarry we may attribute the following elements in the structure of our present Christian thought: That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct, that it is an experience of man's whole nature, and consists largely in feelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize and express.
It is necessary to rationalize this instinct of self-preservation and co-operation, in order to make it of effective service. Here lies the heart of our difficulty. War is the most intensely derationalizing process, and the long steeping of European civilization in the boiling cauldron will have twisted and blunted the very instruments of thought.
Later an elaborate theory was constructed in order to rationalize this living and real thing. It was pretended by a legal fiction that the central King owned nearly all the land, that the great overlords "held" their land of him, the lesser lords "holding" theirs hereditarily of the overlords, and so forth.
Adding to these earliest essays the Oration in Praise of Travel, by Hermann Kirchner, we have a group of instructions sprung from German soil all characterized by an exalted mood and soaring style. They have in common the tendency to rationalize the activities of man, which was so marked a feature of the Renaissance.
Thereafter he would discuss death as fearlessly as he spoke of dinner, and all his fears vanished. Here was a typical rationalization of fear, one that has helped to shape religion, philosophies, ways of living. And the widespread belief in immortality is a compensation and a rationalization of the fear of death. If some men rationalize in this fashion, others take directly opposite means.
Now that we are facing reality and trying to rationalize our thinking, we find that the variation from these masculine and feminine ideals does not necessarily imply biological or psychological abnormality, since the ideals were themselves established without reference to biological and psychological data.
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