The more earnest and conscientious students attain to a proficiency in
these subjects which is quite surprising; there is hardly any
inconsistency so glaring but they soon learn to defend it, or injunction
so clear that they cannot find some pretext for disregarding it.
Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all
they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing
of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language--language being
like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical,
but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean
is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies
and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be
irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into
which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason
only.
Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even
attack the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people have such a
strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and
act upon it quite as much as or more than is good for them: there is no
need of encouraging reason.
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