and man finds other objects
continually thrusting themselves before his eyes, claiming his affection
and controlling his fortunes.

The most legitimate constructions of reason soon become merely
speculative, soon pass, I mean, beyond the sphere of practical
application; and the man of affairs, adjusting himself at every turn to
the opaque brutality of fact, loses his respect for the higher reaches
of logic and forgets that his recognition of facts themselves is an
application of logical principles. In his youth, perhaps, he pursued
metaphysics, which are the love-affairs of the understanding; now he is
wedded to convention and seeks in the passion he calls business or in
the habit he calls duty some substitute for natural happiness. He fears
to question the value of his life, having found that such questioning
adds nothing to his powers; and he thinks the mariner would die of old
age in port who should wait for reason to justify his voyage. Reason is
indeed like the sad Iphigenia whom her royal father, the Will, must
sacrifice before any wind can fill his sails. The emanation of all
things from the One involves not only the incarnation but the
crucifixion of the Logos. Reason must be eclipsed by its supposed
expressions, and can only shine in a darkness which does not comprehend
it. For reason is essentially hypothetical and subsidiary, and can never
constitute what it expresses in man, nor what it recognises in nature.

[Sidenote: and for its subsistence.]

If logic should refuse to make this initial self-sacrifice and to
subordinate itself to impulse and fact, it would immediately become
irrational and forfeit its own justification. For it exists by virtue
of a human impulse and in answer to a human need. To ask a man, in the
satisfaction of a metaphysical passion, to forego every other good is to
render him fanatical and to shut his eyes daily to the sun in order that
he may see better by the star-light. The radical fault of rationalism is
not any incidental error committed in its deductions, although such
necessarily abound in every human system. Its great original sin is its
denial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy its due place in the
world, an ignorant fear of being invalidated by its history and
dishonoured, as it were, if its ancestry is hinted at. Only bastards
should fear that fate, and criticism would indeed be fatal to a bastard
philosophy, to one that does not spring from practical reason and h