THE RULE OF REASON.

By Professor A. C. Fox.

THERE is a long and reputable tradition in Western civilisation about the rule of reason. It goes back to the ancient Greeks, than whom no single people have paid more homage to the rational quality in man, or used it to such telling effect. The tradition was emphasised again in the Middle Ages. This period was regarded for long as above all an age of faith — many said, of credulity; but recently there has been a striking revelation which does justice to the reasoning power of the Schoolmen. They were great arguers, and no one who uses argument can be what Plato called a misologist. . . Then, in the eighteenth century there was the so called Age of Reason, an age cold and formal in some respects, yet capable of much humanitarian zeal and revolutionary fervour. Its close saw the enormous upheaval of the French Revolution.

Our Age of Unreason.

 Now, we are not far from the 18th century, as history counts time, but we seem to be in a different world in respect to the great European tradition. It is not obvious that we place reason on the throne; indeed, we seem to accept David Hume's maxim that reason is and ought to be but the slave of the passions. It is not unfair to say that our period is more passionate than reasonable; it prefers to be moved forward by gusts of feeling rather than by the steady pressure of thought. Of course, we are scientific, and are proud of it, and never before has science had such empire. And is not science an enterprise of reason? Yes, though not so much on the side of its finished products— radios, refrigerators, aeroplanes, and the like— as in respect of its method. It is in using these products that most of us make our sole contacts with science: we know little about its method; and we can easily use the products in a thoroughly unscientific, i.e., irrational, way. If I value a radio set for its constant stream of jazz strains, or if my refrigerator makes me consume more food to my stomach's undoing, of again, if nations take advantage of invention to prepare for the passionate orgy of war: all this is not very striking testimony to outstanding rationality.

 Our Irrational Politics.

 To tell one's contemporaries that they are an irrational lot, that they are false to their great tradition, is very likely to evoke a swift and impatient denial. But let us look again. Everyone knows that in the realm of world politics there are two marked features, nationalism and dictatorship. Now nationalism can no doubt make shift to justify itself by reason, but equally without doubt it rests at bottom on such elements as fear and pride, which are emotional first and last. The drive towards national sufficiency is becoming a frenzy and an obsession; it cannot stand the cool scrutiny of intelligence. Then there are the numerous dictatorships which, despite their variations, are agreed upon hostility to democracy—to that political arrangement which is government by reasoned discussion. About 18 months ago a prominent Nazi told a London audience that his party has no time for the method of reasoned discussion. What it (and all other dictatorships) has time for is the method of appeal to the elemental passions of humanity; and it creates a justifiable suspicion that it is afraid of an appeal to reasonableness, and of the liberty of its subjects to think.

 Chaos in Art.

 It is not only in politics that this story is told. In its economic affairs the world would strike a planetary visitor as a madhouse. But move away from the twin realms of politics and business. Enter the domain of art in its wide sense, and see the same general condition. It is to be found in what is characteristically new in artistic productions. At one extreme of music is the crooner and all his family, who aim apparently at stirring, primitive emotion and nothing else; at the other extreme is the 'advanced' concoction whose striking claim to attention is its utter unintelligibility. The prose of 'new' novels has a trick of appearing as pure gibberish, while many up-to-the-minute poems may have a meaning, if one can tie one's mind sufficiently into knots. Painting has taken quite a new direction after many centuries; and although we may come in time to see where it is going, for the present it strikes most of us as an entirely aimless sprawl. It will profess to depict a human face, and present a weird jumble of alarm clocks, carrots, Towers, and eyebrows. In statuary we struggle to grasp the mind of Epstein and Henry Moore.

Darwin and Freud.

 What is the matter with us, and what has happened? It is altogether too glib to refer to the war. We must go behind that. In between ourselves and the 18th century Age of Reason, and before the war, stand the portentous figures of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. They have been made, perhaps despite themselves, the high priests of the irrational, and their influence upon the present is enormous. One of Darwin's books was the 'Descent of Man,' which has come to be understood popularly as a descent from the ape. His theory has been the cause of a general conviction, not only about our animal ancestry but also about our still savage mind. Formerly, man was defined as the rational animal: since Darwin it is a common axiom that he is a passional animal like all others, with a little extra intelligence. Freud is significant for the application to psychology, of this view of evolution, especially in his discovery of the primitive and instinctive 'unconscious' which dominates our feeble reason. He has given fresh point to Hume's dictum about the slavery of reason to the passions.

 Forsaking the Great Tradition.

 If these doctrines have sunk into the general Western mind, is it surprising that we are suffering from an epidemic of irrationalism? Of course, there have been such epidemics before, but what is peculiar about the present is that unreason and emotion justify themselves in the name of a scientific theory. The great tradition has it that knowledge is power, that man can outpace nature because he can think. Today, this tradition is being given the lie; strong feeling is said to be most proper to us, and more potent in human achievement than cool thought. Reason came on the scene as it were but yesterday, whereas passion has been garnering might and insight through ages of evolution. But, after all, it did not require Darwin and Freud — and Nietzsche — to teach men the power of emotion. The Greeks, from whom our great tradition comes, had themselves painfully emerged from barbarism and saw barbarian peoples all around them. It was just because of this that they clung so tenaciously to the power of thought, lest they should slip back along the all too easy way of unbridled emotion. The Middle Ages exalted reason (as well as faith) because they vividly remembered the passional chaos of the Dark Ages. God to them was essential reason, and a god-like world must be rationally ordered.

 The Power of Reason.

 Both Greeks and Medievalists were profoundly right. The only authority that can draw lasting respect from man is that which resides in the rational; the irrational may coerce and repress, it cannot win men and inspire them. The only force that makes steadily for order and progress is that of reasonableness; the gust of passion may produce marked change, but only in the manner of a tornado. Let him who doubts this look around him to day. The world's disorder is plainly not to be banished by further injections of highly-charged feeling. It will yield only to the onslaught of reason in its two fold character of hard thinking and fair treatment. For these are what reason brings, and in these lies its authority and its might. Reason is thinking: and this is to see a situation in its wholeness and with vivid clearness; it makes sense rather than nonsense. So long as we fog our minds with passion towards other classes or nations, we will be blind even to our own interests, for this is the nemesis of the irrational. And reason is also reasonableness, an impartial weighing of all conflicting claims, including our own, and with a firm intention of fairness. On this basis rests the beneficient rule of public law. The alternative is a short-sighted egotism which ends in over-reaching itself.

 The Paradox of Reason.

 There is a peculiarity about the rational which amounts to a paradox. It has the power to combine, and yet it insists on separating: it is both communalist and individualist. It is communalist because it presents a common platform on which all can meet, nay, on which they must meet. This is quite familiar. We always feel that if we can show the reasonableness of a proposal and that it has been thoroughly thought out, it ought to command general assent from those who can understand it at all. But contrast now what happens with emotion. We cannot be sure that emotion, apart from reasoned guidance, will be a uniting force. If any emotion should unite people, it is love; but the thoughtless affection of a parent may spoil the child and cause bitterness in the family. So it is that if a government, such as a dictatorship, relies upon strong feeling to bind its subjects to one another and to itself, it is trusting to a very shaky support. It is far better to rely on the fact that the citizens can see reason in the large lines of public policy, and that they freely share responsibility for them.
 But reason is also individualist. Its presence in a person tends to make him think for himself : and he who thinks for himself is likely to take his own line, and be more than an echo or copy of his fellows. It is no doubt for this reason that dictatorships prefer to have their subjects irrational, lest they should begin to think and question. But now we can see through the paradox. Because my reason makes me think for myself, it also by that fact asserts my freedom to think and to act as I think. But it tells me at the same time that I must think and act rationally, i.e. as I would expect all other persons to think and act. By my reason I am free to submit to a rule that aims at a wider good than mine, but in which mine is included. And my free rational action helps to make that good. In so far as any government seeks to impose any other rule, it stands condemned.
 The only dominion to which civilised man can submit is not that of dictatorship, or nationalism, or of class-consciousness whether capitalist, middle-class or proletarian. It is rather that rule by which civilisation itself has been brought about and sustained against many shocks, the empire of intelligence and justice, to which our great European tradition bears its splendid witness.

West Australian (Perth, WA : 1935,) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32874385