SCHOLAR ISLAND

"My point is that reason, with its compulsion to set limits, tends to block out the truth."

Arthur M. Young

"Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss-up."

Charles Sanders Pierce

"The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. Nor is reason itself the most satisfactory instrument for the understanding of life."

Aldous Huxley

"I appeal to common observation, which has always found these artificial methods of reasoning more adapted to catch and entangle the mind, that to instruct and inform the understanding."

-john Locke  An essay Concerning Human Understanding

"My moral weakness became my moral strength, the barrenness of my belief was in truth the fertility of my rationality, and I was saved at last.....Can you imagine what it was like to turn from the spirit of religion to the spirit of philosophy, or, as I liked to call it in those days, the spirit of rationality? For here, reasons for beliefs are never beside the point but are the entire substance of the matter. The distinction between the mere belief and the reasoned belief is the distinction that grounds all philosophy. If truth is our end (and what else should be?) we must reason our way there."

-Rebecca Goldstein   The Mind-Body Problem

"Reason is the king of the universe; it is the spark which the all-mighty intelligence which governs all things has given us."

-William Robison Leigh

"As we are speaking of philosophy, we will go on to point out some of the consequences of individualism in this field, though without entering into every detail: first of all came the negation of intellectual intuition and the consequent setting of reason above everything else, this purely human and relative faculty being treated as the highest part of the intelligence, or even regarded as coinciding with the whole of the intelligence, it is this which constitutes rationalism, whose real founder was Descartes."

-Rene Guenon

The Crisis of the Modern World  (1927)

"Neither believe nor reject any thing because any other

person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it.

Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven...."

-Thomas Jefferson

"If we would be guided by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold."

Louis Brandeis

"Whoever does not want to reason is renouncing the status of being human, and should be treated as unnatural."

-Diderot

"Reasoning beings were created for one another's sake; and patience is a branch of justice."

-Marcus Aurelius

"He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave."

-Sir William Drummond, Academical Questions

"Reason alone is insufficient to make us enthusiastic in any manner."

-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Rationalism was meant to diminish fear, but ultimately, it has managed to do nothing of the sort; instead it invalidated meaning, which merely served to heighten our dread."

-Patricia Pearson

A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine)

"My motive and object in all my political works....have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government and enable him to be free, and establish government for himself....And my motive and object in all my publications on religious subjects....have been to bring man to a right reason that God has given him; to impress on him the great principles of divine morality, justice, mercy, and a benevolent disposition to all men and to all creatures; and to excite in him a spirit of trust, confidence and consolation in his Creator unshackled by the fable and fiction of books, by whatever invented name they may be called."

-Thomas Paine

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "have the courage to use your own reason!"-that is the motto of enlightenment."

-Kant

  "The philosophers of the Enlightenment had tried to crate a new society based on the same rational and mechanistic principles that had successfully expanded man's understanding of the physical universe. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the optimistic and victorious spirit of rationalism yielded rapidly to disillusionment, and reason was dethroned by the rediscovery of the irrational depth of the human psyche. Instinct and passion became the focal points of interest; Weltschmerz and withdrawal from the conquest of the external world into private life expressed the new spirit of the times. Schiller voiced the disillusionment of this new Romantic era about knowledge; "nur im Irrtum ist das leben, und die Wahrheit ist der Tod" -Life is merely error; and death is truth. The eighteenth-century idea that reason could make the world a better place to live in had come to be viewed as illusory; the consequent disenchantment with the value of rationality was a pessimistic tedium vitae, a "mal de siecle' that had seized the European mind and of which Byron became the most influential interpreter."

Franz G. Alexander, M.D. & Sheldon T. Selesnick, M.D.

The History of Psychiatry

   "Rational self-interested agents cannot join together in a functioning society-this could be one of the fundamental theorems in sociology. In a world where all individuals behave strictly rationally, armies would run away at the first shot (or would not even get together in the first place). Nobody would vote or pay taxes. IRS agents would accept bribes not to prosecute tax evaders, and then pass some fraction of that to the members of the Senate overseeing committee, to buy them off. The courts would make verdicts in favor of whoever can pay more, or has more power to intimidate the judges and juries. The police would let criminals go in exchange for part of their loot. Actually, I am painting too rosy a picture-when all behave in a purely self-interested manner, there will be no IRS courts, or police. There could only be a Hobbesian war of all against all."

Peter Turchin

War & Peace & War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations

"In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to contain chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adults' legends, cosmological myths and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt."

-Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear

"The natural light of reason, has as much right as any other kind of knowledge to be called divine"

-Spinoza

"The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason."

Mrya Mannes

"Never get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people."

-Don Corleone, in Mario Puzo's The Godfather

"God hath not created anything better than Reason, or anything more perfect, or more beautiful than Reason: the benefits which God giveth are on its account; and understanding is by it, and God's wrath is caused by disregard of it."

           Muhammed (Sayings of Muhammed )

"Believe nothing which is unreasonable, and reject nothing as unreasonable without proper examination."

-Gautama Buddha

"Martin Luther, founder of the Reformation, was the most virulent of God's servants in what now seems like an hysterical crusade against reason. Reason seeks out wisdom, which leads in turn to knowledge. All dangerous stuff to Luther! 'Faith', he exhorted, 'must trample under foot all reason, sense and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God.' Luther accused 'reason' of being a hooker; 'The devil's bride, ration, the whore, comes in and thinks she is clever. Stay at home with your ugly devil's bride....It is more possible to teach an ass to read than to blind reason and lead it right; for reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed' (Works Vol. 12, Martin Luther)

-Alexander Waugh

GOD

"Our Holy Mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason."

-Pope Pius

"Reason is from God, and when things are unreasonable there is something the matter."

G.K. Chesterton

"Ours is....the most rational of all religions.....Those who talk about it as merely.....emotional simply do not know what they are talking about. It is.....all the modern religions, that are merely emotional.....We alone are left accepting the action of the reason and the will without any necessary assistance from the emotions. A convinced Catholic is easily the most.....logical person walking about the world today."

-G. K. Chesterton

"If religions divide men, reason brings them closer.....There is only one single reason. The unity of the human spirit is the great, consoling result that comes from the peaceful clash of ideas, when one puts aside the opposing claims of the so-called supernatural revelations. The covenant of the good minds of the whole Earth against fanaticism and superstition is on the surface the act of an imperceptible minority; at bottom, it is the only covenant that lasts."

-Ernest Renan

"Reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of social arts; it has something to do. it liberates man from the bondage of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It projects a better future and assists man in its realization. And its operation is always subject to test in experience.....Intelligence is not something possessed once and for all. It is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn and courage in re-adjustment."

-John Dewey Reconstruction in Philosophy 1920

" The hatred of reason which is common in our time is very largely due to the fact that the operations of reason are not conceived in a sufficiently fundamental way."

Bertrand Russell

The Conquest of Happiness

"Irrationality is the square root of all evil."

-Douglas Hofstadter

"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has…she is the Devil’s greatest whore, a whore eaten by scab and leprosy, who ought to be trodden underfoot and destroyed, she and her wisdom….Throw dung in her face….drown her in baptism."

Martin Luther

"Faith, must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God"

-Martin Luther

"...reason is the devil's bride, ratio , the whore, comes in and thinks she is clever. Stay at home with your ugly devil's bride....It is more possible to teach an ass to read than to blind reason and lead it right; for reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed."

-Martin Luther   (Works Vol. 12)

"Reason is Unity….All arts lie in man, though not all are apparent. The awakening brings them out. To be taught is nothing; everything is in man, waiting to be awakened."

Paracelsus

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

-Jonathan Swift

"Mankind misses its opportunities, and its failure are a fair target for ironic criticism. But the fact that reason too often fails does not give fair ground for the hysterical conclusion that it never succeeds. Reason can be compared to the force of gravitation, the weakest of all natural forces, but in the end the creator of suns and of stellar systems; those great societies of the Universe."

Alfred North Whitehead

"By reason only can we attain to a correct knowledge of the world and a solution of its greatest problems."

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and

rumored by many, or merely on the authority of your teachers

and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that

anything agrees with reason, then accept it and live up to it."

-Buddha

"Rationalism is no bulwark. If we view reason and feeling as enemies, instead of as a team without whose equal pull nothing can be done, if we discard James, Bergson, and Freud as "anti-intellectualists" and pray for the return of Huxleyan robustness, we are indeed lost…"

Jacques Barzun

"Contrary to popular opinion, human beings are not rational; they rationalize, which is quite different."

Gerald Massadie

History of the Devil

"If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason."

Samuel Butler

"Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat."

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"The union of growing productivity and growing destruction; the brinkmanship of annihilation; the surrender of thoughts, hope, and fear to the decisions of the powers that be: the preservation of misery in the face of unprecedented wealth constitute the most impartial indictment-even if they are not the reason raison d'êtres of this society, but only its by-product. In sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth, is itself irrational."

-Herbert Marcuse One Dimensional Man

"But what is reason worth, after all?"

Fosco Maraini

"The majority of businessmen are incapable of original thought because they are unable to escape the tyranny of reason."

-David Ogilvy

"Not only within contemporary Euro American culture but even within humanist groups there are calls for alternatives to reason."

Robert B. Tapp

"I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity.....and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonapart, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason."

-John Adams 1805

"Call it then the Age of Paine."

-John Adams   1805

   "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

   I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

   But....I do not believe, in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."

-Tom Paine

".....poetry of many kinds....gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. but now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures or music.....My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend. I cannot conceive....The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

-from Autobiography of Charles Darwin

"Mere purposive rationality, unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life."

Gregory Bateson

  I believe that the only force that can save us from self-destruction is reason; the capacity to recognize the unreality of most of the ideas that man holds, and to penetrate to the reality veiled by the layers and layers of deception and ideologies; reason, not as a body of knowledge, but as a "kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects..." a force whose "most important function consists in its power to bind and to dissolve." Violence and arms will not save us; sanity and reason may."

-Erich Fromm

Beyond the Chains of Illusion

"When Reason preaches, if you don't hear her she'll box your Ears."

-Benjamin Franklin Poor Richard's Almanac 1753

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Book: "Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics" by Henry Veatch

Book: "Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music" by Michael P. Steinberg

Book: "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" by Dan Ariely

Book: "Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West" by John Ralston Saul

Book: "Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge To Western Thought" by George Lakoff

Book: "The God of Faith and Reason" by Robert Sokolowski

Book: "The Voice of Reason: Fundamentals of Critical Thinking" by Burton F. Porter

Book: "The March of UnReason: Science, Democracy and the new Fundamentalism" by Dick Taverne

Book: "The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason" by Charles Freeman

Book: "The Nature Of Rationality" by Robert Nozick

Book: "Farewell to Reason" by Paul Feyerbend

Book: "Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason" by Jessica Warner

Book: "The Voice Of Reason: Fundamentals of Critical Thinking" by Burton F. Porter

Book: "The Greeks and the Irrational" by E.R. Dodds