You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, closing the
door of the good father's study behind you. But stop a moment, why do
you close the door? You close the door because your reason tells you
that otherwise the cold air outside will blow in and make the good
father uncomfortable. You put your hat on, because your reason has not
yet been applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out
onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step back onto
the curbstone, because your reason tells you that an automobile is
coming, and that on the sidewalk you are safe from it. So you go on,
using your reason in a million acts of your life whereby your life is
preserved and developed. And if anybody suggested that the fallibility
of your reason should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you
would apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide that he
was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in everyday
judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in philosophy,
metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of all this kind of
insanity being the notion that it is the duty of anybody to believe
anything which cannot completely justify itself as reasonable.
Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma are hard put to
it, and you will find their minds a muddle of two points of view. The
Jewish rabbi will strive desperately to think of some hygienic objection
to the presence of meat and butter on the same plate; the Catholic
priest will tell you that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and
that anyhow we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and the
Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day in seven
their health would break down. Thus they justify faith by reason, and
reconcile the conflict between science and theology. Accepting this
method, I experiment and learn that it improves my digestion and adds to
my working power if I play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably
rational form of conduct--and find myself in conflict with the "faith"
of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a term in
its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly desecrated its
day of holiness!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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