The Importance of Reason

Rationalists do not pretend that human reason can ever make man omniscient. But they say, as far as man is able to attain cognition, he must rely upon reason. The ultimate given is the irrational. There is neither an irrational mode of cognition nor a science of irrationality. We do not know what causes the born differences in human abilities. Science is at a loss to explain why newton and mozart were full of creative genius and why most people are not. It is by all means an unsatisfactory answer to say that a genius owes his greatness to his ancestry or to his race. Such a hypothesis must be appraised on its own merits.