life?

Here is the difficulty, a difficulty of the profoundest and most
instructive sort. If we could see our way clearly through it, little
in ethics would remain obscure. The common mode of meeting it is to
leave it thus paradoxical. Self-sacrifice banishes rationality and is
a glorious madness. But such a conclusion is a repellent one. How can
it be? Reason is man's distinctive characteristic. While brutes act
blindly, while the punctual physical universe minutely obeys laws of
which it knows nothing, usually it is open to man to judge the path he
will pursue. Shall we then say that, though reason is a convenience in
all the lower stretches of life, when we reach self-sacrifice, our
single awesome height, it ceases? I cannot think so. On the contrary,
I hold that in self-sacrifice we have a case not of glorious madness,
but of somewhat extreme rationality. How, then, is rational contrasted
with irrational guidance? As we here approach the central and most
difficult part of our discussion, clearness will oblige me to enter
into some detail.

When a child looks at a watch, he sees a single object. It is
something there, a something altogether detached from his
consciousness, from the table, from other objects around. It is a
brute fact, one single thing, complete in itself. Such is the child's
perception. But a man of understanding looks at it differently. Its
detached singleness is not to him the most important truth in regard
to it. Its meaning must rather be found in the relations in which it
stands, relations which, seeming at first to lie outside it, really
enter into it and make it what it is. The rational man would
accordingly see it all alive with the qualities of gold, brass, steel,
the metals of which it is composed. He would find it incomprehensible