England and America--to what extent are its members controlled by
_reason_, and to what extent by _feeling_ and by the fixed sentiments
growing out of feeling? Ratiocination does not influence one of their
actions in a million. There is not within my knowledge a single instance
where a purely rational conception has been the basis of practice, in
opposition to feeling."

"Surely," I said, "you do not mean to say that educated men are not
governed in the main by reason?"

"I mean just what I say--that I do not know, in practice, a single
instance in which they are so governed in opposition to feeling. Pshaw,
pshaw! young man; if we are to compel the acts of practical daily life
to conform with a dialectic demonstration of what is best for us--to do
only what is in reason best for us--we must simply cease to live, though
we do continue to breathe. Even in physics, of what use are logical
demonstrations, when the premises are only a foundation more unstable
than quicksand--purely provisional?

"Now if these agnostics were truthful--which they try to be; and were
consistent--which they are not, they would be in a trying situation.
Reason shows no advantage to a man in kissing his wife; he has no
syllogistic endorsement for supporting her and the children; in fact, he
has no business to have children--all the result of feeling or
sentiment, all rubbish, and beneath the intellect of a man who worships
Pure Reason! And if the demands of man's moral or affectional nature are
a reason for such indulgences, then his aspirations to the great primal
cause of the known, the unknown, and (to us here and now) unknowable
wonders and mysteries of the universe without, and of ourselves within,
is also justifiable in reason, and ought not by wit and eloquence to be