 their
professorships of Inconsistency and Evasion, in both of which studies the youths
are examined before being allowed to proceed to their degree in hypothetics. The
more earnest and conscientious students attain to a proficiency in these
subjects which is quite surprising; there is hardly any inconsistency so glaring
but they soon learn to defend it, or injunction so clear that they cannot find
some pretext for disregarding it.
    Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they
did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and
fast lines, and to the defining by language - language being like the sun, which
rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd;
the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity
of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those
which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is
hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct
upon reason only.
    Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even attack
the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people have such a strong natural
bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as
much as or more than is good for them; there is no need of encouraging reason.
With unreason the case is different. She is the natural complement of reason,
without whose existence reason itself were nonexistent.
    If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason,
surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must be
also? Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the interests
of reason herself. The Professors of Unreason deny that they undervalue reason;
none can be more convinced than they are, that if the double currency cannot be
rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human reason, the double
currency should cease forthwith; but they say that it must be deduced from no
narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive that admirable faculty
of the one-half of its own existence. Unreason is a part of reason; it must
therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.
 

                               Chapter Twenty-Two

                      The Colleges of Unreason - continued

Of genius they make no account, for they say that every one is a genius, more or
less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little
unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be
