NEITHER GO D NOR DEVIL
217
reason. Like ostriches you have wanted to ignore the irrational im–
pulses of man. What would you think of the lens polisher who would
not admit the necessity for chromatic corrections, or of the artillery–
man who refused to allow for lateral deviation? And yet their mis–
takes would be small compared with yours.
During a good third of
his
existence man dreams: no one knows
exactly in what proportion work, intoxication, desire, the marvellous,
share the other two thirds, and yet society claims to establish psycho–
logical rules and social laws that govern only utilitarian work and
reasonable actions, where emotional factors, not having been allowed
for, are supposed to play no part. Do not tell me all that is just a
question of ruling-class conventions and ruling-class laws, and that
you have had nothing to do with them. You are a party to these
conventions so long as you uphold the same
closed
rationalism as
inspires them. It will be specious for you to argue your will to- over–
throw this decadent civilization so long as you cannot set against it
a fresh reason, full, and yet still avid for what is new: a child's reason.
'One must have been one of the smouldering crowd at a time
of revolutionary action or dramatic events to be able to under–
stand the degree of sensibility the mind can attain when it sur–
renders itself to the violence of collective passion. A crowd is a
multiplication, not an addition,' writes Pierre Mabille in his
Miroir du Merveilleux.
And he adds: 'Emotional intensity, the
primordial factor in the: dynamism of the masses, prevents scien–
tific history from understanding the origins of revolutior1s ancl
religions. Everything is absurd if one confines oneself to official
memoranda and administrative reports, and yet nothing is absurd,
fol' on the whole, the blaze of passion gives more light than any
sensible advice.'
I do not deny that your average reason is sufficient for you to
account for most of the facts of everyday life. I appreciate at its just
worth its usefulness
in
times of calm, at an equal distance between
two crises, emotional and social. Newtonian mechanics suffice to
explain the world on a life-size scale, but cease to
be
exact on the
scale of the microcosm as well as on that of the macrocosm. The
same can be said, but far more seriously, of your immutable reason.
Your reason must confess to failure before most of the great mani–
festations of human behaviour which at the time are commonly
called 'irrational,' whether they are to do with love or war, with
murder or panic, with revolution or idolatry for a man.
And yet these 'irrational' impulses exist, and
in
choosing to ignore
them-as if knowledge of them and their integration with the rational
