reason or not, are so little according to logic--that is, to speakable
reason--that they cannot be put into speech. Men act, whether singly or
in masses, by impulses and instincts for which they give reasons quite
incompetent, often quite irrelevant; but which they have caught from each
other, as they catch fever or small-pox; as unconsciously, and yet as
practically and potently; just as the nineteenth century has caught from
the philosophers of the eighteenth most practical rules of conduct,
without even (in most cases) having read a word of their works.

And what has this century caught from these philosophers? One rule it
has learnt, and that a most practical one--to appeal in all cases, as
much as possible, to "Reason and the Laws of Nature." That, at least,
the philosophers tried to do. Often they failed. Their conceptions of
reason and of the laws of nature being often incorrect, they appealed to
unreason and to laws which were not those of nature. "The fixed idea of
them all was," says M. de Tocqueville, "to substitute simple and
elementary rules, deduced from reason and natural law, for the
complicated traditional customs which governed the society of their
time." They were often rash, hasty, in the application of their method.
They ignored whole classes of facts, which, though spiritual and not
physical, are just as much facts, and facts for science, as those which
concern a stone or a fungus. They mistook for merely complicated
traditional customs, many most sacred institutions which were just as
much founded on reason and natural law, as any theories of their own. But
who shall say that their method was not correct? That it was not the
only method? They appealed to reason. Would you have had them appeal to
unreason? They appealed to natural law. Would you have had them appeal
to unnatural law?--law according to which God did not make this world?
Alas! that had been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in his
time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end. Rabelais