tal"?

Nothing is more instructive than a socialist "experience" meeting at
which everyone tries to tell how he came to be converted. These
gatherings are notoriously untruthful--in fact, there is a genial
pleasure in not telling the truth about one's salad days in the socialist
movement. The prevalent lie is to explain how the new convert, standing
upon a mountain of facts, began to trace out the highways that led from
hell to heaven. Everybody knows that no such process was actually lived
through, and almost without exception the real story can be discerned: a
man was dissatisfied, he wanted a new condition of life, he embraced a
theory that would justify his hopes and his discontent. For once you
touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs
are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. In the
language of philosophers, socialism as a living force is a product of the
will--a will to beauty, order, neighborliness, not infrequently a will to
health. Men desire first, then they reason; fascinated by the future,
they invent a "scientific socialism" to get there.

Many people don't like to admit this. Or if they admit it, they do so
with a sigh. Their minds construct a utopia--one in which all judgments
are based on logical inference from syllogisms built on the law of
mathematical probabilities. If you quote David Hume at them, and say that
reason itself is an irrational impulse they think you are indulging in a
silly paradox. I shall not pursue this point very far, but I believe it
could be shown without too much difficulty that the rationalists are
fascinated by a certain kind of thinking--logical and orderly
thinking--and that it is their will to impose that method upon other men.

For fear that somebody may regard this as a play on words drawn from some
ultra-modern "anti-intellectualist" source, let me quote Santayana. This
is what the author of that masterly series "The Life of Reason" wrote in
one of his earlier books: "The ideal of rationality is itself as
arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as
any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which
the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In
spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands rationality,
what really demands rationality, what makes it a good and indispensable
thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own nature, but