ecause he is lowborn. The
more able should possess more goods. The woman should not vote because
she is not a man. The reasoning is clear and unimpeachable if you accept
the premises, but what gives the premises? In every case cited the
premise is determined largely if not exclusively by social or emotional
factors. If reason can then prescribe equally well that the slave should
be given rights because he is a man of similar traits or denied rights
because he has different traits from his master, if the Jew may either
be given his place of equality because he hath eyes, hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions, or denied equality because he
differs in descent, if a woman is equal as regards taxpaying but unequal
as regards voting, it is at least evident that reason is no unambiguous
source of morality. The devil can quote Scripture and it is a very poor
reasoner who cannot find a reason for anything that he wishes to do. A
partiality that is more or less consistently partial to certain sets or
classes is perhaps as near impartiality as man has yet come, whether by
a rational faculty or any other.

Is it, then, the intent of this argument merely to reiterate that reason
is and ought to be the slave of the passions? On the contrary, the
intent is to substitute for such blanket words as reason and passions a
more adequate analysis. And what difference will this make? As regards
the particular point in controversy it will make this difference: the
rationalist having smuggled in under the cover of reason the whole moral
consciousness then proceeds to assume that because two and two are
always four, or the relations of a straight line are timeless, therefore
ethics is similarly a matter of fixed standards and timeless goods. A
legal friend told me that he once spent a year trying to decide whether
a corporation was or was not a person and then concluded that the
question was immaterial. But when the supreme court decided that a
corporation was a person in the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment it
thereby made the corporation heir to the rights established primarily
for the negro. Can the moral consciousness by taking the name "reason"
become heir to all the privileges of the absolute idea and to the
timelessness of space and number?

Suppose I am to divide an apple between my two children--two children,
two pieces--this is an analysis of the situation which is obvious and
may well be called the analytic activ