" All that is vital is
irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is
essentially sceptical.
The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to
relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science,
inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not
real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the
sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?
Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate
thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we
think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with
oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may
they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable
and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?
The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot
think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and
principally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast
to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of
theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was
established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic
propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity,
the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.
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