value. Since reason is man's basic tool of survival, this means: the life appropriate to a rational being—or: that
which is required for the survival of man qua rational being.
"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil."^10
To live, man must think, he must act, he must produce the values his life requires. This, metaphysically, is the
human mode of existence.
Thinking is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Thinking is the activity of perceiving and
identifying that which exists—of integrating perceptions into concepts, and concepts into still wider concepts, of
constantly expanding the range of one's knowledge to encompass more and more of reality.
Evasion, the refusal to think, the willful rejection of reason, the willful suspension of consciousness, the willful
defiance of reality, is man's basic vice—the source of all his evils.
Man, like every other living species, has a specific manner of survival which is determined by his nature. Man is
free to act against the requirements of his nature, to reject his means of survival, his mind; but he is not free to
escape the consequence: misery, anxiety, destruction. When men attempt to survive, not by thought and productive
work, but by parasitism and force, by theft and brutality, it is still the faculty of reason that they are secretly
counting on: the rationality that some moral man had to exercise in order to create the goods which the parasites
propose to loot or expropriate. Man's life depends on thinking, not on acting blindly; on achievement, not on
destruction; nothing can change that fact. Mindlessness, passivity, parasitism, brutality are not and cannot be
principles of survival; they are merely the policy of those who do not wish to face the issue of survival.
"Man's life" means: life lived in accordance with the principles that make man's survival qua man possible.
Just as man is alive, physically, to the extent that the organs within his body function in the constant service of his
life, so man is alive, as a total entity, to the extent that his mind functions in the constant service of his life. The
mind, too, is a vital organ—the one vital organ whose function is volitional. A man encased in an iron lung, whose
own lungs are paralyzed, is not dead; but he is not liv-