integrated into the rest of one's knowledge, and to induce a trance-like illusion of understanding. One must be
willing to repress one's critical faculty and hold it as one's guilt; one must be willing to drown any questions that
rise in protest—to strangle any thrust of reason convulsively seeking to assert its proper function as the protector of
one's life and cognitive integrity.
All of man's knowledge and all his concepts have a hierarchical structure. The foundation and starting point of
man's thinking are his sensory perceptions; on this base, man forms his first concepts, then goes on building the
edifice of his knowledge by identifying and integrating new concepts on a wider and wider scale. If man's thinking
is to be valid, this process must be guided by logic, "the art of non-contradictory identification"^12 —and any new
concept man forms must be integrated without contradiction into the hierarchical structure of his knowledge. To
introduce into one's consciousness a major and fundamental idea that cannot be so integrated, an idea not derived
from reality, not validated by a process of reason, not subject to rational examination or judgment—and worse: an
idea that clashes with the rest of one's concepts and understanding of reality—is to sabotage the integrative
function of consciousness, to undercut the rest of one's convictions and kill one's capacity to be certain of anything.
There is no greater self-delusion than to imagine that one can render unto reason that which is reason's and unto
faith that which is faith's. Faith cannot be circumscribed or delimited; to surrender one's consciousness by an inch is
to surrender one's consciousness in total. Either reason is an absolute to a mind or it is not—and if it is not, there is
no place to draw the line, no principle by which to draw it, no barrier faith cannot cross, no part of one's life faith
cannot invade; then one remains rational only until and unless one's feelings decree otherwise.
Faith is a malignancy that no system can tolerate with impunity; and the man who succumbs to it will call on it in
precisely those issues where he needs his reason most. When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the
absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness—and one's mind becomes an organ one
cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.
- Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality—but no control is possible in a
universe which,