If you rebel against reason, if you succumb to the old bromides of the Witch
Doctors, such as: “Reason is the enemy of the artist” or “The cold hand of
reason dissects and destroys the joyous spontaneity of man’s creative
imagination”—I suggest that you take note of the following fact: by rejecting
reason and surrendering to the unhampered sway of their unleashed emotions (and
whims), the apostles of irrationality, the existentialists, the Zen Buddhists,
the non-objective artists, have not achieved a free, joyous, triumphant sense
of life, but a sense of doom, nausea and screaming, cosmic terror. Then read
the stories of O. Henry or listen to the music of Viennese operettas and
remember that these were the products of the spirit of the nineteenth
century—a century ruled by the “cold, dissecting” hand of reason. And then
ask yourself: which psycho-epistemology is appropriate to man, which is
consonant with the facts of reality and with man’s nature?