Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even attack the personality of Hope and Justice.  Besides, people have such a strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as much as or more than is good for them:  there is no need of encouraging reason.  With unreason the case is different.  She is the natural complement of reason, without whose existence reason itself were non-existent.

If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason, surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must be also?  Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the interests of reason herself.  The Professors of Unreason deny that they undervalue reason:  none can be more convinced than they are, that if the double currency cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human reason, the double currency should cease forthwith; but they say that it must be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive that admirable faculty of the one-half of its own existence.  Unreason is a part of reason; it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.

CHAPTER XXII:  THE COLLEGES OF UNREASON—­Continued

Of genius they make no account, for they say that every one is a genius, more or less.  No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy—­so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part.  In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

When I talked about originality and genius to some gentlemen whom I met at a supper party given by Mr. Thims in my honour, and said that original thought ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words at once.  Their view evidently was that genius was like offences—­needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes.  A man’s business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad.  And really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our own, for the word “idiot” only means a person who forms his opinions for himself.

The venerable Professor of Worldly Wisdom, a man verging on eighty but still hale, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in consequence of the few words that I had imprudently let fall in defence of genius.  He was one of those who carried most weight in the university, and had the reputation of having done more perhaps than any other living man to suppress any kind of originality.

“It is not our business,” he said, “to help students to think for themselves.  Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do.  Our duty is to ensure that they shall think as we do, or at any rate, as we hold it expedient to say we do.”  In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past.