When the ashes finally settled, it became clear that not only witches but facts had been tortured so that people could create and support a belief they wished to hold. The more people thought about witchcraft, the more they believed in it, and as the resultant positive feedback system went to excess, a mania went to madness. In the American colonies, the insanity reached the point that a dog was tried and executed. If there was any irony in this whole tragedy, it was that the witch hunters, while they were inflicting agony on their victims, thought they were doing Good. Fortunately, by the end of the 1600's this reign of Goodness tapered off, and people were left pretty much alone with their private beliefs.

Ironic or not, the witch hunts provided a tragic marker for the age, in that these grotesque persecutions in the cause of orthodoxy and the name of Goodness were actually logically justified to those people who believed in witches. It is really quite reasonable for people who know what is right to want to stamp out evil, and there is nothing inherently illogical about extending righteousness to the nth degree. While we marvel at the use of scientific logic and math as means to help us unravel the mysteries of nature, we must not forget that rationalism can be so destructive when used by witch hunters and their ilk to dismiss or override basic human values.

However, in the seventeenth century, rationalists thought these values were fixed: They did not have to be created and could not be destroyed. Correct beliefs simply were to be applied, and naturally people who had already discovered them felt morally obliged to impose them with a passion on others. On the other hand, those who were still searching for eternal truths were convinced that logic by itself would lead the sane, rational intelligencia to discover the proper standards for judging right and wrong for everyone. With theological disputes gradually being found to be basically unresolvable by any means—mental or military, Western intellectual life generally shifted to philosophy as well as science, and the guiding principle for the educated, informed, elitist leader in the Age of Reason might well have been, "I think, therefore, you don't have to".

Although this new rationalism was a belief system (i.e., a belief in logic), it constituted a departure from religion in that it denied the supernatural and reduced God to, at most, the role of Logician Supreme. In addition, rationalism went beyond science, which limited itself to the objective, logical study of factual nature. Scientists did not ask the big questions about human values—what was right or wrong or good or bad—but restricted their concerns to the validation of their data and theories. However, rationalists believed they could find valid answers to questions about cultural intangibles like epistemology and ethics primarily through logic, and although they usually based their reasoning on knowledge gained from Scripture, tradition and superstition, an increasing number of thinkers in this era included in their considerations facts based on experience.

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