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By Root 1784 0

the real world. How else but through meticulous reasoning could Roark have built grand new structures that did not fall down? How else could Peter Keating have failed so bitterly, except by letting others do his thinking for him? Roark’s unspoken code is a morality of reason. He is the Active Man, the creator, producer, egoist, life-giver; Keating and Toohey are examples of the Passive Man, the parasite, the imitator, the collectivist, the “altruist,” the mediocrity, the death-carrier. Severely condensed, an early draft of the book appeared as “The Only Path to Tomorrow” in the January 1944 issue of The Reader’s Digest, where Eugene Lyons, whose The Red Decade had first attracted her to Macmillan and who was now her friend, was working as an editor. She found expository writing boring and difficult at this stage in her career and never finished the book.

Two years earlier, she had written an inscription in Paterson’s copy of The Fountainhead that quoted Roark’s tribute to Gail Wynand: “You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.” This was a warm commendation, conveying affection and respect. Yet it also carried a subliminal, elegiac note, one that echoed Roark’s mixed sympathies for Wynand. Rand was beginning to think of Paterson as stubborn, even stifling. On first moving to Hollywood, she had traded long, fond letters with Paterson. But by 1945, her side of the correspondence had cooled. In the midst of sisterhood, conflicts had opened a narrow rift between them. God the father was one sore point. Rand had always known that Paterson believed in God, although she also knew that the crotchety individualist did not endorse any organized religion and thought that the Christian morality would one day be replaced by something better. Rand held faith of any kind to be inconsistent with rationality; she particularly despised Christianity, with its insistence on suffering and brotherhood, as “the best possible kindergarten of communism.” The women had punted and dodged this issue for years. But in their letters it rose acrimoniously to the surface, with Rand at one point writing that “an omniscient being, by definition, is a totalitarian dictator. Ah, but he won’t use his power? Never mind. He has it.” The two also conducted a fascinating, though highly charged, argument about the limits of Aristotelian deductive reasoning. Paterson thought that Rand’s use of logic sometimes resembled the arid arguments put forward by the philosophers Rand most disliked. When such philosophers “had strung some words together, in the form of a syllogism or other logical construction, they thought that [the formulation] had to be so—without asking if the facts which constitute the necessary premises are so,” Paterson wrote. Take, for example, the logic of, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. That is a good syllogism,” she wrote, “but its truth depends on the premises being true—that men are mortal, that Socrates is a man. Logic is an instrument for dealing with whatever you can get into its measure.” The older woman thought that God and men were both to some degree immeasurable. She argued that Rand trusted deductive reasoning too much and overlooked matters that reason might identify as being worthy of investigation but that were illogical, or inexplicable, at least for now. Rand thought that the alternative to a morality of reason was “the fiat of revelation,” and that to hypothesize entities and spheres that the human mind was by its nature inadequate to understand was at best perverse.

More personal matters also troubled their friendship, or at least disturbed Rand. Later, she would describe how, in 1942, Paterson had made a point of asking permission to paraphrase some of her arguments against altruism in The God of the Machine, including the gist of her argument about Boswell and the baby. In the chapter on “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine,” Paterson had adapted Rand’s insight, that a baby cannot survive in a tower without an adult to care for her, to make a case that professional