You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need nomorality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need itmost. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that arock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouthwithout cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouringhis stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; realitywill show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the onlycoin noble enough to buy it.“If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s onlymoral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is acontradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; theunderstood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts nocommandments.“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom:existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds fromthese. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling valuesof his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool ofknowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool mustproceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind iscompetent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: isworthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues,and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness:rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, thatnothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act ofperceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of valuesand one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits nocompromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’sconsciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of fakingreality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only ashort-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mysticalinvention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly,annihilates one’s consciousness.