Reason VS Passion

After Gulliver met and lived amongst the Houyhnhnms, he noticed that their race was more thought driven and thereby more orderly and controlled by what they considered to be reason and rationality. “As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general disposition to all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational creature; so their grand maxim is to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it” (Swift 465). Here is where you just know that they are a humble and docile race; they know nothing of arguing or disagreeing with one another, nothing of evil. To live within a society that holds everyone and everything to a strict discipline was new and unknown to him. Hence he was from a society that was corrupt and vile to say the least. Is it because his race was ruled by passion which to them is being governed by emotions?To show any type of an emotional display of affection or opinion would be classified as improper and unheard of. Therefore, the Houyhnhnms exempted themselves from any and all affiliations with emotion. “They have no fondness for their colts or foals; but the care they take in educating them proceedeth entirely from the dictates of reason” (Swift 466). They did not allow themselves to become servants of their feelings; they maintained the conduct that ruled their society. To see how they associated any acts of passion with sub-human conduct is reflected in the way they reason with thought instead of emotion. Thus here we see that the Enlightenment Period does illustrates these same implementations of rules pertaining to the era of man being governed by reason instead of passion.