The Age of Reason

“ In short,—and to express the matter in one word,—such an Age has reached its highest point of development when it has attained a clear conviction that Reason, and with Reason all that lies beyond mere sensuous personal Existence, is only an invention of certain idle individuals called Philosophers. ”

“ From age to age the human mind busies itself over the deep questions of philosophy and the discoveries of science. From generation to generation men seek to solve the great problems of life by the force of reason ”

“ But here we meet with a new difficulty,—this, namely:—our Age is far from being at one with itself in its view of History, and still farther from agreement with that view which we, who are guided by Reason as Knowledge, take of History, which view it cannot even understand. It is therefore unavoidably necessary that we should, in the first place, set forth our own view in a general way, and justify it, before making those applications of it which are afterwards to occupy our attention;—and to this purpose we shall devote our present lecture. ”

“ In truth, this "spirit of the age" is a mere sound, which by universal consent is allowed to be full of argument, and may be used by any man who can speak articulately or write legibly. All which can be understood is, that those who make frequent use of this phrase ascribe to me an unlimited power over law, morality, custom, and reason. They empower me to invent a new right and wrong whenever I am tired of the old. ”

“ Such an Age is thus obliged to deny and deride all the knowledge which we possess a priori and independent of Experience, and the assertion that from knowledge itself, without intermixture of any sensuous element, new knowledge may originate and flow forth. ”

“ The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past atchievements. ”

“ You perceive that this Age is based upon an already present conception,—an innate Common Sense, which pronounces irrevocably upon its whole system of knowledge and belief; and if we could thoroughly analyze this inborn conception or sense, which is thus to it the root of everything else, we should then, undoubtedly, be able to take in the whole system of the beliefs of the Age at a single glance, perceive the inmost spirit beneath all its outward wrappings, and bring it forth to view. ”

“ It was the age of the scholastic philosophy-an age of dicta and contradicta-an age when the highest human ingenuity was perverted to inquiries respecting the eternal puzzles that lie beneath the basis of all finite knowledge ”

“ But the palpable truths of the propositions, as well as the familiarity of the facts illustrating them, entirely obviate such a necessity.
Our age is an age of great discoveries; and one of the greatest is that which revealed that this world is to be ruled, shaped and guided by the marvelous might of mind. ”

“ There is a fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as "modern civilization," "spirit of the age," "tone of thought," intellectual type of the age," bias of the imagination," "habits of religious thought," unbalanced by any precise definition; and the spirit of rationalism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the specific mental activities of which it is a generalized expression. ”

“ No causes nor effects; no substances, material or spiritual; no evidence even in mathematical demonstration; no liberty nor active power; nothing existing in nature, but impressions and ideas following each other, without time, place, or subject. Surely no age ever produced such a system of opinions, justly deduced with great acuteness, perspicuity, and elegance, from a principle universally received. ”

“ Yet the facts will change their utterances in spite of us; and we, too, change with age and ages in spite of ourselves, so as to see the facts around us as perhaps even more changed than they actually are. ”

“ But, it is only after we have acquired a more intimate knowledge of the principle of the Age, and have learned at the same time how history is to be questioned and what we have to seek from her, that it will be useful or proper for us to adduce from the history of the actual world whatever may be necessary for our purpose and may serve to guard us from error. ”

“ To faith, and virtue, why so backward, man?
From hence:—the present strongly strikes us all; 1430
The future, faintly: can we, then, be men?
If men, Lorenzo! the reverse is right.
Reason is man’s peculiar: Sense, the brute’s.
The present is the scanty realm of Sense;
The future, Reason’s empire unconfined:
On that expending all her godlike power,
She plans, provides, expatiates, triumphs, there;
There, builds her blessings; there, expects her praise;
And nothing asks of Fortune, or of men.
And what is Reason? Be she thus defined; 1440
Reason is upright stature in the soul. ”

“ Speculative and transcendental notions have furnished the world philosophy, and the rules of life policy and duty have been deduced from this and introduced at the second stage of the process,—act, thought, act. All the errors and fallacies of the mental processes enter into the mores of the age. The logic of one age is not that of another. It is one of the chief useful purposes of a study of the mores to learn to discern in them the operation of traditional error, prevailing dogmas, logical fallacy, delusion, and current false estimates of goods worth striving for. ”

“ And this belief is of the greatest importance. It marks the diseased state of the age when we see it adopt the despairing creed that our knowledge is only subjective, and that beyond this subjective we cannot go. ”

“ In this connection, it must be borne in mind that nothing is stationary. The minds of men change from age to age; and that which appears to one generation to be the most rootedly established truth, is in the course of a few decades completely rejected. ”

“ In order to give you, in this place, a still more comprehensive glance of what you have now to expect, I add the following ground of distinction, to which I have not yet adverted. The maxim of the Age is to accept nothing but that which it can understand,—understand, that is to say, through the mere empirical conceptions of Experience;— and, therefore, wherever the Age can establish itself in sufficient power and consistency, it sets up this maxim as its scientific principle, and by it estimates and judges every acquisition of knowledge. ”

“ When the light of such an idea is steadily held on human affairs, it breaks into endless forms of beauty and truth. The content of the idea is gradually evolved; hypotheses spring out of it, which are accepted as principles, rule the mind of an age, and give it its work and its character. ”

“ So soon, however, as, having become theory, it understands itself, admits its own proper significance, and loves, approves, and takes pride in itself, and indeed accounts itself the highest and only truth, then does it assume the distinct Epochal character, reveal itself in all the phenomena of the Age, and may now be thoroughly comprehended by its own admissions. ”

“ And now to explain this principle somewhat further, so that I may at least make it historically clear to you, although I cannot prove it in this place:—it is the greatest error, and the true ground of all the other errors which make this Age their sport, that each individual imagines that he can exist, live, think, and act for himself, and believes that he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; ”

“ Instead of ascertained facts which all recognise, and experiments which conducted under the same conditions always give the same results, we have a dissolving view of theories and intuitions, accepted by some, denied by others, and changing with the changing conditions of the age, and with individual varieties of characters, emotions, and wishes. ”

“ The world is ruled by ideas, by abstract thought. Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them. We recognize this clearly in studying any past period. ”

“ Philosophy, indeed, at a later day, may bring her balance of probability, put the evidence of opposed facts in different scales, and deduce fair-seeming conclusions from an assumed principle that man is a rational creature. But is that assumption just? or, rather, does not History show, and experience prove, that he is swayed from the course which reason indicates, by passion, by indolence, and even by caprice? When the foundation is false, the superstructure must fall. ”

“ You cannot thus reconstruct the past by importing into one age the ideas of another, by interpreting the earliest in terms of the latest products of mental evolution. You may make revolutions in that way, but you cannot write history. ”

“ And so in our own Age, when it has somewhat recovered and composed itself from the manifold errors with which it has been perplexed and harassed, will Inspired Men arise and bring to it that of which it stands in need.
We have finished the task which we proposed to ourselves:—we have delineated, briefly and succinctly as was our purpose, the Characteristics of the Present Age contemplated from those essential principles which belong to all Time. There remains nothing further for us to do but to add a conclusion to the whole. ”

“ Hence it is clear that the Philosopher, in order to be able rightly to characterize any individual Age—and, if he will, his own—must first have understood a priori and thoroughly penetrated into the signification of Universal Time and all its possible Epochs. ”

“ If some of us felt that these, in a sense "new," truths were rather hurried upon us, often crudely expressed and applied; we knew that each generation must seek its own light, and add something to inherited wisdom. ”

“ In the first place,—the fundamental maxim of the Age, as already announced, is now better defined, and it is clear that from its asserted principle ‘What I do not comprehend, that is not,’ there must necessarily follow this other:—‘Now I comprehend nothing whatever except that which pertains to my own personal existence and well-being ”

“ And we rely on these laws of history because they are the embodiment of ages of human experience.
Whatever be our system of philosophy we all practically rely on past experience and observation. Fire burns and water drowns. ”

“ We have learned to suspect the truth of the old, because it is old, and for that reason was born in the days of slavery and darkness—because the probability is that the parents of the old were ignorance and superstition. We are beginning to be wise enough to take into consideration the circumstances of our own time—the theories and aspirations of the present—the changed conditions of the world—the discoveries and inventions that have modified or completely changed the standards of the greatest of the human race. ”

“ Beginning with that thirst of knowledge for its own sake which goes to make the great scholar, it was soon diverted into the two chief channels of intellectual interest which characterised her age—the decay of the older religious ideals and the growth of a scientific conception of the universe, including man. ”

“ To determine the exact measure of the influence that the varied expressions of an age's intellectual process exercises upon any single mind belonging to that age is difficult to the point of impossibility. ”

“ The era of spontaneous beliefs--of popular and semi-conscious theism, morality, and religion, 2d. The transitional age--the age of doubt, of inquiry, and of ill-directed mental effort, ending in fruitless sophism, or in skepticism. 3d. The philosophic or conscious age--the age of reflective consciousness, in which, by the analysis of thought, the first principles of knowledge are attained, the necessary laws of thought are discovered, and man arrives at positive convictions, and rational beliefs. ”

“ Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. [175] We talk of the 'spirit of the age,' and the 'sentiment of the people,' and in various ways we hypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. ”

“ To set these contingent and dubious constructions above the operations of pure thought and pure insight is indeed a return to the philosophy of the man in the street. 'Social morality, art, philosophy, and religion take us far beyond the spatio-temporal externality of history; these are concrete and necessary living worlds, and in them the finite mind begins to experience something of what individuality must ultimately mean.' Our inquiry has thus led us to the threshold of one of the fundamental problems of philosophy—the value and reality of time. ”

“ This is the childish age of Bugaboos and Authority, which is succeeded by the Metaphysical period; the worship of entities, ideals, principles; things to be valued in and for themselves. To this age belongs the reign of Conscience, which especially characterizes our own day. And as our knowledge and understanding of the material universe passes from the realms of mystery into the region of exact knowledge, so must the conduct of life take on the scientific method, and, leaving the darkness of tradition and the fogs of metaphysics, become truly rationalized. ”

“ The history of the philosophy of the last half of this century constitutes a development as continuous and as logical as the philosophy of any similar period of years wherein men have thought persistently and truly upon the problems of life and mind. ”