Principle of sufficient reason

“ Among the abstract ideas, the concepts united in the judgment, the principle of sufficient reason appears in such a way that each of these has its worth, its validity, and its whole existence, here called truth, simply and solely through the relation of the judgment to something outside of it, its ground of knowledge, to which there must consequently always be a return. ”

“ Let us look to the reason itself to see if the principle of its practice lies there; for it is certain that we shall not find the principle of universal validity for our will among our impulses. The reason is a spontaneous synthesis. It is a fact that any one may verify who will search his consciousness—that man may will from reason. The will may be impelled from within, and need not be compelled from without. The will may be an imperative in itself, proclaiming its right because it is reasonable, justifying itself because it is reasonable, functioning because it is the function of reason. ”

“ We ourselves call the objective reason the ideal formula, or, briefly, the ideal; yet good writers and speakers do use the word in both senses. They say, "Man is endowed with reason," or has a "rational nature," in which they employ the term subjectively. They say, also, of such an assertion, "It is unreasonable, or it is contrary to reason;" that is, to the truth, or principle of things, in which they use it objectively, as they do when they speak of the principles affirmed in the ideal formula, and call them the reason, necessary and absolute ideas, or the principles of reason ”

“ But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things, and insists that they can't just come in spots, what KIND of a reason can there ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of logic and necessity and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole philosophical machine-shop as you will, the only REAL reason I can think of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here. It is DEMANDED, demanded, it may be, to give relief to no matter how small a fraction of the world's mass. ”

“ The first principles of every kind of reasoning are given us by nature, and are of equal authority with the faculty of reason itself, which is also the gift of nature. The conclusions of reason are all built upon first principles, and can have no other foundation. ”

“ We will now examine your propositions, and endeavour to discover the deductions to be drawn from them. You say that reason is a dormant principle without revelation:—when any thing is revealed by 20God, it is seen rationally;—that then reason is to exercise its balancing and comparing principle, and the result is, that there is a two-fold revelation in man. ”

“ Reason, then, is a reflex power, and as such, if, in a matter of principle, it recognizes itself as impotent and even absurd a priori, it knows that once in possession of the principle, it borrows from its light and becomes identified with it--an incomparable power of generalization. ”

“ I shall therefore endeavor to treat grave topics with as little gravity as the nature of the case may admit of; drawing my reasons less from authority than from common sense and the nature of things, and addressing them to the untaught feelings of the heart, rather than to what is falsely contradistinguished as reason and judgment. I say falsely, because when the mind is once broken in by the discipline of a spurious philosophy, it is too apt to throw out its view all considerations incapable of being established by any regular chain of reasoning. ”

“ In such cases it is an empirical law of the mind that reason discerns of itself the logical necessity, that is, if it desires to proceed according to the merits of the case, without, however, acting under physical constraint. ”

“ In fact, no belief which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. ”

“ But the infinite variety of circumstance which is formed in this externality by the light of the essence shining in it,—all this infinite material, with its regulations,—is not the object of philosophy.... To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: for what is is reason. ”

“ To object is to argue; and to argue is to assert the validity of argument, and, therefore, of the primary evidence, from which the evidence of each succeeding proposition of the argument flows. To object to the authority of such primary intuitive belief, would thus be to reason against reason,—to affirm and deny at the same moment,—and to own that the very arguments which we urge are unworthy of being received and credited. ”

“ It is our duty to take them without picking and choosing them to suit our views, to explain them, if we can, but not to explain them away; and to reason on them, and find the reason of them, but never to think ourselves rational when, by the shortest cut to reason, we have reasoned ourselves out of them. ”

“ The genuine result of such reasoning, if it were acted upon, would be that we need never, in any science or art whatever, trouble ourselves to enunciate any general principle or maxim, because perfectly useless! ”

“ If you are not able thus to generalize the motive of an action, and if it is the opposite motive that appears to you a universal maxim, your action, being opposed to this maxim, is thereby proved to be contrary to reason and duty,—it is bad. If neither the motive of your action nor the motive of the opposite action can be erected into a universal law, the action is neither good nor bad, it is indifferent. ”

“ In all our knowledge of general principles, what actually happens is that first of all we realise some particular application of the principle, and then we realise that the particularity is irrelevant, and that there is a generality which may equally truly be affirmed. ”

“ Where, in the whole armory of logic, can be found a principle more unquestionable than this, that no man can be to praise or to blame for that which is produced in him, by causes over which he had no control? ”

“ For it is a fatal error to think that reason can take the place of knowledge, that reason is infallible, that reasonable conclusions are of necessity right conclusions. Reason is a man’s servant, not his master; and behaves like a good and faithful servant—a sort of ‘Caleb Balderstone,’ ready to lie royally in his master’s behoof—and bring logical demonstration of any premiss which the will chooses to entertain. But the will is the man, the will chooses; and the man must know, if the will is to make just and discriminating decisions. ”

“ The principle itself is constantly used in our reasoning, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously; but there is no reasoning which, starting from some simpler self-evident principle, leads us to the principle of induction as its conclusion. ”

“ Nor must we demand the cause in all matters alike; it is enough in some cases that the fact be well established, as in the case of the first principles; the fact is the primary thing or first principle. ”

“ Our question in the present discussion being this, “What determines us to acknowledge as real one rather than another system of particular facts?” we have here pointed out that the first determining principle, namely, the Ought, requires us to acknowledge at each moment as real certain particular facts which, even while they are conceived as limiting, constraining, and so determining our acts, are also conceived as thereby enabling us even now to accomplish our will better than we could if we did not acknowledge these facts. ”

“ In the first place, it is contrary to facts to take reason for reasoning, and to envelop them in the same criticism. And then, after all, reasoning is the legitimate instrument of reason; its value is determined by that of the principles on which it rests. ”

“ For the principles of reason, if employed as objective, are without exception dialectical and possess no validity or truth, except as regulative principles of the systematic employment of reason in experience. ”

“ We must not, however, conclude that the generality of the principle is merely verbal; it will be found on inspection to be no vague or unmeaning assertion, but a most important and really fundamental truth. ”

“ If you adopt, as absolute, a criterion of right which is so only relatively, your results will not be absolutely right. Those who trust to their senses become, as it were, slaves to objective existences. Those alone who are guided by their intuitions find the true standard. ”

“ Without attempting in this place to justify my opinion, or even to define the kind of justification which it admits of, I merely declare my conviction, that the general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform, and the test by which they should be tried, is that of conduciveness to the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings ”

“ Which is merely another way of stating the conclusion previously reached—viz. that the only necessity which can be proved to govern our volitions is the necessity which is imposed by our own considerations of reason and morality. ”

“ Even admitting that human reason is perplexed between these contradictories, does it necessarily follow, does it follow as a fair inference from that admission, that there are no truths which can be predicted of reason universally, that there are no laws which are valid for all intellect, without considering whether it is this, or that, or the other intellect ? Can we not admit that man's reason is imperfect, and, in reference to some questions, impotent, and yet stop short of the conclusion that in no respect whatever is it akin to a higher order of intelligence, supposing such to exist? ”

“ When we come to deal with the special problems of moral and social life, we shall have to face further questions as to the connection of causal determination with moral freedom and responsibility, and again with conscious purposive action for ends. Our previous discussion will then be found to have cleared the way for these more complex questions, by removing the difficulties which arise when the causal postulate is mistaken for an axiomatic principle of the interpretation of the systematic nature of Reality. ”

“ In time we thus come to hold, in the world of finite common sense, that much is real and inevitable, that thwarts our desires. Yet it still remains true that what we usually call reason, namely, the search for the truth as such, gets placed at the head, in our wiser daily life, and gets even opposed to the search for ordinary satisfaction, just because there is, in the long run, more true satisfaction in being rational, i.e., in our recognition of the facts of common sense, than there is in striving irrationally. ”

“ Even if they were universally and exactly true within the bounds of experience, which they never are, still they are not the ultimate laws of human action; they are not the principles of human nature, but results of those principles under the circumstances in which mankind have happened to be placed. ”

“ Its universality follows from its very nature as a postulate. If we make a demand that a certain principle shall hold, we naturally extend our demand to all cases without distinction of time, past, present, and to come. The shrinking modesty which clings to the support of precedent is out of place in a postulate. A truth which we assume because we want it may as well be assumed as often as we want it and for all cases in which it may be needed. We can make it therefore as universal as we please, and usually we have no motive for not making it absolutely universal. ”

“ He does not mind, so they say, going in the face of logic and reason to relieve them; for often the kind and charitable are sadly hampered by the fetters of logic and reason, which hold them, as it were, away from their own benevolence. ”

“ We have said that if, in internal phenomena, the certainty of the objective truth fail, all reasoning is impossible. In fact, all reasoning supposes a succession of acts; when one of them exists in the mind, the other does not exist ”

“ The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason. ”

“ Having established the worth of the principles of consciousness, of evidence, and of contradiction, in relation to the dignity of fundamental, we will now examine the intrinsic value of the different criteria. ”

“ Thus, then, the words Use, Advantage, Interest, Good, find no application in a world in which no consciousness exists. [p. 7] Things there are neither good nor bad; they simply are or are not. Ideal truth-to exist at all requires that a mind also exist which shall deal with it as a judge deals with the law, really creating that which it professes only to declare. ”

“ Now, if occasionally I have felt myself called upon to set bounds to and to protest against the illimitable requirements and assumptions of reason in science, my remarks have been directed, not against reason itself, but chiefly against that absoluteness with which it pretends to reign paramount. ”

“ Positive logic abstains, as we see, from speculating upon the leading principles of knowledge, principles of identity, of contradiction of causality, etc. These kinds of principles are not objects of examination or of discussion. ”

“ No matter what show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its cause, its designer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and absolute Reality, — the only being in existence having such compass, such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. ”

“ But the reason, which is the faculty of the logical connection of ideas, and of the logical necessity which rules in that connection, often quits this safe and solid ground of reality, as presented to it in triple experience, whether of revelation and history, or of natural science, and resting entirely on itself, tries to build exclusively on its own foundation. ”