Pure reason

“ Pure reason does not in its ideas point to particular objects, which lie beyond the field of experience, but only requires completeness of the use of the understanding in the system of experience. But this completeness can be a completeness of principles only, not of intuitions and of objects. In order however to represent the ideas definitely, reason conceives them after the fashion of the cognition of an object. ”

“ The whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, is centred in the three following questions:
1. WHAT CAN I KNOW?
2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO?
3. WHAT MAY I HOPE? ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the real, although common sense thus often opposes it to the merely desirable, remains to the end that which, if present, would, as we say, satisfy reason, and thereby give us the greatest fulfilment possible to our type of consciousness. ”

“ You do so because you consider yourself obliged in reason to do it, but if you supply causation at all, why not furnish such a cause as reason has impressed upon you, and which is inherent in your mind—a cause which stands still, an original cause? ”

“ At best more watchful this, but that more strong.
The action of the stronger to suspend,
Reason still use, to reason still attend.
Attention, habit and experience gains;
Each strengthens reason, and self-love restrains. ”

“ This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. ”

“ But we distinguish this mass of passions and pleasures, desire and knowledge and pain, which makes up most of my character at the moment, from that inner and deeper motive-choosing self which is called Reason, and the Will, and the Ego; which is only responsible when motives are voluntarily chosen by directing attention to them. It is responsible only for the choice of one motive out of those presented to it, not for the nature of the motives which are presented. ”

“ By 'practical reason' we mean a consciousness of a possibility of perfection to be realised in and by the subject of the consciousness. By 'will' we mean the effort of a self-conscious subject to satisfy itself. In God, so far as we can ascribe reason and will to Him, we must suppose them to be absolutely united. ”

“ And where we act, as we say, with a motive, where we have in our minds a reason, an aim, an object beyond the act, which the act subserves, there these motives, these thoughts of ends or objects to be realized, are of very different kinds. ”

“ But if we take reason strictly, not for the faculty of mental perception in general, but for ratiocination, or a power of inferring by arguments; I say, if we take reason thus, the perceiving of spiritual beauty and excellency no more belongs to reason than it belongs to the sense of feeling to perceive colors, or to the power of seeing to perceive the sweetness of food. ”

“ This something—reason, consciousness, soul, call it what you will—unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal life—"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!—whence, if there is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. ”

“ IT is the intent of this chapter to shew, that altho’ common language ascribes a variety of faculties and principles to the soul, imputing this action to the blindness of our passions, that to the inconstancy of our tempers; one thing to the heat of our imagination, another to the coolness of our reason; yet, in strictness of truth, every thing that is done by us, is the action and operation of our reason, and is to be ascribed to it, as the sole principle from whence it proceeded, and by which it is governed and effected. ”

“ As a result we shall soon find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals. ”

“ For when, by a comparison of the reason, the mind ascends from those things which are according to reason, then it arrives at a notion of good. And this good we are speaking of, we both feel to be and call good, not because of any addition made to it, nor from its growth, nor from comparing it with other things, but because of its own proper power. ”

“ My Ought is my own will more rationally expressed than, at the instant of a capricious activity, I as yet consciously recognize. The consciousness of the more rational purpose, — of a purpose looming up, as it were, in the distance, beyond my present impulses, and yet even now seen as their own culmination, like a mountain crowning the ascent from the foothills, — the consciousness, I say, of such a purpose, is what we mean in Ethics by the Ought. ”

“ All these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the will to have an external world. Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the thought: 'But there shall be something beyond this.'... The popular assurance of an external world is the fixed determination to make one, now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 304—the italics are my own.) ”

“ This faculty is reason,—the supreme faculty, above sensibility, above understanding. Reason gives the final generalization, the idea of a universe comprehending the infinitude of details presented by the senses, and the worlds of knowledge shaped by the understanding; the idea of a personality embracing the infinite complexities of feeling, and gathering under one dominion the realms of consciousness; the idea of a supreme unity combining in itself both the other ideas; the absolute perfection, the infinite and eternal One, which men describe by the word God. ”

“ In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations of the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason. We may speak of understanding as 'human,' with its often discordant generalisations; but there can be no merely 'human' Reason. ”

“ All our strength and understanding, our valour and renown, and the ends of our actions, result from our reasoning with the intelligent.
7. Reason is the lamp to show us the right and wrong, and the instrument for accomplishment of our desires:—by reliance on right reason, one crosses over easily the wide ocean of the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Notwithstanding therefore in common language, our passions, and the effects of them, are usefully distinguished from our reason, I have here ventured to shew, that all the disorders of human nature, are in effect the disorders of human reason, and that all the perfection or imperfection of our passions is the perfection or imperfection of our reason. ”

“ Things and finite spirits are not to be thought as developments of some inconceivable, mechanical necessity, but as the form in which the moral order—the highest expression of the reason we find in us—has existence or reality. ”

“ And yet, though they seek to use only their reason, they despise reason. These philosophers look upon reason as the humble handmaiden of ecstasy. And that divine ecstasy is excited by the thought of a Nihilum. ”

“ Reason, therefore, and learning, have no power here; but only by their vain activity to keep the soul insensible of that life and death, one of which is always growing up in it, according to the desire of the heart.
Add reason to a vegetable, and you add nothing to its life or death. Its life and fruitfulness lieth in the soundness of its root, the goodness of the soil, and the riches it derives from air and light. ”

“ What life could be more antagonistic to enlightened reason? What mistake more fatal to everything like self-improvement, culture, knowledge, happiness? And all for what? To strive after an impossible perfection, or the solution of insoluble questions, or the favor of a Deity whose attributes he misunderstood. ”

“ Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. ”

“ My purpose, in imagining these illustrations, was to render obvious and palpable the limitations of the intellect, when it attempts to translate feelings into terms of reason, or when it attempts to substitute scientific calculations for spontaneous emotions. The essence of one is [Pg 177] feeling; the essence of the other is logic ”

“ And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not by rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art. ”

“ Those powers and affections, such as thought and reason, judgment and liberty, love and hatred, joy and sorrow, can never be the properties or effects of matter, in any possible variation or modification of its parts. ”

“ But look more closely, and you will see that this incredulous reason is reasoning supported by principles whose bearing is insufficient; you will see that what reveals the infinite and perfect being is precisely reason itself; [278] and that, in turn, it is this rev{357}elation of the infinite by reason, which, passing into sentiment, produces the emotion and the inspiration that we have mentioned. May heaven grant that we shall never reject the aid of sentiment! On the contrary, we invoke it both for others and ourself. Here we are with the people, or rather we are the people. ”

“ And what ye have called the world shall but be created by you: your reason, your likeness, your will, your love, shall it itself become! ”

“ The rational, spiritual, or even physical elements, which may enter and compose this, his summum bonum, represent those intellectual interests which may be termed ultimate, for the very reason, that they relate to what the thinker deems his beatitude. These ultimate intellectual interests possess an absolute sanction, for the lack of which whatever lies outside of them tends to adjudge itself vain. ”

“ We are to assert that just what the internal meaning already imperfectly but consciously is, namely, purpose relatively fulfilled, just that, and nothing else, the apparently external meaning when truly comprehended also proves to be, namely, the entire expression of the very Will that is fragmentarily embodied in the life of the flying conscious idea, — the fulfilment of the very aim that is hinted in the instant. ”

“ But men boast of the reason and the conscience with which they are endowed. Agreed. But with the exception of a small number—the infinite minority of progress—to what advantage have men employed the reason and the conscience of which they boast? ”

“ For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices, and follies, and also our fears. ”

“ A world, the work or the child of the universal reason, developing in time, how can any reflective mind be content with this account of things? The universal reason surely means something by its process, surely lacks something when it seeks for higher forms. ”

“ Reason, with me, had to yield to excess of reason. Every philosophical discovery which I made so flattered my conceit that I often imagined myself to be a great man discovering new truths for the benefit of humanity. ”

“ It partakes of reason, yet it includes something conflicting with reason. These conflicting tendencies are usually modifiable by reason, and may become in the temperate man completely obedient to reason. There remains Reason—the highest and sovereign portion of the soul. ”

“ I called the understanding and the will, the reason and the fancy, the four principal branches of the human consciousness, of which all other mental powers or faculties of the soul, usually ascribed to man, are but so many offshoots. ”

“ You will find at last that one motive is dominant. Either, at the last push, he will do God’s will, or he will do that by which he thinks to serve his interests in the world. Now, what a man does at the last analysis or when pushed into a corner, that is what reveals his real motive. The motive on which he then acts is his only real master-principle. There can be only one such in a life. ”

“ And, as we have already seen, and in the present lecture shall further illustrate, the relation of partial and total meaning is, at the same time, the relation of any finite will to the expression of the complete intent of that same will. Without contradiction, therefore, you are unable to assert the real Being of any world, unless you conceive that world as the expressed will whose partial momentary embodiment you even now observe, whenever you get any rational idea before your mind. ”

“ Down below them, is another question which is included in them all and which sooner or later must be faced by each and every one of us: "Why am I here on earth? Has my life any purpose in the great, everlasting scheme of things? What is that purpose?" ”