Reason

“ 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? ”

“ And if the reason be Unable to unravel us the cause Why objects, which at hand were square, afar Seemed rounded, yet it more availeth us, Lacking the reason, to pretend a cause For each configuration, than to let From out our hands escape the obvious things And injure primal faith in sense, and wreck All those foundations upon which do rest Our life and safety. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ And its First Cause, I must proceed to remark, reason and observation alike lead us to believe must be one—a single cause. When one First Cause is sufficient to explain all the facts, it is contrary to reason to suppose another or several. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ Precedes the Will to think, and Errour lives
Ere Reason can be born: Reason, the Power
To guess at Right and Wrong; the twinkling Lamp
Of wand'ring Life, that winks and wakes by turns,
Fooling the Follower, betwixt Shade and Shining. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though his determination is largely based upon feeling, reason has chosen between feelings, between immediate desire to have, and desire to avoid future discomfort. Reason is triumphant over present desire. ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But looking at reason in itself,—that is considering it as a straight, and not as a reflex act, [1] what has reason done, or what can reason do for man (we speak of kind, and not of degree, for man may have a higher degree of it than animals) , which she has not also done for beavers and for bees, creatures which, though rational, are yet not personal beings? ”

“ 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. ”

“ For, in short, what debauchery, what avarice, what crime among men is there which does not owe its birth to thought and reflection, that is, to reason? For all opinion is reason: right reason, if men's thoughts are conformable to truth ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Reason (or, as some prefer to call it in this limited sense, Understanding) is the power by which we compare, and, from our comparisons, draw inferences or conclusions. By means of it we compare the suggestions of the Imagination with the suggestions of Experience, and accept or reject the former in accordance with the result of our comparison.
xii. Hope
Hope is desire, of which we imagine the fulfilment, while recognizing the presence of doubt. ”

“ I will live by the standard of reason, and if thinking in accordance with reason takes me to perdition, then I will go to hell with my reason, rather than to heaven without it.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential social Me is the most interesting, by reason of certain apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our moral and religious life. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Whether with reason, or with instinct blest, Know, all enjoy that power which suits them best; ”

“ For men believe that their reason governs words; ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But besides forming these three perfectly distinct ideas, and exploring the secret of what has been passing within, the reason also comprehends the necessity of subjecting to control the faculties and forces that are the condition of the greatest satisfaction of human nature. ”

“ The proper work of man, the grand drift of human life, is to follow reason (that noble spark kindled from Heaven; ”

“ Reason progressive, Instinct is complete;
Swift Instinct leaps; slow Reason feebly climbs.
Brutes soon their zenith reach; ”

“ But the universal form in which any opinion comes to your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity, in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight. ”

“ The part of man which is not body I will call the Spirit; under that term including all the faculties not sensual. Let me, for convenience' sake, distribute these faculties of the human spirit into four classes: the intellectual,—including the aesthetic,—moral, affectional, and religious. Let Mind be the name of the intellectual faculty, — including the threefold mental powers, reason, imagination, and understanding; Conscience shall be the short name for the moral, Heart for the affectional, and Soul for the religious faculties. ”

“ The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. ”

“ The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning. ”

“ Now, to follow out this reasoning, what is the marvellous?—that which we do not understand. What is it that we really desire?—that which we cannot obtain. ”