Reasoner

“ If considered as a mere receptacle for Latin and Greek, Mathematics and Metaphysics, Science and Literature, we may, without moral turpitude or virtue, abstractly considered, follow our own inclinations; but the Understanding will all the time be growing either stronger or weaker, wiser or more foolish, whether we study them or whether we let them alone. This action of the Understanding cannot go on without influencing the Affections. ”

“ But your hypotheses about particular problems must be judged by themselves. Your body of central truth is subject only to the test just mentioned. And you call this truth “absolute” merely because you conceive that it bears this test. Whether it does so is a question of fact, not of authority. And every man must, in such a matter, look for himself before judging about what is offered to him.
As to the principal special features of this discussion, they are: (1) The definition and comparison of what I have called the Four Historical Concepts of Being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In estimating the characters or explaining the conduct of acquaintances or of public men, we frame hypotheses as to their dispositions and principles. 'That we should not impute motives' is a peculiarly absurd maxim, as there is no other way of understanding human life. ”

“ Trained by tradition, reason is called common sense. Trained by personal experience to the knowledge of principles, reason is called science. Trained by the contemplation of principles to the perfection of the intellect, reason is called wisdom. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ I proceed to the pleasures of the understanding, which possess a high rank in point of dignity. Of this every one will be sensible, when he considers the important truths that have been laid open by science; such as general theorems, and the general laws that govern the material and moral worlds. The pleasures of the understanding are suited to man as a rational and contemplative being ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a clear distinction between things which are according to, above, and contrary to, reason. The first are propositions, the truth of which may be discovered by the use of the ideas we have acquired from sensation and reflection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What Reasoning is.—We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which may lead to similar results. ”

“ Now in this extremely elementary consideration, namely, in the consideration that unless ideas first voluntarily bind themselves to a given task, and so, by their internal purpose, already commit themselves to a certain selection of its object, they are neither true nor false, — in this consideration, I say, there may be hidden consequences that we shall later find momentous for the whole theory of Being and of truth. ”

“ Reasoning in it, we learn what we are, and whence, and also to know Creator and creature; through it we trace truth and detect falsity, we argue and discover what is consequent and what inconsequent, what is contrary to the nature of things, what is true, what is probable, and what is intrinsically false in disputations. ”

“ And, furthermore, what I have asserted about the insight which the reason gives us is so far from being opposed to the pragmatist's facts, that every rational consideration of the type of truth which they define leads us back to the consideration of absolute truth and to the assertion of an all-inclusive insight. ”

“ 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? ”

“ I am not of your opinion, That nice distinctions and Logistical arguments discover truth, dissolve doubts, and clear the understanding; but I say, they rather make doubts of truth, and blind-fold the understanding ”

“ In those subjects which are at the same time familiar and complicated, and especially in those which are so in as great a degree as moral and social subjects are, it is a matter of common remark how many important propositions are believed and repeated from habit, while no account could be given, and no sense is practically manifested, of the truths which they convey. ”

“ Use one for each reason that you put down. As you think and read you will determine many reasons for the truth or falsity of the proposition. Gradually you will see that a great many of them are not so important as others and that they do not bear directly on the question, but in reality support some more important reason that you have set down. ”

“ We may conclude with logic as sound and certain as is used in any scientific deduction, that every sense, faculty, and hope of the human soul has an objective reality in relation to which it is developed as surely as the wing argues an atmosphere, or the eye an ether. ”

“ Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ In general, when we judge in universal ways, we begin, before we attain an insight into the truth of our judgment, by stating, as abstractly possible, more ideal alternatives than in the end will prove to be determinately possible, or to be valid possibilities. ”

“ But when, on the contrary, one accepts a logical and luminous system of thought, a revelation which offers an explanation of the mystery of being entirely consistent with reason, you think that very remarkable! ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is plain common sense, as all truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified. ”

“ Of Ethology, Or The Science Of The Formation Of Character.
§ 1. The laws of mind as characterized in the preceding chapter, compose the universal or abstract portion of the philosophy of human nature; and all the truths of common experience, constituting a practical knowledge of mankind, must, to the extent to which they are truths, be results or consequences of these. ”

“ Their meaning is almost always in a process either of being lost or of being recovered. Whoever has attended to the history of the more serious convictions of mankind--of the opinions by which the general conduct of their lives is, or as they conceive ought to be, more especially regulated--is aware that even when recognizing verbally the same doctrines, they attach to them at different periods a greater or a less quantity, and even a different kind of meaning. ”

“ To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge. ”

“ In other words, our conceptions, though they may be clear, are not appropriate for our purpose, unless the properties we comprise in them are those which will help us toward what we wish to understand--i.e., either those which go deepest into the nature of the things, if our object be to understand that, or those which are most closely connected with the particular property which we are endeavoring to investigate. ”

“ The topic here considered — The Function of Reason — is one of the oldest topics for philosophical discussion. What is the function of Reason amid the welter of our mental experiences, amid our intuitions, our emotions, our purposes, our decisions of emphasis? In order to answer such a question we have to consider the nature of Reason, its essence. ”

“ Now Reasoning being nothing else but a Comparison of Ideas, and a deducing of Conclusions from Clear and Evident Principles, it is in the first place requisite that our Ideas be Clear and Just, and our Principles True, else all our Discourse will be Nonsense and Absurdity, Falshood and Error. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But reason is the mind's eye, and enables us to see why things are, and when and how events may be made to happen or not to happen. The logician endeavors to learn exactly what this reason is which makes the power of men. ”

“ In this respect rational psychology would rather remind us, that this refusal of our reason to give a satisfactory answer to the questions which stretch beyond this life, should be regarded as an intimation of the reason for us to leave this fruitless and superfluous speculation, and apply our self-knowledge to some fruitful and practical use. ”

“ And now, finally, after surveying all these so various types of beings, we have to recall the comment often already made in these lectures, and to assert that not only these different kinds of realities, but also the concrete experiences whereby we come to observe, and the ideas whereby we ourselves define, describe, and in general undertake to know these very objects, are themselves also in their own measure real, and are as truly real as are the various finite objects of common sense that we know. ”

“ What I say is that our present recognition of the concrete things in which we all believe is not a mere acceptance of any content of sense, but does include an intention to act, and does fulfil, as far as it goes, a purpose, and our own conscious purpose. ”

“ To form a truth, two factors are needed—a fact and an abstraction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any man of sense has only to open his eyes, or to observe himself within, to appreciate how all original knowledge is of the concrete, the definite, the individual. This, I say, is what the traditional method in logic seems to imply. ”

“ There is a manifest contradiction in applying the term depraved to that of reason, the ideas contained in their respective definitions will not admit of their association together, as the terms convey heterogeneous ideas; for reason spoiled, marred, or robbed of its perfection, ceaseth to be rational, and should not be called reason ”

“ The only one which I shall here mention is, that conceptions which are really products of logical reflection, without being readily seen to be so, mingle with our ordinary thoughts, and are frequently the causes of great confusion. ”

“ If you will be candid, and bring your mind into a suitable condition to be reasoned with, we will call you to the consideration of questions which, if properly answered, will lead us into the true light of our subject. ”