One thing which is held to elevate us above the brutes, more than all
else, is our _reason_. “Man is a rational animal.” Yet how few of us
reason,--at any rate systematically! When in a crowd, we are carried
away by the psychology of the crowd; and we are swayed more by our
feelings and emotions than we are by our reason, as a rule. Yet there
can be no doubt that pure reason is the highest type of thinking
possible for the normal man.
Reasoning consists in carrying on a logical and connected train of
thought, each step of which follows logically from the one preceding
it. It is dependent upon learning, sagacity and common-sense. The
essence of reasoning is, of course, _logic_, which is supposed
to portray the highest type of reason. We think about a thing
intellectually, when we reason. We arrive at a conclusion by a
logical train of thought. Each thought is like the link in a chain.
We may arrive at the conclusion in some other way, by some process
of “intuition,” or what not, but reasoning constitutes the basis of
our thinking, and represents the solid rock, upon which most men are
content to build their intellectual houses. And in order to reason
well, systematically clear thinking is required.