To this question I must at once answer that we all of us daily use the
word reason as the name for a process, or a set of processes, which
certainly {85} cannot be reduced to the mere power to form and to use
abstract ideas, and to analyse the already predetermined meaning of
statements. When we speak of an ill-tempered or of a prejudiced man as
"unreasonable," we do not merely mean that he is unable to form or to
define abstract ideas, or that he cannot analyse the meaning of his
own statements. For sometimes such a man is contentiously thoughtful,
and fond of using too many one-sided abstractions, and eager to argue
altogether too vehemently. No, when we call him unreasonable, we mean
that he takes a narrow view of his life, or of his duties, or of the
interests of his fellow-men. We mean, in brief, that he lacks vision
for the true relations and for the total values of things. When we try
to correct this sort of unreasonableness, we do not say to the
petulant or to the one-sided man: "Go to the dictionary, and learn how
to define your abstract terms." Sometimes contentiously prejudiced men
are altogether too fond of the dictionary. Nor do we merely urge him
to form the habit of analysis. No, we may indeed say to him: "Be
reasonable"; but we mean: "Take a wider outlook; see things not one at
a time, but many at once; be broad; consider more than one side; bring
your ideas together; in a word, get insight." For precisely what I
defined in my opening lecture as insight is what we have in mind when,
in such cases, we counsel a man to be reasonable. So, in such uses of
the word reason, reason is not opposed to intuition, as the power to
{86} form abstract ideas is supposed by James to be opposed to the
power to see things by direct vision. No, reason, in such cases, means
simply broader intuition, the sort of seeing that grasps many views in
one, that surveys life as it were from above, that sees, as the
wanderer views the larger landscape from a mountain top.
When, not long since, in a famous decision, the Supreme Court of the
United States called attention to what it called "The rule of reason,"
and declared its intention to judge the workings of well-known modern
business methods by that rule, the court certainly did not mean by
"the rule of reason" the requirement that acts said to be "in
restraint of trade" must be judged merely through a process of forming
abstract ideas or of analysing the signification of assertions. No,
the court was explicitly opposing certain methods of estimate which it
regarded as falsely abstract; and it proposed to substitute for these
false abstractions a mode of judging the workings of certain trade
combinations which was to involve taking as wide and concrete and
practical a view as possible of their total effects. Everybody who
read the court's words understood that, in this case, it was precisely
the merely abstract conception of something technically defined as a
"restraint of trade" which the court wished, not to make sovereign,
but to subordinate to the wider intuition of a fair-minded observer of
the whole result, of a given sort of corporate combination. The {87}
"rule of reason" was intended to bring the whole question out of the
realm of barren abstractions and of mere analysis, and nearer to the
realm where the trained observation of the fair minded man would
decide the case--nearer, in fact, to the realm of intuition. Only, the
decisive intuition must be something broad, and far-seeing, and
synthetic, and fair.
Now I submit that this meaning of the word reason is perfectly
familiar to all of you. Reason, from this point of view, is the power
to see widely and steadily and connectedly. Its true opponent is not
intuition, but whatever makes us narrow in outlook, and consequently
the prey of our own caprices. The unreasonable person is the person
who can see but one thing at a time, when he ought to see two or many
things together; who can grasp but one idea, when a synthesis of ideas
is required. The reasonable man is capable of synopsis, of viewing
both or many sides of a question, of comparing various motives, of
taking interest in a totality rather than in a scattered multiplicity.
You may, of course, admit that this use of the word reason is
familiar; and still you may say that James's contention is
nevertheless sound. For, as you may declare, the real issue is not
regarding the meanings that chance to be linked with the word reason,
but regarding the relative impotence of that process which James chose
to call by this name. As a fact, so you may assert, there exists the
familiar process of forming abstract {88} conceptions; and there also
exists the process of drawing conclusions through an analysis of what
is already contained in the meaning of the assumed premises. Whether
or no one calls these two processes, in their usual combination, by
the name reasoning, James is right in saying that abstractions, and
that such sorts of purely analytic abstract reasoning as he has in
mind, are incapable of giving us religious insight. And both James and
the others who oppose reason to concrete experience are right in
asserting that you get no novel insight whatever through mere
abstractions, or through mere analysis, but are dependent for your
advances in knowledge upon experience. Therefore, as you may continue,
the issue which James and other empiricists raise must not be evaded
by any appeal to vaguer uses of the word reason, whether common-sense
or the Supreme Court chances to authorise such special forms of
expression.
I fully agree to the importance of this comment and of the issue as
thus stated. I am ready to consider the issue. But I also insist upon
estimating the whole use of reason in its proper context. James, in
common with countless other partisans of intuition in religious
matters, is fond of insisting that all our nobler intuitions and all
our deeper faiths are, in their foundations, inwardly compelling, but
inarticulate, and that we degrade them rather than help them when we
define their meaning in abstract terms or employ processes of explicit
{89} demonstration in their defence. James, in common with many
empiricists, also opposes experience in general to all processes of
reasoning, and asserts that the latter never teach us anything novel.
The issue, fairly viewed, is therefore not a perfectly simple one. It
involves the question whether the two modes of getting knowledge
between which we are asked to choose are the only modes actually in
use. Intuition, and experience in general, are by James and by others
sharply contrasted with certain processes of abstraction and of
analysis. It is then pointed out that since these latter processes,
taken by themselves, never give us any essentially novel insights, you
must on the whole cease to use your powers of abstraction and of
analysis, except for the mere purpose of record or of teaching, or of
some other such technical end--computation, analysis of hypotheses,
and the like. You must, at least in religious matters, depend upon the
uprushes from your subconscious self or upon whatever else is
persuasively inarticulate. In the ultimate decisions of life,
inarticulate intuition, mere faith, and that alone, can save you.
Hereupon the perfectly fair question arises whether the alternatives
are thus exhaustively stated. Must one choose between inarticulate
faith and barren abstractions? Must one face the alternative: Either
intuition without reasoning, or else relatively fruitless analysis
without intuition? Perhaps there is a third possibility. Perhaps one
may use one's process of abstraction {90} as a sort of preparation for
certain articulate and noble intuitions that cannot be approached, by
our human sort of consciousness, through any other way. Perhaps
analysis is not the whole process which determines demonstrations.
Perhaps synthesis--the viewing of many facts or principles or
relations in some sort of unity and wholeness--perhaps a synoptic
survey of various articulate truths, can lead us to novel insights. In
that case inarticulate intuitions and barren abstractions are not the
only instruments between which we must choose. For in that case there
will be another sort of aid, a more explicit sort of intuition, a more
considerate view of our life and its meaning, which we may adopt, and
which may lead us to novel results. And these results may be not only
articulate but saving.
Or, to state the issue more generally: In seeking for any sort of
novel truth, have we only the choice between the experience of the
data of sense or of feeling on the one hand and the analysis of
abstract ideas and assertions upon the other? May there not be another
source of knowledge? May not this source consist in the synthetic view
of many facts in their unity--in the grasping of a complex of
relations in their total significance? And may not just this be a
source of insight which is employed in many of the processes
ordinarily known as reasoning processes? May not the formation of
abstract ideas, when wisely used, be merely a means of helping us
toward an easier view of larger unities of fact than {91} our present
sort of human consciousness could grasp except for this auxiliary
device? May not analysis be merely an aspect, a part of our live
thinking? May not all genuine demonstration involve synthesis as well
as analysis, the making of new constructions as well as the dissection
of old assertions? If so, then the issue as presented by James and his
allies is not rightly stated, because an essential part of its context
is neglected. Abstract conceptions are, in fact, in the live and
serious work of thought, a mere preparation for intuitions and
experiences that lie on higher levels than those which, apart from
abstract conceptions, we men can reach. Reasoning processes are
fruitful because they involve sorts of experience, forms of intuition,
that you cannot reach without them. In brief, reason and experience
are not opposed. There is an opposition between inarticulate intuition
and articulate insight. There is also an opposition between relatively
blind experience of any sort and relatively rational experience. And,
in view of such oppositions, it will be perfectly fair to define
reason as the power to get articulate insight--insight into wholes
rather than fragments. It will also be fair to define the reasoning
process as the process of getting connected experience on a large
scale.
Whoever views the matter thus will indeed not be forced to be a
one-sided partisan of the reasoning process as thus defined. He will,
first, fully admit that the formation of abstract ideas is but a means
{92} to an end, and that this end is the enlargement of the range of
our view of the connections of our experience. He will secondly admit
that, as soon as the process of forming abstract ideas is pursued as
an end in itself, pedantry and formalism result, whether the topic be
one of religion, or of science, or of the world's daily work. He will
further agree with James, and with the empiricists generally, that
merely analytic reasoning, if such were, in its isolation, a possible
thing, would be indeed "barren intellectualism." And finally, if he is
wise, he will go still further. He will not despise instinct, and
feeling, and the movings of faith, and the inarticulate intuitions.
For he will know that all these things are human, are indispensable,
and are the basis upon which the genuine work of the reason, the wider
view of life, must be carried toward its fulfilment. For whoever is to
comprehend the unities of life must first live. Whoever is to be best
able to survey the landscape from the mountain top must first have
wandered in its paths and its byways, and must have grown familiar
with its valleys and its recesses. Whoever is to get the mature
insight must first have become a little child.
But whoever, remembering the New Testament word about becoming as a
little child, one-sidedly defends the inarticulate intuitions, as the
only source of religious insight, should remember also the word of St.
Paul: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I
understood as a {93} child; but when I became a man I put away
childish things."
It is the business of reason not to make naught of the indispensable
intuitions of the childlike and of the faithful, but to work toward
the insight such that, if we possessed it, we should "know even as we
are known." That which is weak in this world may indeed confound many
who are called wise; but there is no objection to its becoming also
truly wise itself. For then it would all the better know why it had
been able to confound false wisdom.