All such considerations will seem to many of you hopelessly general.
You will have missed, thus far in my account, concrete instances to
illustrate how what I have now called the reason actually works, how
it is related to experience, how it helps us toward the broader view
of things, how it makes the connections of life more obvious, how it
raises our intuitions to higher levels. And unfortunately, since I
have no time to discourse to you upon the science called Logic--the
science part of whose proper duty it is to define the nature and the
office of what I have now called the reason--I must indeed fail, in
this brief summary, to give you any adequate account of what can be
accomplished through the appeal to this source of insight. All that I
shall try to do, on this occasion, is to mention {94} to you a very
few instances, some of them relatively trivial, wherein, through
reasoning processes, we actually get these larger intuitions on higher
levels, these higher modes of grasping the unity of things. Having
thus very imperfectly exemplified what I mean by the synthetic
processes of reasoning, I shall be ready barely to suggest to you, as
I close, how the reason can be, and is, a source of religious insight.
In some recent logical discussions, and in particular in my colleague
Professor Hibben's text-book of logic, there has been used an example,
trivial in itself, but in its own way typical--an example which is
meant to show how there exists a mental process which is surely worthy
of the name reasoning, and which is, nevertheless, no mere process of
forming abstract ideas and no mere analysis of the meaning of assumed
premises, although, of course, both abstraction and analysis have
their subordinate places in this process. The reasoning involved in
this example is of the very simplest sort. It is expressed in an old
story which many of you will have heard.
According to this story, an aged ecclesiastic, garrulous and
reminiscent, was once, in a social company, commenting upon the
experiences that had come to him in his long and devoted life. Fully
meaning to keep sacred the secrets of the confessional, the old man
was nevertheless led to say: "Ah--it is strange, and sometimes
terrible, what, in my profession, one may have to face and consider.
{95} You must know, my friends, my very first penitent was--a
murderer! I was appalled." The old priest had hardly spoken when the
company was joined by an aged and prominent nobleman of the region,
whom all present greeted with great respect. Saluting his priestly
friend with no little reverence, the nobleman turned to the company
and said, with calm unconsciousness: "You must know, my friends, in my
youth I was the very first person whom my honored friend here ever
confessed."
Now observe. The priest had not said who the murderer was. The
nobleman in his contribution to the conversation had not confessed to
the company the murder. He had not mentioned it in any way. And the
priest had scrupulously avoided mentioning him. But all present drew
at once the reasonable conclusion that, granting the correctness of
the two assertions, the nobleman was a murderer. We, of course, must
all agree in this conclusion. Now is this conclusion the result of a
mere analysis of either of the two assertions made? And does the
conclusion merely result from our power to form abstract ideas?
Plainly, the conclusion is due to the power of all present to make a
synthesis, or, as one sometimes says, to put two and two together.
Plainly, whatever abstract ideas are here used, it is not these which
constitute the main work of a reasonable being who views the situation
in which the nobleman is placed by the whole sense of the
conversation. Reason here discovers a novel fact which {96} neither
the priest nor the nobleman had stated. This discovery is as much an
experience as if it were the observation of an actual killing of one
man by another. Only it is the discovery of the relations involved in
a synthesis of meanings. This discovery is at once empirical (yes, in
the broader sense of the word intuitive), and it is a discovery of a
necessary connection. It is not due to mere analysis. It is not a bit
of barren intellectualism. It is not an unpractical comment. It is a
discovery that might wreck the nobleman's reputation, and that might
more or less indirectly lead to his ultimate conviction upon a capital
charge. Now, that is an example, trivial enough if viewed as a mere
anecdote, but a typical example, of the synthetic and constructive use
of reason as a source of insight.
Let me turn to another also at first sight seemingly trivial case. An
English logician, De Morgan, long ago called attention to a form of
reasoning which, up to his time, the logicians had unduly neglected.
If you assume that "a horse is an animal," you can reasonably conclude
that "the owner of a horse is the owner of an animal"; that "whoever
loves a horse loves an animal," and so on indefinitely. In brief, as
you at once see, from the one assertion, "A horse is an animal," there
rationally follow a limitless number of possible inferences of the
form: "Whatever is in any relation R to a horse is in that same
relation R to an animal." Now you may indeed at first, as I just said,
{97} imagine such reasonings to be comparatively trivial. Whether they
prove to be so, however, depends wholly upon the objects in question,
upon our own interests in these objects, and upon circumstances. They
might be vastly important. From the assertion, "Mr. Taft is President
of the United States," there follows, by this sort of reasoning, the
assertion, "Whoever is a personal friend of Mr. Taft is a personal
friend of the President of the United States." And such a conclusion
some people might be very glad to have you draw. So, too, whoever is a
member of Mr. Taft's family, or household, or club, or of the
university whose degrees he holds, or whoever is a fellow-townsman, or
fellow-countryman, or partisan, or opponent, or enemy of Mr. Taft,
whoever agrees with what he says in his speeches, whoever plays golf
with him, or whoever hopes or fears for his re-election, stands in
just that relation, whatever it may be, to the President of the United
States. And how important such rational inferences might appear for
the comprehension of somebody's actual situation and prospects and
acts depends upon the persons and the interests that may be in
question. To some people just such inferences, at one moment or
another, will not seem trivial, will be worth making, and will be
anything but feats of barren intellectualism. That they are easy
inferences to make is beside the mark. I have no time to ask you here
to study with me the harder inferences upon topics that do not concern
our main purpose. What I {98} need, however, is to illustrate to you
that such reasoning processes go beyond mere analysis, and do involve
a rational and articulate intuition of a novel aspect of experience.
For I defy you to find by any mere analysis of the assertion, "Mr.
Taft is President," the innumerable assertions about friends, about
family, about speeches, and policies, and so on, which as a fact
rationally follow, in the indicated way, from that first assertion.
You find these new results by taking a broader view of the unity of
experience. What, then, I need to have you see is that the reason
which, even in its lightest deeds, can accomplish such syntheses, and
which can lead to such ordered intuitions, and can be the endless
source of such novelties, is not merely the reason of whose powers as
a source of insight James gives so discouraging a picture.
Having thus barely illustrated the thesis that reason can be both
productive of new insight and constructively synthetic in its grasp of
wider ranges of experience than we could observe without it, let me
add that, in the exact sciences, and in particular in mathematics, the
reasoning process, using just such forms of synthesis as I have now
illustrated, is constantly leading investigators to the most varied
and novel discoveries. These discoveries are not due to mere analysis.
They are reports of facts and the results of synthetic construction.
As Mr. Charles Peirce loves to point out, the new discoveries made in
mathematics, and by purely rational processes, {99} are so numerous
that for each year a volume of many hundreds of closely printed pages
is needed to give, with strictly technical brevity, even the barest
outline of the contents of the papers containing the novel results of
that one year's researches. In their union with other sciences, the
mathematical researches constantly lead to still vaster ranges of
novel discovery. Reason, then, is not merely barren, is not mainly
concerned with unproductive analysis, but does enrich our survey of
experience, of its unity and of its meaning.
Perhaps some of you may still object that, if I define reason in the
terms suggested by these instances, there seems to be danger of making
the word "reason" mean simply the same as the word "insight." For
insight, as I defined it in my opening lecture, means a coherent view
of many facts in some sort of unity. And in this case, as you may now
say, why use two words at all? I reply that, in fact, all true insight
is, to my mind, rational insight, upon one or another level of the
development of our power to become rational beings. But you will
remember that insight, as I defined it, also means knowledge which is
intimate and manifold, as well as knowledge which views facts and
relations in their unity. The words intuition and experience are often
used to lay stress upon that aspect of our insight which either makes
it intimate or else brings it into touch with many and various facts.
And such usage is convenient. The word reason, as I have just {100}
exemplified its more synthetic meaning, calls our attention precisely
to that aspect of our better insight which is involved in our power to
grasp many facts in their _unity_, to see the coherence, the
inter-relationship, the totality of a set of experiences. Now when
insight reaches higher levels, these various aspects of our knowledge
are never sundered. But as we grow toward higher insight, we know in
part and prophesy in part and are child-like in so far as that which
is perfect has not yet come.
In these, our imperfect stages of growth, sometimes our knowledge
possesses intimacy, but still has to remain content, for the moment,
with a more inarticulate grasp of deeper meanings. In such cases
James's sort of intuition, or what is often called blind faith, is
mainly in question. And this is indeed a stage on the way to insight.
We feel unities but do not see them. Sometimes, however, as in much of
our ordinary experience, the state of our minds is different; our
knowledge revels in, or else contends with, the endless variety and
multiplicity of the facts of life, and lacks a grasp of their unity.
In that case our insight is often called "merely empirical." We have
experience; and so far our knowledge prospers. But we neither feel
vaguely nor see clearly the total sense of things. And in such cases
our sight is too busy to give us time for higher insight. As the
Germans say, we do not see the wood because of the trees.
In a third stage of partial insight we may stand {101} where, for
instance, the masters of the exact sciences stand. We then grasp, with
clearness, larger unities of controllable experience. We create
objects, as the mathematicians create, in an ideal world of our own
contemplation; and we then come to see that these ideal creations of
ours do, indeed, reveal the eternal truth regarding a world of
seemingly impersonal or superpersonal reality. We learn of this
reality through the coherent synthesis of our ideal constructions. Our
intuition is in this case at once empirical, articulate, and such as
to survey the broad landscape of the genuine relations of things. But
alas! in most such cases our objects, although they are indeed
presented to our rational intuition, are often abstract enough in
their seeming. They are objects such as numbers, and series, and
ordered arrays of highly ideal entities. In such cases the reason does
its typical work; but often the objects of our insight fail to meet
the more intense needs of life.
Thus, then, inarticulate intuitions, ordinary or sometimes more
scientific observations of the details of life, and mathematical
reasonings concerning the unity and the connections of highly ideal
objects such as numbers, come to stand in our experience as more or
less sharply sundered grades of imperfect insight. Thus we naturally
come to view the typical achievements of our reason as a thing apart,
and the rational or exact sciences as remote both from the intuitive
faith of the little ones and from {102} the wealthy experience of the
men of common-sense and of the men of natural science. As a fact, all
these stages of insight are hints of what the Supreme Court meant when
it appealed to the "rule of reason." True insight, if fulfilled, would
be empirical, for it would face facts; intuitive, for it would survey
them and grasp them, and be intimate with them; rational, for it would
view them in their unity.