The Life of Reason | Page 2

express instinctive reactions.--Idealism rudimentary.--Naturalism sad.--The soul akin to the eternal and ideal.--Her inexperience.--Platonism spontaneous.--Its essential fidelity to the ideal.--Equal rights of empiricism.--Logic dependent on fact for its importance, and for its subsistence.--Reason and docility.--Applicable thought and clarified experience


CHAPTER IX
--HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL Pages 205-235 Functional relations of mind and body.--They form one natural life.--Artifices involved in separating them.--Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility.--Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression.--Thought's march automatic and thereby implicated in events.--Contemplative essence of action.--Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's essence.--Consciousness transcendental and transcendent.--It is the seat of value.--Apparent utility of pain.--Its real impotence.--- Preformations involved.--Its untoward significance.--Perfect function not unconscious.--Inchoate ethics.--Thought the entelechy of being.--Its exuberance


CHAPTER X
--THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION Pages 236-255 Honesty in hedonism.--Necessary qualifications.--The will must judge.--Injustice inherent in representation.--?sthetic and speculative cruelty.--Imputed values: their inconstancy.--Methods of control.--Example of fame.--Disproportionate interest in the ?sthetic.--Irrational religious allegiance.--Pathetic idealisations.--Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.--The test a controlled present ideal


CHAPTER XI
--SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL Pages 256-268 The ultimate end a resultant.--Demands the substance of ideals.--Discipline of the will.--Demands made practical and consistent.--The ideal natural.--Need of unity and finality.--Ideals of nothing.--Darwin on moral sense.--Conscience and reason compared.--Reason imposes no new sacrifice.--Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle.--Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason


CHAPTER XII
--FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE Pages 269-291 Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.--Contrary currents of opinion.--Pantheism.--Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals.--Absolutist philosophy human and halting.--All science a deliverance of momentary thought.--All criticism likewise.--Origins inessential.--Ideals functional.--They are transferable to similar beings.--Authority internal.--Reason autonomous.--Its distribution.--Natural selection of minds.--Living stability.--Continuity necessary to progress.--Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage.--Perfectibility.--Nature and human nature.--Human nature formulated.--Its concrete description reserved for the sequel

Introduction to "The Life of Reason"
[Sidenote: Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.]
Whatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised by man, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science or religion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man's career, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; although this variation may often regard or propitiate things external, adjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance of these external things, as well as their existence, he can establish only by the function and utility which a recognition of them may have in his life. The entire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might unfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countless scintillas of consciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian sages, in a single version of the truth committed to each for interpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination of heart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? In which of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these questions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by an individual, is the purpose of the following work.
[Sidenote: Efficacious reflection is reason.]
A philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself a mouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casual consideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same thing. Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles of synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism. So soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before and after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect or retrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part of his life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in which nothing ulterior is regarded. Representation, however, can hardly remain idle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging the absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and veers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly called reason. Man's rational life consists in those moments in which reflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then works in the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt. Such representation is so far from being merely speculative that its presence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action. Reflection gathers experiences together and perceives their relative worth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude of will in the presence of a world better understood and turned to some purpose. The limits of reflection mark those of concerted and rational action; they circumscribe the field of cumulative experience, or, what is the same thing, of profitable living.
[Sidenote: The Life of Reason a name