The Life of Reason | Page 2

abstractions complete facts.--Things concretions of
concretions.--Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order
of nature.--Aristotle's compromise.--Empirical bias in favour of
contiguity.--Artificial divorce of logic from practice.--Their mutual
involution.--Rationalistic suicide.--Complementary character of
essence and existence


CHAPTER VIII
--ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS Pages
184-204 Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical
principle.--Concretions in discourse 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.--Æsthetic and speculative
cruelty.--Imputed values: their inconstancy.--Methods of
control.--Example of fame.--Disproportionate interest in the
æsthetic.--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