The Life of Reason | Page 3

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 for all practical thought and all
action justified by its fruits in consciousness.]
Thus if we use the word life in a eulogistic sense to designate the happy
maintenance against the world of some definite ideal interest, we may
say with Aristotle that life is reason in operation. The Life of Reason
will then be a name for that part of experience which perceives and
pursues ideals--all conduct so controlled and all sense so interpreted as
to perfect natural happiness.
Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures and
pains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those pains
would be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if a
devil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created.
Since the beings, however, in which these values would reside, would,
by hypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment
would take place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called

a progress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without the
ideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral
being. In human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument,
having its sole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in
sentience would not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and
the increasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for
without a picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality
might flow, the improvement could be neither remembered nor
measured nor desired. The Life of Reason is accordingly neither a mere
means nor a mere incident in human progress; it is the total and
embodied progress itself, in which the pleasures of sense are included
in so far as they can be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount
man's rational moments would be to take an inventory of all his goods;
for he is not himself (as we say with unconscious accuracy) in the
others. If he ever appropriates them in recollection or prophecy, it is
only on the ground of some physical relation which they may have to
his being.
Reason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we
should not recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to
some degree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that
measure relevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world
of dreams, do not amount to intelligence until the images in the mind
begin to represent in some way, however symbolic, the forces and
realities confronted in action. There may well be intense consciousness
in the total absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in
dreams, in madness, and may be found, for all we know, in the depths
of universal nature. Minds peopled only by desultory visions and lusts
would not have the dignity of human souls even if they seemed to
pursue certain objects unerringly; for that pursuit would not be
illumined by any vision of its goal. Reason and humanity begin with
the union of instinct and ideation, when instinct becomes enlightened,
establishes values in its objects, and is turned from a process into an art,
while at the same time consciousness becomes practical and cognitive,
beginning to contain some symbol or record of the co-ordinate realities
among which it arises.
Reason accordingly requires the fusion of two types of life, commonly
led in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulse

expressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection
expressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of
Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once
the universal method of practice and its continual reward. All reflection
would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in happiness.
Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time to time a
partial embodiment when he practises useful arts, when his passions
happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his fancy breeds visions
pertinent to his ultimate good. Everyone leads the Life of Reason in so
far as he finds a steady light behind the world's glitter and a clear
residuum of joy beneath pleasure or success. No experience not to be
repented of falls without its