The Life of Reason | Page 4

sphere. Every solution to a doubt, in so far
as it is not a new error, every practical achievement not neutralised by a
second maladjustment consequent upon it, every consolation not the
seed of another greater sorrow, may be gathered together and built into
this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy marriage of two
elements--impulse and ideation--which if wholly divorced would
reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is generated
by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas which
have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to be vain.
[Sidenote: It is the sum of Art.]
Thus the Life of Reason is another name for what, in the widest sense
of the word, might be called Art. Operations become arts when their
purpose is conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the
whole idea is creative and exists only to be embodied, while every part
of the product is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea.
Like art, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the
spontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment.
Both art and reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks;
but when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that its issues
have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical and
cognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justify
and understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created the world
in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extend its
sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhere
exemplified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as it is
from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religion and

mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were already actual
and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously, to a
confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, a
confusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is important
to avoid; but these speculative fables, when we take them for what they
are--poetic expressions of the ideal--help us to see how deeply rooted
this ideal is in man's mind, and afford us a standard by which to
measure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams.
For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man's
imitation of divinity.
[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable.]
To study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human
existence, is no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal
has a natural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who
is attentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life of
Reason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love of
man, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great and
confused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be a
romantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot,
without a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are
free, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the
living natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each
initially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not
realisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the
world. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicial
office to be a satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentative
and ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards must
arise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure that
progress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give it
direction and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward its
natural goal.
[Sidenote: Modern philosophy not helpful.]
There is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which a
critique of human progress can well be attached. Almost every school,
indeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical
theory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow
from current science and speculation the picture they draw of man's

conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may
furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint of
its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind.
One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as
Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes,
to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who
have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside,
and the processes of Nature