Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/754

 REASON

674

REASON

transcendental sense as the function of subsuming under the unity of the ideas the concepts and rules of the understanding. Subsequent German phil- osophers, as Schopenhauer complained, ' 'tried, with shameless audacity, to smuggle in under this name an entirely spurious faculty of immediate, metaphysical so-called super-sensuous knowledge".

Discursive Thinking. — In its general sense, there- fore, reason may be attributed to God, and an angel may be called rational. But in its narrower meaning, reason is man's differentia, at once his necessity and his privilege; that by which he is "a little less than the angels", and that by which he excels the brutes. Reasoning, as St. Thomas says, is a defect of intellect. True, in certain acts our mind functions as intellect; there are immediate truths (fi^cra) and first principles (dpxal) which we intuite or grasp with our intellect; and in such verities there can be no deception or error. On this point the Scholastic system may be said to be absolutely intellectualist or noocentric. The meanest intellect is, to use an expression of St. Augi^istine, capax Dei. Within a certain region our cognitive faculties are absolutely infalhble. Yet the Scholastics also unanimously hold that man's specific mark is ratiocination or discursus. Some indeed, like St. Augustine (who was intent on his analogy between logos in man and in the Blessed Trinity), insist on the intuitional aspect of our mental operations, and pass over the actual process as a whole. Yet none denied that in this life our knowledge is a thing of shreds and patches, laboriously woven from the threads of sense. It is only in patria, for instance, that God's exist- ence will be to us as self-evident as the principle of contradiction is now. The beatific vision will, in fact, be not only as evident, but also as immediate as our present intuition of personal consciousness. But then we shall be on a level with the angels, who are sub- sistent intelligences or pure intuitives. An angel, in Scholastic philosophy, is practically the equivalent of toCs (intellectus, intellegentia) when used by such writers as Aristotle, Porphyry, Plotinus, or Pseudo-Dionysius, to denote not a faculty, but a species of being.

Opposed to this ideal intellection, so characteristic of Scholastic angelology, is our actual human experi- ence, which is a yiyyi^Levoii, a coming to be. Man is rational in the sense that he is a being who arrives at conclusions from premises. Our intellectual life is a process, a voyage of discovery; our knowledge is not a static ready-made whole; it is rather an organism instinct with life and growth. Each new conclusion becomes the basis of further inference. Hence, too, the word reason is used to signify a premise or ground of knowledge, as distinguished from a cause or real ground. So important is this distinction that one may say herein lies the nucleus of all philosophy. The task of the philosopher is to distinguish the a priori of logic form from the a priori of time; and that this task is a difficult one is testified by the existence of the many systems of psychologism and evolutionism. Reason- ing, therefore, must be asserted to be a process sui generis. This is perhaps the best answer to give to the question, so much discussed by the old logicians, as to what kind of causative influence the premises exert on the conclusion. We can only say, they validate it, they are its warrant. For inference is not a mere succession in time; it is a nexus though t-of, not merely an association between thoughts. An irrational con- clusion or a misleading association is as much a fact and a result as a correct conclusion ; the existence of the latter is explained only by its logical parentage. Hence the futility of trying to account completely for the existence of a human thought — the conclusion of a train of reasoning — simply by the accompanying sense-data and psychological associations. The ques- tion of validity is prior to all problems of genesis; for rational knowledge can never be the product of irra- tional conditions.

Allowing then the indefinability of ratiocination, we may proceed to ask if inference is homogeneous; in other words, are there different forms of reasoning? This raises the difficult question as to whether deduc- tion and induction are ultimately irreducible modes of reasoning. The issue is usually confused by a very narrow definition of the syllogism, which has to be fitted into the word-grooves prescribed by syntax. But if, developing Aristotle's thought, we regard a syllogism as the unit of reasoning, then we may define it as the inference of a relation between A and C from a relation of A to B compounded with a relation of B to C. As an illustration we might instance Mill's famous example of the village matron's inference. Mill calls it reasoning from particulars by analogy; but it can easily be seen to be a syllogism; this drug (A) cured my Lucy (B), who had the same sickness as this neighbour's child (C), and hence will cure this child (C). All reasoning seems to consist in such unit steps, and it seems misleading to talk of inference vi materice; material and formal are relative terms.

Psychology of Reasoning. — There is an impor- tant sense, however, in which the epithet "material" has been applied to reasoning, to denote illation in which the relational formality has not yet been dis- sected out. The same laws of thought rule the philosopher's reasoning and the peasant's, but the latter's conclusion will only be fairly certain when its matter comes within his usual cognizance. A man can reason well about familiar matter; but, unless he has exphcitly examined the illative process, he will hesitate and err when dealing with new subject- matter. The mistakes of inventors like Newton and Leibniz are very instructive on this point. We are all, then, as Newman put it, more or less depart- mental; we reason with unequal facility on different subjects. Does it follow that in such cases of concrete informal reasoning there is a rational surplusage of assurance over evidence? This does not seem so clear, and cannot be answered without some analysis. Long before the dawm of modern psychology, Aristotle em- phasized the fact that we never think ■without having an accompanying sense-process, whether it be a visual image, or an auditory symbol, or even the motor im- pression of a word. The Scholastics also admitted this, and indeed many urged the necessity of this conversio ad phantasmata as the explanation of our piecemeal ratiocinative mode of learning. But this is not equivalent to saying that all reasoning can be exactly formulated, crystallized, as it were, ijito words. Language, after all, is merely a conventional drapery of our thought, which is convenient for log- ical analysis and for communicating with others. But do we not in ordinary life often syllogize in sights and reason in sounds? Does not our mind in its inferences leap far ahead of the sluggish machinery of language? And which of us has ever succeeded in fully analyzing his most commonplace attitude or emotion? To account, then, for the major part of our existence, we must admit something analogous to the Aristotelean p6vT](ns — whether we call it the illative sense, or the artistic reason, or implicit thought. The main thing to observe is that it is not a special faculty. It is our reason acting under disabilities of language rather than of thought; for, after all, evidence is for our- selves while demonstration has reference to the audience.

Reason and Feeling. — These experiences have, however, been interpreted in an anti-intellectualist sense. The Pragmatist school regards reasoning as completely determined by its relevance to purpose or interest. And, again, many philosophers (Kant, the Modernists, and many Protestant theologians under the influence of Schleiermacher) have exag- gerated the dualism between head and heart. In fact, a species of epistemological mysticism has been de- vised (cf. Gefuhlsglaube,raisons du coeur, etc.). So far