Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/131

No. 1.] R., through consideration of the theories of unconscious cerebration or thinking and symbolic, thinking, concludes that one learns to understand a concept as one learns to march, dance, or fence, i.e. by habit or organic memory. General terms cover an organized knowledge (un savoir organisé); general ideas are the habits in the intellectual order; conception has varying forms, but only one essential character, the role of the word. These results are only intended for those who can judge about carrying on the work.

The purpose of this paper is to show what intelligible meaning can be attached to the conception (of both common sense and ethical theory) of reason influencing conduct or will or desire. The first section of it disposes of the merely negative or prohibitory conception of reason in its conflict with desire, by reducing it to the discrepancy between two sets of means to some acknowledged or accepted end. The second sets aside theories which lay down maxims or axioms or speculative principles of reasonableness; all such theories are abstract and negative; they err in placing the reasonable outside the moral purpose, and the distinction of means and end which they imply cannot be rigidly observed, because actual ends are not simple and uniform, and are qualified by the means or the context of circumstances. Thirdly, moral reasonableness can only be a characteristic which we can ascribe to purposes of action, and a reasoned purpose on life is one which preserves a self-consistent relation of the parts to the whole. The moral reason, Mr. Bosanquet explains, is the body of intellectual ideas which are predominant as purposes in the individual or the race, having become predominant through the power they have shown of crushing out or adjusting to themselves the active associations of all other ideas. This power is logical power; that is to say, it depends on the range and depth which enables one idea to include in itself, as a system, a great variety of minor purposes. Of course the predominance of an idea rests on the position that every idea would produce action if unchecked, simply by suggestions which, through associated reproductions, call up the necessary movement. In the formed life of a civilized man organizing ideas assert their predominant power, crushing out all other suggestions capable of leading to action.

Belief includes every mode and degree of assent or dissent, — everything in the nature of an acknowledgment, explicit or implicit, of objective existence. Belief is the "mental function of cognizing reality."