Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/301

285, he sometimes refers to sub-human manifestations of sympathy. As regards the mind, he says: "To the mind we ascribe Understanding and Will; to the Understanding we reduce Apprehending, Comparing, Judging, Reasoning, a Methodical Disposition, and the Memory of all these things and of the objects about which they are conversant. To the Will we ascribe both the simple acts of choosing and refusing, and that vehemence of those actions which discovers itself in the passions, over and above that emotion or disturbance of the body, which is visible in them."

Such details are merely preliminary, and we shall now ask what is meant by 'Right Reason,' an expression which is constantly recurring in the treatise. Hobbes had practically denied that there was any such faculty in man. In Cumberland's system, on the other hand, Right Reason plays an important, if a somewhat Protean part. Here, as in the case of the Nature of Things, we find a degree of confusion that can only be explained by the fact that the author's interests are purely practical, and that he is speaking in terms of an inconsistent metaphysic that he has never taken the trouble to think out. The following curious passage is perhaps the author's most explicit statement regarding the nature of Right Reason. He says, "I agree, however, with him [Hobbes] that by Right Reason is not to be understood an infallible Faculty (as he affirms many, but I know not who, to understand it); but yet by it is to be understood a faculty not false in these acts of judging. Nor is it properly understood to be an act of reasoning (as he too rashly asserts), but an effect of the Judgment; that is, true propositions treasured up in the memory, whether they be premises or conclusions, of which some that are practical are called * laws,' for actions are compared with these in order to examine their goodness, not with those acts of reasoning which discover them; yet I willingly allow that these acts of reasoning are also included in the notion of Right Reason." And then, as against Hobbes's view that, out of civil society, "every man's proper reason is to be esteemed, not only the