Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/147

Rh par la raison seul, quelle solide base peut-on lui donner?" In the "Rêveries du Promeneur," prom. 4ême, he says: "Dans toutes les questions de morale difficiles je me suis toujours bien trouvé de les résoudre par le dictamen de la conscience, plutôt que par les lumières de la raison." Indeed Aristotle already says expressly (Eth. Magna, i. 5) that the virtues have their seat in the (in parte irrationali animi), and not in the  (in parte rationali). In accordance with this, Stobæus says (Ecl., ii., c. 7), speaking of the Peripatetics: "" (Ethicam virtutem circa partem animæ ratione carentem versari putant, cum duplicem, ad hanc disquisitionem, animam ponant, ratione præditam, et ea carentem. In parte vero ratione prædita collocant ingenuitatem, prudentiam, perspicacitatem, sapientiam, docilitatem, memoriam et reliqua; in parte vero ratione, destituta temperantiam, justitiam, fortitudinem, et reliquas virtutes, quas ethicas vocant.) And Cicero (''De Nat. Deor.,'' iii., c. 26-31) explains at length that reason is the necessary means, the tool, of all crime.

I have explained reason to be the faculty of framing concepts. It is this quite special class of general non-perceptible ideas, which are symbolised and fixed only by words, that distinguishes man from the brutes and gives him the pre-eminence upon earth. While the brute is the slave of the present, and knows only immediate sensible motives, and therefore when they present themselves to it is necessarily attracted or repelled by them, as iron is by the magnet, in man, on the contrary, deliberation has been introduced through the gift of reason.