Reason

Opposed to this ideal intellection, so characteristic of Scholastic angelology, is our actual human experience, which is a gignómenon, 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. Reasoning, 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 thought-of, not merely an association between thoughts. An irrational conclusion 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 question of validity is prior to all problems of genesis; for rational knowledge can never be the product of irrational 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 deduction 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 materiæ material and formal are relative terms.

There is an important sense, however, in which the epithet "material" has been applied to reasoning, to denote illation in which the relational formality has not yet been dissected 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 explicitly 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 departmental; 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 dawn of modern psychology, Aristotle emphasized 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 impression 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, into words. Language, after all, is merely a conventional drapery of our thought, which is convenient for logical 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 phrónesis) 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 ourselves while demonstration has reference to the audience.

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 exaggerated the dualism between head and heart. In fact, a species of epistemological mysticism has been devised (cf. Gefüsqlaube, raisons du coeur, etc.). So far as this bears on the problem of reason, we may briefly state the case. It is true that our reason works purposively--that is, reason is selective of our subject-matter, but it is not creative or transforming. Nature is an ordered cosmos of which we form a part, so that every object in it has a "practical" bearing on our lives, is connected with our rational, sensitive, or natural appetency. The known is never completely out of resonance with our volitions and emotions. To affirm anything, or to reason about a subject, is at once to take up a position before it. This is especially true of moral and religious matter, and indeed the emotional genesis of ethical convictions has often been urged as a proof of their irrationality. But we should not forget that the liability to be influenced by emotional causes is not confined to ethical or religious reasoning. To put the case generally, we may ask: What precisely is meant by regarding feeling (or will) as forming with reason a co-ordinate source of knowledge? (Cf. G.E. Moore "Principia Ethica", sec. 79-80.) It may be meant that to have a certain feeling towards a conclusion is the same as to have reasoned it; and this is true in the sense that the complex "feeling" may include ratiocination. But when I draw a conclusion, I do not mean that I prefer it or am affected by it. And the fact that the two things can be distinguished is fatal to the assumed co-ordination between emotion and reason. As St. Thomas urged against the pseudo-mystics and Augustinians of all ages, volition is possible only in so far as it includes cognition; and, we may add, emotion is a mode of experience, only inasmuch as it presupposes knowledge.

Again, it may be meant that, without certain experiences of feeling and willing we should not be able to draw certain ethical conclusions. This may be admitted as a psychological fact, viz. that there are many exercises of reason which we shall not correctly perform without an ethical habituation (ethismiô tini, as Aristotle says). In this connection it is interesting to note that Cardinal Newman's object in writing the "Grammar of Assent" was "to show that a right moral state of mind germinates or even generates good intellectual principles". This is very far from countenancing the Kantian view of the practical reason. The School admits a practical reason or "synteresis" (Gewissen, psychological conscience), in the sense of a natural habit of moral Principles. But St. Thomas strenuously denies that it is specialis potentia ratione altior (a special faculty higher than reason).

Finally, a word may be added on the so-called reason of animals. Man is called animal rationale; this expression stands for what Aristotle might call zôon logistikón. The word zôov (in German, Lebewesen), which Aristotle applied even to God, does not mean "animal", but "living being". Is there then, any rational animal? Catholic philosophy attributes to animals a faculty (vis æstimativa) whose function, analogous to that of reason, might, for want of a better name, be called "estimation". Such a faculty also exists in man, but in a higher form, and was called by the Scholastics ratio particularis or vis cogitativa. Unless animals had this organic faculty, it is hard to see how they could apprehend those pragmatic relations (intentioned) such as utility, danger, etc., which are not objects of external sense. To this extent we may allow that the psychic life of brute animals is one of "meanings" and "values". In some way they apprehend aspects and relations. Otherwise such complex co-ordinations as those required for nest-architecture and food-quest would be inconceivable. The extreme views of Bethe, Uexküll, and others almost imply a return to Cartesian Mechanicism, and really refute themselves. The danger lies rather in the anthropomorphic exaggeration of the powers of the animal mind. Experience has shown how fatally easy it is to read human feelings and reasonings into the "mind" of one's favourite cat or pet lapdog. Continuous, patient observations, like those of Mrs. Mary Austin on sheep or of Professor Yerkes on the dancing-mouse, are worth any number of isolated anecdotes. It may be surely affirmed that there is not a single unambiguous record of animal ratiocination. Such experiments as those of Thorndike (on hungry cats shut up in a cage and forced to learn the way out to food) are easily explained by the gradual stereotyping of association between visual impression and motor response, to the exclusion of other random associations. That animals are incapable of rational valuation is confirmed by the recent observations of Forel, Plateau, and others, who have shown that bees (and probably all insects) have no memory of facts, but only of time and distance. Reason, therefore, is still the exclusive prerogative of man. (See DEDUCTION; INDUCTION; INSTINCT; INTELLECT; INTUITION; KNOWLEDGE.)