Part 7

All such considerations will seem to many of you hopelessly general. You will have missed, thus far in my account, concrete instances to illustrate how what I have now called the reason actually works, how it is related to experience, how it helps us toward the broader view of things, how it makes the connections of life more obvious, how it raises our intuitions to higher levels. And unfortunately, since I have no time to discourse to you upon the science called Logic--the science part of whose proper duty it is to define the nature and the office of what I have now called the reason--I must indeed fail, in this brief summary, to give you any adequate account of what can be accomplished through the appeal to this source of insight. All that I shall try to do, on this occasion, is to mention {94} to you a very few instances, some of them relatively trivial, wherein, through reasoning processes, we actually get these larger intuitions on higher levels, these higher modes of grasping the unity of things. Having thus very imperfectly exemplified what I mean by the synthetic processes of reasoning, I shall be ready barely to suggest to you, as I close, how the reason can be, and is, a source of religious insight.

In some recent logical discussions, and in particular in my colleague Professor Hibben's text-book of logic, there has been used an example, trivial in itself, but in its own way typical--an example which is meant to show how there exists a mental process which is surely worthy of the name reasoning, and which is, nevertheless, no mere process of forming abstract ideas and no mere analysis of the meaning of assumed premises, although, of course, both abstraction and analysis have their subordinate places in this process. The reasoning involved in this example is of the very simplest sort. It is expressed in an old story which many of you will have heard.

According to this story, an aged ecclesiastic, garrulous and reminiscent, was once, in a social company, commenting upon the experiences that had come to him in his long and devoted life. Fully meaning to keep sacred the secrets of the confessional, the old man was nevertheless led to say: "Ah--it is strange, and sometimes terrible, what, in my profession, one may have to face and consider. {95} You must know, my friends, my very first penitent was--a murderer! I was appalled." The old priest had hardly spoken when the company was joined by an aged and prominent nobleman of the region, whom all present greeted with great respect. Saluting his priestly friend with no little reverence, the nobleman turned to the company and said, with calm unconsciousness: "You must know, my friends, in my youth I was the very first person whom my honored friend here ever confessed."

Now observe. The priest had not said who the murderer was. The nobleman in his contribution to the conversation had not confessed to the company the murder. He had not mentioned it in any way. And the priest had scrupulously avoided mentioning him. But all present drew at once the reasonable conclusion that, granting the correctness of the two assertions, the nobleman was a murderer. We, of course, must all agree in this conclusion. Now is this conclusion the result of a mere analysis of either of the two assertions made? And does the conclusion merely result from our power to form abstract ideas? Plainly, the conclusion is due to the power of all present to make a synthesis, or, as one sometimes says, to put two and two together. Plainly, whatever abstract ideas are here used, it is not these which constitute the main work of a reasonable being who views the situation in which the nobleman is placed by the whole sense of the conversation. Reason here discovers a novel fact which {96} neither the priest nor the nobleman had stated. This discovery is as much an experience as if it were the observation of an actual killing of one man by another. Only it is the discovery of the relations involved in a synthesis of meanings. This discovery is at once empirical (yes, in the broader sense of the word intuitive), and it is a discovery of a necessary connection. It is not due to mere analysis. It is not a bit of barren intellectualism. It is not an unpractical comment. It is a discovery that might wreck the nobleman's reputation, and that might more or less indirectly lead to his ultimate conviction upon a capital charge. Now, that is an example, trivial enough if viewed as a mere anecdote, but a typical example, of the synthetic and constructive use of reason as a source of insight.

Let me turn to another also at first sight seemingly trivial case. An English logician, De Morgan, long ago called attention to a form of reasoning which, up to his time, the logicians had unduly neglected. If you assume that "a horse is an animal," you can reasonably conclude that "the owner of a horse is the owner of an animal"; that "whoever loves a horse loves an animal," and so on indefinitely. In brief, as you at once see, from the one assertion, "A horse is an animal," there rationally follow a limitless number of possible inferences of the form: "Whatever is in any relation R to a horse is in that same relation R to an animal." Now you may indeed at first, as I just said, {97} imagine such reasonings to be comparatively trivial. Whether they prove to be so, however, depends wholly upon the objects in question, upon our own interests in these objects, and upon circumstances. They might be vastly important. From the assertion, "Mr. Taft is President of the United States," there follows, by this sort of reasoning, the assertion, "Whoever is a personal friend of Mr. Taft is a personal friend of the President of the United States." And such a conclusion some people might be very glad to have you draw. So, too, whoever is a member of Mr. Taft's family, or household, or club, or of the university whose degrees he holds, or whoever is a fellow-townsman, or fellow-countryman, or partisan, or opponent, or enemy of Mr. Taft, whoever agrees with what he says in his speeches, whoever plays golf with him, or whoever hopes or fears for his re-election, stands in just that relation, whatever it may be, to the President of the United States. And how important such rational inferences might appear for the comprehension of somebody's actual situation and prospects and acts depends upon the persons and the interests that may be in question. To some people just such inferences, at one moment or another, will not seem trivial, will be worth making, and will be anything but feats of barren intellectualism. That they are easy inferences to make is beside the mark. I have no time to ask you here to study with me the harder inferences upon topics that do not concern our main purpose. What I {98} need, however, is to illustrate to you that such reasoning processes go beyond mere analysis, and do involve a rational and articulate intuition of a novel aspect of experience. For I defy you to find by any mere analysis of the assertion, "Mr. Taft is President," the innumerable assertions about friends, about family, about speeches, and policies, and so on, which as a fact rationally follow, in the indicated way, from that first assertion. You find these new results by taking a broader view of the unity of experience. What, then, I need to have you see is that the reason which, even in its lightest deeds, can accomplish such syntheses, and which can lead to such ordered intuitions, and can be the endless source of such novelties, is not merely the reason of whose powers as a source of insight James gives so discouraging a picture.

Having thus barely illustrated the thesis that reason can be both productive of new insight and constructively synthetic in its grasp of wider ranges of experience than we could observe without it, let me add that, in the exact sciences, and in particular in mathematics, the reasoning process, using just such forms of synthesis as I have now illustrated, is constantly leading investigators to the most varied and novel discoveries. These discoveries are not due to mere analysis. They are reports of facts and the results of synthetic construction. As Mr. Charles Peirce loves to point out, the new discoveries made in mathematics, and by purely rational processes, {99} are so numerous that for each year a volume of many hundreds of closely printed pages is needed to give, with strictly technical brevity, even the barest outline of the contents of the papers containing the novel results of that one year's researches. In their union with other sciences, the mathematical researches constantly lead to still vaster ranges of novel discovery. Reason, then, is not merely barren, is not mainly concerned with unproductive analysis, but does enrich our survey of experience, of its unity and of its meaning.

Perhaps some of you may still object that, if I define reason in the terms suggested by these instances, there seems to be danger of making the word "reason" mean simply the same as the word "insight." For insight, as I defined it in my opening lecture, means a coherent view of many facts in some sort of unity. And in this case, as you may now say, why use two words at all? I reply that, in fact, all true insight is, to my mind, rational insight, upon one or another level of the development of our power to become rational beings. But you will remember that insight, as I defined it, also means knowledge which is intimate and manifold, as well as knowledge which views facts and relations in their unity. The words intuition and experience are often used to lay stress upon that aspect of our insight which either makes it intimate or else brings it into touch with many and various facts. And such usage is convenient. The word reason, as I have just {100} exemplified its more synthetic meaning, calls our attention precisely to that aspect of our better insight which is involved in our power to grasp many facts in their _unity_, to see the coherence, the inter-relationship, the totality of a set of experiences. Now when insight reaches higher levels, these various aspects of our knowledge are never sundered. But as we grow toward higher insight, we know in part and prophesy in part and are child-like in so far as that which is perfect has not yet come.

In these, our imperfect stages of growth, sometimes our knowledge possesses intimacy, but still has to remain content, for the moment, with a more inarticulate grasp of deeper meanings. In such cases James's sort of intuition, or what is often called blind faith, is mainly in question. And this is indeed a stage on the way to insight. We feel unities but do not see them. Sometimes, however, as in much of our ordinary experience, the state of our minds is different; our knowledge revels in, or else contends with, the endless variety and multiplicity of the facts of life, and lacks a grasp of their unity. In that case our insight is often called "merely empirical." We have experience; and so far our knowledge prospers. But we neither feel vaguely nor see clearly the total sense of things. And in such cases our sight is too busy to give us time for higher insight. As the Germans say, we do not see the wood because of the trees.

In a third stage of partial insight we may stand {101} where, for instance, the masters of the exact sciences stand. We then grasp, with clearness, larger unities of controllable experience. We create objects, as the mathematicians create, in an ideal world of our own contemplation; and we then come to see that these ideal creations of ours do, indeed, reveal the eternal truth regarding a world of seemingly impersonal or superpersonal reality. We learn of this reality through the coherent synthesis of our ideal constructions. Our intuition is in this case at once empirical, articulate, and such as to survey the broad landscape of the genuine relations of things. But alas! in most such cases our objects, although they are indeed presented to our rational intuition, are often abstract enough in their seeming. They are objects such as numbers, and series, and ordered arrays of highly ideal entities. In such cases the reason does its typical work; but often the objects of our insight fail to meet the more intense needs of life.

Thus, then, inarticulate intuitions, ordinary or sometimes more scientific observations of the details of life, and mathematical reasonings concerning the unity and the connections of highly ideal objects such as numbers, come to stand in our experience as more or less sharply sundered grades of imperfect insight. Thus we naturally come to view the typical achievements of our reason as a thing apart, and the rational or exact sciences as remote both from the intuitive faith of the little ones and from {102} the wealthy experience of the men of common-sense and of the men of natural science. As a fact, all these stages of insight are hints of what the Supreme Court meant when it appealed to the "rule of reason." True insight, if fulfilled, would be empirical, for it would face facts; intuitive, for it would survey them and grasp them, and be intimate with them; rational, for it would view them in their unity.

IV

Our lengthy effort to define the work and the place of the reason has brought us to the threshold of an appreciation of its relation to the religious insight which we are seeking.

In looking for salvation, we discover that our task is defined for us by those aspects of individual and social experience upon which our two previous lectures have dwelt. We have learned from the study of these two sorts of experience that, whatever else we need for our salvation, one of our needs is to come into touch with a life that in its unity, in its meaning, in its perfection, is vastly superior to our present human type of life. And so the question has presented itself: Have we any evidence that such a superhuman type of life is a real fact in the world? The mystics, and many of the faithful, answer this question by saying: "Yes. We have such evidence. It is the assurance that we get through intuition, through feeling, through the light revealed to us {103} in certain moments when thought ceases, and the proud intellect is dumb, and when the divine speaks quite directly to the passive and humbled soul." Now when we calmly consider the evidence of such moments of inarticulate conviction, they strongly impress upon us what we have called the religious paradox. Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge--that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible? Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. We know that men differ in faith. We know that one man's intuition regarding the way of salvation may seem to another man to be a mere delusion, a deceitful dream. We know, from the reports of religious experience, that at times even the saints of greatest renown have doubted whether some of their most persuasive visions of the {104} divine were not, after all, due to the cunning deceit of an enemy of souls whom they more or less superstitiously feared. We know that to common-sense, despite its interest in salvation, the reports of the mystics and of the faithful have often appeared to be but the tale of private and vain imaginings. It is fair to ask what are the criteria whereby the true spiritual gifts, the genuine revelations, are to be distinguished. And this, I insist, is a question for the reason, for that aspect of our nature which has to do with forming estimates of wholes rather than of fragments--estimates of life in its entirety rather than of this or that feeling or moment of ecstasy in its isolation.

If, hereupon, without for the moment attempting to discuss how others, as, for instance, James himself, deal with the problem of the reasonable estimate of the value of our religious intuitions, I sketch for you my own opinion as to how reason does throw light upon the religious paradox, I must again emphasise a matter that I mentioned in my opening lecture and that is much neglected. Religious faith does, indeed, involve a seemingly paradoxical attempt to transcend the admitted ignorance of the needy human being, to admit that of himself this being knows almost nothing about the way of salvation, and nevertheless to insist that he is able to recognise his Deliverer's voice as the voice of a real master of life when he hears that voice, or--apart from metaphor--that he is able to be sure what revelation of a divine life, not {105} his own, is the true one when he happens to get it. But religion is not alone in this paradoxical pride of humility. Science and common-sense alike involve a similar admission of the depths of our human fallibility and ignorance, on the one hand, and an analogous assurance that, despite this our fragmentariness of experience, despite our liability to be deceived, we nevertheless can recognise truth when experience once has not wholly verified it, but has sufficiently helped us to get it. For, as individuals, we are constantly confident beyond what our present experience, taken by itself, clearly reveals to us. We, for instance, trust our individual memory in the single case, while admitting its pervasive fallibility in general. We persistently view ourselves as in reasonably close touch with the general and common results of human experience, even at the moment when we have to admit how little we know about the mind or the experience of any one fellow-man, even our nearest friend. We say that some of our opinions, for instance, are warranted by the common-sense of mankind. That is, we pretend once for all to know a good deal about what the common experience of mankind is. And yet, if we look closer, we see that we do not directly see or experience the genuine inner life of any one of mankind except the private self which each one of us regards as his own, while, if we still further consider the matter, we can readily observe how little each one of us really knows even about himself. When {106} we appeal then to what we call common-sense, we pretend to know what it is that, as we say, the mind of mankind finds to be true. But if we are asked to estimate the real state of mind of any individual man, how mysterious that state is! In brief, the paradox of feeling confidence in our own judgment, even while regarding all human opinion as profoundly fallible, is not merely a religious paradox, but also pervades our whole social and personal and even our scientific types of opinion. Not to have what is called a reasonable confidence in our own individual opinions is the mark of a weakling. But usually, if our personal opinions relate to important matters, they bring us into more or less serious conflict with at least some of the opinions of other men. Conflict is one mark that your opinions are worth having. When the conflict arises, we are usually led to consider how fallible other men are. They are fallible, we say, because they are human. How little any poor man knows! Yes, but if this principle holds true, how doubtful are my own opinions! Yet if I fill my mind with that reflection, to the exclusion of all other reasonable considerations, I condemn myself not to mere fallibility, but to certain failure.

The paradox is universal. It pervades all forms and activities of human inquiry. That is the first synthetic observation of the reason, when it surveys the field of human opinion. Everywhere we live by undertaking to transcend in opinion what the {107} evidence before us, at any one moment, directly and infallibly warrants. But is it rational to do this? And if so, _why_ is it rational?

The answer is that while there is much irrational presumption and overconfidence in our human world, there is also a perfectly rational principle which warrants certain forms and methods of thus transcending in our opinions the immediately presented evidence of the moment when we judge. This principle is as universal as it is generally neglected. Rightly understood, it simply transforms for you your whole view of the real universe in which you live.

An opinion of yours may be true or false. But when you form an opinion, what are you trying to do? You are trying to anticipate, in some fashion, what a wider view, a larger experience of your present situation, a fuller insight into your present ideas, and into what they mean, would show you, if you now had that wider view and larger experience. Such an effort to anticipate what the wider view would even now show, if you were possessed of that view, involves both what are usually called theoretical interests and what pragmatists, such as James himself, have often characterised as practical interests. One can express the matter by saying, that you are trying, through your opinions, to predict what a larger insight, if it were present to you, would show or would find, that is, would experience. You can also say that you are trying to define what {108} a fuller apprehension and a fairer estimate of your present purposes, and intentions, and interests, and deeds, and of their outcome, and of their place in life, would bring before your vision. In brief (whether you lay more stress upon deeds and their outcome, or upon experiences and their contents), any expression of opinion, made at any time, is an appeal of the self of the moment to the verdict, to the estimate, to the experience of a larger and better informed insight, in the light of which the self of the moment proposes to be judged. The special criteria by which your momentary opinion is tested, at the time when you form that opinion, vary endlessly with your mood and your training and your feelings, and with the topics and tasks in which you happen to be interested. But the universal form in which any opinion comes to your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity, in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight.

Now you can indeed say: "When I form and express an opinion, I appeal from my present experiences to some wider insight that I view _as if it were_ possible. My opinion asserts that _if I were_ permitted to see what I just now do not directly experience, I should find the facts to be so and so." But no such account of the matter is quite complete. Everything that you regard as possible has to be conceived as somehow based upon what you regard {109} as actual. And so, in fact, your opinions are always appeals to some form of wider or larger or deeper or richer insight that, in the act of appealing to it, you regard as a present or as a past or as a future reality--in brief, as a live and perfectly concrete insight to whose verdict you appeal. Philosophers often express this by saying that all opinions are nothing but efforts to formulate the real contents of experience. This view I accept.