REASON

(Lat. ratio.) That particular faculty in man of which either the exclusive or the more intense enjoyment distinguishes him from the rest of the animal creation. Like most of the terms in the science of mind, that of reason has been employed in a great variety of significations. Dugald Stewart takes it in its widest sense, and comprises under it all the operations of the intellect upon the materials of knowledge which are furnished in the first instance by sense and perception. Its office is to distinguish the true from the false, right from wrong, and to combine means for the attainment of particular ends. According to this defi nition, therefore, the province of reason is coextensive with the range of human activity, and it directs itself to the three supreme objects of desire to man — the good, the beautiful, and the true. Mr. Hume, however, withdraws the discernment of right and wrong, and of the beautiful and its contrary, from the domain of reason; and, on the other hand, also, denies the certainty of the truth which it enunciates, and limits its convincing force merely to a certain weight of probability. Locke's usage of the term, again, partaking as it does of the general loosene of his phraseology, is very different. In one pa age reason is declared to be the faculty which finds out the means, and rightly applies them, to discover either the certain agreement or disagreement of two ideas, or their probable connexion. But, in another place, it is said to be conversant with certainty alone; white the discovery of what, as probable, enforces a contingent a ent or opinion, is ascribed to an especial faculty, which is called the judgment. Bird, on the other hand, confines the latter term to the apprehension of intuitive truth; but agrees so far with Locke as to make it one part of reason, whose other part is reasoning, both demonstrative and moral. On the whole, however, it is clear that in the mind of Locke the terms reasoning and reason were nearly, if not quite, equivalent. But reasoning and deduction are evidently not the source either of the dignity or the authority of the hu man intellect. The discursive faculty can never establish any other than a conditional truth, which predisposes some anterior and pre-established verity as its basis and verification.If there were not in the human mind something primary, unconditional, and absolute, to which all reasonings might be referred, as to their source and foundation, the discursive proce would proceed into infinity, and its con elusions be, as Hume a erts that they are, without any power to enforce a ent. But there are unquestionably in the human mind certain nece ary and universal principles, which, shining with an intrinsic light of evidence, are them selves above proof, but the authority for all mediate and contingent principles. That which is thus above reasoning is the reason. In the language of English philosophy, the terms rens on and understanding are nearly identical, and are so used by Stewart; but in the critical philosophy of Kant a broad distinction has been drawn between them. Reason is the principle of principles; either speculatively verifies every special principle, or practically determines the proper ends of human action. Approximately, it may be called the sum of what, in Scotch philosophy, has been denominated the laws of man's intellectual constitution. The understanding, on the other hind, is coextensive with the vernacular use of reason. It is that which conceives of sensible ib- [s. 1046]