§ 6. THE MEANING OF REASON
The problem as to ‘the sphere of Reason’ could not be more effectually raised. Mr. Balfour clearly implies that there is a sphere of Reason, but forces a perplexed query as to when he believes himself to enter it. Evidently, by his own definitions, his whole political life is lived outside it. Alike his generalisations from past history, and his predictions of the future, are such as afford ‘no ground for believing them to be even approximately true’: those of his opponents, of course, coming for him under the same category. He would, perhaps, hold himself to be in the sphere of Reason when following a proposition in mathematics; but he does not admit himself to be there even when he consents to believe that he will die, and that he had better avoid prussic acid. ‘No experience, however large,’ he insists (p. 75), ‘and no experiments, however well contrived and successful, could give us any reasonable assurance that the co-existences or sequences which have been observed among phenomena will be repeated in the future.’ Not ‘certainty,’ be it observed, but ‘any reasonable assurance.’ That is to say, we have no reasonable assurance that we shall die.
Obviously the extravagance of this proposition is calculated. The point is that no belief whatever concerning life and death and morality and the process of nature can be justified by ‘reason’; and that accordingly no religious belief whatever can be discredited on the score of being opposed to reason or ‘unreasonable.’ If not more reasonable than the most carefully tested or the most widely accepted belief in science, or the belief that the sun will rise or fire burn to-morrow, or that we shall all die, it is not less reasonable than they. Therefore, believe as your bias leads.
It is only fair to Mr. Balfour to say that there is nothing new in his position, though probably it has never before been quite so violently formulated. The Greek Pyrrho (fl. 300-350 B.C.) argued that almost all propositions were doubtful; and some of his followers are said to have been consistent enough to doubt whether they doubted. In the dialogues of Cicero we find the skeptical method employed, with supreme inconsistency, by the official exponents of unbelieved doctrines, to discredit competing doctrines. Among the pagans it was also turned, with no special religious purpose, against all forms of dogmatic doctrine by Sextus the Empiric (fl. 200-250 A.C.); and in the early Christian dialogue of Minucius Felix a pagan is presented as turning it against Christianity. In the later Middle Ages it is resorted to by Cornelius Agrippa, previously a great propounder of fantastic propositions in science, against the current science of his time, and in favour of a return to the simplicity of the early Christian creed. Still later, it was much resorted to, after the Reformation, by Catholics for the purpose of discrediting Protestantism; and Pascal and Huet, the latter in particular, sought to employ it against ‘unbelief.’ Huet left behind him, as his legacy to his church and generation, what Mark Pattison has termed ‘a work of the most outrageous skepticism’; and Pascal’s use of the method has left a standing debate as to whether he himself was a ‘skeptic.’ In England, on the Protestant side, Bishop Berkeley put forth an argument to the effect that the Newtonian doctrine of fluxions involved the acceptance of unproved ‘mysteries,’ and that those who applied it had accordingly no excuse for rejecting the mysteries of Christianity.
Finally, it is fair to note that Mr. Balfour’s nihilistic treatment of reason has a surprising sanction in Hume, to say nothing of the other writers who have practically limited reasoning to mathematical deduction. That great thinker, with his frequent great carelessness, wrote that
‘Our conclusions from experience [of cause and effect] are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding’ (Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding, Sect. iv. Part ii., par. 2).
‘All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning’ (Sect. v., par. 3).
‘All these [spontaneous feelings] are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent’ (Ib. par. 6).
But Hume, be it noted, would in his earlier life have recoiled from Mr. Balfour’s religious Irrationalism, for in his deistic period he wrote that the belief in Deity is ‘conformable to sound reason.’ And, what is more important, he in effect cancelled his own remarks on reason, above cited, by writing as follows in Note B on the Inquiry cited:—
‘Nothing is more usual than for writers, even on moral, political, or physical subjects, to distinguish between reason and experience, and to suppose that these species of argumentation (sic) are entirely different from each other. The former are taken for the mere result of our intellectual faculties, which, by considering a priori the nature of things, and examining the effects that must follow from their operation, establish particular principles of science and philosophy. The latter are supposed to be derived entirely from sense and observation, by which we know what has actually happened from the operation of particular objects, and are thence able to infer what will for the future result from them.... But notwithstanding that this distinction be thus universally received, both in the active and speculative scenes of life, I shall not scruple to pronounce that it is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.’
Hume, it will be observed, is not here bent on vindicating the rational character of direct inference from observation: he had set out in the text by disparaging customary thinking as non-rational; and he is now claiming for the ‘reasoning’ man that experience goes a long way to generate his reasoning processes. ‘The truth is,’ he says in his final paragraph, ‘an inexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all, were he absolutely inexperienced.’ It is a fragmentary note to a hasty passage; but at least it concedes that reasoning is largely a matter of inference from experience, and thus decisively gainsays the assertion in the text that no inference from experience is an ‘effect of reasoning,’ inasmuch as it says such inference is reasoning; that reasoning is a working of the mind on the facts of life; and that the common distinction between reasoning and [beliefs derived direct from] experience ‘is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.’[12] If, he says in the fourth paragraph of the Note, ‘If we examine those arguments which, in any of the sciences above mentioned, are supposed to be the mere effects of reasoning and reflection, they will be found to terminate at last in some general principle or conclusion for which we can assign no reason but observation and experience.’ If an argument be not a process of reasoning, neither word is intelligible. If an argument terminates (=has one end) in a conclusion founded on observation, and if that observation be a ‘reason’ for a proposition, then arguing is reasoning.
If not, what is Mr. Balfour’s book? By his own definition, that is ‘outside the sphere of Reason,’ inasmuch as it is a series of negative propositions which, like their denied contraries, must be ‘incapable of proof.’ What term, then, would he apply to his argument, if he admits that he is arguing?
The philosophic skeptic, it would appear, has logically overreached himself—a very usual consummation. There is little sign that any of the religious skeptics above named ever made any converts to religion; and there is much ‘reason’ to think that they turned many to unbelief. Mr. Balfour from time to time speaks of ‘reasonable people’ and of ‘absurdity.’ But he leaves us in the dark as to what absurdity means, and his thesis excludes from the ‘reasonable’ class alike all religious persons and all scientific persons, unless, possibly, mathematicians as such. Since there is no ‘reasonable assurance’ for the belief that the sun will rise to-morrow, and politicians have no ground in reason for anything they say as such, the mass of the ordinary beliefs of educated mankind are not reasonable or rational; and since we have no ‘reason’ for believing in either mortality or immortality, we can have no reason for believing (whether we do or not) in Mr. Balfour, who avowedly believes in both without reason. His book, by implication, is not an appeal to reason, is not a process of reasoning, and can give no ‘reasonable assurance’ of anything, positive or negative, to anybody. All this by his own showing.
The rationalist, it should seem, has small cause to deprecate such antagonism. He could hardly have a more comprehensive clearing of the field of dialectic for the formulation of his own conception of reason and reasoning, and his own appeal to the reason of reasonable people. As thus:—
1. Reason is our name for (a) the sum of all the judging processes; (b) the act of reflex judgment; (c) ‘private judgment’ as against obedience to authority; and (d) the state of sanity contrasted with that of insanity; and ‘a reason’ is a fact or motive or surmise which we judge sufficient to induce us or others to believe or do (or doubt or not do) something without much or any danger of error, failure, or injury.
2. Reasoning is our name for the process of comparing or stating ‘reasons why’ certain propositions or judgments should be believed or disbelieved, or certain acts done or not done.
3. We are emphatically ‘in the sphere of Reason’ when we are reflecting and reasoning, as distinct from merely feeling, sensating, desiring, or hating; but even the feelings are, as it were, part of the stuff of Reason. Strictly speaking, we are in the sphere of Reason even when we believe what we are told to believe on matters outside the knowledge of our instructors (in so far as we credit them with greater wisdom than our own), or try to believe that what we would like to be true must be true because we would like it (inasmuch as we are proceeding reflectively on a ‘reason why’); though in these cases we are reasoning fallaciously—that is, in a way which can lead to manifold error and injury.
4. Reasonable is our approbatory epithet for an action, course, or person that is guided by reasoning which we see to exclude most risks of error and injury—save of course where the taking of risk of injury is assumed.
Every one of these definitions is justified by the dictionary to begin with, though the dictionaries, of necessity, note further conflicting meanings, as when reason is indicated as ‘the faculty or capacity of the human mind by which it is distinguished from the intelligence of the lower animals,’ or hazily distinguished, on philosophic authority, from ‘the understanding.’ But the lexicographer loyally notes that a reason is ‘a thought or consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion’; and that to reason means, among other things, ‘to reach conclusions by a systematic comparison of facts,’ ‘to examine or discuss by arguments.’ These senses are implicit in daily usage.
The concept of Reason, in short, must include the whole factory of beliefs. The judging faculty, the judging propensity, is a complex of instincts, experiences, inferences, and necessities of thought. It originates at an animal stage, and conserves to the last animal elements—as when, without any process of calculation, you infer, as it were through the muscular sense, that a top-heavy omnibus is likely to overbalance, or that in riding your bicycle round a sharp corner you must incline your body inwards. It deals with diet and medicine, art and industry, no less than with theology and science and politics. In the former, its accepted procedure is obviously a set of survivals of more or less tested ideas from among an infinity of detected mistakes; and the moral law of the intellectual life for the rationalist, the principle which best justifies his assumption of that name, is that every belief or preference whatever is fitly to be tried by all or any of the tests by which beliefs have been sifted in the past, or may more effectually be tested in the future. We are to do with both our religion and our science in general what we have done in the past and are still doing with our medicine, our sanitation, our education, our physics, our historiography.
Without more ado, then, we may proceed to ask how reasons for beliefs are ultimately to be appraised by reasonable and consistent people—in other words, how beliefs are honestly to be justified.