The human reason, that haughty faculty, deified in our age by a myriad of perverse and commonplace minds known under the derisive and doubly vain title of freethinkers, is but blind, despite its high opinion of its own insight. Yes, and we affirm by certain intuition that man's reason is not and cannot be otherwise than blind, aside from the revealing principle which only enlightens it in proportion to its subordination; for, abandoned to itself, reason can only err and must fatally fall into an abyss of illusions.
The melancholy age in which we live but too often offers us an example of the lamentable mistakes into which we are hurried by misguided reason, which, yielding to a criminal presumption, deserts without remorse the principle super-abounding in life, light and glory.
To understand such an anomaly, to explain how reason, which constitutes one of the highest attributes of man, is so far subject to error, it is essential to have a thorough apprehension of the complexity of its nature. What, then, is the real nature of the reason so little studied and so illy known by those very men who raise altars in its honor? Let us try to produce a clear demonstration. And let us first say that reason does not constitute a primary principle in man; for a primary principle could never mistake its object. Neither is it a primary faculty; it is only the form or the manner of being of such a faculty, and thus cannot be a light in itself. The rays by which it shines are external to it in the sense that it receives them from the principle which governs and fertilizes it. Still, let us say that, although neither a principle nor a faculty, reason is none the less, with conscience, of which it forms the base, the noblest power of man; for this power God created free; free from subjection to the principle that enlightens it; free, too, to escape from it. Yet every power necessarily recognizes a guiding principle to whose service it needs must bow; but to reason alone it is granted to avoid the law which imperiously rules the relations of the harmonious subordination of principiant faculties to their principles. Hence the error or possible blindness of reason; hence also its incomparable grandeur, which lies solely in its free and spontaneous subordination. These principles established, let us go still farther, and penetrate deeper into the mysterious genius of reason.
authorized to define reason. He did it in terms at once so simple, so precise, and of such exquisite clarity, that we may venture to think that reason itself could not have better rendered the terms of its own entity.
This definition, let no one fail to see, contains in its extreme brevity more substance than would fill a voluminous treatise. This, then, is his definition:
Reason is the discursive form of the intellect.
Now by this St. Thomas plainly establishes that reason, distinct from the intellect, with which we must beware of confounding it, proceeds from it as effect proceeds from cause. Therefore, intellect surpasses reason as its principiant and guiding faculty; and reason only figures in the intelligential sphere, despite the important part it plays in virtue of its adjunctive or supplementing power.
But what is the purpose of this adjunction? Here, in reply to this grave and important question, let us refer to what the same scholar says elsewhere. "Reason arises," he says, "from the failure of intellect." Certainly this is a luminous, and doubtless a very unexpected proposition. From it we learn, on the one hand, that the intellect is liable to defects and consequently to weaknesses; on the other hand, it seems established that the adjunctive power comes to aid the faculty which governs it, since here the subjected is born of the failure of the subjector.
Let us explain this fresh anomaly. We have in the first place declared the preceding proposition luminous in spite of the obscurity into which we are plunged by the consequences which we have derived from it; but, patience! We are already aware that it is from the very obscurity of things that the brightest light sometimes bursts upon contemplative eyes; and since faith is the next principle to knowledge, let us have faith at least in the trustworthiness of him who addresses us, especially as he has given us repeated, unequivocal tokens of sound and upright reason. Let us, then, have no doubt that the preceding proposition contains a precious precept; and very certainly light will soon dawn on our mind.
This settled, and for the better understanding of the meaning attached to this proposition, let us call to our aid the powers of analogy.