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.