p. 25. A — E.
Though we may think thus in the law of reason, yet, &c.
It is, and has been, a misfortune, a grievous and manifold loss and hindrance for the interests of moral and spiritual truth, that even our best and most vigorous theologians and philosophers of the age from Edward VI to James II so generally confound the terms, and so too often confound the subjects themselves, reason and understanding; yet the diversity, the difference in kind, was known to, and clearly admitted by, many of them, — by Hooker for instance, and it is implied in the whole of Bacon's
Novum Organum
. Instead of the 'law of reason,' Donne meant, and ought to have said, 'judging according to the ordinary presumptions of the understanding,' that is, the faculty which, generalizing particular experiences, judges of the future by analogy to the past.
Taking the words, however, in their vulgar sense, I most deliberately protest against all the paragraphs in this page, from A to E, and should cite them, with a host of others, as sad effects of the confusion of the reason and the understanding, and of the consequent abdication of the former, instead of the bounden submission of the latter to a higher light. Faith itself is but an act of the will, assenting to the reason on its own evidence without, and even against, the understanding.
indeed is, I fully agree, to be brought into captivity to the faith.
Ib.