Noësis: Dianoia: Pistis: Eikasia;
is made by putting in the second place, instead of Demonstration, which is the process pursued, or Science, which is the knowledge obtained, Conception, which is the object with which the mind deals. Such deviations from exact symmetry and correlation in speaking of the faculties of the mind, are almost unavoidable in every language. And there is yet another source of such inaccuracies of language; for we have to speak, not only of the process of acquiring knowledge, and of the objects with which the mind deals, but of the Faculties of the mind which are thus employed. Thus Intuition is the Process; Ideas are the Object, in the first term of our series. The Faculty also we may call Intuition; but the Greek offers a distinction. Noësis is the Process of Intuition; but the Faculty is Nous. If we wish to preserve this distinction in English, what must we call the Faculty? I conceive we must call it the Intuitive Reason, a term well known to our older philosophical writers[347]. Again: taking the second term of the series, Demonstration is the process, Science, the result; and Conceptions are the objects with which the mind deals. But what is the Faculty thus employed? What is the Faculty employed in Demonstration? The same philosophical writers of whom I spoke would have answered at once, the Discursive Reason; and I do not know that, even now, we can suggest any better term. The Faculty employed in acquiring the two lower kinds of knowledge, the Faculty which deals with Things and their Images is, of course, Sense, or Sensation.
The assertion of a Faculty of the mind by which it apprehends Truth, which Faculty is higher than the Discursive Reason, as the Truth apprehended by it is higher than mere Demonstrative Truth, agrees (as it will at once occur to several of my readers) with the doctrine taught and insisted upon by the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And so far as he was the means of inculcating this doctrine, which, as we see, is the doctrine of Plato, and I might add, of Aristotle, and of many other philosophers, let him have due honour. But in his desire to impress the doctrine upon men's minds, he combined it with several other tenets, which will not bear examination. He held that the two Faculties by which these two kinds of truth are apprehended, and which, as I have said, our philosophical writers call the Intuitive Reason and the Discursive Reason, may be called, and ought to be called, respectively, The Reason and The Understanding; and that the second of these is of the nature of the Instinct of animals, so as to be something intermediate between Reason and Instinct. These opinions, I may venture to say, are altogether erroneous. The Intuitive Reason and the Discursive Reason are not, by any English writers, called the Reason and the Understanding; and accordingly, Coleridge has had to alter all the passages, namely, those taken from Leighton, Harrington, and Bacon, from which his exposition proceeds. The Understanding is so far from being especially the Discursive or Reasoning Faculty, that it is, in universal usage, and by our best writers, opposed to the Discursive or Reasoning Faculty. Thus this is expressly declared by Sir John Davis in his poem On the Immortality of the Soul. He says, of the soul,
When she rates things, and moves from ground to ground,
The name of Reason (Ratio) she acquires from this:
But when by reason she truth hath found,
And standeth fixt, she Understanding is.
Instead of the Reason being fixed, and the Understanding discursive, as Mr. Coleridge says, the Reason is distinctively discursive; that is, it obtains conclusions by running from one point to another. This is what is meant by Discursus; or, taking the full term, Discursus Rationis, Discourse of Reason. Understanding is fixed, that is, it dwells upon one view of a subject, and not upon the steps by which that view is obtained. The verb to reason, implies the substantive, the Reason, though it is not coextensive with it: for as I have said, there is the Intuitive Reason as well as the Discursive Reason. But it is by the Faculty of Reason that we are capable of reasoning; though undoubtedly the practice or the pretence of reasoning may be carried so far as to seem at variance with reason in the more familiar sense of the term; as is the case also in French. Moliere's Crisale says (in the Femmes Savantes),
Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison,
Et le raisonnement en bannit la Raison.