It would be easy to expose the errors about me, both in fact and in logic, for which Principal Fairbairn has made himself responsible in his May article in The Contemporary Review, but that would not answer the purpose which leads me to write. Such an outlay of time and trouble is not what those who take an interest in me would thank me for. They would rather wish me to say what I myself think upon the subject he has opened, and whether there are any points for explanation lying about in the vehement rhetoric he has directed against me. Certainly they will not think there is any call for my assuring them that I am not a hidden sceptic; and I can meet them with the thankful recognition that for a long seventy years, amid mental trials sharp and heavy, I can, in my place and in my measure, adopt the words of St. Polycarp before his martyrdom: “For fourscore years and six I have served my Lord, and He never did me harm, but much good; and can I leave Him now?” But this immunity neither has, nor ought to have, hindered me from entering with sympathy into the anxieties of those who are in this respect less happy than myself; and be it a crime or not, I confess to have tried to aid them according to my ability. Not that I can pretend to be well read in mental science, but I have used such arguments and views as are congenial to my own mind, and I have not been unsuccessful in my use of them.
As I have said in print, “A man’s experiences are enough for himself, but he cannot speak for others … He brings together his reasons and relies on them, because they are his own, and this is his primary evidence; and he has a second ground of evidence in the testimony of those who agree with him. But his best evidence is the former, which is derived from his own thoughts … He states what are personally his own grounds in natural and revealed religion, holding them to be so sufficient that he thinks that others also do hold them implicitly or in substance, or would hold them, if they inquired fairly, or will hold if they listen to him, or do not hold from impediments, invincible or not as it may be, into which he has no call to inquire.” (“Gram. of Assent,” pp. 385-6.)
II.
Enough of introduction. I begin with what is of prime importance in Dr. Fairbairn’s charges against me—the sense in which I use the word “Reason,” against which Reason I have made so many and such strong protests. It is a misleading word, as having various meanings. It is sometimes used to signify the gift which distinguishes man from brute: I have not so used it. In this sense it is mainly a popular word, not a scientific. When so taken it is not a faculty of the mind, rather it is the mind itself; or it is a generalization, or it stands for the seat of all the mental powers together. For myself, I have taken it to mean the faculty of Reasoning in a large sense, nor do I know what other English word, to express that faculty, can be used instead of it. Besides, “Reason” is of a family of words all expressive of Reasoning. I may add that it is the meaning which Dr. Johnson puts upon the word, and the meaning which he traces through all its derivative senses, corroborating his account of it by passages from English authors. “Reason,” he says, is “the power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premisses to consequences; the rational faculty; discursive power.” Also it is the sense, I suppose, which Principal Fairbairn himself gives to the word, for he speaks of “the region of reason and reasoning” (p. 667).
III.
This being the recognised sense of the word, it is quite as important for my present purpose to show it to be the sense in which I have myself used “Reason” in what I have written at various times; though Dr. Fairbairn, as having “studied all in books” (p. 663), must be well aware of it already. For instance:
First, I discard the vague popular sense of it as the distinguishing gift of man in contrast to the brute creation. “Sometimes,” I say, “it stands for all in which man differs from the brutes; and so it includes in its signification the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and the directing principle of conduct. In this sense certainly I do not here use it.” (“Univ. Serm.” p. 58.)
This is but a negative account of it, but in another sermon I speak more distinctly: “By the exercise of reason is properly meant any process or act of the mind, by which, from knowing one thing it advances on to know another.” (Ibid. p. 223.)
Again: “It is obvious that even our senses convey us but a little way out of ourselves, and introduce us to the external world only under circumstances, under conditions of time and place, and of certain media through which they act. We must be near things to touch them; we must be interrupted by no simultaneous sounds in order to hear them; we must have light to see them; we can neither see, hear, nor touch things past or future. Now, Reason is that faculty of the mind by which this deficiency is supplied; by which knowledge of things external to us—of beings, facts, and events—is attained beyond the range of sense; … it brings us knowledge—whether clear or uncertain, still knowledge, in whatever degree of perfection, from every side; but, at the same time, with this characteristic, that it obtains it indirectly, not directly, … on the hypothesis of something else being assumed to be true.” (Ibid. p. 206.)