Testi mony of Revela 14. Besides those we have hitherto mentioned, there is one BOOK IV. sort of propositions that challenge the highest degree of our CHAP. assent, upon bare testimony, whether the thing proposed XVI. agree or disagree with common experience, and the ordinary The bare course of things, or no. The reason whereof is, because the testimony is of such an one as cannot deceive nor be deceived: Divine and that is of God himself. This carries with it an assurance tion is the beyond doubt, evidence beyond exception. This is called by highest Certainty. a peculiar name, revelation1, and our assent to it, faith, which [3as absolutely determines our minds, and as perfectly excludes all wavering,] as our knowledge itself; and we may as well doubt of our own being, as we can whether any revelation from God be true. So that faith is a settled and sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no manner of room for doubt or hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine revelation, and that we understand it right: else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of enthusiasm, and all the error of wrong principles, if we have faith and assurance in what is not divine revelation. And therefore, in those cases, our assent can be rationally no higher than the evidence of its being a revelation, and that this is the meaning of the expressions it is delivered in. If the evidence of its being a revelation, or that this is its true sense, be only on probable proofs, our assent can reach no higher than an assurance or diffidence, arising from the more or less apparent probability of the proofs. But of faith, and the precedency it ought to have before other arguments of lectual reach of a more comprehensive intelligence and experience than man's. What is a miracle to a man, thus would not be a miracle to a higher intelligence. And to Omniscience no event could be miraculous. 1 'revelation.' The whole evolution of the universe-in us as well as around us, including its spiritual facts, and also those physical events which men regard as miraculous, while they must really be in harmony with supreme reason-constitutes our revelation of God, in the full meaning of the term revelation. For they are uninterpreta- 3 In first four editions-' has as BOOK IV. persuasion, I shall speak more hereafter 1; where I treat of it as it is ordinarily placed, in contradistinction to reason; though in truth it be nothing else but an assent founded on the highest reason2. СНАР. 1 Ch. xviii. 2 'Christian faith,' says Coleridge, 'is the perfection of human intelligence.' That reason, in its highest form, becomes faith, in the sense of assent founded on the spiritual constitution of man, is true in a deeper meaning of faith than that contemplated by Locke. CHAPTER XVII. OF REASON. 1. THE word reason in the English language has different BOOK IV. significations: sometimes it is taken for true and clear 1 Reason, among the most ambiguous of philosophical terms, here and elsewhere with Locke, as with many of his English contemporaries, signifies the inferential faculty, or power of drawing conclusions, either demonstratively, by deduction from selfevident principles, or inductively, on grounds of probability. It is thus synonymous with reasoning, to the exclusion, or at least in disregard, of the common rational sense on which all reasoning depends. It means discursive as distinguished from intuitive intelligence. So too Reid, in his Inquiry : Philosophers pitying the credulity of the vulgar resolve to have no faith but what is founded upon reason [reasoning]. They apply to philosophy to furnish them with reasons for the belief of those things which all mankind have believed without being able to give any reason for it.' (Introd. 3.) 'First principles fall not within the province of reason, but of common sense.' (ch. ii. 6.) But in his Essays (vi. 2) he ascribes to reason 'two offices, or two degrees. The first is, to judge of things self-evident; the second, to draw conclusions that are not self-evident from those that are. The first of these is the province and sole province of common sense; and therefore it coincides with reason in its whole extent, and is only another VOL. II. name for one branch or one degree of reason.' In later and contemporary philosophical nomenclature, reason is confined to this second meaning, and is thus contrasted with the understanding, with its empirical generalisations, and tentative conclusions, or reason in Locke's meaning. But deeper analysis shows that discursive understanding, thus exercised, depends for the rationality of its results on what is higher than itself, or intuitively evident. Reason in its highest meaning is, as Coleridge has it, 'the power of universal and necessary convictions; the source and substance of truths above sense, having their evidence in themselves.' Its presence is always marked by the intellectual necessity of the position affirmed: this necessity being conditional, when a truth of reason is applied to facts of experience, or to the rules and maxims of the understanding; but absolute, when the subject matter is the growth or offspring of reason. The use of 'reason,' to signify discursive intelligence only, in Locke and by eighteenthcentury philosophers, and to signify intuitive or noetic intelligence only, in the nineteenth, as previously in the seventeenth century, is a signal example of a far-reaching revolution in modern English philosophic thought in the interval. CC CHAP. CHAP. XVII. Various Significations of BOOK IV. principles: sometimes for clear and fair deductions from those principles and sometimes for the cause, and particularly the final cause1. But the consideration I shall have of it here is in a signification different from all these; and that is, as it stands for a faculty in man, that faculty whereby man is the word supposed to be distinguished from beasts, and wherein it is evident he much surpasses them 2. Reason. Wherein consists. 2. If general knowledge 3, as has been shown 1, consists in Reasoning a perception of the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas, and the knowledge of the existence of all things without us (except only of a God, whose existence every man may certainly know and demonstrate to himself from his own existence), be had only by our senses, what room is there for the exercise of any other faculty, but outward sense and inward perception? What need is there of reason? Very 1 Thus a spark is in part the reason in things, or the explanation, of an explosion of gunpowder; seeing is the reason, or final cause, of our visual organism. So too we speak of reason, not merely as a human faculty, but as immanent in, and constitutive of, the nature of things. The ultimate premises in a train of reasonings are also called the reason of the final conclusion. 2 'Reason' is applicable to the abstracting, as distinguished from the merely sensuous or animal, activity of man. Cf. Bk. II. ch. xi. § 10. 36 'general knowledge,' i. e. intuitive certainty of the truth of any general abstract proposition. * Ch. i. § 2; ch. vi. 5 What of the intuitive knowledge we were said to have of our own existence' (ch. ix. § 3), and through reflection of the operations of our own minds (Bk. II, ch. i. § 4)? This seems here to be covered by 'perception '— afterwards called 'inward.' Here again we have the deistical conception which puts God at a distance without us.' 'This power to 'demonstrate' God's existence implies reason, in the sense of reasoning, in addition to outward sense and inward perception.' 8 'Outward sense' gives us, according to ch. xi, that imperfect knowledge of things, outside our organisms, which is called sense-perception; and 'inward perception,’including ‘reflection,' gives us knowledge of our own existence, and of the relations of our abstract ideas, along with a demonstrative proof of the existence of God. But demonstration' presupposes discursive faculty, and in itself shows the need of reason' [i. e. reasoning), as does all our 'general knowledge' of the relations of our abstract ideas in mathematics and morality. chapter concentrates attention upon discursive activity, which carries us from the intuited data of outward sense and inward perception to the completer conceptions of the phenomena and laws of the universe, which are the issue of attempts to grasp intellectually what is dimly apprehended in sense. This chapter contains Locke's account of discursive, as supplementary to intuitive and sensuous, activity of mind, in the way both of increasing the number of This СНАР. XVII. much both for the enlargement of our knowledge, and BOOK IV. regulating our assent. For it hath to do both in knowledge and opinion, and is necessary and assisting to all our other intellectual faculties, and indeed contains two of them, viz. sagacity and illation. By the one, it finds out; and by the other, it so orders the intermediate ideas1 as to discover what connexion there is in each link of the chain, whereby the extremes are held together; and thereby, as it were, to draw into view the truth sought for, which is that which we call illation or inference, and consists in nothing but the perception of the connexion there is between the ideas, in each step of the deduction; whereby the mind comes to see, either the certain agreement or disagreement of any two ideas, as in demonstration, in which it arrives at knowledge; or their probable connexion, on which it gives or withholds its assent, as in opinion. Sense and intuition reach but a very little way3. The greatest part of our knowledge depends upon deductions and intermediate ideas: and in those cases where we are fain to substitute assent instead of knowledge, and take propositions for true, without being certain they are so, we have need to find out, examine, and compare the grounds of their probability. In both these cases, the faculty which finds out the means, and rightly applies them, to discover certainty in the one, and probability in the other, is that which we call reason. For, as reason perceives the necessary and indubitable connexion of all the ideas or proofs one to another, in each step of any demonstration that produces knowledge; so it likewise perceives the probable connexion of all the ideas or proofs one to another, in every step of a discourse, to which it will think assent due. This is the |