602 Dr WHEWELL, OF THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS 



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 Demon- 

 strative 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 appre- 

 hended, and which, as I have said, our philosophical writers call the Intuitive Reason and the 

 Discursive Season, 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 Dis- 

 cursive 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. 



If Mr Coleridge's assertion were true, that the Understanding is the discursive and the 

 Reason the fixed faculty, we should be justified in saying that The Understanding is the faculty 

 by which we reason, and the Reason is the faculty by which we understand. But this is not so. 



Nor is the Understanding of the nature of Instinct, nor does it approach nearer than the 

 Reason to the nature of Instinct, but the contrary. The Instincts of animals bear a very 

 obscure resemblance to any of man's speculative Faculties ; but so far as there is any such 

 resemblance, Instinct is an obscure image of Reason, not of Understanding. Animals are 



