214 



SCIENCE. 



one of the two great causes of change, — namely, that of 

 unfavorable external or physical conditions. Let us now 

 look at the other — namely, the internal nature and char- 

 acter of Man. We can see how it is that, when working 

 under certain conditions, the peculiar powers of Man must 

 lead to endless developments in a wrong direction. Fore- 

 most among these powers is the gift of Reason. I speak 

 here of Reason not as the word is often used, to express 

 a great variety of powers, but as applied to the logical 

 faculty alone. In this restricted sense, the gift of Rea- 

 son is nothing more than the gift of seeing the necessity 

 or the natural consequences of things — whether these 

 be things said or things done. It is the faculty by which, 

 consciously or unconsciously, we go through the mental 

 process expressed in the word "therefore." It is the 

 faculty which confers on us a true gift of prophecy — the 

 power of foreseeing that which " must shortly come to 

 pas;." In its practical application to conduct, and to 

 the affairs of life, it is the gift by which we see the means 

 which will secure for us certain ends, whether these ends 

 be the getting of that which we desire, or the avoiding of 

 that which we dread. But in its root, and in its essence, 

 as well as in its application to the abstract reasoning of 

 mathematics, it is simply the faculty by which we see one 

 proposition as involving, or as following from another. 

 The power of such a faculty obviously must be, as it 

 actually is, immeasurable and inexhaustible, because 

 there is no limit to this kind of following. That is to 

 say, there is no end to the number of things which are 

 the consequence of each other. Whatever happens in 

 the world is the result of causes, moral or material, 

 which have gone before, and this result again becomes the 

 cause of other consequences, moral or material, which 

 must follow in their turn. It is a necessary result of the 

 unity of nature, and of the continuity of things, that the 

 links of consequence are the links of an endless chain. 

 It is the business of Reason to see these links as they 

 come one by one gradually into view ; and it is in the 

 nature of a reasoning creature to be drawn along by them 

 in the line, whatever it may be, which is the line of their 

 direction. The distance which may be traversed in fol- 

 lowing that direction even for a short time, and by a 

 single mind, is often very great — so great that a man 

 may be, and often is, a different Being from himself, both 

 in op'nions and in conduct, at two different epochs of his 

 life. There are, indeed, individuals, and there are times 

 and conditions of society, in which thought is compara- 

 tively stagnant, when it travels nowhere, or when its 

 movements are so slow and gradual as to be impercep- 

 tible. But, on the other hand, there are times when 

 mind is on the march. And then it travels fast and far. 

 The journey is immense indeed, which may be accom- 

 plished by a few successive generations of men following, 

 one after another, the links of consequence. At the end 

 of such a journey, the children may be separated from 

 their fathers by more than the breadth of oceans. They 

 may have passed into new regions of thought and of 

 opinion, of habit and of worship. If the movement has 

 been slow, and if the time occupied has been long, it will 

 be all the more difficult to retrace the steps by which the 

 change has been brought about. It will appear more 

 absolute and complete than it really is — the new regions 

 of thought being in truth connected with the old by a 

 well-beaten and continuous track. 



But these endless processes of development arising out 

 of the operation of the reasoning faculty, are consistent 

 with any result — good or bad. Whether the great 

 changes they produce have been for the better or for the 

 worse, must depend, not on the length of the journey, but 

 on the original direction in which it was begun. It de- 

 pends on whether that direction has been right or wrong 

 — on whether the road taken has been the logical devel- 

 opment of a lie. The one has a train of consequences as 

 long and as endless as the other. It is the nature of the 

 reasoning faculty that it works from data. But these 



data are supplied to it from many different sources. In 

 the processes of reasoning on which the abstract sciences 

 depend, the fundamental data are axioms or self-evident 

 propositions. These may, in a sense, be said to be sup- 

 plied by the reasoning faculty itself, because the recog- 

 nition of a truth as self-evident is in itself an exercise of 

 the reasoning faculty. But in all branches of knowledge, 

 other than the abstract sciences, that is to say, in every 

 department of thought which most nearly concerns our 

 conduct and our beliefs, the data on which Reason has 

 to work are supplied to it from sources external to itself. 

 In matters of Belief, they come, for the most part, from 

 Authority, in some one or other of its many forms, or 

 from imagination working according to its own laws up- 

 on impressions received from the external world. In 

 matters of conduct, the data supplied to Reason come 

 from all the innumerable motives which are founded on 

 the desires. But in all these different provinces of 

 thought it is the tendency and the work of Reason to fol- 

 low the proposition, or the belief, or the motive, to all its 

 consequences. Unless, therefore, the proposition is 

 really as true as it seems to be ; unless the belief is really 

 according to the fact ; unless the motive is realiy legiti- 

 mate and good, it is the necessary effect of the logical 

 faculty to carry men farther and farther into the paths of 

 error, until it "lands them in depths of degradation and 

 corruption of which unreasoning creatures are incapable. 

 It is astonishing how reasonable — that is to say, how 

 logical — are even the most revoking practices connected, 

 for example, with religious worship or religious customs, 

 provided we accept as true some fundamental conception 

 of which they are the natural result. If it be true that 

 the God we worship is a Being who delights in suffer- 

 ing, and takes pleasure, as it were, in the very smell of 

 blood, then it is not irrational to appease Him with hec- 

 atombs of human victims. This is an extreme case. 

 There are, however, such cases, as we know, actually 

 existing in the world. But, short of this, the same prin- 

 ciple is illustrated in innumerable cases, where cruel and 

 apparently irrational customs are in reality nothing but 

 the logical consequences of some fundamental belief re- 

 specting the nature, the character, and the commands of 

 God. In like manner, in the region of morals 

 and of conduct not directly connected with religious 

 beliefs, Reason may be nothing but the servant of 

 Desire, and in this service may have no other work 

 to do than that of devising means to the most 

 wicked ends. If the doctrine given to Reason be the 

 doctrine that pleasure and self-indulgence, at whatever 

 sacrifice to others, are the great aims and ends of life, 

 then Reason will be busy in seeking out "many inven- 

 tions " for the attainment of them, each invention being 

 more advanced than another in its defiance of all oblig- 

 ation and in its abandonment of all sense of duty. Thus 

 the development of selfishness under the guidance of 

 faculties which place at its command the great powers 

 of foresight and contrivance, is a kind of development 

 quite as natural and quite as common as that which con- 

 stitutes the growth of knowledge and of virtue. It is 

 indeed a development which, under the condition sup- 

 posed — that is to say, the condition of false or erroneous 

 data supplied to the reasoning faculty — is not an accident 

 or a contingency, but a necessary and inevitable result. 



And here there is one very curious circumstance to be 

 observed, which brings us still closer to the real seat of 

 the anomaly which makes Man in so many ways the one 

 great exception to the order of Nature. That circum- 

 stance is the helplessness of mere Reason to correct the 

 kind of error which is most powerful in vitiating conduct. 

 In those processes of abstract Reason which are the 

 great instruments of work in the exact sciences, the 

 reasoning faculty has the power of very soon detecting 

 any element of error in the data from which it starts. 

 That any given proposition leads to an absurd result is 

 one of the familiar methods of disproof in mathematics. 



