60 REV. A. E. WHATELY^ D.D., ON THE DEMAND 



always counselled us for the best), I farther concluded that it is 

 almost impossible that our judgments can be so correct or solid 

 as they would have been, had our Eeason been mature from 

 the moment of our birth, and had we always been guided by 

 it alone."* And elsewhere, referring to this intellectual crisis 

 in his life, he says : " From that time I was convinced of the 

 necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the 

 opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of 

 building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and 

 abiding superstructure in the sciences/'f This procedure was 

 of course in itself reasonable ; under the circumstances, he could 

 not have done otherwise. But now, after nearly three centuries, 

 it is time to take account of the gain as well as the loss which 

 falls to us through this breach with the past. Elevated from the 

 position of a passing necessity of the age to tliat of an accepted 

 principle in metaphysics, it meant simply this : that the reason of 

 the individual thinker, however much help he might accept from 

 previous thought, must accept no material already organized by 

 previous thought, but must start — like Descartes with his 

 " Cogito, ergo sum " — from the barest and most inchoate data 

 he can find in his own mind. This would be all very well if 

 philosophy were concerned with bare reason, but when we have 

 to deal with religious systems, pulsating with life, the actual 

 creations, under whatever disadvantages, of the self-organizing 

 experience of living communities, the case is difierent. But 

 the difference was not realized. So we come to the age of 

 Deism and the Illumination, when reason in this narrow sense 

 reigned supreme, and to Kant, the great forerunner of the 

 modern Idealists. Kant excellently illustrates my account of 

 Intellectualism. For him reason as such does not work upon 

 rational material but upon phenomena, and by phenomena he 

 means mere sense-material, conveying no knowledge. The 

 thing-in -itself which lies behind the phenomena is unknown. 

 Eeason is a sort of active mechanism working in, or behind, our 

 minds (for of course its activity must be distinguished from 

 that of our own personal volition) which does not receive, but 

 constructs, knowledge. Experience, which for Kant is merely 

 sensuous, is unorganized, colourless, shapeless, dumb, till Eeason 

 has done its work upon it. To some this will seem obviously 

 sound, because our simplest perceptions (short of bare sensation. 



* Discourse on Method, etc., tr. Veitch, p. 14. 

 t Meditations, Id., p. 97. 



