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admirable in itself is any stationary result? The exploration of the circumstance that the only result that is satisfied with itself is a quality of feeling is that reason always looks forward to an endless future and expects endlessly to improve its results. Consider, for a moment, what Reason, as well as we can today conceive it, really is. I do not mean man's faculty which is so called from its embodying in some measure Reason, or NOUS as something manifesting itself in the mind in the history of mind's development in neture. What is this reason? In the first place, it is something that never can have
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been completely embodied. The most insignificant of general ideas always involves conditional prediction or requires for its fulfillment that events should come to pass, and all that ever can have come to pass must fall short of completely fulfilling its requirements. At the same time, the very being, of the General, of Reason, is of such a mode that this being consists in the Reason's actually governing events. Suposse a piece of carborundum has been made and has subsequently been dissolved in aqua regia without anybody at any time, so far as I know, ever having tried to scratch
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A little example will serve to illustrate what I am saying. Take any general term whatever. I say of a stone that it is hard. That means that so long as the stone remains hard, every essay to scratch it by the moderate pressure of a knife will surely fail. To all the stone hard is to predict that no matter how often you try the experiment, it will fail every time. that innumerable series of conditional predictions is involved in the meaning od this lowly adjective. Whatever may have been done will not begin to exhaust its meaning.
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it with a knife. Undoubtedly, I may have good reason, nevertheless, to call it hard; because some actual fact has occurred such that Reason compells me to call it so, and a general idea of all the facts of the case can only be formed if I do call it so. In this case, my calling it hard is an actual event which is governed by that law of hardness of the piece of carborundum. But if there were no actual fact whatsoever which was meant by saying that the piece of carborundum was hard, there would be not the slightest meaning in the word hard as applied to it. The very being of the general, of reason, consists in its governing individual events. So, then, the
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essense of Reason is such that its being never can have been completley perfecter. It always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth. It is like the character of a man which consists in the ideas that he will conceive and in the efforts that he will make, and which only develops as the occasions actually arise. Yet in all his life long no son of Adam has ever fully manifested what there was in him. So, then, the Development ofReason requires as a part of it the occurence of more indovidual events than ever can occur. It requires too all the coloring of all qualities of feeling, including pleasure, in its proper place among