REASON, according to the common notion, is the highest faculty of the human mind, by which man is distinguished from brutes, and which enables him to contemplate things spiritual as well as material, to weigh all that can be said or thought for and against them, and hence to draw conclusions, and to act accordingly. A man may therefore be said to possess reason in proportion as he actually exer cises that power, that is, reasons and acts according to the conclusions or results at which he has arrived. In such expressions as " We have reason to believe such an account," or " He has no reason to be dis satisfied," the word " reason " does not signify the mental power itself, but the conclusion or result of the process of reasoning, in contra distinction to motives, which arc never tho results of mental opera tions, but merely outward circumstances by which our actions are influenced.
Thus far reason is of a purely practical nature, and Kant therefore divided reason (if we may venture to translate his word Vernunft by the English word reason), into practical and theoretical. The latter, which is also called pure, ideal, or transcendental reason, is, accord ing to him, the mind's power of producing ideas it priori from its own resources, or the power of conceiving things and their attributes which lie beyond the sphere of our experience, such as infinity, the absolute, God, the supreme good, &e. How far our knowledge of these things
can extend is shown in the work of Kant, entitled Kritik der reinen Vernunft; or ' Criticism of Pure Reason.' Reason, in its practical acceptation, forms ideas it posteriori, in as far as it derives them from a consideration and comparison of the phenomena of the external world, endeavours to discover unity in variety, and traces all phenomena to one source, a supreme reason, of which human reason is only a reflex.
Schelling defines reason to be the identity of the subjective and the objective, that is, the identity of the power which knows and that which it knows, which includes the knowledge of this identity. As the original identity, says he, exists in God, or is God, reason is a direct knowledge or an intellectual perception of God, of whom no indirect knowledge is possible. Hence God and reason are essentially of the same nature ; they are identical : God is in reason, and reason is in God.
(0. 31 Klein, Bearti(Je :am Studien der Philosophic alt Wissenseltaft (kJ All. There are some good remarks on this subject in S. T. Cole ridge's Aids to Reflection.)