The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One

Table of Contents based on Scribner’s first edition (1905)

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.–Efficacious reflection is reason.–The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness.–It is the sum of Art.–It has a natural basis which makes it definable.–Modern philosophy not helpful.– Positivism no positive ideal.–Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.–Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.–The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.–Heraclitus and the immediate.—Democritus and the naturally intelligible.—Socrates and the autonomy of mind.–Plato gave the ideal its full expression.–Aristotle supplied its natural basis.–Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.–Plato’s myths in lieu of physics.–Aristotle’s final causes. Modern science can avoid such expedients.—Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.–Verbal ethics.–Spinoza and the Life of Reason.–Modern and classic sources of inspiration.......................................................Pages 1–19 REASON IN COMMON SENSE CHAPTER I THE BIRTH OF REASON Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with a chosen good.–Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.–In experience order is relative to interests, which determine the moral status of all powers.–The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.–The flux first.–Life the fixation of interests.–Primary dualities.–First gropings. Instinct the nucleus of reason.–Better and worse the fundamental categories. Pages 23–30 CHAPTER II FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS Dreams before thoughts.–The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.–Internal order supervenes.–Intrinsic pleasure in existence.– Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an Contents liv object.–Subhuman delights.–Animal living.–Causes at last discerned.–Attention guided by bodily impulse. ....................................................... Pages 31–39 CHAPTER III THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS Nature man’s home.–Difficulties in conceiving nature.–Transcendental qualms.–Thought an aspect of life and transitive.–Perception cumulative and synthetic.–No identical agent needed.–Example of the sun.–His primitive divinity.–Causes and essences contrasted.–Voracity of intellect.–Can the transcendent be known?–Can the immediate be meant?–Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?–Mens naturaliter platonica.–Identity and independence predicated of things...............................................................Pages 41–52 CHAPTER IV ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY Psychology as a solvent.–Misconceived rôle of intelligence.–All criticism dogmatic.–A choice of hypotheses.–Critics disguised enthusiasts.–Hume’s gratuitous scepticism.—Kant’s substitute for knowledge.–False subjectivity attributed to reason.–Chimerical reconstruction.–The Critique a work on mental architecture.–Incoherences.–Nature the true system of conditions.– Artificial pathos in subjectivism.–Berkeley’s algebra of perception.–Horror of physics.–Puerility in morals.–Truism and sophism.–Reality is the practical made intelligible.–Vain “realities” and trustworthy “fictions.” Pages 53–72 CHAPTER V NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED Man’s feeble grasp of nature.–Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought.–Mind the erratic residue of existence.–Ghostly character of mind.–Hypostasis and criticism both need control.–Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas.–Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature.– Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit.–Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science redistributes but does not deny. Pages 73–83 CHAPTER VI DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS Another background for current experience may be found in alien minds.–Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.–Subject and object empirical, not lv Contents transcendental, terms.–Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary qualities.–Tertiary qualities transposed.–Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived body.—“Pathetic fallacy” normal yet ordinarily fallacious.–Case where it is not a fallacy.–Knowledge succeeds only by accident.–Limits of insight.–Perception of character.–Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.–Consciousness untrustworthy.–Metaphorical mind.— Summary............................................................................................ Pages 85–98 CHAPTER VII CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE So-called abstract qualities primary.–General qualities prior to particular things.–Universals are concretions in discourse.–Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea.–Ideas are ideal.–So-called abstractions complete facts.–Things concretions of concretions.–Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of nature.–Aristotle’s compromise.– Empirical bias in favour of contiguity.–Artificial divorce of logic from practice.–Their mutual involution.–Rationalistic suicide.–Complementary character of essence and existence. ...............................................Pages 99–111 CHAPTER VIII ON THE...