But the consideration I shall have of it
here is in a signification different from all these; and that is, as
it stands for a faculty in man, that faculty whereby man is supposed
to be distinguished from beasts, and wherein it is evident he much
surpasses them.
2. Wherein reasoning consists. If general knowledge, as has been
shown, consists in a perception of the agreement or disagreement of
our own ideas, and the knowledge of the existence of all things
without us (except only of a God, whose existence every man may
certainly know and demonstrate to himself from his own existence),
be had only by our senses, what room is there for the exercise of
any other faculty, but outward sense and inward perception? What
need it there of reason? Very much: both for the enlargement of our
knowledge, and regulating our assent. For it hath to do both in
knowledge and opinion, and is necessary and assisting to all our other
intellectual faculties, and indeed contains two of them, viz. sagacity
and illation. By the one, it finds out; and by the other, it so orders
the intermediate ideas as to discover what connexion there is in
each link of the chain, whereby the extremes are held together; and
thereby, as it were, to draw into view the truth sought for, which
is that which we call illation or inference, and consists in nothing
but the perception of the connexion there is between the ideas, in
each step of the deduction; whereby the mind comes to see, either
the certain agreement or disagreement of any two ideas, as in
demonstration, in which it arrives at knowledge; or their probable
connexion, on which it gives or withholds its assent, as in opinion.
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