Children, they urge, are often evidently thinking and reasoning, though
they can neither think nor speak in words. If you ask me to define
reason, I answer as before that this can no more be done than thought,
truth or motion can be defined. Who has answered the question, "What is
truth?" Man cannot see God and live. We cannot go so far back upon
ourselves as to undermine our own foundations; if we try to do we topple
over, and lose that very reason about which we vainly try to reason. If
we let the foundations be, we know well enough that they are there, and
we can build upon them in all security. We cannot, then, define reason
nor crib, cabin and confine it within a thus-far-shalt-thou-go-and-no-
further. Who can define heat or cold, or night or day? Yet, so long as
we hold fast by current consent, our chances of error for want of better
definition are so small that no sensible person will consider them. In
like manner, if we hold by current consent or common sense, which is the
same thing, about reason, we shall not find the want of an academic
definition hinder us from a reasonable conclusion. What nurse or mother
will doubt that her infant child can reason within the limits of its own
experience, long before it can formulate its reason in articulately
worded thought? If the development of any given animal is, as our
opponents themselves admit, an epitome of the history of its whole
anterior development, surely the fact that speech is an accomplishment
acquired after birth so artificially that children who have gone wild in
the woods lose it if they have ever learned it, points to the conclusion
that man's ancestors only learned to express themselves in articulate
language at a comparatively recent period. Granted that they learn to
think and reason continually the more and more fully for having done so,
will common sense permit us to suppose that they could neither think nor
reason at all till they could convey their ideas in words?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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