'...I and an indefinite number of other persons, if we contemplate Religion and Science as unproved systems of belief standing side by side, _feel a practical need for both_; and if this need is, in the case of those few and fragmentary scientific truths by which we regulate our animal actions, or an especially imperious and indestructible character--on the other hand, _the need for religious truth, rooted as it is in the loftiest region of our moral nature_, is one from which we would not, if we could, be freed.... _We are in this matter_,' he adds, '_unfortunately altogether outside the sphere of Reason_.' FOOTNOTES: [8] This is the elucidation of the puzzling phrase, 'the exception proves the rule,' so often fallaciously used. It comes from the Latin schoolmen's 'Exceptio _probat_ regulam,' where the meaning is patent enough. [9] _Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, p. 13. [10] Compare Professor Royce:--'Our intelligent ideas of things never consist of mere images of things, but always involve a consciousness of how we propose to act towards the things of which we have ideas' (_Gifford Lectures_, 1900, i. 22). [11] I exclude the possibility that 'experience' might be construed to mean the entire development of the mind from infancy. Such a construction would reduce the argument to insignificance all round. Sec. 6. THE MEANING OF REASON The problem as to 'the sphere of Reason' could not be more effectually raised. Mr. Balfour clearly implies that there _is_ a sphere of Reason, but forces a perplexed query as to when he believes himself to enter it. Evidently, by his own definitions, his whole political life is lived outside it. Alike his generalisations from past history, and his predictions of the future, are such as afford 'no ground for believing them to be even approximately true': those of his opponents, of course, coming for him under the same category. He would, perhaps, hold himself to be in the sphere of Reason when following a proposition in mathematics; but he does not admit himself to be there even when he consents to believe that he will die, and that he had better avoid prussic acid. 'No experience, however large,' he insists (p. 75), 'and no experiments, however well contrived and successful, could give us _any reasonable assurance_ that the co-existences or sequences which have been observed among phenomena will be repeated in the future.' Not 'certainty,' be it observed, but 'any reasonable assurance.' That is to say, we have no reasonable assurance that we shall die.