4. _Reasonable_ is our approbatory epithet for an action, course, or person that is guided by reasoning which we see to exclude most risks of error and injury--save of course where the taking of risk of injury is assumed. Every one of these definitions is justified by the dictionary to begin with, though the dictionaries, of necessity, note further conflicting meanings, as when reason is indicated as 'the faculty or capacity of the human mind by which it is distinguished from the intelligence of the lower animals,' or hazily distinguished, on philosophic authority, from 'the understanding.' But the lexicographer loyally notes that _a_ reason is 'a thought or consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion'; and that _to_ reason means, among other things, 'to reach conclusions by a systematic comparison of facts,' 'to examine or discuss by arguments.' These senses are implicit in daily usage. The concept of Reason, in short, must include the whole factory of beliefs. The judging faculty, the judging propensity, is a complex of instincts, experiences, inferences, and necessities of thought. It originates at an animal stage, and conserves to the last animal elements--as when, without any process of calculation, you infer, as it were through the muscular sense, that a top-heavy omnibus is likely to overbalance, or that in riding your bicycle round a sharp corner you must incline your body inwards. It deals with diet and medicine, art and industry, no less than with theology and science and politics. In the former, its accepted procedure is obviously a set of survivals of more or less tested ideas from among an infinity of detected mistakes; and the moral law of the intellectual life for the rationalist, the principle which best justifies his assumption of that name, is that every belief or preference whatever is fitly to be tried by all or any of the tests by which beliefs have been sifted in the past, or may more effectually be tested in the future. We are to do with both our religion and our science in general what we have done in the past and are still doing with our medicine, our sanitation, our education, our physics, our historiography. Without more ado, then, we may proceed to ask how reasons for beliefs are ultimately to be appraised by reasonable and consistent people--in other words, how beliefs are honestly to be justified. FOOTNOTE: [12] So Kant: 'Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions are blind' (_Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, ed. Kirchmann, 1870, p. 100); and Comte: 'There is no absolute separation between observing and reasoning' (_Politique Positive_, 1851, i. 500). Sec. 7. THE TEST OF TRUTH