d all the better know why it had
been able to confound false wisdom.

II

All such considerations will seem to many of you hopelessly general.
You will have missed, thus far in my account, concrete instances to
illustrate how what I have now called the reason actually works, how
it is related to experience, how it helps us toward the broader view
of things, how it makes the connections of life more obvious, how it
raises our intuitions to higher levels. And unfortunately, since I
have no time to discourse to you upon the science called Logic--the
science part of whose proper duty it is to define the nature and the
office of what I have now called the reason--I must indeed fail, in
this brief summary, to give you any adequate account of what can be
accomplished through the appeal to this source of insight. All that I
shall try to do, on this occasion, is to mention {94} to you a very
few instances, some of them relatively trivial, wherein, through
reasoning processes, we actually get these larger intuitions on higher
levels, these higher modes of grasping the unity of things. Having
thus very imperfectly exemplified what I mean by the synthetic
processes of reasoning, I shall be ready barely to suggest to you, as
I close, how the reason can be, and is, a source of religious insight.

In some recent logical discussions, and in particular in my colleague
Professor Hibben's text-book of logic, there has been used an example,
trivial in itself, but in its own way typical--an example which is
meant to show how there exists a mental process which is surely worthy
of the name reasoning, and which is, nevertheless, no mere process of
forming abstract ideas and no mere analysis of the meaning of assumed
premises, although, of course, both abstraction and analysis have
their subordinate places in this process. The reasoning involved in
this example is of the very simplest sort. It is expressed in an old
story which many of you will have heard.

According to this story, an aged ecclesiastic, garrulous and
reminiscent, was once, in a social company, commenting upon the
experiences that had come to him in his long and devoted life. Fully
meaning to keep sacred the secrets of the confessional, the old man
was nevertheless led to say: "Ah--it is strange, and sometimes
terrible, what, in my profession, one may have to face and consider.
{95} You must know, my friends, my very first penitent was--a
mur