ng a broader view of the unity of
experience. What, then, I need to have you see is that the reason
which, even in its lightest deeds, can accomplish such syntheses, and
which can lead to such ordered intuitions, and can be the endless
source of such novelties, is not merely the reason of whose powers as
a source of insight James gives so discouraging a picture.

Having thus barely illustrated the thesis that reason can be both
productive of new insight and constructively synthetic in its grasp of
wider ranges of experience than we could observe without it, let me
add that, in the exact sciences, and in particular in mathematics, the
reasoning process, using just such forms of synthesis as I have now
illustrated, is constantly leading investigators to the most varied
and novel discoveries. These discoveries are not due to mere analysis.
They are reports of facts and the results of synthetic construction.
As Mr. Charles Peirce loves to point out, the new discoveries made in
mathematics, and by purely rational processes, {99} are so numerous
that for each year a volume of many hundreds of closely printed pages
is needed to give, with strictly technical brevity, even the barest
outline of the contents of the papers containing the novel results of
that one year's researches. In their union with other sciences, the
mathematical researches constantly lead to still vaster ranges of
novel discovery. Reason, then, is not merely barren, is not mainly
concerned with unproductive analysis, but does enrich our survey of
experience, of its unity and of its meaning.

Perhaps some of you may still object that, if I define reason in the
terms suggested by these instances, there seems to be danger of making
the word "reason" mean simply the same as the word "insight." For
insight, as I defined it in my opening lecture, means a coherent view
of many facts in some sort of unity. And in this case, as you may now
say, why use two words at all? I reply that, in fact, all true insight
is, to my mind, rational insight, upon one or another level of the
development of our power to become rational beings. But you will
remember that insight, as I defined it, also means knowledge which is
intimate and manifold, as well as knowledge which views facts and
relations in their unity. The words intuition and experience are often
used to lay stress upon that aspect of our insight which either makes
it intimate or else brings it into touch with many and va