oves. In so far as man is not a rational being and does
not live in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions and
dreamful ideas roll by without mutual representation or adjustment, in
so far as his body takes the lead and even his galvanised action is a
form of passivity, we may truly say that his life is not intellectual
and not dependent on the application of general concepts to experience;
for he lives by instinct.

[Sidenote: Their mutual involution.]

The Life of Reason, the comprehension of causes and pursuit of aims,
begins precisely where instinctive operation ceases to be merely such by
becoming conscious of its purposes and representative of its conditions.
Logical forms of thought impregnate and constitute practical intellect.
The shock of experience can indeed correct, disappoint, or inhibit
rational expectation, but it cannot take its place. The very first
lesson that experience should again teach us after our disappointment
would be a rebirth of reason in the soul. Reason has the indomitable
persistence of all natural tendencies; it returns to the attack as waves
beat on the shore. To observe its defeat is already to give it a new
embodiment. Prudence itself is a vague science, and science, when it
contains real knowledge, is but a clarified prudence, a description of
experience and a guide to life. Speculative reason, if it is not also
practical, is not reason at all. Propositions irrelevant to experience
may be correct in form, the method they are reached by may parody
scientific method, but they cannot be true in substance, because they
refer to nothing. Like music, they have no object. They merely flow, and
please those whose unattached sensibility they somehow flatter.

Hume, in this respect more radical and satisfactory than Kant himself,
saw with perfect clearness that reason was an ideal expression of
instinct, and that consequently no rational spheres could exist other
than the mathematical and the empirical, and that what is not a datum
must certainly be a construction. In establishing his "tendencies to
feign" at the basis of intelligence, and in confessing that he yielded
to them himself no less in his criticism of human nature than in his
practical life, he admitted the involution of reason--that
unintelligible instinct--in all the observations and maxims vouchsafed
to an empiricist or to a man. He veiled his doctrine, however, in a
somewhat unfair and satirical nomenclature, and h