Besides those we have hitherto mentioned, there is one sort of propositions that challenge the highest degree of our Assent upon bare Testimony, whether the thing proposed agree or disagree with common experience and the ordinary course of things, or no. The reason whereof is, because the Testimony is of such an one as cannot deceive, nor be deceived, and that is of God himself. This carries with it assurance beyond doubt, evidence beyond exception. This is called by a peculiar name, Revelation, and our assent to it, Faith: which as absolutely determines our minds, and as perfectly excludes all wavering, as our knowledge itself; and we may as well doubt of our own being, as we can whether any Revelation from God be true. So that Faith is a settled and sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no manner of room for doubt or hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine Revelation, and that we understand it right; else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of enthusiasm, and all the error of wrong principles, if we have Faith and Assurance in what is not divine revelation. And therefore, in those cases our Assent can be rationally no higher than the evidence of its being a revelation, and that this is the meaning of the expressions it is delivered in. If the evidence of its being a Revelation, or that this is its true sense, be only on probable proofs, our assent can

reach no higher than an assurance or diffidence, arising from the more or less apparent probability of the proofs. But of Faith, and the precedency it ought to have before other arguments of persuasion, I shall speak more hereafter, where I treat of it, as it is ordinarily placed, in contradistinction to Reason; though in truth, it be nothing else but an assent founded on the highest reason.”

CHAP. XVII.

OF REASON.

THE word Reason has various significations: sometimes it means True principles; sometimes, fair deductions from those principles; and sometimes the Cause, particularly the final cause.

I use it to signify "that faculty which is supposed to distinguish man from other animals, and wherein it is evident he much surpasses them."

Reason is necessary to all our other intellectual faculties; and indeed contains two of them, Sagacity, and Illation by the first of which it finds out, and by the second it arranges those intermediate proofs which discover the relation between two ideas. Sense and Intuition reach but a little way; the great

est part of our knowledge depends upon Deduction : that faculty then which finds out the means, and rightly applies them, to discover certainty in knowledge, and probability in Opinion, I call Reason.

In Reason we may consider these four degrees: the first and highest is to discover proofs; the second, to arrange them methodically; the third, to perceive their connexion; and the fourth, to draw a right conclusion.

I doubt whether Syllogism be the proper instrument of this faculty; and for these reasons: Syllogism serves our Reason only in one of the fore-mentioned parts of it: that is to shew the connexion of the proofs in any one instance, and no more: but where such connexion really is, it is as easily or better perceived without it. We shall find that we reason most clearly, when we only observe the connexion of the proofs, without reducing our thoughts to any rule of syllogism and that many men reason correctly and clearly, who know not how to make a syllogism. It is sometimes used to discover a fallacy hid in a rhetorical flourish, or cunningly wrapped up in a smooth period; and to strip an absurdity of the cover of wit and good language: but here it is only of use to those that have studied mode and figure.

:

If but few can make syllogisms, if but a small part of those few know that their conclusions in the allowed modes and figures are right, and if they are the

only proper instruments of Reason, and means of Knowledge, then before Aristotle there was no one who could know any thing by reason, and since him there is not one in ten thousand that does. But God did not make men barely two-legged creatures, and leave it to Aristotle to make them rational. The understanding is not taught to reason by the rules of syllogism it has a native faculty to perceive the coherence or incoherence of it's ideas; and can methodize them without such perplexing repetitions. say not this to lessen Aristotle, whom I consider as one of the greatest men among the antients; whose large views, acuteness, penetration of thought and strength of judgment few have equalled; and whose invention of forms of argumentation did great service against those who were not ashamed to deny any thing.

I

I own that all right reasoning may be reduced to his forms of syllogism; but I do not allow that it is the only or the best way. It is plain that he himself found some forms to be conclusive, and others not so, not by the forms themselves, but by the original way of knowledge,-the visible agreement of ideas. Tell a country gentlewoman that the wind is southwest, the weather lowering, and rain threatening, she will easily understand that she should not go out thin clad in such a day, after a fever:-she clearly sees the probable connexion of these ideas, wind, clouds,

rain, wetness, cold, relapse, and danger of death, which would be quite lost to her in the artificial arrangement of mode and figure.

Illation or Inference is justly considered as the great act of the rational faculty: but the mind, very desirous to enlarge its knowledge, or very apt to favour the sentiments it has once imbibed, too often makes inferences before it perceives the connexion of those ideas that must hold the extremes together. To infer is, by virtue of one proposition laid down as true, to draw in another as true.-Let this proposition be laid down, "Men shall be punished in another world," whence be inferred this "Men can determine themselves." In this instance, what shews the reasonableness of the inference, but a view of the connexion of the intermediate ideas? viz. Men shall be punished-God the punisher—just punishment—the punished guilty-could have done otherwise-freedom-self determination: Here the mind seeing the connexion between the idea of men's punishment in the other world, and the idea of God punishing, between that and the justice of the punishment, between that and guilt, between that and a power to do otherwise, between that and freedom, and between freedom and self determination, sees the connexion between men and self-determination.

Is not the connexion of the extremes more clearly seen in this natural order, than in the jumble of five