If we let the foundations be, we
know well enough that they are there, and we can build upon them in
all security. We cannot, then, define reason nor crib, cabin and
confine it within a thus-far-shalt-thou-go-and-no-further. Who can
define heat or cold, or night or day? Yet, so long as we hold fast
by current consent, our chances of error for want of better
definition are so small that no sensible person will consider them.
In like manner, if we hold by current consent or common sense, which
is the same thing, about reason, we shall not find the want of an
academic definition hinder us from a reasonable conclusion. What
nurse or mother will doubt that her infant child can reason within
the limits of its own experience, long before it can formulate its
reason in articulately worded thought? If the development of any
given animal is, as our opponents themselves admit, an epitome of
the history of its whole anterior development, surely the fact that
speech is an accomplishment acquired after birth so artificially
that children who have gone wild in the woods lose it if they have
ever learned it, points to the conclusion that man's ancestors only
learned to express themselves in articulate language at a
comparatively recent period.
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