bstract reasoning is
thus at best made dependent for its explicit warrant upon the
presupposed truth of the premises used in the reasoning process. Or,
as is sometimes said, the reason can discover nothing essentially new.
It turns its premises over and over, and gets out of them only what
has already been put into them. Experience, on the other hand, is full
of countless novelties; for what you can find through observation and
experiment depends not upon previous assumptions, but upon the skill
and the good fortune of the inquirer, and upon the wealth of life and
of the real world.

In brief, for those who look at reason in this way, to use your reason
is simply to draw necessary inferences from assumed premises. And no
premises, as such writers insist, can warrant any inference except the
inference of a conclusion which is already hidden away, so to speak,
in the premises themselves. {84} Thus reasoning, as they tell us, is a
process which, in the conclusion inferred, merely lets out of the bag
the cat which was concealed in that bag, namely, in the premises.
Reason, therefore, is indeed (so such writers assert) barren wherever
novelty is sought. It is useful only for purposes of formulation, and
in certain parts of the abstract sciences, where deduction has a
technical place, as a means for preparing the way for experimental
tests. In life, experience is the guide to true novelty. And
therefore, if religious insight can be attained at all, it must be due
not to the reason, but to some sort of religious experience.

Such objections to the use of reason in the religious field depend, as
you see, upon identifying the reasoning process with the combination
of two well-known mental processes; first, the process of forming and
using abstract conceptions; secondly, the process of analysing
assertions, or combinations of assertions, to make more explicit what
is already contained in their meaning. Our next question may well be
this: Is such an account of the work of reason just to the actual
usage that common-sense is accustomed to make of this familiar name?

II

To this question I must at once answer that we all of us daily use the
word reason as the name for a process, or a set of processes, which
certainly {85} cannot be reduced to the mere power to form and to use
abstract ideas, and to analyse the already predetermined meaning of
statements. When we speak of an ill-tempered or of a pr