ejudiced man as
"unreasonable," we do not merely mean that he is unable to form or to
define abstract ideas, or that he cannot analyse the meaning of his
own statements. For sometimes such a man is contentiously thoughtful,
and fond of using too many one-sided abstractions, and eager to argue
altogether too vehemently. No, when we call him unreasonable, we mean
that he takes a narrow view of his life, or of his duties, or of the
interests of his fellow-men. We mean, in brief, that he lacks vision
for the true relations and for the total values of things. When we try
to correct this sort of unreasonableness, we do not say to the
petulant or to the one-sided man: "Go to the dictionary, and learn how
to define your abstract terms." Sometimes contentiously prejudiced men
are altogether too fond of the dictionary. Nor do we merely urge him
to form the habit of analysis. No, we may indeed say to him: "Be
reasonable"; but we mean: "Take a wider outlook; see things not one at
a time, but many at once; be broad; consider more than one side; bring
your ideas together; in a word, get insight." For precisely what I
defined in my opening lecture as insight is what we have in mind when,
in such cases, we counsel a man to be reasonable. So, in such uses of
the word reason, reason is not opposed to intuition, as the power to
{86} form abstract ideas is supposed by James to be opposed to the
power to see things by direct vision. No, reason, in such cases, means
simply broader intuition, the sort of seeing that grasps many views in
one, that surveys life as it were from above, that sees, as the
wanderer views the larger landscape from a mountain top.

When, not long since, in a famous decision, the Supreme Court of the
United States called attention to what it called "The rule of reason,"
and declared its intention to judge the workings of well-known modern
business methods by that rule, the court certainly did not mean by
"the rule of reason" the requirement that acts said to be "in
restraint of trade" must be judged merely through a process of forming
abstract ideas or of analysing the signification of assertions. No,
the court was explicitly opposing certain methods of estimate which it
regarded as falsely abstract; and it proposed to substitute for these
false abstractions a mode of judging the workings of certain trade
combinations which was to involve taking as wide and concrete and
practical a view as possible of their total effec