“He who tries to rise above reason, falls outside of it,” said Plotinus. If this be so; if, as Plotinus said also, “ Nous is King,” reason must cover more than inferential reasoning. The methods of inference are not sovereign, but manifestly instrumental; they furnish the scaffolding for the mind's ascent, but not the goal of its endeavour. This distinction between the wider and the narrower use of reason is familiar in every age of thought; it appears in the Platonic (...) and Aristotelian doctrines of Nous, in Aquinas's discrimination of discursive and intuitive knowledge, in Spinoza's of ratio and scientia intuiliva, and in that of the understanding and the reason in post–Kantian idealism. At times, as in the case last mentioned, it has been pressed to an extreme, with the result that reason was set in sharp contrast to the understanding, which came to be regarded as a separate faculty and even as a source of error. Wordsworth, to whom the antithesis passed through Coleridge, wrote of “that false secondary power, by which we multiply distinctions.” In face of such excesses, it behoves us to be on our guard, and to remember that thought is one amid the diversity of its operations, and that faith is at least as fallible as logic. It is only by co-operating in the service of reason that either can point the way to truth. (shrink)

While reflecting recently on what the historian means by greatness, I was led to examine Croce's theory of economic action. It seemed to promise an answer to the troublesome problem of the relationship between greatness and moral goodness. How those hopes were disappointed will be explained presently, but Croce's theory must first be considered on its merits. I shall confine the discussion as far as possible to Croce's philosophy of the practical, avoiding any detailed reference, e.g., to the somewhat artificial (...) parallelism within the dialectic of the spirit between the forms of theoretical and those of practical activity. Since, however, Croce teaches—and his practice is in accordance with his teaching—that any severance of part from whole does violence to philosophy, it will be necessary to touch on certain larger questions before we close. (shrink)