agents or ministers, and reason the sovereign or legislator.[1] I cannot conceive how Kant, by giving the word Vernunft, the meaning of the Latin word ratio, has been able to say that it is the highest degree of the activity of a mind which has the power of all its liberty, and the consciousness of all its strength[2]: there is nothing more false. Reason does not exist in liberty, but on the contrary, in necessity. Its movement, which is geometric, is always forced: it is an inference from the point of departure, and nothing more. Let us examine this carefully. The Latin word ratio, whose meaning Kant has visibly followed, has never translated exactly the Greek word logos, in the sense of word; and if the Greek philosophers have substituted sometimes the logos for nous, or the word for the intelligence, by taking the effect for the cause, it is wrong when the Romans have tried to imitate them, by using ratio, in place of mens, or intelligentia. In this they have proved their ignorance and have disclosed the calamitous ravages that skepticism had already made among them. The word ratio springs from the root ra or rat, which in all the tongues where it has been received, has carried the idea of a ray, a straight line drawn from one point to another.[3] Thus reason, far from being free as Kant has pretended, is what is the most constrained in nature: it is a geometric line, always subject to the point whence it emanates, and forced to strike the point toward which it is directed under penalty of ceasing to be itself; that is to say, of ceasing to be straight. Now, reason not being free in its course, is neither good nor bad in itself; it is always analogous to the principle of which it is the
- ↑ De Gérando, Hist. des Systèmes de Philos., t. ii., p. 193.
- ↑ Krit. der Rein. Vernunft, s. 24.
- ↑ In the Oriental languages (
Hebrew characters) (rou) indicates the visual ray, and (Hebrew characters)
(rad), all movement which is determined upon a straight line. This root,
accompanied by a guttural inflection, is called recht, in German, and right
in English and Saxon. The Latins made of it rectum, that which is straight.
In French rature and rateau. The Teutons, taking right in a figurative sense,
have drawn from this same root, rath, a council, and richter, a judge.
