Book Description

Excerpt from The Pursuit of Reason T a famous trial, Whistler the painter proclaimed that a picture must be reckoned as the outcome, not of so many days' labour, but of the education of a lifetime.' In the same order of ideas I may call this Treatise on Reason the labour of a lifetime: for I cannot easily remember the time when I was not interested in one or other of the questions with which it is concerned. This is said only for the sake of anyone who may know work of the author in other fields. I believe that the second and third chapters of my First Book constitute something like a 'system.' And it will be found upon reflection that most of the chapters that follow and almost all the practical conclusions of the Second Book do in fact rest upon those two chapters as their logical basis. Nevertheless this 'pursuit of Reason' is not offered as a system; but first of all as a pure exercise of the faculty of reasoning. As I have said again elsewhere, it is addressed first of all to those (though few) to whom the act of reasoning appears both as a pleasure and a duty. And by reasoning I understand something different from mere controversial argument. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.