Without it, man's representative powers would
be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes; and it is
therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or
substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes
inclusively, called this likewise discourse, discuvsus discursio,
from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but
running, as it were, to and fro to abstract, generalise, and
classify. Now when this faculty is employed in the service of the
pure reason, it brings out the necessary and universal truths
contained in the infinite into distinct contemplation by the pure act
of the sensuous imagination--that is, in the production of the forms
of space and time abstracted from all corporeity, and likewise of the
inherent forms of the understanding itself abstractedly from the
consideration of particulars, as in the case of geometry, numeral
mathematics, universal logic, and pure metaphysics. The discursive
faculty then becomes what our Shakespeare, with happy precision,
calls "discourse of reason.
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