On the Difference in Kind of Reason and the Understanding
Now if there be one preventive of both these extremes more efficacious than another, and preliminary to all the rest, it is the being made fully aware of the diversity of Reason and Understanding. And this is the more expedient, because though there is no want of authorities ancient and modern for the distinction of the faculties, and the distinct appropriation of the terms, yet our best writers too often confound the one with the other.
On the contrary, Reason is the Power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense, and having their evidence in themselves. Its presence is always marked by the necessity of the position affirmed.
Contemplated distinctively in reference to formal (or abstract) truth, it is the speculative reason; but in reference to actual (or moral) truth, as the fountain of ideas, and the light of the conscience, we name it the practical reason.
Whenever, by self-subjection to this universal light, the will of the individual—the particular will—has become a will of reason, the man is regenerate: and reason is then the spirit of the regenerated man, whereby the person is capable of a quickening inter-communion with the Divine Spirit.
In this at once most comprehensive and most appropriate acceptation of the word, reason is pre-eminently spiritual, and a spirit—even our spirit—through an effluence of the same grace by which we are privileged to say, Our Father.
On the other hand, the judgments of the Understanding are binding only in relation to the objects of our senses, which we reflect under the forms of the Understanding. It is, as Leighton rightly defines it, 'the faculty judging according to sense.'
But there is, in this sense, no human reason. There neither is nor can be but one reason, one and the same: even the light that lighteth every man's individual understanding, and thus maketh it a reasonable understanding—one only, yet manifold: it goeth through all understanding, and remaining in itself regenerateth all other powers.
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