Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999)
Lecture 8: Shakespeare's Definition of Reason: Discourse and Capability

Transcript
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a common way there, right? Each of you guys goes off in this private way, right? Private interpretation, right? Private thought. Okay? So, now we've seen a little bit of what the natural beginnings of philosophy are and why we should come into philosophy from its natural beginnings, right? Okay? Some was written. Good. Now we've come to the second part of how we should come into philosophy, right? We should come into philosophy from its natural beginnings through the, what, use of reason, right? Okay? And we're talking about reason now as reason. I'm not talking about reason insofar as it actually knows something because that's already about its natural beginnings. For this purpose, I like to use that Shakespeare, right? I like to use Shakespeare's exhortation to use reason, right? Okay? Now, let's talk about it in kind of a general way today. I'm going to give you, you know, a, questions for understanding Shakespeare's exhortation, right? Okay? But, make sure we don't miss anything, right? Let's look at the exhortation kind of generally here. Now, the exhortation is written in what is called blank verse, which is the perceptive term now for this kind of verse. It's very common in Shakespeare's tragedies, right? Shakespeare makes fun of the term, but... Okay? Now, what is blank verse? Do you know? It doesn't rhyme. Unrhymed. It's unrhymed, iambic, and amateur. Okay? It's unrhymed. What's an iamb? Well, pentameter is five. Iamb means what? I can't remember if it's short, long, or long, short. I think it's a... Or the accent, I'm sorry, accent on the second, huh? Yeah. It's two syllables of the accent on the second, right? Okay? Now, it's the most common meter, also, that we sometimes fall into in daily life, right? It's closer to daily speech, right? Okay? If you want a little mnemonic device that I thought of years ago, for the four main meters, a little mnemonic device is at... I've got to try to remember where the accent goes, right? So, you have two basic ones. In the iambic and the trochaic, I have two syllables. It's like the word it has two letters, right? Mm-hmm. In the iambic vest and the dactylic, you have three syllables. Okay? Those are the four main meters, huh? In the iambic, iambic, trochaic, and pestic, and dactylic. But here, you have two syllables, right? Here you have three syllables, that's what I remember. Mm-hmm. In iambic and trochaic, you have two syllables, right? Now, if you remember what the iambic is, you can remember all the rest. In iambic, you have two syllables of the accent on the second syllable. Trochaic, you have two syllables of the accent on the, what? First syllable, right? In dactylic, you have, what? Three syllables of the accent on the, what? First line, and this is the reverse, right? Okay, okay, and this is going to be the last one, yeah. Tell it to be this. Now, um, like I say, I'm going to try to teach, you know, posity or so. That's my device, you know. Now, the iambic meter, as I say, it, it's, um, we sometimes fall into it in daily speech, right? And, uh, in speeches, they'll sometimes use a little bit of iambic meter. Four score and seven years ago. Or when Roosevelt said, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. That's iambic meter, right? Yeah. Okay. So, it's the most natural one, right? And the thing I noticed in Shakespeare is, you'll often use the Trochaic meter for witches or fairies, huh? Uh-huh. Fair is foul, and foul is fair. That's what's in the Trochaic meter, right? Something kind of mysterious about that, right? Um, Thomas seems to use that, uh, Rotei Devotee, since he's a Trochaic a bit, right? Something very mysterious, the Eucharist. What did you say? Thomas in the, in the Rotei Devotee, somewhere it seems to be to be in the Trochaic meter. So, uh, now, pentameter means you have, what? Five Iams, huh? So we get to the Pentagon. Pentagon, right? Okay, the ten-syllable line, then, right? With the accents on the second, the fourth, the sixth, the eighth, and the tenth, right? Now, occasionally, you know, the poet will vary things, right, to avoid Venati and so on, but, I mean, that's basically what you're doing, right? Ten-syllable lines with the accents on the even number, right? Two, four, six, eight, ten, right? Okay? But they're unrhyped, right? Now, in Shakespeare's sonnets, you have, what? Iambic pentameter, right? Okay? But the first and the third line rhymes, and the second and the fourth line, right? In each of the three couplets, or quartets, rather, and the couplet at the end, they rhyme, right? Okay? Okay, but this is more like TV speech, right? Okay? So it's written in unrhymed Iambic pentameter, right? Now, the vegetation is on seven lines, but the first line begins on the, what, seventh syllable, and the seventh line ends on the, what, sixth? Six, yeah. So you have the equivalent of six lines of Iambic pentameter, right? But you can't, you know, originally six lines, right? So you've got to keep it in the seven lines, okay? Mm-hmm. Now, that's all. That's kind of a, it should be, what, right? The concern right there, which is so you can kind of see the structure, right? Mm-hmm. I want to play around with the numbers there. It starts on this seven, which is a symbol of wisdom, right? Inns on six, which is a perfect number, right? Mm-hmm. That would be pretty accidental, right? Mm-hmm. That's all I'm playing around. And it's got it on seven lines, which is a symbol of wisdom, right? Mm-hmm. And there's exactly 49 words in there, which is seven times seven. Nurek Stahl says intellect is best, right? Mm-hmm. So for the Pythagoreans among us, for the Straussens among us, it's like, you see numbers, right? Yeah, I put those things out, right? But it's pretty accidental, right? Okay? You never know, you know, how some of these poets are, you know? But then, you know, Shakespeare's a master of the English language. You say, it's got to command the English the way he does something. And apparently his vocabulary is huge. Right, yeah. I mean, I've heard the numbers and I forget the numbers. It's incredible that Shakespeare's vocabulary, probably any man ever had the vocabulary he had. Incredible. They have such an understanding of these words. I feel for them, right? Now, you might divide the exhortation into two parts, right? Oh, you don't have one, do you? No, no. Okay. And the first part is the lines. Here, you can... This other one is with questions. All right, I'm going to check the questions today. The meter, the thing on the top here. The first part, it says, What is a man if his chief good, right? And mark it of his time, Be but to sleep and feed them. A beast no more. Now, that is based upon a proportion, a likeness of ratios. And in a way, you can reason for this proportion in a way like the mathematician does. Now, if a mathematician, for example, if he can see that A is to B as X is to Y, if he can see a proportion, right, that A is to B as X is to Y, he can reason for this proportion in some very obvious ways. If A is equal to B, then X is what? Equals to Y. Yeah. If A is more than B, then X is more than Y. And if less, less, right? Okay? Now, Shakespeare is going to reason, right, in that way, right? And you can argue this way in terms of better. What is proportion to a line, Shakespeare? Is that what you meant when you saw the nature of things? That comes out when he says more. No more. Because numbers are said to be more or less, right? Now, what's the proportion in the line here, right? Well, you could say that the chief good is to man as the chief good of the beast is to what? Yeah. Okay. The fact you can supply the fourth term is a sign as you see proportion, right? You see a likeness of the ratios, right? But now, instead of using the phrase chief good of the beast, which would be too pedantic, like me, right? He says to sleep and feed, right? Okay? As if that seems to be the chief good of the beast, right? We had this beast around the house, and Muppet, this cat, the Muppet seems to sleep and feed. And she purrs when she sleeps, and she purrs when she gets her food, and that seems to be her chief good, right? Okay? So, it would be more clear if you use the word chief good of the beast, but I mean chief good of the beast, right? That's a chief good of the beast. Now, you can now, what, alternate the proportion, right? Like in Matthew, in Matthew, two is to three, four is to six, and the first is to the third, and the second is to be, what, the fourth, right? You can alternate the proportion here now and say, now, the chief good of man is to chief good of the beast, to sleep and feed, as man is to the what? Beast. Okay? See that? Now, you've got to reason a bit like, you know, with the rigor of math, right? Once you know that A is to B, as X is to Y in math, if A is no more than B, then X is no more than Y, right? So, if the chief good of man is no more than the chief good of the beast, to sleep and feed, then man is no more than any what? Beast, right? Okay? Now, which is more known to us? That man is no more than a beast, or if the chief good of man is no more than to sleep and feed, which is more known to us. Yeah, yeah. Because you will run into men who, therefore, nothing more than to sleep and feed and maybe sexual pleasure, right? Okay? That's nothing more than the beast, right? But if you put them in a cage, you treat them like an animal, they would protest, right? See? So, it's more known, it seems, that man is more than a beast, right? And that his chief good is more than the good of the beast. But then you can reason, right? You can reason in either way. You can say, if man is more than a beast, then the chief good of man must be more than the chief good of the beast. Or you can argue that way around, and then say, man is more than a beast, therefore, right? Or you can argue that way around and say, if the chief good of man is no more than the chief good of the beast, to sleep and feed, then man is no more than a beast. But man is more than a beast, therefore this can't seem to be no more than that, right? Okay? Now, notice, you're seeing there that there's a necessary connection between what man is and what the chief good of man is. It's determined by the very nature of man, what he is. And between the beast and what the chief good of the beast is, right? Okay? Now, notice Shakespeare's phrase there. What is a man if his chief good and market of his time, right? Now, chief good means the greatest good, right? But he identifies that with the market of his time. Now, market could be taken in the sense of the end of the goal, right? And what Shakespeare is seeing there is what Aristotle saw before him, that the good and the end are basically the same thing. The good of the thing is its end and their purpose, and vice versa. On top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, there used to be a dance band called the Marksmen. And this, I suppose, because they were the hotel, it was the famous hotel, and Mark Hopkins there was the Marksmen. But no, it's the Marksmen, it's the man who would accept the what? Target, right? And this is Aristotle when he talks about the end of man. He talks about the Skopas, the target, right? The dream end, right? So he's seen that the chief good of man and the market or end of his life, right, are the same, right? It's very profound, he sees that. Now, notice, when he says, market of his time, he means, time there is a, what, metonym for the life of a man. Now, do you all know what a metonym is? Metonym is the name of one of the figures of speech, like metaphor, irony, and so on. And metonym, what you do is give the name of the container to the contained, or vice versa. So since my life is contained, or measured by time, right, time is used as a metonym for my life. Now, it's very profound that Shakespeare uses time as a metonym for our life, more than he would use for the beast, right? Because there's a sense in which man lives in time more than any other thing in this world. Because he's always looking before and after, and speaking of before and after, he's in time, right? And you're always planning your day, your week, your life, right? Ranging events in time, right? In the third book about the soul there, Aristotle says, man is the animal who has a sense of time. Man has history and biography and so on, right? And if he's suffering from amnesia, he'll be in trouble, right? So your life is over, right? So the market of his time is the end or purpose of his life, right? Time being metonym for his life. And that's the same as the chief good of man, right? So, basically then, he's reasoning on the basis of this proportion, right? Now, in the second part of the exhortation, he's going to say what it is that man has more than the beast, right? And that will be reason, right? And therefore, you can kind of guess that man's chief good is going to involve reason, right? But it's in ethics that we see what use of reason is really our chief good, right? Now, no one else is the strength of this argument, right? And again, it's similar to mathematics, right? What is a three if it be half of four? What is a three if it be half of four? What is a three if it be half of four? What is a three if it be half of four? What is a three if it be half of four? What is a three if it be half of four? What is a three if it be half of four? A two, right? See how profound it is, right? Half of four is to two, as half of six is to three, right? So what is a three if it be half of four? A two no more. But obviously three is more than two, right? Well, Shaker's saying something like that, right? The chief good of man is to man, right? Like half of six is to three. And the chief good of the beast is to the beast, like half of four is to two, right? So it's absurd to say that three is no more than half of four. In that case, it'd be no more than two. But there you see the likeness between numbers and things, right? So if you add to body, to life, you get a plank, right? And you add to body, to life, to sense, you get a what? Animal, right? And you add to body, to life, to sense, to reason, and you get a what? Man. If you subtract reason from a man, you're done by an animal, right? If you subtract sensation from an animal, you're done by a plank. If you subtract life from a plank, you're done by a body, right? Okay? So the natures of things are like what? Numbers, right? And you add or subtract the one, and you have a different number, right? You add or subtract a difference, and you have another what? Kind of thing, right? Okay? You add reason to animal, and you've got no longer an animal in the sense of a beast, right? Okay? A beast is just an animal, right? Three is not just two, though, is it? It's two plus one, right? Mm-hmm. So it gets a name, now it's three. It's no longer two. As I say, even the man who regards the good of the beast as his chief good, right? He still thinks he's more than a beast, right? And he would be indignant if you said, well, what's between the cage, right? With the animals. You know? Or if we can save your life or the life of the dog, we'll stop going, right? We can do more than a beast, right? They say, you'd be indignant at this thing. But now, in the second part, he's going to say what it is that man has more than a beast, and that's going to be what? Reason. Reason, right? Now, Shakespeare has the elements here of a definition of reason, huh? But what words there pertain to a definition of reason, huh? What's the most basic word, huh, that he gives there that pertains to the definition of reason? Discourse? No. Oh, looking. Oh, before and after. Looking before and after. No, no, no. Capability. Huh? Capability, yeah, yeah. Notice, reason there is a capability, and I take the liberty of sorting it to ability, right? Okay? Why large discourse and looking before and after are not an ability, those are names of acts, right? Okay? Okay? But reason is an ability for some act, right? And so you define an ability for some act by saying it's an ability and then stating the act for which it is an ability. So, he's saying that reason is the ability for large discourse, looking before and after. I gave you that page on the census of before, didn't I? Yes. Yeah, okay. So, you should consult that when we talk about that word. So this is Shakespeare's definition of reason. It's the ability for large discourse, looking before and after. And this is, I think, the first definition, really, of reason as reason, right? Now, as we said before, the distinction between things is like numbers, right? And reason and nature are like the distinction there between two and three. Reason has something of what nature has, but it's not just nature, right? It's like there's a way, there's a two and three, right? But three is not just two. It's a mean addition, right? And so we can consider reason as a nature. There are some things that reason actually knows, right? There's a road that reason actually follows, right? But when we say you're defining reason as reason, we're talking about what reason has an addition to nature, right? Okay? Beyond nature, right? Okay? Just like we say three is not just two, but it has two in it, right? But what's an addition, right? And it has an addition that it's half of what? Six, let's say, right? So, in general, when you're talking about an ability, we always distinguish abilities by what they're for, right? An ability is never known by itself. I always give this example, right? A whole example. Purpose goes down to the employment agency, right? Looking for a job, right? You guys are going to try to match me with the jobs that are available, right? Well, tell me a little bit about yourself. Well, I've got ability. What's he got to say? Do what? Are you able to play the piano? You've got a job here as a pianist, right? Are you able to, you know, type 100 words a minute or something? You've got a job here as a pianist, right? So the ability, right? It's got to be an ability for something. So how do you know that I have the ability, say, to walk? Yeah. You don't really see my ability to walk, do you? You see what I do through my ability to walk, right? How do you know someone has the ability to play the piano? You sit down, you see him playing the piano, right? You don't actually see his ability. You see what he does to his ability. You see the guy on the athletic field striking people out, and then your mind, what, grasps his ability, right? But through what he's doing, right? And we know that we have an ability through the act, which is ability. And that's how we distinguish one ability from another, right? Is the ability, for example, to walk and the ability to see, are they the same ability? Well, if walking was a form of seeing, maybe they would be, right? Or seeing is a form of walking, right? But if walking and seeing are really quite independent, right, then it seems that the ability to walk and the ability to see must be something quite distinct, right? And it's possible, of course, in that case, you know, you're going to have a man having one ability, not the other, right? So the blind man can walk, and the man who's paralyzed can maybe see, right? But even before that, you might recognize that seeing is not a kind of walking, is it? And hearing is not a kind of seeing, vice versa, right? So the ability to see and the ability to hear. So you have to know the existence of an ability and distinguish one ability from another and then finally define the ability by what it's an ability like before. So Shakespeare is going to define reason here. Ability is a genus, right? You're going to read the definition by saying what the act for which it is an ability. Now, the first word is discourse, right? Reason is the ability for discourse, huh? Now, discourse maybe is not so familiar over in English now, right? Discourse comes from the Latin word, right, for running. That's where you get the word course in English, right? Course, right? You're taking five courses in college, right, sometimes? But it goes back to the idea of running, discourse. We speak of the current, electric current, the current of the stream, right? And it's interesting the way that word is carried over. You can see it maybe more clearly in English, the word course, huh? One of our state documents says, when in the course... course of human events. Does it also have a circular form, the word course, as a beginning and an end? A race course, my dear. But the idea that it comes from the Latin word to run, right? Or to run from one place to another, right? But then we tend to carry the word run over to not just the act of the legs, which it means originally, but to human action, right? And then we carry it over even to the movement of the mind, right? Now, let me take an example here. It's an English word. You know this play, Romeo and Juliet, right? Now, there's a young man in a great hurry there. His name is Romeo, right? And there's a wise old, what? Siskin, right? And you know the words he gives advice to Hamlet? I meant to Hamlet, to Romeo. He says, Wisely and slow, they stumble. In fact, ten syllables, right? Wisely and slow, it's for, they stumble, be more than fast, right? What does he mean when he says that to Romeo? Is he talking about running in the first sense of the word, running, with his legs? It looks back to that, right? Because when a person runs up the stairs sometimes, you know, you see your mother somewhere, they stumble, right? What is he talking about here? It's a course of action. Yeah, like you would in the course of action, right? There it's applied to what? Action in general, right? It's borrowed from the word to run, right? So it looks back to that first meaning of run, right? But now it has a sense of act and haste, you know, repentantly. Sure, right? It's a warning, right? Wise and slow. But then, finally, we carry the word run over, and we sometimes apply it to the mind, huh? And so you hear a professor say sometimes, now, I'm going to run through this once more. Yeah. Right? Okay? And notice that the same, with the Latin with course, right? You've got the race course, where you're probably running with your legs, right? Mm-hmm. Then you have within the course of human events, where you talk about the course of action, right? And sometimes I'll say, you know, the tragedy is the likeness of a course of action that is not such a thing. Okay? But then we have, as I say, an assumption, the student normally takes five courses, right? Yeah. A semester, right? So the mind is running or going from one thing to another, right? Okay? So discourse names an act of reason that is like a, what? Yeah, it's like a motion, right? It's going from one thing to another, right? Okay? Now, the nearest thing to that, though, is not running with your legs, right? Although we often borrow words in the legs. We talk about steps, right? Mm-hmm. Every step, second step. It's not even running in the sense of action, right? Mm-hmm. But it's more like, when I go to the art museum, right, and I look at one painting, and I look at another painting, and I look at another painting, right? Or I go to a concert, and I hear the first movement, and then the second movement, and then the third movement, and then the next piece, right? You know? So, it's not only reason that goes from one thing to another, right? Even among our knowing powers, right? But my eyes can go from one thing to another, right? I can look at you, and I look at you, and I look at you, right? Okay? And, you know, we put our eyes over the figures in the columns, and so on, right? I run down the page, right? You see that sometimes, right? Okay? But now there's another sense of discourse that presupposes that reason can go from one thing to another, right? But is the discourse that distinguishes reason from what the eyes do? What is that discourse that distinguishes reason in its movement from the eye, going from one thing to another? This is in similarity, right? When a student takes a course, right? The professor shouldn't be talking about the same thing every day, right? You know, he's going from one thing or one topic to another, maybe, right? That's very much like being in a museum and going from one thing to another, right? Okay? But there's a discourse that is peculiar to reason, right? And it's more than just going from one thing to another, right? Through another? Yeah. It's... It's... The years of imagination have the ability to go from one thing to another, right? But reason is also able to come to know something through knowing other things, huh? And the act, which is so characteristic of reason that it gets its feet from reason, namely reasoning, right? In reasoning, you're coming to know one statement through what? Other statements. You're coming to know the conclusion through the premises, right? But in defining you're coming to know one thing to another, right? One comes to know what blank verse is through unrhymed and I am and talented, right? One comes to know what an I am is through syllable and accent and second and so on, right? Okay. So reason is the ability to know one thing through knowing other things. And that separates reason from senses. Because I don't see one pain through seeing other things. I can look at you and then look at him. I don't see him through seeing you. I can hear one movement, the first movement of Mozart's Symphony, and I can hear the second movement, right? If I don't hear the second movement, I'm hearing the first movement. But when I define, I come to know what something is I didn't know before through things I know already. Now, I sometimes ask students, you know, what is a perfect number, right? In methodical, they don't know, right? But they know what a number is, right? They know what it is to be, what, measured by something, right? Measured evenly, right? They know what it is to be, what, equal, right? And I put all these things together and I say it's a number that is equal to the sum of everything they measured in. Oh, that's what it is, right? Okay. So they're coming to know, but something is that they didn't know through things they didn't know already. Okay. So defining and reasoning are two kinds of what? Discourse, right? In the sense of what? Coming to know the unknown through the known, right? Counting and calculating are two other ways, right? When I count, I come to know a number through the one, right? When I calculate, add, subtract, multiply, divide, I come to know a number I didn't know through some numbers that I, what, didn't know, right? Okay. So what Shakespeare is telling us here, in the Middle Ages sometimes discourses was used as a synonym almost for reasoning, right? But if you want a discourse that separates reason from the eye and the ear and the imagination, which are the closest to it, right? Knowing, unknowing powers, you'd have to say that reason is the ability to know one thing before or after another, even the sense that you can do that, right? But reason is the ability to, what, come to know something unknown, right, through things that are, what, known. And that's seen especially in reasoning, right? Which is so characteristic of reason that it's named for reason. Reasoning is not just going from one statement to another, right? But it's coming to know a statement, which in logic we call the conclusion, right? Through at least two other statements, which are called the premises, right? Okay. Calculating is coming to know a number you didn't know, two numbers you didn't know, right? I get to the checkout counter in the grocery store, and I know the cost of everything I put into my basket, right? But I don't know yet the cost of everything I have to make, right? If I could come to know that number by adding the numbers, it's very fascinating to be there, see if she's got enough, right? Okay. Do you see that? So that's the first thing. I think we've got a winning chart now, 520. We've got to stop here. Oh, wow. Yeah. So reason is the ability to come to know one thing to do another. Okay? That's right. Okay. But as you think about it, I'll give you this other one which has a list of questions, right? Okay. We can, so we should be studying just a few. I think you can learn from this agitation. Who else need a copy? I do a copy. Sure, sure. Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? I'll keep one for myself so I can do it. Yeah, we'll kind of explain the rest of the definition and we'll start to go through these ones to make sure we, okay? So, deo gracias. Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Do you want a copy? Ready? Let's hear our little prayer. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, an angelic doctor. And help us to understand all that you have written. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Now, trying to understand the definition, that the first word, really, the fundamental word, the fundamental part of a definition that comes before all the rest, is called in logic the genus, huh? And the genus states, in a general way, what the thing is. So like in the definition of square, the genus is quadrilateral, right? And that states what a square is, but in a general way, in common with other things, huh? And then you add differences to complete that definition, okay? Like equilateral and right-angled, to complete the definition of square. Now, what's the genus here of the definition of reason? What's the fundamental word, huh? Capability. Capability, yeah. Which I take the liberty of shortening to ability, right? Okay? That's the first thing you have to realize, huh? That reason is an ability, huh? An ability to do something, but the basic idea here is that it's an ability. Now, when you define an ability, after starting with the word ability, you have to complete that definition by telling or saying what it's an ability for, right? Okay, okay. So, you have to state for what is an ability. You don't know an ability except through what it's an ability for. You don't even know you have an ability unless you do that for which it is an ability, huh? And that's why sometimes people do amazing things in the athletic field and they say, I didn't know I had it in me. But they had an ability that was undiscovered, right? Or unknown, let's see, to that point. Now, Shakespeare has a number of words there that are going to say what it's an ability for, right? It's an ability for large discourse, and then you'll add later on, looking before and after, right? But a second thing you might say is that we define... and ability, not only by what it is ability for, but we define ability by the utmost of which it is capable. Now let me illustrate that with two very simple examples I use all the time. Suppose a man is able to lift 300 pounds, right? But he can't lift 301 pounds. 301 pounds would be like the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, right? He can lift 300 pounds. Now if a man can lift 300 pounds, he's also able to lift 200 pounds, right? Or 100 pounds. In fact, he can do that easier than 300 pounds, right? But if you want to define that man's weightlifting ability, what would you define it by? 100 or 200 or 300? 300. Yeah, yeah. Because if you said he has the ability to lift 100 pounds or 200 pounds, that's true, it doesn't tell you the full or complete ability of the man, does it? Okay? While the ability to lift 300 pounds, if you think about it, is included the ability to lift 200 or 100 pounds. You see that? Okay. If I can run a mile in five minutes, but I can't do it in less than five minutes, right? I'm also able to run it in 10 minutes or 15 minutes, right? It may be easier to do it in 10 or 15 minutes than in five minutes. But if you want to define my capacity, my ability there, you do it by the ability to run a mile in five minutes, not 10 or 15, right? Okay? So, the first word that Shakespeare uses, and every other word he uses here, maybe you want to bear in mind these two things, right? Okay? So, the first thing he tells us is that reason is an ability for discourse. It's an ability for discourse. Now, we mentioned two meanings of the word discourse. It comes from the Latin word to run, right? To run together with other. Okay? So, reason is able to go from one thing to another. Okay? But it's also able to what? Know one thing to another. It's able to come to know something it didn't know through things that it does know. As when it reasons, right? It comes to know a statement it didn't know through other statements that it did know. And you'll see that in Euclid as he goes through one theorem, right? He uses things that he's seen before in order to see something new, right? And when you define, you come to know what something is through other things that you know, right? So, he came to know what blank verse was through I am and through, yeah, and through unrhymed, right? And if you didn't know what I am was, we came to know that through knowing what syllables are and two syllables are and the accent on the second syllable, right? And calculating, adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing is coming to know one through the other, right? Coming to know a number you didn't know through at least two numbers that you did know. Now, included, you could say, in the ability to know, come to know one thing through other things is included the ability to go from one thing to another, okay? But we define reason more by the ability to know one thing through other things because that shows you the, what, utmost of its ability, huh? You see that? Okay? Now, why does Shakespeare define it by discourse? Why doesn't he say something about what we talked about before, that there are some things that reason, as it were, and actually understands, huh? Why does he not say that? Because other things besides reason can do that. So, let's see. So, doesn't something with the sense do that? It can recognize something? Perhaps part of it, yeah. Yeah? Yeah? Yeah, if you're going to see something coming right at you, you don't think about it and just get out of it. Yeah. Yeah. You react to it. But there really is so much using your reason in that case, maybe, yeah. If you can use those things that it already has a natural understanding of, to come to things that it doesn't. Yeah. If there weren't some things we knew without discourse, we wouldn't be able to discourse at all. Like I was saying before with reasoning, if you understood nothing before reasoning, you'd have nothing to reason from, right? If you didn't know what anything was before you define, you'd have nothing with which to define. See? So, in a way, there are some things that you know without discourse is before discourse, right? But what reason naturally understands without discourse is rather general and rather, what? Yeah, and not very precise, right? So, reason can go beyond that, right, through discourse, and you come to know things more particularly and more expensively, right? Okay? Okay? You could also say that, though, even in those things that we naturally understand, like a whole is larger than one of its parts, to some extent we arrive at that by a discourse, because experience comes before any universals. So, from experience, we get, in a way, the universal. So, even the things we naturally understand is something of a spontaneous, you might say, right? Discourse, huh? Okay? From experience, a whole and part, we get the idea of whole and part, and then we see that a whole must be more than a part, and so on. Okay? So, there's various ways you can see why you would say discourse rather than anything else here as a starting point, huh? Okay? But a sign of that, too, is that the act which is most characteristic of reason, that gets its name from reason, namely reasoning, right, is a discourse, right? Okay? So, we see that it's most characteristic of reason, huh? Reasoning. Just what's most characteristic of the sense of taste is tasting. Right? Okay? But discourse is a little bit broader in meaning than reasoning. It includes defining and counting and calculating and so on, huh? Okay? So, that's the first word he uses to say what's an ability for. It's an ability for discourse, right? And reason is able to come to know something unknown, to know what it knows, huh? In a way, that's the way Albert the Great talks about logic, right? The logic is the art of what? Using what you know to come to know what you don't know. And defining is one way, and reasoning is the other way. He divides logic if you are in defining and reasoning, right? Okay? But now Shakespeare adds an adjective here. And he says that reason is the ability for large discourse. Now, what does this word large mean? Well, I think it has about six meanings here, okay? And, but to begin with, you can say that a discourse, a reason, can be called large in three ways, huh? It could be said to be about the large, or because its limit is large, or, and this is stretching the word a little bit more, but in Shakespeare's time, because the discourse itself is large, meaning that it's law, right? Okay? Now, each of these is going to have two under it. Now, there's two ways you can understand large here when you say the discourse is about the large, huh? One is that it's about the universal, what is common to many, what is said in many, right? 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