This is your attitude toward
rudimentary reason. Such a process, in one of the other animals,
must be either abstract or it is not a reasoning process. Your
intelligence tells you that such a process is not abstract reasoning,
and your homocentric thesis compels you to conclude that it can be
only a mechanical, instinctive process.
Definitions must agree, not with egos, but with life. Mr. Burroughs
goes on the basis that a definition is something hard and fast,
absolute and eternal. He forgets that all the universe is in flux;
that definitions are arbitrary and ephemeral; that they fix, for a
fleeting instant of time, things that in the past were not, that in
the future will be not, that out of the past become, and that out of
the present pass on to the future and become other things.
Definitions cannot rule life. Definitions cannot be made to rule
life. Life must rule definitions or else the definitions perish.
Mr. Burroughs forgets the evolution of reason. He makes a definition
of reason without regard to its history, and that definition is of
reason purely abstract.
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