Rightly directed reasoning is one of the foundation stones of a truly democratic community, from which issue liberty of thought and enlightenment. The word "reason" might be defined as the faculty of intelligence, especially the faculty by which we arrive at necessary truth. From the days when the ancient Greeks spoke of "Athens, the Free." to the present time, men have sought to advance beyond accepted traditions, and the beliefs and customs of earlier generations, by the path of human reason. Reason involves a mental process, and right reasoning is essential in arriving at truth.
The present chaos, brought about by human will and invention, can be illumined and ordered only by properly educated and disciplined thinking. Right ideals must displace the tendency towards human deification and the belief that "might is right." The understanding of individual freedom and individual responsibility is closely related to "the spiritual facts of being." Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 428). "To divest thought of false trusts and material evidences in order that the spiritual facts of being may appear,—this is the great attainment by means of which we shall sweep away the false and give place to the true."
Speaking no doubt from experience, the author of Proverbs declared that "where there is no vision, the people perish." Here "vision" may be taken to refer to spiritual discernment. The dark shadows of mesmerism which have for so long claimed to obscure or blot out that ability, are slowly but surely giving place to some, knowledge of the permanent facts of being. That it is becoming increasingly obvious that all mortal seeming is unreal, is borne out by a recent statement of a well-known physicist, in which he draws the conclusion that the common sense view of cause and effect is meaningless. Further, he observes that if a scientific view of cause and effect still operates, it does this in "some substratum of the world which lies beyond the world phenomena."
