Today liberal culture speaks of ‘the Enlightenment legacy’, as if we thought that reason suddenly sprang from nowhere in the Eighteenth Century. Equivalently, we think of religion and especially Christianity as a matter of emotion and faith which is extra-rational, if not downright irrational, and dangerously opposed to the rational ventures of scientific understanding.

However, this is a very foreshortened perspective. Up till relatively recent times, few people thought of religion and reason as being in opposition to each other. This was primarily because they thought of reason itself as something essentially spiritual.

They naturally thought this, because reasoning is something done by conscious minds, whose reality a merely material explanation is in principle unable to account for. Although we now deploy, in processes of computing, myriad mechanical equivalents for logical, mathematical and grammatical processes, there remains an absolute distinction between a rational connection and a mechanical one. This is a certain feeling of ‘aptness’ which reaches an absolute degree in the case of logical necessity. Although we can programme machines to perform such logical operations, it remains crucial that machines cannot equivalently programme minds to perform them in turn. There remains an ineffable difference.

This difference, as already indicated, has to do with feeling. Reasoning is something performed by conscious minds which infuses both their own bodies and their immediate environments. If we discover that reality can automatically reproduce our ‘exact’ logical feelings, then the causal priority of mind over computation can cause us to suspect that it is structure that follows feeling or is completed by it, rather than the reverse. Perhaps this is true even at the sub-human level.

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"Not only is the modern secular person already a cyborg, she is also inherently schizophrenic – as arguably instanced by our growing epidemic of mental health."

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This sort of consideration can lead one to conclude that rationalism itself requires a metaphysical doctrine of the irreducibly higher reality of reason, as an intellectual, spiritual and conscious process. Additionally, it requires a doctrine that does not divide it from the entire field of embodied and impelling emotion which traditional philosophies thought of as the domain of ‘soul’. Enlightenment ‘rationalisms’, by contrast, have tended to abandon any accounts of the ontological reality of the domains of the intellectual or of the psychic -- such as were once common to Hindu, Buddhist, Neoplatonic or Monotheistic outlooks.

The result of this abandonment is frequently a blind obeisance before what are taken to be sheerly random material processes. There now exists no ground for supposing that reality really conforms to reason beyond a very limited and artificially-carved out milieu. In consequence, Enlightenment thought sometimes ascribed our extra-logical ethical and aesthetic outlooks to the non-rational operation of sheerly natural impulses, passions and sympathies, which then required a certain degree of detached rational constraining.

One tended to end up with a duality of irrational feeling over-against a reason that could already be in principle automated, whether in terms of pure logic or of rules for inference. Only rarely (perhaps with Hume on one reading) did Enlightenment thought retain or sharpen a sense that reason itself is a higher kind of feeling and intuition.