Note (return) — Chapter II

Religion, in the estimation of Cousin, is grounded on cognition rather than upon feeling. It is the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of duty in its relation to God and to human happiness; and as reason is the general faculty of all knowing, it must be the faculty of religion. "In its most elevated point of view, religion is the relation of absolute truth to absolute Being," and as absolute truth is apprehended by the reason alone, reason "is the veridical and religious part of the nature of man." 66 By "reason," however, as we shall see presently, Cousin does not mean the discursive or reflective reason, but the spontaneous or intuitive reason. That act of the mind by which we attain to religious knowledge is not a process of reasoning, but a pure appreciation, an instinctive and involuntary movement of the soul.