BEAL PBESENCE 448 REASON general as well as the particular, the lofty as well as the low. For there are men and women who are neither selfish nor drunken, nor lecherous; your ex- perimental cesspool is not Paris, your Paris is not the universe; your hospital wards may contain cases of all moral maladies, but you forget the moving world of health and life outside its walls; your vaunted collection lacks one specimen, not the rarest, and certainly the most beautiful. For the dream is as true a leaf of life as the sober vision, and idealism is the permanent revenge of man over the inequalities of life — the protest of creative mind against exter- nal fatality. Idealistic art seizes life at its richest moments, and presents it pre- served forever by its immaterial essence from inconstancy and degradation. This so-called realism is not reality — ^the steps of true art must ever be elimination and generalization; its postulates, the eter- nal conventions of form, style, language, and subject, necessary because they are elemental. REAL PRESENCE, the doctrine of the actual presence of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist. REAL SCHOOLS (German, Real- schulen), those educational institutions of Germany between the elementary school and the university having for their special object the teaching of science, art, the modern languages, etc.; in contra- distinction to the ordinary grammar schools and gjTiinasiums, in which the classical languages hold a more impor- tant place. REAM, a quantity of paper of any size containing 20 quires or 480 sheets. A common practice is now to count 500 sheets to the ream. REAPING HOOK, a curved blade of steel set in a short handle, and used for reaping; a sickle. REAPING MACHINE, a machine for reaping or cutting down grain in the field. There are numerous varieties. Properly speaking, the Reaping Hook (</. V.) (represented 1490 B. c. in a har- vest scene on a tomb at Thebes, and still in use) and the scythe are reaping ma- chines; but the term is generally con- fined to the modern machines, in which operations formerly carried out by the human hand are effected by machinery. The idea of a mechanical reaper was probably suggested by Capel Lloft in 1785, and in 1786, Pott, an Englishman, made the first machine. In 1822 a self- sharpening mowing machine was pat- ented in the United States. Between 1852 and 1874 nearly 3,000 patents for reaping machines were taken out for the United States. Two of the most cele^ brated are McCormick's, invented about 1831, and improved in 1846, and Wood's reaping and automatic binding machine, first used in 1874. Modern reapers are of three classes, manual delivery, self- raking, and self-binding. A binder largely used, and pushed by 4 to 6 horses, clears a strip 12 to 20 feet vdde. There are combined headers and thresh- ers which cut, thresh, and sack grain, doing 100 acres a day. REASON, in logic, the premise or or premises of an argument, and espe- cially the minor premise. In metaphys- ics, the power of thinking consecutively; the power of passing in mental review all the facts and principles bearing on a subject, and, after a careful considera- tion of their bearings, drawing conclu- sions in many cases conformable with truth. Reason, weighing facts, discovers the law of gravitation, calculates eclipses, weighs the planets, ascertains the con- stituent elements of the sun, and even of more distant worlds. It can exercise itself on the most abstract and spiritual theories, as well as on those of a simpler character. Reid distinguished between reason and judgment, considering the sphere of the former to be propositions capable of demonstration. Stewart con- sidered the word reason as ambiguous. In common discourse it denotes the power of discriminating truth from falsehood, and right from wrong. To these he adds the power of devising means to accomplish ends; or reason may be limited to the power of distin- guishing truth from falsehood; or it may be used of our rational power in general, or of the discursive faculty alone. Brown thinks that there is no faculty of reason which is nothing more than a series of relative suggestions. Im- manuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared in 1781. Mill considers reason- ing in its extended sense to be synony- mous with inference, and divides it into induction, i. e., reasoning from particu- lars to generals, and ratiocination, rea- soning from generals to particulars. Formerly it was believed that of the whole visible creation man alone was capable of reasoning; but Darwin con- siders that only a few persons now dis- pute that animals possess some power of reason. Their actions may be due to instinct or to the association of ideas, the last named principle being connected with reason. In history: On Nov. 10, 1793, the French National Convention ordered the worship of the Goddess of Reason. Madame Maillard, selected as such a
