If so, then all of them are defective. They will give rise to expectations, and people will wait for the fire when they see the smoke, as they expect that every swan is white (until they see black) or that the water always boils at 100° (until they decide to have breakfast in the mountains). However, these expectations are not inferences and do not have to be true. Not rational, but animal behavior is built on them. The mind comes into play when you say, "Although A and B are neighbors, they are causally related only sometimes." When you know properly what smoke is, you will be able to draw a true conclusion; but until then, the mind must see in expectation only expectation, and no more. If it is not necessary to do this, if the inference is based on an axiom, we do not appeal to previous experience. I believe that two magnitudes equal to a third are equal, not because I have never seen them unequal. I just know that this is how it should be. Many now call axioms unnecessary repetitions, but I do not agree with this. Only these repetitions lead us along the road of knowledge. By calling them repetitions, we are simply saying that we know them firmly and confidently. This or that statement will be a repetition for us to the extent that you know it. 9 x 7 = 63 is a repetition for a sophisticated adult, but not for a child who begins to multiply the multiplication table, and not for a savage who adds nine to nine seven times. If nature is completely interconnected, any true judgment about it (say, "It was a hot summer in 1939") would be a tautology to the mind that embraced it as a whole. Perhaps "God is love" is a tautology for seraphim, but not for humans.

"But," you will remark, "we certainly arrive at the truth by reasoning." Of course. In this we fully agree with the naturalists, otherwise we could not argue. But we have different ways of understanding what is. For them, the development of reason is essentially connected with its emergence by a causal connection of the first type (cause-effect). They talk about how people have learned to think, leaving unanswered the very other question of whether they will know the truth. And they try to show how the product of evolution has nevertheless become a means of knowing the truth.

However, the attempt itself is ridiculous. This will become clear if we consider the most miserable and desperate version of it. Prirodov will say:

"Well, of course, we can't yet understand exactly how natural selection has turned pre-rational brain activity into inferences that are capable of comprehending truth. But we are sure that it was. After all, selection is supposed to protect and help useful behavior, and our ability to infer is useful. If it is useful, it makes it possible to comprehend the truth." See what he does? The very possibility of inference is still questionable—the naturalist spoke of what we consider inference, as if they did not comprehend any truth. Both he and we want to figure it out. And here he himself makes an inference ("if useful, then it is true"), as if in his system of inference they were not in question. But if the very value of reasoning is doubtful, it cannot be proved by reasoning. Reason is our support, we stand on it and can neither attack it nor defend it. If we equate it with other phenomena and depart from it, we will immediately have to go back to it and ask it for mercy.

You can go lower. One can abandon claims to truth altogether and say: "Our way of thinking is useful" without adding to oneself: "And therefore it is true." It is useful, it helps to build bridges or satellites, and we have had enough. There is no need to ask for more - it helps, and thanks for that. When we use it for the immediate good, everything goes well, but when we fall into reasoning and want to work out a general view of "reality", only long, boring, and probably empty arguments come out. Let us be more modest, we do not need theology, ontology, metaphysics...

But then there is no need for natural trust. For it is the best example of reasoning taken far beyond the limits of experience. Nature cannot be perceived either by the senses or by the imagination. It cannot be grasped at all; You can only get close to it, and even then not too closely. Obeying his desires, the naturalist brings together into a single self-sufficient system everything that he has deduced from our scientific experiments. Moreover, he dares to say: "There is nothing else but this," and such an assertion is extremely far from any experience whatsoever and does not lend itself to practical verification. The very first step along this path leads to a glaring incongruity, to violence against the possibilities of experience, and gives rise to many chimeras.

The theist position may seem like an equally terrible chimera. (No, not the same—the theist does not dare to deny anything entirely.) However, he does not have to assume that reason arose relatively recently in the process of selection. For us, the mind of God is older than nature, and nature owes to it the orderliness by which we can know it. For us, the human mind, in cognizing, is illumined by the mind of God. In this way he is duly freed from the burden of unreasonable causes; is liberated — and he is determined by the known truth. If some natural causes contributed to this, then God intended it so.

Calling the act of cognition supernatural (not memories, but "visions", which in any of the possible worlds should be like this, and not otherwise), we somewhat violate the usual use of words. But we do not mean to say that this act is illusory, or mystical, or, if you like, spiritual. More precisely, our other word is "extra-natural". What we mean by this is that it cannot be merely a function of a complex and mind-free system called nature. He must be free enough from it to really know. We cannot do without a vague spatial representation, but we need to correct it. It is better not to imagine that thinking is above nature, or under it, or outside of it. Let's imagine that it is between us and nature. We build the idea of nature by inference. Reason is given to us before nature, and our whole conception of nature depends on it. Our inferences precede our picture of nature, just as the telephone precedes the voice. We will not be able to squeeze reason into nature. If we describe it as a product of evolution, we will tacitly bracket our reason at the moment of this reasoning. The first, the general, is only a manifestation of the irrational work of a huge self-sufficient system; ours, the present one, is conditioned not by extra-rational causes, but by knowable truth. But the thought of which we think, like our whole idea of nature, depends on the present act of thought, and not vice versa. This act is the primary reality, without it we cannot recognize everything else as real. If it doesn't squeeze into nature, there's nothing you can do. We cannot discard it. Along with it, it would have to be discarded.

IV. NATURE AND THE EXTRA-NATURAL

In the long course of European thought, not all, but many—at any rate, many who have proved that it is necessary to listen to it—have said that nature exists, but not in itself and not by itself. Its existence depends on something else.

R. G. Collingwood. The Idea of Nature, III, 3

If our arguments are sound, then thinking is connected in a special way with the whole system of nature. Thus, the understanding of a machine is connected with a machine in a different way than the parts of the machine itself are connected with each other. Understanding an object is not a part of it. In this sense, something extra-natural comes into play every time we think. Note that I do not at all believe that all our consciousness is necessarily like this; Fears, sufferings, pleasures, hopes, mental images can be considered as part of nature, without reaching the absurdity. The boundary is not between "matter" and "immaterial" and not between "body" and "soul" (all four of these concepts are not simple), but between nature and reason; and it does not cut off "me" from the "external world," but the mind from non-rational phenomena, both physical and mental.

There is no peace on this border, but the traffic there is one-way. We all know that the mind allows and helps us to change the course of nature, the ordinary, physical, when we build bridges, and the spiritual, when we curb our emotions with arguments. Physical nature yields to us much more often and more easily than mental nature, but somehow, a little, we change both. Nature, on the other hand, can in no way give rise to rational thought; it can change it, but at the same moment this thought becomes unreasonable. As we have seen, a train of thought can no longer be trusted if it is entirely reduced to unreasonable causes. Nature crosses the line to kill; Reason takes captives and even cultivates new lands. Everything you see now—the book, the table, the wall, the furniture, your washed hands, and your trimmed nails—is evidence of the cultivation of natural land; Everything would have been different if reason had not interfered. And if you follow my arguments as carefully as I would like, you are helped by the mind, which has curbed the natural fragmentation of attention. If you have a toothache or fear distracts you, nature has intervened and, without generating anything reasonable, has prevented you from thinking to the best of its ability.