Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes inclusively, called this likewise discourse, 'discursus, discursio,' from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but running as it were to and fro to abstract, generalize, and classify.
Now when this faculty is employed in the service of the pure reason, it brings out the necessary and universal truths contained in the infinite into distinct contemplation by the pure act of the sensuous imagination, that is, in the production of the forms of space and time abstracted from all corporeity, and likewise of the inherent forms of the understanding itself abstractedly from the consideration of particulars, as in the case of geometry, numeral mathematics, universal logic, and pure metaphysics.

The discursive faculty then becomes what our Shakspeare with happy precision calls "discourse of reason." We will now take up our reasoning again from the words "motion in itself." It is evident then, that the reason, as the irradiative power, and the representative of the infinite, judges the understanding as the faculty of the finite, and cannot without error be judged by it.

When this is attempted, or when the understanding in its 'synthesis' with the personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to supersede the reason, it is then what St.Paul calls the mind of the flesh ([Greek: phronaema sarkos]) or the wisdom of this world.

The result is, that the reason is super-finite; and in this relation, its antagonist is the insubordinate understanding, or mind of the flesh.
IV.

Reason, as one with the absolute will, ('In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God',) and therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is above the will of man as an individual will.