“How could we guide ourselves through life without the beacon-light of reason?  It pierces the darkness of social ignorance, it helps us to distinguish vaguely objects heretofore plunged in obscurity, and which will always remain invisible to those who are unprovided with this indispensable accessory—­the gift of reasoning.

“He who ventures in the darkness and walks haphazard, finds himself suddenly confronted by obstacles which he was unable to foresee.

“He finds himself frightened by forms whose nature he cannot define, and is often tempted to attribute silhouettes of assassins to branches of trees, instead of recognizing the real culprit who is watching him from the corner of the wild forest.

“Life, as well as the wildest wilderness, is strewn with pitfalls.  To think of examining it rapidly, without the aid of that torch called reason, would be imitating the man of whom we have just spoken.

“Many are the mirages, which lead us to mistake dim shadows for disquieting realities, unless we examine them critically, for otherwise we can never ascribe to them their true value.

“Certain incidents, which seem at first sight to be of small importance, assume a primordial value when we have explained them by means of reasoning.

“To reason about a thing is to dissect it, to examine it from every point of view before adopting it, before deferring to it or before rejecting it; in one word, to reason about a thing is to act with conscious volition, which is one of the phases essential to the conquest of common sense.

“This principle conceded, it then becomes a question of seriously studying the method of reasoning, which we propose to do in the following manner but first it is necessary to be convinced of this truth.”

Without reason there is no common sense.

Yoritomo teaches us that, altho moderation is only of secondary importance, it is still indispensable to the attainment of common sense.

It is moderation which incites us to restrain our impatience, to silence our inexplicable antipathies and to put a break on our tempestuous enthusiasms.

Can one judge of the aspect of a garden while the tempest is twisting the branches of the trees, tearing off the tendrils of the climbing vines, scattering the petals of the flowers and spoiling the corollas already in full bloom?

And now, Yoritomo, who loves to illustrate his teachings by expressive figures of speech, tells us the following story.

“A Japanese prince, on awakening, one day, demanded lazily of his servants what kind of weather it was, but he forbade them to raise the awnings which kept a cool, dim light in his room and shielded his eyes from the strong light from without.  The two servants left him reclining upon his divan and went into the adjoining room, where the stained-glass windows were not hung with curtains.

“One of them, putting his face close to a yellow-tinted pane of glass, exclaimed in admiration of the beautiful garden, bathed in the early morning sunlight.