Calne, the neurologist, recognizes better than Lakoff and Johnson that it's not "science" that decides where a concept begins and ends but culture, often after a spirited rhetorical battle. As a revisionist intellectual, he thus plunges ahead, seeking to tailor reason to his own wishes even as he blithely speaks of "reason's nature." Why does he believe reason can't direct our goals?

Unlike emotions, reason does not entail needs that crave satisfaction. It is, furthermore, hard to imagine how reason would operate if it did crave satisfaction, for then it would not compete with emotions, it would be an emotion; we would feel reason in the way we feel anger (which craves a fight) or fear (which craves a flight). The separation of reason from motivation is fundamental to--even constitutive of--human cognition.

Despite Calne's argument, scientific and philosophical juries remain out on whether to slice motivational aspects of thought away from reason and dump them in the "emotion" category. In this volatile intellectual arena, Calne can thus safely construe reason as a solely instrumental activity, just as Lakoff and Johnson can equate it to embodied metaphors. The point Calne, Lakoff and Johnson all play down in their eagerness to promote customized versions of reason is that it is ultimately public, deliberative lobbying and usage that determine what will count as "reason," not neuronal reactions associated with individual judgments.

On that score, for all their industry, Lakoff and Johnson display little energy for considering how their vision violates deeply held views of metaphorical genius as an individual gift. They slight the creative side of metaphor, the ability of literary and scientific genius to reject clichéd associations and images. In their final chapter, Lakoff and Johnson assert that "we do not, for the most part, have control over how we conceptualize situations and reason about them," and "we cannot freely change our conceptual systems by fiat."

Tell it to Newton and Mallarmé, to Einstein and Yeats. Aristotle famously wrote that to be a master of metaphor is the greatest thing of all. Lakoff and Johnson describe our minds as products of metaphor. The truth, Aristotle would doubtless point out, is in between.

Finally, if the new reasoning about reason sometimes falters because it fails to square with previous wisdom we still support, it also loses a few revolutionary points for reiterating the previously better said. Does Calne truly take us far beyond Hume's 1739 judgment that "reason is...the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them"? Or Ovid's observation that "what is now reason was formerly impulse"?

As for Lakoff and Johnson, we can similarly ask whether the tiresome social-science sedulousness with which they proceed renders their message vastly different from Roger Bacon's thirteenth-century insight that "reasoning draws a conclusion--but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience." And whether Wilde did not intuit the essence of Philosophy in the Flesh in having Lord Henry observe in The Picture of Dorian Gray, "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.... It is hitting below the intellect."

Philosophical revolutionaries resemble political ones in speaking too quickly for the rest of us. Science may solve various mysteries of neural causation, but it will be "culture" that decides how the numbers and chemistry hook up with the words and concepts we know and love. Stimulating as they are, these books offer reasons of which reason itself knows nothing.

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