An address delivered to the Glasgow Philosophical Society on Jan. 10, 1895.
When I received, some months ago, the invitation to address your
society, my mind was carried irresistibly back to a period in the last century,
in which, through my study of three eminent teachers whose works have had a
permanent influence on my thought, I seem to feel more at home in the
intellectual life of your famous University than in that even of my own. It is a
period of about 50 years; beginning in 1730, when Francis Hutcheson was summoned
from Dublin to fill in Glasgow the chair now worthily occupied by my friend
Professor Jones; and ending in 1781, when Thomas Reid retired from the same
chair to put into final literary form the teaching that he had given here for 17
years. Between the two, as the immediate predecessor of Reid, though not the
immediate successor of Hutcheson, stands the greater name of Adam Smith. I felt
in private duty bound
to select the work of one of the three as
the theme of my address: the difficulty was to choose. I should have much liked
to try to explain the attraction which the refinement, balance and
comprehensiveness of Hutcheson’s ethical views have always had for me; but
on such an occasion it seemed prudent to defer to the sometimes capricious
judgment of history: and in the face of that judgment, I felt diffident of my
power of persuading you to regard Hutcheson’s system with more than
antiquarian interest. With Adam Smith, as I need hardly say, the case was
altogether different. His doctrine has gone out into all lands, and his words
unto the ends of the world: and hardly a year passes without some attempt being
made somewhere to extract fresh instruction from his epoch-making work, or to
throw fresh light on its method or its relations. But for this very reason I
doubted whether I should not seem superfluous in adding my pebble to the
imposing cairn of literary products that has thus been raised to his memory. The
intermediate position of Reid, unquestionably a more important leader of thought
than Hutcheson, unquestionably less familiar to current thought than Adam Smith,
seemed on the whole to fit the opportunity best: I propose therefore this
evening to present to you—not with the fulness and exactness of a critical
historian but in the lighter and more selective style allowed to an occasional
utterance—such features of Reid’s philosophical work as appear to me
of most enduring interest. (I. ¶ 1)
I will begin by endeavouring to remove a prejudice, which perhaps my very title may have produced. (I. ¶ 2)
The Philosophy of Common Sense,
you may say, is
not this after all an intellectual monstrosity? Philosophy is a good thing and
Common Sense in its place is a good thing too: but they are both better kept
apart. If we mix them, shall we not find ourselves cutting blocks with a
scalpel, and using a garden-knife for the finer processes of scientific
dissection?
(I. ¶ 3)
And I am the more afraid of this prejudgment, because in the only passage of Kant’s works in which he speaks of Reid’s philosophical labours, it is this antithesis that he applies in condemnation of them: and, speaking as I do in a University where the leading expositor of Kant, to Englishmen as well as Scotsmen of our age, has taught for so many years, I cannot but feel this condemnation a formidable obstacle to my efforts to claim your sympathy for Reid. (I. ¶ 4)
The passage I refer to is that in Kant’s Prolegomena to
any future Metaphysic (1783) in which he considers with a sense of
pain
how completely Hume’s opponents Reid, Oswald, Beattie,
and even Priestley
missed the point of Hume’s problem. Instead of
answering Hume’s sceptical reasoning by probing more deeply into
the nature of reason,
as Kant believed himself to have done, they
discovered a more convenient means of putting on a bold face without any proper
insight into the question, by appealing to the common sense of mankind…a
subtle discovery for enabling the most vapid babbler
without a
particle of insight
to hold his own against the most penetrating
thinker. (I. ¶ 5)
The censure you see is strong: but is it thoroughly intelligent? Reid, says the critic, has not caught Hume’s point. Has Kant caught Reid’s? I venture to doubt whether he ever gave himself a chance of catching it. (I. ¶ 6)
This for two reasons. First, look at the names he puts together,
Reid, Oswald, Beattie;
—the first a thinker of indubitable
originality; the third a man of real, but chiefly literary, ability, a poet by
choice and a philosopher from a sense of duty; the second a theological
pamphleteer. Is it likely that Kant would have thus bracketed the three, if he
had really read them? How came he to put them on a par? That is easily
explained. He had doubtless read Priestley’s examination which treats the
three together, and which, written as it was primarily from a theological point
of view, gives even a larger space to Oswald. This explains Kant’s odd
conjunction of names, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and even
Priestley,
—even, that is, their critic Priestley. I imagine Kant
was on general grounds more likely to be attracted by Priestley’s book
than by Reid’s, since he had a keen interest in the progress of
contemporary physical science, and Priestley had here a well-deserved
reputation: and certainly the Reid who appears in Priestley’s pages,
misquoted, misrepresented and misunderstood, was likely enough to be regarded as
another Oswald. (I. ¶ 7)
My second reason is that if Kant had ever studied Reid’s
Inquiry into the Human Mind he could hardly have failed to extend
his studies to the Hume to whom Reid was replying. This may startle you.
What,
you may say, Kant not read Hume: why any shilling
handbook of the history of philosophy will tell you that Hume’s scepticism
woke up Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.
Certainly, but it was not the
same scepticism as that which woke up Reid to construct the Philosophy of Common
Sense: it was the veiled, limited and guarded scepticism of the Inquiry
into the Human Understanding, not the frank, comprehensive and
uncompromising scepticism of the Treatise on
Human Nature. Kant’s Hume is a sceptic who ventures modestly to
point out the absence of a rational ground for his expectation that the future
will resemble the past, while in the same breath hastening to assure the reader
that his expectation remains unshaken by his arguments. Reid’s Hume is a
sceptic who boldly denies the infinite divisibility of space, who professes to
have in his intellectual laboratory a solvent powerful enough to destroy the
force of the most cogent demonstration, and who ventures to tell his fellow-men
plainly that they are each and all nothing but bundles of different
perceptions, succeeding each other with inconceivable rapidity.
I think
that if Kant had even looked into Reid’s Inquiry, the
difference between the earlier and the later Hume must have struck him, and he
must have been led on to read the Treatise on
Human Nature; whereas it is evident and admitted that he never did
read it. (I. ¶ 8)
Do you still want proof that Kant did not catch Reid’s point? I
have a witness to bring forward whom Kant himself would have allowed to be a
good witness,—Mr David Hume: who was persuaded by a common friend to
peruse parts of Reid’s work before it appeared, and to write his view of
them to the author. Hume did not much like the task in prospect: I
wish,
he grumbles to the common friend, that the parsons would
confine themselves to their old occupation of worrying one another, and leave
philosophers to argue with moderation, temper, and good manners.
In fact,
he expects another Warburton: but when he has read the MS. his tone changes. It is certainly very
rare,
he writes to Reid, that a piece so deeply philosophical is
wrote with so much spirit, and affords so much entertainment to the reader.
… There are some objections,
he goes on, that I would
propose, but I will forbear till the whole can be before me. I will only say
that if you have been able to clear up these abstruse and important topics,
instead of being mortified, I shall be so vain as to pretend to a share of the
praise: and shall think that my errors, by having at least some coherence, had
led you to make a strict review of my principles, which were the common ones,
and to perceive their futility.
(I. ¶ 9)
Well, I think you will agree with me that this is a charmingly urbane letter, from a free-thinker of established literary reputation to a parson turned professor, as yet hardly known in the world of letters, who had hit him some smart blows and ventured to laugh at him a little as well as argue with him. But Hume recognises that the parson unexpectedly writes like a philosopher: and Hume, as we saw, has a high ideal of the manner in which philosophers should conduct their debates; and it is a pleasure to find him acting up to his ideal, a pleasure all the greater from the rarity with which it is afforded to the student of philosophical controversy. (I. ¶ 10)
But it was not Hume’s urbanity that I wished now to dwell: I
wished to point out that it never occurs to Hume that Reid has appealed from the
expert to the vulgar, and endeavoured to avoid his conclusions without answering
his arguments. What rather strikes Hume is the philosophic depth that his
antagonist has shown in attacking his fundamental assumptions;—which were,
as he says, the common ones, and which Reid, accordingly had traced back through
Berkeley and Locke to the start of modern philosophy in Descartes. It is
difficult, I think, for us to appreciate equally the penetration shown in this
historical aperçu, because the connexion of ideas
that Reid makes apparent now seems to us so obvious and patent. But this is the
case with many important steps in the development of philosophical thought: when
once the step has been taken, it appears so simple and inevitable that we can
hardly feel that it required intellectual force and originality to take it. You
remember, perhaps, the depreciatory remark made on Christopher Columbus by a
schoolboy who didn’t see why so much fuss should be made about his
discovery of America, since, if he went that way at all, he could not well miss
it.
Similarly it now seems to us that if Reid went that way at
all
he could not fail to find the source of the Idealism of Berkeley and
the pulverizing scepticism of Hume in Locke’s assumption that the
immediate object of the mind in external perception is its own ideas: and that
finding this view equally in Malebranche, he could not fail to trace it to
Descartes. His merit lay in the independence of thought required to free himself
from this assumption, question it and hunt it home: and this merit Hume
evidently recognised. (I. ¶ 11)
And now, perhaps, I may have persuaded some of my hearers that Kant entirely
failed to see what Reid and his followers were driving at. But if so, I have
gone to far, and persuaded them of more than I intended. The appeal to vulgar
common sense has an important place in Reid’s doctrine: he does
rely on it: nor can I defend him from the charge that he relies on it too much.
He does hold that the mere ridiculousness of Hume’s conclusions is a good
reason for disbelieving them: and even in his later and maturer treatise he
speaks of the sense of the ridiculous as a guide to philosophic truth, in
language that lacks his usual circumspection. For our sense of the ridiculous is
manifestly stirred by the mere incongruity of an opinion with our intellectual
habits: a strange truth is no less apt to excite it than a strange error. When
the Copernican theory was slowly winning its way to acceptance, even the grave
Milton allowed himself a jest on the new carmen who drive the earth
about
: and I can remember how, when the Darwinian theory was new, persons
of the highest culture cracked their jokes on the zoologist’s supposed
private reasons for the absurd conclusion that his ancestor was a monkey. And
this is doubtless all for the best: laughter is a natural and valuable relief in
many perplexities and disturbances of life, and I do not see why it should not
relieve the disturbance caused by the collision of new opinions with old: only
let us remember that it is evidence of nothing except the mere fact of
collision. But, though Reid does rely more than he ought on the argumentum ad risum, he is not so
stupid as to think that a volume is required to exhibit this argument. He does
say to the plain man, If philosophy befools her votaries, and leads them
into these quagmires of absurdity, beware of her as an ignis
fatuus
: but he immediately adds, Is it, however, certain that
this fair lady is of the party? Is it not possible that she may have been
misrepresented?
and that she has been misrepresented is the thesis which
he aims at proving. (I. ¶ 12)
In the course of the proof, no doubt, he leads us again to Common
Sense, as the source and warrant of certain primary data of knowledge at once
unreasonal and indubitable: but the Common Sense to which we are thus led is not
that of the vulgar as contrasted with the philosopher: Reid’s point is
that the philosopher inevitably shares it with the vulgar. Whether a philosopher
has been developed out of a monkey may possibly be still an open question; but
there can be no doubt that he is developed out of a man; and, if we consider his
intellectual life as a whole, we may surmise that the larger part of it is
occupied with the beliefs that he still shares with the unphilosophical majority
of his contemporaries. It is on this fact that Reid’s appeal to him is
based. He refers to Hume’s account of the manner in which, after solitary
reflection has environed him with the clouds and darkness of doubt, the genial
influence of dinner, backgammon, and social talk
dispels these
doubts and restores his belief in the world without and the self within: and
Reid takes his stand with those who are so weak as to imagine that they
ought to have the same belief in solitude and in company.
His
essential demand, therefore, on the philosopher, is not primarily that
he should make his beliefs consistent with those of the vulgar, but that he
should make them consistent with his own; and the legitimacy of the demand
becomes, I think, more apparent, when we regard it as made in the name of
Philosophy rather than in the name of Common Sense. For when we reflect on plain
Common Sense,—on the body of unreasoned principles of judgment which we
and other men are in the habit of applying in ordinary thought and
discourse,—we find it certainly to some extent confused and inconsistent:
but it is not clear that it is the business of Common Sense to get rid of these
confusions and inconsistencies, so long as they do not give trouble in the
ordinary conduct of life: at any rate is is not its most pressing business,
since system-making is not its affair. But system-making is preeminently the
affair of Philosophy, and it cannot willingly tolerate inconsistencies: at least
if it has to tolerate them, as I sadly fear that it has, it can only tolerate
them as a physician tolerates a chronic imperfection of health, which he can
only hope to mitigate and not completely to cure. (I. ¶ 13)
Accordingly, in Reid’s view it is the duty of a
philosopher—his duty as a philosopher—to aim steadily and
persistently at bringing the common human element of his intellectual life into
clear consistency with the special philosophic element. And Reid is on the whole
perfectly aware,—though his language occasionally ignores it,—that
for every part of this task the special training and intellectual habits of the
philosopher are required. For the fundamental beliefs which the philosopher
shared with the plain man can only be defined with clearness and precision by
one who has reflected systematically, as an ordinary man does not reflect, on
the operations of his own mind; even the elementary distinction between
sensation and perception is, Reid admits, only apprehended by the plain man in a
confused form. To bring the distinction into clear consciousness, to attend to
sensation and perception each by itself, and to attribute nothing to one
which belongs to the other,
requires, he tells us, a degree of
attention to what passes in our own minds, and a talent for distinguishing
things that differ, which is not to be expected in the vulgar.
The
philosopher alone can do it: but in order to do it, he must partially divest
himself of his philosophic peculiarities. That is, he must temporarily put out
of his mind the conclusions of any system he may have learnt or adopted, and
merely bring his trained faculty of reflective attention to the observation and
analysis of the common human element of his thought. (I. ¶ 14)
But if it be admitted that the philosopher alone is capable of the
steady and clear attention required to ascertain the fundamental beliefs of
Common Sense, what valid evidence is there of the general assent to these
beliefs on which Reid lays stress, and which, indeed, the term implies? He seems
to be in a dilemma; either the many must be held capable of reflective analysis,
or the decision on questions of fundamental belief must after all be limited to
the expert few. The difficulty is partly met by pointing out that the
philosophical faculty required to judge of such a statement when made; just as
few of us could have found out the axioms required in the study of geometry, but
we could easily see the truth of Euclid’s at a very early age. Still,
granting this, I think that Reid presses too far the competence of plain man
even to judge of philosophical first principles. It is true, as he
urges, that this judgment requires no more than a sound mind free from
prejudice and a distinct conception of the questions
: but it does not
follow, as Reid seems to think, that every man is a competent judge, the
learned and unlearned, the philosopher and day-labourer alike:
because a
good deal of the painful process we call learning
is normally
needed to realise these apparently simple requirements, freedom from prejudice
and distinctness of conception. I will not affirm that no day-labourer could
attain a distinct conception of the positions that Reid is defending against
Berkeley and Hume: but I venture to think that a day-labourer who could convince
us that he had attained it would be at once recognised as a born philosophy,
incontrovertibly qualified by native genius for membership of the society that I
have the honour to address. (I. ¶ 15)
At the same time I cannot think Reid wrong in holding that the
propositions he is most concerned to maintain as first principles are implicitly
assented to by men in general. That for ordinary men sense-perception involves a
belief in the existence of a thing perceived, independent of the perception:
that similarly consciousness involves a belief in the existence of a permanent
identical subject of changing conscious states: that ordinary moral judgment
involves the belief in a real right and wrong in human action, capable of being
known by a moral agent and distinct in idea from what conduces to his interest:
that in ordinary thought about experience we find implicit the unreasoned
assumption that every change must have a cause, and a cause adequate to the
effect, all this I think will hardly be denied by any one who approaches the
question with a fair mind. He may of course still regard it as unphilosophical
to rest the validity of these beliefs on the fact of their general acceptance.
But here again it must be said that Reid’s own deference to general assent
is of a strictly limited and subordinate kind. He is far from wishing truth to
be determined by votes: he only urges that authority, though tyrannical
as a mistress, is useful as a handmaid to private judgment.
He points out
that even in the exactest science authority actually has this place: even a
mathematician who has demonstrated a novel conclusion is strengthened in his
belief in it by the assent of other mathematical experts who have examined his
demonstration, and is reduced to a kind of suspense
by their
dissent. (I. ¶ 16)
That is, I think, undeniable: and perhaps we may separate
Reid’s just and moderate statement of the claims of Authority from his
exaggerated view of the competence of untrained intellects to deal with
philosophical first principles; and simply take it as a cardinal point in the
philosophy of Common Sense that a difference in judgment from another whom he
has no reason to regard as less competent to judge them himself naturally and
properly reduces a thinker to a kind of suspense.
When the
conflict relates to a demonstrated conclusion, it leads him to search for a flaw
in the opponent’s demonstration; but when it relates to a first principle,
primary datum, or fundamental assumption, this resource appears to be excluded:
and then, perhaps, when he has done all that he can to remove any
misunderstanding of the question at issue, the Common Sense philosopher may be
allowed to derive some support from the thought that his own conviction is
shared by the great majority of those whose judgments have built up and
continually sustain the living fabric of our common thought and knowledge. And
this, I think, is all that Reid really means to claim. (I. ¶ 17)
I have now, I hope, succeeded in making clear the general relation
which Reid’s epistemology bears to his psychology. I have not used these
modern terms, because Reid himself blends the two subjects under the single
notion of Philosophy of the Human Mind
: but it is necessary, in
any careful estimate of his work, to distinguish the process of psychological
distinction and analysis through which the fundamental beliefs of Common Sense
are ascertained, from the arguments by which their validity is justified. I do
not propose to enter into the details of Reid’s psychological view, which
has largely become antiquated through the progress of mental science. But if
Locke is the first founder of the distinctively British study, Empirical
Psychology, of which the primary method is introspective observation and
analysis, I think Reid has a fair claim to be regarded as a second founder: and
even now his psychological work may be studied with interest from the patient
fidelity of his self-observation, the acumen of his reflective analysis, and,
especially, his entire freedom from the vague materialism that, in spite of
Descartes, still hung about the current philosophical conception of Mind and its
operations. It is, indeed, in the task of exposing the unwarrantable assumptions
generated by this vague materialism that the force and penetration of
Reid’s intellect is most conspicuously shown. (I. ¶ 18)
Let me briefly note this in the case of the beliefs involved in ordinary sense-perception, since this problem occupies a leading place in his discussion. Not, I ought to say, that he is specially interested in this problem on its own account: he makes it quite clear that it is on far greater issues that his thought is really set. God, Freedom, Duty, the spirituality of human nature,—these are, for Reid as for Kant, the grave matters really at stake in the epistemological controversy. But these greater matters, for the very reason of their supreme importance, are apt to stir our deepest emotions so strongly as to render difficult the passionless precision of analysis and reasoning which Reid rightly held to be needful for the attainment of philosophical truth: while at the same time it is clear to him that all the questions hang together, and that the decision of one in the sense that he claims will carry with it the similar determination of the rest. (I. ¶ 19)
Accepting this view then, and remembering that in a trivial case we
are trying no trivial issue, let us examine his treatment of the cognition by
Mind of particular material things. Here Reid’s task, as he ultimately
saw, was merely carrying further the work of Descartes. By clearly
distinguishing the motions of material particles antecedent to perception from
perception itself as a psychical fact, Descartes had got rid of the old
psychophysical muddle, by which forms or semblances of things perceived by the
senses were supposed somehow to get into the brain through the animal
spirits
and so into the mind. But he had not equally got rid of the view
that perception was the getting of an idea in the mind, from which the existence
of a thing outside the mind like the idea had to be somehow inferred.
This view is definitely held, not only by his disciple Malebranche but by his
independent successor Locke. They do not see what Reid came to see, that the
normal perception of an external object presents itself to introspection as an
immediate cognition: that is, as a cognition which has no psychical mediation,
no inference in it. What prevented them and others from seeing this was, mainly,
a naïve assumption that the mind can only know immediately what is
present
to it, and that things outside the body cannot be thus
present; as the mind cannot go out to them and they cannot get into the mind,
only the ideas of them can get in. It was reserved to Reid to point out the
illegitimacy of this assumption, and to derive it from a confused half
unconscious transfer to Mind and its functions of cognition, of the conditions
under which body acts on body in ordary physical experience. When the assumption
is made explicit and traced to its source, it loses, I think, all appearance of
validity. (I. ¶ 20)
It is to be observed, that in affirming external perception to be an immediate cognition, Reid does not of course mean that it is physically uncaused. He only means that the perceiving mind has not a double object, its own percept and a non-mental thing like its percept: and accordingly that our normal conviction of the present existence of the non-mental thing perceived is not a judgment attained by reasoning, but a primary datum of knowledge. He recognizes like his predecessors that it has physical antecedents, movements of material particles both without and within the organism. And he recognizes, more distinctly than his predecessors, that it has psychical antecedents and concomitants, i.e. sensations which he carefully distinguishes from the perception that they suggest and accompany. A consideration of these antecedents may possibly affect our reflective confidence in the cognition that follows them,—that question I will deal with presently,—but at any rate it cannot properly modify our view of the content of this cognition as ascertained by introspective observation. This, I think, remains true after duly taking account of the valuable work that has been done since Reid’s time, in ascertaining more accurately the antecedents and concomitants of our common perceptions of extended matter. Whatever view we may take on the interesting but still disputed questions as to the precise manner in which visual, tactual, and muscular feelings have historically been combined in the genesis of our particular perceptions and general notions of matter and space,—there can still be no doubt of the fundamental difference in our present consciousness between these perceptions or notions and any combinations of muscular, tactual, and visual feelings. (I. ¶ 21)
It has indeed been held, by an influential school of British
psychologists, that this manifest difference is merely apparent and illusory: it
has been held that by a process of mental chemistry
sensations and
images of sensation have been compounded
into what we now
distinguish as perceptions and conceptions of matter in space, and that the
latter really consist of sensations and images of sensation, just as water
really consists of oxygen and hydrogen. But this view involves a second
illegitimate transfer of physical conditions to psychical facts; and Reid would
certainly have rejected mental chemistry
in this application as
unhesitatingly as he does reject it when applied to support the conclusion that
a cluster of the ideas of sense, properly combined may make up the idea
of a mind.
He would have rejected it for the simple reason that we have
no ground for holding any fact of consciousness to be other than careful
introspection declares it to be. In the case of material chemistry, the
inference that a compound consists of certain elements depends on experimental
proof that we can not only make the compound out of the elements, but can also
make the elements again out of the combined. But even if we grant that our
cognitions of Matter and Space, of Self and Duty, are derived from more
elementary feelings, it is certain that no psychical experiment will enable us
to turn them into such feelings again: the later phenomena, if products, are
biological not chemical products, resulting from evolution, not mere
composition. (I. ¶ 22)
Still it may be said, granting the existence of cognitions and
beliefs that cannot now be resolved into more elementary feelings, and that
present themselves in ordinary thought with the character of unreasoned
certitude, systematic reflection on these beliefs and their antecedents must
render it impossible to accept them as trustworthy premises for philosophical
reasoning. It is a commonplace that the senses deceive, and the more we learn of
the psychophysical process of sense-perception, the more clear it becomes why
and how they must deceive. Even apart from cases of admitted illusion,
philosophical reflection on normal perception continually shows us, as Hume
urges, a manifest difference between the actual percept and what we commonly
regard as the real thing perceived. Thus, Hume says, the table which we
see seems to diminish as we remove farther from it: but the real table which
exists independent of us suffers no alteration. It was, therefore, nothing but
its image which was present to the mind. These are the obvious dictates of
reason.
In answering this line of objection Reid partly relies on a weak
distinction between original and acquired perception, which the progress of
science has rendered clearly untenable and irrelevant. Apart from this his
really effective reply is twofold. First he points out that the very evidence
relied upon to show the unreality of sense-percepts really affords striking
testimony to the general validity of the belief in an independent reality known
through sense-perception. It is by trusting, not by distrusting, this
fundamental belief that Common Sense organised into Science continually at once
corrects and confirms crude Common Sense. Take Hume’s case of the table.
If nothing but images were present to the mind, how could we ever know that
there exists a real table which does not alter while the visible magnitude
changes its distance from us? The plain man knows this through an acquired
perception, by which he habitually judges of real magnitude from visible
appearances: but science carries the knowledge further, enabling us to predict
exactly what appearance a given portion of extended matter will exhibit at any
given distance from the spectators. Now all this coherent, precise and unerring
prediction rests upon innumerable sense-perceptions; and the scientific
processes which have made it possible have been carried on throughout the basis
of the vulgar belief in the independent existence of the matter perceived.
Is it not absurd,
Reid asks, to suppose that a false
supposition of the rude vulgar has been so lucky in solving an infinite number
of phenomena of nature?
(I. ¶ 23)
Suppose, however, that the opponent resists this argument: suppose he maintains that, though physical science may find the independent existence of matter a convenient fiction,—as mathematicians find it convenient to feign that they can extract the square root of negative quantities,—still in truth Mind can know only mental facts—feelings and thoughts. Suppose he further urges that the common belief in the independent existence of the object of perception is found on reflection to have no claim to philosophic acceptance, because while admittedly unreasoned it cannot be said to be strictly intuitive:—granted that I may directly perceive the table before me, I cannot directly perceive that it exists independently of my perception. To this line of argument Reid has another line of reply. He points out to the Idealist that he does not escape from this kind of unreasoned belief by refusing to recognise a reality beyond consciousness. He has still to rely on data of knowledge which are open to the same objections as the belief in the independent existence of matter. For instance, he has to rely on memory. If sense-perception is fallible, memory is surely more fallible; if we do not know intuitively and cannot prove that what we perceive really exists independently of our perception, still less can we either know intuitively or prove that what we recollect really happened: if on reflection we find it difficult to conceive how the Non-ego can be known by the Ego, there is surely an equal difficulty in understanding how the Present Ego can know the Past. And yet once cease to rely on memory, and intellectual life becomes impossible: even in reasoning beyond the very simplest we have to rely on our recollection of previous steps in reasoning. A pure system of truths reasoned throughout from rational intuitions may be the philosophic ideal: but it is as true of the intellectual as of the physical life that living somehow is prior to living ideally well: and if we are to live at all, we must accept some beliefs that cannot claim Reason for their source. Is it not then, Reid urges, arbitrary and unphilosophical to acquiesce tranquilly in some of these beliefs of Common Sense, and yet obstinately to fight against others that have an equal warrant of spontaneous certitude? May we not rather say that it is the duty of a philosopher to give impartially a provisional acceptance to all such beliefs, and then set himself to clarify them by reflection, remove inadvertencies, confusions and contradictions, and as far as possible build together the purged results into an ordered and harmonious system of thought? (I. ¶ 24)
If, finally, the opposiing philosopher answers that he cannot be
satisfied by any system that is not perfectly transparent to reason, Reid does
not altogether refuse him his sympathy, although he cannot encourage him to
hope. I confess,
he says, after all that the evidence of
reasoning, and of necessary and self-evident truths, seems to be the least
mysterious and the most perfectly comprehended … the light of truth so
fills my mind in these cases that I can neither conceive nor desire anything
more satisfying. On the other hand, when I remember distinctly a past event, or
see an object before my eyes,
though this commands my belief no
less than an axiom … I seem to want that evidence which I can best
comprehend and which gives perfect satisfaction to an inquisitive mind.
And to a philosopher who has been accustomed to think that the treasure
of his knowledge is the acquisition of his reason, it is no doubt humiliating to
find
that his knowledge of what really exists or did exist comes
by another channel
and that he is led to it
as it were
in the dark.
It is no wonder
then that some
philosophers should invent vain theories to account for this knowledge:
while others spurn at a knowledge they cannot account for and vainly
attempt to throw it off.
But all such attempts
he holds,
are as impracticable as an attempt to fly.
(I. ¶ 25)
The passage from which I have quoted was published in 1785, when Reid was 75 years of age. Even before it was published, attempts at aerial navigation had suddenly come to seem less chimerical in the physical world; and, before the end of the century, in the world of thought, attempts to transcend and rationally account for the beliefs of Common Sense—more remarkable than any dreamt of by Reid—had begun to excite some interest even in our insular mind. The nineteenth century is now drawing to its close; and these attempts to fly are still going on, both in the physical and in the intellectual world; but in neither region, according to my information, have they yet attained a triumphant success. At the same time our age, which has seen so many things achieved that were once thought impossible, may without presumption contemplate such attempts in a somewhat more hopeful spirit than was possible to Reid: and I should be sorry to say anything here to damp the noble ardour or to depress the high aspirations that ought to animate a society like yours. But if there should be any one among you who, desirous to philosophize and yet fearing the fate of Icarus, may prefer to walk in the dimness and twilight of the lower region in which my discourse has moved,—then I venture to think that he may even now find profit in communing with the earnest, patient, lucid and discerning intellect of the thinker, who, in the history of modern speculation, has connected the name of Scotland with the Philosophy of Common Sense. (I. ¶ 26)