CHAPTER VIIIINSPIRED COMMON SENSE AND CAUSATION: ACTIVE OR MORAL POWER IN MAN

‘Has your lordship read Dr. Reid’sEssays on the Intellectual Powers of Man? Those readers who have been conversant in the modern philosophy of mind, as it appears in the writings of Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, will be much entertained with this work, which does great honour to the sagacity and patience of the author. It contains the principles of hisInquiry, laid down on a larger scale, and applied to a greater variety of subjects. Dr. Reid treats hisopponents and their tenets with a respect and a solemnity that sometimes tempt me to smile. His style is clear and simple; and his aversion to the wordideais so great, that I think he never once uses it in delivering his own opinions. It was not without reason that Stillingfleet took the alarm at Mr. Locke’s indiscreet use of that word. It was indeed anignis fatuusthat decoyed him in spite of his excellent understanding into a thousand pits and quagmires. Berkeley it bewildered still more. And it reduced David Hume to the condition of a certain old gentleman of whom we read, that—Fluttering his pinions vain,Plumb down he dropped, ten thousand fathoms deep.’

Fluttering his pinions vain,Plumb down he dropped, ten thousand fathoms deep.’

Fluttering his pinions vain,

Plumb down he dropped, ten thousand fathoms deep.’

Whether our power of conceiving is so far a test of possibility, as that what is distinctly conceived must be concluded to be possible, and what cannot be conceived impossible, was a question which interested Reid. It is discussed in theEssays on the Intellectual Powers, and also in the draft of a letter to Dr. Price, preserved among the manuscripts at Birkwood; in which it is argued that our power of conception cannot be a criterion of what is possible. The argument turns much on the meanings of ‘conception,’ ‘possibility,’ and ‘impossibility.’ He thus addresses Dr. Price:—

‘I would willingly suggest some subject on which I might have the favour of your thoughts when you have leisure and are disposed for such correspondence. What occurs to my thoughts just now is a metaphysical axiom very generally adopted, and, I think, occasionally adopted by you in yourReview of the Principal Questions in Morals—That what we distinctly conceive is possible. From this axiom D. Hume infers that it is possible that an universe may start into existence without a cause, and other like extravagancies. The use he makes of it led me to consider it a good many years ago, and I have a strong suspicion that there is some fallacy in it, which has imposed on men’s understandings, owing to the ambiguity of the wordconceive.‘As to the history of this axiom, I suspect it to have taken its rise from what Descartes laid down as the criterion of truth, which he maintained to be clear and distinct conception.Quidquid clare et distincte concipio esse verum, id est verum.Cudworth seems to have followed him in this, making the criterion of verity to be clear, self-consistent intelligibility. Those who came after, judging it difficult to maintain that everything istruewhich is clearly conceivable or intelligible, have maintained that everything that can be clearly conceived is at leastpossible. This seemed to be the proper correction of Descartes’ maxim, and it has passed from one hand to another without strict examination.‘Whatever is true or false, whatever is possible or impossible, may be expressed by a proposition. Now, what do we mean when we say that we conceive a proposition? I think no more is meant, if we speak properly, than that we understand what is meant by that proposition. If this be so, it must surely be granted that we may understand the meaning of a proposition which expresses what is impossible. He who understands the meaning of this proposition, “Two and two make four,” must equally understand the meaning of this other, “Two and two do not make four.” Both are equally understood; that is, the conception of both is equally clear; yet the first is necessarily true, and the second impossible.‘Perhaps it will be said, that we may not merely conceive themeaningof a proposition, but we may conceive it to be atrueproposition, and that it is our being able to conceive it to be true that gives us ground to think it possible. In answer to this, I beg you would attend very carefully to the meaning of these words—“Conceiving a proposition to be true.” I can put no other meaning upon them but judging it to be true, that is, giving some degree of assent to it. Judgment or assent admits of various degrees, from the slightest suspicion to the most deliberate conviction; from the most modest and diffident assent to the most pertinacious and dogmatical. I conceive there maybe inhabitants in the moon; that is, my judgment leans a little that way. I would not use that expression unless the probability, however small, seemed to be on that side of the question.‘If this be the meaning of conceiving a proposition to be true, then the meaning of the axiom will be, that a propositionwhich appears to us to have any degree of probability, however small, must at least be possible. But the axiom, taken in this sense, is surely false. It would be superfluous to give instances of this to a mathematician.‘If it should be said that conceiving a proposition to be true means, neither barely to understand the meaning of the proposition, nor the giving any degree of assent to it, I would be glad to know what it really does mean. For I am at a loss to know what power of the understanding we mean by the conceiving a proposition to be true, if it is neither simple apprehension, by which we barely understand the meaning of a proposition, nor judgment, by which we assent to the proposition or dissent from it. I know of no power of the understanding intermediate between these two. And if there is none, I think the axiom must be false.‘There are many propositions which, by the faculties God has given us, we perceive to be not only true, but necessarily true; and the contradictions of these must be impossible. So that our knowledge of what is impossible keeps pace with our knowledge of necessary truth.‘By our senses and our memory, by testimony and other means, we have the certain knowledge of many truths which we do not perceive to be necessary; their contraries therefore may be possible for aught we know. But we know that whatever is true, whether necessary or not, is possible. Our knowledge therefore of what is possible keeps pace with our knowledge of truth, whether contingent or necessary. Beyond this, I am afraid our knowledge of what is possible is conjectural. And although we are apt to think everything to be possible which we do not perceive to be impossible, yet in this we may be greatly deceived. You know well, sir, that mathematics affords many instances of impossibilitiesin the nature of things, which no man would have dreamed of or believed, until they were discovered by accurate and subtle reasoning. Perhaps if we were able to reason demonstratively to as great an extent in other subjects as in mathematics, we might discover many things to be impossible which we now take to be possible. We are apt to think it possible that God might have made an universe of sensible and rational creatures, into which neither natural nor moral Evil should ever enter. It may be so for what I know. But how are you certain that thisis possible? I can distinctly conceive it, say you; therefore it is possible. I do not admit this argument. May not a man who is a mathematician as distinctly conceive that in the infinite variety of numbers gradually ascending, there is no ratio whatsoever which is not equal to the ratio of some one whole number to some other whole number? Yet the mathematician can demonstrate that there are innumerable ratios which are not equal to the ratio of some one number to another. Many mathematicians, taking it for granted that it was possible to square the circle, have spent their lives in a fruitless pursuit. May not our taking things to be possible, in matters of higher moment, when we can show no good reason that they are so, lead us into unnecessary disputes and vain theories? Ought we to admit that as a just argument in reasoning, or even as a pressing difficulty, which is grounded on the supposition that such a thing is possible, when in reality we have no good evidence of its being possible, and for anything we can show to the contrary, it may be impossible?’

‘As to the history of this axiom, I suspect it to have taken its rise from what Descartes laid down as the criterion of truth, which he maintained to be clear and distinct conception.Quidquid clare et distincte concipio esse verum, id est verum.Cudworth seems to have followed him in this, making the criterion of verity to be clear, self-consistent intelligibility. Those who came after, judging it difficult to maintain that everything istruewhich is clearly conceivable or intelligible, have maintained that everything that can be clearly conceived is at leastpossible. This seemed to be the proper correction of Descartes’ maxim, and it has passed from one hand to another without strict examination.

‘Whatever is true or false, whatever is possible or impossible, may be expressed by a proposition. Now, what do we mean when we say that we conceive a proposition? I think no more is meant, if we speak properly, than that we understand what is meant by that proposition. If this be so, it must surely be granted that we may understand the meaning of a proposition which expresses what is impossible. He who understands the meaning of this proposition, “Two and two make four,” must equally understand the meaning of this other, “Two and two do not make four.” Both are equally understood; that is, the conception of both is equally clear; yet the first is necessarily true, and the second impossible.

‘Perhaps it will be said, that we may not merely conceive themeaningof a proposition, but we may conceive it to be atrueproposition, and that it is our being able to conceive it to be true that gives us ground to think it possible. In answer to this, I beg you would attend very carefully to the meaning of these words—“Conceiving a proposition to be true.” I can put no other meaning upon them but judging it to be true, that is, giving some degree of assent to it. Judgment or assent admits of various degrees, from the slightest suspicion to the most deliberate conviction; from the most modest and diffident assent to the most pertinacious and dogmatical. I conceive there maybe inhabitants in the moon; that is, my judgment leans a little that way. I would not use that expression unless the probability, however small, seemed to be on that side of the question.

‘If this be the meaning of conceiving a proposition to be true, then the meaning of the axiom will be, that a propositionwhich appears to us to have any degree of probability, however small, must at least be possible. But the axiom, taken in this sense, is surely false. It would be superfluous to give instances of this to a mathematician.

‘If it should be said that conceiving a proposition to be true means, neither barely to understand the meaning of the proposition, nor the giving any degree of assent to it, I would be glad to know what it really does mean. For I am at a loss to know what power of the understanding we mean by the conceiving a proposition to be true, if it is neither simple apprehension, by which we barely understand the meaning of a proposition, nor judgment, by which we assent to the proposition or dissent from it. I know of no power of the understanding intermediate between these two. And if there is none, I think the axiom must be false.

‘There are many propositions which, by the faculties God has given us, we perceive to be not only true, but necessarily true; and the contradictions of these must be impossible. So that our knowledge of what is impossible keeps pace with our knowledge of necessary truth.

‘By our senses and our memory, by testimony and other means, we have the certain knowledge of many truths which we do not perceive to be necessary; their contraries therefore may be possible for aught we know. But we know that whatever is true, whether necessary or not, is possible. Our knowledge therefore of what is possible keeps pace with our knowledge of truth, whether contingent or necessary. Beyond this, I am afraid our knowledge of what is possible is conjectural. And although we are apt to think everything to be possible which we do not perceive to be impossible, yet in this we may be greatly deceived. You know well, sir, that mathematics affords many instances of impossibilitiesin the nature of things, which no man would have dreamed of or believed, until they were discovered by accurate and subtle reasoning. Perhaps if we were able to reason demonstratively to as great an extent in other subjects as in mathematics, we might discover many things to be impossible which we now take to be possible. We are apt to think it possible that God might have made an universe of sensible and rational creatures, into which neither natural nor moral Evil should ever enter. It may be so for what I know. But how are you certain that thisis possible? I can distinctly conceive it, say you; therefore it is possible. I do not admit this argument. May not a man who is a mathematician as distinctly conceive that in the infinite variety of numbers gradually ascending, there is no ratio whatsoever which is not equal to the ratio of some one whole number to some other whole number? Yet the mathematician can demonstrate that there are innumerable ratios which are not equal to the ratio of some one number to another. Many mathematicians, taking it for granted that it was possible to square the circle, have spent their lives in a fruitless pursuit. May not our taking things to be possible, in matters of higher moment, when we can show no good reason that they are so, lead us into unnecessary disputes and vain theories? Ought we to admit that as a just argument in reasoning, or even as a pressing difficulty, which is grounded on the supposition that such a thing is possible, when in reality we have no good evidence of its being possible, and for anything we can show to the contrary, it may be impossible?’

A letter to Dr. Gregory in March 1786 shows theEssays on the Active or Moral Powersin the press:—‘I am proud of the approbation you express of theEssays. I have made some corrections and additions, but such as I hope will not make it necessary to write the book over again. But I wish, if I find health and leisure in summer, to add some Essays to go before that on “Liberty of the Will,” in order to give some further elucidation of the principles of morals. I expect your remarks and D. Stewart’s on what is in hand. It will be no inconvenience to wait two, three, or even four months.’ Two years later, early in 1788, when he was in his seventy-eighth year, the fiveEssays on the Active Powers of Manwere published. This was Reid’s last appearance as a philosophical author. The eight Essays of 1785, and the five Essays of 1788, all relate to human Power—power immanent or intellectual, and power overtly operative or moral.

In March, a few weeks after the book appeared, Beattie writes to Sir W. Forbes:—

‘I have been looking into Dr. Reid’s book onThe Active Powers of Man. It is written with his usual perspicuity and acuteness; is in some parts very entertaining; and to me, who have been obliged to think much on those subjects, is very interesting throughout. The question concerning Liberty and Necessity [of the Will] is very fully discussed, and very ably, and I think nothing more need be said about it. I could have wished that he had given a fuller examination of the passions, and been a little more practical in illustrating the duties of morality. But his manner in all his writings more turned to speculative than to practical philosophy; which may be owing to his having employed himself so much in the study of Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and other theorists; and partly, no doubt, to the habits of study and modes of conversation which were fashionable in this country in his younger days. If I were not personally acquainted with the Doctor, I should conclude from his books that he was rather too warm an admirer of Mr. Hume. He confutes, it is true, some of his opinions; but pays them much more respect than they are entitled to.’

To Beattie’s less profound intelligence, indignant sentiment was more acceptable, in defence of fundamental faith, than the calm inquiry and sympathetic criticism of Reid.

The Literary Society which met monthly in the College was occasionally a channel for his thoughts through all the years of the Glasgow professorship, as the more famous ‘Wise Club’ had been at Aberdeen. Principal Leechman, Black, Moor, Arthur, and Dr. Thomas Hamilton were also members. Some of Reid’s contributions before 1788 seem to have been incorporated in theEssays. After that he still found vent for his thoughts in papers for the Society, and in letters to Dr. Gregory, chiefly about Power and Causation. Among the most important of those submitted to the Society in his last years, I find ‘Some Observationson the Modern System of Materialism,’ in which the impotence of matter is maintained; as also in another, entitled ‘Miscellaneous Reflections on Priestley’s account of Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind.’ Then we have ‘Observations on the Utopia of Sir Thomas More.’ A short essay ‘On Power,’[24]in March 1792, was his last metaphysical performance: it sums up his conclusions regarding our conception of causation, as regulated by the Common Sense. ‘Observations on the Danger of Political Innovation,’ suggested by the Revolution in France, were read in the Society on November 1794.

This last Essay is characteristic. It presses a distinction between two political attitudes that are apt to be confounded—the one speculative, dealing with abstractions, treating the facts of the case and history as irrelevant; the other practical, taking account of the actual conditions, therefore disposed to modify its ideals by a due regard to what has been and now is. The first asks what that organisation of society is, which, abstractly considered, is most favourable to progress: the other cautiously considers how the inherited political organism may with least friction be adapted to the changed conditions of the social evolution. Reid assumes this last as his attitude, arguing that the British Constitution encourages continuous orderly evolution, not sudden revolution, and that this is illustrated in its history since 1688. At first, he had looked with sanguine hope to the French Revolution, but, like Edmund Burke, who shortly before had been Rector of Glasgow University, his hope gave place to fear. It is interesting that it was theVindiciæ Gallicæof Sir James Mackintosh that had inspired him with the hope; for, according to his daughter,Mrs. Carmichael, he was struck with admiration on reading the book, and used often to speak of it as one of the most ingenious essays in political philosophy he had ever met with.

Jeremy Bentham as well as Mackintosh was known to Reid by his writings, as appears in this letter to Dr. Gregory, in September 1788, which refers to Bentham’sDefence of Usury, published the year before:—

‘I am much pleased with the tract you sent me on Usury. I think the reasoning unanswerable, and have long been of the author’s opinion, though I suspect that the general principle—that bargains ought to be left to the judgment of the parties, may admit of some exceptions; when the buyers are the many, the poor, the simple, and the sellers few, rich, and cunning. The former may need the aid of the magistrate to prevent their being oppressed by the latter. It seems to be upon this principle that postage, freight, the hire of chairs and coaches, and the price of bread, are regulated in most great towns. But with regard to the loan of money in a commercial state, the exception can have no place—the borrowers and lenders are upon an equal footing, and each may be left to take care of his own interest.’

Three years before his death Reid is found preparing theAccount of the University of Glasgow, which appeared three years after his death, in theStatistical Account of Scotlandpublished by Sir John Sinclair. It was not communicated by him to Sir John, but transmitted by Professor Jardine, in name of the Principal and Professors, at whose request Reid seems to have engaged in this work. It was an anonymous publication, but it has been attributed to him, and it bears internal evidence of his hand. His colleague, Professor Richardson, in his biographical account of Professor Arthur, Reid’s successor, published in 1803, mentions that ‘the Statistical Account of the University was all written by Dr. Reid, except the statements respectingthe business of particular classes.’ It shows intelligence then uncommon in Scotland of the mediæval constitution of Universities, and appreciation of the true academical ideal. The life begun at King’s College forty years before in projects of University reform, was fitly closed by this account of the great western seat of learning.

Mrs. Reid died early in 1792. His feelings were thus expressed in a letter to Dugald Stewart:—

‘By the loss of my bosom friend, with whom I lived fifty-two years, I am brought into a kind of new world, at a time of life when old habits are not easily forgot, or new ones acquired. But every world is God’s world, and I am thankful for the comforts He has left me. Mrs. Carmichael has now the care of two deaf old men, and does everything in her power to please them; and both are very sensible of her goodness. I have more health than at my time of life [82] I had any reason to expect. I walk about; entertain myself with reading what I soon forget; I can converse with one person if he articulates distinctly and within ten inches of my left ear; I go to church without hearing a word of what is said. You know I had never any pretensions to vivacity, but I am still free from languor andennui.’

After this sorrow, his daughter, Mrs. Carmichael, lived much in his house in the Professors’ Court. She became a widow in the same year, for her husband died a few months after Mrs. Reid. Elizabeth Leslie, daughter of his stepsister Margaret, was also an inmate, and added to the comfort of the closing years. Soon after her father’s death Mrs. Carmichael went to live at Aberdeen.

Philosophical recognition of the genuine Common Sense or natural judgment of mankind, especially in two of its factors, which seemed to Reid obscured if not suppressed by dogmatic hypothesis, gave its character to his whole intellectual life. He found, in the first place, that ‘all philosophers; from Plato to Mr. Hume, agree in this, that we do not perceive external objects immediately, and that the immediate object of perception must be some image present to the mind.’ To rid philosophy of this hypothesis, as a mere prejudice, inconsistent with the absolute trustworthiness, and therefore with the supreme and final rational authority of our natural judgment, was the chief aim of his Aberdonian life—culminating in theInquiryin 1764. He found, in the second place, that ‘to confound the notion of agent or efficient cause with that of physical cause has been a common error of philosophers, from the days of Plato to our own’; and it seemed to him as subversive of moral relations in the universe as the other was of physical relations. Accordingly, our conception of Power or Causation chiefly engaged him in Glasgow. This appears in his ‘Essays’ on moral Power in man; in his correspondence with Kames and Gregory in the last twenty years of his life; as well as in the unpublishedfragment on ‘Power,’ in 1792, which was his last expression of reflective thought. The Philosophy of Perception and the Philosophy of Causation—our common sense of extended reality in our first intercourse with it in the senses, and our common sense conception of ‘power’ and ‘cause’ which arises in the presence of the changes amidst which we live and have our being—these were the two poles of Reid’s philosophical life. His whole life was a war against two common errors of philosophers regarding these, from the days of Plato to our own, in each of which the seeds of speculative and practical scepticism seemed to lie thickly. If these two fundamental convictions were untrustworthy, then faith in anything must lose its sustaining strength. For our perceptions through the five senses are the first principles of all our reasonings about the actual universe, and our causal judgments are the means of interpreting the realities to which those perceptions only introduce us.

We find ourselves continually in contact and collision with Power that is external to ourselves individually; and we seem, too, to be exerting powers of our own: on the Power latent in the universe, our happiness or misery, our whole destiny, depends. What does all this mean? What is meant by the judgment that all changes in the universe are ‘caused’; and what is the origin of this judgment, or of the conception of ‘cause’ that is involved in it? Are the powers which we recognise in us and around us to be referred only to inanimate things as their centres; or only to living and self-conscious persons; or to both?

Priestley, as an advocate of the claim of matter to account sufficiently for self-conscious life in man, and Kames and Priestley by their universal necessity, confirmed Reid’s disposition to inquire further into the nature andorigin of the conception of power, and the judgment that every change presupposes what we ambiguously call a cause. His cousin Gregory, too, inquired about causation, and gave the results to the world in anEssay on the Difference between the Relation of Motive and Action, and that of Cause and Effect in Physics, which appeared in 1792.

That every change must be caused, Reid regarded as a postulate of which the contradictory was absolutely inconceivable: it was necessarily implied in the common rational sense of Man, and, while incapable of logical proof, was that without which nothing else could be proved. That the things presented to our senses are themselves powerless; that all power is spiritual, referable only to Will; and that this is the common sense implicate of our physical and moral experience of changes, was the proposition which Reid now set himself to justify. Our experience of our own voluntary exertion is the only experience which directs us to the quarter in which power, properly so called, resides. A voluntary agent is our only example of a cause, or of that to which change must be finally referred as its responsible source. We can find no productive power in any inanimate thing. Matter, instead of being the universal cause, is in itself powerless, and can account for nothing. The material universe is virtually an external system of interpretable signs, regulated by non-material power.

Take the following extracts from various letters of Reid’s to Gregory, from 1785 onwards,[25]in the unpublished paper on Power:—

‘Power to produce an effect supposes power not to produce it; otherwise it is not power but necessity, which is incompatible with power taken in a strict sense.... I am not ableto form a conception how power (in the strict sense) can be exerted without will; nor can there be will without some degree of understanding. Therefore nothing can be an efficient cause in the proper sense but an intelligent being [i.e.a person]. Hence the only notion we can form of Almighty Power is, that God can do whatever He wills. Matter cannot be the cause of anything: it can only be an instrument in the hands of a real cause.... In physics the word cause has another meaning, which, though I think it an improper one, yet is distinct, and therefore may be reasoned upon. When a phenomenon is produced according to a certain law of nature, we call the law [or rule] thecauseof that phenomenon; and to the laws or rules of nature we accordingly ascribe power or efficiency. The whole business of physics is to discover, by observation and experiment, the laws of nature, and to apply them to the solution of phenomena. Now a law of nature is a purpose or resolution of the Author of nature to act according to a certain rule. There must be a real agent to produce the phenomenon according to the law. A malefactor is not hanged by the law, but by the executioner according to the law.’Again:—‘A cause in the proper and strict sense signifies amindthat has power and will to produce the effect. A cause in the physical sense means only something which, by the laws of nature, the effect always follows; as when we say that heat is the cause that turns water into vapour.... Between a physical cause and its effect the conjunction must be constant; unless in the case of a miracle. What D. Hume says of causes in general is very just when applied to physical causes—that a constant conjunction with the effect is essential to such causes, and implied in the very conception of them.’ Again:—‘I wish that the same general name—cause—had not been given to both. They differtoto genere. For a physical cause is not an agent. It does not act, but is acted upon.Youaccordingly give them different names; calling the one the agent and not the cause, the other the cause and not the agent. But I think this too bold an innovation in language. Men have been so much accustomed to call the Deity the First Cause of things, that to maintain that He is no cause at all would be too shocking. To say that the world existswithout a causewould be accounted atheism, in spite of all explanations.... The words agent and action are less ambiguous. We say onebodyacts upon another; and in vain would one attempt to abolish this language. To remedy this ambiguity of “cause” and “agent,” I say that each of these words has two meanings—a lax or popular and a philosophical.... It is remarkable that the philosophical meaning must have been the first, and the popular a corruption introduced by time.... Power is first conceived from being conscious of it in ourselves. Conceiving of inanimate beings from what we are conscious of in ourselves, we at first ascribed to them such power as we are conscious of, till experience informs us that inanimate things have not the same powers as we have; but language was formed before this discovery was made.... It is a curious question how we come by the cognition of power and cause, so that we ascribe them to things that have no will nor intelligence. I am apt to think that savages, whenever they see motion which they cannot account for, there they suppose a soul. In this period of society language is formed. At length the more acute and speculative few discover that some of the things which the vulgar believe to be animated are inanimate. What use must wise men make of this discovery? Will they affirm that the sun does not shine nor give heat? that the sea never rages nor the winds blow? nor the earth bring forth grass and corn? The wiser part will speak the common language, and suit it to their new notions as well as they can; just as philosophers still say with the vulgar, that the sun “rises” and “sets.”’

Again:—‘A cause in the proper and strict sense signifies amindthat has power and will to produce the effect. A cause in the physical sense means only something which, by the laws of nature, the effect always follows; as when we say that heat is the cause that turns water into vapour.... Between a physical cause and its effect the conjunction must be constant; unless in the case of a miracle. What D. Hume says of causes in general is very just when applied to physical causes—that a constant conjunction with the effect is essential to such causes, and implied in the very conception of them.’ Again:—‘I wish that the same general name—cause—had not been given to both. They differtoto genere. For a physical cause is not an agent. It does not act, but is acted upon.Youaccordingly give them different names; calling the one the agent and not the cause, the other the cause and not the agent. But I think this too bold an innovation in language. Men have been so much accustomed to call the Deity the First Cause of things, that to maintain that He is no cause at all would be too shocking. To say that the world existswithout a causewould be accounted atheism, in spite of all explanations.... The words agent and action are less ambiguous. We say onebodyacts upon another; and in vain would one attempt to abolish this language. To remedy this ambiguity of “cause” and “agent,” I say that each of these words has two meanings—a lax or popular and a philosophical.... It is remarkable that the philosophical meaning must have been the first, and the popular a corruption introduced by time.... Power is first conceived from being conscious of it in ourselves. Conceiving of inanimate beings from what we are conscious of in ourselves, we at first ascribed to them such power as we are conscious of, till experience informs us that inanimate things have not the same powers as we have; but language was formed before this discovery was made.... It is a curious question how we come by the cognition of power and cause, so that we ascribe them to things that have no will nor intelligence. I am apt to think that savages, whenever they see motion which they cannot account for, there they suppose a soul. In this period of society language is formed. At length the more acute and speculative few discover that some of the things which the vulgar believe to be animated are inanimate. What use must wise men make of this discovery? Will they affirm that the sun does not shine nor give heat? that the sea never rages nor the winds blow? nor the earth bring forth grass and corn? The wiser part will speak the common language, and suit it to their new notions as well as they can; just as philosophers still say with the vulgar, that the sun “rises” and “sets.”’

That morally responsible intending Will is our ultimate conception of Power or Cause, properly so called, is not less the lesson of the Birkwood manuscript ‘On Power’ of 1792. Thus:—

‘Will is necessarily implied in the notion of Power. Volition and what naturally follows upon our volitions, is all that we conceive to be in our own power. What a man never willed can never be imputed to him as his action. A being that has no will can have no power. When we impute powers to dead matter, it must be in some popular or analogical sense, but not in the proper sense. There can be no productive power in an inanimate object.... A cause is that which has power to produce an effect. When we ascribe power to things inanimateas causes, we mean nothing more than a constant conjunction by the laws or rules of nature, which experience discovers. Thus we say that the sun has power to retain the planets in their orbits, and that heat has power to melt lead. If the ignorant be led by the ambiguity of the word to conceive power in the sun or in heat to produce the effects attributed to them, this is a vulgar error which philosophy [i.e.of common sense] corrects. By what agents these effects are [immediately] produced we know not; but we have good reason to believe that they cannot be produced by inanimate matter.’

Reid also allows that, for anything we can tell, things which have no proper power of their own may be terms in a sequence that is subject to anabsolutenecessity of being the sequence that it is. But however this may be, it transcends our knowledge; we must be satisfied with the common sense conviction of persistent uniformities in fact pervading the universe of change, whether this fact is the result of a divine necessity or of arbitrary divine will. Natural uniformities are presupposed in all our reasoning about our natural surroundings, and without this presupposition things could not be reasoned about or formed into science. All our knowledge of natural events, beyond original perceptions of sense, consists in interpretation of the phenomena of which the senses make us aware. Upon this judgment of the common sense our inductions are all grounded, so that it may be called the inductive principle. Withdraw trust from it and experience becomes blind as a mole. We mayfeelwhat is present at the moment, but the distant and the future are wholly hid in darkness.

Power or intelligent agency is thus the exclusive characteristic of conscious persons: interpretable order is the characteristic of inanimate things. These are two correlative judgments or inspirations of our natural common sense uponwhich human reasonings turn. Reid finds when he reflects patiently that he is obliged, by a rational instinct as it were, to recognise himself and other persons as the centres of responsible power, the only sort of power or causality in existence that can be supposed by us; and also to recognise in the impersonal world without, something that in itself is passive and impotent, but which, as a system of interpretable sense signs, may be said metaphorically to form thelanguageof nature, of which the natural sciences are (so far) the interpretation. The universe is thus a material order directed by spiritual power, in a measure corresponding to the body and the spirit in man, as man now is. But this larger conception carries us beyond the modest philosophy to which Reid confined himself; although he more than once approached it, perhaps through some unconscious reminiscence of the Berkeleyism of his youth, of which, I think, he failed to see the real drift, as it was unfolded inAlciphronand especially inSiris.

Yet the following scrap, which I find among unpublished manuscripts of his later life, shows that such thoughts were not quite absent from his mind:—

‘The ancient philosophers called God the Soul of the World. This, considered as a figurative expression, is destitute neither of beauty nor of truth. What the soul of man is to his body, that God is to the universe, in several respects; but not in all. There are many respects in which the metaphor fails: (1) The human soul did not make its own body, but God made the world; (2) the human soul is ignorant of the nice texture and mechanism of its body, but God knows the whole mechanism of the universe, because He conceived and made it; (3) the human soul receives much of its information by bodily organs: God’s knowledge of all things is immediate and not dependent on bodily organs; (4) our power over our own bodies is limited: the power of God over the universe is unlimited; (5) ourbodies are wholly made up of inert and soulless matter: the universe is stored with various orders of living beings and free agents, subject to the Divine Power as their moral governor and capable of paying back the service of rational subjects.’

But the philosophy of the Common Sense, as represented by Reid, did not rise to the conciliation of the natural order of the material with the originative freedom of the spiritual world, in which operating law in outward nature is recognised as immediate divine agency, or a part of a revelation of perfectly reasonable Will in and through a universe of things and persons.

In the last winter of his life Reid read an interesting discourse on ‘Muscular Motion,’ in the Literary Society, of which he so long had been a member. After describing articulately the progressive changes in the human muscles which mark the advance of age, and proposing an explanation, he thus concludes his last public discourse:—

‘May I be permitted to mention that it was my own experience of some of these effects of old age on the muscular motions that led my thoughts to this explanation, which, as it is owing to the infirmities of age, will, I hope, be treated with the greater indulgence. It is both pleasant and useful to contemplate with gratitude the wisdom and goodness of the Author of our being, in fitting this machine of our body to the various employments and enjoyments of life. The structure is admirable as far as we are permitted to see it in this infancy of our being. And the internal structure which is behind the veil that limits our understanding, and which gives motion to the whole, is, in a manner most wonderful, though unknown to us, made subservient to our volition and efforts. This grand work of nature, like the fruits of the earth, has its maturity, its decay, and its dissolution. Like those also, in all its decay it nourishes a principle within which is to be the seed of a future existence. Were the fruit conscious of this, it would drop into the earth with pleasure, in the hope of a happy Resurrection. This hope, by the mercy of God, is given to all good men. It is the consolation of old age, and more than sufficient to make its infirmities sit light.’

The dissolution of the material organism which for eighty-sixyears had served the writer of these words was now near. Of his few early philosophical associates, Campbell and Beattie only were alive at the beginning of 1796, and in April of that year Campbell died. Reid followed him six months later. Dugald Stewart, then Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, gives the following account of the months before the end:—

‘In the summer of 1796, about two years after the death of his wife, he was prevailed on by Dr. Gregory to pass a few weeks at Edinburgh. He was accompanied by Mrs. Carmichael, who lived with him in Dr. Gregory’s house, a situation which united under the same roof every advantage of medical care, of tender attachment, and of philosophical intercourse. As Dr. Gregory’s professional engagements necessarily interfered with his attentions to his guests, I enjoyed more of Dr. Reid’s society than might otherwise have fallen to my share. I had the pleasure, accordingly, of spending some hours with him daily, and of attending him in his walking excursions, which frequently extended to the distance of three or four miles. His faculties (excepting his memory, which was considerably impaired) appeared as vigorous as ever; and, although his deafness prevented him from taking any share in general conversation, he was still able to enjoy the company of a friend. Mr. Playfair and myself were both witnesses of the acuteness which he displayed on one occasion, in detecting a mistake, by no means obvious, in a manuscript of his kinsman, David Gregory, on the subject of “Prime and Ultimate Ratios.” In apparent soundness and activity of body, he resembled more a man of sixty than of eighty-seven. He returned to Glasgow in his usual health and spirits; and continued for some weeks to devote as formerly a regular portion of his time to the exercise both of body and mind. It appears from a letter of Dr. Cleghorn’s to Dr. Gregory, that he was still able to work with his own hands in his garden; and he was found by Dr. Brown occupied in the solution of an algebraical problem of considerable difficulty, in which, after the labour of a day or two, he at last succeeded.’

It was thus in summer. In September he was attacked bya violent disorder, and after a severe struggle, attended with repeated strokes of palsy, he passed away on the 7th of October. Thus ended the tranquil life of deep and patient thought, which opened at Strachan and almost spanned the eighteenth century, morally and intellectually the representative of Scottish philosophical restoration under the conditions of the time. His ashes were laid in the College Church burial-ground, within the shadow of the College of which he had so long been the chief ornament, and under a tombstone bearing this inscription:—

‘Memoriæ sacrumThomæ Reid, S.T.D., quondam in Schola Regia Aberdonensi Philosophiæ Professoris; nuper vero in Universitate Glasguensi, ab anno 1764 usque ad annum 1796, Philosophiæ Moralis Professoris; qui in Scientia Mentis Humanæ, ut olim in Philosophia Naturali illustris ille Baconius Verulamius, omnia instauravit; qui ingenii acumine doctrinæque omnigenæ, summam morum gravitatem, simul atque comitatem, adjuvavit; qui obiit 7° October, 1796, annos natus 86. Cujusque ossa cum cineribusElizebethæ Reid, conjugis carissimæ, triumque filiarum morte prematura abrepturam, sepulchro condita sunt. Hoc Monumentum poni jussit filia piissima, unica superstes, Martha Carmichael.’

After the University of Glasgow had in 1872 exchanged the College in the High Street, with its touching memories, for its new and stately home on the bank of the Kelvin, Reid’s remains were carried to the Necropolis which overlooks his old home in the Drygate, and the tombstone was removed to the College on Gilmore Hill.

I find Reid’s will, dated 7th May 1792, recorded in the Sheriff-Court Books of Lanarkshire. Dr. and Mrs. Carmichael are executors, with Mr. Leslie and Mr. Rose conjoined. Furniture, books, and papers are left to Mrs. Carmichael, except a few books for the University Library.Of the rest of the property, personal and real—after payment of debts, including £300 to Dr. Carmichael, ‘payable in full of my daughter’s tocher,’ and ‘£300 to John Sargent, London, cousin-german of the dearest Elizabeth Reid, my wife’—one half is assigned to Mrs. Carmichael, and the other half, in equal portions, to ‘my sisters, Mrs. Leslie and Mrs. Rose,’ burdened with ‘a liferent annuity of £10, to my stepmother, Janet Fraser, widow of Mr. Lewis Reid.’ The real property is described as consisting of ‘eleven and a half falls of ground, with the whole houses thereon, and the well therein, bounded on the west by William Street, on the north by the property of Dr. Carmichael, on the south by the property of Joseph Crombie, and on the east by the property of John Duguid and Wm. Risk, all in the Barony parish.’ This property appears to have been bought about 1780, the year in which Reid ceased to teach in the College.

That this life, much withdrawn from the public eye in the interest of philosophic reflection, was not unappreciated when it ended, is shown by the recognition which immediately followed. On the day after he died the event was thus announced in theGlasgow Courier:—

‘Thomas Reid, D.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, died on the seventh day of October. His ingenious and elaborate works, especially hisInquiry into the Human Mind, and hisEssays on the Intellectual and the Active Powers of Man, are noble and lasting monuments of his eminent abilities, his deep penetration, and his extensive learning. By unravelling sceptical perplexities, overturning ill-founded hypotheses, and resting every conclusion on evident principles, he has brought about a memorable revolution in the Philosophy of Human Nature. His character through life was distinguished by an ardent love of truth, and an assiduous pursuitof it in various sciences; by the most amiable simplicity of manners, gentleness of temper, strength of affection, candour, and liberality of sentiments, which displayed themselves in the habitual exercise of all the social virtues; and by steadiness, fortitude, and rational piety.’

A few days later a more elaborate study of his character appeared in theCourier:—

‘Dr. Reid was unquestionably one of the profoundest philosophers of the age; and although some who think it a proof of weakness to differ from Mr. Hume have slighted the speculations of Dr. Reid, and undervalued the precision which he laboured to introduce, his Inquiry into the Senses will probably be coeval with our language. It is founded on facts which must continue to interest men while their constitution continues unchanged. In his pursuit of new knowledge he studied the late improvements in chemistry; he observed the great political events which have happened, and contemplated that with which the time seems pregnant with the keen interest of one entering on life. He venerated religion—not the noisy, contentious systems which lead men to hate and persecute each other, but the sublime principle which regulates the conduct, by controuling the selfish and animating the benevolent affections. When vilified by intemperate philosophers [e.g.Priestley], he made no reply, being satisfied with having stated what he thought the truth; and when outraged by zealots who falsely call themselves Christians, he bore the outrage meekly, using no terms of complaint or reproach. He was to the last moment free from that morose querulous temper which has been deemed inseparable from age. Instead of repining at the prosperity and enjoyments of the young, he delighted in promoting them; and after having lost all his own family except one daughter, he continued to treat children with such condescension and benignity that some very young ones noticed the peculiar kindness of his eye. His end accorded with the wisdom and goodness of his life. He used sometimes to say, “I am ashamed of having lived so long after having ceased to be useful,” though at that very time he was acquiring and communicating useful knowledge. During his last illness, which was severe, he complained of nothing but the trouble that hegave his affectionate family, and he looked to the grave as a place not of rest merely but of triumph.’

The affectionate judgment of his contemporaries, in the first days of sorrow, instead of exceeding, fall short of the deliberate judgment of leaders of European thought in a later generation. The rise of his reputation was slow. As there are too many who make themselves appear more wise than they are, it was the more uncommon fault of Reid to appear less a philosopher than he really was. Extreme caution made him suspicious of ingenious conjecture in matter-of-fact inquiry, and perhaps blinded him to the large part which imagination as well as reason has to play in progress. ‘It is genius, and not the want of it,’ he says, ‘that adulterates philosophy, and fills it with error and false theory’; and in the spirit of this warning, as well as by temperament, he was intellectually conservative more than progressive or adventurous.

In outward appearance he was somewhat under the middle size, with a bodily constitution of uncommon strength and tenacity, maintained by a methodically regulated life and habitual serenity of temper. Raeburn’s picture, now in Fyvie Castle, for which he sat during his last visit to Edinburgh, expresses the deep and persistent thought, as well as the reposeful and benevolent temper, which gave unity to his long life. Copies of this picture are preserved at Birkwood, in the College of Glasgow, and in the National Portrait Gallery at Edinburgh, as well as in the great window of the Mitchell Hall of Marischal College. There is also an excellent medallion by Tassie, done six years before Reid’s death.

After the death of Mrs. Carmichael, in February 1805, all who were descended of the Rev. Lewis Reid ofStrachan, by his wife Margaret Gregory, had passed away. His second wife and widow died at Aberdeen in 1798, like her stepson, in her eighty-seventh year, having survived him about eighteen months. The great-granddaughter of Mrs. Leslie his half-sister, Grace Anna Leslie, now of Birkwood, married Dr. Ross Paterson in 1864. Their youngest daughter has charge of the Reid family papers, to which I owe many facts first published in these pages. A son of his other half-sister, Mrs. Rose, a medical officer in the Indian army, was introduced in 1805 to Sir James Mackintosh, then Recorder of Bombay, by Professor Ogilvie of Aberdeen, as a relative of the advocate of the final philosophical appeal to the Common Sense; and Mackintosh in a letter to Mr. Ogilvie expresses the deep interest with which he saw ‘the nephew of Dr. Reid, whose philosophy, like you, I do not embrace, but whose character and talents every cultivator of science must venerate.’ Sir James’s later judgments of the philosophy, after a more attentive study of its scope, were more favourable.

We find truth, as Pascal says, not only by logical reasoning but by an act of immediate reason, not to be effaced by all the subtleties of the speculative sceptic, who is thus confounded by the resistance of rational human nature. This is a general expression of Reid’s more elaborate reply to sceptical distrust in all human knowledge and belief. That genuine human nature, when awakened into conscious life, is practically irresistible, is what Reid insists on; for no sane man acts in contradiction to the common sense of which he is conscious, although he can speculate sceptically in an abstract way, and may even serve truth in doing so. For this scepticism may amend philosophical systems in which the constituent principles of human nature are not theoretically recognised in their integrity; and it may also stimulate the unphilosophical to a deeper and truer insight of what the natural principles are on which men must proceed in their actions. But the principles themselves are not reached by reasoning: they are the inspiration of God; and it is this divine inspiration that makes experience and reasoning at all possible for men.

That I am an individual self-conscious person, to whom something other than, and independent of, my individual self is presented in my senses—so independent of meindividually that it can inform me of the existence of other persons whose conscious life is numerically different from mine; that the free agency of a person is the only sort of power that we are obliged to recognise, persons being revealed as responsible powers in and through our moral nature; and that the powerless things of sense, of which we are immediately percipient in our sense perceptions, are interpretable for purposes of common life and science, inasmuch as their changes must be determined by natural laws, all reasoning being otherwise impossible—theseI think are the chief ‘inspirations’ or ‘revelations’ of the Common Sense on which Reid enlarges. This account of those inspirations is not offered as complete; only as results, more or less fragmentary, reached by the deep and steady reflection of a long life.

Reid’s philosophical appeal to the divine inspirations of the common sense, without which nothing can be proved, on behalf of truths which do not admit of direct logical proof, but only of a sort of philosophical justification, has been disparaged as an ignoble retreat from the standpoint of the philosopher, in the interest of popular prejudices and blind authority. It has been spoken of as an appeal from the reasoned judgments of the reflecting minority to the unreasoned opinions of the unreflecting majority, an opening for arbitrary dogmas to enter and crush free inquiry. This is the drift of the criticism of Priestley in last century, and of Ferrier in this, while Kantian critics complain of Reid’s lazy arrest of philosophy at the level of ordinary beliefs. Besides this, what Reid claims as ‘the chief merit of his philosophy’—that of questioning the common assumption that external things cannot present themselves in our perceptions, but onlyunauthenticated representations of them—proceeds, according to Priestley, on a misinterpretation of the metaphorical language of philosophers: to refute it is an idle waste of controversial labour, taking figures of speech for serious science.

If ‘common sense’ in this philosophy means only unintelligent opinion, as opposed to the judgments of thinkers, Reid’s response to the sceptic may well be regarded as an arrest of intelligence,—blind dogmatism instead of philosophy. But candid critics interpret words in the meaning intended by those who use them. This appeal to the judgments named those of the common sense, is intended as an appeal to reason itself—reason, that is to say, in its final form in a finite intelligence, whose experience of the universe is incomplete, and working under conditions imposed upon its exercise in intelligent beings who are not omniscient. Reid’s Common Sense is the final perception of a being who can know the universe of reality only in part, and is therefore needed by man in that intermediate position in which an absolute beginning or end of things must be to him incomprehensible. It is an appeal to that which must in reason be final, in an intelligence that only partly shares in divine omniscient reason. Although its judgments are not evolved from premises, they are nevertheless what all men, except infants and lunatics, more or less distinctly acknowledge in their individual actions, although they may misconstrue them in their uneducated opinions, or spoil them by indulgence in purely speculative systems. The divine inspiration of the common sense is therefore man’s final support, amidst the so-called ‘contingencies’ of temporal change in himself and his surroundings. A philosophical appeal to it isof practical importance in reference to what, at the human point of view, are contingent truths of moral reasoning: the necessary truths of abstract thought, it has been well said, ‘sufficiently guard themselves.’

Accordingly the judgments of the common sense which chiefly interested Reid are what he calls first principles of ‘contingent’ truths, as distinguished from abstract necessities the opposites of which are self-contradictory or unthinkable. Contingent truths, on the other hand, may be rejected in thought; but those who reject them speculatively must proceed upon them in their actions and reasonings, including even sceptical reasonings. The man whose scepticism involves a practical surrender of the common judgment, that what we call the outward world is independent enough ofhisindividual existence to make it a trustworthy medium of intercourse for him with other living persons; and who acts accordingly on the belief that ‘other persons’ are only conscious states of his own individual mind, would be pronounced a lunatic. Again, the fatalist, who rejects practically the moral judgment that refers the issues of a deliberate voluntary determination to the voluntary or personal agent as its responsible centre, insanely sits still in the midst of danger, and refrains from exerting a power which he denies. And he who refuses to proceed upon the logically undemonstrable postulate of universal natural order, by ceasing to reason about wholly uninterpretable chaos, is inevitably crushed by the Universal Power that he ignores.

It is thus that practical disregard of inspired final reason appears to Reid to be ‘destructive at once of the science of the philosopher, the prudence of the man of the world, and the faith of the Christian.’ The unjust as well as the just,so far as they live at all, must, he sees, live by faith in what cannot be either proved or disproved by direct demonstration. And if all those final judgments of practical reason were contradicted in daily action, as well as in academic theory, ‘piety, patriotism, parental affection, and private virtue would appear as ridiculous as knight-errantry: the pursuits of pleasure, ambition, and avarice must be grounded upon this sort of belief as well as those that are honourable and virtuous.’

On the other hand there are common prejudices which, while they last, are popularly dignified as ‘common sense.’ Some now universally admitted truths of science at first shocked men, although afterwards found to be in harmony with the general common sense to which philosophy appeals. That we are living on a material ball that revolves in space; that the revolving ball revolves also on its axis; that the sun does not rise and set, but is at rest; the existence of the antipodes; the invisibility of the distances of things—are a few examples. Instead of contradicting the common sense, the common sense, in the light of further experimental evidence, finally imposes them upon us. At any ratetheircontradictories cannot be justified by the universal intellectual paralysis which is the alternative to the rejection of agenuinejudgment of the common sense. The assertion that the earth is in motion and the sun relatively at rest does not contradict sane human nature: that changes in nature are all wholly chaotic, and therefore wholly uninterpretable, can never become a scientific discovery, because it implies subversion of all science and makes scientific reasoning impossible. The invisibility of the distances of things, rightly understood in the light of its evidence, draws no protest from genuine human nature.Human nature or final reason protests, on the other hand, when the material world is believed to be so unreal that I cannot by means of it find that there are other human beings. The impotence of all things presented to the senses does not contradict reason in the common sense in the way the impotence, and consequent irresponsibility, of man does.

But Reid, I think, makes too little of the service of philosophical reflection, in quickening into conscious life in the individual the postulates on which human knowledge and conduct finally turn, and in developing their meaning. Such primary assumptions as the real existence of outward things; our own individual personal existence; and the existence of God, are held with very different degrees of intelligence, by the indolent and thoughtless and by those who reflect. Advance in philosophy is advance in interpreting the meaning of each of these three postulates, and of their mutual relations, as seen in an improved conception of what ‘matter’ means, what ‘self’ means, and what ‘God’ means. The common sense or final reason of man is developed in different degrees in different persons, in different places, at different periods of human history, and in the same person at different times in his life. It is not individually independent of evolutionary law; although its genuine constituents are latent in each man and may be made to respond to an adequate appeal. The practical reason of the common sense, while not founded on but presupposed in philosophy, may nevertheless be deepened and enlightened in each man by reflection and criticism. Its final action is therefore far from superseding the philosopher, who has to systematise man’s advancing experience of the universe in the light of an idealisedcommon sense, or the common sense in the ideal man, which the philosopher tries to approach more nearly. In this intellectual progress the cruder conceptions of ‘matter’ and ‘self’ and ‘God,’ as well as of the final physical and the moral relations of the three postulated existences, are purified and expanded; but always without disparagement to the primary roots. Improvement of human knowledge, in harmony with the awakened common sense inspirations, is our intellectual ideal.

It may perhaps be said that Reid makes his appeal to the root principles of practical reason—the essential sanity of mankind—only on behalf of what no one seriously calls in question; and moreover that he attributes the scepticism with which he struggled to a speculative theory of philosophers, instead of to facts in nature and in man, which suggest distrust in the ‘inspirations’ on which human understanding depends, in its lack of omniscience. What need, it may be asked, for a prolonged endeavour to justify belief in the existence of the house in which we live, the planet on which it stands, or the human beings among whom we seem to play our parts? Only insane persons—really insane—can be found to doubt realities like these. Insanity cannot be cured by an elaborate disproof of the ‘ideal system’; and as for the sane, such common sense sanities as these are safe enough without this philosophical appeal to human sanity. As regards those beliefs—si non rogas intelligo. I know all that I need to know, as long as I am not asked to justify and explain my knowledge, logically or otherwise, and remain contented to enjoy the things that unpractical thinkers vainly try to understand.

That sceptical distrust in our original faculties, and inPower or Providence that is finally operative in the universe in which we have our being, lies deeper than the ‘ideal system’ which was Reid’s bugbear; and also that it arises mostly in connection with less obtrusive elements in the common sense than our perceptions through the five senses, is in harmony with the gradual development of Reid’s own thought which I have tried to trace. For he advanced, as we saw, from reflection upon those ‘inspirations’ of the common sense that are implied in our physical perceptions, to reflection upon those other data of the common sense that are implied in our perceptions of personal and morally responsible agency. It is in touching and seeing the material world that the common sense is first awakened; and thus the material world is the most obtrusive object in human experience, its perceptions affording the fittest preliminary object-lesson on the office of this final reason in the whole rational economy of man. External perceptions are the beginnings of all reasonings about concrete existence. They are the obvious examples of those original judgments, which are ‘the inspiration of the Almighty,’ more obvious than the often dormant ones that are moral and spiritual. All the discoveries of our reason are grounded on them. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder in the constitution, is calledlunacyby all; as when a man believes that he is made of glass: but when a man suffers himself to be reasoned out of them by metaphysical arguments he would call thismetaphysical lunacy; which differs from the other species of the distemper in this, that it is not continued, but intermittent. He thus tests reason in its final authority, as distinguished from reason in its innumerable inferential exercises: the authority may be logically vindicated asreasonable, but its judgments are not conclusions originally deduced from premises.

It must also be remembered that the Reidian protest on behalf of a philosophical recognition of the blended judgment and feeling which makes this common reason that is more or less consciously alive in all men, is a protest on behalf of the regulative authority of this reason in its genuine integrity. All philosophical systems, so far, proceed upon and acknowledge its judgments; but, as it seemed to Reid, often only after spoiling them. He made it his particular mission to restore them in their genuine integrity to philosophy as the prime factors of all true theories. In perception does the outward reality actually appear, extended as it really is, without any unextended medium interposed, exactly as the internal reality of a pain or a pleasure appears without a medium, when I am conscious of being pained or pleased? If so, let us then, Reid would say, accept this fact as final, even although we cannot account for it; instead of perverting it by supposing that the external reality is one thing, and the immediately perceived object of which alone we are curious a different thing;—dreaming that this supposed internal object, as its copy, explains our perception of the external object that is imperceptible. Again, according to genuine common sense, the ‘self’ which I am obliged to presuppose is invisible; my body or my brain is external toit, as much so as the sun and moon are; for they are all parts of the material world—all objects of my senses—unlike my proper personality, which is approached only through the inner consciousness, and not at all through perception of the senses. Here, too, Reid protests on behalf of the genuine common sense, and against the scientifically pervertedcommon sense offered to him by Priestley. For the distinctive feature of Reidism is not vague acknowledgment of the common sense, but acknowledgment of it as it is found to be when steadfast reflection is applied to the final mental experience of man.

A modern critic may complain that Reid’s point of view is too narrow and special, and his method too matter-of-fact to entitle the result to be called philosophy. It looks unlike philosophy proper, which is concerned with the universe and universals, and is like a special science of human mind, having human mind for its finite object or province, as other special sciences have their limited provinces. For instance, astronomy has the stellar bodies; chemistry, the elementary constitution of bodies; geology, the phenomena in the strata of the earth’s crust; and so on. Now the final problem of universal reality, or at least universal reality in ultimate relation to man, is the proper business of the philosopher, who contemplates the all-comprehensive synthesis which sustains or explains each special science, and even the universe of nature and man; while, as human philosophy, it still recognises the inherent infinity that makes realities overleap the special sciences. For philosophy is the supreme speculation, concerned with Matter or outward Nature, Self or Spirit, and God or the final all-determining Power—and of this final inquiry Reid had hardly a conception. Yet we must allow that when Reid’s method is called ‘inductive,’ it is more than inductive in the ordinary meaning of the word induction in the natural sciences. He does not reach the several principles of the common sense by the way of probable generalisation from observed facts; rather as truths which arise out of latency into more or less distinctconsciousness, in response to steadfast meditation. They are philosophically recognised ‘inspirations,’ or ‘revelations’—not tentative generalisations; and their justification must not be confounded with the ordinary verification with which we are familiar in sciences of outward nature. The common sense provides material to the philosopher, not ready made, but still not mere issue of empirical generalisation.

How far a philosophy akin to that of Reid admits of philosophical expansion, or of being brought up to date at the end of the nineteenth century, when the fundamental questions of religious thought are at the root of our doubts and perplexities, may be considered on a review of the fortunes of Reid’s appeal to the inspirations of final reason in the century which has passed since he died.

How has Reid’s protest of reason in the name of common sense—a protest against sceptical paralysis of human intelligence, physical and moral—fared in the nineteenth century? Has Reid by this protest established what is of lasting value either to human happiness or to philosophical theory? What has modern thought, as developed at the end of the nineteenth century, to say to a Scottish eighteenth century inquiry into human mind that finds its root in a postulated sense of reality, which must be taken as finally authoritative when it is recognised in its genuine integrity? How do faith and doubt now stand finally related, as compared with their relations when Reid opposed Hume? Is there still room for philosophical argument founded on the divine inspirations of the Common Sense, under, for instance, our transformed conception of the universe as an evolution?

Expansion rather than subversion of the philosophy which ultimately argues from the common sense, has, I think, been going on. Matter-of-fact study of human mind, as engaged in perception of the material world, and in the moral exercise of voluntary agency, which with Reid makes this perception of matter, and moral consciousnessof free agency its prominent spiritual facts, has now risen to criticism of our conception of the Supreme Power that is finally at work in the universe in which we live and move and have our being. And a less purely academic scepticism than that against which Reid summoned the common sense now confronts us. If Reid’s mission was to call attention to our direct mental grasp of outward realities, by exploding a theory which seemed to paralyse that grasp, it would have been his corresponding mission now to justify, in name of the moral and spiritual elements of the common sense, the religious interpretation of the universe, which finds in the facts of matter and man a continuous self-revelation of omnipotent love and mercy—and this in the face of a world which repels our more philanthropic civilisation, by its abundant suffering and sin. Instead of philosophy at war with common sense, common sense is now alleged as at war with the finally moral and religious conception of the universe, which Reid accepted as conclusive under the premises of an old-fashioned natural theology. Now universal natural law is supposed to exclude God, and sentient misery to make theistic faith in the goodness, and therefore trustworthiness, of the Supreme Power an anachronism, which must give place to universal pessimist doubt and despair. How can we rest with trust in those practical principles of human nature to which Reid appealed, when they and we are found in a universe so full of evil as this in which we find ourselves? Are we not navigating the ocean of life in a vessel that is not seaworthy? These are questions now expressed or felt.

For forty years after Reid’s death the higher thought of Scotland, represented by its leaders, remained well within the old lines. It was still careful analysis of what ispresented in human consciousness, with a gradual decline of interest in the metaphysical and moral problems which Hume’s agnostic distrust had introduced even into Reid’s modest treatment of the common sense. Scottish philosophy became a search for natural sequences and co-existences among phenomena, instead of search for firm intellectual and moral footing in a universe to which we are introduced by being percipient of an infinitesimal part through our five senses. For a quarter of a century Dugald Stewart was Reid’s acknowledged successor, less original, and even less adventurous, than his master, but unrecognisable in the ill-tempered criticism of Schopenhauer. With dignified eloquence, wider intimacy with society than Reid’s, and more learning, he applied inductive methods to find the laws that determine intellectual character and the education of the human mind, also to solve social questions, in graceful language—all which touched the popular imagination more than his somewhat prosaic predecessor.

Early in the nineteenth century, Thomas Brown, the young Edinburgh Professor of Moral Philosophy, and colleague of Stewart, raised a revolt against Reid and Stewart in some of their characteristic philosophy. This brilliant youth, minor poet as well as philosopher, had practised medicine in Edinburgh before his appointment, in 1810, at the age of thirty-two, to the chair of Stewart. In medical practice he had been the colleague of Dr. Gregory, Reid’s cousin, and so long his correspondent. Brown, unlike Reid, was one of the precocious philosophers. At the age of twenty he appeared as a critic of theZoonomiaof Darwin, and a few years later as author of anInquiry intothe Relation of Cause and Effect, which contains the essence of the philosophy that was afterwards expanded and applied in hisLectures. He died at the age of forty-two, leaving works undistinguished by the deep and patient thought of Reid, and diffuse in style, but abounding in ingenious analysis—an interesting contribution to the logic of physical inquiry, instead of appeals to carefully considered judgments of the Common Sense in Perception and in Causation. Brown recognised instinctive belief in natural constancies of co-existence and sequence among phenomena, and treated associations among mental states as the chief explanation of the phenomena of mind. The originative moral agency of intending and intelligent Will, so prominent latterly in Reid, disappears in Brown. And Brown, like Priestley, disparaged Reid’s claim to merit for reversing the philosophical prejudice that ‘ideas’ are the only objects of human cognition, regarding it as a metaphor mistaken for a dogma. Indeed, the empirical laws of association tend with Brown, as with Priestley, to be the sole ultimate laws of mind: perhaps this tendency was restrained in expression as much by personal respect for Reid and Stewart as by conviction.

After Brown, philosophy in Scotland was for a time dormant—superseded by Combe and phrenology. But contemporaneously, in ‘the twenties,’ a philosophy more akin to Reid than to Brown made its appearance in England; although the analogy is not on the surface, and has not, I think, been observed. Coleridge, especially in hisAids to Reflection, published in 1825, insists with eloquent emphasis upon the difference between ‘the Reason,’ which is divine or inspired, and mere ‘Understanding,’ which generalises the phenomena that emerge in experience: he also pressesthe distinction between free agency, as implied in morally responsible causation, and the mechanical order of nature with which physical sciences are exclusively concerned. ‘The Reason,’ to which Coleridge appeals, corresponds in function to ‘the Common Sense’ of Reid. It is described as fixed and final; as in all its decisions appealing to itself; and as ‘much nearer to sense than the understanding,’ for it is direct insight of truth, whereas understanding must refer all its judgments to premises. That man, because he is morally responsible, must originate, within his individual personality as their final centre, all acts for which he is responsible, is with Coleridge a postulate, ‘the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every manmayfind for himself,’ and so see the true meaning of the words power and causality. In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations of the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason. We may speak of understanding as ‘human,’ with its often discordant generalisations; but there can be no merely ‘human’ Reason. There neither is nor can be but one and the same Reason; the light without which the individual understanding would be darkness.

The philosophy that carefully measures its conclusions by the Common Sense found its way from Scotland into France early in this century, in arrest of the materialism and scepticism which had taken the place of the spiritual philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. In 1811 Royer Collard, eminent as a philosopher and a statesman, was made Professor of Philosophy in Paris. In that year, when he was preparing his lectures, he accidentally found a copy of Reid’sInquiryat a book-stall near the Seine.He was charmed with its contents, which thereafter inspired his teaching.[26]Through Royer Collard, Reid’s philosophy became the dominant philosophy of France, and it still retains an elevating spiritual influence in the national schools.[27]In 1828 Reid’s works were translated and discussed by Jouffroy, a leading thinker in his generation, who thus leavened thinking minds among contemporaries. But Victor Cousin was Reid’s most eloquent and famous missionary. He had been educated by Royer Collard in Reid’s principles. His ardent and comprehensive genius, however, became dissatisfied with what he called a ‘sage but timid doctrine,’ and treated it as a vigorous but hardly philosophical protest against the sceptic in the name of uncritical common sense. In his enthusiasm, Cousin turned to Germany for ‘a philosophy so masculine and brilliant that it could command the attention of Europe.’ At first he thought he found in Kant the profound refutation of the sceptic, and the grand constructive philosophy he wanted. But soon Kant’s mode of expelling the ‘mortal poison’ seemed as unsatisfactory as Reid’s, and he parted company with him so far as to join first Schelling and then Hegel in an eclectic or all-reconciling system. But in the end the fascination of Hegelian thought abated. There might, after all, be deeper meaning, and more capacity for development, in Reid’s appeal than he had supposed. So in his later years Cousin returned to his first love. HisPhilosophie Écossaise, which appeared in its latest form in 1857, is an eloquent appreciation of Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Reid, and Beattie, with Reid as the chief figure in the centre.

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