FOOTNOTES

Meantime a formidable intellectual force had appeared in Scotland, in argumentative collision with those Germans by whom Cousin had been fascinated, and also with Cousin’s own eclectic assimilation of all philosophies. Sir William Hamilton was warning his contemporaries against the ‘masculine and brilliant’ Continental philosophy, and energetically recalling them to Reid, by two essays in theEdinburgh Review—one in October 1829, destructive of the ‘Philosophy of the Unconditioned,’ the other in October 1830, constructive, on Reid’s ‘Philosophy of Perception.’ The reconstruction of the philosophy of the Common Sense, contained by implication in these famous essays, was, in 1846, elaborated in commentaries which embrace the literature of philosophy, in Hamilton’sReid. The Glasgow professor re-appeared in the company of the most learned of all Scottish philosophers, educated especially by Aristotle and his commentators, by Kant, and by Reid himself, whose modest enterprise was now measured by the profoundest problems and most comprehensive conceptions of ancient and modern speculation. The magnificent intellect of Hamilton raised deep questions among us that lay dormant in Reid.

Hamilton in Scotland is so far in parallel with Cousin in France, that—moving in opposite directions—they both helped togermanisethe philosophy which makes its last appeal to the common sense. Cousin, dissatisfied with the ‘timidity’ of Reid, tried to reconcile a philosophy that should comprehend the Infinite with the philosophy that is confined to experience. Hamilton’s mission was to clip the wings of the speculative adventurers. This made him put the emphasis on the inadequacy of a human understanding for fully coping with the eternal reality. While he praisedReid for making the Common Sense in its integrity the necessary criterion of philosophy, he claimed for himself the special credit of distinguishing its necessities as of two sorts—the one a positive power, the other the impotence implied in finite intelligence. Hence human experience rests on a conditioned, or (so far) paralysed intelligence; and if omniscience only can be called ‘knowledge,’ while to know ‘in part,’ therefore with involved mysteries, must be called ignorance—it follows that man knows nothing. Ignorance is then the consummation of human philosophy, and its highest attainment is this discovery. ‘Our dream of knowledge is a little light rounded with darkness.’ ‘The highest reach of science and philosophy is the scientific recognition of human ignorance.’ ‘Doubt is the beginning and the end of all our efforts to know.’ ‘The last and highest consecration of all true religion is an altar to the unknown and unknowable God.’ Man’s knowledge of existence must be relative to his limited experience and intelligence.

The missionary of a neglected truth is apt to be one-sided and even paradoxical, and strenuous expression was natural to Hamilton. From his first essay in 1829 to his last in 1855 he sought to show the inconsistency of infinite knowledge with our limited share of inspiration in the Common Sense. Accordingly, the negative and incomplete, or what Bacon calls ‘broken’ character of man’s knowledge, rather than its positive victories, is ever supreme in theHamiltonianisedReid, along with a recast of Reid’s account of the Common Sense as involved in perception of the outward things of sense.

The respective offices of Reid and Hamilton might be compared in this aphorism of Pascal—‘La Nature soutientla Raison impuissante.’ Need for the common sense with which human nature is charged, illustrates the impotence of man’s unomniscient understanding and limited share of the Divine Reason. Taking those words of Pascal, Reid puts emphasis on ‘la nature’; Hamilton on ‘impuissance.’ But both are recognised by each: it is a difference of emphasis. Neither Hamilton nor Mansel excludes the conservative influence of ‘la nature,’ taken in its integrity, in the way Mr. Herbert Spencer does, when he rests philosophy only on the strongly emphasised part of Hamiltonian philosophy. In Hamilton the ‘raison impuissante’ is insisted on really in order to make room for ‘la nature’; on the ground that the logical understanding, here ‘la raison,’ is too impotent to be able todisprovethe genuine judgments of the Common Sense.

Brown’s rebellion against Reid early in the century, in the interest of a universal physical causation or association, has its parallel in Ferrier’s revolt, in the middle of the century, against the Hamiltonian Reid, in the interest of abstract metaphysics as opposed to uncriticised common sense. In the name of philosophy he excludes from philosophy all except necessary truths of abstract reason; neglecting, as beneath its regard, the world of change, in which Reid’s mixed and practical reason, or Common Sense, had been offered as final guide. The office of philosophy, according to Ferrier, is among the eternal truths, which alone can be absolutely demonstrated, and which relieve philosophy from ‘the oversight of popular opinion and the errors of psychological science,’ which had been unworthily dignified as the final test of truth. The natural beliefs of mankind, instead of being worshipped as divine, are banished in Ferrier’s philosophy,on the ground that their self-contradictoriness is demonstrable: the business of the philosopher, accordingly, is to substitute ‘reasonable thinking’ for ‘common sense.’ The ‘raison impuissante,’ emphasised by Hamilton—the ignorance in which Hamilton revels—is not allowed by Ferrier to be ignorance at all; for ‘man cannot be said to be ignorant of self-contradictions that can be knowledge for no mind, human or divine.’ Independent or unperceived matter is not merely hid from man’s knowledge on account of his ‘raison impuissante’; it is hid from all intelligence, because inconsistent with thenecessarilymind-dependent essence of Being. Pure reason does not need to be finally supplemented by practical principles of common sense. It is able to shift for itself without this surrender. The conciliation of common sense thinking and philosophy is accomplished by the submission of common sense to universal compulsory reason. Opinion must submit to demonstration, instead of demonstration, intelligible only by the few, having to make way for the undemonstrable dogmas of the unreflecting.

Reid, I suspect, could hardly recognise, in the stuffed figure thus put up by Ferrier to be knocked down, either the ‘common sense’ in whichhefound the root of a human knowledge of the realities revealed in place and time throughout the long experience of man, or the ‘perception’ in which things external to the individual mind make their appearance ‘in part.’ The practical impassibility of disbelieving the existence of other living beings, of discarding memory as wholly delusion, of treating man as irresponsible, and our surroundings as chaotic or wholly uninterpretable, alike for science and in common life—these were alleged constituents of the common sense with which Reidconcerned himself. They all lie outside the demonstrations of Ferrier, in which he unfolds his theory in forms of artistic beauty and easy grace, which make him the most picturesque figure in the succession of Scottish philosophers. Yet Brown and Ferrier in the end helped on the expansion of Reid.

Before Ferrier passed away in 1864, a revolution in the conception of the universe was in progress in Britain. The idea of continuous physical evolution of external nature and of man, promulgated biologically by Darwin, and by Mr. Herbert Spencer as the all-comprehensive generalised law of a universe that was supposed to be the outcome of unknowable Power, has become a popular creed within the last forty years. Simultaneously, methods of development akin to Hegel were introduced by Dr. Hutcheson Stirling in hisSecret of Hegel, and afterwards in Glasgow by Dr. Caird, who adorned Reid’s chair for nearly thirty years—methods for making explicit latent Divine Reason as what explains and sustains the universe. Reid’s appeal in a practical temper, to the mixed and moral reason in man, as that with which man is inspired—an appeal widened and prolific of deeper questions in Hamilton—was still too cautious to attempt to formulate the mysteries of existence, in fully intelligible principles, which should remove the darkness around the ‘little light’ with which Reid was satisfied. He would have looked with distrust at the more ambitious intellectual constructions which seemed to be superseding the common sense of human nature, as the human response to the sceptic or agnostic, whose philosophical knowledge turned all knowledge into ignorance at the last. Reid was too human to be satisfied with merely physical generalisationsof sequences and co-existences of phenomena, finally unintelligible, and therefore unworthy of trust; and he would have been too cautious to accept a network of abstract intellectual necessities, latent in the universe, as the last and best human account of nature and man as actually found in place and time. To rest satisfied with the evolutionary generalisation he would have regarded as involving the ‘common error of philosophers since the days of Plato,’ in confounding moral agency with physical causation. Of the magnificent Hegelian constructions he would probably have said, what he says of Samuel Clarke’s theological demonstration—‘These are the speculations of men of superior genius. But whether they be as solid as they are sublime, or whether they be the wanderings of imagination in a region beyond the limit of human understanding, I am unable to determine.’

The alternatives presented to this generation—either agnostic pessimist despair or universal science in which man is in some sense identified with God—final nescienceversusfinal omniscience—ultimate and universal problem of existence taking the place of a Reid’s science of human mind—represent the unending struggle between sceptical distrust of the Universal Power, ignorantly worshipped, and reasonable ethical faith in the Universal Power, with consequent hope for men. It is in Scotland a new form of the war with David Hume to which Reid’s life was given. It has been going on since Socrates argued with the Sophists at Athens, and since Job justified the morality of Providence among the Eastern emirs. The eighteenth-century question, ‘What is Matter?’ has risen in the nineteenth to the question, ‘What is God?’ The inspired Common Sense or Common Reason of Reid seems to be sublimatedin universally necessitating dialectical Reason, in this Scoto-German way of resisting the agnostic. To fill the place of the ‘unknown and unknowable God’ of the Hamiltonian emphasis, human knowledge appears identified and co-extensive with the Divine, in an absolute idealism, presumed to be the only adequate refutation of all subverting doubt. The ‘raison impuissante,’ sustained by and culminating in ‘la nature,’ or inspired common sense, is exchanged for what looks like a pantheistic necessity that leaves no room for moral agency in man or God, and which scorns the incomplete knowledge that cannot dispense with a faith venture at its root.

Yet Reid, if he were now among us, might find the common sense not superseded but idealised, in the more articulate response of reason in man to the all-pervading active Reason which the later philosopher identifies with his own. That the common sense latent in man is the inspiration of God is an assumption with which he started in hisInquiry. ‘The inspiration of the Almighty giveth man understanding.’ ‘The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.’ So the common sense moral trust in God, or universal moral venture, is at the root of all human life and human knowledge, giving unity and vitality to the whole. It is the ‘little light’—a ray from the perfect divine light,—and the universe is interpretable for all human purposes only in and through it. It is that in each of us through which the inspirations in the ideal man, when dormant in individuals, can nevertheless be made to respond, in an ethical or religious common sense of the infinite love and mercy of the all-sustaining Power that is always waiting to be gracious—to respond to the inspirations of Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles.

If ‘knowledge’ means only what is reached by the logical understanding elaborating materials given by sense; and if the name is denied to the inspirations of the Common Sense, what those inspirations should be called becomes a question about the meaning of a word. God is then ‘unknowable’ by man, only inasmuch as faith in the perfect reason and goodness of the Universal Power is more than an ordinary scientific generalisation. But if we recognise in the Common Sense, and in its underlying Theistic Faith, that without which all our knowledge must dissolve in ignorance, then the faith must be accepted as in reason the final ground of the knowledge; and therefore as in us the last form of the universal reason, in and through which what is divine in us protests against limitation to an intelligence that becomes paralysed in the absence of this its indispensable factor. If knowledge means omniscient physical science of the universe of reality, then the universe of realityisfinally unknown and unknowable. But if mancanlive in intelligible relations to what transcends natural science,—call this which enables him so to live, ‘knowledge,’ ‘science,’ ‘common sense,’ ‘faith,’ ‘inspiration,’ ‘revelation,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘reason,’—it is treasure found for the philosopher.

Can Reid’s ‘common sense’ be sublimated into the universal consciousness of Hegelian dialectic, and does this translation of faith into absolute science constitute the true ideal of Scottish common sense philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century? Is common knowledge, and scientific knowledge in special sciences, only knowledge ‘in part,’ while the true philosopher may aspire to know even as God knows? Must man thus claim omniscience as the only fit ground of his protest against sceptical nescience?Or, must his interpretation of the experience through which he is passing be, even in the end, only an inspired faith-venture, instead of the omniscience which elevates the common sense into itself? Rather, must not the supposed omniscience, which is dissatisfied with faith-ventures, because faith is supposed to be blind, be itself only the common sense under another name—but with its intellectual constitution more articulately explicated?

Surely only omniscience and omnipotence can dispense with the moral and religious venture of our inspired common sense and its implied theistic faith, as the root of reason in man—in his intermediate place and office, between perfect knowledge and total ignorance. So understood, Reid’s philosophy isvirtuallythe philosophy that makes its final appeal to the divine in man, latent in each individual man, in and through whom the universe is gradually interpreted as a revelation of perfect reason or perfect goodness. True philosophy is then the moral and religious venture which accepts and applies the principles of common sense, in the assurance that, in genuine submission to their inspired authority, we cannot finally be put to intellectual or moral confusion. Faith in God is latent even in the perceptions of external sense, in which Reid found the first example of the operation of this inspiration. Alike in the outer world of the senses, and in free or responsible agency in man, filial faith, ethical or theistic, may be justified by reasoning, although it Cannot be reached by logic as a direct conclusion from premises. It is our primary postulate, and not an object of logical proof; therefore credible in reason while it is not demonstrable.

In this way a humanised Hegelianism, which seeks torestore or retain the often dormant faith in the perfectly good God, and thus in the future of man, may even be taken as in line with Reid, under the altered intellectual conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. It virtually appeals at last to moral faith.[28]

Poetry in another way than philosophy expresses and interprets for man the inspired experience that transcends physical science and its logical understanding. And we find in the great poets of the Victorian era an appeal through the imagination to those elements in human nature, to which Reid made argumentative appeal as a philosopher. In this lies Wordsworth’s ‘healing power.’ His ‘Intimations of Immortality’ express divine inspirations, through which man learns to understand himself and his surroundings—inspirations that, dormant, ‘fade into the light of common day,’ yet, recovered by reflection, ‘in a season of calm weather, though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither.’ And ‘In Memoriam’ is Tennyson’s protest against the doubting spirit of the age, on behalf of the final and life-determining principles, which underlie creeds, belong to our earliest childhood, and on which the wisest and best have rested with a more or less intelligent consciousness through the ages—God revealed in the ideal man latent in all men. The human office of inspired common sense or ethical reason, final for beings whose ‘knowledge’ must be intermediate between omniscience and blind ignorance of mere sense and feeling, is its tacit philosophy—

‘Our wills areours, we know not how,Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.We have butfaith: we cannotknow;For knowledge is of things we see;And yet we trust it comes fromThee,A beam in darkness: let itgrow.Let knowledge grow from more to more,But more of reverence in us dwell;That mind and soul, according well,May make one music as before,But vaster.’

‘Our wills areours, we know not how,Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.

‘Our wills areours, we know not how,

Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.

We have butfaith: we cannotknow;For knowledge is of things we see;And yet we trust it comes fromThee,A beam in darkness: let itgrow.

We have butfaith: we cannotknow;

For knowledge is of things we see;

And yet we trust it comes fromThee,

A beam in darkness: let itgrow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,But more of reverence in us dwell;That mind and soul, according well,May make one music as before,

Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;

That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster.’

Our scientific interpretation of the ever-changing universe at last rests on ethical theistic faith, and the Christian revelation of divine love is responded to by the divine inspiration of God in Man, in the form of the spiritual Common Sense. If this be not so, we cannot rely on the Common Sense, for it then belongs to a morally untrustworthy universe.

Established on this faith, philosophy or theology, in Scotland and throughout the world, awaits the sceptical criticism and the spiritual healing power of the masters of thought in the twentieth century, for its further development, and application to human affairs.

THE END

FOOTNOTES[1]The above from data at Birkwood.[2]Scottish Notes and Queries, iii. 84-88; 128.[3]The number is, unfortunately, unrecorded.[4]BirkwoodMSS.[5]InScotland and Scotsmen of the Eighteenth Century, by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, there is an interesting account of this Mr. Bisset.[6]Essays on the Intellectual Powers, II. ch. 10.[7]While he lived here, he seems to have retained the incumbency of New Machar till May 1752.[8]Long ago removed. I have an engraving of it.[9]TheseMS.dissertations have been lately recovered, and I have thus been able to compare them with theInquiry, in which I find them mostly embodied.[10]BirkwoodMS.[11]I have elsewhere discussed the true meaning of Berkeley’s philosophy.[12]Between the College and the Cathedral, diverging to the east.[13]Watt began those experiments in Glasgow about 1763.[14]The American revolt was a severe stroke to Glasgow at the time, though it led to a great development of manufactures in the city afterwards. See Colville’sBy-Ways of History(1897), pp. 281-314.[15]William Traill, a Glasgow graduate, was elected. Playfair (of St. Andrews), afterwards Professor John Playfair of Edinburgh, was also a candidate, then only eighteen.[16]The Bell of the Brae.[17]The Forth and Clyde Canal was commenced in 1768 and opened from sea to sea in 1790.[18]Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who often met him at Blair Drummond, mentions that ‘for more than fifteen years Reid spent great part of the College vacation there with Lord Kames.’[19]Kant’s uncritical identification of Reid’s philosophical appeal to the common rational sense with the popular appeal and declamation of Oswald and even Beattie, is exposed by Professor Sidgwick inMind(April 1895).[20]BirkwoodMSS.[21]BirkwoodMSS.[22]Professor Richardson’s Memoir of Arthur.[23]The World as Will and Idea, translated by Mr. Haldane and Mr. Kemp, ii. 240. Schopenhauer makes other interesting references to Reid.[24]BirkwoodMSS.[25]See also Reid’sEssays on the Active Powers, I. 1-6, andpassim.[26]M. Boutroux, inRevue Française d’Edimbourg, No. 4.[27]Reid’s philosophy was Renan’s ‘ideal’ in his early life, according to his biographer.[28]So in the ‘Preliminary Notice,’ in the new edition of Dr. Stirling’sSecret of Hegel—last paragraph.

[1]The above from data at Birkwood.

[2]Scottish Notes and Queries, iii. 84-88; 128.

[3]The number is, unfortunately, unrecorded.

[4]BirkwoodMSS.

[5]InScotland and Scotsmen of the Eighteenth Century, by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, there is an interesting account of this Mr. Bisset.

[6]Essays on the Intellectual Powers, II. ch. 10.

[7]While he lived here, he seems to have retained the incumbency of New Machar till May 1752.

[8]Long ago removed. I have an engraving of it.

[9]TheseMS.dissertations have been lately recovered, and I have thus been able to compare them with theInquiry, in which I find them mostly embodied.

[10]BirkwoodMS.

[11]I have elsewhere discussed the true meaning of Berkeley’s philosophy.

[12]Between the College and the Cathedral, diverging to the east.

[13]Watt began those experiments in Glasgow about 1763.

[14]The American revolt was a severe stroke to Glasgow at the time, though it led to a great development of manufactures in the city afterwards. See Colville’sBy-Ways of History(1897), pp. 281-314.

[15]William Traill, a Glasgow graduate, was elected. Playfair (of St. Andrews), afterwards Professor John Playfair of Edinburgh, was also a candidate, then only eighteen.

[16]The Bell of the Brae.

[17]The Forth and Clyde Canal was commenced in 1768 and opened from sea to sea in 1790.

[18]Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who often met him at Blair Drummond, mentions that ‘for more than fifteen years Reid spent great part of the College vacation there with Lord Kames.’

[19]Kant’s uncritical identification of Reid’s philosophical appeal to the common rational sense with the popular appeal and declamation of Oswald and even Beattie, is exposed by Professor Sidgwick inMind(April 1895).

[20]BirkwoodMSS.

[21]BirkwoodMSS.

[22]Professor Richardson’s Memoir of Arthur.

[23]The World as Will and Idea, translated by Mr. Haldane and Mr. Kemp, ii. 240. Schopenhauer makes other interesting references to Reid.

[24]BirkwoodMSS.

[25]See also Reid’sEssays on the Active Powers, I. 1-6, andpassim.

[26]M. Boutroux, inRevue Française d’Edimbourg, No. 4.

[27]Reid’s philosophy was Renan’s ‘ideal’ in his early life, according to his biographer.

[28]So in the ‘Preliminary Notice,’ in the new edition of Dr. Stirling’sSecret of Hegel—last paragraph.

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