Thomas Reid

by Alexander Campbell Fraser

‘Suppose I am pricked with a pin, I ask, is the pain I feel a sensation? Undoubtedly it is. There can be nothing that resembles pain in an inanimate thing: the pain must be in me, a living being. But I ask again, is the pin a sensation? To this question I feel myself under a necessity of answering that the pin is not a sensation, nor can have the least resemblance to any sensation. The pin has length and thickness, figure and weight. A sensation can have none of these qualities. I am not more certain that the pain I feel is a sensation than that the pin is not a sensation. Yet the pin is an object of sense; and I am as certain that I perceive its figure and hardness by my senses as that I feel pain when I am pricked by it.’

This is to say that if, with the philosophers, I call the pin as well as the pain a sensation or an idea, I must mean by ‘sensation’ and ‘idea,’ when I apply those words to the pin, not a private self-contained feeling or a fancy, in which I am only manifesting my conscious self, but (so to speak) a public sensation or idea—perceivable by other persons as well as by me—a manifestation, in short, of what is outside my mind—of something that exists permanently in space and not transitorily in me—and that is thus fit to be a medium of communication between me and other living persons, informing me of their existence and in some measure of their thoughts—all which (Reid takes for granted) each person’s private feelings and fancies could not do. But to employ the words ‘sensation’ and ‘idea’ in this new meaning, and to speak of an idea as public or external, would be an abuse of language. We must mark, always by appropriate words, distinctions which we are obliged to acknowledge in fact. The inspirations or revelations of the common sense, in and through which the Almighty Power gives us an understanding of the life and world in which we find ourselves, inspirations in which all men are believed more or less to participate, require us to distinguish the solid and extended pin, as something public or outward, in contrast to the private feeling of pain, of which no one except the person who feels it is conscious. I am thus obliged to recognise more in existence than my own sensations and ideas—as much obliged as I am to recognise my sensations and ideas themselves when I am conscious of them. Only so can I find myself living in an environment that is capable of signifying the contemporaneous life, and some of the thoughts and feelings of other persons. In all this I am only falling back on the divine revelations of the common sense. They make me reject in conduct what is inconsistent with them; although this natural obligation is all the reason I can give in justification of my obedience.

It is thus that Reid recognises his right in reason to grasp realities that are independent of his individual self; and he thinks that he is doing this philosophically by getting rid of the unphilosophical supposition, that he needs to work his way to them by logical reasoning, founded on wholly inward impressions. The true philosophy of perception with him is to discharge the medium, and at once take the bull by the horns.

Some may think that the Inquiry represents wasted labour—that the ‘metaphysical lunacy’ which abolishes personal pronouns as meaningless words, and inconsistently reasons that all who reason must be fools, is at the best the idle intellectual pastime of persons who pretend to be universal sceptics—all which Reid has taken too seriously, and which at any rate by its self-contradiction refutes itself. For it asserts that assertion is impossible. It is an argument that concludes for the rejection of the postulates without which it is impossible for human beings to reason at all. It is a philosophy that destroys itself in destroying all philosophy. The suicide does not need to be put to death.

Yet the suicide, doubly slain in the Inquiry, may be used as a warning of the consequence of doing violence to the genuine common sense, or ideal man that is latent in each man; especially on subjects in which doubt is easier than in the case of outward things and persons. The ‘metaphysical lunacy’ of doubt about the existence of other persons may be acknowledged, while the common sense, unawake in its moral or spiritual elements, fails to protest against ethical atheism or agnosticism. What Reid calls the common sense is alive consciously in various degrees, in different persons, in different countries and periods. A common sense of the existence of outward things and persons is practically awake in all sane minds. But the spiritual convictions, of which some are hardly conscious, may be rejected even practically without obvious lunacy. And something is gained for those convictions, if it can be shown, as a reductio ad absurdum, that their rejection involves the moral sceptic too in the ‘lunacy’ of universal doubt and pessimist despair.

That Reid lays much stress on ‘calling in question the common theory of ideas or images in perception’ is explained by his assumption, that this theory involves perversion of the common sense even in its preliminary contact with outward things in sense, thus obviously discrediting it as the final court of appeal in every other instance. It may in this way be taken as a plea for a more faithful adherence on the part of philosophers to the genuine common-sense judgments, which can be made to respond to an adequate appeal, however dormant they may be in individuals. This final appeal to human nature must, in short, be to human nature as it is in fact, not to human nature as distorted in hypothesis.

For, after all, the root of the agnosticism which is found in history alternating with the final faith of the common sense, lies deeper than in mistaken hypotheses of philosophers about our perceptions in sense. Reid’s substitution in philosophy of immediate for mediate perception of matter is therefore an inadequate cure. The periodically returning doubt concerns, not the outness or inwardness of what is revealed to sense, but the meaning and character of the Power that is at work within the universe of matter and mind, and with which we first come into contact and collision in sense. Is it, in its final and pervading Power, a bad or a good sort of universe that we open our eyes upon, when we begin to exercise our senses? What are its final relations to me, and my final relations to it? Nobody doubts the existence of things and persons, so far as they are revealed to the senses. But what is our implied Common Sense of the final meaning of the Whole? Am I to put an optimist or a pessimist ultimate interpretation upon it all? The lurid mixture of pain and pleasure, evil and good, presented by the animated world, combined with spiritually dormant common sense in individual men,—is surely a more potent factor of agnostic doubt than an erroneous account of perception in circulation among persons who speculate.

Reid’s course of thought amidst new surroundings in Glasgow brought him nearer to the source and corrective of the scepticism that is aroused by the suspicious-looking universe of mingled good and evil, to which our sense perceptions introduce us.