Thomas Reid

by Alexander Campbell Fraser

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 is presented 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 the Zoonomia of Darwin, and a few years later as author of an Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, which contains the essence of the philosophy that was afterwards expanded and applied in his Lectures. 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 his Aids 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 presses the 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 man may find 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’s Inquiry at 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. His Philosophie 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.

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 the Edinburgh 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’s Reid. 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 to germanise the 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 praised Reid 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 the Hamiltonianised Reid, 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 soutient la 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 to disprove the 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 the necessarily mind-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.