Reid, I suspect, could hardly recognise, in the stuffed figure thus put up by Ferrier to be knocked down, either the ‘common sense’ in which he found 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 Reid concerned 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 his Secret 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 generalisations of 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 nescience versus final 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 sublimated in 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 his Inquiry. ‘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 reality is finally unknown and unknowable. But if man can live 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 is virtually the 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 to restore 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—