James Frederick Ferrier

by Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane

At the time of which we write the so-called 'Scottish School' of Reid, Stewart, and Beattie reigned supreme in orthodox Scotland; it had undisputed power in the Universities, and besides this obtained a very reputable place in the estimation of Europe, and more especially of France. As it was this school more especially that Ferrier spent much of his time in combating, it is its history and place that we wish shortly to describe. To do so, however, it is needful to go back to its real founder, Locke, in order that its point of view may fairly be set forth.

In applying his mind to the views of Locke, the ordinary man finds himself arriving at very commonplace and well-accustomed conceptions. Locke, indeed, may reasonably be said to represent the ideas of common, everyday life. The ordinary man does not question the reality of things, he accepts it without asking any questions, and bases his theories—scientific or otherwise—upon this implied reality. Locke worked out the theory which had been propounded by Lord Bacon, that knowledge is obtained by the observation of facts which are implicitly accepted as realities; and what, it was asked, could be more self-evident and sane? It is easy to conceive a number of perceiving minds upon the one hand, ready to take up perceptions of an outside material substance upon the other. The mind may be considered as a piece of white paper—a tabula rasa, as it was called—on which external things may make what impression they will, and knowledge is apparently explained at once. But though Locke certainly succeeded in making these terms the common coin of ordinary life, difficulties crop up when we come to examine them more closely. After all, it is evident, the only knowledge our mind can have is a knowledge of its own ideas—ideas which are, of course, caused by something which is outside, or at least, as Locke would say, by its quality. Now, from this it would appear that these 'ideas' after all come between the mind and the 'thing,' whatever it is, that causes them—that is to say, we can perhaps maintain that we only know our 'ideas,' and not things as in themselves. Locke passes into elaborate distinctions between primary qualities of things, of which he holds exact representations are given, and secondary qualities, which are not in the same position; but the whole difficulty we meet with is summed up in the question whether we really know substance, or whether it is that we can only hope to know ideas, and 'suppose' some substratum of reality outside. Then another difficulty is that we can hardly really know our selves. How can we know that the self exists; and if, like Malebranche, we speak of God revealing substance to us, how do we know about God? We cannot form any 'general' impressions, have any 'general' knowledge; only a sort of conglomeration of unrelated or detached bits of knowledge can possibly come home to us. The fact is, that modern philosophy starts with two separate and self-existent substances; that it does not see how they can be combined, and that the 'white-paper' theory is so abstract that we can never arrive at self-consciousness by its means.

Berkeley followed out the logical consequences of Locke, though perhaps he hardly knew where these would carry him. He acknowledged that we know nothing but ideas—nothing outside of our mind. But he adds the conception of self, and by analogy the conception of God, who acts as a principle of causation. Whether there is necessary connection in his sensations or not, he does not say. Hume followed with criticism, scathing and merciless. He states that all we know of is the experience we have; and by experience he signifies perceptions. Ideas to him are nothing more than perceptions, and whether they are ideas simply of the mind, or ideas of some object, is to him the same. If we begin to imagine such conceptions as those of universality or necessity, of God or the self, beyond a complex of successive ideas, we are going farther than experience permits. We cannot connect our perceptions with an object, nor can we get beyond what experience allows. Custom merely brings about certain conclusions which are often enough misleading. It connects effect and cause, really different events: it brings about ideas of morality very often deceptive. We have our custom of regarding things, another has his—who can say which is correct? All we can do is, what seems a hopeless task enough—we can try to show how these unrelated particulars seem by repetition to produce an illusionary connection in our minds.

Both mind and matter appear, then, to be wanting, and experience alone is suggested as the means of solving the difficulty in which we are placed—a point in the argument which left an opportunity open to Kant to suggest a new development, to ask whether things being found inadequate in producing knowledge, we might not ask if knowledge could not be more successful with things. But it is the Scottish lines of attempted solution that we wish to follow out, and not the German. Perhaps they are not so very different.

Philosophy, as Reid found it, was in a bad way enough, as far as the orthodox mind of Scotland was concerned. All justification for belief in God, in immortality, in all that was held sacred in a century of much orthodoxy if little zeal, was gone. Such things might be believed in by those who found any comfort in so believing, but to the educated man who had seriously reflected on them, they were anachronisms. The very desperateness of the case, however, seemed to promise a remedy. Men could not rest in a state of permanent scepticism, in a world utterly incapable of being rationally explained. Even the propounder of the theories allowed this to be true; and as for others, they felt that they were rational beings, and this signified that there was system in the world.

A champion arose when things were at their worst in Thomas Reid, the founder, or at least the chiefest ornament, of the so-called Scottish School of Philosophy. He it was who set himself to add the principle of the coherence of the Universe, and the consequent possibility of establishing Faith once more in the world. Reid, to begin with, instead of looking at Hume's results as serious, regarded them as necessarily absurd. He started a new theory of his own, the theory of Immediate Perception, which signified that we are able immediately to apprehend—not ideas only, but the Truth. And how, we may ask, can this be done?

It had been pointed out first of all that sensations as understood by Locke—that is, the relations so called by Locke—might be separated from sensation in itself; in fact, that these first pertained to mind. Hence we have a dualistic system given us to start with, and the question is how the two sides are to be connected? What does this theory of Immediate Perception, which Reid puts forward as the solution, mean? Is it just a mechanical union of two antitheses, or is it something more?

As to this last, perhaps the real answer would be that it both is, and is not. That is, the philosophy of Reid would seem still dualistic in its nature; it certainly implies the mechanical contact of two confronting substances whose independence is vigorously maintained, in opposition to the idealistic system which it superseded; but in reference to Reid we must recollect that his theory of Immediate Perception was also something more. As regards sensation, for example, he says that we do not begin with unrelated sensations, but with judgment—that is, we refer our sensations to a permanent subject, 'I.' Sensations 'suggest' the nature of a mind and the belief in its existence. And this signifies that we have the power of making inferences—how we do not exactly know, but we believe it to be, not by any special reasoning process, but by the 'common-sense' innately born within us. Common-sense is responsible for a good deal more—for the conceptions of existence and of cause, for instance; for Reid acknowledges that sensations alone must fail to account for ideas such as those of extension, space, and motion. This standpoint seems indeed as if it did not differ widely from the Kantian, but at the same time Reid appears to think that it is not an essential that feelings should be perceptively referred to an external object; the first part of the process of perception is carried on without our consciousness—the mental sensation merely follows—and sensation simply supposes a sentient being and a certain manner in which that being is affected, which leaves us much where we were, as far as the subjectivity of our ideas is concerned. He does not hold that all sensation is a percept involving extension and much else—involving, indeed, existence.

Following upon Reid, Dugald Stewart obtained a very considerable reputation, and he was living and writing at the time Ferrier was a young man. His main idea would, however, seem to have been to guard his utterances carefully, and enter upon no keen discussions or contentions: when a bold assertion is made, it is always under shelter of some good authority. But his rounded phrases gained him considerable admiration, as such writing often does. He carried—perhaps inadvertently—Reid's views farther than he would probably have held as justifiable. He says we are not, properly speaking, conscious of self or the existence of self, but merely of a sensation or some other quality, which, by a subsequent suggestion of the understanding, leads to a belief in that which exercises the quality. This is the doctrine of Reid put very crudely, and in a manner calculated to bring us back to unrelated sensation in earnest. Stewart adopted a new expression for Reid's 'common-sense,' i.e. the 'fundamental laws of belief,' which might be less ambiguous, but never took popular hold as did the first.

There were many others belonging to this school besides Reid and Stewart, whom it would be impossible to speak of here. The Scottish Philosophy had its work to do, and no doubt understood that work—the first essential in a criticism: it endeavoured to vindicate perception as against sensational idealism, and it only partially succeeded in its task. But we must be careful not to forget that it opened up the way for a more comprehensive and satisfactory point of view. It was with Kant that the distinction arose between sensation and the forms necessary to its perception, the form of space and time, and so on. As to this part of the theory of knowledge, Reid and his school were not clear; they only made an effort to express the fact that something was required to verify our knowledge, but they were far from satisfactorily attaining to their goal. The very name of 'common-sense' was misleading—making people imagine, as it did, that there was nothing in philosophy after all that the man in the street could not know by applying the smallest modicum of reflection to the subject. Philosophy thus came to be considered as superfluous, and it was thought that the sooner we got rid of it and were content to observe the mandates of our hearts, the better for all concerned.