The similarity between this modern picture of man and the earlier theological one is striking. In both cases the central assumption is that human development from child to man consists in the unfolding of certain inherited characteristics which are capable of further specific modification under influences proceeding from outside. The only difference between the two pictures is that in the modern one the concepts of heredity and adaptation have been formed without special application to the ethical characteristics of the soul.
It is clear that from both Augustine's and the modern scientific viewpoint there is no sense in requiring - as Reid did - those who seek the truth about themselves and the world to recover a condition which had been theirs as children. Nor from this point of view is there any justification to call on a Common Sense, innate in man, to sit in judgment on the philosophical efforts of the adult reason.
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That even in the days of Augustine the original conception of human nature had not disappeared entirely, is shown by the appearance of Augustine's opponent Pelagius, called the 'arch-heretic'. To consider him at this point in our discussion will prove helpful for our understanding of Reid's historic position in the modern age.
What interests us here in Pelagius's doctrine (leaving aside all questions concerning the meaning of the Sacraments, etc.), is the picture of man which must have lived in him for him to teach as he did.
Leaving his Irish-Scottish homeland and arriving about the year 400 in Rome, where on account of the unusual purity of his being he soon came to be held in the highest esteem, Pelagius found himself obliged to come out publicly against Augustine, for he felt that Augustine's teachings denied all free will to man. In the purely passive surrender of man to the will of God, as Augustine taught it, he could not but see danger for the future development of Christian humanity. How radically he diverged from Augustine in his view of man we may see from such of his leading thoughts as follow:
'Each man begins his life in the same condition as Adam.'
'All good or evil for which in life we are deserving of praise or blame is done by ourselves and is not born with us.'
'Before the personal will of man comes into action there is nothing in him but what God has placed there.'
'It is therefore left to the free will of man whether he falls into sin, as also whether through following Christ he raises himself out of it again.'
Pelagius could think in this way because he came from a part of Europe where the older form of human memory, already at that time almost extinct in the South, was in some degree still active. For him it was therefore a matter of direct experience that the development of man from childhood onwards was connected with a diminution of certain original capacities of the soul. Yet he was so far a child of his age as to be no longer capable of seeing whence these capacities originated.
To provide the necessary corrective to Augustine's doctrine of inheritance, Pelagius would have had to be able to see in the first years of life both a beginning of the earthly and a termination of the pre-earthly existence of the soul. The imperfections of his picture of man, however, led him to underestimate, even to deny, the significance of heredity and so of original sin in human life. For an age which no longer had any direct experience of the soul's pre-natal life, the doctrines of Augustine were undoubtedly more appropriate than those of Pelagius; Augustine was in fact the more modern of the two.
And now, if we move forward a dozen centuries and compare Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant from this same point of view, we find the same conception of man again triumphant. But there is an essential difference: Kant carried all before him because he based himself on an age-old view of human nature, whereas Reid, uncomprehended up to our own day, pointed to a picture of man only just then dawning on the horizon of the future. Just as through Pelagius there sounded something like a last call to European humanity not to forget the cosmic nature of the soul, so through Reid the memory of this nature announced its first faint renewal. It is common to both that their voices lacked the clarity to make themselves heard among the other voices of their times; and with both the reason was the same: neither could perceive in fullness - the one no longer, the other not yet - the picture of man which ensouled their ideas.