Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was the founder. Reid admitted that Berkeley and Hume drew legitimate conclusions from Locke’s general assumption that the objects of thought are not things, but ideas. Therefore Reid maintained that Locke’s position must be given up. Still empiricism remains tenable and must be applied to the phenomena of mind. What are the data of consciousness? Not individual ideas, as Locke said, but complex ideas or judgments. The elements will be discoveredlater by analysis of these complex states which are first given. The mind is not a blank piece of paper upon which simple characters are first inscribed, and then later the understanding introduced to form judgments and the reflection to add belief in the existence of objects. Our knowledge starts rather from judgments, which involve certain original truths or “natural judgments.” Mankind possesses the faculty of “common sense,” and this faculty makes these truths a common possession. Among the principles that “common sense” includes are self-consciousness, the reality of objects perceived, and the principle of cause.

The Scottish School called attention to the importance of self-observation. The members of the school made their attack upon sensualism from the point of empirical psychology. Philosophy became in their hands the perfecting of psychology as a science of inner observation. Thus they were in accord with the school of the Enlightenment, although opposed to its sensualistic outcome. The prominent members of the school were Reid, Dugald Stewart, Brown, and Sir William Hamilton.

CHAPTER IX
THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE AND GERMANY[46]

The Situation in France in the Enlightenment. The historian of the French Enlightenment has to take account of the reign of two kings; that of Louis XIV (1643–1715); and that of Louis XV (1715–1774). Together they cover the long period of one hundred and thirty-one years. The reign of Louis XV marks the actual development of the Enlightenment, while that of Louis XIV contains the causes. The long reign of seventy-two years of Louis XIV had been an absolute, arbitrary, and personal government. It had been an age unsurpassed in literature and eloquence, but also an age in which all those subjects that did not redound to the glory of the church were suppressed. It had been the age of Molière, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, and Fénelon; an age when art was encouraged, but also an age in which political and philosophical originality would not presume to breathe. Between Descartes’ death in 1650 and the death of Louis XIV in 1715, one finds a single philosopher, Pierre Bayle, and he had to leave France. The Newtonian physics was not accepted in France until 1732—forty-five years after its publication in England. Upon the death of Louis XIV the artistic glories of his reign lost all their value for the nation. In their place was set the problem of the material misery of the nation, which had been causedby the long wars and the extravagance of paternal government.

The reign of Louis XV seethes with the struggle of social forces. It is a period in which the individual is striving to gain his rights under the institutions that have so long repressed him. The development of the French Enlightenment is identical with the struggle for political liberty. In no other period of history—except perhaps the Age of Pericles—is the history of philosophic thought so intimately connected with political history. The fifty-nine years of the reign of Louis XV are filled with exciting events which interest both the philosopher and the historian. The French Enlightenment is the “reaction against that protective and interfering spirit which reached its zenith under Louis XIV.” With Louis XV the magnificence and the utility of ecclesiastical and political absolutism could not be maintained. For the hierarchy of the church was unable longer to keep up its claim of independence and morality; and the State was rapidly exhausting its power by exhausting its financial resources. Each event in the history of France in the eighteenth century had therefore two aspects—each led to the Revolution, and each was a step in the development of the Enlightenment of the individual. The pioneers in the movement could not have been conscious of the end to which their criticism would lead; but to us looking back upon the century the result seems inevitable. A comparison with the situation in England is interesting. While in England the political and ecclesiastical institutions were so elastic that they could without disintegrating absorb the movement of the Enlightenment, and while they were so little bound to traditional institutions that the growthin individualism would be constitutional, the situation in France was exactly opposite. (1) In France the church and the political institutions had become inelastic bodies under Louis XIV. They had reached the limit of their development. So deeply rooted in absolutism and special privileges were they that they were not open to innovation or reform. During the reign of Louis XV the only question was, which would be crushed—the new individualism or the old institutions. No compromise was possible. The institutions, having survived their usefulness, gave way. (2) In the next place the French church and state had for many years been identified with oppression and tyranny, while the English people had within a century gained many needed reforms by beheading one king and forcing out another. Consequently the English government of the eighteenth century was identified with the liberty of the individual. In England political and religious speculation followed and did not precede political reforms. In France the opposite was true. To the mind of the French people the church represented only superstition, and the state only profligacy and tyranny. The more they seemed to support each other in one social structure, the more rapid, virulent, and excessive would naturally be the reaction against both when once individualism got a footing.

The result was that while in England the Enlightenment always remained critical and negative, in France it became an obstinate and positive dogmatism. Behind French criticism was developing a philosophical creed. The French Enlightenment was a social cause and a self-sustaining idea. The French philosophers of the eighteenth century, on the whole, were not superior men intellectually, for they were inclined to make the smalllook large and the large great. But although their perspective was inaccurate, they had an enthusiastic faith in progress and humanity.

The English Influence in France. Louis XIV and his two predecessors had made Paris the intellectual centre of Europe, and up to 1690 it had no rival. The French language had taken its place beside the Latin as the language of science. The circle of scientists existing just before and at the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign had its equal nowhere in Europe. We remember how Hobbes found Euclid in Paris, Locke spent four years at or near Paris, Leibnitz gained there all his mathematical erudition and training. During the seventeenth century Paris was the centre of scholastic influence, and this is seen directly or indirectly in the writings of all seventeenth century philosophers. The English had taken their cue from the French; but on the other hand, it is doubtful if as late as the death of Louis there were a half dozen Frenchmen that knew the English language.

About the time of the publication of Locke’s Essay the intellectual centre of gravity began to move from Paris to London. The founding of the Royal Society in Oxford in 1660 was the beginning of the organization of British scientific influence. Newton’s physics (1687) then began to supplant the Cartesian physics, and Locke’s psychological doctrines the dogmatism of the Rationalists, among the thinkers of western Europe. Newtonian physics and English empiricism became the scientific watchwords of the eighteenth century; and although the French were late in accepting them, it is said that at the end of the Enlightenment there was no cultured Frenchman who could not read English. Wefind that such notable Frenchmen as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Buffon, Brissot, Helvetius, Gournay, Jussieu, Lafayette, Maupertuis, Mirabeau, Roland, and Rousseau visited England during the period from the death of Louis XIV to the Revolution. Poets, mathematicians, historians, naturalists, philologists, philosophers, and essayists all agreed to the necessity of studying the language and people on whom their fathers had not deigned to waste thought except in contempt.

But perhaps the political motive was quite as strong as the scientific in turning the French of the eighteenth century toward England. The English government was the example of political liberty of that time. The rising inquisitive thinkers of France had no alternative but to turn to free England for spiritual support against their own decrepit tyranny. The first French visitors were amazed at English prosperity, even though the crown had decreased in power—amazed at the liberty of the press and Parliament, amazed at the control of the revenues by the representative body. England thus became the school for all the thinkers of Europe, and through her literature taught the lesson of political liberty first to France, and then to all Europe.