UNIVERSAL SCEPTICISM VERSUS INSPIRED COMMON SENSE: AN ‘INQUIRY INTO THE
HUMAN MIND ON THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMON SENSE’
1764
As early as October 1762, as we have seen, Reid had given signs of an
intention to offer the world some results of his meditations regarding
the foundations of belief. Accordingly, in the end of the following
year, he produced his first book, _An Inquiry into the Human Mind
on the Principles of Common Sense_. Its motto expresses its leading
argument—‘The inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.’
For it was to the inspirations, or revelations, of what he called the
‘common sense’ or ‘common judgment,’ regarded as the root of any human
understanding of man and his environment, that he made his final appeal
against the all-embracing doubt of Hume. This was the rock on which he
took his stand in the universal deluge.
Reid was now in his fifty-fourth year. Hitherto his modesty had concealed
his strength from all but a few friends. His book was concerned with
questions that were not likely to withdraw him rapidly from ‘the
obscurity of a learned retirement.’ The _Inquiry_, with its appeal to
the final reason latent in human nature, is not to be interpreted as an
appeal to popular opinion against theories of philosophers. In fact, its
implied argument is not obvious to popular intelligence, although it is
profoundly connected with all the chief interests of human life. Great
books of this sort attract only the few who think. His brother-in-law,
Mr. Rose, mentions that ‘Alexander Millar, the London bookseller, being
in Aberdeen at this time, and in company with Dr. Reid, protested against
books in metaphysics as bad bargains for publishers; by which he said he
had himself lost money, but never gained any. Notwithstanding, Dr. Reid,
having his _Inquiry_ ready for publication, sold it to Mr. Millar for
£50. When his friends bantered him upon the small sum he had received
for so valuable a performance, he jocosely replied, “I think it is well
sold.”’[10]
Another parallel here occurs between Reid and Kant. The _Kritik of Pure
Reason_, Kant’s first great work, appeared in 1781, when he was in his
fifty-seventh year. So, too, with Locke, who inaugurated the era of
modern thought in which Reid and Kant are chief figures. His _Essay_,
like Reid’s _Inquiry_, was the first fruit of twenty years of reflective
thought, and it too made its appearance when its author was in his
fifty-seventh year. It is curious to contrast the balanced caution and
moderation of these long pondered treatises with the more paradoxical
productions of others, whose intellectual ardour and impatience speedily
committed them to all-comprehensive systems. Descartes, at forty, with
his provisional doubt and reconstruction on a slender foundation;
Spinoza, younger still, with his rational evolution of the universe from
a single substance; Berkeley with his analysis of the material world
into significant ideas, delivered at the age of twenty-five with the
impetuous enthusiasm of Irish juvenile genius; and David Hume with his
universal disintegration of human knowledge and belief, planned before
he was one-and-twenty, composed before he was twenty-five, and eagerly
given to the world in his twenty-eighth year. Reid, with his ‘good
and well-wearing parts,’ characteristically represents the restrained
authorship of those who treat our short life on this planet as short
enough for well-weighed answers to the final questions about life and the
universe.
As Reid’s _Inquiry_ was really an appeal to human nature in arrest of
Hume’s intellectual suicide, he desired, before presenting it to the
world, to submit the argument privately to the Edinburgh sceptic. This
was done through their common friend Dr. Blair. After Hume had read
portions of the manuscript, he wrote this courteous letter to Reid on
Feb. 25, 1763:—
‘By Dr. Blair’s means I have been favoured with the perusal of
your performance, which I have read with great pleasure and
attention. It is certainly very rare that a piece so deeply
philosophical is wrote with so much spirit, and affords so
much entertainment to the reader, though I must still regret
the disadvantages under which I read it, as I never had the
whole performance at once before me, and could not be able
to compare one part with another. To this reason chiefly I
ascribe some obscurities which, in spite of your short analysis
and abstract, seem to hang over your system; for I must do
you the justice to own that when I enter into your ideas, no
man appears to express himself with greater perspicuity than
you do, a talent which above all others is requisite in that
species of literature which you have cultivated. There are
some objections which I would willingly propose to the chapter
“Of Sight,” did I not suspect that they arise from my not
sufficiently understanding it. I shall therefore forbear till
the whole can lie before me, and shall not at present propose
any further difficulties to your reasonings. I shall only say
that if you have been able to clear up these abstruse and
important subjects, instead of being mortified, I shall be so
vain as to pretend to a share of the praise; and shall think
that my errors, by having at least some coherence, have led you
to make a more strict review of my principles, which were the
common ones, and to perceive their futility.’
In his reply to this letter Reid recognises the debt which philosophy
owes to the sceptical criticism of Hume. He writes thus to Hume:—
‘KING’S COLLEGE, _18th March 1763_.
‘SIR,—On Monday last Mr. John Farquhar brought me your letter
of February 25th, enclosed in one from Dr. Blair. I thought
myself very happy in having the means of obtaining, at second
hand, through the friendship of Dr. Blair, your opinion of
my performance; and you have been pleased to communicate it
directly in so polite and friendly a manner as merits great
acknowledgments on my part.
‘In attempting to throw some light on these abstruse subjects,
I wish to preserve the due mean between confidence and despair.
But whether I have any success in this attempt or not, I shall
always avow myself your disciple in metaphysics. I have learned
more from your writings in this kind than from all others put
together. Your system appears to me not only coherent in all
its parts, but likewise justly deduced from principles commonly
received among philosophers,—principles which I never thought
of calling in question, until the conclusions you draw from
them in the _Treatise of Human Nature_ made me suspect them.
If these principles are solid your system must stand; and
whether they are or not can better be judged after you have
brought to light the whole system that grows out of them,
than when the greater part of it was wrapped up in clouds and
darkness. I agree with you therefore, that if this system shall
ever be demolished, you have a just claim to a great share
of the praise, both because you have made it a distinct and
determinate mark to be aimed at, and have furnished proper
artillery for the purpose. When you have seen the whole of my
performance, I shall take it as a very great favour to have
your opinion upon it, from which I make no doubt of receiving
light, whether I receive conviction or no.’
Hume’s philosophy being the suicide of intelligence, can hardly be
spoken of as a ‘system.’ It is not constructive, but wholly destructive,
and therefore a negation of system, philosophic or other, in a finally
speechless and motionless agnostic doubt.
Hume’s letter to Reid was his only rejoinder to the _Inquiry_. In 1763
he had ceased to produce philosophical books. His recognition of the
‘deeply philosophical’ nature of Reid’s argument is a testimony to the
worth of the work on which Reid’s literary reputation chiefly rests.
The ‘share of the praise’ which Hume claims, Reid was ready to concede.
‘I hope,’ he says in the Dedication of the _Inquiry_, ‘I hope that the
author of this sceptical system wrote it in the belief that it would be
useful to mankind. And perhaps it may prove so at last. For I conceive
the sceptical writers to be a set of men whose business it is to pick
holes in the fabric of knowledge wherever it is weak and faulty; and
when those places are properly repaired, the whole building becomes more
firm and solid than it was formerly’. And, in fact, the intellectual
progress of mankind has been sustained by an alternation of sceptical and
conservative philosophies.
After prolonged cogitation, the ‘weak and faulty’ place in the ‘fabric’
of modern philosophy seemed to Reid to lie in an unproved assumption with
which modern philosophers set out in their speculations. For they took
for granted that only the sensations and ideas within each mind could be
perceived: yet we naturally ‘believe that we are seeing and handling the
very outward things themselves’ that make what is called the material
world. If the philosophers are right, we have no immediate revelation of
the qualities of outward things, and no evidence of their existence,
except the succession of changing sensations and ideas of sensations
which alone are presented to us. I can never directly encounter an
external object. What I suppose to be outward is all in my mind. With
a world thus imprisoned within me, is there any legitimate way through
which I can assure myself of realities outside my mind, including other
living persons who have their own sensations and ideas as much as I have
mine, but numerically different from my private stock? If not, grave
consequences seemed to follow: faith and hope must die out of human life.
So Reid argued.
The _Treatise of Human Nature_ was the scarecrow that warned Reid of the
destructive consequences of this assumption, that we are shut up among
our own ideas; as he had himself in youth been taught to believe, and
by which he had been led on to Berkeley’s conception of a wholly ideal
material world. He now began to see this ideal material world of Berkeley
in a new light. It seemed to leave him _alone_ in the universe of his
own mind. The ideal matter of Berkeley cannot, he argued, inform me of
the existence of other living persons: what I have supposed to be other
persons must be, like the rest, only some of my own ideas. If I allow
that my own sensations and ideas are my only possible original data, I
cannot from such transitory phantoms infer the real existence of other
persons. With this starting-point as my only one, the whole universe
naturally supposed to surround me—bodies and spirits, friends and
relations, all dead things and all living persons—acknowledged by common
judgment to have a permanent existence, whether I am having ideas of them
or not—vanish at once. My _private_ sensations and ideas can never really
signify to me the existence of other conscious beings; only what might
be called _public ideas_, common to other minds and to me, could do this.
And such objects are not properly called ‘ideas’—public or private; they
are dead things and living persons; they exist whether I individually
have sensations and ideas or not. In short, Reid could find nothing in
Berkeley’s philosophical theory—as he interpreted it[11]—which afforded
even probable ground for concluding that there were in existence other
intelligent beings—fathers, brothers, friends, or fellow-citizens. ‘I am
left alone,’ the only creature of God, in that forlorn state of egoism
into which it was said some of the disciples of Descartes were brought by
this same preliminary assumption of their master—a sufficient _reductio
ad absurdum_ of the favourite postulate which leads to it. To act upon
it would argue insanity in the agent; it must therefore be empty verbal
speculation. So Reid further argued.
But even this solitude is not the last issue of Reid’s _bête noire_.
The system in which I have been educated, he said, not only leaves me
absolutely alone; _it extinguishes me_, along with the external universe
of things and persons; it is at last literally suicidal. It transforms
persistent personal existence into a mere succession of unconnected
sensations and ideas. If the magic circle of sensations and ideas, within
a self that persists amidst perpetual changes, cannot be broken through,
then even this supposed ‘self’ must be an illusion, and the word self
must be meaningless. The personal pronoun ‘I,’ as well as the personal
pronoun ‘you,’ are both alike unmeaning. The universe resolves at last,
not merely into sensations that are all referable to myself, but into
sensations without any self—into isolated sensations—which seem indeed to
follow one another in an orderly way, but without any guarantee that the
seeming order is more than transitory, or that the illusory cosmos may
not at any moment become chaos.
Is there nothing within the resources of reason to arrest this
intellectual suicide? Has reason got anything to show in justification
of this preliminary sacrifice of a conviction on which men have to
act, whatever their theories may be? Must I surrender the conviction,
that when I am seeing or touching I am actually having revealed to me
something that is extended and solid, and that, _as such, must_ be more
and other than the private sensations and ideas of the person that is
seeing and touching? Must this conviction, and others like it, on which
human experience practically depends, be all sacrificed on the altar of
authority and conjecture?
This had been the question around which Reid’s thoughts were revolving
in the twenty years preceding the publication of his book. ‘For my own
satisfaction,’ he tells us, ‘I entered into a serious examination of
the principles upon which this sceptical system is built; and was not
a little surprised to find that it leans with its whole weight upon a
hypothesis which is ancient indeed, and hath been very generally received
by philosophers, but of which I could find no solid proof. The hypothesis
I mean is—that we do not really perceive things that are external, but
only certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon the mind, which
are called “impressions” and “ideas.” I thought it unreasonable, upon the
authority of philosophers, to admit an hypothesis which, in my opinion,
overturns all philosophy; all religion and virtue, and all common sense;
and I resolved to inquire into this subject anew, without regard to any
hypothesis.’
To _accept_ as a spiritual fact the judgment of human nature, which
assures me that when I am seeing or touching I am ‘face to face’ with a
reality that exists independently of my changing sensations or ideas,
instead of trying in vain by reasoning to _prove_ the existence of this
reality by means of intervening sensations and ideas,—this was the
alternative he adopted. I dismiss the unwarranted supposition that only
my own mind and its invisible contents can be immediately manifested
to me; and I fall back on the perception I have of something solid and
extended, and therefore more and other than a mere sensation or idea,
as what is present to me when I see and touch. Recognition of the fact
that our five senses somehow bring us into a consciousness of what is
neither a transitory sensation nor an idea of a sensation, but something
independent of me, and that would continue to exist after I individually
had ceased to exist—this recognition of external realities is Reid’s
key to sound philosophy. It is a displacement of the so-called ‘ideas’
of the philosophers, and of fallacious inferences founded upon them,
and a substitution of the common reasonable sense, or common judgment
of reason, which neither requires nor admits of logical proof. Reid
might say that what is most worth proving cannot be logically proved.
We all have a direct perception of external reality which cannot be
eradicated by reasoning. Abolition of the prejudice which interposed
_reasonings founded on unreal ideas_ between our perception and the solid
and extended reality, seemed to Reid, in virtue of its far-reaching
consequences, to be the chief good he had as a philosopher secured to
mankind. In his old age he writes thus to Dr. Gregory:—
‘The merit of what you are pleased to call _my philosophy_
lies, I think, chiefly in having called in question the common
theory of ideas, or images of things in the mind, being the
only objects of thought—a theory founded on natural prejudices,
and so universally received as to be interwoven with the
structure of language. Yet, were I to give you a detail of what
led me to call in question this theory, after I had long held
it as self-evident and unquestionable, you would think, as I
do, that there was much of chance in the matter. The discovery
was the birth of time, not of genius; and Berkeley and Hume
did more to bring it to light than the man that hit upon it.
I think there is hardly anything that can be called _mine_ in
the philosophy of mind which does not follow with ease from the
detection of this prejudice.’
Yet Reid’s _Inquiry_ has been condemned as an unphilosophical appeal
from the thoughtful to vulgar intelligence, making the unreflecting many
supreme judges in questions intelligible only to the reflecting few. His
employment of ‘common sense’ to express the regulative principle of his
philosophy would put his book outside philosophical literature, if this
term were taken as a synonym for unreasoned opinion—the average judgments
of the man in the street. Reid’s own account of what he means by common
sense, not to speak of Hume’s recognition of the ‘deeply philosophical’
character of the argument in the _Inquiry_, should protect him against
this imputation. He describes the common sense to which he constantly
appeals as ‘the first degree of reason,’ and as having for its office ‘to
judge of things self-evident.’ As such, he contrasts it with reasoning,
or ‘the second degree of reason, which draws conclusions that are not
self-evident from the self-evident judgments of the common sense.’ This
distinction between the common rational sense, on which a knowledge
of the universe, like the human, which falls short of omniscience,
_must_ ultimately turn, and those judgments that are reached by logical
reasoning, corresponds to what the Greeks distinguished as noetic and
dianoetic power of reason in man. Reid’s genuine judgments of the common
sense may be regarded as the divinely inspired response to questions
which can be determined for man only by this ideal man latent in us
all—judgments verified by the insanity that is implied in resisting them
in our actions.
As obtrusive examples of judgments of the common sense, Reid takes
the logically undemonstrable convictions (1) of the existence of
things external to and independent of me and my perceptions; (2) of my
individual personal existence, and continuous personal identity; and (3)
of the uniformity, and therefore interpretability, of nature, implying
that I may form conclusions about what I have not experienced by what I
have experienced. I cannot demonstrate the truth of these judgments: I
can only justify them in reason by showing that human nature responds
to them, and forbids me to reject them in my actions, on pain of being
judged a lunatic, whatever I may say in my speculative theories. ‘Such
original and natural judgments,’ he says, ‘are part of the furniture
which _nature_ hath given to the human understanding. They are the
inspiration of the Almighty. They serve to direct us in the common
affairs of life, when our reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark;
they are part of our constitution; all the discoveries of our reason
are grounded upon them; they make up what is called _the common sense_
of mankind. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder
in the constitution, is what we call _lunacy_, as when a man believes
that he is made of glass. When a man suffers himself to be reasoned out
of the principles of common sense by metaphysical arguments, we call
it _metaphysical lunacy_, which differs from the other species of the
distemper in this, that it is not continued, but intermittent; it is apt
to seize the patient in solitary and speculative moments; but when he
enters into sanity, Common Sense recovers her authority.’
It is the first of these three examples of the common sense that is
the subject of the _Inquiry_—intended as preliminary to others which
may follow. ‘A clear enumeration and explication of the principles of
common sense’ was henceforward Reid’s ultimate aim; but thus far he
took those involved in our experience when we are tasting, or smelling,
or hearing, or touching, or seeing. As axioms and definitions are the
preliminaries of abstract mathematical reasonings, so our sensuous
perceptions through the five senses are the preliminaries to reasonings
about concrete realities in the world of change. The leading principle
of the _Inquiry_ is, that something extended, solid, and movable is
directly manifested in our sensuous experiences, equally with the direct
manifestations of our own sensations and other feelings when we are
conscious of them; and also that we are obliged by common sense to regard
extended, solid, and movable things as _other_ than mere transitory
sensation or idea. Extended things, large or small, refuse to be melted
down into sensations or states of one’s private consciousness. Take this
specimen of philosophical argument for accepting perceptions which cannot
be logically demonstrated, but which the common sense of human nature
refuses to reject:—
‘Suppose I am pricked with a pin, I ask, is the _pain_ I feel
a sensation? Undoubtedly it is. There can be nothing that
resembles pain in an inanimate thing: the pain must be in me,
a living being. But I ask again, is the _pin_ a sensation? To
this question I feel myself under a necessity of answering that
the pin is not a sensation, nor can have the least resemblance
to any sensation. The pin has length and thickness, figure and
weight. A sensation can have none of these qualities. I am
not more certain that the pain I feel _is_ a sensation than
that the pin _is not_ a sensation. Yet the pin is an object
of sense; and I am as certain that I perceive its figure and
hardness by my senses as that I feel pain when I am pricked by
it.’
This is to say that if, with the philosophers, I _call_ the pin as well
as the pain a sensation or an idea, I must mean by ‘sensation’ and
‘idea,’ when I apply those words to the pin, not a private self-contained
feeling or a fancy, in which I am only manifesting my conscious self,
but (so to speak) a _public_ sensation or idea—perceivable by other
persons as well as by me—a manifestation, in short, of what is _outside
my mind_—of something that exists permanently in _space_ and not
transitorily in _me_—and that is thus fit to be a medium of communication
between me and other living persons, informing me of their existence and
in some measure of their thoughts—all which (Reid takes for granted)
each person’s private feelings and fancies could not do. But to employ
the words ‘sensation’ and ‘idea’ in this new meaning, and to speak of
an idea as public or external, would be an abuse of language. We must
mark, always by appropriate words, distinctions which we are obliged to
acknowledge in fact. The inspirations or revelations of the common sense,
in and through which the Almighty Power gives us an understanding of the
life and world in which we find ourselves, inspirations in which all men
are believed more or less to participate, require us to distinguish the
solid and extended pin, as something public or outward, in contrast
to the private feeling of pain, of which no one except the person who
feels it is conscious. I am thus obliged to recognise more in existence
than my own sensations and ideas—as much obliged as I am to recognise
my sensations and ideas themselves when I am conscious of them. Only so
can I find myself living in an environment that is capable of signifying
the contemporaneous life, and some of the thoughts and feelings of other
persons. In all this I am only falling back on the divine revelations of
the common sense. They make me reject in conduct what is inconsistent
with them; although this natural obligation is all the reason I can give
in justification of my obedience.
It is thus that Reid recognises his right in reason to grasp realities
that are independent of his individual self; and he thinks that he
is doing this philosophically by getting rid of the unphilosophical
supposition, that he needs to work his way to them by logical reasoning,
founded on wholly inward impressions. The true philosophy of perception
with him is to discharge the medium, and at once take the bull by the
horns.
Some may think that the _Inquiry_ represents wasted labour—that the
‘metaphysical lunacy’ which abolishes personal pronouns as meaningless
words, and inconsistently reasons that all who reason must be fools, is
at the best the idle intellectual pastime of persons who pretend to be
universal sceptics—all which Reid has taken too seriously, and which
at any rate by its self-contradiction refutes itself. For it asserts
that assertion is impossible. It is an argument that concludes for the
rejection of the postulates without which it is impossible for human
beings to reason at all. It is a philosophy that destroys itself in
destroying all philosophy. The suicide does not need to be put to death.
Yet the suicide, doubly slain in the _Inquiry_, may be used as a warning
of the consequence of doing violence to the genuine common sense, or
ideal man that is latent in each man; especially on subjects in which
doubt is easier than in the case of outward things and persons. The
‘metaphysical lunacy’ of doubt about the existence of other persons
may be acknowledged, while the common sense, unawake in its moral
or spiritual elements, fails to protest against ethical atheism or
agnosticism. What Reid calls the common sense is alive consciously
in various degrees, in different persons, in different countries and
periods. A common sense of the existence of outward things and persons is
practically awake in all sane minds. But the spiritual convictions, of
which some are hardly conscious, may be rejected even practically without
obvious lunacy. And something is gained for those convictions, if it can
be shown, as a _reductio ad absurdum_, that their rejection involves
the moral sceptic too in the ‘lunacy’ of universal doubt and pessimist
despair.
That Reid lays much stress on ‘calling in question the common theory of
ideas or images in perception’ is explained by his assumption, that this
theory involves perversion of the common sense even in its preliminary
contact with outward things in sense, thus obviously discrediting it as
the final court of appeal in every other instance. It may in this way be
taken as a plea for a more faithful adherence on the part of philosophers
to the genuine common-sense judgments, which can be made to respond to an
adequate appeal, however dormant they may be in individuals. This final
appeal to human nature must, in short, be to human nature _as it is in
fact_, not to human nature _as distorted in hypothesis_.
For, after all, the root of the agnosticism which is found in history
alternating with the final faith of the common sense, lies deeper than
in mistaken hypotheses of philosophers about our perceptions in sense.
Reid’s substitution in philosophy of immediate for mediate perception of
matter is therefore an inadequate cure. The periodically returning doubt
concerns, not the outness or inwardness of what is revealed to sense,
but the meaning and character of the Power that is at work within the
universe of matter and mind, and with which we first come into contact
and collision in sense. Is it, in its final and pervading Power, a bad
or a good sort of universe that we open our eyes upon, when we begin to
exercise our senses? What are its final relations to me, and my final
relations to it? Nobody doubts the existence of things and persons, so
far as they are revealed to the senses. But what is our implied Common
Sense of the final meaning of the Whole? Am I to put an optimist or a
pessimist ultimate interpretation upon it all? The lurid mixture of pain
and pleasure, evil and good, presented by the animated world, combined
with spiritually dormant common sense in individual men,—is surely a more
potent factor of agnostic doubt than an erroneous account of perception
in circulation among persons who speculate.
Reid’s course of thought amidst new surroundings in Glasgow brought him
nearer to the source and corrective of the scepticism that is aroused by
the suspicious-looking universe of mingled good and evil, to which our
sense perceptions introduce us.