INSPIRED COMMON SENSE AND CAUSATION: ACTIVE OR MORAL POWER IN MAN
Philosophical recognition of the genuine Common Sense or natural judgment
of mankind, especially in two of its factors, which seemed to Reid
obscured if not suppressed by dogmatic hypothesis, gave its character
to his whole intellectual life. He found, in the first place, that ‘all
philosophers; from Plato to Mr. Hume, agree in this, that we do not
perceive external objects immediately, and that the immediate object of
perception must be some image present to the mind.’ To rid philosophy
of this hypothesis, as a mere prejudice, inconsistent with the absolute
trustworthiness, and therefore with the supreme and final rational
authority of our natural judgment, was the chief aim of his Aberdonian
life—culminating in the _Inquiry_ in 1764. He found, in the second place,
that ‘to confound the notion of agent or efficient cause with that of
physical cause has been a common error of philosophers, from the days of
Plato to our own’; and it seemed to him as subversive of moral relations
in the universe as the other was of physical relations. Accordingly, our
conception of Power or Causation chiefly engaged him in Glasgow. This
appears in his ‘Essays’ on moral Power in man; in his correspondence with
Kames and Gregory in the last twenty years of his life; as well as in the
unpublished fragment on ‘Power,’ in 1792, which was his last expression
of reflective thought. The Philosophy of Perception and the Philosophy of
Causation—our common sense of extended reality in our first intercourse
with it in the senses, and our common sense conception of ‘power’ and
‘cause’ which arises in the presence of the changes amidst which we live
and have our being—these were the two poles of Reid’s philosophical
life. His whole life was a war against two common errors of philosophers
regarding these, from the days of Plato to our own, in each of which the
seeds of speculative and practical scepticism seemed to lie thickly.
If these two fundamental convictions were untrustworthy, then faith in
anything must lose its sustaining strength. For our perceptions through
the five senses are the first principles of all our reasonings about the
actual universe, and our causal judgments are the means of interpreting
the realities to which those perceptions only introduce us.
We find ourselves continually in contact and collision with Power that
is external to ourselves individually; and we seem, too, to be exerting
powers of our own: on the Power latent in the universe, our happiness
or misery, our whole destiny, depends. What does all this mean? What is
meant by the judgment that all changes in the universe are ‘caused’; and
what is the origin of this judgment, or of the conception of ‘cause’ that
is involved in it? Are the powers which we recognise in us and around
us to be referred only to inanimate things as their centres; or only to
living and self-conscious persons; or to both?
Priestley, as an advocate of the claim of matter to account sufficiently
for self-conscious life in man, and Kames and Priestley by their
universal necessity, confirmed Reid’s disposition to inquire further into
the nature and origin of the conception of power, and the judgment that
every change presupposes what we ambiguously call a cause. His cousin
Gregory, too, inquired about causation, and gave the results to the world
in an _Essay on the Difference between the Relation of Motive and Action,
and that of Cause and Effect in Physics_, which appeared in 1792.
That every change must be caused, Reid regarded as a postulate of which
the contradictory was absolutely inconceivable: it was necessarily
implied in the common rational sense of Man, and, while incapable of
logical proof, was that without which nothing else could be proved. That
the things presented to our senses are themselves powerless; that all
power is spiritual, referable only to Will; and that this is the common
sense implicate of our physical and moral experience of changes, was the
proposition which Reid now set himself to justify. Our experience of our
own voluntary exertion is the only experience which directs us to the
quarter in which power, properly so called, resides. A voluntary agent is
our only example of a cause, or of that to which change must be finally
referred as its responsible source. We can find no productive power in
any inanimate thing. Matter, instead of being the universal cause, is
in itself powerless, and can account for nothing. The material universe
is virtually an external system of interpretable signs, regulated by
non-material power.
Take the following extracts from various letters of Reid’s to Gregory,
from 1785 onwards,[25] in the unpublished paper on Power:—
‘Power to produce an effect supposes power not to produce it;
otherwise it is not power but necessity, which is incompatible
with power taken in a strict sense.... I am not able to form
a conception how power (in the strict sense) can be exerted
without will; nor can there be will without some degree of
understanding. Therefore nothing can be an efficient cause in
the proper sense but an intelligent being [_i.e._ a person].
Hence the only notion we can form of Almighty Power is, that
God can do whatever He wills. Matter cannot be the cause of
anything: it can only be an instrument in the hands of a real
cause.... In physics the word cause has another meaning,
which, though I think it an improper one, yet is distinct,
and therefore may be reasoned upon. When a phenomenon is
produced according to a certain law of nature, we call the law
[or rule] the _cause_ of that phenomenon; and to the laws or
rules of nature we accordingly ascribe power or efficiency.
The whole business of physics is to discover, by observation
and experiment, the laws of nature, and to apply them to
the solution of phenomena. Now a law of nature is a purpose
or resolution of the Author of nature to act according to
a certain rule. There must be a real agent to produce the
phenomenon according to the law. A malefactor is not hanged by
the law, but by the executioner according to the law.’
Again:—‘A cause in the proper and strict sense signifies a
_mind_ that has power and will to produce the effect. A cause
in the physical sense means only something which, by the laws
of nature, the effect always follows; as when we say that
heat is the cause that turns water into vapour.... Between a
physical cause and its effect the conjunction must be constant;
unless in the case of a miracle. What D. Hume says of causes
in general is very just when applied to physical causes—that
a constant conjunction with the effect is essential to such
causes, and implied in the very conception of them.’ Again:—‘I
wish that the same general name—cause—had not been given to
both. They differ _toto genere_. For a physical cause is not an
agent. It does not act, but is acted upon. _You_ accordingly
give them different names; calling the one the agent and
not the cause, the other the cause and not the agent. But
I think this too bold an innovation in language. Men have
been so much accustomed to call the Deity the First Cause of
things, that to maintain that He is no cause at all would be
too shocking. To say that the world exists _without a cause_
would be accounted atheism, in spite of all explanations....
The words agent and action are less ambiguous. We say one
_body_ acts upon another; and in vain would one attempt to
abolish this language. To remedy this ambiguity of “cause” and
“agent,” I say that each of these words has two meanings—a
lax or popular and a philosophical.... It is remarkable that
the philosophical meaning must have been the first, and the
popular a corruption introduced by time.... Power is first
conceived from being conscious of it in ourselves. Conceiving
of inanimate beings from what we are conscious of in ourselves,
we at first ascribed to them such power as we are conscious
of, till experience informs us that inanimate things have not
the same powers as we have; but language was formed before
this discovery was made.... It is a curious question how we
come by the cognition of power and cause, so that we ascribe
them to things that have no will nor intelligence. I am apt
to think that savages, whenever they see motion which they
cannot account for, there they suppose a soul. In this period
of society language is formed. At length the more acute and
speculative few discover that some of the things which the
vulgar believe to be animated are inanimate. What use must
wise men make of this discovery? Will they affirm that the sun
does not shine nor give heat? that the sea never rages nor the
winds blow? nor the earth bring forth grass and corn? The wiser
part will speak the common language, and suit it to their new
notions as well as they can; just as philosophers still say
with the vulgar, that the sun “rises” and “sets.”’
That morally responsible intending Will is our ultimate conception
of Power or Cause, properly so called, is not less the lesson of the
Birkwood manuscript ‘On Power’ of 1792. Thus:—
‘Will is necessarily implied in the notion of Power. Volition
and what naturally follows upon our volitions, is all that we
conceive to be in our own power. What a man never willed can
never be imputed to him as his action. A being that has no
will can have no power. When we impute powers to dead matter,
it must be in some popular or analogical sense, but not in the
proper sense. There can be no productive power in an inanimate
object.... A cause is that which has power to produce an
effect. When we ascribe power to things inanimate as causes,
we mean nothing more than a constant conjunction by the laws or
rules of nature, which experience discovers. Thus we say that
the sun has power to retain the planets in their orbits, and
that heat has power to melt lead. If the ignorant be led by the
ambiguity of the word to conceive power in the sun or in heat
to produce the effects attributed to them, this is a vulgar
error which philosophy [_i.e._ of common sense] corrects. By
what agents these effects are [immediately] produced we know
not; but we have good reason to believe that they cannot be
produced by inanimate matter.’
Reid also allows that, for anything we can tell, things which have no
proper power of their own may be terms in a sequence that is subject to
an _absolute_ necessity of being the sequence that it is. But however
this may be, it transcends our knowledge; we must be satisfied with the
common sense conviction of persistent uniformities in fact pervading the
universe of change, whether this fact is the result of a divine necessity
or of arbitrary divine will. Natural uniformities are presupposed in
all our reasoning about our natural surroundings, and without this
presupposition things could not be reasoned about or formed into science.
All our knowledge of natural events, beyond original perceptions of
sense, consists in interpretation of the phenomena of which the senses
make us aware. Upon this judgment of the common sense our inductions are
all grounded, so that it may be called the inductive principle. Withdraw
trust from it and experience becomes blind as a mole. We may _feel_ what
is present at the moment, but the distant and the future are wholly hid
in darkness.
Power or intelligent agency is thus the exclusive characteristic of
conscious persons: interpretable order is the characteristic of inanimate
things. These are two correlative judgments or inspirations of our
natural common sense upon which human reasonings turn. Reid finds
when he reflects patiently that he is obliged, by a rational instinct
as it were, to recognise himself and other persons as the centres of
responsible power, the only sort of power or causality in existence that
can be supposed by us; and also to recognise in the impersonal world
without, something that in itself is passive and impotent, but which,
as a system of interpretable sense signs, may be said metaphorically to
form the _language_ of nature, of which the natural sciences are (so far)
the interpretation. The universe is thus a material order directed by
spiritual power, in a measure corresponding to the body and the spirit
in man, as man now is. But this larger conception carries us beyond the
modest philosophy to which Reid confined himself; although he more than
once approached it, perhaps through some unconscious reminiscence of the
Berkeleyism of his youth, of which, I think, he failed to see the real
drift, as it was unfolded in _Alciphron_ and especially in _Siris_.
Yet the following scrap, which I find among unpublished manuscripts of
his later life, shows that such thoughts were not quite absent from his
mind:—
‘The ancient philosophers called God the Soul of the World.
This, considered as a figurative expression, is destitute
neither of beauty nor of truth. What the soul of man is to his
body, that God is to the universe, in several respects; but not
in all. There are many respects in which the metaphor fails:
(1) The human soul did not make its own body, but God made
the world; (2) the human soul is ignorant of the nice texture
and mechanism of its body, but God knows the whole mechanism
of the universe, because He conceived and made it; (3) the
human soul receives much of its information by bodily organs:
God’s knowledge of all things is immediate and not dependent
on bodily organs; (4) our power over our own bodies is
limited: the power of God over the universe is unlimited; (5)
our bodies are wholly made up of inert and soulless matter:
the universe is stored with various orders of living beings
and free agents, subject to the Divine Power as their moral
governor and capable of paying back the service of rational
subjects.’
But the philosophy of the Common Sense, as represented by Reid, did not
rise to the conciliation of the natural order of the material with the
originative freedom of the spiritual world, in which operating law in
outward nature is recognised as immediate divine agency, or a part of
a revelation of perfectly reasonable Will in and through a universe of
things and persons.