RETROSPECTIVE AND CRITICAL
We find truth, as Pascal says, not only by logical reasoning but by
an act of immediate reason, not to be effaced by all the subtleties
of the speculative sceptic, who is thus confounded by the resistance
of rational human nature. This is a general expression of Reid’s more
elaborate reply to sceptical distrust in all human knowledge and
belief. That genuine human nature, when awakened into conscious life,
is practically irresistible, is what Reid insists on; for no sane man
acts in contradiction to the common sense of which he is conscious,
although he can speculate sceptically in an abstract way, and may even
serve truth in doing so. For this scepticism may amend philosophical
systems in which the constituent principles of human nature are not
theoretically recognised in their integrity; and it may also stimulate
the unphilosophical to a deeper and truer insight of what the natural
principles are on which men must proceed in their actions. But the
principles themselves are not reached by reasoning: they are the
inspiration of God; and it is this divine inspiration that makes
experience and reasoning at all possible for men.
That I am an individual self-conscious person, to whom something other
than, and independent of, my individual self is presented in my senses—so
independent of me individually that it can inform me of the existence of
other persons whose conscious life is numerically different from mine;
that the free agency of a person is the only sort of power that we are
obliged to recognise, persons being revealed as responsible powers in
and through our moral nature; and that the powerless things of sense,
of which we are immediately percipient in our sense perceptions, are
interpretable for purposes of common life and science, inasmuch as their
changes must be determined by natural laws, all reasoning being otherwise
impossible—_these_ I think are the chief ‘inspirations’ or ‘revelations’
of the Common Sense on which Reid enlarges. This account of those
inspirations is not offered as complete; only as results, more or less
fragmentary, reached by the deep and steady reflection of a long life.
Reid’s philosophical appeal to the divine inspirations of the common
sense, without which nothing can be proved, on behalf of truths which do
not admit of direct logical proof, but only of a sort of philosophical
justification, has been disparaged as an ignoble retreat from the
standpoint of the philosopher, in the interest of popular prejudices and
blind authority. It has been spoken of as an appeal from the reasoned
judgments of the reflecting minority to the unreasoned opinions of the
unreflecting majority, an opening for arbitrary dogmas to enter and crush
free inquiry. This is the drift of the criticism of Priestley in last
century, and of Ferrier in this, while Kantian critics complain of Reid’s
lazy arrest of philosophy at the level of ordinary beliefs. Besides
this, what Reid claims as ‘the chief merit of his philosophy’—that of
questioning the common assumption that external things cannot present
themselves in our perceptions, but only unauthenticated representations
of them—proceeds, according to Priestley, on a misinterpretation of the
metaphorical language of philosophers: to refute it is an idle waste of
controversial labour, taking figures of speech for serious science.
If ‘common sense’ in this philosophy means only unintelligent opinion,
as opposed to the judgments of thinkers, Reid’s response to the sceptic
may well be regarded as an arrest of intelligence,—blind dogmatism
instead of philosophy. But candid critics interpret words in the meaning
intended by those who use them. This appeal to the judgments named those
of the common sense, is intended as an appeal to reason itself—reason,
that is to say, in its final form in a finite intelligence, whose
experience of the universe is incomplete, and working under conditions
imposed upon its exercise in intelligent beings who are not omniscient.
Reid’s Common Sense is the final perception of a being who can know the
universe of reality only in part, and is therefore needed by man in that
intermediate position in which an absolute beginning or end of things
must be to him incomprehensible. It is an appeal to that which must in
reason be final, in an intelligence that only partly shares in divine
omniscient reason. Although its judgments are not evolved from premises,
they are nevertheless what all men, except infants and lunatics, more
or less distinctly acknowledge in their individual actions, although
they may misconstrue them in their uneducated opinions, or spoil them
by indulgence in purely speculative systems. The divine inspiration of
the common sense is therefore man’s final support, amidst the so-called
‘contingencies’ of temporal change in himself and his surroundings. A
philosophical appeal to it is of practical importance in reference
to what, at the human point of view, are contingent truths of moral
reasoning: the necessary truths of abstract thought, it has been well
said, ‘sufficiently guard themselves.’
Accordingly the judgments of the common sense which chiefly interested
Reid are what he calls first principles of ‘contingent’ truths, as
distinguished from abstract necessities the opposites of which are
self-contradictory or unthinkable. Contingent truths, on the other hand,
may be rejected in thought; but those who reject them speculatively
must proceed upon them in their actions and reasonings, including even
sceptical reasonings. The man whose scepticism involves a practical
surrender of the common judgment, that what we call the outward world
is independent enough of _his_ individual existence to make it a
trustworthy medium of intercourse for him with other living persons;
and who acts accordingly on the belief that ‘other persons’ are only
conscious states of his own individual mind, would be pronounced a
lunatic. Again, the fatalist, who rejects practically the moral judgment
that refers the issues of a deliberate voluntary determination to the
voluntary or personal agent as its responsible centre, insanely sits
still in the midst of danger, and refrains from exerting a power which he
denies. And he who refuses to proceed upon the logically undemonstrable
postulate of universal natural order, by ceasing to reason about wholly
uninterpretable chaos, is inevitably crushed by the Universal Power that
he ignores.
It is thus that practical disregard of inspired final reason appears to
Reid to be ‘destructive at once of the science of the philosopher, the
prudence of the man of the world, and the faith of the Christian.’ The
unjust as well as the just, so far as they live at all, must, he sees,
live by faith in what cannot be either proved or disproved by direct
demonstration. And if all those final judgments of practical reason were
contradicted in daily action, as well as in academic theory, ‘piety,
patriotism, parental affection, and private virtue would appear as
ridiculous as knight-errantry: the pursuits of pleasure, ambition, and
avarice must be grounded upon this sort of belief as well as those that
are honourable and virtuous.’
On the other hand there are common prejudices which, while they last,
are popularly dignified as ‘common sense.’ Some now universally admitted
truths of science at first shocked men, although afterwards found
to be in harmony with the general common sense to which philosophy
appeals. That we are living on a material ball that revolves in space;
that the revolving ball revolves also on its axis; that the sun does
not rise and set, but is at rest; the existence of the antipodes; the
invisibility of the distances of things—are a few examples. Instead
of contradicting the common sense, the common sense, in the light of
further experimental evidence, finally imposes them upon us. At any
rate _their_ contradictories cannot be justified by the universal
intellectual paralysis which is the alternative to the rejection of a
_genuine_ judgment of the common sense. The assertion that the earth is
in motion and the sun relatively at rest does not contradict sane human
nature: that changes in nature are all wholly chaotic, and therefore
wholly uninterpretable, can never become a scientific discovery, because
it implies subversion of all science and makes scientific reasoning
impossible. The invisibility of the distances of things, rightly
understood in the light of its evidence, draws no protest from genuine
human nature. Human nature or final reason protests, on the other hand,
when the material world is believed to be so unreal that I cannot by
means of it find that there are other human beings. The impotence of all
things presented to the senses does not contradict reason in the common
sense in the way the impotence, and consequent irresponsibility, of man
does.
But Reid, I think, makes too little of the service of philosophical
reflection, in quickening into conscious life in the individual the
postulates on which human knowledge and conduct finally turn, and in
developing their meaning. Such primary assumptions as the real existence
of outward things; our own individual personal existence; and the
existence of God, are held with very different degrees of intelligence,
by the indolent and thoughtless and by those who reflect. Advance in
philosophy is advance in interpreting the meaning of each of these
three postulates, and of their mutual relations, as seen in an improved
conception of what ‘matter’ means, what ‘self’ means, and what ‘God’
means. The common sense or final reason of man is developed in different
degrees in different persons, in different places, at different periods
of human history, and in the same person at different times in his life.
It is not individually independent of evolutionary law; although its
genuine constituents are latent in each man and may be made to respond to
an adequate appeal. The practical reason of the common sense, while not
founded on but presupposed in philosophy, may nevertheless be deepened
and enlightened in each man by reflection and criticism. Its final action
is therefore far from superseding the philosopher, who has to systematise
man’s advancing experience of the universe in the light of an idealised
common sense, or the common sense in the ideal man, which the philosopher
tries to approach more nearly. In this intellectual progress the cruder
conceptions of ‘matter’ and ‘self’ and ‘God,’ as well as of the final
physical and the moral relations of the three postulated existences, are
purified and expanded; but always without disparagement to the primary
roots. Improvement of human knowledge, in harmony with the awakened
common sense inspirations, is our intellectual ideal.
It may perhaps be said that Reid makes his appeal to the root principles
of practical reason—the essential sanity of mankind—only on behalf of
what no one seriously calls in question; and moreover that he attributes
the scepticism with which he struggled to a speculative theory of
philosophers, instead of to facts in nature and in man, which suggest
distrust in the ‘inspirations’ on which human understanding depends, in
its lack of omniscience. What need, it may be asked, for a prolonged
endeavour to justify belief in the existence of the house in which we
live, the planet on which it stands, or the human beings among whom we
seem to play our parts? Only insane persons—really insane—can be found
to doubt realities like these. Insanity cannot be cured by an elaborate
disproof of the ‘ideal system’; and as for the sane, such common sense
sanities as these are safe enough without this philosophical appeal to
human sanity. As regards those beliefs—_si non rogas intelligo_. I know
all that I need to know, as long as I am not asked to justify and explain
my knowledge, logically or otherwise, and remain contented to enjoy the
things that unpractical thinkers vainly try to understand.
That sceptical distrust in our original faculties, and in Power or
Providence that is finally operative in the universe in which we have our
being, lies deeper than the ‘ideal system’ which was Reid’s bugbear; and
also that it arises mostly in connection with less obtrusive elements
in the common sense than our perceptions through the five senses, is in
harmony with the gradual development of Reid’s own thought which I have
tried to trace. For he advanced, as we saw, from reflection upon those
‘inspirations’ of the common sense that are implied in our physical
perceptions, to reflection upon those other data of the common sense
that are implied in our perceptions of personal and morally responsible
agency. It is in touching and seeing the material world that the common
sense is first awakened; and thus the material world is the most
obtrusive object in human experience, its perceptions affording the
fittest preliminary object-lesson on the office of this final reason
in the whole rational economy of man. External perceptions are the
beginnings of all reasonings about concrete existence. They are the
obvious examples of those original judgments, which are ‘the inspiration
of the Almighty,’ more obvious than the often dormant ones that are
moral and spiritual. All the discoveries of our reason are grounded on
them. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder in the
constitution, is called _lunacy_ by all; as when a man believes that he
is made of glass: but when a man suffers himself to be reasoned out of
them by metaphysical arguments he would call this _metaphysical lunacy_;
which differs from the other species of the distemper in this, that it
is not continued, but intermittent. He thus tests reason in its final
authority, as distinguished from reason in its innumerable inferential
exercises: the authority may be logically vindicated as reasonable, but
its judgments are not conclusions originally deduced from premises.
It must also be remembered that the Reidian protest on behalf of a
philosophical recognition of the blended judgment and feeling which makes
this common reason that is more or less consciously alive in all men,
is a protest on behalf of the regulative authority of this reason in
its genuine integrity. All philosophical systems, so far, proceed upon
and acknowledge its judgments; but, as it seemed to Reid, often only
after spoiling them. He made it his particular mission to restore them
in their genuine integrity to philosophy as the prime factors of all
true theories. In perception does the outward reality actually appear,
extended as it really is, without any unextended medium interposed,
exactly as the internal reality of a pain or a pleasure appears without
a medium, when I am conscious of being pained or pleased? If so, let us
then, Reid would say, accept this fact as final, even although we cannot
account for it; instead of perverting it by supposing that the external
reality is one thing, and the immediately perceived object of which alone
we are curious a different thing;—dreaming that this supposed internal
object, as its copy, explains our perception of the external object that
is imperceptible. Again, according to genuine common sense, the ‘self’
which I am obliged to presuppose is invisible; my body or my brain is
external to _it_, as much so as the sun and moon are; for they are all
parts of the material world—all objects of my senses—unlike my proper
personality, which is approached only through the inner consciousness,
and not at all through perception of the senses. Here, too, Reid protests
on behalf of the genuine common sense, and against the scientifically
perverted common sense offered to him by Priestley. For the distinctive
feature of Reidism is not vague acknowledgment of the common sense, but
acknowledgment of it as it is found to be when steadfast reflection is
applied to the final mental experience of man.
A modern critic may complain that Reid’s point of view is too narrow and
special, and his method too matter-of-fact to entitle the result to be
called philosophy. It looks unlike philosophy proper, which is concerned
with the universe and universals, and is like a special science of human
mind, having human mind for its finite object or province, as other
special sciences have their limited provinces. For instance, astronomy
has the stellar bodies; chemistry, the elementary constitution of bodies;
geology, the phenomena in the strata of the earth’s crust; and so on. Now
the final problem of universal reality, or at least universal reality in
ultimate relation to man, is the proper business of the philosopher, who
contemplates the all-comprehensive synthesis which sustains or explains
each special science, and even the universe of nature and man; while, as
human philosophy, it still recognises the inherent infinity that makes
realities overleap the special sciences. For philosophy is the supreme
speculation, concerned with Matter or outward Nature, Self or Spirit, and
God or the final all-determining Power—and of this final inquiry Reid had
hardly a conception. Yet we must allow that when Reid’s method is called
‘inductive,’ it is more than inductive in the ordinary meaning of the
word induction in the natural sciences. He does not reach the several
principles of the common sense by the way of probable generalisation from
observed facts; rather as truths which arise out of latency into more
or less distinct consciousness, in response to steadfast meditation.
They are philosophically recognised ‘inspirations,’ or ‘revelations’—not
tentative generalisations; and their justification must not be confounded
with the ordinary verification with which we are familiar in sciences of
outward nature. The common sense provides material to the philosopher,
not ready made, but still not mere issue of empirical generalisation.
How far a philosophy akin to that of Reid admits of philosophical
expansion, or of being brought up to date at the end of the nineteenth
century, when the fundamental questions of religious thought are at the
root of our doubts and perplexities, may be considered on a review of
the fortunes of Reid’s appeal to the inspirations of final reason in the
century which has passed since he died.