author himself had, however, carried a long way towards a satisfactory solution. The name of Locke, associated with the names of Clarke and Butler, distinguishes the close of the seventeenth and the commencement of the eighteenth century as the Augustan era of metaphysical science in the southern division of the island.
The imperfection or one-sidedness of Locke’s philosophy, as regards the expression of its fundamental principles, was exhibited, in what is virtually the form of a reductio ad absurdum, by David Hume, in his “Treatise of Human Nature,” where, on the principles of Locke, all knowledge is reduced to a succession of phenomena, while absolute existence and human philosophy are proved to imply a tissue of contradictions.
The philosophical doubts of Hume occasioned another independent effort to find the theory of knowledge. A conservative reaction, against the universal scepticism which he had extracted from the doctrine of Locke, was manifested almost contemporaneously in Scotland by Thomas Reid, and in Germany by Immanuel Kant—in Scotland with a tendency to what is practical and palpable, and in Germany to idealism and pantheism.
The epoch of Reid and Kant is distinguished by making the original structure of human intelligence a principal object of scientific attention. Each philosopher sought to find in that quarter a refuge from scepticism, and the only possible ultimate explanation of knowledge. Reid, on the inductive method of Bacon, systematically collected, under the name of “principles of common sense,” those inexplicable beliefs, or original living facul
