Page:Modern Rationalism (1897).djvu/114

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
114
MODERN RATIONALISM.

struggle lies between the followers of Mill and the followers of Sir William Hamilton. Here, again, the change of attitude of the opponents of Rationalism is deeply significant. The dogmatic intuitionalism of the old schoolmen, who were at least consistently logical and rational, has given place to a system which can only oppose "faith" to scepticism; the attempt to give a demonstrative solution of the world-problem is practically abandoned. Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scotch school, or school of "Common Sense," was alarmed at the sceptical results of the acceptance of Locke's principles. In his "Inquiry into the Human Mind with Principles of Common Sense," published in 1763, he introduces the new form of intuitionalism. He admits that Berkeley's and Hume's inferences are correct, and pleads that they form a reductio ad absurdum on the empirical principles. The empirical method in general must be retained; pneumatology will make no progress unless, like somatology, it runs on empirical lines. But the "ideal" system, as he calls it—the notion that we get all our ideas from without, and only come to judge about things by combining them—is incorrect. We must be admitted to have certain primitive judgments independently of experience, and "the sum-total of primitive judgments which are present in the consciousness of all men, and on which all certainty ultimately rests, is called common sense." How are we assured of the objective truth of such judgments? By an instinctive impulse to form them, a blind faith—not unlike the sentimentalism which had been advocated in Germany against the Rationalists. "It was," says Falckenberg, "a transfer of the innate faculty of judgment inculcated by the ethical and aesthetical writers from the practical to the theoretical field." Reid was immediately supported by Oswald and Dugald Stewart, and a number of minor writers. Whewell and Hamilton, though much influenced by Kant, subscribed to the principles of Reid; and the tradition has been ably supported in more recent times by Dean Mansel, and by Professor Eraser, Professor Veitch, Professor Spencer Baynes: Dr. McCosh and Dr. Cairns also adopt it with modifications. Hamilton (in whom and Mill the antagonistic forces were personified during the first half of the century) bases his philosophy on the facts of consciousness; but, in opposition to the passive receptivity of the Empirics,