CHAPTER VIII
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Power in man; in his correspondence with Kames and Gregory in the last twenty years of his life; as well as in the unpublished
