Thomas Reid/Chapter XI
CHAPTER XI
How has Reid's protest of reason in the name of common sense—a protest against sceptical paralysis of human intelligence, physical and moral—fared in the nineteenth century? Has Reid by this protest established what is of lasting value either to human happiness or to philosophical theory? What has modern thought, as developed at the end of the nineteenth century, to say to a Scottish eighteenth century inquiry into human mind that finds its root in a postulated sense of reality, which must be taken as finally authoritative when it is recognised in its genuine integrity? How do faith and doubt now stand finally related, as compared with their relations when Reid opposed Hume? Is there still room for philosophical argument founded on the divine inspirations of the Common Sense, under, for instance, our transformed conception of the universe as an evolution?
Expansion rather than subversion of the philosophy which ultimately argues from the common sense, has, I think, been going on. Matter-of-fact study of human mind, as engaged in perception of the material world, and in the moral exercise of voluntary agency, which with Reid makes this perception of matter, and moral consciousness of free agency its prominent spiritual facts, has now risen to criticism of our conception of the Supreme Power that is finally at work in the universe in which we live and move and have our being. And a less purely academic scepticism than that against which Reid summoned the common sense now confronts us. If Reid’s mission was to call attention to our direct mental grasp of outward realities, by exploding a theory which seemed to paralyse that grasp, it would have been his corresponding mission now to justify, in name of the moral and spiritual elements of the common sense, the religious interpretation of the universe, which finds in the facts of matter and man a continuous self-revelation of omnipotent love and mercy—and this in the face of a world which repels our more philanthropic civilisation, by its abundant suffering and sin. Instead of philosophy at war with common sense, common sense is now alleged as at war with the finally moral and religious conception of the universe, which Reid accepted as conclusive under the premises of an old-fashioned natural theology. Now universal natural law is supposed to exclude God, and sentient misery to make theistic faith in the goodness, and therefore trustworthiness, of the Supreme Power an anachronism, which must give place to universal pessimist doubt and despair. How can we rest with trust in those practical principles of human nature to which Reid appealed, when they and we are found in a universe so full of evil as this in which we find ourselves? Are we not navigating the ocean of life in a vessel that is not seaworthy? These are questions now expressed or felt.
For forty years after Reid’s death the higher thought of Scotland, represented by its leaders, remained well within the old lines. It was still careful analysis of what is presented in human consciousness, with a gradual decline of interest in the metaphysical and moral problems which Hume's agnostic distrust had introduced even into Reid's modest treatment of the common sense. Scottish philosophy became a search for natural sequences and co-existences among phenomena, instead of search for firm intellectual and moral footing in a universe to which we are introduced by being percipient of an infinitesimal part through our five senses. For a quarter of a century Dugald Stewart was Reid's acknowledged successor, less original, and even less adventurous, than his master, but unrecognisable in the ill-tempered criticism of Schopenhauer. With dignified eloquence, wider intimacy with society than Reid's, and more learning, he applied inductive methods to find the laws that determine intellectual character and the education of the human mind, also to solve social questions, in graceful language—all which touched the popular imagination more than his somewhat prosaic predecessor.
Early in the nineteenth century, Thomas Brown, the young Edinburgh Professor of Moral Philosophy, and colleague of Stewart, raised a revolt against Reid and Stewart in some of their characteristic philosophy. This brilliant youth, minor poet as well as philosopher, had practised medicine in Edinburgh before his appointment, in 1810, at the age of thirty-two, to the chair of Stewart. In medical practice he had been the colleague of Dr. Gregory, Reid's cousin, and so long his correspondent. Brown, unlike Reid, was one of the precocious philosophers. At the age of twenty he appeared as a critic of the Zoonomia of Darwin, and a few years later as author of an Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, which contains the essence of the philosophy that was afterwards expanded and applied in his Lectures. He died at the age of forty-two, leaving works undistinguished by the deep and patient thought of Reid, and diffuse in style, but abounding in ingenious analysis—an interesting contribution to the logic of physical inquiry, instead of appeals to carefully considered judgments of the Common Sense in Perception and in Causation. Brown recognised instinctive belief in natural constancies of co-existence and sequence among phenomena, and treated associations among mental states as the chief explanation of the phenomena of mind. The originative moral agency of intending and intelligent Will, so prominent latterly in Reid, disappears in Brown. And Brown, like Priestley, disparaged Reid's claim to merit for reversing the philosophical prejudice that 'ideas' are the only objects of human cognition, regarding it as a metaphor mistaken for a dogma. Indeed, the empirical laws of association tend with Brown, as with Priestley, to be the sole ultimate laws of mind: perhaps this tendency was restrained in expression as much by personal respect for Reid and Stewart as by conviction.
After Brown, philosophy in Scotland was for a time dormant—superseded by Combe and phrenology. But contemporaneously, in 'the twenties,' a philosophy more akin to Reid than to Brown made its appearance in England; although the analogy is not on the surface, and has not, I think, been observed. Coleridge, especially in his Aids to Reflection, published in 1825, insists with eloquent emphasis upon the difference between 'the Reason,' which is divine or inspired, and mere 'Understanding,' which generalises the phenomena that emerge in experience: he also presses the distinction between free agency, as implied in morally responsible causation, and the mechanical order of nature with which physical sciences are exclusively concerned. 'The Reason,' to which Coleridge appeals, corresponds in function to 'the Common Sense' of Reid. It is described as fixed and final; as in all its decisions appealing to itself; and as 'much nearer to sense than the understanding,' for it is direct insight of truth, whereas understanding must refer all its judgments to premises. That man, because he is morally responsible, must originate, within his individual personality as their final centre, all acts for which he is responsible, is with Coleridge a postulate, 'the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself,' and so see the true meaning of the words power and causality. In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations of the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason. We may speak of understanding as 'human,' with its often discordant generalisations; but there can be no merely 'human' Reason. There neither is nor can be but one and the same Reason; the light without which the individual understanding would be darkness.
The philosophy that carefully measures its conclusions by the Common Sense found its way from Scotland into France early in this century, in arrest of the materialism and scepticism which had taken the place of the spiritual philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. In 1811 Royer Collard, eminent as a philosopher and a statesman, was made Professor of Philosophy in Paris. In that year, when he was preparing his lectures, he accidentally found a copy of Reid’s Inquiry at a book-stall near the Seine. He was charmed with its contents, which thereafter inspired his teaching.[1] Through Royer Collard, Reid's philosophy became the dominant philosophy of France, and it still retains an elevating spiritual influence in the national schools.[2] In 1828 Reid's works were translated and discussed by Jouffroy, a leading thinker in his generation, who thus leavened thinking minds among contemporaries. But Victor Cousin was Reid's most eloquent and famous missionary. He had been educated by Royer Collard in Reid's principles. His ardent and comprehensive genius, however, became dissatisfied with what he called a 'sage but timid doctrine,' and treated it as a vigorous but hardly philosophical protest against the sceptic in the name of uncritical common sense. In his enthusiasm, Cousin turned to Germany for 'a philosophy so masculine and brilliant that it could command the attention of Europe.' At first he thought he found in Kant the profound refutation of the sceptic, and the grand constructive philosophy he wanted. But soon Kant's mode of expelling the 'mortal poison' seemed as unsatisfactory as Reid's, and he parted company with him so far as to join first Schelling and then Hegel in an eclectic or all-reconciling system. But in the end the fascination of Hegelian thought abated. There might, after all, be deeper meaning, and more capacity for development, in Reid's appeal than he had supposed. So in his later years Cousin returned to his first love. His Philosophie Ecossaise, which appeared in its latest form in 1857, is an eloquent appreciation of Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Reid, and Beattie, with Reid as the chief figure in the centre.
Meantime a formidable intellectual force had appeared in Scotland, in argumentative collision with those Germans by whom Cousin had been fascinated, and also with Cousin’s own eclectic assimilation of all philosophies. Sir William Hamilton was warning his contemporaries against the 'masculine and brilliant' Continental philosophy, and energetically recalling them to Reid, by two essays in the Edinburgh Review—one in October 1829, destructive of the 'Philosophy of the Unconditioned,' the other in October 1830, constructive, on Reid's 'Philosophy of Perception.' The reconstruction of the philosophy of the Common Sense, contained by implication in these famous essays, was, in 1846, elaborated in commentaries which embrace the literature of philosophy, in Hamilton's Reid. The Glasgow professor re-appeared in the company of the most learned of all Scottish philosophers, educated especially by Aristotle and his commentators, by Kant, and by Reid himself, whose modest enterprise was now measured by the profoundest problems and most comprehensive conceptions of ancient and modern speculation. The magnificent intellect of Hamilton raised deep questions among us that lay dormant in Reid.
Hamilton in Scotland is so far in parallel with Cousin in France, that—moving in opposite directions—they both helped to germanise the philosophy which makes its last appeal to the common sense. Cousin, dissatisfied with the 'timidity' of Reid, tried to reconcile a philosophy that should comprehend the Infinite with the philosophy that is confined to experience. Hamilton's mission was to clip the wings of the speculative adventurers. This made him put the emphasis on the inadequacy of a human understanding for fully coping with the eternal reality. While he praised Reid for making the Common Sense in its integrity the necessary criterion of philosophy, he claimed for himself the special credit of distinguishing its necessities as of two sorts—the one a positive power, the other the impotence implied in finite intelligence. Hence human experience rests on a conditioned, or (so far) paralysed intelligence; and if omniscience only can be called 'knowledge,' while to know 'in part,' therefore with involved mysteries, must be called ignorance—it follows that man knows nothing. Ignorance is then the consummation of human philosophy, and its highest attainment is this discovery. 'Our dream of knowledge is a little light rounded with darkness.' 'The highest reach of science and philosophy is the scientific recognition of human ignorance.' 'Doubt is the beginning and the end of all our efforts to know.' 'The last and highest consecration of all true religion is an altar to the unknown and unknowable God.' Man’s knowledge of existence must be relative to his limited experience and intelligence.
The missionary of a neglected truth is apt to be one-sided and even paradoxical, and strenuous expression was natural to Hamilton. From his first essay in 1829 to his last in 1855 he sought to show the inconsistency of infinite knowledge with our limited share of inspiration in the Common Sense. Accordingly, the negative and incomplete, or what Bacon calls 'broken' character of man’s knowledge, rather than its positive victories, is ever supreme in the Hamiltonianised Reid, along with a recast of Reid's account of the Common Sense as involved in perception of the outward things of sense.
The respective offices of Reid and Hamilton might be compared in this aphorism of Pascal—'La Nature soutient la Raison impuissante.’ Need for the common sense with which human nature is charged, illustrates the impotence of man's unomniscient understanding and limited share of the Divine Reason. Taking those words of Pascal, Reid puts emphasis on 'la nature'; Hamilton on 'impuissance.' But both are recognised by each: it is a difference of emphasis. Neither Hamilton nor Mansel excludes the conservative influence of 'la nature,' taken in its integrity, in the way Mr. Herbert Spencer does, when he rests philosophy only on the strongly emphasised part of Hamiltonian philosophy. In Hamilton the 'raison impuissante' is insisted on really in order to make room for 'la nature'; on the ground that the logical understanding, here 'la raison,' is too impotent to be able to disprove the genuine judgments of the Common Sense.
Brown's rebellion against Reid early in the century, in the interest of a universal physical causation or association, has its parallel in Ferrier's revolt, in the middle of the century, against the Hamiltonian Reid, in the interest of abstract metaphysics as opposed to uncriticised common sense. In the name of philosophy he excludes from philosophy all except necessary truths of abstract reason; neglecting, as beneath its regard, the world of change, in which Reid’s mixed and practical reason, or Common Sense, had been offered as final guide. The office of philosophy, according to Ferrier, is among the eternal truths, which alone can be absolutely demonstrated, and which relieve philosophy from 'the oversight of popular opinion and the errors of psychological science,' which had been unworthily dignified as the final test of truth. The natural beliefs of mankind, instead of being worshipped as divine, are banished in Ferrier's philosophy, on the ground that their self-contradictoriness is demonstrable: the business of the philosopher, accordingly, is to substitute 'reasonable thinking' for 'common sense.' The 'raison impuissante,' emphasised by Hamilton—the ignorance in which Hamilton revels—is not allowed by Ferrier to be ignorance at all; for 'man cannot be said to be ignorant of self-contradictions that can be knowledge for no mind, human or divine.' Independent or unperceived matter is not merely hid from man’s knowledge on account of his 'raison impuissante'; it is hid from all intelligence, because inconsistent with the necessarily mind-dependent essence of Being. Pure reason does not need to be finally supplemented by practical principles of common sense. It is able to shift for itself without this surrender. The conciliation of common sense thinking and philosophy is accomplished by the submission of common sense to universal compulsory reason. Opinion must submit to demonstration, instead of demonstration, intelligible only by the few, having to make way for the undemonstrable dogmas of the unreflecting.
Reid, I suspect, could hardly recognise, in the stuffed figure thus put up by Ferrier to be knocked down, either the 'common sense' in which he found the root of a human knowledge of the realities revealed in place and time throughout the long experience of man, or the 'perception' in which things external to the individual mind make their appearance 'in part.' The practical impossibility of disbelieving the existence of other living beings, of discarding memory as wholly delusion, of treating man as irresponsible, and our surroundings as chaotic or wholly uninterpretable, alike for science and in common life—these were alleged constituents of the common sense with which Reid concerned himself. They all lie outside the demonstrations of Ferrier, in which he unfolds his theory in forms of artistic beauty and easy grace, which make him the most picturesque figure in the succession of Scottish philosophers. Yet Brown and Ferrier in the end helped on the expansion of Reid.
Before Ferrier passed away in 1864, a revolution in the conception of the universe was in progress in Britain. The idea of continuous physical evolution of external nature and of man, promulgated biologically by Darwin, and by Mr. Herbert Spencer as the all-comprehensive generalised law of a universe that was supposed to be the outcome of unknowable Power, has become a popular creed within the last forty years. Simultaneously, methods of development akin to Hegel were introduced by Dr. Hutcheson Stirling in his Secret of Hegel, and afterwards in Glasgow by Dr. Caird, who adorned Reid’s chair for nearly thirty years—methods for making explicit latent Divine Reason as what explains and sustains the universe. Reid's appeal in a practical temper, to the mixed and moral reason in man, as that with which man is inspired—an appeal widened and prolific of deeper questions in Hamilton—was still too cautious to attempt to formulate the mysteries of existence, in fully intelligible principles, which should remove the darkness around the 'little light' with which Reid was satisfied. He would have looked with distrust at the more ambitious intellectual constructions which seemed to be superseding the common sense of human nature, as the human response to the sceptic or agnostic, whose philosophical knowledge turned all knowledge into ignorance at the last. Reid was too human to be satisfied with merely physical generalisations of sequences and co-existences of phenomena, finally unintelligible, and therefore unworthy of trust; and he would have been too cautious to accept a network of abstract intellectual necessities, latent in the universe, as the last and best human account of nature and man as actually found in place and time. To rest satisfied with the evolutionary generalisation he would have regarded as involving the 'common error of philosophers since the days of Plato,' in confounding moral agency with physical causation. Of the magnificent Hegelian constructions he would probably have said, what he says of Samuel Clarke's theological demonstration—'These are the speculations of men of superior genius. But whether they be as solid as they are sublime, or whether they be the wanderings of imagination in a region beyond the limit of human understanding, I am unable to determine.'
The alternatives presented to this generation—either agnostic pessimist despair or universal science in which man is in some sense identified with God—final nescience versus final omniscience—ultimate and universal problem of existence taking the place of a Reid’s science of human mind—represent the unending struggle between sceptical distrust of the Universal Power, ignorantly worshipped, and reasonable ethical faith in the Universal Power, with consequent hope for men. It is in Scotland a new form of the war with David Hume to which Reid's life was given. It has been going on since Socrates argued with the Sophists at Athens, and since Job justified the morality of Providence among the Eastern emirs. The eighteenth-century question, 'What is Matter?' has risen in the nineteenth to the question, 'What is God?' The inspired Common Sense or Common Reason of Reid seems to be sublimated in universally necessitating dialectical Reason, in this Scoto-German way of resisting the agnostic. To fill the place of the 'unknown and unknowable God' of the Hamiltonian emphasis, human knowledge appears identified and co-extensive with the Divine, in an absolute idealism, presumed to be the only adequate refutation of all subverting doubt. The 'raison impuissante,' sustained by and culminating in 'la nature,' or inspired common sense, is exchanged for what looks like a pantheistic necessity that leaves no room for moral agency in man or God, and which scorns the incomplete knowledge that cannot dispense with a faith venture at its root.
Yet Reid, if he were now among us, might find the common sense not superseded but idealised, in the more articulate response of reason in man to the all-pervading active Reason which the later philosopher identifies with his own. That the common sense latent in man is the inspiration of God is an assumption with which he started in his Inquiry. 'The inspiration of the Almighty giveth man understanding.' 'The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.' So the common sense moral trust in God, or universal moral venture, is at the root of all human life and human knowledge, giving unity and vitality to the whole. It is the 'little light'—a ray from the perfect divine light,—and the universe is interpretable for all human purposes only in and through it. It is that in each of us through which the inspirations in the ideal man, when dormant in individuals, can nevertheless be made to respond, in an ethical or religious common sense of the infinite love and mercy of the all-sustaining Power that is always waiting to be gracious—to respond to the inspirations of Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles.
If 'knowledge' means only what is reached by the logical understanding elaborating materials given by sense; and if the name is denied to the inspirations of the Common Sense, what those inspirations should be called becomes a question about the meaning of a word. God is then 'unknowable' by man, only inasmuch as faith in the perfect reason and goodness of the Universal Power is more than an ordinary scientific generalisation. But if we recognise in the Common Sense, and in its underlying Theistic Faith, that without which all our knowledge must dissolve in ignorance, then the faith must be accepted as in reason the final ground of the knowledge; and therefore as in us the last form of the universal reason, in and through which what is divine in us protests against limitation to an intelligence that becomes paralysed in the absence of this its indispensable factor. If knowledge means omniscient physical science of the universe of reality, then the universe of reality is finally unknown and unknowable. But if man can live in intelligible relations to what transcends natural science,—call this which enables him so to live, 'knowledge,' 'science,' 'common sense,' 'faith,' 'inspiration,' 'revelation,' 'feeling,' or 'reason,'—it is treasure found for the philosopher.
Can Reid’s 'common sense' be sublimated into the universal consciousness of Hegelian dialectic, and does this translation of faith into absolute science constitute the true ideal of Scottish common sense philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century? Is common knowledge, and scientific knowledge in special sciences, only knowledge 'in part,' while the true philosopher may aspire to know even as God knows? Must man thus claim omniscience as the only fit ground of his protest against sceptical nescience? Or, must his interpretation of the experience through which he is passing be, even in the end, only an inspired faith-venture, instead of the omniscience which elevates the common sense into itself? Rather, must not the supposed omniscience, which is dissatisfied with faith-ventures, because faith is supposed to be blind, be itself only the common sense under another name—but with its intellectual constitution more articulately explicated?
Surely only omniscience and omnipotence can dispense with the moral and religious venture of our inspired common sense and its implied theistic faith, as the root of reason in man—in his intermediate place and office, between perfect knowledge and total ignorance. So understood, Reid’s philosophy is virtually the philosophy that makes its final appeal to the divine in man, latent in each individual man, in and through whom the universe is gradually interpreted as a revelation of perfect reason or perfect goodness. True philosophy is then the moral and religious venture which accepts and applies the principles of common sense, in the assurance that, in genuine submission to their inspired authority, we cannot finally be put to intellectual or moral confusion. Faith in God is latent even in the perceptions of external sense, in which Reid found the first example of the operation of this inspiration. Alike in the outer world of the senses, and in free or responsible agency in man, filial faith, ethical or theistic, may be justified by reasoning, although it cannot be reached by logic as a direct conclusion from premises. It is our primary postulate, and not an object of logical proof; therefore credible in reason while it is not demonstrable.
In this way a humanised Hegelianism, which seeks to restore or retain the often dormant faith in the perfectly good God, and thus in the future of man, may even be taken as in line with Reid, under the altered intellectual conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. It virtually appeals at last to moral faith.[3]
Poetry in another way than philosophy expresses and interprets for man the inspired experience that transcends physical science and its logical understanding. And we find in the great poets of the Victorian era an appeal through the imagination to those elements in human nature, to which Reid made argumentative appeal as a philosopher. In this lies Wordsworth’s 'healing power.' His 'Intimations of Immortality' express divine inspirations, through which man learns to understand himself and his surroundings—inspirations that, dormant, 'fade into the light of common day,' yet, recovered by reflection, 'in a season of calm weather, though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither.' And 'In Memoriam' is Tennyson’s protest against the doubting spirit of the age, on behalf of the final and life- determining principles, which underlie creeds, belong to our earliest childhood, and on which the wisest and best have rested with a more or less intelligent consciousness through the ages—God revealed in the ideal man latent in all men. The human office of inspired common sense or ethical reason, final for beings whose 'knowledge' must be intermediate between omniscience and blind ignorance of mere sense and feeling, is its tacit philosophy—
'Our wills are ours, we know not how,
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.'
Our scientific interpretation of the ever-changing universe at last rests on ethical theistic faith, and the Christian revelation of divine love is responded to by the divine inspiration of God in Man, in the form of the spiritual Common Sense. If this be not so, we cannot rely on the Common Sense, for it then belongs to a morally untrustworthy universe.
Established on this faith, philosophy or theology, in Scotland and throughout the world, awaits the sceptical criticism and the spiritual healing power of the masters of thought in the twentieth century, for its further development, and application to human affairs.
THE END
- ↑ M. Boutroux, in Revue Française d’Edimbourg, No. 4.
- ↑ Reid’s philosophy was Renan’s 'ideal' in his early life, according to his biographer.
- ↑ So in the 'Preliminary Notice,' in the new edition of Dr. Stirling’s Secret of Hegel—last paragraph.