Page:(1856) Scottish Philosophy—The Old and the New.pdf/10

10 Truth, under the relation in which we have at present to consider it, is not truth simply, but truth in philosophy. An illustration will make this distinction plain. Suppose that we are discussing the subject of salt, and that we say, "salt is white and gritty, it is in some degree moist, it is sometimes put into a salt-cellar and placed on the dinner-table, and sometimes it is kept in a box in the kitchen; it is eaten with most articles of food, and usually helped—although never to one's neighbour—with a small spoon." These statements about salt are all truths; they are truths, as we may say, simply, but they are not truths in chemistry. No man would be considered much of a chemist, who was merely acquainted with these and other such circumstances, concerning salt. So in philosophy, no man can be called a philosopher who merely knows and says, that he and other people exist, that there is an external world, that a man is the same person to day that he was yesterday, and so forth. These are undoubtedly truths, but I maintain that they are not truths in philosophy, any more than those others just mentioned, are truths in chemistry. Our old Scottish school, however, is of a different way of thinking. It represents these and similar facts as the first truths of philosophy, and to these it has recourse in handling the deeper questions of metaphysics. I have no objections to this, for those who like it—only my system deals with first truths of a very different order; and it denies, that the first truths of the old Scottish school are truths of philosophy at all. This is one very fundamental point of difference between the old and the new Scottish system of metaphysics; and am not at all ashamed to confess it.

The first truths of the old Scottish school have not only no value in philosophy, they have no value in any intellectual market in the world. They possess no exchangeable worth: they are positively not vendible; yet, Dr Reid and his successors have been in the habit of charging their students for them, at the rate of three guineas ahead, and of doing this while all the rest of the world was obtaining them in unlimited abundance for nothing. That was scarcely fair. "I exist," says Dr Reid: surely that is a truth worth knowing. "So do you:"—is not