Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/452

Rh 432 ENGLISH LITERATURE [GEORGIAN. &quot; origin of our moral ideas to a particular power of percep tion, to which he gave the name of the moral sense.&quot; l But this was to use the word &quot; sense &quot; in a different meaning from what it had ever borne before ; inasmuch as the objects of this so-called sense, being the qualities of moral actions, must be of necessity incorporeal, intangible, and imperceptible, and, as such, totally unlike the objects of the faculties commonly called senses, viz., sights, sounds, smells, tastes, &c. Nor was anything gained for the independence and immutability of morality ; for it was argued by com mentators on Hutcheson that, if the moral faculty were a &quot; sense,&quot; then the qualities perceived by it, like the secondary qualities of material objects perceived by sensa tion and reflection, must be understood as subjective not objective, as existing in and for the perceiving mind alone, and not inherent in the actions themselves, which would thus become colourless and neutral, i.e., destitute of moral character. A return upon scepticism was a frequent incident in the history of the Greek schools of thought, especially when the principles of opposing systems had been put forth with un usual warmth, and their supporters had found reconcilia tion and the explanation of differences out of the question. An example of this, in the history of English thought, is Hume, furnished by the case of Hume. Provoked by the extravagant paradoxes of Berkeley, who had ecclesiastical and professional reasons for trying to convince men that material objects had no reality, mind was everything, since the mystical and unnatural state of mind so engendered would favour the reception of any theology the philosopher might afterwards desire to implant, Hume undertook to prove that mind had no real existence any more than matter, or that, if it had, such existence could not be proved. When I talk of &quot;my mind,&quot; he said, how do I know that there is anything really existent which corresponds to the words? By the impressions and sensa tions of which I am conscious ? But these only prove themselves ; no one of course denies them ; I only deny, at least I say you cannot prove, the existence of an entity in which these impressions inhere, and to which you give the name of &quot;mind.&quot; If there was no flaw in such reason ing, philosophy was brought to a stand, and no certainty of any kind was attainable by the human faculties. Before the Scotch school and the great Immanuel Kant appeared to challenge these conclusions, David Hartley, in his Observations on Man (1749), espoused the tenets of Locke, and applied all his ingenuity to explaining the origin of as much of our knowledge as he could with any plausibility so treat, by referring it to the physical principle of the &quot; association of ideas.&quot; In the treatise already referred to, Hume declares that he does not wish to undermine or even to combat any man s belief ; his aim was only to demolish bad logic, to expose the emptiness of alleged proofs of the divine govern ment which were no proofs at all, and to make men see that &quot; belief is more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our nature.&quot; The line of thought suggested by this and similar expressions appears to have Reid. been taken up and eagerly pursued by Reid, who, in his Inquiry into the Human Mind upon the Principles of Common Sense (1764), maintains that a large, and not the least important part of our knowledge is acquired, not, as Locke asserted, through sensation and reflection, but by means of immediate and instinctive judgments, in forming which the common sense of all mankind is at one. The moral faculty, according to Reid, judges of right and wrong in this instinctive way : it is a branch of common sense. Beattie, who was a better poet than he was a philosopher, Dugald Stewart. pushed Reid s theory to an extreme which bordered on the ridiculous, including among the &quot; irresistible &quot; and &quot;necessary&quot; beliefs of the human mind a number of notions which are really of a historic and derivative charac ter. Dr Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, adopting the system of Locke as a basis, wrote on Matter and Spirit, criticised the philosophy of Reid, and discussed the tenet of philosophical necessity ; a strong materialistic bias per-. vades his writings. A greater thinker than any that Europe had witnessed since Descartes, now arose in Germany. This was Kant, whose ambition it was to put a Kai period to the desolating prevalence of scepticism, and deliver philosophy from the instability and uncertainty by which it had been long beset. His Critique of the Pure Keason appeared about 1781. Against Locke, he showed that the mind can form neither conceptions nor judgments without the pre-existence in the thought of the absolute and universal ideas of time, space, unity, cause, being, &c., which ideas proceed from the intelligence itself, without any action being exerted on the organs of sensation. They are a priori, that is, prior to sensible experience ; they belong to the pure reason, and may be regarded as the forms of our knowledge, forms which the understanding applies to the material furnished by perceptions. He does not, however, allow that these ideas, though a priori, have any objective character ; and for this metaphysical subjectivism he has been strenuously assailed by the Platonizing and orthodox schools of the present day. Against the material ists he maintains, in the Critique of the Practical Reason, that the &quot; moral motive,&quot; or principle, which the intelligence (called in this aspect the practical reason) furnishes us with for the direction of our will, is immutable, absolute, &quot; necessary, given a priori by the reason, and presenting to us the supreme and universal good as the final end of our existence, cur desires, and our efforts. This motive is duty, or the moral obligation imposed on the human will by a power above it, which, consequently, is not man himself. To the knowledge, therefore, derived from the practical reason, Kant ascribes an objective character, which, as we saw, he denied to the forms of the pure reason. This law of duty supposes liberty in man as the very condition of the obligation which it imposes on him. Here of course Kant is at variance with the necessitarians and materialists. There being a necessary connection between virtue, i.e., the obedience to duty, and the supreme good which it seeks, yet this connection being only partially realizable in this life, Kant infers the reality of a future life and the immortality of the soul. And, in view of our powerlessness to bring about this harmony between happiness and virtue, he infers the existence of a First Cause, infinitely powerful, just, and wise, which will establish it hereafter. The colossal system of Kant was known to Dugald Stewart (whose first work, Dugi Outlines of Moral Philosophy, appeared in 1793), but only Stew through the medium of an imperfect Latin translation ; from this cause, probably, he is thought to have failed to do full justice to it. Dugald Stewart, who was appointed to the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in 1785, was the master of a clear and charming style, which made his lectures the delight of a large circle of pupils. Among these were numbered not a few, in the spheres both of thought and action, who have left their mark 6n the age and the society to which they belonged, Brougham, Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, Francis Horner,Lord Lansdowne, Jeffrey, Sir Walter Scott, Sydney Smith, James Mill, Alison the historian, and Dr Chalmers, a varied and brilliant auditory for one piofessor to have lectured to and influenced in his day. One of the most interesting of Stewart s numerous works is his Dissertation concerning the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters in Europe. In his Outlines