Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/99

 and with the fundamental notions and beliefs which belong to the original structure of the human mind, as an agent consciously capable of knowing, and coming into direct and practical contact with, objects that are independent of itself. An inductive enumeration must, besides, be made of those first principles which the older philosophy had overlooked and in consequence traversed. And Reid has set himself to effect each of these tasks. He has exploded the favourite hypothesis of representative images or entities, by showing that it is destitute of the evidence of internal experience, irrational, contradictory to the immediate dictates of our faculties, and, therefore, by vitiating the testimony of our original mental structure in one department of its utterances, and thus precluding any decisive appeal to its testimony as the ultimate criterion of truth in any other, fairly resolvable into universal scepticism. He has also, both in the “Inquiry” and the “Essays,” in the course of an analytic examination of the phenomena of the external senses, memory, imagination, and reasoning, collected many other specimens of judgments of which we cannot rid ourselves, while, at the same time, we cannot explain their presence in the mind by means of any derived origin. To a faith in these utterances of our nature he had cleared a road by removing the hypothesis of representative perception, and thus enabling philosophy to return, in that particular, to an acknowledgment of the credit of the common sense. In a word, Reid removed the excrescence of representations, which, in spite of common sense, the philosopher had introduced into the