Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/427

Rh that Reid analysed or accepted the analysis of this fact—it follows as a necessary consequence that Reid, so far from having overthrown the representative theory, was himself a representationist. His analysis gave him more than he bargained for. He wished to obtain only one, that is, only a proximate object in perception; but his analysis necessarily gave him two: it gave him a remote as well as a proximate object. The mental mode or operation which he calls the perception of matter, and which he distinguishes from matter itself this, in his philosophy, is the proximate object of consciousness, and is precisely equivalent to the species, phantasms, and representations of the older psychology; the real existence, matter itself, which he distinguishes from the perception of it, this is the remote object of the mind, and is precisely equivalent to the mediate or represented object of the older psychology. He and the representationists, moreover, agree in holding that the latter is the object of belief rather than of knowledge.

The merits of Dr Reid, then, as a reformer of philosophy, amount in our opinion to this: he was among the first to say and to write that the