Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/436

426 subverts it; he leaves the orthodox proposer of the principle to find that out.

Reid totally misconceived the nature of scepticism and idealism in their bearings on this problem. He regarded them as habits of thought, as dispositions of mind peculiar to certain individuals of vexatious character and unsound principles, instead of viewing them as catholic eras in the development of all genuine speculative thinking. In his eyes they were subjective crotchets limited to some, and not objective crises common to all who think. He made personal matters of them, a thing not to be endured. For instance, in dealing with Hume, he conceived that the scepticism which confronted him in the pages of that great genius was Hume's scepticism, and was not the scepticism of human nature at large—was not his own scepticism just as much as it was Hume's. His soul, so he thought, was free from the obnoxious flaw, merely because his anatomy, shallower than Hume's, refused to lay it bare. With such views it was impossible for Reid to eliminate scepticism and idealism from philosophy. These foes are the foes of each man's own house and heart, and nothing can be made of them if we attack them in the person of another. Ultimately and fairly to get rid of them, a man must first of all thoroughly digest them, and take them up into the vital circulation of his own reason. The only way of putting them back is by carrying them forward.

From having never properly secreted scepticism