Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/259

 REID. 237 immediate objects of thought are not things but ideas, and that judgment or knowledge arises from the combination of ideas originally separate. The absurdity of the conse- quences shows the falsity of the premises. The true phi- losophy must not contradict common sense. It is not cor- rect to look upon the mind as a sheet of white paper on which experience inscribes single characters, and then to make the understanding combine these originally discon- nected elements into judgments by means of comparison, and the belief in the existence of the object come in as a later result added to the ideas by reflection. It is rather true that the elements discovered by the analysis of the cognitive processes are far from being the originals from which these arise. It is not isolated ideas that come first, but judg- ments, self-evident axioms of the understanding, which form part of the mental constitution with which God has endowed us; and sensation is accompanied by an immediate belief in the reality of the object. Sensation guarantees the presence of an external thing possessing a certain character, although it is not an image of this propert}^ but merely a sign for something in no wise resembling itself. This is the standpoint of the founder * of the Scottish School, Thomas Reid (1710-96, professor in Aberdeen and Glasgow ; An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 1 764 ; Essays on the Intellectual Poztiers of Man, 1785, Essays on the Act iz'c Powers, 1788, together under the title, Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind. Collected Works, 1804, ^"ci often since, especially the edition by Hamil- ton, with valuable notes and dissertations, 7th ed., 2 vols., 1872). We may recognize in it a revival of the common notions of Herbert, as well as a transfer of the innate faculty of judgment inculcated by the ethical and aesthetic writers from the practical to the theoretical field; the "common sense" of Reid is an original sense for truth, as the "taste" of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson was a natural sense for the good and the beautiful. Like Jacobi at a later period, Reid points out that mediate, reasoned knowledge presupposes a knowledge which is immediate, and all inference and pp. 36, 68 seq., which is the standard authority on the school as a whole. — Tr.
 * In the sense of "chief founder" ; cf. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875,