Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/260

 238 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL. demonstration, fixed, undemonstrable, immediately certain fundamental truths. The fundamental judgments or princi- ples of common sense, which are true for us, even if [pos- sibly] not true in themselves, are discoverable by observation (empirical rationalism). In the enumeration of them two dangers are to be avoided : we must neither raise contingent principles to the position of axioms, nor, from an exagger- ated endeavor after unity, underestimate the number of these self-evident principles. Reid himself is always more sparing with them than his disciples. He distinguishes two classes : first principles of necessary truth, and first principles of contingent truth or truth of fact. As first principles of necessary truth he cites, besides the axioms of logic and mathematics, grammatical, aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical principles (among the last belong the principles: "That the qualities which we perceive by our senses must have a subject, which we call body, and that the thoughts we are conscious of must have a subject, which we call mind"; "that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause which produced it"). He lays down twelve principles as the basis of our knowledge of matters of fact, in which his reference to the doubt of Berkeley and Hume is evident. The most impor- tant of these are : "The existence of everything of which I am conscious"; "that the thoughts of which I am conscious, are the thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person"; "our own personal identity and continued existence, as far back as we remember anything distinctly"; "that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be"; "that we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will"; "that there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men "; "that there is a certain regard due ... to human authority in matters of opinion"; "that, in the phenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like what has been in similar circum- stances." The widespread and lasting favor experienced by this theory, with its invitation to forget all earnest work in the problems of philosophy by taking refuge in common sense, shows that a general relaxation had succeeded the energetic i