Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/270

 A. SETH, SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY. 269 but something might have been said of the positive advance upon Locke that Berkeley did not fail to make in point of psychological theory, recognised as this was not more by Hume than by Reid himself. And, apart from any concern of Reid, the like omission is to be observed in the handling of Hume. While Prof. Seth brings out in a most effective way the negative, or at least purely sceptical, character of Hume's xiltimate results, and argues with reason against a late attempt to represent him simply as a constructive philosopher, acknowledgment might still have been made of the serious purpose with which, as the Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature shows, he set him- self to the task of bringing the " science of man," after Locke, into some kind of line with the physical science of Newton and others. Nor even as a general philosopher, in respect of that part of the philosophic function which his champion Prof. Huxley had not least in view, viz., the providing of a theory or explana- tion of the special sciences, can it be said that Hume is devoid of all constructive aim. Opinions may differ as to the sufficiency of his theory of physical, still more of mathematical, science ; but if we are to take him, as Prof. Seth desires (p. 70), "at his own valuation," not only again in the Introduction but throughout many chapters in the body of the Treatise, we may hardly deny that, in the uncertain mixture of his intellectual temperament, there was after all a considerable dash of the genuine positive spirit. Reid's great merit, on the question of perception, is declared to be his clear insight (in general) into the impossibility of giving any explanation of that function from an assumption of unrelated sensations, to be afterwards brought, by one means or another, into relation. Prof. Seth thinks that the most advanced psycho- logists of the present day have been driven, practically, to the same position, which he would himself express in the form that, though indeed " sensation is the condition of perception," " sen- sation as sensation does not enter into perception at all" (p. 93). Here we need not follow him into what he finds well or again not quite well said by Eeid, but may remark that, in seeking to apply the modern psychological doctrine of " local signs " against a vain distinction made by Reid between the cases of visible and tangible extension, he gives it first, on pp. 90-1, some rather questionable expression, and then is led on to use language about both visual and tactile sensations that they " must contain some specific indication or hints as to the whereabouts of the object if our location of the latter is not to be purely arbitrary" which does not seem to consist very well with the denial (just quoted from next page) to " sensation as sensation " of any import for perception. That denial is, surely, much too absolutely made. It is plain that in the philosophical analysis of objective percep- tion (or percepts) any elements of sensation that are disclosed must appear as ordered or related in manifold fashion, as also that, even