Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/533

No. 5.] been modernized by Mill. It was this sceptical development of Locke's "way of ideas" that drove some Scotch philosophers to seek refuge in the theory or no theory of Immediate Perception. By thus putting the mind with its nose up against things (to use a homely but graphic phrase of Von Hartmann's) they sought to cut off the very possibility of doubt. But this is to cut the Gordian knot in an inadmissible way. The doubt has been raised and is plainly possible. This is fully admitted and stated with admirable clearness by Hamilton, even while insisting most strenuously upon the testimony of consciousness to a duality of existence. "The facts of consciousness," he says, "are to be considered in two points of view, either as evidencing their own ideal or phenomenal existence, or as evidencing the objective existence of something else beyond them. A belief in the former is not identical with a belief in the latter. The one cannot, the other may possibly be refused. In the case of a common witness we cannot doubt the fact of his testimony as emitted, but we can always doubt the truth of that which his testimony avers. So it is with consciousness." Hence to shout Immediate Perception is no reply. It is to seek an imaginary security by shutting one's eyes to the danger, instead of boldly facing it. A more legitimate method is to show the inadequacy of the idealistic substitutes for a trans-subjective real world, to show, as I said before, that it is only in virtue of their borrowings from Realism that they can be stated and discussed. This indirect proof, proceeding by the exclusion of other possible theories, is declared by Hartmann to be the only way in which a critical Realism can be firmly established; or, to put it otherwise, the doubt must be redargued by showing its ultimate scope. This is to a certain extent what Reid does, and it is in his criticisms of the ideal theory conceived in this spirit, and not in his dogmatic assertion of immediate perception, that we must recognize his philosophical merit and his philosophical importance.

.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.