Page:Thomas Reid (Fraser 1898).djvu/144

 Power or Providence that is finally operative in the universe in which we have our being, lies deeper than the 'ideal system' which was Reid's bugbear; and also that it arises mostly in connection with less obtrusive elements in the common sense than our perceptions through the five senses, is in harmony with the gradual development of Reid's own thought which I have tried to trace. For he advanced, as we saw, from reflection upon those 'inspirations' of the common sense that are implied in our physical perceptions, to reflection upon those other data of the common sense that are implied in our perceptions of personal and morally responsible agency. It is in touching and seeing the material world that the common sense is first awakened; and thus the material world is the most obtrusive object in human experience, its perceptions affording the fittest preliminary object-lesson on the office of this final reason in the whole rational economy of man. External perceptions are the beginnings of all reasonings about concrete existence. They are the obvious examples of those original judgments, which are 'the inspiration of the Almighty,' more obvious than the often dormant ones that are moral and spiritual. All the discoveries of our reason are grounded on them. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder in the constitution, is called lunacy by all; as when a man believes that he is made of glass: but when a man suffers himself to be reasoned out of them by metaphysical arguments he would call this metaphysical lunacy; which differs from the other species of the distemper in this, that it is not continued, but intermittent. He thus tests reason in its final authority, as distinguished from reason in its innumerable inferential exercises: the authority may be logically vindicated as