Page:Thomas Reid (Fraser 1898).djvu/151

 the Relation of Cause and Effect, which contains the essence of the philosophy that was afterwards expanded and applied in his Lectures. He died at the age of forty-two, leaving works undistinguished by the deep and patient thought of Reid, and diffuse in style, but abounding in ingenious analysis—an interesting contribution to the logic of physical inquiry, instead of appeals to carefully considered judgments of the Common Sense in Perception and in Causation. Brown recognised instinctive belief in natural constancies of co-existence and sequence among phenomena, and treated associations among mental states as the chief explanation of the phenomena of mind. The originative moral agency of intending and intelligent Will, so prominent latterly in Reid, disappears in Brown. And Brown, like Priestley, disparaged Reid's claim to merit for reversing the philosophical prejudice that 'ideas' are the only objects of human cognition, regarding it as a metaphor mistaken for a dogma. Indeed, the empirical laws of association tend with Brown, as with Priestley, to be the sole ultimate laws of mind: perhaps this tendency was restrained in expression as much by personal respect for Reid and Stewart as by conviction.

After Brown, philosophy in Scotland was for a time dormant—superseded by Combe and phrenology. But contemporaneously, in 'the twenties,' a philosophy more akin to Reid than to Brown made its appearance in England; although the analogy is not on the surface, and has not, I think, been observed. Coleridge, especially in his Aids to Reflection, published in 1825, insists with eloquent emphasis upon the difference between 'the Reason,' which is divine or inspired, and mere 'Understanding,' which generalises the phenomena that emerge in experience: he also presses