did reid's metaphilosophy survive kant, hamilton, and mill?

METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1987 0026-1068 $2.00

DID REID’S METAPHILOSOPHY SURVIVE KANT, HAMILTON, AND MILL?

EDWARD H. MADDEN

Thomas Reid’s work was received in strangely diverse ways. His writings were warmly received and largely accepted by numerous philosophers of signifi- cant rank, and he became the founder of a tradition of commonsense metaphilosophy, natural realism, and agency theory. Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton (in a wobbly fashion), and lesser figures like James Beattie made Reid a pdtent force in Scottish philosophy for many years, while Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, Victor Cousin, and Theodore ‘Jouffroy made his commonsense views dominant in French philosophy for fifty years. John Witherspoon, Francis Wayland, Henry Tappan, Alexander Campbell, Asa Mahan, and numerous other philosophers made Reid’s work the standard American philosophy for six decades.’

The other side of the coin is perhaps better known. Every student of the history of philosophy knows Kant’s derogatory remarks about Reid - how childish to believe vulgar beliefs can undercut philosophical argument! Ulrich, Jacobi, and numerous other detractors of Reid agreed. G. H. Lewes spoke for the British critics who were horrified by Reid’s references to “metaphysical lunacy” and his reductio ad absurdurn thrusts at speculative philosophy. Lewes wrote, “If this were meant for banter, it was very poor banter; if for argument, it was pitiable.”’ Poor Lewes, of course, had no understanding whatever of Reid’s concept of commonsense, a point made long ago by Asa Mahan. As we shall see, Reid was not jesting in the least about metaphysical lunacy and his reductios are far from pitiable, being, as they are, corollaries of his nativistic epistemic framework, parts of which framework he and Kant shared.

J . S. Mill was a more perceptive critic of the commonsense tradition, but, I shall claim, Reid had already undercut the spectator, passive, atomistic epistemology of the British empiricists on whose work Mill’s criticisms of Reid depended. Reid, so to speak, had splendidly refuted Mill before the latter put pen to paper.

Hamilton, it turns out, is the problematic case. On the one hand, he explicitly accepts Reid’s metaphilosophy but frequently neglects it in discussing specific issues. Nowhere does he depart more from the commonsense tradition

Cf. Blau, 1952, chap. iii; Schneider, 1963, chap. iv; Flower and Murphey, 1977, Vol. I, chaps. 4-6; Barker and Beauchamp, 1976; Madden, 1982, pp. 319-41; Madden, 1984, pp. 93-109; Madden, 1985, pp. 301-26; and Hoeveler, 1981.

Quoted by Mahan, 1881,, Vol. 2, p. 83. Mahan’s defense of Reid against Lewes and other detractors of commonsense pervades this work.

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than in his own original contribution to philosophical literature, his “law of the conditioned.” Within this framework he interpreted antinomies in a way incompatible with both Reid’s and Kant’s treatments. Alas, he was not only sometimes unclear about Reid’s metaphilosophy but he was completely muddled about his natural realism. Hamilton’s edition of Reid’s work is culttered with long footnotes that obscure rather than clarify the texts.

In what follows I shall: 1) give a straightforward exposition of Reid’s metaphilosophy; 2) give an exposition of Hamilton’s variant of it; 3) give a short exposition of Mill’s main criticism of the commonsense strategy in general and of Hamilton’s rendition of it in particular; 4) defend Reid against the misinterpretations of Kant and Lewes, and against the pertinent and informed criticism of Mill, as wgll as offer certain criticisms of Reid myself, which, however, should be taken as constructive in nature since the commonsense tradition after Reid exhibited resources for meeting them; 5) show wherein Hamilton was a genuine supporter of Reid and wherein he misunderstood and departed from him; and 6 ) conclude that Reid survives his critics quite well and can do without allies as dubious as Hamilton. The whole thrust of the paper is to clarify commonsense metaphilosophy and put it in proper perspective.

I

The key to understanding Reid’s metaphilosophy is his claim that man’s constitution or intellect has a native epistemic input.3 A number of principles and concepts in daily use cannot in principle be learned from experience. Take the concept of space. It cannot be generated from experience since it is a presupposition of all experience. A body could not exist if there were no space to contain it or could not move if there were no space to move through. What can supply a presupposition of experience except the native capacities of the constitution itself? The native concept of space, to be sure, is not completely indpendent of sensation; it remains dormant until it is activated by the proper sensations.

Native epistemic input may refer to either necessary or contingent subject matter.4 Mathematical propositions and several metaphysical principles are examples of the former. To deny that a cone is the third part of a cylinder of the same base and same altitude is self-inconsistent. Denying the denial produces a necessary proposition, a self-evident one, about the nature of cones. Likewise to say that an appearance can exist without being the appearance of something not itself an appearance is also self-inconsistent and grammatical nonsense. Denying the claim again produces a necessary proposi-

Reid, Philosophical Works, 1967, Vol. I, pp. 332-36. Reid’s references to nativism are ubiquitous; see also, I , pp. 120, 121, 122, 125, 128, 130, 159, 186, 195 ff., 260, 317-18, 332, 333,336, and so on. On space, see pp. 324-26. ‘ Ibid., I, pp. 441 ff., 452 ff., 454 ff. For a complete discussion see pp. 434-61.

DID REID’S METAPHILOSOPHY SURVIVE KANT, HAMILTON, AND MILL? 33

tion, a conceptually self-evident one, about the existence of physical objects. What one man accounts a quality and substance “all men d o and ever did.” “It seems, therefore, t o be a judgement of nature, that the things immediately perceived are qualities, which must belong to a subject.”(Reid, 1967, I , p 322) This view is strengthened by the structure exhibited in all natural languages according t o which every adjective must belong t o some substantive expressed or understood.

On the other hand, the claim that everything one perceives is illusory is not self-inconsistent, and hence the claim that perception is indubitable is a contingent proposition. The reason that perception is indubitable, even though the proposition to this effect is contingent, is that it never goes beyond what is given, what is evident. False inferences from perception it is that lead t o illusions, Hence the reliability of perceptual testimony, like that of consciousness, is a first principle of contingent truths and claims our assent on its own authority. (Reid, I , 1967, pp. 334-39, 445-46) In addition, perception qualifies as a first principle since, in addition to its indubitability, the native endowment of the intellect itself assures the percipient of the independent existence of the objects perceived.

“Necessary” and “contingent,” it must be kept in mind, lest confusion result, refer to the subject matter of the different principles, not to the principles themselves. Principles of what is self-evident and principles of what is evident are both, by their own natures, necessarily true, as well as necessary in the sense that they could not be otherwise given the native epistemic input of the intellect itself. These principles taken collectively are what Reid meant by “commonsense.”

In addition t o characterizing first principles as self-evident or evident, Reid also described them as universally held, catholic in import, and belief in them unavoidable.’ I t is crucial t o recognize, however, that being self-evident, evident, universally held, catholic, and unavoidable in n o way prove or establish the principles; rather they are criteria for identifying which of many contenders are genuine principles of commonsense. There is much that parades as commonsense which certainly is neither self-evident nor evident. It is precisely the j o b of the criteria to substantiate which are genuinely connonsensical judgments rather than t o establish that they are evident or self-evident.

The principles of commonsense are invulnerable t o discursive arguments designed to undermine them. It is pointless in principle t o try t o disprove what is evident (or self-evident) by what is less evident. I t is always plausible that the denial of a t least one philosophical premise makes more sense than accepting a conclusion which undercuts the evident.6 I t would be equally

Ibid., pp. 233-34. Cf. Madden, 1983,pp. 23-36. Cf. Duggan’s Introduction to his edition of Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind,

1970, p. xii. This point is simply a restatement of Reid’s universal claim that any philosophical argument that undercuts commonsense must lead to absurdities and hence must contain an unacceptable premise.

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pointless, of course, t o try t o prove evident principles by discursive arguments, as several philosophers have unwisely done.

Any philosophy which contravenes the truths of commonsense has absurd consequences, and the task of the commonsense philosopher is t o detect and reject the premise that yields them. Bwt why look for the troublemaker among the philosophical premises? The reason is that philosophers generally are careful thinkers, and their conclusions usually follow if their premises are granted. Such is precisely the case with Hume. He accepted Descartes’ and Locke’s premise that the only things we directly apprehend are our own sensations, impressions, ideas, or whatever else the non-physical entity of direct awareness they insisted upon, for various epistemic reasons, might be called. He relentlessly pushed this epistemic point of departure t o its inevitable skeptical conclusion. The need, then, is to reject the messenger premise and not Hunie’s argument. Hume defended the messenger premise by his “dimin- ishing table” argument, which, in fact, leads t o a conclusion opposite t o the one intended. Reid observed: “[TI he real table may be placed successively a t a thousand different distances, and in every distance, in a thousand different positions; and it can be determined demonstratively, by the rules of geometry and perspective, what must be its apparent magnitude, and apparent figure, in each of those distances and positions.” (Reid, 1967, I , p. 304) If the tablc always appears t o have the magnitude and figure it should manifest from every distance and every position, “is this not a strong argument that it is the real table you see?” (Zbid.) Nevertheless, even if the fallacy of a philosophical argument employed to undercut commonsense cannot be detected, commonsense judgements are justifiably retained anyway. The previous point simply needs t o be reasserted, namely, that the evident cannot be displaced by what is less evident, as any discursive discourse will be.

Reid had numerous colorful ways of making points against philosophers who rcject the truth of ordinary be!iefs for whatever reasons.

A remarkable deviation from [commonsense principles] , arising from a disorder in the constitution, is what we call Zunacy; as when a man believes that he is made of glass. When a man suffers himself t o be reasoned out of the principles of commonsense, by metaphysical arguments, we may call this metaphysicaz lunacy; which differs from the other species of the dis- temper in this, that it is not continued, but intermittent; it is apt t o seize the patient in solitary and speculative moments; but, when he enters into society, Common Sense recovers her authority. (Reid, 1967, 1, p. 209)

In the same vein he later wrote, “I never heard that any skeptic ran his head against a post, or stepped into a kennel, because he did not believe his eyes.” (Reid, 1967, I , p. 234) These are flamboyant ways of referring to the unavoidability of commonsense judgments. Denying them is pointless in the sense that doing so never gets rid of them. The philosopher who momentarily denies


them reaffirms them in the market place, or, even while denying them, acts upon them unwittingly. That Hume admitted this state of affairs was, for Reid, a very honest if self-defeating thing for a skeptic to do.

I1

Hamilton initially described his own metaphilosophy in more or less Reidian terms. (Hamilton, 1865, I, pp. 268-71) Commonsense principles (or “universal consciousness,” as he preferred to call it) are unlearned and underived. They are apriori principles of the mind, native elements of the intellect that have original epistemic import. The concept of space, for example, cannot be learned from experience since any experience of physical objects presupposes it. That objects are experienced as being in space is thus an apriori input of the intellect itself.

The chief characteristic of these apriori principles is their necessity. They are built in from the beginning, so to speak, so a person cannot do otherwise than experience objects in space or experience the duality between independently existing mental and physical events. “In fact, by its necessity alone can we recognize [a principle] as an original datum of intelligence, and distinguish it from any mere result of generalization and custom.” (Hamilton, 1865, I, p. 270) Such a principle is not a contingently indissolvable association but “an inevitable compulsion,” what “we cannot help but think,” and in principle can never be resolved into an acquired propensity which can “only inform us of what is, not what must be.” (Hamilton, 1967, 11, p. 972)

Reid, unlike Thomas Brown, Hamilton continued, correctly saw that representative realism was a disastrous breach in the philosophical dike. He clearly saw that the premise “we are only directly aware of sensations,images, ideas, impressions, or whatever” led from Locke’s representationalism through Berkeley’s subjective idealism to Hume’s skepticism. The last he considered a reductio of the premise and to avoid such consequences he interpreted a sensation as a non-substantive act of the mind, a sensing, so to speak. On this view, the object known and the reality existing are convertible concepts. Thus Reid “at once denies to the skeptic and idealist the premisses of their conclusion; and restores to the realist, in its omnipotence, the argument of common sense.” “Reid’s analysis therefore . . . accomplished everything at once.” (Hamilton, 1866, p. 93)

Brown, however, was not as judicious as Reid; he followed the commonsense rnetaphiliosophy when convenient and ignored it when it was not. (Hamilton, 1865, I , pp. 278-84) He inconsistently accepted as true ‘‘I believe in an independently existing material world” because the belief in the proposition is irresistible, but he rejected as false “1 directly perceive the library table” even though this belief is equally irresistible. Supposedly discursive philosophical arguments overthrow the latter but not the former. However Brown was not only self-inconsistent but undercut his own argument. The

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irresistibility of a belief in the independent existence of a material world wholly depends upon the irresistible belief that we directly apprehend it. “[Hlere not only are two primitive beliefs supposed to be repugnant, and consciousness therefore delusive; the very belief which is assumed as true, exists in fact only through the other, which,ex hyporhesi, is false.” (Hamilton, 1866, p. 92)

Hamilton believed that departing from the principles of commonsense was philosophical suicide. The abandonment of Reid’s metaphilosophy leads to a proliferation of speculative hypotheses among which there is no rational way to decide, whether “rational” be construed intuitively or discursively. There are always as many different speculative hypotheses as there are possible ways of distorting or mutilating the principles of commonsense. An enumeration of the deviations would provide a history of speculative philosophy. In this con- text, Hamilton did not argue directly against any of these deviations but intended to exhibit how philosophy thereby falls into variety and error, a philosophical babel, so to speak, in which no progress is discernible. “[B] y the very act of refusing any one datum of consciousness, philosophy invali- dates the whole credibility of consciousness, and, consciousness ruined as an instrument, philosophy is extinct.” (Hamilton, 1865, I, p. 299)

According to Hamilton, the principles of commonsense are vulnerable only in one way but have successfully escaped that vulnerability. To begin with, the native epistemic input cannot legitimately be challenged by higher or more fundamental principles since this input is epistemically rock bottom’, being, as it is, the presupposition of all knowledge. The only way to cast doubt upon the apriori principles would be to show that the principles themselves are directly contradictory of each other or that they yield consequences which are mutually repugnant. If such inconsistencies were to be discovered the native principles as a whole would be untenable, “for the maxim ‘falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,’ must determine the credibility of consciousness, as the credibility of every other witness.” However, no attempt to prove such inconsistencies has been successful, “and the presumption in favour of the truth of consciousness and the possibility of philosophy has, therefore, never been redargued.” (Hamilton, 1967,II, p. 746)

Hamilton criticized Kant and others for misconstruing the principles of commonsense as contingent beliefs of the vulgar offered as refutations of philosophical arguments. Kant and the others can be partially excused, however, since Beattie and Oswald did appeal to the undeveloped beliefs of the unreflective many against philosophical theories. “[El ven Reid, in hi5 earlier work, was not so explicit as to prevent his being occasionally classed in the same category.” (Zbid., p. 752) However, in his later Essays on rheInreIIectuaI Powers, Reid, like Kant, used the criterion of necessity to distinguish apriori principles from inductive contingencies, though neither one apparently realized their indebtedness to Leibniz. Moreover, Reid’s employment of the concept of necessity “in the discrimination and establishment of the fundamental principles of thought, more especially in his later works, sufficiently shows,


that the reproach of an uncritical application of the argument from common sense, made against the Scottish philosophers in general, was, at least in reference to him, unfounded.” (Zbid., p. 753)

Hamilton was critical of Dugald Stewart in a surprising way. He thought Stewart erred in a way Reid did not, but, as we shall see later, it is likely that Reid and Stewart stood together against Hamilton. Hamilton’s criticism of Stewart arises in the following way. It must be kept in mind, wrote the Edinburgh sage, that commonsense principles yield two different sorts of belief. I can believe that I phenomenally distinguish between irreducible thoughts and things, and every philosopher would unhesitatingly agree. It would be self-inconsistent to say of a non-inferential phenomenal given that it is false. I can also believe that the experience of mental-physical duality is evidence of two irreducible worlds existing beyond the phenomona, and most philosophers would unhesitatingly disagree. And they have a perfectly good right to do so since there is nothing self-contradictory in maintaining that what I am conpelled to view as non-ego is nevertheless (unknown to me) only a modification of my mind. Thus Dugald Stewart erred in claiming that we can as little doubt the fact testified to as we can doubt the fact of consciousness testifying. (Hamilton, 1865, I, pp. 271-76)

Hamilton’s most original and lengthy contribution to phiIosophica1 literature was his “law of the conditioned.” He looked upon his law as an addition to Reid’s commonsense philosophy but, as we shall see in section 5, the law cross-grained Reid’s work. Hamilton distinguished between positive and negative necessities, the former referring to Reid’s principles of commonsense and the latter to his own law of the conditioned. Reid’s sense of necessity, like Leibniz’s, is “what we cannot help but think” or “that of which the thought of the contrary is impossible.” The nativistically supplied presuppositions of knowledge are positive necessities. Hamilton’s negative sense of necessity, on the other hand, results from a dialectical argument. Take space. We are mentally incompetent to conceive the existence of either bounded or infinite space. Yet by the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction one or the other, we know not which, niust be true. We have, in short, a negative necessity - one inconceivable must be true. The result is Hamilton’s general formula- tion of the law of the conditioned: of two contradictory propositions neither of which can be construed as existentially possible due to the impotence of the mind, one of which, by negative necessity, must be so construed. (Hamilton, 1967,II, p. 972; 1866, pp. 14-15)

According to Mill, Hamilton tried to prove that “present consciousness” is indubitable, which no one denies; but he simply assumed, what is in doubt, that what is introspectively irreducible for an adult bears testimony to metaphysical irreducibility. Even the staunchest empiricist, Mill held, insists that

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present consciousness yields indubitable knowledge. I am aware of being in pain and cannot be mistaken about this feeling. “The inward fact, the feeling in our own minds, [is] never doubted, since t o d o so would be t o doubt that we feel what we feel.” (Mill, 1877, 1 , p. 176) However, the empiricist denies that the introspective irreducibility of a present state of consciousness need bear any metaphysical testimony; the irreducibility may simply be the result of “indissoluble associations.” Hamilton erroneously assumed, for exatnple, that the consciousness of duality, of a substantive ego and non-ego, since it is introspectively unanalyzable, and hence supposedly basic, bears testimony t o the distinction in reality. However, according t o the empiricist, the unavoidable beliefs in substantive minds and objects can be shown t o be acquired beliefs and their unavoidability explained by associations that have become so strong, by constant repetition at an early date, that they are indissoluble. Thus the unavoidable beliefs and apparent duality, not being basic facts of consciousness, cannot, on Hamilton’s own standard, bear testimony to the truth of natural realism. According to Mill,

[Olriginal elements can only come to light, as residual phenomena, by a previous study of the modes of generation of the mental facts which are confessedly not original; a study sufficiently thorough t o enable us t o apply its results t o the convictions, beliefs, or supposed intuitions which seem to be original, and t o determine whether some of them may not have been generated in the same modes, so early as t o have become insepar- able from our consciousness before the time at which memory commences. (Ibid., pp. 184-85)

Mill criticized Hamilton for being insensitive t o the origin of ideas. Hamilton, he said, thought it pointless to imagine the steps by which we may be supposed t o have acquired the notion of extension when in fact we are unable to conceive the possibility of that notion not always being in our possession. But Hamilton is quite wrong; because we cannot imagine a time a t which we had n o knowledge of extension is n o evidence that there has not been such a time. It may be a necessary belief t o those who think i t so; they may be genuinely incapable of not holding it. “But even if this incapability extended t o all man- kind, it might be merely the effect of a strong association;like the impossibility of believing Antipodes; and it cannot be shown that even where the impossibility is, for the time, real, it might not, as in that case, be overcome.” (Ibid., p. 188) Instead of proving a belief t o be an original fact of consciousness by showing that i t could not have been acquired, Hamilton assumed that it could not for the simple reason that we cannot get rid of it now. Here Hamilton is inconsistent with other parts of his philosophy. “That things which we ‘are unable t o imagine t o ourselves the possibilities of,’ may be, and many of them must be, true, was a doctrine which we thought we had learned from the author of the Philosophy of the Conditioned.” (Ibid., p. 186)


1111

Kant’s, h w e s ’ , Ulrich’s, and Jacobi’s contemptuous dismissal of the Scottish commonsense tradition is completely misguided and based on their own mis- understanding of Reid’s major works. Kan t understood commonsense, as por- trayed by Reid, as sound understanding of the contingent affairs of daily life and hence dismissed the Scot for using it, quite illegitimately, t o attackphil- osophical arguments. Nothing could be further from the truth. Reid’s principles of commonsense are epistemically basic, referring, as they do, to the evident and self-evident knowledge which is the epistemic input of the intellect itself. Ironically, as far as Kant was concerned, Reid’s principles of commonsense might just as well be called synthetic apriori principles instead of ones about nativistic epistemic input. Moreover, Reid, as we have seen, made it quite clear why violating these principles constituted a legitimate reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy that violated them. One can only wonder if his continental and British critics, particularly Lewes, ever read his work seriously or were content with echoes of it in the works of Oswald and Beattie.

I t might be claimed that Kant had good grounds for misconstruing Reid. After all, his criticisms were in response t o the Inquiry, which appeared long before the Essays on Intellectual Powers where the apriori nature of commonsense principles is made clear. This mitigation of Kant’s mistake, however, will not do. Reid clearly presented his nativistic view in the Inquiry; he repeatedly characterized perception as an epistemic input of the intellect itself which is prompted into action by the releasing occasion of an appropriate sensation. That he generalized his nativistic view to other areas in Intellectual Powers, and discussed the view in greater detail, scarcely shows it was not prominently present in his detailed discussion of sensation and perception in the Inquiv.

To be sure, Reid’s use of “commonsense” is far from its ordinary sense, but this fact should have caused his critics n o problems of interpretation. Hamilton pointed out innumerable precedents in the history of philosophy for Reid’s philosophic sense of “commonsense.” Indeed, he argued in incred- ible detail that Reid’s sense was standard among philosophers from Aristotle onward. (Hamilton, 1967, 11, pp. 770-803) Some of his cases are a bit strained but many seem convincing. The most striking similarity, perhaps, is between Herbert of Cherburg and Reid. (Ibid., pp. 781 -82) This historical barrage is useful i n pointing u p the fact that Reid’s continental critics and Lewes should have known enough history of philosophy t o have avoided their caricature of his doctrines.

Mill was n o improvement upon previous critics. According t o him, it will be recalled, the commonsense realists are wrong in thinking that what is introspectively irreducibile in a mature person reflects metaphysical irreducibility. The empiricist is right, Mill claimed, that unavoidable beliefs about extension, substances, and so on, can be shown t o be acquired beliefs, and their introspective irreducibility and unavoidability explained by associations that have

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become so strong, by constant association of original sensations, that they are indissolvable. Thus these beliefs, no t being basic, cannot constitute the principles of commonsense or consciousness.

This criticism may apply to Hamilton, who had a simplistic, atomistic, and passive view of sensation, but it is totally irrelevant to Reid’sview of sensation. I t seems impossible that Mill could have read the chapters on conception, abstraction, and judgment in the Intellectual Powers - for only here d o we find Reid’s massive attack on the epistemology of British empiricism which refuted Mill’s commitments in advance. (Reid, 1967,I,pp. 360-88,389-412, 413-75) We need to examine this point in some detail.

On epistemic issues, Reid believed the British empiricists held a grossly inadequate passive view of sensory knowledge. The percipient supposedly gains his basic concepts of red, hard, loud, sweet, acrid, and so on, from impressions on the appropriate sense organs that through association are transformed into complex concepts. To Reid this view seemed naive and false. Sensory and perceptual knowledge is no t given; it has to be achieved through abstractions, generalizations, and judgments. Sensations are not articulated from the beginning; they come in large, undifferentiated blobs. The problem is to make sense out of the blobs. “Red” is not what we get through sense impressions; it is the result of abstraction and generalization. All of this activ- ity, it should be carefully noted, is required before perception proper is possible. When we have acquired the necessary conceptual background of par- ticulars, properties, and the judgemental ascription of the former to the latter (quite early involving the use of language) we are then able to see that the apple is red and only then are non-given sensations able t o activate the mind’s capacity for direct and immediate perception. As conceprs of “red,” e t al., emerge and the constitution becomes mature or ripe the two converge and perception is the result.

Conception and judgment involving, as they do, attention, abstraction, and generalization might seem to turn sensation and perception into mediate and indirect activities. But such an appearance rests, for Reid, upon the assumption that sensation an‘d perception are passive and hence quite early achievements, an assumption and inference which he vigorously rejected. Attention, abstraction, and generalization are necessary t o gain the required universals - concepts of various qualities ~ which are a prerequisite for perception. When the prerequisite has been reached and the nativistic features of perception matured, then the transformation of sensory qualities into perceptual properties is direct and immediate. Had Mill been acquainted with this dimension of Reid’s work or, if acquainted with i t , had fully appreciated it, he would have given up this criticism of the commonsense tradition since n o more brilliant critique of the assumptions from which it emanated has ever been made.

Reid’s claim that sensation is not a given but an achievement and his denial of a self-contained given have led recent commentators t o label him as a pre- cursor of pragmatism.’ This claim, it seems to me, is misleading. We might

’ Flower and Murphey, 1977, see numerous pragmatic dimensions in Reid. See Vol. I , p . 250, for example.


just as well say that Reid anticipated absolute idealists since the latter more than any later philosophers came t o stress the point that “red” is a highly structured concept and, being a universal, could not simply be the input of the senses. Indeed, so many subsequent philosophers criticized the British empiricists along Reid’s lines that if one wants to play the prefigurement game then one must admit Reid prefigured so much that the claim becomes vacuous.

I t must not be supposed that Reid’s metaphilosophy is faultless because Kant, Lewes, Mill, and the others failed to identify the faults. Reid’s nieta- philosophy faces several problems, though it is not immediately clear that they are insurmountable. To begin with, Reid’s principles seem unnecessarily prolix and could with profit be reduced to a smaller number, systematized, and made more precise. Hamilton was aware of this problem but went to the other extreme and tried t o reduce them to one!

A more serious problem arises when Raid tries t o justify his principles in a way out of harmony with his niost basic commitments. Is it not possible that the principles of commensense give erroneous epistemic import? May not the basic principles be the “gift” of an evil demon? In meeting this argument, Reid unfortunately brings in the concept of a just God to insure veridical import. God is just, he insisted, and would not deceive us. Instead of following the lead of Descartes, so inappropriate to his OWE commitments, he should have relied on his own strategy of asking where the burden of proof lies. In other contexts he nicely showed the pointlessness of using the “possibility argument.” That something is possible is n o reason for thinking that either p or not-p is true. The burden of proof lies with the skeptic to show why a series of evident and self-evident propositions should be abandoned, a proof which will always include premises that are less evident than the ones they purport to undercut.

The most serious criticism of all is that Reid’s criteria concern only truth value and not meanings of propositions. He argued that any proposition which contravenes the truth value of an ordinary proposition is automatically thrown out of court. But, after all, what philosophers deliberately plan t o deny the truth of ordinary propositions? CertainIy Berkeley did not. To be sure, skeptics and absolute idealists appear to deny them. The skeptic argues that since we are sometimes mistaken in our perceptual judgments and there is no intrinsic difference between veridical and faulty perceptions, it is logically possible that we are always mistaken both in what we take t o be true and t o be false. The skeptic is not claiming that ordinary truth values are not accept- able or reliable but only that if they are we cannot know it t o be the case. The absolute idealist also seems to throw doubt on ordinary claims with his concept of internal relations. Since everything is internally related there are n o separate entities, and since ordinary statements imply the existence of such entities these statements must be false. They may be true in some sec- ondary way about appearances, but they are ultimately false because there are n o separate entities.

Berkeley, however, n o more than the commonsense realist, doubted any

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facts that are a t stake when one talks about chairs, doors, stones, or about scientific laws. When I say that there is a rug on the floor the fact remains true, if originally true, whether “rug” and “floor” are interpreted as independently existing physical objects or as clusters of sensations, just as Kepler’s laws hold whether planets are interpreted one way or the other. However, it seems clear that Berkeley gave concepts like rug and floor a meaning incompatible with their ordinary ones. Certainly a rug and a floor are things the ordinary person takes t o be physical objects, and “the rug is on the floor” implies in ordinary parlance that the rug, e.g., exists independently of being perceived, precisely what Berkeley wished to deny. Reid, however, was power- less t o reject Berkeley since he had no ordinary meaning requirements, a deficiency in part made up in the Scottish tradition by Dugald Stewart and Asa Mahan, though many generations had t o pass before the commonsense tradition concentrated on meaning as well as truth. The criticism that “physical object” is epistemically loaded and is not to be found in ordinary discourse itself, Stewart and Mahan would have found unconvincing. Why they would have distnissed the issue I have dealt with elsewhere. (Madden, 1983, P. 24)

V

Unlike Kant, Lewes, and the others, Hamilton clearly understood that Reid meant by “commonsense” nativistic, apriori principles of the intellect and not sound judgment in the contingent affairs of everyday life. Moreover, he understood, as a consequence, that Reid did not use vulgar judgments to undermine philosophical arguments. Nevertheless Hamilton did misunderstand a crucial aspect of Reid’s characterization of the nativistic principles. For Hamilton the analysis of “necessity” is “unavoidability,” or what we cannot help but believe, given the native structure of our intellect. Hamilton mainly credited Leibniz with the introduction of this sense of “necessity,” in contrast t o Aristotle’s sense, and believed that Reid had taken it over, if not directly from the German philosopher, then from others who subsequently held it. Hamilton was mistaken, however; the author of the Inquiry and Essays never analyzed “necessity” as “unavoidable belief.” For Reid, unavoidability, like universality, catholicity, and self-evidence, is one among several criteria of necessity, and certainly a sign of something is not an analysis of it. Reid, in fact, never gave a detailed analysis of the concept of necessity, though he accepted tautologies as examples of it, just as he accepted conceptual presuppositions of knowledge as a different kind of example of it. But tautologies and necessary presuppositions have nothing in common with the claim that necessity is the inability not to believe. For Reid, unavoidability is not only a criterion of necessity but functions also as a reducrio. Hume in his study can be a skeptic, but he never ran his head against a post in the market place because he believed sensations unreliable. Such use of unavoid-


ability is about as far removed from an analysis of “necessity” as one can get.

The question remains, however, whether Hamilton understood and utilized the dialectical drift of the Glasgow philosopher’s meta-philosophy. Did he think it plausible that the denial of a t least one philosophical premise makes more sense than accepting a conclusion which undercuts the evident? Did he regard the reductio as a legitimate argument? Did he think a task of the commonsense philosopher is to detect and reject the premise of any philosophy that leads t o the contravening of commonsense truths? And so on. The answers to these questions are distressingly complex since, with only minor reserva- tions, he pledged allegiance to the dialectical drift but often failed t o follow it in practice and in developing his own “law of the conditioned” seemed t o abandon it altogether. I shall first examine the allegiance - sonie of it shaky -- and then the deviation.

At first glance, it might appear that Hamilton’s strongest allegiance was to defending Reid’s rejection of representative realism and denouncing Brown’s reintroduction of it. Unfortunately complications arose, and Hamilton blew hot and cold on this issue. Hamilton distinguished two kinds of representative realism: i) we are directly acquainted only with non-physical entities like ideas, impressions, or sense data; and ii) we are directly acquainted only with modifications of the mind itself (which are not entities a t all). Brown held the second version and claimed, in fact, that Reid had also. Mill agreed with Brown. Hamilton became rattled and said that Reid had eliminated i) and erroneously assumed that he had thereby eliminated all forms of representative realism. Was it possible that he himself held version ii)? Hamilton went through a period when he thought these critics might be correct but finally decided that there was too much counter-evidence in favour of Reid’s natural realism. But he never managed to show how the opposing evidence could be reconciled. Elsewhere I have argued that Hamilton was wrong in the first place t o be rattled by Brown and Mill and that all evidence points towards Reid’snatural realism.* Hamilton’s criticism of Brown as undercutting his own argument remains a good piece of philosophical criticism.

Hamilton’s strongest commitment t o the reductio is his claim that abandon- ing the principles of commonsense was philosophical suicide, leading, as it does, t o the proliferation of speculative hypotheses, with its attendant philosophical babel and cessation of progress in epistemic analysis. Hamilton went far beyond Reid’s specific use of the rcductio in the case of the “messenger theory” and gave a wholesale reductio aimed a t eliminating speculative philosophy altogether.

Hamilton strongly defended the invulnerability of the principles of commonsense. Since they are basic they cannot be challenged legitimately by any other principles. Their own inconsistency is the only thing that could under-

’ Madden, “Was Reid a Naturalist Realist?” to appear in Philosophy and Phenomeno- logical Research.

44 EDWARD H. MADDEN

mine them. Hamilton, however, confusedly assumed that because no inconsistency had been detected the principles were consistent, an untenable doctrine for any philosopher to hold.

On the other hand, Hamilton asserted a number of points and made several criticisms which are difficult to reconcile with an unflawed understanding of Reid’s metaphilosophy. i) Hamilton criticized Reid for implying in the Inquiry that vulgar beliefs could undercut philosophical arguments. The “metaphysical lunacy” reference in the Inquiry jarred Hamilton. This way of making philosophical theories appear odd and untenable, he thought, is an unjustifiable practice and should be eschewed. Reid had the good sense to avoid it in the Essay on Infellecfual Powers. (Hamilton, 1967, 11, pp. 752-53)

Hamilton’s criticism is astounding; he unwittingly agreed with at least part of the continental critics and Lewes - they too insisted that Reid used vulgar beliefs to undercut philosophical arguments. To begin with, Hamilton was wrong in thinking that Reid’s so-called “vulgar attacks” were confined to the lnquiry. The “metaphysical lunacy” phrase appears there, to be sure, but the ridicule of the skeptic - he doesn’t butt his head against posts, on the grounds that appearances are not known to be veridical - occurs in Znfellec- fual Powers. Hamilton did not realize that for Reid ridicule was an argument, and he thereby missed the crucial link in Reid’s thought between the nativistic principles of commonsense and the ordinary persons’s rejection of speculative philosophy. According to one such principle we are directly aware of physical objects, but the advent of the messenger theory, through a series of steps, eventuates in the skeptical claim that if we perceive physical objects at all we can never know it. This result, Reid claimed, is ridiculous and constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the messenger premise which spawned it. The reason that it is ridiculous and absurd is that no one, certainly not the skeptic, could possibly act on it. It is a reductio of any theory that it can be believed in the philosopher’s study but cannot be acted upon in the market place. The ordinary man is quite right, Reid concluded, in rejecting any consequences of a philosophical system that undercuts a proposition the belief in which is unavoidable since it results from a nativistic epistemic input.

ii) Hamilton’s distinction between consciousness and what it testifies to is a serious departure from Reid’s metaphilosophy and reflects the increasing Kantian influence which flowered in his third and most fundamental departure.

According to Hamilton’s distinction, a person is conscious of directly pesceiving a physical object, and this consciousness testifies to the metaphysical truth of natural realism. Now the revelation of consciousness is phenomenal and indubitable whereas the metaphysical fact testified to may legitimately be questioned by philosophical arguments. But this distinction undercuts the whole of Reid’s metaphilosophy, since he denied a distinction between the content of consciousness, conceived as phenomena, and what it testifies to - what the percipient is conscious of, by virtue of his native constitution, is the


physical object itself and not a phenomenon that testifies to its existence. Inexplicably Hamilton had taken on Kan tian terminology and thereby u n - wittingly put insurmountable obstacles in the way of his own natural realism. Reid said we are never directly aware of mental surrogates of objects in perception, and Hamilton in most contexts stressed the same point, abandon- ing it on this occassion for n o apparent reason. Hamilton further confused matters by occasionally referring t o Reid’s and Kant’s “constitutive principles”, (ibid., p. 746), patently false as far as Reid was concerned since the Scot never allowed the construction of physical objects, so to speak, out of sense data. That both Reid and Kant had regulative principles of the understanding is true, but Reid‘s regulative principle of sensation held that sensation is a way or mode of experiencing, an act of the mind, and has no entity sta- tus, and was designed t o preclude the dichotomy between phenomena and objects, a distinction which, he thought correctly, could only lead to skepticism.

Hamilton’s distinction, which is Kantian, and his defense of natural realism are inconsistent but Hamilton remained blithely unaware of his problem and repeated the two claims throughout his career. Here, if anywhere, he merited Mill’s rebuke that his self-inconsistencies came so close together as t o be breath taking.

iii) Hamilton violated Reid’s metaphilosophy most seriously when he intro- duced his concept of negative necessities, although, again, he did not inten- tionally or wholly abandon the metaphilosophy of his countryman. As we have seen, Hamilton generalized his concept of negative necessities into a metaphysical principle which he called The Law of the Conditioned: All positive thought lies between two extremes, inconditionates, neither of which we can conceive as possible and yet, as mutual contradictories, the one or the other we must recognize as necessary.

Before we can be clear how the law of the conditioned departs from Reid’s metaphilosophy we need to amplify several aspects of this definition. “Condi- tioned” refers t o what can be positively known, which includes, among other things, qualities, properties, essences, and appearances. These modes of existence are positively known because they are “relatively known” - that is, they are known only in relation t o faculties capable of apprehending them. And yet they are not “absolutely relative”; by the nature of the intellect itself we must conceive qualities, e t al., as the accident of a subject or substance. At this point Hamilton was still a Reidian.

“Inconditionates” is a shorthand way of referring to entities like space, time, matter, and God which can be characterized either as absolute (limited) or infinite (unlimited) but the natures of which in these respects are not accommodated t o our faculties of knowing. The two incompatible characteriza- tions of each entity (say, space is infinite; space is finite), then, constitute the two polar opposites one of which must be true though the existence of each is inconceivable. The law of the conditioned, in short, is calculated to turn Kant’s antinomies and the traditional paradoxes of the ancients into negative

46 EDWARD H. MADDEN

necessities - one or the other must be true though we cannot know, in principle, which one.

It is important t o notice that Harnilton’s strategy was twofold; t o transform the antinomies and paradoxes into negative necessities in order to avoid skepticism, on the one hand, and claims t o positive knowledge about ultimate entities, on the other. The point was t o avoid speculative philosophy as n o less an obnoxious alternative than Kant’s use of antinomies for skeptical pur- poses.

Hamilton’s method of diverting the antinomies into negative necessities, while it undercut Kant, also undercut a crucial aspect of Reid’s metaphilosophy. Reid claimed that any ordinary belief which is universal, self-evident, evident, and unavoidable automatically carries more weight than any discursive philosophical argument which would reject it. However, it will be recalled, Reid believed an effort must be made t o uncover the unacceptable premise of an argument designed to undercut a principle of commonsense. Hamilton occasionally used the first part of Reid’s metaphilosophy, but in his law of the conditioned he systematically ignored the second. Every antinomy and paradox was transformed into a negative necessity. To be sure, he rejected the Eleatic claim that motion is impossiblc and the belief in it an illusion. No, that things move is a principle of commonsense since it is universal, evident, and unavoidable. He made n o effort, however, t o solve the paradox by criti- cally examining the Eleatic premises, far from it. He systematically turned this paradox, like all others, into a negative necessity, as his law of the conditioned required, and thus systematically ignored a crucial element in Reid’s metaphilosophy. Hamilton’s law is opposed t o both Reid’s and Kant’s ways of dealing with paradoxes and antinomies.

If what I have written is true, or reasonably close t o the mark, Reid has survived his critics quite well. Kant and Lewes simply misunderstood the commonsense tradition. Mill depended upon a spectator epistemology for his criticism which Reid had already mortally wounded. And my own criticisms can be accommodated within expanded versions of Reid’s metaphilosophy. But did Reid survive his dubious ally Hamilton as well? Yes, but barely. There can be little doubt that Hamilton’s confused commentary in his edition of Reid’s work helped lower its prestige after its long dominance in France and America and strong influence in Scotland. But Reid was never eclipsed. Differ- ent elements of his commonsense metaphilosophy influenced such diverse thinkers as Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and certain members of a strand in recent linguistic analysis. Indeed, Reid has flourished in the twentieth century. Several new editions of his work have appeared in recent years minus Hamilton’s notes, and that is all t o the good.g Reid is clearest and most appealing when read unaccompanied by a chorus. Moreover, a cadre of Reid scholars has arisen among historians of philosophy, and new monographs and books about the Glasgow scholar appear a t regular intervals. And Professor Roderick

Reid, 1970; 1969; 1975.


Chisholm and his colleagues and students have been influenced by a careful study of Rcid in their own formulations and solutions of various problems in epistemology and agency theory. Interest has generalized to the whole commonsense tradition, whether in Scotland, France, or America.” All of these facts, and others, are cheering to one, like myself, who has tried to clarify Reid’s metaphilosophy and who believes that there is much in it, as well as in his epistemology and agency theory, that is very much alive today.

University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0027 USA

References

Barker, S. F., and T. L. Beauchamp, eds., Thomas Reid: Critical Interpreta- tions (Philadelphia: Philosophical Monographs, 1 976).

Blau, Joseph, Men and Movements in American Philosophy (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952).

Chisholm, Roderick, “Freedom and Action” in Freedom and Determinism, ed. K. Lehrer (New York: Random House, 1966).

Flower, Elizabeth and Murray Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977).

Grave, S. A., 7he Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).

Hamilton, Sir William, Lectures on Metaphysics, ed. H. L. Manse1 and J. Veitch, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1865).

~~ Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1866).

~- Dissertations, second volume of Hamilton’s edition of Reid’s Philosophical Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967).

Hoeveler, J. D., James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Lehrer, Keith, “Reid’s Influence on Contemporary American and British Philosophy,” reprinted in Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations, 1976. Cf. number 1.

Madden, E. H., ‘‘Commonsense and Agency Theory,” Review of Metaphysics,

_- “The Metaphilosophy of Commonsense,” American IYlilosophical

_ _ “Victor Cousin and the Commonsense Tradition,” History of Philosophy

36 (1982), 319-21.

Quarterly, 20 ( I 983), 23-36.

Quarterly, 1 (1984), 93-109.

lo Cf. footnote 1. In addition, see the Introductions to the new editions of’ Reid’s works; Grave, 1960; Marcel-Lacoste, 1982; Chisholm, 1966; Lehrer, 1976; and Taylor, 1966.

48 EDWARD H. MADDEN

_ _ “Francis Wayland and the Scottish Tradition,” Dunsuctions of the C. S. Peirce Society, 21 (1985), 301-26.

Mahan, Asa, Critical Histoy of Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Eliot Stock, 188 1).

Marcil-Lacoste, Louise, Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common- Sense Philosophers (Kingston and Montreal: McCill-Queen’s University Press, 1982).

Mill, J . S., An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1877).

Reid, Thomas, Phi1oso;lhical Works, ed., with notes and supplementary dissertations, by Sir William Hamilton, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Ceorg Olms, 1967).

-- Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. B. Brody (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1969).

-- Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, ed., B. Brody (Cam- bridge: M.I.T. Press, 1969).

-- An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. T. Duggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

-- Inquiries and Essays, ed. Keith Lehrer and R. E. Beanblossom (Indian- apolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975).

Schneider, Herbert, A History of American Philosophy, 2nd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

Taylor, Richard, Action and Purpose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966).

did reid's metaphilosophy survive kant, hamilton, and mill?

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