To see the introductory post, click here. To see the previous post, click here. To see a more detailed exposition/refutation of Locke, Condillac, and Reid by Rosmini click on THE ORIGIN OF IDEAS listed above, underneath this blogs header title.
Reid (1710-1796)
The disastrous consequences deduced by two such powerful minds as Berkeley and Hume from the principles of Locke, aroused and alarmed the Scottish philosopher Reid. he saw that these consequences annihilated the external world, and destroyed all certainty of human cognitions with such rigor of logic, that, by granting the premises, no escape was possible from the conclusion.
But on the other hand he saw that these consequences were opposed to the common sense of mankind, and destroyed all morality and religion. Therefore he said, “They can not be true.”
The conclusion, therefore, of Reid was that the premises were false, and that Locke’s system must not be accepted blindly, but must be submitted to a profound re-examination in order to detect the falsehood which lay at its root.
He set to work on this investigation with all the force of his genius, and in the end was convinced that he had succeeded.
Reid observed that in the fact of human perceptions there is something besides simple sensation. If it were true that man knows nothing beyond his sensations he would be able to affirm nothing beyond them. But experience shows us that we affirm the existence of real beings which are not our sensations; since we are conscious of knowing not only the modifications of our own spirit (mind), but also of the substances which are not ourselves, and which exercise an action upon us. We must, therefore, conclude that we have not only the faculty of sensation, but another mysterious faculty as well, and that whenever we experience a sensation it is this which excites and compels us to affirm the existence of something outside of the sensation.
But here the Scottish philosopher found himself confronted by the following difficulties, which form the great knot of the ideological problem.
How can we explain this faculty which affirms that which we do not find in sensation?
The object of this faculty is not given by sensation. Where then does it reside-what presents it to our perception?
Reid endeavored to meet the difficulties thus: he said, “We must not go beyond our facts. Now it is attested by fact that we perceive substance and being, things which do not fall under our senses, which are entirely different from sensations, but which we perceive on occasion of the sensations. We must therefore admit that the human soul has of its own nature an instinct which leads us to this perception. This instinct is a primitive faculty which must be accepted as an ultimate and inexplicable fact.”
According to Reid, then, there is in us a suggestion of nature, as he terms it, by which on experiencing the sensations we are necessitated not to stop there, but to pass beyond them by an act of thought, to the persuasion of the existence of real beings, which are the causes of our sensations, and to which we give the name of bodies.
By means of this primitive faculty, which affirms or perceives the corporeal substance itself, Reid thought he had confuted the Idealism of Berkeley, and secured the existence of bodies. He thought also that by placing the criterion of certitude in this same primitive faculty, he had given its death-blow to the Scepticism of Hume. He imagined that he had thus reconciled philosophy with the common sense of mankind, from which it had been divorced by the English philosophers.
The merit of the thinkers of the Scottish school consists in this, that they were the first who attempted to liberate philosophy from the sensistic principles of Locke and Condillac.
Kant (1724-1800)
Whilst it was supposed that the Scottish school had placed philosophy once for all on a solid basis, the celebrated Sophist of Konigsberg came and shattered its foundations again, and worse than before. He took the author of the Scottish school at his word, and proceeded to reason with him much as follows: “You are quite right in saying that our persuasion of the existence of bodies does not come from the sense, but from a totally different faculty. The human spirit is by its very nature obliged to affirm the existence of bodies when our sensitive faculty experiences sensations. If so, our faith in the existence of bodies is an effect of the nature of the human mind, and hence if our mind were differently constituted we should not be necessitated to affirm that bodies exist. Therefore the truth of the existence of bodies is subjective or relative to the mind that pronounces it, but it is not in any way objective. We are indeed obliged to admit the existence of bodies, because we are so constituted that we cannot resist this instinct of our nature; but it does not by any means follow that these bodies exist in themselvespthat they have an objective existence independent of us.”
This reasoning was extended by Kant to all human cognitions in general. He maintained that since they are all and each acts and products of the human spirit, and this spirit can never go out of itself, so there can be nothing but subjective truth and certainty, and therefore we can never be sure that things are such as they appear.
To support this reasoning he observed that as all beings act according to the laws of their nature, so their products ear the stamp of those laws, whence he concluded that since our cognitions are all products of our own spirit, they must necessarily be in conformity with its nature and laws.
“Who can tell,” he says, “that if there were a mind constituted differently from our own, it would not see things quite differently from what they appear to us? Does not a mirror reflect objects according to the form which these objects assume in it, a convex mirror showing them elongated, a concave mirror on the contrary making them appear shortened.”
“The human mind therefore,” he continues, “gives its own forms to objects of its cognitions, it does not receive those forms from the objects themselves. Now the office of the philosopher consists in discovering what these forms are, in enumerating them one by one, and in defining each according to its proper limitations. For this all that is required is accurately to observe all the objects of human cognition, transferring the forms of such objects to the human mind itself, and thus getting rid of the transcendental illusion, which leads us to imagine that the forms belong to the objects, whilst they are actually the forms of our own mind.”
This task Kant undertook to accomplish in his work, which bears the title A CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. His method is as follows.
The Sensitivity, according to Kan, has two forms. The one he assigns to the external sense, and he terms it space, the other to the internal sense, and he calls this time. To the understanding he assigns four forms, quantity, quality, modality, and relation; to the reason he gives three forms- namely, absolute matter, absolute whole, absolute spirit; in other words, matter, the universe, and God.
By this method Kant professed to reconcile all the most opposite systems of philosophy. Of these he makes two grand divisions, the Dogmatic and the Sceptical. Under the Dogmatic he includes all that admitted the truth and certainty of human cognitions. Under the Sceptical those that denied them. He said that both sides were in the right; that the Dogmatists were so, because a truth and certainty existed-namely, the subjective or relative; and that the Sceptics too were right, because there is not such thing as objective truth or certainty in the objects considered in themselves, since man cannot know anything as it is in itself.
This system Kant termed Criticism, because it criticised not only all previous systems, but human reason itself. He also called it Transcendental Philosophy, because it transcended sense and experience, and subjected to its criticism all that man believed himself to know about the sensible world.
The system of Kant, however, is in fact:
- Sceptical, because the subjective truth and certainty which he admits cannot, except by an abuse of words, be called either truth or certainty.
- Idealistic, since it admits only the subjective existence of bodies, and declares them to be the mere product of instinct and the innate forms of the human mind. It admits bodies only in appearance, and denies their proper existence. Moreover, his system is idealism, transported from the particular to the general. It is the idealism which Berkeley had applied to bodies only, extended by Kant, no less than by Hume before him, to all the objects of human cognition, whether corporeal or spiritual, concrete or abstract.
- Atheistic, because if human reason cannot give us security of the absolute and objective truth of the objects presented to our perception, there is not possibility of knowing with certainty the existence of God, and God is reduced to a subjective phenomenon. Kant himself admits this with perfect frankness. In fact, he criticizes all arguments employed by philosophers to demonstrate the existence of God, and proves, as he thinks, that they are futile and useless.
- Pantheistic, because according to this system nothing is left but spirit, which produces and figures to itself all things, in virtue of its inherent instincts and innate forms. It follows that one only substance exists, which is the human subject itself, and which carries within it the whole universe and God Himself; so that God, in this system, becomes a modification of man.
- Spiritualistic and Materialistic at once, because what we call matter is in the object man as a product of himself, and what we call spirit is also in the object man as producing and modifying him, so that the human spirit becomes at one and the same time spirit and matter.
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