The Divine Lamp

Article 3

The difficulty as seen by Reid

109.  But to come to our difficulty, we must see what Dr. Reid understands by the three words, sensation, memory, and imagination.  He says:

A sensation-a smell, for instance-may be presented to the mind in three different ways.  It may be smelled; it may be remembered; it may be imagined or thought of.  In the first case it is necessarily accompanied with a belief of its present existence; in the second, it is necessarily accompanied with a belief of its past existence; and in the last, it is not accompanied with belief at all, but is what the logicians call  a simple apprehension.

110.  It being immaterial to the correctness of a reasoning in what sense words are used, provided that one takes care to define them beforehand, and then never to use them in any other meaning, I shall not stop to examine whether the sense given by Dr. Reid to the three words sensation, memory, imagination, be the same as is attributed to them in common discourse.  Instead of doing this, I shall ask the reader to note well the concepts which Dr. Reid wishes respectively to convey by those terms.

    First of all, I would call attention to the difference he makes between the first two and the third.  By the first two (sensation and memory) he wants us to understand, not the bare perception of a being, but a perception united with  the persuasion of the real existence of that being; with this sole distinction, that, in the case of the sensation, we are persuaded that the being really exists now, and in the case of the memory, the being really existed heretofore.  On the contrary, by imagination he means the faculty of perceiving the being, but without any persuasion of its existence, either present or past, accompanying the perception; which kind of perception the Schoolmen designated-and, I think, with greater propriety-by the name of simple apprehension.

111.  The question now arises as to whether the simple apprehension of a being, or the act of imagination taken in the sense of Dr. Reid, precedes in our soul the sensation and the memory, as Locke and Hume appear to maintain, or whether it is preceded by them, as Dr. Reid contends.

    Now, it is precisely by following up the controversy between these philosophical antagonists, that we see the difficulty which I proposed at the beginning, brought out to full view.  That difficulty is, in substance, ever the same; but it assumes a great variety of forms according to the aspects in which it has happened to fall in the way of philosophical inquirers.  Let us see, then, whether either party has succeeded in untying the knot, or in showing us the way out of the labyrinth.

112.  The system of the adversaries of Dr. Reid, or, as he calls it, the ideal system, is described by him as follows: “The ideal system teaches us that the first operation of the mind about its ideas is simple apprehension: that is, the are conception of a thing, without any belief about it; and that after we have got simple apprehensions, by comparing them together, we perceive agreements or disagreements between them; and that this perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas is all that we call belief, judgment, or knowledge.”

    Such is what we may call the last expression of the system of Locke and of his followers both in England and France.

     In analyzing the system of Condillac I pointed out how its whole essence consists in this, that it places the formation of ideas first, and then, through a comparison between these ideas, the formation of judgments.  but here at once the difficulty of which I speak showed itself, and in such a way that, according to that system, it could not possibly be solved.  For Condillac himself supplied me with arguments which necessarily led to the conclusion that no idea could be formed except through a judgment; and that therefore the question of ideas could not be treated separately from that of judgments.

    But as on the other hand no judgment can be formed except through some idea, there remained to explain how a judgment was possible antecedently to all ideas, in Locke’s and Condillac’s hypothesis that all ideas are acquired (see 86-98).

    Now, this was the difficulty as seen and noted by Dr. Reid, though in a more partial form: on which account he could, indeed, confute the system of his adversaries, but not, as it seems to me, propose a system capable of affording a satisfactory solution of the difficulty itself.

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