James Frederick FerrierHaldane, Elizabeth Sanderson
Philosophy
James Frederick Ferrier
Haldane, Elizabeth Sanderson
Ferrier, James Frederick, 1808-1864
Both mind and matter appear, then, to be wanting, and experience alone
is suggested as the means of solving the difficulty in which we are
placed--a point in the argument which left an opportunity open to Kant
to suggest a new development, to ask whether things being found
inadequate in producing knowledge, we might not ask if knowledge could
not be more successful with things. But it is the Scottish lines of
attempted solution that we wish to follow out, and not the German.
Perhaps they are not so very different.
Philosophy, as Reid found it, was in a bad way enough, as far as the
orthodox mind of Scotland was concerned. All justification for belief
in God, in immortality, in all that was held sacred in a century of
much orthodoxy if little zeal, was gone. Such things might be believed
in by those who found any comfort in so believing, but to the educated
man who had seriously reflected on them, they were anachronisms. The
very desperateness of the case, however, seemed to promise a remedy.
Men could not rest in a state of permanent scepticism, in a world
utterly incapable of being rationally explained. Even the propounder of
the theories allowed this to be true; and as for others, they felt that
they were rational beings, and this signified that there was system in
the world.
A champion arose when things were at their worst in Thomas Reid, the
founder, or at least the chiefest ornament, of the so-called Scottish
School of Philosophy. He it was who set himself to add the principle of
the coherence of the Universe, and the consequent possibility of
establishing Faith once more in the world. Reid, to begin with, instead
of looking at Hume's results as serious, regarded them as necessarily
absurd. He started a new theory of his own, the theory of Immediate
Perception, which signified that we are able immediately to
apprehend--not ideas only, but the Truth. And how, we may ask, can this
be done?
It had been pointed out first of all that sensations as understood by
Locke--that is, the relations so called by Locke--might be separated
from sensation in itself; in fact, that these first pertained to mind.
Hence we have a dualistic system given us to start with, and the
question is how the two sides are to be connected? What does this
theory of Immediate Perception, which Reid puts forward as the
solution, mean? Is it just a mechanical union of two antitheses, or is
it something more?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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