authority, as distinguished from reason in its innumerable inferential
exercises: the authority may be logically vindicated as reasonable, but
its judgments are not conclusions originally deduced from premises.
It must also be remembered that the Reidian protest on behalf of a
philosophical recognition of the blended judgment and feeling which makes
this common reason that is more or less consciously alive in all men,
is a protest on behalf of the regulative authority of this reason in
its genuine integrity. All philosophical systems, so far, proceed upon
and acknowledge its judgments; but, as it seemed to Reid, often only
after spoiling them. He made it his particular mission to restore them
in their genuine integrity to philosophy as the prime factors of all
true theories. In perception does the outward reality actually appear,
extended as it really is, without any unextended medium interposed,
exactly as the internal reality of a pain or a pleasure appears without
a medium, when I am conscious of being pained or pleased? If so, let us
then, Reid would say, accept this fact as final, even although we cannot
account for it; instead of perverting it by supposing that the external
reality is one thing, and the immediately perceived object of which alone
we are curious a different thing;—dreaming that this supposed internal
object, as its copy, explains our perception of the external object that
is imperceptible. Again, according to genuine common sense, the ‘self’
which I am obliged to presuppose is invisible; my body or my brain is
external to _it_, as much so as the sun and moon are; for they are all
parts of the material world—all objects of my senses—unlike my proper
personality, which is approached only through the inner consciousness,
and not at all through perception of the senses. Here, too, Reid protests
on behalf of the genuine common sense, and against the scientifically
perverted common sense offered to him by Priestley. For the distinctive
feature of Reidism is not vague acknowledgment of the common sense, but
acknowledgment of it as it is found to be when steadfast reflection is
applied to the final mental experience of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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