For forty years after Reid’s death the higher thought of Scotland,
represented by its leaders, remained well within the old lines. It was
still careful analysis of what is presented in human consciousness, with
a gradual decline of interest in the metaphysical and moral problems
which Hume’s agnostic distrust had introduced even into Reid’s modest
treatment of the common sense. Scottish philosophy became a search for
natural sequences and co-existences among phenomena, instead of search
for firm intellectual and moral footing in a universe to which we are
introduced by being percipient of an infinitesimal part through our five
senses. For a quarter of a century Dugald Stewart was Reid’s acknowledged
successor, less original, and even less adventurous, than his master,
but unrecognisable in the ill-tempered criticism of Schopenhauer. With
dignified eloquence, wider intimacy with society than Reid’s, and more
learning, he applied inductive methods to find the laws that determine
intellectual character and the education of the human mind, also to solve
social questions, in graceful language—all which touched the popular
imagination more than his somewhat prosaic predecessor.
* * * * *
Early in the nineteenth century, Thomas Brown, the young Edinburgh
Professor of Moral Philosophy, and colleague of Stewart, raised a revolt
against Reid and Stewart in some of their characteristic philosophy.
This brilliant youth, minor poet as well as philosopher, had practised
medicine in Edinburgh before his appointment, in 1810, at the age of
thirty-two, to the chair of Stewart. In medical practice he had been the
colleague of Dr. Gregory, Reid’s cousin, and so long his correspondent.
Brown, unlike Reid, was one of the precocious philosophers. At the age
of twenty he appeared as a critic of the _Zoonomia_ of Darwin, and a few
years later as author of an _Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and
Effect_, which contains the essence of the philosophy that was afterwards
expanded and applied in his _Lectures_. He died at the age of forty-two,
leaving works undistinguished by the deep and patient thought of Reid,
and diffuse in style, but abounding in ingenious analysis—an interesting
contribution to the logic of physical inquiry, instead of appeals to
carefully considered judgments of the Common Sense in Perception and in
Causation. Brown recognised instinctive belief in natural constancies of
co-existence and sequence among phenomena, and treated associations among
mental states as the chief explanation of the phenomena of mind. The
originative moral agency of intending and intelligent Will, so prominent
latterly in Reid, disappears in Brown. And Brown, like Priestley,
disparaged Reid’s claim to merit for reversing the philosophical
prejudice that ‘ideas’ are the only objects of human cognition, regarding
it as a metaphor mistaken for a dogma. Indeed, the empirical laws of
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