Can Reid’s ‘common sense’ be sublimated into the universal consciousness of Hegelian dialectic, and does this translation of faith into absolute science constitute the true ideal of Scottish common sense philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century? Is common knowledge, and scientific knowledge in special sciences, only knowledge ‘in part,’ while the true philosopher may aspire to know even as God knows? Must man thus claim omniscience as the only fit ground of his protest against sceptical nescience? Or, must his interpretation of the experience through which he is passing be, even in the end, only an inspired faith-venture, instead of the omniscience which elevates the common sense into itself? Rather, must not the supposed omniscience, which is dissatisfied with faith-ventures, because faith is supposed to be blind, be itself only the common sense under another name—but with its intellectual constitution more articulately explicated? Surely only omniscience and omnipotence can dispense with the moral and religious venture of our inspired common sense and its implied theistic faith, as the root of reason in man—in his intermediate place and office, between perfect knowledge and total ignorance. So understood, Reid’s philosophy is _virtually_ the philosophy that makes its final appeal to the divine in man, latent in each individual man, in and through whom the universe is gradually interpreted as a revelation of perfect reason or perfect goodness. True philosophy is then the moral and religious venture which accepts and applies the principles of common sense, in the assurance that, in genuine submission to their inspired authority, we cannot finally be put to intellectual or moral confusion. Faith in God is latent even in the perceptions of external sense, in which Reid found the first example of the operation of this inspiration. Alike in the outer world of the senses, and in free or responsible agency in man, filial faith, ethical or theistic, may be justified by reasoning, although it Cannot be reached by logic as a direct conclusion from premises. It is our primary postulate, and not an object of logical proof; therefore credible in reason while it is not demonstrable. In this way a humanised Hegelianism, which seeks to restore or retain the often dormant faith in the perfectly good God, and thus in the future of man, may even be taken as in line with Reid, under the altered intellectual conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. It virtually appeals at last to moral faith.[28] * * * * *