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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. XI.————
sent to our minds. To these perceptions they gave the name indifferently of ideas, images, phantasms, or representations; whereupon Dr Reid, getting embarrassed by the ambiguity caused by a diversified nomenclature, taxed them roundly with maintaining an hypothesis which was unsupported by facts, and had for its consequence the denial of all intuitive cognition—of all knowledge at first hand. There never was a more mistaken or unfounded charge, made though it was in perfect good faith by Dr Reid. By ideal or representative knowledge they meant, as has been said, exactly what he and his school mean by intuitive or presentative knowledge: by ideas, or images, they meant what philosophers now usually term intuitions, and what the world at large calls perceptions. And further, what Dr Reid and his school mean by ideal or representative knowledge, his opponents would have called re-representative knowledge, had they used such a term; but, instead of employing it, they expressed their meaning quite as well by the common words memory or imagination. The history of philosophical controversy has no more memorable mistake to record than this of Dr Reid, in which he supposed that his adversaries understood by representation what he meant by that term: he meant imagination, and supposed that they did the same; they, however, meant intuition, which was precisely the point in defence of which Dr Reid was contend-
