FOLLOWERS OP REID. 239 endeavors which Hume had demanded of himself and of his readers. With this declaration of the infallibility of com- mon consciousness, the theory of knowledge, which had been so successfully begun, was incontinently thrust aside, although, indeed, empirical psychology gained by the industrious investigation of the inner life by means of self- observation. James Beattie continued the attack on Hume in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism, 1770, on the principle that wisdom must never contradict nature, and that whatever our nature compels us to believe, hence whatever all agree in, is true. In his briefer dissertations Beattie discussed Memory and Imagination, Fable and Romance, the Effects of Poetry and Music, Laughter, the Sublime, etc. While Beat- tie had given the preference to psychological and aesthetic questions, James Oswald (1772) appealed to common sense in matters of religion, describing it as an instinctive faculty of judgment concerning truth and falsehood. The most ■eminent among the followers of Reid was Dugald Stewart (professor in Edinburgh ; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1 792-1 827; Collected Works, edited by Hamilton, 1854-58), who developed the doctrines of the master and in some points modified them. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), who is highly esteemed by Mill, Spencer, and Bain, approximated the teachings of Reid and Stewart to those of Hume. The philosophy of the Scottish School was long in favor both in England and in France, where it was employed as a weapon against materialism. By way of appendix we may mention the beginnings of a psychological sesthetics in Henry Home (Lord Kames, 1696-1782), and Edmund Burke (1728-97).* Home, in ethics a follower of Hutcheson, is fond of supporting his sesthetic views by examples from Shakspere. Beauty (chap, iii.) appears to belong to the object itself, but in reality it is only an effect, a "secondary quality," of the object; like color, it is nothing but an idea in the mind, "for an object is said to be beautiful for no other reason but that it appears so to the spectator." It arises from regularity,
- Home, Elements of Criticism, 1762. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry inte
the Origin of eur Ideas of the Sublime and the Beantiftil, 1756.
