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268 CRITICAL NOTICES : of hearing. Prof. Seth has done a good work in bringing fairly into view, without exaggerating, Reid's merits, and he has also been able, within his limits, to give marked effect to the founder's desire that " the lectures should be a contribution to philosophy and not merely to the history of systems ". As an express effort to bring directly face to face the opposed philosophical schools of the present day, the lectures are specially welcome. They are, as usual with the author, very well written, and show him not less anxious than ever to understand and allow for the point of view of those from whom he differs. As Eeid set out even more expressly than Kant to answer Hume, and saw in Hume the natural term of that movement of modern philosophy which had been started by Descartes and had received a new direction from Locke, the first third of the course of six lectures is occupied with a review of the " Philosophical Presuppositions " which Hume took from his predecessors and of the "Philosophical Scepticism" into which not partially, like Berkeley before him, but completely he ran them out. In the next two lectures, Eeid's own doctrine especially of Sensation and Perception, upon which he spent his strength is considered, and his deficiency of philosophical system gives the occasion of passage to the Kantian " Answer " which at least was free from shortcoming in that respect. Shortcomings enough appear, however, arising from Kant's readiness to make admissions to Hume which the wiser Eeid had withheld ; and the last third of the course is occupied first with an exposure of the particular superstition of " Eelativity of Knowledge" which Kant imposed upon his adherents, including Hamilton within the Scottish school itself, and then with a consideration of the help towards philosophical system that may be had by the truer heirs of Eeid's saving common sense from Kant's profounder successor, Hegel, whose "analysis of the conceptions of reason as reason" is pro- nounced " an indefinite advance on anything that had gone before it in modern philosophy ". The account of Descartes and Locke, in the first lecture, is remarkably good. It would be impossible to bring out more clearly and succinctly the inability of the " two-substance" doc- trine of the world to afford any explanation of perception or knowledge. This doctrine, with its mediating factor of "ideas,"' Locke took in all essentials from Descartes ; and, if he had not done service otherwise to the philosophical theory of knowledge by giving the chief impulse to scientific psychological inquiry in modern times, his halting and wavering application of it must have kept him from ever winm'ng any place of importance in the history of philosophical thought. Berkeley is lightly passed over in the transition (made in the second lecture) to Hume, on the just ground that Hume, while drawing directly from Locke the principles that he carried out to the fateful results, received at most from the younger thinker mere aid and suggestion