Alexander Campbell Fraser

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ While he praised Reid for making the Common Sense in its integrity the necessary criterion of philosophy, he claimed for himself the special credit of distinguishing its necessities as of two sorts—the one a positive power, the other the impotence implied in finite intelligence. Hence human experience rests on a conditioned, or (so far) paralysed intelligence; and if omniscience only can be called 'knowledge,' while to know 'in part,' therefore with involved mysteries, must be called ignorance—it follows that man knows nothing. ”

“ Ignorance is then the consummation of human philosophy, and its highest attainment is this discovery. 'Our dream of knowledge is a little light rounded with darkness.' 'The highest reach of science and philosophy is the scientific recognition of human ignorance.' 'Doubt is the beginning and the end of all our efforts to know.' 'The last and highest consecration of all true religion is an altar to the unknown and unknowable God.' Man’s knowledge of existence must be relative to his limited experience and intelligence. ”

“ If knowledge means omniscient physical science of the universe of reality, then the universe of reality is finally unknown and unknowable. But if man can live in intelligible relations to what transcends natural science,—call this which enables him so to live, 'knowledge,' 'science,' 'common sense,' 'faith,' 'inspiration,' 'revelation,' 'feeling,' or 'reason,'—it is treasure found for the philosopher. ”

“ In the name of philosophy he excludes from philosophy all except necessary truths of abstract reason; neglecting, as beneath its regard, the world of change, in which Reid’s mixed and practical reason, or Common Sense, had been offered as final guide. The office of philosophy, according to Ferrier, is among the eternal truths, which alone can be absolutely demonstrated, and which relieve philosophy from 'the oversight of popular opinion and the errors of psychological science,' which had been unworthily dignified as the final test of truth. ”

“ The eighteenth-century question, 'What is Matter?' has risen in the nineteenth to the question, 'What is God?' The inspired Common Sense or Common Reason of Reid seems to be sublimated in universally necessitating dialectical Reason, in this Scoto-German way of resisting the agnostic. To fill the place of the 'unknown and unknowable God' of the Hamiltonian emphasis, human knowledge appears identified and co-extensive with the Divine, in an absolute idealism, presumed to be the only adequate refutation of all subverting doubt. ”

“ If Reid’s mission was to call attention to our direct mental grasp of outward realities, by exploding a theory which seemed to paralyse that grasp, it would have been his corresponding mission now to justify, in name of the moral and spiritual elements of the common sense, the religious interpretation of the universe, which finds in the facts of matter and man a continuous self-revelation of omnipotent love and mercy—and this in the face of a world which repels our more philanthropic civilisation, by its abundant suffering and sin. ”

“ Expansion rather than subversion of the philosophy which ultimately argues from the common sense, has, I think, been going on. Matter-of-fact study of human mind, as engaged in perception of the material world, and in the moral exercise of voluntary agency, which with Reid makes this perception of matter, and moral consciousness of free agency its prominent spiritual facts, has now risen to criticism of our conception of the Supreme Power that is finally at work in the universe in which we live and move and have our being. ”

“ Poetry in another way than philosophy expresses and interprets for man the inspired experience that transcends physical science and its logical understanding. And we find in the great poets of the Victorian era an appeal through the imagination to those elements in human nature, to which Reid made argumentative appeal as a philosopher. ”

“ God is then 'unknowable' by man, only inasmuch as faith in the perfect reason and goodness of the Universal Power is more than an ordinary scientific generalisation. But if we recognise in the Common Sense, and in its underlying Theistic Faith, that without which all our knowledge must dissolve in ignorance, then the faith must be accepted as in reason the final ground of the knowledge ”

“ He would have looked with distrust at the more ambitious intellectual constructions which seemed to be superseding the common sense of human nature, as the human response to the sceptic or agnostic, whose philosophical knowledge turned all knowledge into ignorance at the last. Reid was too human to be satisfied with merely physical generalisations of sequences and co-existences of phenomena, finally unintelligible, and therefore unworthy of trust ”

“ The alternatives presented to this generation—either agnostic pessimist despair or universal science in which man is in some sense identified with God—final nescience versus final omniscience—ultimate and universal problem of existence taking the place of a Reid’s science of human mind—represent the unending struggle between sceptical distrust of the Universal Power, ignorantly worshipped, and reasonable ethical faith in the Universal Power, with consequent hope for men. ”

“ Caird, who adorned Reid’s chair for nearly thirty years—methods for making explicit latent Divine Reason as what explains and sustains the universe. Reid's appeal in a practical temper, to the mixed and moral reason in man, as that with which man is inspired—an appeal widened and prolific of deeper questions in Hamilton—was still too cautious to attempt to formulate the mysteries of existence, in fully intelligible principles, which should remove the darkness around the 'little light' with which Reid was satisfied. ”

“ It is described as fixed and final; as in all its decisions appealing to itself; and as 'much nearer to sense than the understanding,' for it is direct insight of truth, whereas understanding must refer all its judgments to premises. That man, because he is morally responsible, must originate, within his individual personality as their final centre, all acts for which he is responsible, is with Coleridge a postulate, 'the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself,' and so see the true meaning of the words power and causality. ”

“ Pure reason does not need to be finally supplemented by practical principles of common sense. It is able to shift for itself without this surrender. The conciliation of common sense thinking and philosophy is accomplished by the submission of common sense to universal compulsory reason. ”

“ The natural beliefs of mankind, instead of being worshipped as divine, are banished in Ferrier's philosophy, on the ground that their self-contradictoriness is demonstrable: the business of the philosopher, accordingly, is to substitute 'reasonable thinking' for 'common sense.' The 'raison impuissante,' emphasised by Hamilton—the ignorance in which Hamilton revels—is not allowed by Ferrier to be ignorance at all ”

“ It is that in each of us through which the inspirations in the ideal man, when dormant in individuals, can nevertheless be made to respond, in an ethical or religious common sense of the infinite love and mercy of the all-sustaining Power that is always waiting to be gracious—to respond to the inspirations of Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles.
If 'knowledge' means only what is reached by the logical understanding elaborating materials given by sense ”

“ Our scientific interpretation of the ever-changing universe at last rests on ethical theistic faith, and the Christian revelation of divine love is responded to by the divine inspiration of God in Man, in the form of the spiritual Common Sense. ”

“ In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations of the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason. We may speak of understanding as 'human,' with its often discordant generalisations; but there can be no merely 'human' Reason. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To rest satisfied with the evolutionary generalisation he would have regarded as involving the 'common error of philosophers since the days of Plato,' in confounding moral agency with physical causation. ”