- Length
- 320 pagesBrookes, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Edinburgh, 1997
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
An Inquiry into the Human Mind
The one eighteenth-century reply to Hume that engages him rather than deploring him, by a Scottish minister turned professor who sent his manuscript to Hume before publishing it. Its claim is that the whole modern tradition had been reasoning from an assumption none of its members ever defended.
- Date
- 1764
- Author
- Thomas Reid
- Region
- Aberdeen and Glasgow
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 25 years
The dominant philosophy in Scottish, French and American universities for most of the nineteenth century, dismissed for most of the twentieth, and taken seriously again since the 1980s.
What the book says
A reply to Hume that works by refusing his starting point, organised as an examination of the five senses one at a time. Reid's opening move is a piece of reasoning about reasoning: a valid argument that ends in an absurdity tells you a premise is false, and the conclusions of modern philosophy - that we cannot know whether anything exists outside our own minds, that there is no self, that causation is habit - are absurd in exactly that way. So a premise is false, and it is the one nobody examined: that what the mind immediately perceives is not the world but its own ideas, images or impressions standing in for it. Once that is granted, Reid argues, no route back to the world exists, and Berkeley and Hume were simply honest about it. He then rebuilds. Sensation and perception are different things: a smell is a state of me, but when I feel a table I am immediately aware of the table, not of a picture of it. Perception is a natural sign, and reading it is a capacity we have rather than an inference we make. The principles this rests on cannot be proved, because they are what proof starts from, and denying them in argument while relying on them in life is the mark of a philosophy gone wrong.
What it argues
That perception is direct, and that the theory of ideas which denies this was never argued for. Reid distinguishes sensation from perception: a sensation is a state of the perceiver with no object, like a pain, whereas perceiving is being immediately aware of something other than oneself. On the ideas theory these are conflated, so that what we are aware of in seeing a tree is a mental image, and the tree becomes an inference we cannot make. Reid's alternative treats sensations as natural signs which we interpret without inference, the way we read a face or a word - a capacity constituted by our nature rather than justified by reasoning. The first principles this depends on are not provable; they are what proving uses, and a philosophy that undermines them undermines itself, since the argument that reaches the sceptical conclusion also relies on memory, on language and on the reliability of reasoning.
What it answered
Hume's Treatise, and behind it Descartes, Locke and Berkeley, whom Reid treats as a single tradition with one shared and undefended premise. His diagnosis is historical as well as philosophical: he traces the theory of ideas back through the moderns to the scholastic species, and argues that it entered philosophy as a piece of technical machinery and was then mistaken for an observation about the mind.
How it argues
Sense by sense, and by close description rather than by demonstration. Reid works through smell, taste, hearing, touch and sight, showing in each case what is a sensation and what is a perception and where the two have been run together. The account of touch and of our grasp of hardness is the most sustained. He also argues by asking what the sceptic must rely on in order to state the position - memory, testimony, the meanings of words - and pointing out that none of these is available on the theory being defended.
The moment
The Scottish Enlightenment at its height, with Reid one of the founders of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society - the Wise Club - which met to discuss exactly these questions and which had been reading Hume for years. Reid had been a parish minister until he was over forty, and his temperament shows: the book is patient, respectful of its opponent, and entirely without the horror that most contemporaries brought to Hume.
How it travelled
Further than its author's reputation suggests. Common-sense philosophy became the standard teaching in Scotland, was carried to France by Royer-Collard and Cousin, and dominated American college philosophy through the nineteenth century, where it shaped a great deal more than philosophy departments. It then collapsed: the twentieth century treated Reid as a plodding refuter of a philosopher he had not understood. The recovery began in the 1970s and 80s and is substantial - he is now read as an early direct realist and as a serious epistemologist of testimony and of first principles.
The strongest objection
That he answered a book its author had already left behind. Reid aims almost everything at the Treatise, which Hume had disowned and replaced with the Enquiries, and several of the positions he demolishes - the crude classification of ideas, belief as force and vivacity - are ones Hume had himself abandoned. Hume's own response to the manuscript was polite and unbothered, and he seems to have regarded the Enquiry as already containing his answer. The deeper objection is that appealing to first principles which cannot be defended is a way of stopping the argument rather than winning it, and that Reid needs a criterion for which principles qualify. He offers a list; the list is not obviously principled.
Why read it
Because it is the clearest and least intimidating book in this batch, and because the diagnostic move - a valid argument ending in absurdity means a premise is wrong, so find the premise - is worth having whether or not one accepts where he applies it. The chapter on touch and the concluding chapters on first principles are the ones that repay attention.
- First printed
- 1764
- First in English
- 1764
- Digitised
- Yes
Reid developed the position at greater length in the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of 1785 and the Essays on the Active Powers of 1788; the Inquiry is the compact statement.
Written in English. The text is public domain.
Where it stands
Revived, and doing work. Reid is cited in current debates about perception as a founder of direct realism, in epistemology on the legitimacy of beliefs that cannot be justified without circularity, and in the philosophy of testimony, where his argument that we are entitled to believe what we are told is now a standard position rather than an eccentric one.
The passage
the first degree of reason
Reid's own description of common sense, as the office that judges of things self-evident. Public domain, and his own words.
Contested
How fair his reading of Hume is has been argued since 1764, and the charge that he attacks the Treatise while Hume had moved on is a real one. Whether common sense is doing epistemological work or is a way of declining to answer is the standing objection. Whether Reid's direct realism is coherent given that he accepts sensations as real mental states is disputed by current interpreters. And how much of the nineteenth century's common-sense philosophy is actually Reid's, as opposed to his popularisers', is a question the recent scholarship has had to disentangle.