Series: A Selective History of 17th & 18th Century Epistemology? (Part 2: Empiricism)
"Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu”
Generally-speaking, for the Empiricists, knowledge about the world could only be obtained via direct observations and measurements about its properties and phenomena. As the Italian scholastic philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, wrote in Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate (1256–1259), deriving from the Peripatetic school of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Peripatetic axiom: Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu or “nothing is in the intellect that is not first in senses”. In other words, we do not have facts about the external world—only facts derived from our senses, which may or may not correspond accurately to the real essence of the world outside of our senses.
As the English philosopher, Dan Robinson elaborates, “we do not experience externality directly but only mediately” because we must rely on our senses to know such things. The senses are mediated by our sense organs, such as our eyes and our ears and so on. If so, then the next step might be to question whether these sensory organs are faithful or accurate in reporting the properties of the external world and to what degree they might be.
But how would you achieve this? For the empiricists, this is nigh impossible; there is no non-sensory faculty by which we could verify such sensory knowledge. There are no means to peer outside the box in which we are confined, and to do otherwise is to speculate without evidential reason. The buck stops there. There is hence a potential divide between the phenomenal reality as it might be empirically known by our senses and the noumenal reality as it might be known in-of-itself or possible by non-human beings—to retroactively use Kantian jargon.
In other words, as the English philosopher, John Locke, argues in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1695), we can only know the nominal essence, and not the real essence, of things in virtue of the way they hold “the power to produce in us the ideas”, and to which we give these nominal ideas distinct names. Locke believes that humans are born as a blank slate or tabula rasa—a slate which we fill in with empirical or lived-in knowledge, but this knowledge or experience can be further broken down into an experience of qualities.
It should be noted that the three major empiricists of the Enlightenment, John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume are foremost epistemologists; if Descartes is a metaphysician, who believes that knowledge of the real essence of things is not only possible, but graspable within the human cognition, then these three philosophers are not.
Following the Anglo-Irish philosopher, Robert Boyle’s, notion of probabilistic knowledge out of his Corpuscularianism, we can only speak of probabilism and therefore probable reasoning, when we speak of nominal essence and so on—everything else, real essences included, are to be binned to degrees of speculation.
“Whatsoever the mind perceives IN ITSELF, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call IDEA; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call QUALITY of the subject wherein that power is.”
In particular, for Locke, a name is nothing more than an assemblage of primary and secondary qualities, by which we aggregate them together to form the unique idea of a name or a thing in the world. By primary qualities, we refer to qualities of an object which are independent of our senses, insofar as they resembles our ideas of them, such as shape and motion, but by which its secondary qualities do not resemble the first and can only be inferred via their power to invoke ideas of them in us through our senses.
As Locke wrote on primary qualities in 1695, “Take a grain of wheat, divide it into two parts; each part has still solidity, extension, figure, and mobility: divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible; they must retain still each of them all those qualities. For division (which is all that a mill, or pestle, or any other body, does upon another, in reducing it to insensible parts) can never take away either solidity, extension, figure, or mobility from any body.”
But in the case of secondary qualities, and thus sensible qualities, “Let us consider the red and white colours in porphyry. Hinder light from striking on it, and its colours vanish; it no longer produces any such ideas in us: upon the return of light it produces these appearances on us again. Can any one think any real alterations are made in the porphyry by the presence or absence of light; and that those ideas of whiteness and redness are really in porphyry in the light, when it is plain it has no colour in the dark? It has, indeed, such a configuration of particles, both night and day, as are apt, by the rays of light rebounding from some parts of that hard stone, to produce in us the idea of redness, and from others the idea of whiteness; but whiteness or redness are not in it at any time, but such a texture that hath the power to produce such a sensation in us.”
A porphyry is a type of rock. The rock might have primary qualities of form, motion and solidity, but the qualities of colour, smell and taste are secondary qualities to be derived from the rock via our senses. Secondary qualities do not resemble the first. The primary qualities are independent; the secondary or sensible qualities are subjective. Locke distinguishes the former as belonging to things-in-themselves, and the latter as being mere derivations of primary qualities and thus distinct. In this way, the process of knowing secondary qualities is conducted through the powers of the first to induce sensory information in us.
“For the clearer understanding of this, you must know sensible qualities are by philosophers divided into PRIMARY and SECONDARY. The former are Extension, Figure, Solidity, Gravity, Motion, and Rest; and these they hold exist really in bodies. The latter are those above enumerated; or, briefly, ALL SENSIBLE QUALITIES BESIDE THE PRIMARY; which they assert are only so many sensations or ideas existing nowhere but in the mind.”
This distinction of primary and secondary qualities is an important development in the history of epistemology, and which George Berkeley and David Hume, and later the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, critiqued as a standard subject in empirical approaches to epistemology.
For the Irish philosopher, George Berkeley, secondary qualities are also mind-dependent. As his character, Hylas, explains in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), “The latter are those above enumerated; or, briefly, all sensible qualities beside the primary; which they assert are only so many sensations or ideas existing nowhere but in the mind.” Hence, for Hylas, secondary qualities are internal thinking substances, made possible through the senses and thus the mind.
But for Philonous, the other character in Berkeley’s dialogue, this is to first assume that “extension and figures are inherent in external unthinking substances”, but also that “the same arguments which are brought against Secondary Qualities will hold good against these” too. To make sense of this, refer back to Locke’s example of the porphyry and its colours under various shades of light. For Locke, the secondary quality of colour is dependent upon external factors, such as the presence of light, to obtain a sense of colour which is subjective to the mind. The porphyry in of itself can have many colours visible to the senses, such as if it were in the dark or in the light. Hence, the sense of colour is a secondary and thus requires the mind to draw a subjective insight of the object instead of a quality in-of-itself.
But what if we were to reverse the Lockean subjective critique of mind-dependent secondary qualities now onto primary ones? According to Berkeley’s Philonous, we would conclude that the primary qualities are now mind-dependent as well. For Hylas, “no real inherent property of any object can be changed without some change in the thing itself”. This is to say, that primary qualities are unable to be changed without the object itself being different from the object it already is. This is the only way a primary quality might change.
But Philonous offers this rebuttal: “as we approach to or recede from an object, the visible extension varies, being at one distance ten or a hundred times greater than another. Doth it not therefore follow from hence likewise that it is not really inherent in the object?” Consider an example of a mountain. The mountain has extension; that is, it takes up space. In fact, one can argue that it takes up a lot of space. According to Hylas, this quality of extension, or the taking up of space, should be external outside of the mind. Even if the mountain were to be cleaved into two pieces, the quality of extension would hold, albeit for two now separated pieces of mountain.
To Philonous, this is incorrect, because if one were to stand at great distance away from the mountain, the mountain and its perceived extension would shrink. If extension would shrink, depending on the distance by which we observe it, then extension is not external of the mind. We must then conclude, by this example, that at least the quality of extension is mind-dependent and thus subjective in contradiction with Locke.
We can now approach Berkeley’s immaterialism, or that to be is to be perceived—esse est percipi. As Hylas concludes near the end of the dialogues, “I freely own there is no other substance, in a strict sense, than spirit. But I have been so long accustomed to the term matter that I know not how to part with it: to say, there is no matter in the world, is still shocking to me. Whereas to say—there is no matter, if by that term be meant an unthinking substance existing without the mind; but if by matter is meant some sensible thing, whose existence consists in being perceived, then there is matter: this distinction gives it quite another turn; and men will come into your notions with small difficulty, when they are proposed in that manner.”
To Berkeley, the difference between their immaterialism and a more general materialism is this: “The question between the Materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds.” Where a Materialist might consider everything as a physical monism, and thus that everything is one physical substance, Berkeley would rather consider everything to be a mental monism, or to be a mind-dependent dualism of spirit/minds and ideas.
“Bereave matter of all its intelligible qualities, both primary and secondary, you in a manner annihilate it, and leave only a certain unknown, inexplicable something, as the cause of our perceptions; a notion so imperfect, that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it.”
But if Berkeley does away with Lockean primary and secondary qualities, while maintaining the existence of the mind, the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, does away with them all. As Hume argues in Section XII of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), “It is universally allowed by modern enquirers, that all the sensible qualities of objects, such as hard, soft, hot, cold, white, black, & etc. are merely secondary, and exist not in the objects themselves, but are perceptions of the mind, without any external archetype or model, which they represent. If this be allowed, with regard to secondary qualities, it must also follow, with regard to the supposed primary qualities of extension and solidity; nor can the latter be any more entitled to that denomination than the former. The idea of extension is entirely acquired from the senses of sight and feeling; and if all the qualities, perceived by the senses, be in the mind, not in the object, the same conclusion must reach the idea of extension, which is wholly dependent on the sensible ideas or the ideas of secondary qualities. Nothing can save us from this conclusion, but the asserting, that the ideas of those primary qualities are attained by Abstraction, an opinion, which, if we examine it accurately, we shall find to be unintelligible, and even absurd. An extension, that is neither tangible nor visible, cannot possibly be conceived: and a tangible or visible extension, which is neither hard nor soft, black nor white, is equally beyond the reach of human conception. Let any man try to conceive a triangle in general, which is neither Isosceles nor Scalenum, nor has any particular length or proportion of sides; and he will soon perceive the absurdity of all the scholastic notions with regard to abstraction and general ideas.”
What Hume means here is that secondary qualities, and thus qualities made known by our sense experience, are the only qualities that matter, so to speak, because both arguments for the existence of primary qualities and the mind are either nonsensical or based on observations from the secondary qualities of objects in the world. For primary qualities such as extension, or the occupying of space, they are inescapably mediated by our senses to us, and thus our senses perceive the primary qualities of extension through the secondary and thus sensible qualities of colour and so on. In other words, to perceive primary qualities is to perceive them via secondary qualities, because that which is not apprehensible by the senses cannot be conceived at all by the human mind. Or, in other words, we are unable to perceive the thing-in-of-itself; thus, we depend on secondary qualities to make impossible inferences on things we cannot ever perceive.
Indeed, for Hume, as he declares in Section IV of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), “I assert, that instead of explaining the operations of external objects by its means, we utterly annihilate all these objects, and reduce ourselves to the opinions of the most extravagant scepticism concerning them. If colours, sounds, tastes, and smells be merely perceptions, nothing we can conceive is possessed of a real, continued, and independent existence; not even motion, extension and solidity, which are the primary qualities chiefly insisted on.”
“All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.”
In Section IV of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume describes an epistemological distinction of objects, known retroactively as Hume’s Fork, which has become influential in philosophical history, such that Kant, the transcendental idealist, was motivated to produce his Critique Of Pure Reason (1781) as a response, as he retroactively explained in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science (1983), as translated by Gary Hatfield, because of its importance in the history of epistemology and metaphysics: “Since the Essays of Locke and Leibniz, or rather since the rise of metaphysics as far as the history of it reaches, no event has occurred that could have been more decisive with respect to the fate of this science than the attack made upon it by David Hume. […] Hume started mainly from a single but important concept in metaphysics, namely, that of the connection of cause and effect (and also its derivative concepts, of force and action, etc.), and called upon reason, which pretends to have generated this concept in her womb, to give him an account of by what right she thinks: that something could be so constituted that, if it is posited, something else necessarily must thereby also be posited; for that is what the concept of cause says. He indisputably proved that it is wholly impossible for reason to think such a connection a priori and from concepts, because this connection contains necessity; and it is simply not to be seen how it could be, that because something is, something else necessarily must also be, and therefore how the concept of such a connection could be introduced a priori. From this he concluded that reason completely and fully deceives herself with this concept, falsely taking it for her own child, when it is really nothing but a bastard of the imagination, which, impregnated by experience, and having brought certain representations under the law of association, passes off the resulting subjective necessity (i.e., habit) for an objective necessity (from insight). From which he concluded that reason has no power at all to think such connections, not even merely in general, because its concepts would then be bare fictions, and all of its cognitions allegedly established a priori would be nothing but falsely marked ordinary experiences; which is so much as to say that there is no metaphysics at all, and cannot be any. […] The question was not, whether the concept of cause is right, useful, and, with respect to all cognition of nature, indispensable, for this Hume had never put in doubt; it was rather whether it is thought through reason a priori, and in this way has an inner truth independent of all experience, and hence also a much more widely extended use that is not limited merely to objects of experience: regarding this Hume awaited enlightenment. […] I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy. […] If we begin from a well-grounded though undeveloped thought that another bequeaths us, then we can well hope, by continued reflection, to take it further than could the sagacious man whom one has to thank for the first spark of this light”
The famous fork, as Hume explains, is a separation of objects of knowledge into relations-of-ideas and matters-of-fact; in other words, “Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic; and in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the square of the two sides, is a proposition which expresses a relation between these figures. That three times five is equal to the half of thirty, expresses a relation between these numbers. Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their certainty and evidence. Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the mind.”
In contemporary jargon, we would say that Hume’s relations-of-ideas refers to analytic, a priori and necessary propositions, while his matters-of-fact refers to synthetic, a posteriori and contingent propositions. At the core of the fork is Hume’s problem of induction, which posits that the notion of cause-and-effect is predicated on relations-of-ideas that does not inherently follow into insight of matters-of-fact.
As he writes in Section IV, “All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses. If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country, or in France; he would give you a reason; and this reason would be some other fact; as a letter received from him, or the knowledge of his former resolutions and promises. A man finding a watch or any other machine in a desert island, would conclude that there had once been men in that island. All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. And here it is constantly supposed that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious. The hearing of an articulate voice and rational discourse in the dark assures us of the presence of some person: Why? because these are the effects of the human make and fabric, and closely connected with it. If we anatomize all the other reasonings of this nature, we shall find that they are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that this relation is either near or remote, direct or collateral. […] I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other. Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects. Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact. This proposition, that causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experience, will readily be admitted with regard to such objects, as we remember to have once been altogether unknown to us; since we must be conscious of the utter inability, which we then lay under, of foretelling what would arise from them.”
Hence, Hume argues that there is nothing—inherently in of itself—within matters-of-fact of the past that would justify the continuation of that matters-of-fact into the future, such that the notion of cause-and-effect is merely nominal within the inductive processes of the mind which, although justifiably out of habit and custom make certain assumptions about how the world works, are nevertheless justifiable only within those relations-of-ideas, and remain impenetrable to matters-of-fact as they occur outside of them.
As he elaborates in his well-known thought experiment of two billiard balls, “We are apt to imagine that we could discover these effects by the mere operation of our reason, without experience. We fancy, that were we brought on a sudden into this world, we could at first have inferred that one Billiard-ball would communicate motion to another upon impulse; and that we needed not to have waited for the event, in order to pronounce with certainty concerning it. Such is the influence of custom, that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree. […] It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second Billiard-ball is a quite distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. A stone or piece of metal raised into the air, and left without any support, immediately falls: but to consider the matter a priori, is there anything we discover in this situation which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion, in the stone or metal? […] When I see, for instance, a Billiard-ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse; may I not conceive, that a hundred different events might as well follow from that cause? May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable than the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to show us any foundation for this preference. In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary; since there are always many other effects, which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience. […] When we reason a priori, and consider merely any object or cause, as it appears to the mind, independent of all observation, it never could suggest to us the notion of any distinct object, such as its effect; much less, show us the inseparable and inviolable connexion between them. A man must be very sagacious who could discover by reasoning that crystal is the effect of heat, and ice of cold, without being previously acquainted with the operation of these qualities.”
In this way, Hume represents the endpoint of a certain strand of philosophical development, which begins with the scepticism of the French philosopher, René Descartes, and which ends with himself as one of the most sceptical thinkers in history. The problem of induction was rejected by Kant on the basis of his argument for synthetic a priori propositions, such as 7 + 5 = 12, wherein the idea of 12 is not contained within the ideas of 7 or 5 respectively, and nevertheless, we are able to synthetically know a priori that 7 + 5 = 12, as well as his argument for a transcendental idealism, wherein our internal relations-of-ideas and external matters-of-fact must necessarily work together to produce a representative sense of phenomena within us, which hints to the possibility of cause-and-effect, although this will be elaborated on with Part Three as a conclusion to this series on 18th Century Epistemology.
“Common sense convinces every man that a lively dream is no nearer to a reality than a faint one; and that, if a man should dream that he had all the wealth of Croesus, it would not put one farthing in his pocket.”
To conclude this selective history, we must consider the criticisms of Hume’s contemporary and earliest critic, the other Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, who represented the school of common-sense realism in the sphere of 18th Century epistemology.
For Reid, his criticisms are lobbed against Hume’s warping of “the common language into a conformity with his principles”, as he wrote in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785). However, he later extends his general criticisms to the rest of the Enlightenment philosophers as well, as he continues, “The last effect I observe of the difficulty of inquiries into the powers of the mind is, that there is no other part of human knowledge in which ingenious authors have been so apt to run into strange paradoxes, and even into gross absurdities. When we find philosophers maintaining that there is no heat in the fire nor colour in the rainbow; when we find the gravest philosophers, from Descartes down to Bishop Berkeley, mustering up arguments to prove the existence of a material world, and unable to find any that will bear examination; when we find Bishop Berkeley and Mr. Hume, the acutest metaphysicians of the age, maintaining that there is no such thing as matter in the universe—that sun, moon, and stars, the earth which we inhabit, our own bodies, and those of our friends, are only ideas in our minds, and have no existence but in thought; when we find the last maintaining that there is neither body nor mind—nothing in nature but ideas and impressions, without any substance on which they are impressed—that there is no certainty, nor indeed probability, even in mathematical axioms: I say, when we consider such extravagances of many of the most acute writers on this subject, we may be apt to think the whole to be only a dream of fanciful men who have entangled themselves in cobwebs spun out of their own brain. But we ought to consider that the more closely and ingeniously men reason from false principles, the more absurdities they will be led into; and when such absurdities help to bring to light the false principles from which they are drawn, they may be the more easily forgiven.”
If the scepticism of Hume saw a world in which everything is mediated through the senses, and the rationalism of Descartes saw one mediated through the mind, then the common-sense or direct realism of Reid saw an immediate world, wherein what you saw is all there is—there is no gap between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds.
As he explained while criticising Berkeley’s idealism in An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), “We shall therefore allow, that if visible objects were not external, but existed only in the mind, they could have no figure, or position, or extension; and! that it would be absurd to affirm, that they are seen either erect or inverted; or that there is any resemblance between them and the objects of touch. But when we propose the question, Why objects are seen erect and not inverted? we take it for granted, that we are not in Bishop Berkeley's ideal world, but in that world which men, who yield to the dictates of common sense, believe themselves to inhabit. We take it for granted, that the objects both of sight and touch, are external, and have a certain figure, and a certain position with regard to one another, and with regard to our bodies, whether we perceive it or not. When I hold my walking-cane upright in my hand, and look at it, I take it for granted that I see and handle the same individual object. When I say that I feel it erect, my meaning is, that I feel the head directed from the horizon, and the point directed towards it: and when I say that I see it erect, I mean that I see it with the head directed from the horizon, and the point towards it. I conceive the horizon as a fixed object both of sight and touch, with relation to which, objects are said to be high or low, erect or inverted : and when the question is asked, WhyI see the object erect, and not inverted? it is the same as if you should ask, Why I see it in that position which it really hath? or, Why the eye shows the real position of objects, and doth not show them in an inverted position, as they are seen by a common astronomical telescope, or as their pictures are seen upon the retina of an eye when it is dissected.”
Between human beings is a common basis of understanding, and so we must possess common sense; otherwise, we would not understand one another. As he defines in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), “Not to go back to ancient philosophy upon this point, modern philosophers consider sense as a power that has nothing to do with judgment. Sense they consider as the power by which we receive certain ideas or impressions from objects, and judgment as the power by which we compare those ideas and perceive their necessary agreements and disagreements. […] But all these senses, whether external or internal, have been represented by philosophers as the means of furnishing our minds with ideas, without including any kind of judgment. […] On the contrary, in common language sense always implies judgment. A man of sense is a man of judgment. Good sense is good judgment. Nonsense is what is evidently contrary to right judgment. Common sense is that degree of judgment which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business. Seeing and hearing by philosophers are called senses, because we have ideas by them; by the vulgar they are called senses, because we judge by them. We judge of colours by the eye; of sounds by the ear; of beauty and deformity by taste; of right and wrong in conduct, by our moral sense or conscience. […] There is a certain degree of it which is necessary to our being subjects of law and government, capable of managing our own affairs, and answerable for our conduct towards others: this is called common sense, because it is common to all men with whom we can transact business or call to account for their conduct. The same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, and which he distinctly apprehends. All knowledge and all science must be built upon principles that are self-evident, and of such principles every man who has common sense is a competent judge when he conceives them distinctly. Hence it is that disputes very often terminate in an appeal to common sense.”
From Cicero to Hume himself—Reid even quotes the latter twice as proof—the return to common sense is mentioned as a return to the natural senses, and away from illusion, and thus closer to the base nature of the self and thus truth than other systems of erroneous thought and overthinking. Even the most ardent sceptic must admit that practically-speaking, we must trust our senses to reliably navigate us through the world; as Reid reminds us, “This, indeed, has always been the fate of the few that have professed scepticism, that, when they have done what they can to discredit their senses, they find themselves, after all, under a necessity of trusting to them. Mr. Hume has been so candid as to acknowledge this; and it is no less true of those who have not shown the same candour; for I never heard that any sceptic run his head against a post, or stepped into a kennel, because he did not believe his eyes.”
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
An utterly fantastic read!! This line struck me the most from Hume:
“Such is the influence of custom, that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree.”
Amazing series 🔥🔥