Essays On The Intellectual Powers Of Man Pdf

[Minette Mccandrew]

KnudHaakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History and Director of the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, University of Sussex, and the General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid.

More than twenty years separate An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense and the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, but Thomas Reid had already foreshadowed the latter in his early work. Although he had analysed only the five senses and the associated principles of the human mind, he would, he said: leave the further prosecution of this inquiry to future deliberation. The powers of memory, of imagination, of taste, of reasoning, of moral perception, the will, the passions, the affections, and all the active powers of the soul, present a vast and boundless field of philosophical disquisition, which the author of this inquiry is far from thinking himself able to survey with accuracy.

Perhaps it was this typically modest assessment of his own powers which led Reid to abandon what appears to have been a plan of making the Inquiry a work in two books in which the second book should begin with a chapter on memory coming `next to the external Senses'. However this may be, it is clear that a great deal of the ideas which eventually were to be presented in the Intellectual Powers have solid roots already in his work at Aberdeen in the 1750s and early 1760s and, in some cases, earlier. As time wore on, he did come to think himself able to present a survey of sufficient accuracy and this proved to be one covering, to varying degrees, the topics he had listed earlier.

In the years which intervened between the two works, Reid was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and it was his lectures there which, together with his contributions to the Glasgow Literary Society, provided him with the opportunity to plough the `vast and boundless field of philosophical disquisition' in the detail which he demanded. The result was that when he retired from active teaching in 1780, he could, as he points out in the Dedication to the present work, draw `the substance of these Essays' from his lectures. Reid gave two courses at Glasgow; one was the `public class', a general course in moral philosophy understood in the wide sense as distinguished from natural philosophy; the other, `private class' was a more specialised course in the philosophy of mind. The former course was divided into three sections, pneuma- tology, ethics and politics, of which the first was by far the most comprehensive. In the other course, Reid developed the implications of his theory of the mind, lecturing on `the culture of the mind', the relationship between mind and body, and on the fine arts, rhetoric and logic.

Reid stopped teaching when he was seventy, apparently because he was losing his hearing and because he wanted to write up a full and systematic account of his philosophy. It seems that he set about the latter with expedition. In a letter to his close friend, Lord Kames, in 1781 he responded to an inquiry of Kames's about his `magnum opus' and some time during the following couple of years Reid began to forward instalments of the work to Edinburgh where his two main protges, James Gregory and Dugald Stewart, read and commented extensively upon it. Reid thanked both of them, as well as the recently deceased Kames, in his characteristically generous Dedication to the Intellectual Powers. By June 1783 the writing instalments had reached 638 manuscript pages and we find Reid estimating that `what you [Gregory] have got before may be one-half or more of all I intend.' However, as we have seen, already at the time of the Inquiry, Reid intended a good deal more than what is in the Intellectual Powers, namely what he called the active powers. His plan was for one large work encompassing both intellectual and active powers, and only in the spring of 1784 is there evidence that he had decided to divide it into two volumes when he wrote to Gregory:

I send you now the remainder of what I propose to print with respect to the Intellectual Powers of the Mind. It may, perhaps, be a year before what relates to the Active Powers be ready, and, therefore, I think the former might be published by itself, as it is very uncertain whether I shall live to publish the latter.

In the same letter he states his choice of title for the first volume and settles for its division into eight essays. However, as late as December 1784, when Gregory and Stewart already were reading proofs of the Intellectual Powers, Reid was still fussing that the work might be too much for one volume and too little for two but that he might finish his work on the active powers so quickly that, `there may be two sizeable books in the whole'. As it turned out, the publisher John Bell brought out the Intellectual Powers in Edinburgh in the summer of 1785 while Reid continued his work on the rest of his scheme which appeared in 1788 as Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Reid received a fee of ;300 for the Intellectual Powers as well as a respectful, if limited, critical appreciation of the work. There seems to have been only three contemporary reviews, in the English Review, the Monthly Review, and the Critical Review.

However, the genuine philosophy of the human mind, is in so low a state, and has so many enemies, that, I apprehend those who would make any improvement in it must, for some time at least, build with one hand, and hold a weapon with the other. In other words, the historical context of philosophical theories is only of relevance as a weapon in the war of ideas. When the war has been won, the victor is the pure philosophical distillate of timeless truth. The pleasure of the irony is that one has to understand Reid in his historical context to see why he should have come to this ahistorical conclusion.

In the Inquiry, a methodologically pioneering work due to itsextensive and rigorous use of observational data to justify claimsabout perception, Reid examines each of the five senses and discussesthe ways in which we achieve knowledge of the world by employingthem. Intellectual Powers expands his system beyond theapprehension of the world through the senses to consideration ofmemory, imagination, knowledge, the nature of judgment, reasoning andtaste. The Active Powers examines a collection of topicsconcerning ethics, the nature of agency generally, and the distinctivefeatures of human agency.

An implication of Reid's application of his common sense method tofirst principles is that Reid is not concerned to answer questions ofjustification that appear pressing to contemporary epistemologists. Heis not, for instance, interested in providing a refutation ofskepticism about the external world by appeal to firstprinciples. Reid believes he can refute skeptical hypotheses--such asDescartes's hypothesis of an evil demon who makes us believe that theworld is the way we take it to be when it is really vastlydifferent--simply by showing that such a hypothesis is no more likelyto be true than the common-sensical belief that the world is much theway we perceive it to be. Since the belief in the external world is adictate of common sense, it is, Reid thinks, as justified as it needsto be when it is shown to be on the same footing as anyalternative. Justification, therefore, does not necessarily requireproviding positive reasons in favor of common-sensical beliefs; commonsense beliefs could be adequately justified simply by undermining theforce of the reasons in favor of alternatives to common sense. Infact, as we move through this entry, we will witness Reid's repeateddeployment of this strategy in the form of burden-of-proof argumentsagainst his major foil, the Way of Ideas. Common sense constrains,rather than dictates, acceptable philosophical positions.

Third, related, when one event produces another event, e.g. fertilizerenables better plant growth, Reid strongly resists describing thatinteraction as necessary (The Correspondence of ThomasReid 2006, 234, 243). One event may be constantly conjoined toanother event, but it is a mistake to believe that this forms anynecessity. Fourth, unlike nearly all other Early Modern philosopherstraditionally taught in the canon, Reid was an avowed experimentalist,made so by borrowing Newton's methods in Opticks, andconducted experiments to provide evidence for his claims about thenature of the mind, perception and agency. Reid was active in hiscommunity, bringing his penchant for knowledge through experimentationto meetings in Aberdeenshire in which experimental techniques infarming were debated. Fifth, Reid understands Newtonian physics tooffer partial confirmation to some beliefs about God and God'srelation to the world. Newtonian natural science's role in thisconnection is to provide evidence for belief that our solar system isorderly and well-governed. (See 8. Philosophy ofReligion below).

Stating central features of Reid's commitment to Newtonianism goes along way to understanding Reid's empiricism and science since Reidattributes most of his own views about these matters toNewton. Despite the fact that with a few notable exceptions Reidscholars have neglected issues in his philosophy of science, a few keycontroversies have emerged and merit brief mention. First, Reid wasembroiled in clashes with other thinkers and correspondents about thescope of Newton's Regulae Philosophandi. Interpretationsdiffered considerably, as did the translations and restatements of therules themselves. Given that after Bacon's work,Newton's Regulae formed the most important statement onmethod in natural philosophy to be found in the Early Modern period,Reid was quick to defend his interpretation of these rules againstalternate uses by Priestley and others.

Reid's is an act-based theory of conception, in contrast to the Way ofIdeas' object-based theory. Conceptions are ways of being aware ofobjects. To conceive of an object is to be aware of thatobject as the bearer of some particular property. So I canconceive that Brienne of Tarth is tall, or that Brienneof Tarth is female, or that Brienne of Tarth is a tallfemale. Being tall and being female are different properties, andtheir difference signals something important about Reidianconception. Being tall is a relational property since height is atrait that is assessed relative to some further thing or standard. Toforeshadow, this subtle feature of conception will become importantfor Reid in his discussion of vision, especially his discussion of therelational property of visible figure.

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