OF THE SOUL. 229 



Eeid and others by appealing to common -sense. To 

 this school, which had to teach the youth of Scot- 

 land, common-sense included the universally admitted 

 conceptions of an enlightened form of Christian doctrine. 

 This had, in their country, received a very strong popular 

 confirmation by the evangelical movement which op- 

 posed free thought as much as extreme clericalism, and 

 which trusted to immediate evidences and inner light. 

 This immediate evidence or common-sense told man that 

 the world had a Creator, that he himself had a soul and 

 a spiritual destiny. Such a broad basis of common- 

 sense, such a fruitful field for social reform and popular 

 instruction, did not exist in France. Writers of the 

 most opposite schools have eloquently described the con- 

 dition of things there. Not only M. Taine but Victor 

 Cousin has described the reception which Locke's ideas 

 met with in France, where the logical and systematic 

 mind of Condillac reduced them to an extreme sensa- 

 tionalism which took no notice of all the surrounding 

 conditions and the background of Locke's philosophy. 



If we leave out this background and the evidence of 

 common-sense, if we abandon, as Hume did, the doctrine 

 of the substantial nature of the soul, the psychology 

 which remains reduces the inner life to a passive re- 

 ceptivity, the mind to a tabula rasa, to a blank page 

 which receives passively the impressions of the senses ; 

 and even the word reflection, which denotes the process 

 by which general ideas and knowledge are formed, does 

 not help us to understand the two great facts of the 

 inner world : its unity and its activity. Hume recog- 

 nised the difficulty, but he contented himself with 



