OF THE SOUL. 



241 



practical or ethical problem was in his later writings put 

 into the foreground. For our present purpose it is suffi- 

 cient to note that by far the most important psychological 

 question with which Kant dealt was the problem of the 

 unity of thought as it appears in the exact knowledge 

 which we possess in the sciences. There being on one 

 side the casual mass of unordered sensations, on the 

 other an orderly arrangement of scientific knowledge, 

 the question arose, How must the human mind be 

 equipped so as to be able to make order out of disorder, 

 to import unity into the multiplicity and variety of the 

 material given by our senses ? l We may note that pure 



1 In defining the problem in this 

 way, we see at once that Kant ad- 

 hered to the thesis developed in 

 the writings of Locke, Berkeley, and 

 Hume : that knowledge and science 

 is an attempt to bring unity and 

 order into the contingent and 

 chaotic material supplied by our 

 sense-impressions, termed by them 

 ideas. In opposition to this view, 

 which he termed the ideal system, 

 Reid showed a deeper psychological 

 insight when he searched for the 

 unity and order in what was given 

 to the observing and thinking mind, 

 when he distinguished between sen- 

 sation and perception. According 

 to his view, single sensations or 

 ideas were not the original given 

 components, but these consisted of 

 perceptions, i.e., of single elements 

 already joined together. He thus 

 may be considered as the first psy- 

 chologist who maintained that the 

 thinking process in the adult intel- 

 ligent person is not the putting 

 together of loose material, but that 

 the beginning of this synthesis is 

 afforded already in our perceptions. 

 The single sensation is itself a 

 mental abstraction, and as such 

 never given in experience alone. 



VOL. III. 



Reid in this way goes behind the 

 words and terms of language. To 

 him, relations or judgments are the 

 material with which we work, not 

 the separate and single sensations 

 into which we, by a process of ab- 

 straction, may scientifically and 

 artificially divide them. Whereas 

 for Kant, the synthesis of the given 

 loose material seemed to be the main 

 function of the thinking mind, this 

 synthesis existed already for Reid 

 in the simplest original data of per- 

 ception or experience. In this 

 respect Reid stood nearer to modern 

 views and theories in psychology 

 than did Kant. But wherein he 

 failed was in his enumeration of the 

 original complex data of conscious- 

 ness and in the precise definition of 

 the subsequent processes of thought 

 which are partly analytical, i.e., 

 dissecting, partly synthetical, i.e., 

 leading on to higher or more com- 

 prehensive unities of thought. For 

 an English reader, the best exposi- 

 tion of the permanently valuable 

 contributions of the Scottish school 

 to the psychology of the intellectual 

 process is to be found in Prof. A. 

 Seth's ' Balfour Lectures on Scot- 

 tish Philosophy,' notably Lectures 



Q 



