374 ON THE HYPOTHESIS 



phantasms of the Greek schools, the visions of Malebranche or Berkeley, the 

 mathematical points of Boscovich, the APPARITIONS or APPEARANCES of the 

 Common-Sense hypothesis, whether they be a name or a thing, any thing or 

 nothing, the writers themselves have given us no clew to determine, and per- 

 haps have hardly determined for themselves. 



We have thus travelled over a wide extent of ground, but have not yet quite 

 reached our journey's end. It still remains to us to examine the popular 

 hypothesis of the present day, put forth from the north, under the captivating 

 title of the System of Common Sense ; produced undoubtedly from the best mo- 

 tives, and offered as a universal and infallible specific for all the wounds and 

 weaknesses we may have incurred in our encounters with the preceding 

 combatants. 



The consideration of this shall form the subject of our ensuing lecture ; 

 and I shall afterward, by your permission, follow up the whole by submitting 

 a few general observations on the entire subject, and endeavour to collect for 

 your use, from the wide and tangled wilderness in which we have been beat- 

 ing, the few flowers and the little fruit that may be honestly worth the trouble 

 of preservation. 



LECTURE VI. 



ON THE HYPOTHESIS OF COMMON SENSE. 



IT must be obvious, I think, to every one who has attentively watched the 

 origin and progress of those extraordinary and chimerical opinions through 

 which we have lately been wading, and which have been dressed up by phi- 

 losophers of the rarest endowments and deepest learning, into a show of 

 systems and theories, that the grand cause of their absurdities is attributable 

 to the imperfect knowledge we possess respecting the nature and qualities of 

 matter, and the nature and qualities of those perceptions which material ob- 

 jects produce in the mind, through the medium of the external senses. 



These perceptions, however accounted for, and whatever they have been 

 supposed to consist in, have in most ancient, and in all modern, schools been 

 equally denominated ideas ; and hence ideas have sometimes implied modifi- 

 cations, so to speak, of pure intelligence, which was the opinion of Plato and 

 of Berkeley; of immaterial apparitions or phantasms, which was that of 

 Aristotle, and in a certain sense may perhaps be said to have been that of 

 Hume ; of real species or material images, which was that of Epicurus, of 

 Sir Kenelm Digby,* and many other schoolmen of the middle of the seven- 

 teenth century ; of mere notional resemblances, which was that of Des 

 Cartes ; and of whatever it was the ultimate intention of any of these scho- 

 lastic terms to signify, whether phantasm, notion, or species ; whatever is 

 the object of the understanding when a man thinks, or the mind can be em- 

 ployed about when thinking, which was that of Locke, and is the fair import 

 of the word in popular speech. 



It is possible, moreover, that this indiscriminate use of the same term to 

 express different apprehensions, and particularly in modern times, has contri- 

 buted to many of the errors which are peculiarly chargeable to the metaphy- 

 sical writers of modern times. But this opinion has been carried much farther 

 by Dr. Reid, \vho has persuaded himself that the word idea has been the rock 

 on which all the metaphysical systematizers, from the time of Aristotle to 

 his own era, have shipwrecked themselves ; and hence, having determined to 

 oppose the absurdities of his own countryman Mr. Hume, by the introduction 



*He was warmly opposed by Alexander Ross, of Hudibrastic memory, who was a stanch Aristotelian, 

 jnd' ""^ucotly, denied the materiality of ideas. See ROM'* argument in Professor Stewart's Essays, 



