382 FALLACIES. 



of Dr. Reid are even now the most effectual course of 

 study for detaching the mind from the prejudice of 

 which this was an example. And the value of the 

 service which he thus rendered to popular philosophy, 

 is not much diminished although we may hold, with 

 Brown, that he went too far in imputing the " ideal 

 theory" as an actual tenet, to the generality of the 

 philosophers who preceded him, and especially to 

 Locke and Hume : for if they did not themselves con- 

 sciously fall into the error, unquestionably they often 

 led their readers into it. 



The prejudice, that the conditions of a phenomenon 

 must resemble the phenomenon, is occasionally exag- 

 gerated, at least verbally, into a still more palpable 

 absurdity ; the conditions of the thing are spoken of as 

 if they were the very thing itself. In Bacon's model- 

 inquiry, which occupies so great a space in the Novum 

 Organum, the inquisitio informant calidi, the conclusion 

 which he favours is that heat is a kind of motion; 

 meaning of course not the feeling of heat, but the con- 

 ditions of the feeling ; meaning, therefore, only, that 

 wherever there is heat, there must first be a particular 

 kind of motion; but he makes no distinction in his 

 language between these two ideas, expressing him- 

 self as if heat, and the conditions of heat, were one 

 and the same thing. So Darwin, in the beginning 

 of his Zoonomia, says, " The word idea has various 

 meanings in the writers of metaphysic : it is here used 

 simply for those notions of external things which our 

 organs of sense bring us acquainted with originally" 

 (thus far the proposition, though vague, is unexcep- 

 tionable in meaning,) <c and is defined a contraction, a 

 motion, or configuration, of the fibres which constitute 

 the immediate organ of sense." Our notions, a con- 

 figuration of the fibres ! What kind of philosopher 



