OF THE SOUL. 225 



Hume, started in the popvilar and elegant writings of 

 Shaftesbury, but received a more professional expression 

 in the writings of the Scottish university teachers.^ The 

 great problem with which they were concerned was to 

 define what is meant by common-sense, and to what 

 extent the appeal to common-sense is legitimate and 

 ultimate. So far as the subject is concerned with which 

 I am dealing at present, Thomas Reid, who occupies the 

 central position in this Scottish school, appeals to common- 

 sense against the scepticism of Hume, as immediately 

 revealing to us two facts : the existence of an external 

 world, and that of the soul. These two principles are 

 elements of our original nature as it came from the 

 hands of the Creator. Every sensation which I receive 

 brings with it the belief in an external object and of 

 myself, the experiencing subject. Reid, in fact, appealed 

 to what in more recent philosophical phraseology are 

 called the data of consciousness, and, in doing so, he 

 opened out and cultivated the great field of observation 

 of the phenomena of the inner world. He has been 

 blamed for multiplying too much the number of these 

 immediate data, but he and his followers have the merit 

 of taking due note of the breadth and fulness of the 

 human mind, of its active as well as its intellectual 

 powers, and of counteracting the one-sided intellectualism 

 and the exclusiveness of those who would find the solu- 



^ None of the principal repre- osophers in England, they developed 



sentatives of the English, as dis- ' their ideas in treatises dealing 



tinguished from the Scottish school ! usually with one or a few special 



of philosophy, beginning with Bacon i problems without any attempt 



and ending with John Stuart Mill [ towards completeness or systematic 



and Herbert Spencer, were univer- [ unity. The latter appears for the 



sity teachers. Like so many of the j first time, as has already been said, 



great naturalists and natural phil- ' in Herbert Spencer. 

 VOL. III. P 



