FALLACIES OF SIMPLE IN3PECTI0X. 473 



Reid had to employ a world of argument and illustration to faniiliarizo 

 pieoplo with tlio truth, that the soiiisations or impressions on our minds 

 need not neccssaiily be copies of, or have any reseuiblance to, the 

 causes wliich produce them; in opposition to the iiutural pn-judice 

 which led men to assimihite tiie action of bodies upon our senses, and 

 through them upon our minds, to the transfer of a given form from one 

 object to another by actual moulding. The works of Ur, Kei<l are 

 even now the most effectual course of s^udy for detaching the mind 

 fi-ora the. prejudice of which this was an example. And the value of 

 the service wliich he thus rendered to popular [)hilosophy, is not much 

 diminislnjd although we may hold, with Brown, that he went too for 

 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 consciously 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 exaggerated, at least verbally, into a 

 still more palpable absurdity ; the conditions of the thing are sj)oken 

 of as if they ivere the very thing itself. In Bacon's model-incjuiry, 

 which occupies so gi'eat a space in the Novum Organum, the hiquisitio 

 informam calidi, the conclusion which he favors is that heat is a kind 

 of motion; meaning of course not the feeling of heat, but the conditions 

 of the feeling ; meaning, therefore, only, that wherever there is heat, 

 there must first be a particular kind of motion ; but he makes no chs- 

 tinction in his language between these two ideas, expressing himself as 

 if heat, and the conditions of heat, were one and the same thing. So 

 Darwin, in the beginning of his 7.oonomia, says, " The word idea has 

 various meanings in the writers of metaphysics : 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 

 unexceptionable in meaning), " and is defined a contractiim, a motion, 

 or configuration, of the fibres which constitute the immediate organ of 

 sense." Om- notions, a configuration of the fibres ! What kind of 

 philosopher must he be who thinks that a phenomenon is defined to he 

 the condition on which he su])poses it to de{)end \ Accordingly he 

 says soon after, rtot that our idt;as are caused by, or consequent uj\on, 

 certain organic phenomena, but " our ideas are animal motions of the 

 organs of sense." And this confusion nms through the four volumes of 

 the Zoonomia ; the reader never knows whether the writer is speaking 

 of the effect, or of its supposed cause; of the idea, a state of mental 

 consciousness, or of the state of the nerves and brain, which he consid- 

 ers it to presuppose. 



I have given a variety of instances in which the natural ])rijudice, 

 that causes and their eff*ects must resemble one another, has ojn-rated 

 in practice so as to give rise to grievous errors. I shall now go further, 

 and produce from the WTitings, even of recent philosophers, instances 

 in which the prejudice itseli" is laid down as an established princijde. 

 M. Victor Cousin, in the last of his very remarkable lectures on Locke 

 (which as a resume of the objections of the opj)ositc school to that yreat 

 man's doctrines, is a work of eminent merit), enunciates this maxim in 

 the following unqualified terms : " Tout ce qui est vrai de reffl't est 

 vrai de la cause." A doctiine to which, unless m some peculiar and 

 technical meaning of the words cause and effect, it is not to bo ima- 

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