504 



FALLACIES. 



of perception. Dr. Reid had to em- 

 ploy a world of argument and illus- 

 tration to familiarise people with the 

 truth that the sensations or impres- 

 sions on our minds need not neces- 

 sarily be copies of, or bear any re- 

 semblance to, the causes which pro- 

 duce them ; in opposition to the 

 natural prejudice which led people 

 to assimilate the action of bodies 

 upon our senses, and through them 

 upon oiir minds, to the transfer of 

 a given form from one object to an- 

 other by actual moulding. The works 

 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 wemay hold, with 

 Brown, that he went too far in im- 

 puting the "ideal theory," as an 

 actual tenet, to the generality of tlie 

 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 nuist resemble the 

 phenomenon is occasionally exagger- 

 ated, at least verbally, into a still 

 more palpable absurdity ; the condi- 

 tions of the thing are spoken of as if 

 they were the very thing itself. In 

 Bacon's model inquiry, which occu- 

 pies so great a space in the Novum 

 Organum, the inquisitio in fwmam 

 ^calidi, the conclusion which he fav- 

 ours is that heat is a kind of motion ; 

 meaning of course not the feeling of 

 heat, but the conditions of the feel- 

 ing ; meaning, therefore, only that 

 whenever 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 himself as if heat, and the 

 conditions of heat, were one and the 

 same thing. So the elder Darwin, in 

 the beginning of his Zoow^mut, says, 

 "The word idea has various mean- 

 ings in the writers of metaphysics : 



' no- ™1 



it is here used simply for those no 

 tions of external things which our 

 organs of sense bring us acquainted 

 with originally," (thus far the pro- 

 position, though vague, is unexcep- 

 tionable in meaning,) " and is defined 

 a contraction, a motion, or configura- 

 tion of the fibres which constitute 

 the immediate organ of sense." Our 

 notions a configuration of the fibres ! 

 What kind of logician must he be 

 who thinks that a phenomenon is de- 

 fined to he the condition on which he 

 supposes it to depend ? Accordingly 

 he says soon after, not that our ideas 

 are caused by, or consequent on, cer- 

 tain organic phenomena, but "our 

 ideas are animal motions of the organs 

 of sense." And this confusion runs 

 through the four volumes of the Zoono- 

 mia ; 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 considers it to pre- 

 suppose. 



I have given a variety of instances 

 in which the natural prejudice, that 

 causes and their effects must resemble 

 one another, has operated in practice 

 so as to give rise to serious errors. I 

 shall now go further, and produce 

 from writings even of the present or 

 very recent times, instances in which 

 this prejudice is laid down as an es- 

 tablished principle. M. Victor Cou- 

 sin, in the last of his celebrated lec- 

 tures on Locke, enunciates the maxim 

 in the following unqualified terms : 

 " Tout ce qui est vrai de I'effet, est 

 vrai de la cause." A doctrine to which, 

 unless in some peculiar and technical 

 meaning of the words cause and effect, 

 it is not to be imagined that any per- 

 son would literally adhere ; but he who 

 could so write must be far enough from 

 seeing that the very reverse might 

 be the effect ; that there is nothing 

 impossible in the supposition that no 

 one property which is true of the effect 

 might be true of the cause. Without 

 going quite so far in point of expres- 

 sion, Coleridge, in his Bioyraphia Lite- 



