"DEAR SMITH,--To-day is the grand question decided by our judges, whether they will admit of any farther proof with regard to the Douglas affair, or whether they will rest contented with the proofs already produced. Their partiality is palpable and astonishing; yet few people think that they will dare to refuse inquiring into facts so remarkable and so strongly attested. They are at present sitting, but I hope to tell you the issue in a postscript. Our friend Johnstone[150:1] has wrote the most super-excellentest paper in the world, which he has promised to send to you this evening in franks. Please to deliver the enclosed to Colonel Barré. I am," &c.[150:2]
We have already found one distinguished fellow-countryman of Hume controversially attacking his works. But another and greater critic was soon to appear. Dr. Thomas Reid was preparing for the press his "Inquiry into the Human Mind," which he published in 1764. His was the greatest mind which set itself in opposition to Hume's system, in British literature; and he was great, because he examined the works of the sceptical philosopher, not in the temper of a wrangler or partisan, but in the honest spirit of an investigator, who is bound either to believe in the arguments he is examining, or to set against them a system which will satisfy his own mind, and the minds of other honest thinkers. Reid was born in 1710, and he was exactly a year older than Hume, for the birth-day of both was on the 26th of April.[151:1] The philosopher of common sense, thus brought the accumulated thought and learning of advanced years to bear on a series of works which the sceptic had commenced in early youth. There is something in Reid's method of laying down his principles, and explaining their application, that disinclines the reader to allow him the palm of original genius, and suggests the idea that he is a personification of the natural sagacity and useful industry of his countrymen. But this feeling arises more from his hatred of such apparent paradoxes as Hume loved, from his courting rather than avoiding what is familiar and intelligible, and from the titles he gave to his books, than from deficiency of true originality. Whether his merit lay in his genius or his industry, he raised a new fabric of philosophy out of part of those fragments to which the sceptic had reduced previous systems. The term "common sense," which he used to characterize his system, had been long employed in philosophy; and if _bon sens_ may be held its equivalent, it is to be found in the preliminary dissertation of a French translation of Hume's miscellaneous essays, published in the same year as Reid's Inquiry.[152:1] Here, and occasionally by Reid, it is used in its popular sense, expressing philosophical opinions derived from the general notions of mankind. In this sense it is an application of induction to mental operations. It views the opinions of men at large as so many experimental facts, which, as in the case of the physical operations of nature, may be subjected to the rules of induction. Hume himself held that mental phenomena are as regular, and as capable of having laws of nature applied to them, as physical phenomena. But even if he were right, there is a disturbing influence at force in the circumstance, that, as the operation of induction is itself a phenomenon of the same class with those professed to be subjected to its observation, the philosopher is apt to embody in his writings the intuitions, if they may be so termed, of his own mind, instead of giving such an accurate transcript of the results of external observation as the physical inquirer is generally enabled to present.