The Scottish Philosophy [129]
by much sound sense and fitted to be eminently useful to those entering on the study of the human mind. He closes Essay 1. with a classification of the mental powers: (1) The powers we have by means of our external senses; (2) Memory; (3) Conception; (4) The power of resolving and analyzing complex objects, and compounding those that are simple; (5) judging; (6) Reasoning; (7) Taste; (8) Moral perception; and, last of all, consciousness. may offer a few remarks on each of these.
. After the full discussion in which we have been engaged in reviewing his " Inquiry," it is not needful to dwell on this subject. A large portion of Essay II. is occupied with a review of the " sentiments of philosophers about the perception of external objects," such as the Peripatetics, Malebranche, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Arnauld, and Leibnitz. His account of the opinions of these men is marked by great conscientiousness and candor: it is generally clear, often searching, always characterized by plain sense, at times superficial and mistaken. Hamilton has shown that Reid has fallen into gross blunders from not having mastered, as a whole, the higher speculative systems, such as those of Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibnitz. Hamilton's notes should always be read with Reid's exposition. These notes are as valuable for their logical acumen and erudition, as the text is for its independence and its homely sense.
. His analysis of this power, which will be found to contain such elements as retention, phantasy, association, and recognition, is not at all searching. But he is successful in showing that it is an original faculty, and he has a number of useful, though somewhat superficial, remarks upon its mode of operation. He describes memory as giving us an immediate knowledge of things past, which leads to a very severe criticism by Hamilton, who remarks that an immediate knowledge {216} of things past is a contradiction. But Reid does not use the word `immediate' in the same rigid sense as Hamilton: all that he means is that, in our recognition of the past, there is no reasoning or any other discursive process. Hamilton is right when he says that the immediate object before the mind is a phantasm or representation in the mind; but it is also true that in memory we go intuitively, beyond the representation in the mind, to the past occurrence which it represents. Reid says that "our notion of duration, as well as our belief in it, is got by the faculty of memory." Whereon Hamilton remarks that this is to make " time an empirical or generalized notion," and then tells us that time is a necessary notion, arising on the occasion of experience. But Reid's doctrine is the more correct of the two. In every act of memory we have the remembrance of an event in time past, and have thus the idea of time in the concrete, and get the idea of time in the abstract by separating the time from the event; and upon reflection we discover that there are necessary convictions involved in our belief in time. Reid's account of the idea of time, though not exhaustive, is thus correct so far as it goes. By not calling in a faculty of recognition, Hamilton has not been able to show how we get the idea of time, and has been obliged with Kant to make it some sort of form.
. Under this phrase he includes three things. They are either the conceptions of individual things, the creatures of God; or they are conceptions of the meaning of general words; or they are the creatures of our own imagination." He has sensible remarks as to each of these, but not a good nomenclature to indicate the distinctions. It is in this essay that he treats of the train of thought in the mind, which he does in a superficial manner, compared even with his predecessors Turnbull and Hutcheson.
. He does not distinguish so carefully as he should have done between the abstract and general notion. He has a glimpse of the distinction between the comprehension and extension of a general conception. " The species