## 1. The Enlightenment Background



While the Scottish philosophers of the 18th century are
studied extensively, the philosophers who worked in Scotland's
universities during the 19th century are generally
neglected, and in many cases virtually unknown. Francis Hutcheson,
David Hume and Thomas Reid and are names familiar to almost all
philosophers; Sir William Hamilton, James Frederick Ferrier, Alexander
Bain, Edward Caird and Andrew Seth to very few. Yet it is in the 19th
century that something called "Scottish philosophy" came
to consciousness, and gained an honored place in the international
academy of its day. Across Europe and North America, and even in
Australasia, for most of the 19th century Scottish philosophy was held
in very high regard.It was only with the turn of the 20th century that
its star fell, and did so surprisingly rapidly. To understand this
decline in reputation, it is necessary to see 19th century
Scottish philosophy against the background of the century that
preceded it.



According to George Davie there is an



> 
> opposition...between...two contrasting positions that in
> their tension provided Scottish philosophy with its central problem:
> the Berkeleian system, according to which, in the interests of
> reconciling progress with traditional standards, we are to set aside
> the instincts of the farmer in favour of the sophistication of the
> philosopher and to think with the learned while we talk with the
> vulgar; and the Hutchesonian system, according to which, with the same
> aim of reconciling material advance with the intellectual principle,
> we are to respect the instincts of the farmer as against the
> sophistication of the philosopher and initiate a sort of dialogue
> between the vulgar and the learned, instead of talking down to the
> farmer from the standpoint of the philosopher. (Davie 1994,
> 41-2)
> 



Cast in these terms it is easy to place the two most famous
philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment on either side of the
divide. On the side of the first is Hume, whose skeptical conclusions
arise from the Berkeleyan presupposition asserted in the very first
sentence of his *Treatise of Human Nature*:



> 
> All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two
> distinct kinds, which I shall call *impressions* and
> *ideas*. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees
> of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind. (Hume
> 1739, 1)
> 



On the other side is Thomas Reid, for whom the errors of Hume result
from the boldness of his starting point.



> 
> It is genius, and not the want of it, that adulterates philosophy, and
> fills it with error and false theory. A creative imagination disdains
> the mean offices of digging for a foundation, of removing rubbish, and
> carrying materials: leaving these servile employments to the drudges
> in science, it plans a design, and raises a fabric. (Reid 1764, 15)
> 



The problem as Reid saw it was that a highly theoretical philosophy
was trying to run before it could walk, because in sharp contrast to
subjects that are "really sciences"--mechanics,
astronomy and optics are the examples he gives--



> 
> when we turn our attention inward and consider the phaenomena of human
> thoughts, opinions and perceptions, and endeavour to trace them to the
> general laws and first principles of our constitution, we are
> immediately involved in darkness and perplexity. And if common sense,
> or the principles of education, happen not to be stubborn, it is odds
> but we end in absolute skepticism. (Reid 1764, 16)
> 



It is well known that, on Reid's analysis, Hume's skepticism derives
in large part from his implicit subscription to the "way of
ideas", a conception of knowledge and experience that finds its
origins in Descartes, Malebranche and Locke, and its most dramatic
exposition in Berkeley who, though no skeptic, "proved by
unanswerable arguments what no man in his senses could believe"
(Reid 1997, 20). The antidote to such skepticism is common sense, but
not of the robust sort displayed by Dr. Johnson when he purported to
refute Berkeley by kicking a stone. "Common sense" can
mean two things, in fact: widespread popular conviction on the one
hand, or on the other, the basic principles at work in human reasoning
and belief formation. Widespread conviction can be false, of course,
which is why the method of the School of Common Sense was thought
suspect by many, described by Kant, for example, as a stratagem by
which "the stalest windbag can confidently take up with the
soundest thinker" (Kant 1783, 259]). But in Reid at any
rate, philosophical inquiry into the human mind is not a matter of
making popular opinion the test of truth, but of initiating a
"dialogue between the vulgar and the learned" (to repeat
Davie's happy phrase) in which proper weight is attached to actual
minds at work.



There is, then, this deep division within the philosophy of the
Scottish Enlightenment, yet it occurs within a context of striking
unanimity also. "Wise men now agree, or ought to agree in this,
that there is but one way to the knowledge of nature's works; the way
of observation and experiment" Reid writes (Reid 1764, 11),
thereby endorsing the express intention of Hume to "introduce
the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects" (the
subtitle of the *Treatise*). Both remarks reflect a commitment
to the project of a "science of mind", a project common to
all the major Scottish philosophers of the period. Thus George
Turnbull (Reid's teacher) writing in 1740 says "I was led long
ago to apply myself to the study of the human mind in the same way as
to that of the human body" (quoted in Davie 1994, 24)



In short, both division and unanimity are present within eighteenth
century Scottish philosophy, unanimity with respect to aim--a
science of mind--and division with respect to method--the
"principles of common sense" versus "the way of
ideas". This is a tension, however, within only one part of
18th century Scottish philosophy, namely the philosophy of
sensation and perception, and not perhaps the most influential part.
The Scottish Enlightenment is in many ways more marked by the type of
thinking about social and political topics that we find in Adam Smith
and Adam Ferguson, as well as Hume, who in this respect take their cue
from Hutcheson. The example *par excellence* is Smith's
*Theory of Moral Sentiments* (1759; 6th edition
1790), where the Humean ambition of countering the "books of
divinity and abstruse metaphysics" (*Treatise*) was
furthered by a sympathetic attention to how human beings in society
actually are, and what social forms and political arrangements will
best work to their happiness and well being.



In the 19th century, this strand of Enlightenment thinking
ceased to be an important part of the philosophical agenda. That
agenda was dominated, rather, by the "science of mind"
more narrowly conceived, that is to say logic (i.e., the philosophy of
truth and reason) and the philosophy of perception.


## 2. Thomas Brown (1778-1820)



From 1810 onwards, when Thomas Brown (1778-1820) took up the
Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, the story of Scottish
philosophy is that of repeated attempts to resolve the tension that
lay within that "science of mind". It is also a story of
remarkable institutional continuity. Brown was a student of Dugald
Stewart (1753-1828), who in turn was a student and friend of
Reid and, having taught briefly at Glasgow, held the Chair of Moral
Philosophy at Edinburgh. This continuity was sustained throughout most
of the succeeding century as the students of Scottish professors
themselves became Scottish professors, often moving between the four
ancient universities. This was especially notable in the case of the
Logic Chair in Edinburgh, where Hamilton was succeeded by Campbell
Fraser, Fraser by Andrew Seth, and Seth by Norman Kemp Smith, a
succession of professor/student stretching from 1836-1945.



Stewart was enormously highly thought of in his own day, and had a
European-wide reputation. At the time of his death he was described as
'the pride and ornament of Scotland', and a striking
monument to him was erected on Edinburgh's Calton Hill. Yet in
retrospect Stewart's thought continued the framework established by
the 8th century Scots, and arguably made no notably innovative
contribution to the central debate in Scottish philosophy. It was
Brown who took Scottish philosophy into a new phase.



Brown was a poet and physician as well as a philosopher, and a rather
more independent thinker than Stewart, so much so, in fact, that
Stewart regarded him as something of a traitor to the philosophy of
Reid. Perhaps because of his medical background, Brown was sympathetic
to Humean empiricism, and to a large extent endorsed both Hume's
rejection of metaphysics and his associationist psychology. Brown's
first book, published in 1798 at the early age of twenty, was a set of
*Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin*. His premature
death in 1820 meant that he published relatively little philosophy
during his life time, though his *Inquiry into the Relation of Cause
and Effect* revealed his sympathy for Hume. At the time of his
death he left behind voluminous lectures that were posthumously
published. In them he was critical of Reid, though on certain issues
he may be said to have sided with Reid against Hume. In his most
frequently quoted remark, however, which does not come from the
lectures, he famously sought to diminish the distance between the
two.



> 
> Reid bawled out that we must believe in an outward world; but added,
> in a whisper, we can give no reason for our belief. Hume cries out
> that we can give no reason for such a notion; and whispers, I own we
> cannot get rid of it. (Mackintosh, 1837, 346)
> 



Brown's lectures were immensely popular with students, and on
publication they were rapturously received and widely read, running
through a great many editions, both in Britain and America, for
several decades. Despite this popularity, after 1850 or so, they fell
into total neglect. This may have been because Brown's qualified
championship of Hume sat rather uncomfortably with the consensus among
Scottish philosophers for most of the nineteenth century. Consequently
the greatest contribution that his lectures made to philosophical
debate was second hand - namely the re-interpretation and defence of
Reid that they induced on the part of the most prominent philosopher
of the period--Sir William Hamilton.


## 3. Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856)



Sir William Hamilton was a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow and
Oxford. At Glasgow he studied logic and moral philosophy under George
Jardine and James Mylne. Though neither published anything of
significance, they both transmitted to a new generation the
philosophical legacy of Reid - though not uncritically. Mylne in
particular seems to have viewed Reid with detachment. In 1807 at
Balliol College Oxford Hamilton held the Snell Exhibition, a
scholarship that regularly allowed Scottish students of philosophy to
spend time at England's oldest university, and though he found the
intellectual life there uninspiring compared to Edinburgh, he gained
an extensive knowledge of Aristotelianism . From 1811-21 he
worked at the Scottish Bar (with limited success) until being
appointed Professor of Universal and Civil History at the University
of Edinburgh, where he transferred to the Chair of Logic and
Metaphysics in 1836, a post he held until his death in 1856.



At the height of his powers, Hamilton was regarded as a major
intellectual figure of international importance. In a memoir, Noah
Porter, President of Yale, records that in America Hamilton "was
regarded as the greatest writer and teacher among living Englishmen
[sic!]". Further evidence of this towering stature lies in the
fact that a volume on Hamilton was included in the series
*Philosophical Classics*, edited by William Knight, Professor
of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews. The inclusion ranked him alongside
Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, Kant and Hegel. Such an estimation must
now strike us as strange, yet there is point in asking why his times
regarded him in such a favorable light. The answer has several
sources. First there was his personal charisma and enormous
erudition--'possibly the most learned Scot that ever
lived' according to Alexander Campbell Fraser, his successor in
the Chair at Edinburgh. Secondly, (as Porter records) by the early
19th century, a measure of intellectual exhaustion had set in in
philosophical circles, and this provided a ready audience for his
vigorous style of writing. Thirdly, there was his almost unique
knowledge of German philosophy. Thanks to two trips he made to Germany
during his years as a lawyer, Hamilton acquired an extensive knowledge
of Kant and his immediate successors, little of which had been
translated into English but which Hamilton was able to read in the
original language. At the same time, he was not only thoroughly versed
in the Scottish tradition of philosophy that he had acquired from
Jardine and Mylne, but an enthusiastic exponent of Reid, whose
collected works he edited and annotated extensively. He was thus
perfectly placed to broaden the horizons of Scottish philosophy, to
push it beyond the narrower confines of Common Sense by bringing to
wider attention the importance of Kant, while doing so as one
profoundly sympathetic to the native tradition. It is precisely for
these reasons, in fact, that he is praised by John Veitch in the
*Philosophical Classics* volume devoted to his philosophy.



Hamilton's published relatively little during his lifetime, and though
two volumes of lectures appeared after his death, his philosophical
views can be adequately ascertained from three long essays that he
wrote for the *Edinburgh Review*--"The Philosophy of
the Unconditioned" (1829), "The Philosophy of
Perception" (1830) and "Logic" (1833), subsequently
republished in a collection of his papers. In the first of these
Hamilton recounts the course philosophy had taken in France after
"the philosophy of Descartes and Malebranche had sunk into
oblivion" (Hamilton 1853, 2). It began with the emergence of a
highly materialist version of Lockean empiricism "a doctrine so
melancholy in its consequences, and founded on principles thus partial
and exaggerated, [that it] could not be permanent" (ibid., 3).
Rescue came from two sources. The first of these was the Scottish
Philosophy of Common Sense which showed that there are mental
phenomena that cannot be interpreted as any form of sensation and that
"intelligence supposes principles, which, as *conditions*
of its activity, cannot be the *results* of its
operation" (ibid., 3 emphasis original). The other source of
renewal was German philosophy after Kant, and in particular the
Absolute Idealism that was "founded by Fichte, but evolved by
Schelling" (ibid., 6). "The Philosophy of the
Unconditioned" is ostensibly a review of Victor Cousin's Course
de Philosophie, which had been published in Paris the previously year
(1828), but the 'review' is chiefly important in its
providing an occasion for Hamilton to formulate his own solution to
the tension between the philosophy of common sense and the way of
ideas.



The question at issue can be expressed in a number of different ways.
Kant held that we can only have knowledge of phenomena, never of
noumena or things in themselves. Clearly this version of
phenomenalism, though in many ways the antithesis of empiricism, has
elements in common with the "way of ideas" to which Reid
objected, which holds that the mind apprehends the world indirectly,
through "impressions". The alternative position, referred
to in the 19th century as "presentationism" is
often called "direct realism" and holds, as Reid contends,
that we directly apprehend the world of real things. Both positions
have their difficulties. Those who followed Kant, notably Fichte and
Schelling, sought to escape the "scandal" of unknowable
things-in-themselves, and those who followed Reid sought to overcome
the contention implicit in his approach that our knowledge of the
world is "conditioned" by the principle of common sense.
Hence the pursuit of a philosophy of the
"unconditioned".



Hamilton argues that the age-old search for a philosophy of the
unconditioned is futile, and he contends that what is in effect a
combination of phenomenalism and presentationism will supply
everything that a properly grounded understanding of reality requires.
In "The Philosophy of Perception" he engages in the debate
by defending Reid against criticisms in Thomas Brown's posthumously
published *Lectures*, and in a very vigorous
manner--"It is always unlucky to stumble on the threshold.
The paragraph (Lect. xxvii) in which Dr Brown opens his attack on Reid
contains more mistakes than sentences" (ibid. 69). Brown claimed
that a close analysis of Reid's writings showed that his position on
perception was not really that of direct realism but
"hypothetical realism", that is the belief in an external
world that cannot be known directly. It is this contention that
Hamilton aims to refute, but it is arguable that he misinterprets
Brown. Moreover in his notes to Reid's *Collected Works*, which
were composed rather later, he appears to come round to something very
like Brown's interpretation and to hold that Reid was not, strictly
speaking, a direct realist after all.



If we construe Reid as holding that in the act of perception there are
three elements--the physiological modification of the organ, a
mental sensation and the perception of an object--then we can
contrast this with Hamilton's position which holds that the mental
sensation and the perception are simultaneous and in a sense two sides
of the same coin. Reid holds, of course, that we do not reason from
sensation to perception; the apprehending mind moves from one to the
other by a natural, inbuilt instinct--one of the principles of
common sense. Hamilton too holds that there is no reasoning process
here, but he also thinks that the continuing division that Reid is
employing between sensation and perception is incompatible with the
idea of immediate perception or direct realism. Hence his amendment,
which so to speak ties the sensation and perception together. But how
is this further contention to be sustained? Is it a conceptual truth
of some kind, or an empirical observation about how the mind works?
Hamilton's writings in general tend to assertion more than argument,
and while he has a great deal to say on this point, it does seem that
his "solution" to the problem of perception is an
arbitrary stipulation designed to overcome it. At any rate, if we do
press the question of its defence, we quickly encounter a new version
of the old division, namely whether the perception is to be identified
as a manifestation of self-evident principles of common sense, or as a
psychological association of ideas. In this sense Hamilton's thesis is
still set within the fundamental parameters of the Hume/Reid debate.




At the time of his death, Hamilton's philosophical endeavors were
widely regarded as offering the most profound treatment to date of
some of philosophy's deepest and most perennial problems. This
estimation did not persist for long. Two devastating attacks, from
strikingly different philosophical perspectives, appeared in print
within a decade. The best known of these was John Stuart Mill's
*Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy* (1865).
Mill's two volume work constituted a detailed and highly critical
examination of Hamilton's philosophical contentions (as well as his
excursions into logic) largely from the point of view of empiricism in
general, and empirical psychology in particular. In the same year, the
Scottish philosopher Hutchison Stirling, in *Sir William Hamilton:
Being the Philosophy of Perception an Analysis* published the
first (and ultimately only) part of an equally strenuous attack from
an Idealist point of view. Hamilton's defenders leapt into print,
notably the Oxford philosopher H L Mansel (whom Mill had also
attacked) and John Veitch, Hamilton's student and amanuensis. James
McCosh, then Professor of Logic at Belfast, also joined the fray with
*An Examination of Mr J S Mill's Philosophy* (1866), though
this was much more an attack on Mill than a defence of Hamilton.



Despite these vigorous voices, Hamilton's philosophical reputation
declined rapidly. In terms of the tradition of Scottish philosophy,
however, it was not Mill who mattered most, but Hamilton's student and
friend James Frederick Ferrier. It was Ferrier who strove most
obviously, in the name of Scottish philosophy, to take a different
tack from both Reid and Hamilton.


## 4. James Frederick Ferrier (1808-1864)



Though the expression "Scottish philosophy" came to be
ever more widely used in the second half of the 19th century, its
first appearance was in the title of a privately printed pamphlet by
J.F. Ferrier--*Scottish Philosophy, the Old and the New*
(1854). Ferrier chose this title because his pamphlet was expressly
written in defence of the contention that it is possible to engage in
something called "Scottish philosophy" while departing
radically from the tenets of Reid, Stewart and so on. Ferrier writes
with great force and feeling.



> 
> It has been asserted, that my philosophy is of Germanic origin and
> complexion. A broader fabrication than that never dropped from human
> lips or dribbled from the point of a pen. My philosophy is Scottish to
> the very core; it is national in every fibre and articulation of its
> frame. It is a natural growth of old Scotland's soil and has drunk in
> no nourishment from any other land. Are we to judge the productions of
> Scotland by merely looking to what Scotland has hitherto produced? May
> a philosopher not be, heart and soul, a Scotsman--may he not be a
> Scotsman in all his intellectual movements, even though he should have
> the misfortune to differ in certain respects, from Dr Reid and Sir
> William Hamilton (Ferrier 1854, 12)
> 



The explanation of the feeling with which Ferrier writes lies in the
fact his little book is a response to the charge levelled against him
in the contest for Hamilton's Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at
Edinburgh (then still in the gift of the Town Council), when he was
accused by the Free Church party of departing from "the Scottish
philosophy" in favour of some sort of Hegelianism. This charge
was almost certainly motivated by the ecclesiastical rivalries
generated by the Disruption in the Church of Scotland that took place
in 1843, but it is nonetheless true that Ferrier expressly denounces a
certain conception of "Common Sense" philosophy, and one
which he identifies closely with Reid. Indeed he is not afraid to
repeat his objections in his defence of himself.



> 
> Suppose we are discussing the subject of salt, and that we say
> "salt is white and gritty, it is in some degree moist, it is
> sometimes put into a salt cellar and placed on the dinner
> table..."...No man would be considered much of a
> chemist, who was merely acquainted with these and other such
> circumstances, concerning salt....So, in philosophy, no man can
> be called a philosopher who merely knows and says, that he and other
> people exist, that there is an external world, that a man is the same
> to day as he was yesterday, and so forth. These are undoubtedly
> truths, but I maintain that they are not truths in philosophy, any
> more than those just mentioned are truths in chemistry. Our old
> Scottish school, however, is of a different way of thinking. It
> represents these and similar facts as the first truths of philosophy,
> and to these it has recourse in handling the deeper questions of
> metaphysics. I have no objections to this, for those who like
> it--only my system deals with first truths of a very different
> order; and it denies that the first truths of the old Scottish school
> are truths in philosophy at all. This is one very fundamental point of
> difference between the old and the new Scottish system of metaphysics
> (ibid., 7)
> 



It is important to note that Ferrier thinks this castigation of one
version of "Common Sense" philosophy is quite compatible
with claiming the right to be the inheritor of, though not restricted
by, the programme of Reid and Hamilton. And there are indeed several
points of contact to be observed. The first is this. Ferrier shares
with Hamilton a largely unspoken assumption that the question of mind
and world lies at the heart of philosophy. This assumption signalled a
move away from the much broader conception of moral philosophy as both
psychological *and* social inquiry, which as we have already
noted, is characteristic of Ferguson, Hume, Adam Smith, and even Reid
in part. Second, and more importantly perhaps, Ferrier's own
philosophical reflections continue to fit Davie's description of
Scottish philosophy as a "dialogue between the vulgar and the
learned".



Ferrier's reputation rested upon an earlier series of essays on
*The Philosophy of Consciousness* which appeared in Blackwood's
Magazine between 1838 and 1843. In these essays he took his stand on
the contention that consciousness implies the impossibility of a
naturalistic science of mind, and in a later essay robustly defends a
version of Berkeleyan idealism. While Reid thought that Berkeley's
philosophical position was one that "no man in his senses could
believe", somewhat surprisingly perhaps, Ferrier describes
Berkeley as "the champion of common sense...who could have
foiled the prince of skeptics at his own weapons" (Ferrier 1865,
301). "Among all philosophers ancient or modern, we are
acquainted with none who presents fewer vulnerable points that Bishop
Berkeley. His language it is true, has sometimes the appearance of
paradox; but there is nothing paradoxical in his thoughts, and time
has proved the adamantine solidity of his principles."
(*ibid.* p. 291) By Ferrier's account, Berkeley settles the
issue of sensation and perception with which Hamilton struggled, by
seeing that there is a false abstraction here.



> 
> The external world *in itself*, and the external world in
> relation *to us*, was a philosophic distinction which he
> [Berkeley] refused to recognize. In his creed, the substantive and
> phenomenal were one. And though he has been accused of sacrificing the
> substance to the shadow, and though he still continues to be charged,
> by every philosophical writer, with reducing all things to ideas in
> the mind, he was guilty of no such absurdity...There does not
> appear to be much justice in the ordinary allegation, that Berkeley
> discredited the testimony of the senses, and denied the existence of
> the material universe. He merely denied the distinction between things
> and their appearances, and maintained that the thing *was* the
> appearance and the appearance *was* the thing. (ibid.,
> 302-3 emphasis original)
> 



On this interpretation Berkeley espouses a sort of idealism but



> 
> genuine idealism, looking only to the fact, and instructed by the
> unadulterated dictates of common sense, denies...that we can
> separate in thought objects and perceptions *at all*; hence
> this system has nothing whatever to do either with the preservation or
> the destruction of the material universe; and hence, too, it is
> identical...with genuine unperverted realism. (ibid., 309
> emphasis original)
> 



In this way Ferrier, despite his disagreements, actually concurs with
Reid's strictures on the kind of philosophical theorizing that tries
to deploy Newtonian methods in the way that Hume does. Indeed, Ferrier
thinks that "the inert and lifeless character of modern
philosophy is ultimately attributable to her having degenerated into a
physical science" (ibid., 191), and he condemns the resulting
"picture of man" as "a wretched association machine,
through which ideas pass linked only by laws over which the machine
has no control" (ibid., 196). His alternative to this
externalist conception of "the science of mind" is a
return to the introspective examination of human consciousness.
"Consciousness is philosophy nascent; philosophy is
consciousness in full bloom and blow. The difference between them is
only one of degree, and not one of kind; and thus all conscious men
are to a certain extent philosophers, although they may not know
it" (ibid., 197) In short, the proper engagement of philosophy
is a matter of bringing consciousness to a better understanding of
itself, which is at least one interpretation of the ambition of Reid's
*Inquiry*.



Ferrier's philosophy, then, can be construed as both importantly
different to Reid's, and at the same time another exploration in the
common sense tradition. For Reid, Berkeley is the principal architect
of "the way of ideas", and hence though not himself a
skeptic, the purveyor of a philosophy that makes radical skepticism
inevitable. In sharp contrast, for Ferrier, Berkeley's philosophy
(with some additions of Ferrier's own) is the *answer* to
skepticism. By rejecting the philosophers' invention of 'matter',
Berkely means to affirm common sense. It hardly needs to be said that
this construction of Berkeley was a highly controversial position.
Moreover, it throws the whole subject of mind and consciousness back
into the realms of metaphysical philosophy and hence seems to abandon
the shared methodological assumption that, to quote Reid again,
"there is but one way to the knowledge of nature's works; the
way of observation and experiment" a supposition he
wholeheartedly shared with Hume. This implication--that the
methods of the sciences are inapplicable to philosophy--somewhat
isolated Ferrier within Scottish philosophy. Though he was regarded
with great acclaim in continental Europe, Scottish philosophers moved
in different directions, some to an intensification of the
experimental method, and some to Absolute Idealism. Of the first
group, the most prominent and influential was Alexander Bain.


## 5. Alexander Bain (1818-1903)



Alexander Bain was Regius Professor of Logic at the University of
Aberdeen from 1860 to 1880. A man of remarkable gifts, he was
appointed to the Chair largely on the strength of distinguished
philosophical work he had published while working as a journalist in
London. It was there that he made the acquaintance of John Stuart Mill
with whom he formed a lasting friendship. *Dissertations on Leading
Philosophical Question*s (1903), is a collection of his essays
published in retirement, though almost all had originally appeared in
the journal *Mind*, a journal he was instrumental in founding,
In several of these essays, Bain takes Reid and Hamilton as his
starting point and, broadly, follows the same methods. But, his
sympathy with Mill and anti-metaphysical inclinations led him to push
them in a much more strongly empirical direction. The most interesting
of his *Dissertations*, in this connection, is entitled
"Associationist Controversies" and at the heart of these
controversies we can find a distinction between philosophy and
psychology that both reveals the significant difference between Bain
and Ferrier, and establishes the discipline of experimental psychology
in its own right.



> 
> We are, at the moment, in the midst of a conflict of views as to the
> priority of Metaphysics and Psychology. If indeed the two are closely
> identified as some suppose, there is no conflict; there is in fact,
> but one study. If, on the other hand, there are two subjects, each
> ought to be carried on apart for a certain length, before they can
> either confirm or weaken each other. I believe that in strictness, a
> disinterested Psychology should come first in order, and that, after
> going on a little way in amassing the facts, it should revise its
> fundamental assumptions...I do not see any mode of attaining a
> correct Metaphysics until Psychology has at least made some way upon a
> provisional Metaphysics (Bain 1903, 38)
> 



Bain can be interpreted as a practitioner of the "science of
mind" no less than Reid or Hume. But whereas in Reid and Hume
(and Ferrier) the distinction between philosophy and psychology as the
modern world understands it, was unclear, it is one of Bain's chief
claims to enduring significance that, as this quotation reveals, he
brought the distinction between psychological and metaphysical
questions to prominence, and in what would now be called his research
programme he gave priority to the former. The conclusion to be drawn
is that Bain, like Ferrier, can be seen to stand in the tradition of
Scottish philosophy in the sense that he adopted its methods. But in
contrast to Ferrier, he did so in ways that further removed the
question of sensation and perception from the realms of traditional
metaphysics, and pressed the study of the mind in the direction of
empirical psychology.



One notable feature of this development lies in the fact that Bain was
one of the principal exponents and defenders of
"associationism", whose origins, arguably, are to be found
most clearly in Hume's *Treatise*. Associationism is the
application of empirical observation to the relation between ideas and
experiences. What it seeks is observed regularities, in the hope of
formulating psychological laws that will enable us to order the
contents of mind. Two such principles--Contiguity and
Similarity--were widely accepted, and identified by Bain as being
employed by Reid and Hamilton. A third--Contrast--was more
disputable, and in "Associationist Controversies" Bain is
principally concerned with the nature and identifiable independence of
principles such as these.



However, in the present context his arguments are chiefly interesting
not so much for their elaboration of associationism, as for the light
they throw on the development of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth
century. One point in particular seems to me illuminating. In the
dispute between Reid and Hume with respect to the operations of the
mind one of the fundamental points of difference is this. Reid is
trying, in the main, to establish basic principles of the mind's
operation which will vindicate its rationality, and hence avoid the
depths of skepticism into which Hume's account forces it. Hume, on the
contrary, declares that "reason is nothing but a wonderful and
unintelligible instinct in our souls which carries us along a certain
train of ideas...[and that this] habit is nothing but one of the
principles of nature, and derives all its force from that
origin" (Hume 1888, 179), Reid's purpose is precisely to show
that the basic operations of the mind are more than psychological
regularities. They are exercises of intelligibility. Now in terms of
this difference, Bain is of Hume's persuasion. This is revealed not
merely in his striking deployment of decidedly Humean terminology
when, for instance, he contrasts the perception and the memory of a
thing in terms of "vividness" (Bain 1903, 42). It is even
more evident when he asserts that "The flow of representations
in dreaming and madness offers the best field of observation for the
study of associations as such" (ibid., 45).



What this remark reveals is that Bain is interested first in
establishing empirical laws with respect to the contents of the human
mind. The reason that he thinks dreaming and madness are the best
places to start is precisely because he sees that the pursuit of
rational principles, that is to say, philosophically coherent
principles, is likely to distort our observation by inclining us to
see rational connections rather than empirical associations, or as he
puts it "associations as such". In this respect he is
employing Hume's rather than Reid's conception of human nature.
Certainly he reserves judgement on the final outcome of these
investigations with respect to philosophy, arguing only for the
priority of psychology over metaphysics and not, as Hume may be said
to do, for the elimination of the second by the first. But so far as
the science of mind that had been such a marked feature of Scottish
philosophy goes, Bain clearsightedly pursues its more empirical
ambitions.



For Ferrier the empirical laws of association that Bain seeks are not
"truths in philosophy". No one can be called a philosopher
who merely knows and says, that in dreaming or madness this mental
representation tends to be associated with that. The philosopher
aspires, rather, to make sense of experience, and the whole point
about the experience of the dreamer or the madman is that no sense is
to be made of it. By contrast, the empirical psychologist, seriously
committed to the experimental method, does not, in the end, render
consciousness intelligible; he or she simply describes how the mind
works.



With Ferrier and Bain, then, the tension within Scottish philosophy
that Davie has identified is resolved in radically different ways, the
first by a return to metaphysics, the second by an advance to
psychology. Both can claim to be inheritors of the Scottish tradition,
and yet both, in quite different ways, may be said to have implied its
demise. With Bain, the nature of the demise is evident; the philosophy
of mind is replaced by empirical psychology. With Ferrier, the nature
of the demise is rather different. Faced with the prospect of
returning to Berkeleyan metaphysics, several prominent Scottish
philosophers preferred to look elsewhere, namely to Germany and Hegel.
The result was that as the century ended a group of philosophers based
chiefly in the Universities of Glasgow and St Andrews and known as the
Scottish Idealists came to prominence.


## 6. The Scottish Idealists



In his illuminating study *Scottish Philosophy*, importantly
subtitled *A comparison of the Scottish and German answers to
Hume*, and the first of two sets of Balfour Lectures, Andrew Seth
remarks:



> 
> The thread of national tradition, it is tolerably well known, has been
> but loosely held of late by many of our best Scottish students of
> philosophy. It will hardly be denied that the philosophical
> productions of the younger generation of our University men are more
> strongly impressed with a German than with a native stamp (Seth
> Pringle-Pattison 1885, 1-2)
> 



Seth does not say who it is he has in mind, but a knowledge of the
period makes it relatively easy to surmise. In fact Seth himself (he
changed his name to Seth Pringle-Pattison in 1898) was for a time
identified as one in virtue of being joint editor with R B Haldane of
*Essays in Philosophical Criticism* (1883). This volume came to
be regarded as the Scottish Idealists' philosophical manifesto, though
Seth in his second set of Balfour Lectures *Hegelianism and
Personality* registered a fundamental disagreements with the
Idealists. The reference to "a German stamp", however, may
be somewhat misleading. An interest in, and a knowledge of, Kant can
be found to go back to Hamilton, and far from being regarded as a
threat to the Scottish tradition was recognized (by Veitch, for
instance) as an important part of its enrichment. The German
philosophy referred to here, then, is that which emanated from
Hegel.



*The Secret of Hegel* is the title of a very large book by
James Hutchison Stirling (Hamilton's Idealist critic), first published
in 1864. Stirling is credited with bringing Hegel to the attention of
British (and not just Scottish) philosophy for the first time, though
a wit at the time remarked that if Stirling did know the secret of
Hegel, he had kept it to himself! Though Stirling was, in modern
terms, a layman (he held no university post) the book was well
received. Combined with his critical volume on Hamilton (published
just one year later), Stirling's work was a key to the diminishing
interest in the Common Sense tradition within Scottish philosophy and
the increasing influence of German Idealism and Hegel in particular, a
development that may be said to have culminated in the first complete
English translation of Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* in
1910 by J.B. Baillie, Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the
University of Aberdeen.



Of the Scottish Idealists the most prominent and influential was
Edward Caird (1835-1908). A graduate of the University of
Glasgow, after a period at Oxford he returned in 1866 to become
Glasgow's Professor of Moral Philosophy, a post he held for almost 30
years, before returning to Oxford to become Master of Balliol. Caird
was an admirer of Kant, but believed that Kant had failed to
capitalize fully on his own insights, and that the real import of his
philosophy could be uncovered with the help of Hegel. The aim of
philosophy, on this interpretation, was the ultimate reconciliation of
seemingly incompatible elements in human experience--religion and
science, freedom and causality, reason and desire, for instance, but
above all and at its most abstract, subject and object (or mind and
body). The employment of these distinctions is essential to making
human experience intelligible, but once they are held to be absolute
error and confusion arises. Materialism makes the distinction between
mind and body absolute and seeks to explain the former in terms of the
latter; Cartesianism works in reverse. Both result in rendering the
relation mysterious.



The solution lies in the Hegelian perception that our knowledge is
perfected when its objects are conceived as parts of a whole,
ultimately the Absolute. This way of understanding, however, is not
something to be accomplished simply. Human understanding evolves as
human experience increases and our knowledge expands. Accordingly,
Caird and the other Scottish Idealists, especially David Ritchie at St
Andrews, welcomed the growth of natural science, and especially
biology, as providing important new material for the further
evolutionary development of human understanding as a whole.



Three consequent problems can be said to have occupied them chiefly.
The first was to avoid the charge of "mentalism" or
"panpsychism". The Idealist contention that materialism is
false leads easily to the counter accusation that the world is made of
mental stuff. This charge is often leveled at Berkeley, interest in
whom greatly increased among Scottish philosophers at this time.
Alexander Campbell Fraser, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the
University of Edinburgh, though not himself an Idealist in
philosophy,became editor of a new collected edition of Berkeley's
works. Ferrier, Fraser and Seth all denied that Berkeley's
immaterialism amounts to mentalism, but it became common to
distinguish between "subjective Idealism" and
"Absolute Idealism", the latter being the doctrine the
Scottish Idealists espoused.



Appeal to "The Absolute", however, brings another
danger--a threat to the reality of individual finite minds. There
is a risk that the individual subject is reduced to a modification of
the one Absolute universal mind, and hence eliminated as an
independently existing centre of consciousness. This was the principal
reason that led Seth to conclude against Hegelianism in his second set
of Balfour Lectures, and he identified it as a problem that the other
Idealists (notably Caird) failed to avoid.



The third issue is religion. How does "the Absolute"
relate to "God"? This was not simply a question internal
to Idealist philosophy, but of far wider cultural and intellectual
concern, partly because of the threat that Darwinian biology and
Biblical "higher" criticism seemed to pose for Christian
theism, and partly because of the rise of anthropological inquiry and
the new "science of religions". Edward Caird's brother
John, a prominent churchman, Professor of Divinity at Glasgow,
subsequently Principal of the University, and also an Idealist in
philosophy, devoted this Croall Lectures to this topic. A more
sustained opportunity to address these questions arose with the
establishment in 1882 of the Gifford Lectures at the four Scottish
Universities. Several series of these important lectures were given by
the principal Scottish Idealists, and subsequently
published--*The Evolution of Religion* (1891-2) by
Edward Caird (widely regarded as his philosophical masterpiece),
*Naturalism and Agnosticism* (1896-8) by J.S. Ward, and
*The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity* (1912-13) by John
Caird, are three of the most important. All of them deploy the
resources of Idealist philosophy to defend a version of theism that is
compatible with evolutionary biology. They do so in part by
interpreting the concept of "evolution" philosophically so
that both thought and religion are understood to evolve, no less than
biological organism.


## 7. James McCosh (1811-94)



Did Scottish Idealism constitute a revitalization and continuation of
the Scottish philosophical tradition, or its demise? James McCosh who
published *The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository,
Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton*, in 1874 had no doubt.
Writing from the distant perspective of Princeton he held that the
Scottish philosophy was now opposed within Scotland on two
fronts--by the materialism of Bain on the one hand, and on the
other, by the Hegelianism of Caird (described by George Davie as
"a very untypical Scotsman and one quite exceptionally apathetic
to educational customs of the country" (Davie 1961 86)).



McCosh was in a good position to make this assessment. As a student at
the University of Glasgow he acquired a wide knowledge of the
tradition (though this seems to have been due more to the library than
the lecture hall), and later while a divinity student at Edinburgh he
attended Hamilton's lectures. Ordained to the ministry of the Church
of Scotland in 1834, McCosh got caught up in the conflicts that
eventually led to the great Disruption of 1843, and split the national
church for almost 100 years. Though he ministered faithfully for the
Free church side, he also found time to continue with his
philosophical studies and in 1850 published *The Method of the
Divine Government, Physical and Moral*, a work that eventually ran
to thirteen editions. On the strength of this book, McCosh was offered
the Professorship of Logic and Metaphysics at the Queen's College
Belfast, part of the newly created National University of Ireland.
Eighteen years later he accepted the Presidency of the College of New
Jersey (subsequently Princeton University) where he also taught moral
philosophy, even after his retirement from the Presidency in 1888.



For McCosh, the heart of 'the Scottish philosophy' lay in
its combination of observational methods of inquiry with moral and
religious formation. "Ever since I became a teacher of the
science of mind" he writes, "I have given more attention
to philosophy than theology. In doing this I have been able to serve
religion more effectively than any other course I could have
taken" (McCosh 1896, 251). Given this account of what made the
Scottish philosophy distinctive, it is easy to see why McCosh thought
the philosophical schools becoming fashionable in Scotland signalled
its demise. The materialism of Bain fastened on the former
(observational methods) but abandoned the latter (moral formation),
while the Idealism of Caird abandoned the former in the interests of
the latter.



McCosh's pessimism that the combination of Realism and Theism which
underlay the Scottish philosophical enterprise from Hutcheson to
Hamilton had foundered within the universities of Scotland, was offset
by his hope and belief that the rising cultural and intellectual
independence of the United States from its European origins would
constitute fertile ground for a new 'American' philosophy
that would both continue and develop all that was best in the Scottish
tradition. He proved to be quite wrong in this speculation. Two
philosophies rose to prominence in America. Both of them had some
connection with what came to be known a little later as the
"college philosophy" that emanated from Scotland via
Princeton. One was a version of Idealism that was sympathetic to
theism, and the other Pragmatism, which owed something to Reidian
'Common Sense'. Neither of them, however, was Realist, and
both were soon displaced by logical positivism.


## 8. Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1856-1931)



While McCosh regarded the division between empiricists like Bain, and
Idealists such as Caird, to be largely exhaustive, he did leave open
the possibility of persisting with the insights and methods of
Scottish philosophy, and commended a few individuals in this respect,
among them Robert Flint (1838-1910), who was Professor of Moral
Philosophy at St Andrews before moving to the Chair of Divinity at
Edinburgh. McCosh's list is short, and does not include Andrew Seth.
Yet arguably it was Seth who, in a major work published some decades
later, proved to be the most articulate exponent of the Scottish
philosophical tradition, retaining the fundamentals of Scottish
philosophy in a highly sophisticated form.



Though McCosh does not mention Seth, it is hard to believe that he did
not know of Seth's earlier lectures on Scottish philosophy since these
appeared in print before McCosh had retired from the Presidency at
Princeton. In any event, there is an interesting historical connection
between the two men. As President of the College of New Jersey,
McCosh's vision and energy laid the foundations for its transformation
from a worthy regional institution to an internationally acknowledged
leader in higher education. It was in 1896, two years after McCosh's
death, that this remarkable transformation was finally acknowledged in
the change of name to Princeton University. Seth (by then Seth
Pringle-Pattison) was invited to attend the celebrations on behalf of
the University of Edinburgh, and gave two lectures on Theism.



It was twenty years later, however, before his *magnum opus*,
*The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy* appeared.
This book began life as Gifford Lectures delivered at the University
of Aberdeen in the years 1912 and 1913. World War I (in which Seth's
son Ronald fought and died) delayed both their revision and their
publication. Consequently, they were not published until 1917. Lecture
One begins with David Hume's *Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion*, and taking that as his starting point, Seth proceeds to
address all the issues that had long dominated philosophical debate in
Scotland. These include the existence of God, the relation of mind to
body, the nature and scope of science, the theory of knowledge and the
problem of skepticism. The 'recent philosophy', to which the subtitle
refers, is the division and debate between empirical psychology and
idealistic philosophy that had taken up competing sides on these
questions. The heart of Seth's strategy is to analyze the defects of
of empiricism and Idealism, and then to seek an integration of the
compelling philosophical insights of both. He acknowledges that the
Scottish philosophical tradition is inherently naturalistic, while at
the same time accepting the Idealists rejection of Hume's narrow
empiricism. In Lecture V of the first series, Seth accordingly
elaborates and defends what he calls 'higher' naturalism. Three
elements are key to this more sophisticated version of the naturalism
that united Hume and Reid. First, philosophy has to be grounded in
experience. It relies on both introspection and experiment, and cannot
proceed satisfactorily in the form of rationalistic deductions from a
priori principles. Second, dispassionately considered, we experience
different orders of mind. The mind of animals is different to the mind
of human beings. In particular, the human mind exhibits moral
consciousness, something wholly lacking in other creatures. This is no
less a fact of experience than anything biological observation or
laboratory experiments might reveal. Given these critical differences
between the kinds of mind experienced in nature, it is a mistake to
seek to bring all evolved creatures within the scope of a unitary
causal or biological explanation. Thirdly, the perennial task of
philosophy is to search for a comprehensive explanation of experience.
Philosophy's proper ambition is not to be a distinctive science, but
to formulate an explanatory understanding that will integrate the
radical differences within experience without eliminating them. Both
psychologism and Idealism, whatever other merits they may have, fail
in this respect.



Seth's scope of reference, the subtlety of his arguments, his
familiarity with the most recent advances in evolutionary biology and
experimental psychology make *The Idea of God* a remarkable
work. It represents a synthesis of profound learning that extended
over almost half a century, from his days as a student until close to
his retirement as a Professor. In his retirement Seth published two
more substantial books, one of them a second set of Gifford Lectures,
yet there is no doubt that *The Idea of God* is his finest
work, and a major philosophical accomplishment by any standard. Issued
by Britain's most prestigious academic publisher, the Clarendon Press
at Oxford University, the book was widely reviewed and highly
acclaimed at the time of its publication. Yet it did not long retain
the attention it received at first, and subsequently sank into
obscurity. In the last hundred years it has almost never been referred
to. Given its merits, why should this be?



McCosh was correct in claiming that neither the empirical psychology
of Bain, nor the Hegelian Idealism of Caird, was an adequate successor
to the philosophical tradition to which, for the most part, they owed
their origins. Nevertheless, both succeeded in attracting the talent
and enthusiasm of a new generation of scholars, and they did so to
powerful effect. Psychology became a hugely influential voice in the
world of intellectual inquiry, and alongside other social 'sciences'
such as sociology, economics and political science, this seemed to
validate a strictly empirical approach to the study of many of the
topics that had occupied the philosophers of the Scottish
Enlightenment. As a result, all these new subjects, whose origins owed
much to Scottish philosophy, grew in allegiance and prestige.
Inevitably, this development had a philosophical effect. The new
'sciences' gave greater credibility to the empiricist epistemology
that appeared to underwrite them. Meanwhile, in a similar spirit,
Idealist philosophy came under attack. In 1903, the Cambridge
philosopher G.E. Moore published an essay entitled "The
Refutation of Idealism". It is arguable that Moore did not
understand what he was aiming to refute, but in any event his essay
began a return to ascendancy by the British empiricist tradition,
aided in part by the Logical Empiricism that emanated from Austria and
then took root in America. In due course this spelt the end of British
Idealism. For empiricists, the most significant Scottish philosopher
was now identified as Hume, whose naturalism, ironically, had been
importantly rehabilitated by Norman Kemp Smith, Seth's student and
successor. By this time Reid's star had long been waning, and he
quickly came to be forgotten. For more than fifty years, both Reid
*and* Hegel disappeared from the curriculum and
conscientiousness of philosophers in Scotland. Accordingly, two major
contributors to the 'recent philosophy' that Seth took to be the
relevant context of his Gifford Lectures, were silenced. Little
wonder, then, that his brilliant rapprochement between these
perpetually antagonistic currents in philosophical thought soon
disappeared.