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WorkThomas Reid

Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

Reid's long reply to the theory of ideas, faculty by faculty, from perception and memory to judgment and taste.

by Thomas Reid905 passages held

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First published
(aged 75)
Original language
English

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Overview

At about seventy, having stopped lecturing at Glasgow, Reid turned the lectures he had given there since 1764 into a book that takes the powers of the mind one at a time: perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgment, reasoning and taste. Throughout, it contests the theory of ideas, the view that the mind knows only its own ideas and must infer a world behind them. Perception, Reid replies, reaches things themselves, and memory reaches the past itself rather than a present copy of it. Since every argument has to start somewhere, he sets out the first principles that reasoning takes for granted, among them that our natural faculties are not deceptive. He also takes apart John Locke's account of personal identity with the case of a brave officer. The officer is flogged at school as a boy, captures an enemy standard as a young man and still remembers the flogging, and as an old general remembers the standard but not the flogging. By Locke's rule, which makes identity a matter of memory, the general both is and is not the boy. Reid sent the manuscript in instalments to two younger friends in Edinburgh — the philosopher Dugald Stewart, once his student, and the physician James Gregory — and in December 1784, with the two of them already reading proofs, he was still worrying about its length. John Bell published the book in Edinburgh in the summer of 1785, and Reid was paid £300 for it. A German reviewer in 1788 called it the most important foreign work of speculative philosophy in recent years, and judged a translation of the whole superfluous. It went through one edition in Reid's lifetime.

Key concepts

What three things does Reid say every act of perception involves?

A conception of the object, a strong conviction that it exists now, and the fact that this conviction is immediate, not the conclusion of reasoning. No image stands between. That is the core of Reid's direct realism: in seeing a tree, the object of the act is the tree itself, though how the organs, nerves and brain bring the perception about remains, he admits, unknown.

What is the difference between conception and judgment?

Conception, or simple apprehension, only thinks of something and asserts nothing; judgment affirms or denies. A winged horse can be conceived without the least belief that one exists. Reid warns that words such as 'conceive' and 'imagine' are used for both acts, and that confusing them led philosophers to treat judgment as a mere comparison of ideas rather than a verdict about things.

What are the first principles of contingent truths?

Truths about what happens to be the case that must be taken for granted, because nothing more evident could prove them. Reid lists twelve, among them that what we are conscious of exists, that what we distinctly remember really happened, that other people have life and intelligence, that our natural faculties are not fallacious, and that in nature what is to be will probably resemble what has been in similar circumstances.

How does the brave-officer case refute Locke on personal identity?

Locke made personal identity consist in memory: a person reaches as far back as their consciousness does. Reid's officer is flogged as a boy, takes an enemy standard as a young man and remembers the flogging, and as a general remembers the standard but not the flogging. Identity carries through, so the general is the boy; by Locke's rule he is not. Memory, Reid concludes, is evidence of identity, not what it consists in.

What is a general conception, according to Reid?

The meaning of a general word: a conception of attributes that many individuals share, formed for language and reasoning. It is not an image, and nothing that exists is general. Against Berkeley and Hume, who allowed only particular ideas, Reid holds that a triangle can be conceived exactly as a plane figure bounded by three straight lines, without picturing any particular triangle.

Why does Reid call taste partly rational?

Because beyond the palate, taste includes a judgment about real qualities, not only a pleasant feeling. The feeling accompanies the perception of beauty, but the beauty itself lies in the object: first in excellences of mind such as the virtues, then, borrowed from them, in things that are their signs, such as a face or a well-made work. A taste can therefore be correct or corrupted.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Perception Without Intermediaries

When a person sees the moon, is it the moon they perceive or an image of it in the mind? The book takes the moon's side against a line of philosophers running from Descartes to Hume.

Perception, Reid holds, involves three things: a conception of the object, a firm belief in its present existence, and that belief arriving immediately, not as the conclusion of an argument. Nothing stands between. The ideas that Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume set in the mind as its only objects are, he argues, a philosopher's fiction that reflection never finds. Once admitted they cannot be got past, since no argument leads from images alone to a world, which is why Descartes had to prove that matter exists and Berkeley could deny it. Plain people never doubted that the sun they see is the sun.

  • perception
  • sensation
  • external world
  • ideas
  • philosophy of mind

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First Principles and the Limits of Proof

If every argument has to start somewhere, what may be taken for granted without proof? The book answers with a list, and with the charge that a skeptic who refuses the list refuses reason too.

Essay VI sets out first principles of two kinds, necessary truths as in mathematics and morals, and contingent ones: among them that what we distinctly remember really happened, that other people have life and intelligence, and that our natural faculties are not fallacious. The last cannot be proved, Reid argues, since any proof would use the faculties in question; Descartes tried and argued in a circle. Such principles are not beyond scrutiny. They carry marks: denying them is absurd rather than merely false, and they command the consent of ages and nations, learned and unlearned alike.

  • first principles
  • common sense
  • judgment
  • knowledge
  • evidence
  • skepticism
  • epistemology
  • belief
  • reasoning
  • reason
  • causation
  • induction
  • scientific method

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Memory and the Same Person

Does a person stay the same because they remember, or remember because they are the same? The book takes the second answer, and takes Locke apart with a flogged schoolboy grown old.

Memory, for Reid, is an original faculty giving immediate knowledge of things past, not a present image from which the past is inferred. It is how each of us knows our own identity, but it does not make that identity: a person is one indivisible thing, and remembering is evidence of sameness, not its substance. Locke's rule, that identity reaches as far back as consciousness does, meets the brave officer, flogged as a boy, a captor of an enemy standard as a young man, and a general who has forgotten the flogging. By Locke's rule the general both is and is not the boy.

  • memory
  • consciousness
  • mind
  • locke

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Conceiving, Abstracting and General Words

How can a mind think of a centaur, or of triangles in general, if thinking means having an image before it? The book answers that conceiving needs no existing object, and that general words carry general conceptions.

Every other power of the mind, Reid observes, is directed at something real: we perceive what is present and remember what was. Conception alone reaches what never existed, and a centaur is as easy to conceive as a horse, without the least belief that one lives. That is the best evidence, he argues, that no image stands before the mind as its object. The same line carries into abstraction. Against Berkeley and Hume, he defends general conceptions, formed for language and reasoning and fixed by the common meaning of general words, so that two mathematicians can share an exact conception of a plane triangle.

  • conception
  • imagination
  • abstraction
  • universals
  • language
  • analogy

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Taste, and Beauty in the Object

Is beauty in the object or only in the feeling of whoever looks at it? The last essay places it in the object, and makes a good taste something a person can have or lack.

Taste, for Reid, is partly animal and partly rational, and its rational part is a judgment, not only a feeling. The virtues, the graces and the muses have a beauty that lies not in the spectator's feelings but in the real excellence of the object; where we fail to perceive it, the fault lies in some defect or perversion of our faculties. Much beauty is borrowed: a face or a well-made work pleases as the sign of an estimable quality of mind. So the proverb that there is no disputing about taste, taken without limit, stands on slender ground: the same arguments would tell against any standard of truth.

  • aesthetics
  • beauty

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Within this work

passages held
905
distinct concepts
664
by passages held, corpus-wide
#70

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “ideas” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
ideasperception61
perceptionphilosophy of mind27
ideasphilosophy of mind25
ideasknowledge20
perceptionskepticism18
ideasskepticism17
judgmentperception17
first principlesskepticism15
languageperception15
ideasjudgment14
knowledgeperception13
languagephilosophy of mind11
ideaslanguage10
judgmentknowledge10
judgmentlanguage7
philosophy of mindskepticism7
first principlesjudgment6
judgmentskepticism5
first principlesknowledge4
first principleslanguage4
judgmentphilosophy of mind4
knowledgelanguage4
knowledgeskepticism4
knowledgephilosophy of mind3
first principlesideas2
first principlesperception2
languageskepticism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1748 An Essay on Quantity

    A sixteen-page paper, published sixteen years before Reid's first book, the Inquiry into the Human Mind.

     EN
  2. 1764 An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense

    Reid's first book briefly states the case against the theory of ideas that his two later volumes of Essays argue at length.

     EN
  3. 1774 A Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic, with Remarks

    A chapter in another man's book rather than a book of its own, and the fullest account of formal logic that Reid published.

     EN
  4. 1785 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man you are here EN
  5. 1788 Essays on the Active Powers of Man

    Companion to the Intellectual Powers, turning from how we know to how we act; the last of Reid's books.

     EN
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