Kant did a work similar to this last, but in a different manner.Rejecting (as Reid had done) the combined dogmatic and deductive method of Descartes, he introduced the critical method, affirming that reason can criticise itself, and proceeding to criticise reason by a kind of {306}
logical process of a most unsatisfactory kind.Criticism has succeeded criticism, each new critic taking a new standing-point, or advancing a step farther, till Hegel's system became the <reductio ad absurdum> of the whole method of procedure inaugurated by Kant.I admit that Kant was right in affirming that <a priori> principles should be examined before they are assumed in philosophical investigation.We are not at liberty to assume a first truth till we have shown it to be a first truth; and we have no right to use it in argument or deduction till we have determined its precise nature and law; but this is to be done, I maintain, in the inductive manner, with its accompanying analysis and exclusions.The Scottish school commenced this work, but they do not profess to have completed it.Stewart everywhere proclaims that it is to be done by the combined efforts of successive inquirers, pursuing the same method for ages.
Reid and Stewart nowhere profess to give a full list, or even a rigid classification, of the intuitive convictions of the mind.All that they affirm is, that those principles which they have seized for the purpose of meeting the scepticism of Hume, are and must be intuitive.They do not even pretend to give a full account of these, or to express them in their ultimate form.They vacillate in the account which they give of them, and in the nomenclature which they employ to denote them.They draw no definite distinction between cognitions, beliefs, and judgments.They treat of the faculties, and also of the principles of common sense, but they do not tell us how the two stand related to each other.And here I may be permitted to observe, that I look on these fundamental laws as being the necessary laws of the faculties regulating all their exercises, but not as laws or principles before the consciousness; and they are to be reflexly discovered as general laws only by the induction of their individual acts.Reid and Stewart do not even tell us what are the tests by which their presence may be detected:
these I hold to be, first, as Aristotle and Locke have shown, self-evidence; and, second, as Leibnitz and Kant have shown, necessity and universality.Such defects as these they were quite willing to confess in that spirit of modesty which was one of their highest characteristics; and to any one complaining that they had not settled every point, they would, {307} as it were, say, Go on in the path which we have opened; we are sure that there is more truth yet to be discovered, and rejoice we must and will if you succeed where we have failed and raise a little higher that fabric of which we have laid the foundation.
