In proceeding in the way of observation, both discover natural laws or principles, and both call them by the name of " common-sense." " Common-sense is certainly sufficient to teach those who think of the matter with tolerable seriousness and attention, all the duties and offices of human life; all our obligations to God and our fellow-creatures; all that is morally fit and binding.And there is no need of words to prove that to be morally fit and obligatory, which common-sense and reason clearly show to be so." Reid holds that all active power implies mind.This was the expressed doctrine of Turnbull before him." It is, therefore, will alone that produces both power and productive energy." " To speak of any other activity and power, is to Speak without any meaning at all; because experience, the only source of all our ideas (and of the materials of our knowledge), does not lead us to any other conception or idea of power." Nor should it be omitted that both -- in this respect, however, like all the other Scotch metaphysicians ever speak with profound reverence of Scripture; ever, however, dwelling most fondly on those doctrines of the word which are also truths of natural religion; such as the existence of God, the obligations of morality, and the immortality of the soul.
I have been at pains to trace these agreements, not with the view of depreciating the originality and still less the independence of Reid, who may have had some of these views suggested to him by his teacher, but who may have afterwards found them in other writers, and who no doubt thought them all for himself, and adopted them because they seemed to him to be sound. We have seen that in one or two points, Reid fell behind his master, who had clearer apprehensions than his pupil of mingling deductive with inductive observation, and of the laws of the association of ideas.But in other and more important philosophic doctrines, Reid passed far beyond his teacher.Reid claims to be original in rejecting the ideal theory of sense perception; which had been the received one for two thousand years, which had been adopted by Locke, and pursued to its logical consequences by Berkeley.But Turn bull evidently adheres to the old view." Properly speaking, what we call matter and space are but certain orders of sensible {105}
ideas produced in us, according to established rules of nature, by some external cause; for when we speak of material effects and of space, we only mean, and can indeed only mean, certain sensible perceptions excited in our mind according to a certain order, which are experienced to be absolutely inert and passive, and to have no productive force." He speaks of the "external material world " as unperceived by us, and in itself absolutely unperceivable, as all philosophers acknowledged When, in speaking of the material world, he says it may be called the "external cause or occasion of those sensible ideas, and their connections, which make to each of us what we call the sensible world,"we see that this is the doctrine which Reid set aside g, and yet we may notice that the phrase " occasion " is used by Turnbull, as by Reid, to designate the relation of the external action to the internal perception.In another point, Reid made a more important advance upon Turnbull.
Living at a later age, Reid had to meet the objections of the great modern revolutionist, and had in consequence to dive down into profounder depths of the human constitution.
The scepticism of Hume brought out to view the superficialities of the philosophy of Shaftesbury, partly by following its principles to their legitimate consequences, but mainly by making all men feel that it is nothing wherewith to meet the assaults of the new and formidable enemy.Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Turnbull had all appealed to common-sense; but Reid behoved to take a deeper and more searching view of the principles which constitute common-sense, in order to meet the exigencies of the new era.
Turnbull's works had no great circulation in their own day, and they speedily disappeared from public view.It might have been different had he continued in Aberdeen, and gathered around him a body of young men ready to receive and to propagate the lessons he taught them.But he departed into other fields, -- into the literary circle of England, and a church which set more value on liturgy than on abstract doctrine, -- and there he met with few to appreciate his gifts.A Presbyterian Scot might have urged, with some plausibility, that his name has perished because he forsook the country and the church in which his philosophic labors would have been valued.It might even have been different, had he published his metaphysical {106}
treatises a dozen of years earlier; for then they might have run their course with those of Hutcheson and Butler.But at the very time that Turnbull advertised his work on "Moral Philosophy," Hume published his "Treatise of Human Nature,"which, as it forced its way to the front, required philosophy to deepen its foundations and give a new facing to its buttresses.Turnbull is remembered because he had, for three years, when he was himself a very young man, a diligent and thoughtful pupil, who in due time wrestled with the great sceptic, and is acknowledged by Scotland as the representative of its native philosophy.
