Let our first quotation be one from the opening paragraph of the third 'Century' in which Traherne introduces himself as the bearer of certain uncommon powers of memory and, arising from these powers, a particular mission as a teacher:

Traherne could bear in himself such a picture of man's infancy because, as he himself emphasizes, he was in possession of an unbroken memory of the experiences which the soul enjoys before it awakens to earthly sense-perception. The following passage from the poem, My Spirit, gives a detailed picture of the early state in which the soul has experiences and perceptions quite different from those of its later life. (We may recall Reid's indication of how the child receives the natural language of things.)

Assuredly, the philosopher who discovered that we must become as little children again if we would be philosophers, is the one to whom we may relate Traherne, but not Berkeley. And if we wish to speak of Traherne, as Dobell tried to do, we speak correctly only if we call him a 'Reidean before Reid was born'.

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⁹ Oxenford's translation.

'I thought it unreasonable, upon the authority of philosophers, to admit a hypothesis which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy, all religion and virtue, and all common sense: and finding, that all the systems which I was acquainted with, were built upon this hypothesis, I resolved to enquire into this subject anew, without regard to any hypothesis.'

Reid notes as a fundamental characteristic of human language that it includes two distinct elements: first, the purely acoustic element, represented by the sheer succession of sounds, and secondly the variety of meanings represented by various groups of sounds, meanings which seem to have nothing to do with the sounds as such. This state of language, where the sound-value of the word and its value as a sign to denote a thing signified by it, have little or nothing to do with one another, is certainly not the primeval one. In the contemporary state of language, which Reid calls artificial language, we must see a development from a former condition, which Reid calls natural language. So long as this latter condition obtained, man expressed in the sound itself what he felt impelled to communicate to his fellows. In those days sound was not merely an abstract sign, but a gesture, which moreover was accompanied and supported by the gestures of the limbs.

When Reid says that there are certain characteristics - and these just of the kind whose development truly ennobles human life - which the soul brings with it into the world, a picture of man is evoked in us in which the supersensible part of his being appears as an entity whose existence reaches further back than the moment of birth and even the first beginnings of the body. Now such a conception of man is in no way foreign to humanity, in more ancient times it was universally prevalent, and it still lives on to-day, if merely traditionally, in the eastern part of the world. It is only in the West that from a certain period it ceased to be held. This was the result of a change which entered into human memory in historical times, just as the re-dawning of the old knowledge of man's pre-existence, of which Reid is a symptom, is a result of another corresponding alteration in the memory-powers of man in modern times.

The certainty of Reid's philosophical instinct, if such an expression be allowed, and at the same time his tragic limitations, due to an inability fully to understand the origin of this instinct, come out clearly in the battle he waged against the 'idea' as his immediate predecessors understood it. We know that Plato introduced this word into the philosophical language of mankind. In Greek ιδέα (from ιδεá¿Î½, to see) means something of which one knows that it exists, because one sees it. It was therefore possible to use the word 'to see' as Plato did, because in his day it covered both sensible and supersensible perception. For Plato, knowing consisted in the soul's raising itself to perceiving the objective, world-forming IDEAS, and this action comprised at the same time a recollection of what the soul had seen while it lived, as an Idea among Ideas, before its appearance on earth.

'Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts His wisdom could bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unattainable by books, and therefore I will teach them by experience.' (Ill, 1.)

'An Object, if it were before
Mine Ey, was by Dame Nature's Law
Within my Soul: Her Store
Was all at once within me; all her Treasures
Were my immediat and internal Pleasures;
Substantial Joys, which did inform my Mind.