Reid, like his contemporary Kant, felt his philosophical conscience stirred by Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, and, like Kant, set himself the task of opposing it. Unlike Kant, however, whose philosophic system was designed to arrest man's reason before the abyss into which Hume threatened to cast it, Reid contrives to detect the bridge that leads safely across this abyss. Even though it was not granted to him actually to set foot on this bridge (this, in his time, only Goethe managed to do), he was able to describe it in a manner especially helpful for our own purpose.

But man is not only a percipient being; he is also a being of will, and as such he comes into a relationship with the world which can be a source of rich experience. If one observes this relationship, one is bound to notice that it is based on the self-evident assumption that one possesses a lasting individuality, whose actions deal with a lasting material world. Any other way of behaviour would contradict the common sense of man; where we meet with it we are faced with a lunatic.

When nature speaks to man through his senses, something occurs exactly analogous to the process when man communicates with man through the spoken word. In both cases the perception, that is, the result of the process of perception, is something quite other than the sum of sensations underlying it. Per-ceiving by means of the senses is none other than a re-ceiving of nature's language; and this language, just like human language, bears two entirely different elements within it. According as one or the other element prevails in man's intercourse with nature, this intercourse will be either 'natural' or 'artificial' - to use the terms by which Reid distinguished the two stages of human speech.

It is clear that from both Augustine's and the modern scientific viewpoint there is no sense in requiring - as Reid did - those who seek the truth about themselves and the world to recover a condition which had been theirs as children. Nor from this point of view is there any justification to call on a Common Sense, innate in man, to sit in judgment on the philosophical efforts of the adult reason.

Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended."

Augustine refers to these words when he concludes that examination of his childhood memories which he undertook in order to prove the depravity of the soul from its first day on earth. He says: 'In the littleness of children didst Thou, our king, give us a symbol of humility when Thou didst say: Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.'

This precaution, however, has not saved Traherne from being misinterpreted in our own day in precisely the way he feared - indeed, by no less a person than his own discoverer, Dobell. It is the symptomatic character of this misinterpretation which prompts us to deal with it here.

² In a comment on a letter Carlyle had written to him, and in a note dealing with the contemporary philosophy in Germany.

The first of the three books in which Reid set out the results of his labours appeared in 1764 under the title, Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. The other two, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man, appeared twenty years later. In these books Reid had in view a more all-embracing purpose than in his first work. The achievement of this purpose, however, required a greater spiritual power than was granted to him. Comparing his later with his earlier work, Reid's biographer, A. Campbell Fraser, says:

Thus philosophy and common sense seem to stand in irreconcilable opposition to each other. But this opposition is only apparent. It exists so long as philosophy thinks it is able to come to valid conclusions without listening to the voice of common sense, believing itself to be too exalted to need to do so. Philosophy, then, does not realize 'that it has no other root but the principles of Common Sense; it grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them: severed from this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots.' (I, 5.)