'For my own satisfaction, I entered into a serious examination of the principles upon which this sceptical system is built; and was not a little surprised to find that it leans with its whole weight upon a hypothesis, which is ancient indeed, and hath been very generally received by philosophers, but of which I could find no solid proof. The hypothesis I mean is, That nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it: That we do not really perceive the things that are external, but only certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon the mind, which are called impressions and ideas.

The simplest human reasoning, prompted only by common sense, and the subtlest philosophical thought, both need language for their expression. Through his ability to speak, man lifts himself above an instinctive animal existence, and yet he develops this ability at an infantile stage, when, in so far as concerns the level of his consciousness and his relationship to the world, he hardly rises above the level of the animal. It requires a highly developed intelligence to probe the intricacies of language, yet complicated tongues were spoken in human history long before man awoke to his own individual intelligence. Just as each man learns to think through speaking, so did humanity as a whole. Thus speech can become a means for acquiring insight into the original form of human intelligence. For in speech the common sense of man, working unconsciously within him, meets the fully awakened philosophical consciousness.³

The following passage in Reid's Inquiry provides a key for the understanding of his difficulty in conceiving an adequate picture of man's being. In this passage Reid maintains that all art is based on man's experience of the natural language of things, and that in every human being there lives an inborn artist who is more or less crippled by man's growing accustomed to the state of artificial language in his intercourse with the world. In continuation of the passage quoted on page 99 Reid says:

Pelagius could think in this way because he came from a part of Europe where the older form of human memory, already at that time almost extinct in the South, was in some degree still active. For him it was therefore a matter of direct experience that the development of man from childhood onwards was connected with a diminution of certain original capacities of the soul. Yet he was so far a child of his age as to be no longer capable of seeing whence these capacities originated.

Later in this chapter we shall discuss Dobell's philosophical misinterpretation of Traherne, to which he fell victim because he maintained his accustomed spectator standpoint in regard to his object of study. Miss Wade has, indeed, been able to pay the right tribute to Traherne, the mystic, whose inner (and also outer) biography she was able to detect by taking seriously Traherne's indications concerning his mystical development. Her mind, however, was too rigidly focused on this side of Traherne's life - his self-training by an iron inner discipline and his toilsome ascent from the experience of Nothingness to a state of Beatific Vision. This fact, combined with her disinclination to overcome the Augustinian picture of man in herself, prevented her from taking Traherne equally seriously where he speaks as one who is endowed with a never interrupted memory of his primeval cosmic consciousness - notwithstanding the fact that Traherne himself has pointed to this side of his nature as the most significant for his fellow-men.

'Verily, verily I say unto you, except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.' (John iii, 3.)

At the time when the soul has experiences of the kind described by Traherne, it is in a condition in which, as yet, no active contact has been established between itself and the physical matter of the body and thereby with gravity. Hence there is truth in the picture which Traherne thus sketches from actual memory. The same cannot be said of Berkeley's world-picture. The fact that both resemble each other in certain features need not surprise us, seeing that Berkeley's picture is, in its own way, a pure 'eye-picture' of the world. As such, however, it is an illusion - for it is intended for a state of man for which it is not suited, namely for adult man going upright on the earth, directing his deeds within its material realm, and in this way fashioning his own destiny.

⁷ This same period of life played a decisive part in the spiritual evolution of Rudolf Steiner, as may be seen in his autobiography, The Story of My Life.

'If this be true, supposing certain impressions and ideas to exist presently in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the existence of anything else; my impressions and ideas are the only existences of which I can have any knowledge or conception; and they are such fleeting and transitory beings, that they can have no existence at all, any longer than I am conscious of them. So that, upon this hypothesis, the whole universe about me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon, stars, and earth, friends and relations, all things without exception, which I imagined to have a permanent existence whether I thought of them or not vanish at once:

The way in which the two paths of observation have here been set out must not give rise to the expectation that they are discussed by Reid in a similarly systematic form. For this, Reid lacked the sufficient detachment from his own thoughts. As he presents his observations in the Inquiry they seem to be nothing but a systematic description of the five senses, broken into continually by linguistic considerations of the kind indicated above. So, for example, many of his more important statements about language are found in his chapter on 'Hearing'.