Reid’s sense of magnitude

Reid went some way towards accepting this himself. Though he rejected Hume’s geometrical finitism, he granted Hume’s perceptual finitism. He allowed that ‘there is a limit beyond which we cannot perceive any division of a body,’ and that ‘The parts become too small to be perceived by our senses.’ He only insisted that ‘we cannot believe that it becomes then incapable of being further divided, or that such division would make it not to be a body’ (Intellectual Powers II.19: 219/34-37).