ABSTRACT
We need to distinguish at the outset two sorts of ways in which Reid is said to get the ideal theory wrong. The first, and less damaging (because quite obviously false), is expressed by Sir William Hamilton in a footnote to the Inquiry:
by the Ideal Theory, Reid always understands the ruder form of the doctrine, which holds that ideas are entities, different both from the external object and from the percipient mind, and … he had no conception of the finer form of that doctrine, which holds that all we are conscious of in perception, (of course also in imagination) is only a modification of the mind itself.
