ABSTRACT
This chapter and the next two will be devoted to an exposition of Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind. This work is primarily concerned with perception and perceptual knowledge. It was his early work, a work strongly motivated by a desire to provide an alternative to a theory, one that he traces from Descartes through Locke and Berkeley to Hume, which he calls the ideal system, the ideal theory, or the theory of ideas. Reid assumed, whether correctly or not, that Hume’s theory rested upon two assumptions. One, an assumption about psychology, is that the immediate object of thought is always some impression or idea and, therefore, that all our conceptions and beliefs are nothing but impressions and ideas. The other, an assumption about epistemology, is that all our justified beliefs are justified by reasoning from impressions and ideas. Reid held both of these theses to be false. The first leads, he contends, to conclusions that are inconsistent with the facts, to conclusions affirming that we could not have the beliefs and conceptions we actually have, and the second leads, he avers, to scepticism, to the conclusion that we do not know those things which all of us assume we do know.
