Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

What it is about

Reid's answer to Hume, of 1785: if an impeccable chain of reasoning ends by denying that we know anything of the world, perhaps the fault lies in a premise nobody had examined.

Context and history

The premise is what Reid calls the 'theory of ideas': the assumption, shared by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, that what we directly perceive is not things but mental representations. Once that is granted, Reid says, scepticism is unavoidable, because there is no longer any way out of the inside of one's head. His alternative is that perception puts us in contact with the objects themselves, and that there are principles of common sense which are not proved because they are what every proof rests on. It is the principal text of the Scottish school, it dominated the teaching of philosophy in the United States for decades, and it has interested philosophers again over the last fifty years.

Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.