Further, Hume’s greatness does not consist in the fact that he preached modesty to the contending parties, that he banished the doubting reason into the study and restricted life to belief in probabilities, but in the mental strength which enabled him to endure sharp contradictions, and, instead of an overhasty and easy reconciliation, to suspend the one impulse until the other had made its demands thoroughly, completely, and regardlessly heard.  Though he is distinguished from other skeptics by the fact that he not only shows the fundamental conceptions of our knowledge of nature and the principles of religion uncertain and erroneous, but finds necessary errors in them and acutely uncovers their origin in the lawful workings of our inner life, yet his historical influence essentially rests on his skepticism.  In his own country it roused in the “Scottish School” the reaction of common sense, while in Germany it helped to wake a kindred but greater spirit from the bonds of his dogmatic slumbers, and to fortify him for his critical achievements.

(c) %The Scottish School%.—­Priestley’s associational psychology, Berkeley’s idealism, and Hume’s skepticism are legitimate deductions from Locke’s assumption that the immediate objects of thought are not things but ideas, and that judgment or knowledge arises from the combination of ideas originally separate.  The absurdity of the consequences shows the falsity of the premises.  The true philosophy must not contradict common sense.  It is not correct to look upon the mind as a sheet of white paper on which experience inscribes single characters, and then to make the understanding combine these originally disconnected elements into judgments by means of comparison, and the belief in the existence of the object come in as a later result added to the ideas by reflection.  It is rather true that the elements discovered by the analysis of the cognitive processes are far from being the originals from which these arise.  It is not isolated ideas that come first, but judgments, self-evident axioms of the understanding, which form part of the mental constitution with which God has endowed us; and sensation is accompanied by an immediate belief in the reality of the object.  Sensation guarantees the presence of an external thing possessing a certain character, although it is not an image of this property, but merely a sign for something in no wise resembling itself.

This is the standpoint of the founder[1] of the Scottish School, Thomas Reid (1710-96, professor in Aberdeen and Glasgow; An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 1764; Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 1785, Essays on the Active Powers, 1788, together under the title, Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind.  Collected Works, 1804, and often since, especially the edition by Hamilton, with valuable notes and dissertations, 7th ed., 2 vols., 1872).  We may recognize in