Secondly.It should be held that he who undermines the fundamental truth spontaneously discovered, is doing an injury to humanity.Scepticism, as Hume delights to show, can produce no mischief in the common secular affairs of life, because there are circumstances which keep men right in spite of their principles, or want of principles.But it is very different in respect of those questions which fall to be discussed in higher ethics and theology.A man will not be tempted by any sophistry to doubt the connection of cause and effect when he is thirsty and sees a cup of water before him; in such a case he will put forth his hand and take it, knowing that the beverage will refresh him.But he may be led by a wretched sophistry to deny the necessary relation of cause and effect when it would lead him upward from God's works to God himself, or induce him to seek peace in Him.Hence the importance of not allowing fundamental truth to be assailed; not because the attack will have any influence on the practical affairs of this life, but because it may hold back and damp our higher aspirations, moral and religious.Hume hoped that his scepticism might soften asperities, but he did not wish to think that any bad influences could follow from it.On one occasion he was told of a banker's clerk in Edinburgh, of good reputation, who had eloped with a sum of money; and the philosopher wondered greatly what could {158} induce such a man thus to incur, for an inconsiderable sum, such an amount of guilt and infamy."I can easily account for it," said John Home, "from the nature of his studies, and the kind of books he was in the habit of reading." "What were they," said the philosopher.He was greatly annoyed when told, Boston's "Fourfold State," and Hume's "Essays." Certainly the youth must have been in a perplexed state who had been converted from a belief in the " Fourfold State" by Hume's " Essays,"or who was hesitating between them.Thirdly.The philosopher must undertake a more important work.He must inquire into the nature of fundamental truth; he must endeavor to unfold the mental powers that discover it, and to expound their mode of operation, and their laws.He cannot indeed prove first truths by mediate evidence, for if they were capable of probation they could not be first truths; but he can show that they are first truths perceived by immediate cognition of the objects, and in no need of external support.He must as far as possible clear tip the difficulties and perplexities in which the discussions in regard to them have become involved.In particular, he must show that while the reflex consideration of the ultimate principles of knowledge often lands us in difficulties, the principles them selves never lead us into positive contradictions; and that, therefore, while we allow that the human faculties are limited, we cannot admit that they are deceptive.This is what has been attempted by one philosopher after another since the days of Hume.
In fact, all later philosophy springs directly or indirectly from the thorough-going examination to which the Scotch sceptic had subjected received truths.It has been the aim of the Scottish school, as modified and developed by Reid, to throw back the scepticism of Hume.Reid tells us that he once believed the received doctrine of ideas so firmly as to embrace the whole of Berkeley's system along with it, till, on discovering the consequences to which it had been driven by Hume, he was led to review the whole theory and abandon it.Kant declares that he was roused from his dogmatic slumbers by the assaults of the Scottish sceptic, and was thus impelled to the task of repelling the attack.It is scarcely necessary to say that all other philosophies, deserving the name, which have {159}
originated within the last hundred years, have ramified directly or indirectly from the Scottish and the German schools; one school, the French school of M.Cousin, seeking to combine the two.