Thomas Reid, on Intelligible Objects

Abstract

Reid's philosophy is an attempt to describe the operations of the mind. The author is less concerned with objects than with the power or faculty by means of which the mind is furnished with objects. This faculty he calls con ception or apprehension or understanding, and he is careful always to dis tinguish it from the power of judgment by means of which we come to possess belief or knowledge. Much of what is most distinctive in Reid's philosophy is to be found in his account of these two faculties and of the way in which they are related to each other. In directing his attention to powers and their operations, Reid seems to have been influenced by the logic handbooks that were current in his day. Reid approved of attempts inspired by Descartes to reform the teaching of logic by treating of the operations of conception, judgment, and reasoning rather than simply dealing with the properties of concepts, propositions, and arguments. Early in his career, however, Reid remarked on the error involved in supposing that, because concepts are in some sense prior to propositions, the operation of conception?which logicians were calling simple apprehen sion?must be considered as the first operation of the mind, with the result that perception and memory were classified together with imagination as simple apprehensions.1 On the contrary, said Reid, perception, memory, and consciousness are judgments; they include, together with a conception of the object, a belief in the object's existence. Simple apprehension, by which we imagine or conceive of an object without judging as to whether it exists, comes after judgment, and can work only with materials given to it in percep tion or consciousness.