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It belongs to the first rudiments of art the mere grammar that an artist's convictions, as bodied forth in sense-given symbols, should not palpably and shockingly contradict the conditions of the sensible world; his is the far more difficult and delicate task of expressing himself, not by violation, but by selection, emphasis, reconstruction.
The 'real' is separated from the phenomenal, and truth divorced from fact. The sense-given world is the whole world, and yet is a world of mere accidental conjunctions and separation. That is Hume's scepticism, and yet according to Reid is the legitimate development of Descartes' 'ideal system. Reid, I take it, was right in seeing that there was a great dilemma.
Reid was a vigorous reasoner, and credit has been given to him by some disciples of Kant's doctrine of time and space. Schopenhauer says that Reid's 'excellent work' gives a complete 'negative proof of the Kantian truths'; that is to say, that Reid proves satisfactorily that we cannot construct the world out of the sense-given data alone.
Yet, somehow or other, it exists, and it 'represents' realities; though the divine power has to be called in to guarantee the accuracy of the representation. The objective world, again, does not reveal itself to us as simply made up of 'primary qualities'; we know of it only as somehow endowed with 'secondary' or sense-given qualities: as visible, tangible, audible, and so forth.
Locke, therefore, insisted upon the necessity of ascertaining the necessary limits of human knowledge. All our knowledge of material facts is obviously dependent in some way upon our sensations however fleeting or unreal they may be. Therefore, the material sciences must depend upon sense-given data or upon observation and experiment.
Mill is here dealing with the questions which Kant attempted to answer by showing how the mind imposes its forms upon sense-given materials, forms them into concepts, and combines the concepts into judgments and reasoning. Mill evades the mysterious and transcendental at the cost of omitting reason altogether.
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