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For, just one or two out of a complex cluster of ideas, and sometimes merely the look or sound of the word itself, is often all that is absolutely necessary for the suggesting another set of ideas to continue the process of thought; and consequently, some metaphysicians have even fancied that all reasoning is but the mechanical use of terms according to a certain form.
But, unlike other Scots of the pen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I remember little, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a single sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians comprehended and stood aghast at justification, sanctification, adoption, and effectual calling. These, apparently, were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life.
It is known, that there are metaphysicians who have raised a controversy on the point; maintaining that we are not warranted in referring our sensations to a cause such as we understand by the word Body, or to any external cause whatever.
A little dose, as Pierre Huber expresses it, of judgment or reason, often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature. Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, a remarkably accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not of its origin.
The student in philosophy will perceive that I allude to the distinction on which so much stress was laid by the schoolmen, and which has been retained either under the same or under other names by most metaphysicians to the present day, viz., between what were called essential, and what were called accidental, propositions, and between essential and accidental properties or attributes.
"Hayward can pardon your having an ambassador or two at your FEET, but to find the way to your HEART obstructed by a crowd of astronomers, Russ-expansionists, metaphysicians, theologians, translators, historians, poets; this is more than he can endure. The crowd reduces him, as Ampere said to Mme. Recamier, to the qualified blessing of being only chez vous, from the delight of being avec vous.
And now, as we have missed church, I will lie down again, and you shall read me that nice sermon, which I always like to hear when I can't go to church; the one in the green book about Nabob's vineyard." Great philosophers and profound metaphysicians should by rights have lived at Slumberleigh. Those whose lines have fallen to them "ten miles from a lemon," have time to think, if so inclined.
But if, as metaphysicians, we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about what really makes it go, we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts altogether, and bury ourselves in the thickness of those passing moments over the surface of which they fly, and on particular points of which they occasionally rest and perch.
Following Aristotle, most historians of philosophy have been metaphysicians; they have concerned themselves far less with what the ancient thinkers really knew than with what they thought. A chance using of a verbal quibble, an esoteric phrase, the expression of a vague mysticism these would suffice to call forth reams of exposition.
All of these men were anxious to avoid what they regarded as the perils of Idealism, and yet they seem quite unable to retain a foothold upon the position which they consider the safer one. Reid called his doctrine the philosophy of "Common Sense," and he thought he was coming back from the subtleties of the metaphysicians to the standpoint of the plain man.
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