the mind present in that place?' Again, Dr. Reid states the original theory of ideas, while declaring that he conceives it' to have no solid foundation, though it has been adopted very generally by philosophers... This notion of our perceiving external objects, not immediately, but in certain images or species of them conveyed by the senses, seems to be the most ancient philosophical hypothesis we have on the subject of perception, and to have, with small variations, retained its authority to this day.' Granted that Dr. Reid exaggerated the extent to which metaphysicians have kept up the notion of ideas as real images of things, few will deny that it does linger much in modern minds, and that people who talk of ideas do often, in some hazy metaphorical way, think of sensible images.[1] One of the shrewdest things ever said about either ideas or ghosts was Bishop Berkeley's retort upon Halley, who bantered him about his idealism. The bishop claimed the mathematician as an idealist also, his 'ultimate ratios' being ghosts of departed quantities, appearing when the terms that produced them vanished.
It remains to sum up in few words the doctrine of souls, in the various phases it has assumed from first to last among mankind. In the attempt to trace its main course through the successive grades of man's intellectual history, the evidence seems to accord best with a theory of its development, somewhat to the following effect. At the lowest levels of culture of which we have clear knowledge, the notion of a ghost-soul animating man while in the body, and appearing in dream and vision out of the body, is found deeply ingrained. There is no reason to think that this belief was learnt by savage tribes from contact with higher races, nor that it is a relic of higher culture from which the savage tribes have degenerated; for what is here treated as the
- ↑ Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy,' Democritus (and see his remarks on Reid); Lucretius, lib. iv.; 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' p. 8; Stewart, Philosophy of Human Mind,' vol i. chap. i. sec. 2; Reid, 'Essays,' ii. chaps. iv. xiv.; see Thos. Browne, 'Philosophy of the Mind,' lect. 27.
