Note 720 — Chapter V · (continued 2)

‘I once believed this doctrine of ideas so firmly, as to embrace the whole of Berkeley's system in consequence of it; till, finding other consequences to follow from it, which gave me more uneasiness than the want of a material world, it came into my mind more than 40 years ago, to put the question, What evidence have I for this doctrine that all the objects of my knowledge are ideas in my own mind? From that time to the present, I have been candidly and impartially, as I think, seeking for the evidence of this principle but can find none, excepting the authority of philosophers.’ Reid's Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind, edit. Edinburgh, 1808, vol. i. p. 172. And, in a letter which he wrote to Hume in 1763, he, with a simple candour which must have highly amused that eminent philosopher, confesses that ‘your system appears to me not only coherent in all its parts, but likewise justly deduced from principles commonly received among philosophers; principles which I never thought of calling in question, until the conclusions you draw from them in the “Treatise on Human Nature” made me suspect them.’ Burton's Life and Correspondence of Hume, vol. ii. p. 155.