It was just the notion of an “impression” upon which Reid—the great eighteenth-century enemy of the “‘idea’ idea”—fastened, to be followed by Green in the following century, and by a host of others (H. A. Prichard, Wilfrid Sellars, J. L. Austin, Jonathan Bennett) in our own. Reid says: There is no prejudice more natural to man, than to conceive of the mind as having some similitude to body in its operations. Hence, men have been prone to imagine, that as bodies are put in motion by some impulse or impression made upon them by contiguous bodies; so the mind is made to think and to perceive by
...more
October 24, 2020. Page 142. Thomas Reid.
