Reid and His French Disciples: Aesthetics and Metaphysics (review)

6~8 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY or PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 philosophy of nature similar to that of Leibniz, who held very different views indeed. She never sorts out the (admittedly) difficult theological issues, and her confusion is evident in her ambiguous use of the term 'essence' and the consequently misguided discussion of Boyle's matter theory. Sargent's ample and useful descriptions of Boyle's observational and experimental practice depict an empiricist (in the usual sense) who practiced an experimental method. Like Mersenne, Gassendi, and Newton, Boyle acknowledged the limits of that method, which, he held, could produce probable but not certain conclusions. This acknowledgement is what Sargent calls diffidence. In this respect Boyle departed from both Bacon and Descartes, who each claimed that his method could produce certain knowledge of the world. Other scholars, notably Richard H. Popkin and Barbara J. Shapiro, have argued that Boyle falls within the camp of mitigated sceptics, who settled for moral rather than metaphysical certainty.4 While Sargent contributes little that is new--and much that is misleading--to our understanding of Boyle's epistemological convictions, her description of the details of his practice in observing, experimenting, and writing do contribute substantial material for a more contextualized understanding of both the history and philosophy of science. MARGARET J. OSLER University of Calgary James w. Manns. Reid and His French Disciples: Aesthetics and Metaphysics. BriU's Studies in Intellectual History, Vol. 45. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Pp. 25o. Cloth, $65.75. This clearly written study argues that a dominant influence on the course of French aesthetics from Victor Cousin to Rent Sully-Prudhomme at the end of the nineteenth century was the realist philosophy of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Thomas Reid. The idealist turn in Cousin, whose impact on French philosophy was considerable , took him away from the orthodoxy of Condillac and the sensationalists to a theistic metaphysics that gave pride of place to an aesthetic of expression. Manns begins with Cousin, the master orator and teacher, and traces the diffusion of Reid's thought in the course of the century, focusing on the institutional connections of teacher-pupil and acadetnic posts as the channels of dissemination. Two ideas at the heart of this book and of the history of modern aesthetics will perhaps be of greatest interest to readers today. The first is the commonsense notion of natural signs. The second, which is a subject once again attracting interest, is sympathy . Manns performs the welcome service of excavating these from the largely forgotten sediment of nineteenth-century academic philosophy. Thomas Reid looked to the 4See Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticismfrom Erasmus to Spinoza, revised and expanded edidon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979; first published 196o),and Barbara J. Shapiro, Probabilityand Certaintyin Seventeenth-CenturyEngland: A Study o/the Relationships betweenNatural Science,Religion,History,Law, and Literature(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). BOOK REVIEWS 619 idea of natural signs, as Manns puts it, for "a transcendental condition for the possibility of the language we... speak" (57)- According to Reid, natural signs express states of mind in a manner that is directly motivated by the state of mind or, in other words, by virtue of the mechanical relation between the state of mind and the bodily response to it. Such language, therefore, "comes naturally," that is, is part of the physiological design of the body. Arbitrary signs, on the other hand, are not direct expressions of the subjective state, but conventional significations of it. They operate by appealing to a conventional code that is shared by users of the system of arbitrary signs. Because communication could never occur without inventing the code, Reid posited the necessary precondition of natural signs as the foundation for communication. Parents must be able to communicate basic states of mind to their small children in order to teach them what arbitrary signs will mean. If natural signs do exist, their relation to arbitrary signs becomes very interesting in the rhetoric of images and gestures, for much the same reason that Roland Barthes scrutinized the imbrication of denotation and connotation in the photographic message--another (much disputed) example of natural signs linked to...