The "Science of Man" in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and Their Contemporaries (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 307 understand Berkeley's success," and this becomes very clear in the course of her commentary. As she continually points out, the New Theory is very successful in attacking the geometric theory on its own terms and in articulating an alternative account of how visual perception works. After following the commentary, it is no great mystery why Berkeley's account of vision became the received view of the matter in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The third part of the book deals primarily with the relationship between the New Theory and Berkeley's more famous works: the Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledgeand the ThreeDialoguesbetweenHylas and Philonous. Although this section is rather brief, it is in many ways the most thought-provoking, for it aims at little less than a reinterpretation of Berkeley's metaphysics in terms of his theory of visual representation. Much of this task involves showing that the doctrines of the New Theory are less at variance with those of the Principles and D/a/0gues than is commonly supposed . Atherton argues (convincingly, in my judgment) that commentators who allege a radical discontinuity between the "materialistic" language of the New Theory and the immaterialism of the later works have mistaken some of the key claims of the New Theory while reading the immaterialism of the Principles as an unnecessarily awkward thesis. Briefly put, Atherton's point here uses a distinction between/dea//sm and immater /a/ism. Idealism is the thesis that ideas exist only in the mind; immaterialism is the doctrine that ideas can represent only other ideas (rather than some extramental substance). Within the context of this distinction, the New Theory can be treated as an immaterialistic work, since it concentrates on the capacity of visible ideas to represent tangible qualities. To use Atherton's language, "the argument of the New Theorydoes not concern the status of visual qualities themselves but is instead about the way in which visual qualities represent something nonvisual" (232). Whether this line of argument succeeds and we should read the Principles as a general application of the kind of argument found in the New Theory is a large and important question likely to be the subject of much debate. But anyone interested in Berkeley will need to take account of the historical and interpretive points made in this book. DOUGLAS M. JESSEPH North CarolinaState University Peter Jones, ed. The "Scienceof Man" in the ScottishEnlightenment: Hume, Reid and Their Contemporaries. New York: Columbia University Press, 199o. Pp. vii + 204. Cloth, $45.oo. There is a strong and understandable tendency to treat historical writings in philosophy in familiar ways. For example, the scholarship on a certain historical author may center around a handful of"standard" philosophical issues, especially those issues with which we identify a particular author. Additionally, our scholarship can incline towards treating a historical author as though he or she were a contemporary of ours, engaged in the same philosophical debates that fill our professional journals today. The 308 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL 1992 "Science of Man" in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and Their Contemporaries is a very refreshing departure from this general tendency. The collected essays are far-ranging in their subject matter: five center on Hume, two on Hume and Reid, one on eighteenth-century theories of the origins of language, and one on Boswell. What holds the collection together, other than their all being in some sense essays on various aspects of this "science of man," is this attempt to get out of a rut, to remove some of our own academic blinders and to see these figures and this science in a fresh light. In this regard, The "Science of Man" is a remarkable and thoroughly enjoyable success. Some of the essays do their work by addressing philosophical and personal aspects of these figures that twentieth-century scholarship has almost invariably not seen. Despite the central role of the "common" people in Hume's philosophy as a frequent benchmark, just what Hume understands the common people or the vulgar to be has gained scant attention. Chisick's essay shows us that the answer is neither obvious nor...