Summary Of Reid's Active Power In General By David Hume

While Reid seems to show some signs of respect for Hume, he does have many criticisms of the author’s work. The fourth chapter of Reid’s Active Power in General is a direct critique of Hume’s work. Especially Hume’s thoughts on the powers of the individual. His main problem with Hume was the way he used induction for the Treatise. Hume attempts to treat his thoughts on human abilities like a scientific experiment. Reid notes Hume makes exceptions to this, which is going against the scientific process. Thus, Reid decides the entire Treatise is unusable, due to Hume’s misuse of his own thought process. After noting Hume’s biggest mistake, Reid goes through several of his arguments to prove them wrong. According to Reid, Hume makes several outlandish …show more content…
everything reflects previously understood experiences. He concludes the external world can’t be proven exists. Reid will go through several arguments against these claims. Firstly, he claims that the word ‘power’ is synonymous with force, energy, agency, and others, but Reid says power (and some other words) can’t be properly defined. Because it is too raw of a concept and can’t be compared or broken down to make definitions. Furthermore, Hume decides power can’t be understood. Reid thinks that if power can’t be understood, then it can’t be argued how it’s used. Then Reid talks about a principle, the 1st principle, which he believes in, but Hume does not. The principle is that all changes in nature must have a cause. Which involves both talking about experiences, with Reid also mentioning truths. For Hume, experiences are the way we interoperate everything from the external world. While Reid says experiences will show what things are, have been, and will be, it doesn’t show necessities, i.e. the causes of things. Whereas truths, are our pre-known thoughts that show causes and can’t come from experiences. With all that, Hume thinks the principle is from