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“Philosophical Essays; to which are subjoined, copious Notes, critical and explanatory, and a Supplementary Narrative; with an Appendix. By James Ogilvie. 8vo. pp. 416. Philadelphia: John Conrad. 1816,” The North American Review, vol. 4, no. 12 (March 1817), pp. 378–408; selection from pp. 401–402.
[Edward Tyrrel Channing]
Edward Tyrrel Channing was a Unitarian who, in 1819, would be appointed to the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. In that capacity he was an important conduit of Scottish common sense philosophy in early America. Besides this review of Ogilvie, Channing was the author of fourteen other reviews in the North American Review. Authorship of this review is attributed to Channing in William Cushing, Index to the North American Review (Cambridge, 1878), p. 123. On Channing see W. Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought (Philadelphia, 1936), p. 33; Richard J. Petersen, “Scottish Common Sense in America, 1768–1850: An Evaluation of its Influence,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The American University, 1963), pp. 144–5; E. H. Todd, “Philosophical Ideas at Harvard College, 1817–37,” New England Quarterly, vol. 16 (March 1943), p. 87.
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It is certain, that we are very much in the dark as to efficient causes. We cannot trace what the philosophers call necessary connexions in the phenomena we witness; nor can we explain the “manner in which one event proceeds from another as its cause.” We observe a constant conjunction between certain events; we confidently look for this conjunction hereafter, and are in the habit of calling that which precedes, the cause; and that which follows, the effect. If this is what Mr. Ogilvie means, when he says, that we owe to Hume the first satisfactory elucidation of the fact, that our knowledge of cause and effect includes nothing more ‘than a perception and belief of the uniform antecedence of one event and sequence of another,’ we assure him, the fact was clearly held and explained, and by christian philosophers too, before Hume’s speculations appeared. If Mr. Ogilvie’s statement of the fact mean [sic] the same thing as ours, we can set him right on another point. He gives us to know, that Dr. Reid and his disciples, differ from Hume, and on fallacious grounds too, as to the fact which has just been stated. Mr. Ogilvie will find, by looking into the matter, that Dr. Reid and one of his disciples at least, opposed only the sceptical conclusions, which Hume drew from a principle they admitted. — The Doctor does indeed argue rather drily against Hume, that if mere priority or conjunction implied efficiency or causation, we may call day the cause of night, night the cause of day, and in this way make any thingto [sic] be the cause of any thing. We are sorry to see Mr. Ogilvie so much discomposed at this.* — Dr. Reid does indeed deny, that there is any efficiency in priority or conjunction. Still he thinks we are greatly in the dark as to efficient causes, though he holds it to be a first principle, that there must be an efficient cause for every phenomenon we witness. He is merely saving men from dreary scepticism. Mr. Ogilvie should have understood his countryman better, and remembered that Hume himself may possibly better deserve the charge of ‘sophistical artifice,’ than such a straight-forward observer as Dr. Reid.
The foundation of knowledge being laid, our author proceeds to analyse the relation of cause and effect; and begins with inquiring into the grounds of our belief, that the succession of events in time future, will resemble that of events in time past. He takes Adam, (who had the advantage of being full grown from the first, and who surely would be the only person, who could have any doubts on the subject) and gives a flourishing account of the supposed state of his mind, as to the reappearance of the sun after its first set. At first, he is in perfect uncertainty; but the repeated and regular return of the luminary would, by and by, give him a firm assurance of the unbroken alternation of day and night; though it would take an antediluvian life at least, to become as sure of the fact as we are. So Mr. Ogilvie adopts Hume’s hypothesis, and resolves our belief in this case into custom or habit; while Dr. Reid would make it a part of our constitution. Here then is our author’s creed, and we take it to be a mere obscuration of Hume. He is now in motion, and the remainder of the Essay is devoted to defining the regions of the knowable, and drawing several conclusions from the whole matter. Of these, and the enormous notes upon every thing, we can say nothing.
*The Shepherd tells Touchstone, “that a great cause of the night, is lack of the sun;” or, in our author’s elegant paraphrase, it is ‘the absence of solar light in consequence of interposing terraqueous opacity.’ Mr. Ogilvie actually undertakes to support the shepherd’s proposition, in a very vigorous analysis of day and night, shewing how ‘they resolve themselves into four links in the chain of cause and effect.’ p. 51.