Mill on Happiness: A question of method

There are issues in Reid scholarship as well as the primary texts that seem to suggest that Reid is not a direct realist about visual perception. In this paper, I examine two key issues – colour perception and visible figure – and attempt to defend the direct realism of Reid's theory through an interpretation of ‘directness’ as well as what Reid calls ‘acquired perception’, which is ‘mediate’ in that it requires prior perception of signs, but nonetheless constitutes direct perception.