{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_60399/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_60399","id":"gutenberg_60399","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60399","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Biographies","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Reid, Thomas, 1710-1796"],"text":"THOMAS REID\n\n\n\n\nFAMOUS SCOTS SERIES\n\n_The following Volumes are now ready_:\u2014\n\n\n    THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON.\n    ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.\n    HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK.\n    JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES.\n    ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN.\n    THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE.\n    RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS.\n    SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON.\n    THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE.\n    JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK.\n    TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.\n    FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. OMOND.\n    THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS.\n    NORMAN MACLEOD. By JOHN WELLWOOD.\n    SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor SAINTSBURY.\n    KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By LOUIS A. BARB\u00c9.\n    ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. GROSART.\n    JAMES THOMSON. By WILLIAM BAYNE.\n    MUNGO PARK. By T. BANKS MACLACHLAN.\n    DAVID HUME. By Professor CALDERWOOD.\n    THOMAS REID. By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER.\n\n\n\n\n[Illustration:\n\n    THOMAS\n    REID\n\n    BY\n    A:CAMPBELL\n    FRASER ::\n\n    FAMOUS\n    SCOTS:\n    SERIES\n\n    PUBLISHED BY\n    OLIPHANT ANDERSON\n    & FERRIER \u00b7 EDINBVRGH\n    AND LONDON\n]\n\n\n\n\nThe designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and the\nprinting from the press of Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh.\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE\n\n\nThis little book is an attempt to present Reid in a fresh light, and in\nhis relations to present-day thought. It deals with the Scottish chapter\nin that enduring alternation between agnostic despair and endeavour\nafter perfect insight which seems to be a law of the philosophic\nprogress of mankind. Thomas Reid, home-bred and self-contained, is the\nnational representative, in the eighteenth century, of the _via media_\nbetween these extremes. In the concluding chapter I have looked at the\nphilosophical appeal to inspired data of Common Sense, in the wider light\nof the theistic philosophy of the universe, and not merely as part of an\ninductive science of the human mind. This connects the theistic postulate\nof spiritual reason, as the foundation of human experience, with Reid\u2019s\nappeal to the ultimate but often dormant necessities of human nature, a\nsubject treated more fully in my _Philosophy of Theism_ (1896).\n\nFor valuable unpublished material\u2014more indeed than I could avail\nmyself of within narrow limits\u2014I am indebted to Miss Hilda Paterson,\nthe guardian of manuscript remains and other relics of her ancestor,\npreserved at Birkwood, in Reid\u2019s native country of the Dee. I also owe\nmuch to Mr. R. S. Rait, now of New College, Oxford, the historian of the\nUniversities of Aberdeen, whose research has done much to illustrate\nhis _alma mater_ in the North. And I am indebted to Dr. Davidson, the\nProfessor of Logic, and to Mr. Anderson, the Librarian, of the University\nof Aberdeen, for documents to which the space at my disposal forbids more\nthan an occasional reference.\n\nThose who desire to study further the chapter in the history of European\nphilosophy in which Reid\u2019s name is prominent, may be referred to\nCousin\u2019s critical appreciation in his _Philosophie \u00c9cossaise_ (1857),\nand to Professor Andrew Seth\u2019s Balfour Lectures on \u2018Scottish Philosophy\u2019\n(1885), in which the Scottish and German answers to Hume are compared.\nThe industry of the late Dr. M\u2019Cosh has collected, in his _Scottish\nPhilosophy_ (1875), interesting particulars regarding our national\nphilosophers from Hutcheson to Hamilton.\n\n                                                                 A. C. F.\n\nUNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, _21st February 1898_.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n                                                                      PAGE\n\n                                CHAPTER I\n\n  BOYHOOD AND ANCESTRY: STRACHAN AND THE VALLEY OF THE DEE, 1710-1722    9\n\n                               CHAPTER II\n\n  AT MARISCHAL COLLEGE, 1722-1737                                       18\n\n                               CHAPTER III\n\n  NEW MACHAR AND DAVID HUME, 1737-1751                                  30\n\n                               CHAPTER IV\n\n  OLD ABERDEEN: A REGENT IN KING\u2019S COLLEGE, 1751-1764                   43\n\n                                CHAPTER V\n\n  UNIVERSAL SCEPTICISM VERSUS INSPIRED COMMON SENSE: AN \u2018INQUIRY\n    INTO THE HUMAN MIND ON THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMON SENSE,\u2019 1764        56\n\n                               CHAPTER VI\n\n  GLASGOW COLLEGE: THE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY, 1764-1780         72\n\n                               CHAPTER VII\n\n  IN PHILOSOPHICAL RETIREMENT: AUTHORSHIP IN OLD AGE, 1780-1795        103\n\n                              CHAPTER VIII\n\n  INSPIRED COMMON SENSE AND CAUSATION: ACTIVE OR MORAL POWER IN MAN    118\n\n                               CHAPTER IX\n\n  THE END, 1796                                                        126\n\n                                CHAPTER X\n\n  RETROSPECTIVE AND CRITICAL                                           133\n\n                               CHAPTER XI\n\n  REID IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON SENSE\n    PHILOSOPHY: REID IN FRANCE: REID AND HAMILTON: REID AND\n    SCOTO-HEGELIAN IDEALISM: ETHICAL OR THEISTIC FINAL FAITH           144\n\n\n\n\nTHOMAS REID\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nBOYHOOD AND ANCESTRY: STRACHAN AND THE VALLEY OF THE DEE\n\n1710-1722\n\n\nThomas Reid makes his first appearance as a boy in the manse of Strachan\nin Kincardineshire, where he entered this world of sense on the 26th of\nApril 1710. His father, the Rev. Lewis Reid, was minister of the parish\nfor fifty-eight years, from 1704 until his death in 1762. The mother,\nMargaret Gregory, was the eldest daughter, by his second marriage, of\nDavid Gregory, laird of Kinairdy in Banffshire. An elder son, David,\nborn in 1705, and two daughters, Isobel and Jane, with Thomas, formed\nthe family at the manse when Thomas was a boy. David was twice married,\nand died about 1780, without issue; the elder daughter, Isobel, died\nunmarried, in her stepmother\u2019s house at Aberdeen, in 1770; and the\nyounger, Jane, after a _m\u00e9salliance_, died without issue after the middle\nof the century. Their mother, Margaret Gregory, died in 1732, when the\nmanse was still the home of Thomas. In 1735, Mr. Lewis Reid married his\nsecond wife, Janet, daughter of Fraser of Phopachy in the county of\nInverness. Two sons and five daughters were the issue of the second\nmarriage. The eldest son died when a student at Marischal College, in\n1758, and the younger, who studied medicine, died in London about ten\nyears later. Of the daughters, one died in infancy, and two others,\nElizabeth and Mary, died unmarried\u2014the former in Edinburgh in 1772,\nand the latter in Aberdeen in 1771. Of the other two, Margaret became\nin 1763 the wife of the Rev. Alexander Leslie, minister of Fordoun in\nKincardineshire, and Grace married the Rev. John Rose, minister of Udny\nin Aberdeenshire. Mrs. Rose died in 1793, and Mrs. Leslie in 1829, the\nlast survivor of the Reid family circle at Strachan.[1]\n\nIt is recorded of the father of this large family that he was respected\nfor piety, prudence, and benevolence, inheriting from his ancestors\nsimplicity of manners, and literary tastes which, without attracting the\nnotice of the world, engaged his leisure and dignified his rural life. Of\nthe two wives, the second survived her stepson, the philosopher.\n\nThe remote parish of Strachan is formed by the romantic valley\nthrough which the Feugh finds its way from the Grampians to the Dee\nat Banchory-Ternan\u2014a breezy upland region, redolent of heather and\nbog-myrtle, apt in its solitude to educate reflective individuality in\none so disposed. In those days the road to the south over the Cairn o\u2019\nMount passed through Glen Dye, under the shadow of Clochnaben, a road\ntwo centuries ago frequented by robbers, and invested with a halo of\nromance by tales of marvellous adventures. But Glen Dye has an interest\nof another kind. Centuries ago it was the home and property of the family\nof Cant, from whom Andrew Cant, the noted Covenanting preacher, was\ndescended,[2] and with whom the more widely celebrated Immanuel Kant,\nchief factor in the philosophical thought of modern Europe, claimed\nconnection. Strachan is thus associated in imagination with two of\nthe most illustrious thinkers of the eighteenth century. Thomas Reid\nis in this way connected locally with his famous German philosophical\ncontemporary, as well as by parallels in their lives which appear in the\nsequel, and by spiritual analogies in their philosophy. They are moreover\nunited by their common antagonism to the scepticism of David Hume, who\nalso through them is associated with the moorland valley of the Feugh,\nmaking it suggest to fancy three memorable intellectual figures. In\nScotland David Hume and Thomas Reid are the two greatest names of their\ncentury in philosophy.\n\nImagination is our only guide when we try to picture the boyhood of\nThomas Reid in the homely surroundings at Strachan. The one recorded fact\nabout him is, that in his tenth year the home education of the manse\nwas followed by two years spent in the neighbouring parish school of\nKincardine O\u2019Neil. Thus far no signal signs of future eminence appeared.\nHe was, it seems, an unprecocious youth, remarked for modesty and patient\nindustry. The insight of the schoolmaster is said to have found in him\nthe rudiments of a man of \u2018good and well-wearing parts.\u2019 I wish that some\nfurther record could be found of this sagacious prophet of his pupil\u2019s\nsteady mental concentration, and I have not discovered why the boy was\nplaced in the Kincardine school. This dim picture is our only one in the\nfirst twelve years of his life.\n\nThe lack of personal incident in those years is in a manner compensated\nby the interest of an illustrious ancestry\u2014Reids and Gregories. He\ninherited mind through his father, but much more through his mother,\nwith whom he shared the unique celebrity of a family which in successive\ngenerations shed lustre on the valley of the Dee\u2014a memorable example of\ninherited intellect.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIn the end of the fourteenth century certain lands of Pitfodels,\nbetween the bridge of Dee at Aberdeen and the Den of Cults, became the\nproperty of William Reid, a kinsman of the former owner, Alexander\nMoray, \u2018lord of Culboyne.\u2019 The lands remained in the Reid family\nuntil the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Marion, heiress\nof Alexander, the last Reid of Pitfodels, married Thomas, the eldest\nson of Gilbert Menzies, a burgess of Aberdeen, whose family was known\nthereafter for three centuries as Menzies of Pitfodels. James Reid,\nthe first minister of Banchory-Ternan after the Reformation, was, it\nseems, grandson of a younger brother of this Alexander of Pitfodels;\nand Lewis Reid, the minister of Strachan, was in direct descent from\nthe minister of Banchory. It is told of James Reid that he was \u2018a man\nof notable head-piece for witte, and the most of his children were men\nof extraordinary qualifications.\u2019 His eldest son, Robert, noted for\ngood sense, succeeded him at Banchory. The second son, Thomas, was one\nof the numerous Scots famed for learning, who migrated to the Continent\nin the end of the fifteenth century and after. He was educated partly\nat Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he was made regent about 1602.\nHe was afterwards in residence at Oxford and abroad: he defended a\nthesis \u2018_De objecto Metaphysic\u00e6_\u2019 at Rostock in 1610. After his return\nto Britain he became Greek and Latin Secretary to King James, some of\nwhose works he translated into Latin. Verses of his may be found in the\n\u2018_Deliti\u00e6 Poetarum Scotorum_.\u2019 Alexander, the next brother, was physician\nto Charles I., and author of works in physiology well considered at\nthat time. John, a brother of the minister of Banchory, translated\ninto \u2018the Scottishe tunge\u2019 Buchanan\u2019s _History of Scotland_, and this\nunpublished version is in the College of Glasgow. A second Robert,\ngrandson of the eldest of these four sons, became minister of Banchory\nat the Restoration; he was a member of the first Episcopal Synod at\nAberdeen in the restored Establishment (the Covenanting Alexander Cant\nwas his immediate predecessor); he died in 1682. Thomas, the second son,\n\u2018wadsetter of Eslie in Banchorie,\u2019 was father of the Rev. Lewis Reid of\nStrachan, by his wife, Jane, a niece of Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys; and\nthus young Thomas Reid at Strachan was related to the family from which\nthe historian Bishop Burnet was descended. These Reids of Banchory rest\nin the old burial-ground there, \u2018not farre from the banke of the river\nDee, expecting the general resurrection, and the glorious appearing of\nJesus Christ there Redemier.\u2019\n\nBut the Gregory connection of Thomas Reid through his mother is, as I\nhave said, more significant than the Reid succession. During the Civil\nWars of the seventeenth century, the minister of the rural parish of\nDrumoak, on the north side of the Dee, between Banchory and Pitfodels,\nwas the Rev. John Gregory, son of an Aberdeen merchant, whose father was\na M\u2019Gregor from Glenlyon. The Gregories of Deeside were thus descendants\nof the clan Gregor of Glenlyon and Glenstrae, a circumstance referred\nto by Sir Walter Scott in the Introduction to _Rob Roy_. The minister\nof Drumoak married a lady named Anderson, one of a family reputed for\nmathematical ability in successive generations. She inherited the genius\nof her family, and transmitted it to her sons. Her husband at Drumoak\nseems to have steered his cause skilfully in that troubled time, for he\nbought the good estate of Kinairdy, part of the heritage of the lordly\nhouse of Creighton Viscount Frendraught. Alexander, the eldest son of the\nRev. John Gregory of Kinairdy, was killed by one of the Creightons in a\nfray in 1663, and the homicide was the occasion of a _cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre_.\nDavid, the second son, succeeded his murdered brother in the lands of\nKinairdy, and shared in the mathematical inheritance of the Gregories.\nFor some reason he sold Kinairdy and became an energetic merchant,\nspending part of his life in Holland. This David of Kinairdy was twice\nmarried, and father of twenty-nine children, which perhaps explains the\nsale. The wife of the Rev. Lewis Reid of Strachan was a daughter of\nthe second marriage. Three of her brothers were eminent Professors of\nMathematics in British Universities\u2014namely, David, first at Edinburgh,\nand then at Oxford, the friend of Newton; James, the successor of David\nin Edinburgh; and Charles, who professed mathematics at St. Andrews.\nDavid\u2019s son was Professor of History at Oxford from 1724 till 1767, and\nDean of Christ Church; and his cousin David succeeded to the chair of\nMathematics at St. Andrews. Two other Professors were sons of two of\n\u2018Kinairdy\u2019s\u2019 daughters\u2014namely, our Thomas Reid, and Alexander Innes,\nwho professed Philosophy in Marischal College. These all traced their\nbirth to the minister of Drumoak and his mathematical wife\u2014through\ntheir son David. But James, the third son of the Drumoak manse, was not\nless illustrious in himself and in his descendants. He was Professor\nof Mathematics, first at St. Andrews and then at Edinburgh, inventor\nof the reflecting telescope, also Newton\u2019s friend and correspondent,\nwho introduced the science of Newton into the Universities of Scotland.\nIt is of him that Whiston writes from Cambridge:\u2014\u2018He had already\ncaused several of his students to keep acts upon several branches of\nthe Newtonian philosophy; while we at Cambridge, poor wretches, were\nignominiously studying the fictitious hypotheses of the Cartesian.\u2019\nHis son James became in 1725 Professor of Medicine in King\u2019s College,\nAberdeen, a considerable local figure. He had two sons: James, who\nsucceeded his father, and John, a regent of philosophy in his father\u2019s\ncollege, afterwards Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh, and remembered\nas the author of _A Comparative View of Man and the Animal World_, and\n_A Father\u2019s Legacy_, books full of good sense. Dr. John Gregory\u2019s son,\nJames, was Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh from 1776 till 1821, a\nphysician and a metaphysician\u2014in the sequel, the intimate friend and\ncorrespondent of Thomas Reid, and the patron of Thomas Brown. Of his\nfamily, one son held the Chair of Chemistry in King\u2019s College, and\nafterwards in Edinburgh till his death in 1858; another, Donald, was an\neminent arch\u00e6ologist, author of the _History of the Western Highlands\nand Islands_; a third died in high mathematical repute at Cambridge,\nreturning to the original bent of this extraordinary family, in which\nthe disposition to mathematics had latterly been overborne by medicine\nand moral philosophy. Even this long list of names omits scientific\ncelebrities who were descended from the minister of Drumoak and his wife,\nMargaret Anderson, more remotely still from the wild clan Gregor of\nGlenlyon and Glenorchy.\n\nBut the life of romantic adventure did not descend to young Thomas\nReid at Strachan. A disposition to look at the world on its moral and\nreligious side, perhaps inherited from the Reids, with a strong bent\nto mathematics and the scientific side of things, inherited from the\nGregories, along with his own patient, concentrated reflection, was the\ninheritance of the boy \u2018of good and well-wearing parts\u2019 who left the\nKincardine school in 1722. The long life that followed presents none\nof the outward incidents that readily touch the popular fancy; but to\nthose awake to the higher problems of human life it touches thought\nand imagination in another fashion. It has been said that a human life\nshould resemble a well-ordered poem: the exordium should be simple and\nshould promise little. This condition is fulfilled in the life of Thomas\nReid, which, to the end, was modestly spent in learned retirement,\nindifferent to vulgar fame. Its chief interest lies in the spectacle\nof penetrating sagacity, independent and sincere, steadily devoted to\nthe invisible world of thought and belief, in quest of the ultimate\nfoundations and guarantees of human knowledge. It should attract those\nwho, in an age of sceptical criticism, seek to assure themselves of\nthe final trustworthiness of the experience into which, at birth, they\nwere admitted as strangers, ignorant of what the whole means, like the\nagnostic in Pascal. Who has sent me into this life, I know not; what\nthe world around me is, I know not; nor what I am myself. I find myself\nchained to one little planet, but without understanding why I am here\nrather than there; and why this period of time was given me to live in\nrather than any other in the unbeginning and endless duration. Life with\nits memories and forecasts looks like a blind venture. The sum of my\nknowledge seems to be that I must die; but what I am most ignorant of\nis the meaning of death. One is drawn to Reid by an interest in final\nquestions like these, which the agnostic spirit is now forcing upon\nus. It was the sceptical disintegration of human knowledge and belief\nthat was going on in his own time that led Reid, with the patience and\npersistency revealed in his boyhood, to devote a long life to testing\nin his own sincere fashion man\u2019s intellectual and moral footing in that\nworld of sense which, all strange to it, he entered in the valley of the\nFeugh.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nAT MARISCHAL COLLEGE\n\n1722-1737\n\n\nAt the age of twelve Reid emerges out of the obscurity in which his\nboyhood lies concealed from us. In one of his letters to his cousin,\nDr. James Gregory, written in his old age, he mentions \u2018April 1722\u2019\nas the date of his first visit to Aberdeen, then a town of some eight\nthousand inhabitants, and twenty miles distant from the moorland valley\nin which he was born. He tells how he was taken to see his grandmother,\nwho was living in Aberdeen, the second wife and widow of David Gregory\nof Kinairdy. \u2018I found her,\u2019 he says, \u2018old and bedridden, but I never\nsaw a more ladylike woman. I was now and then called into her room,\nwhen she sat upon her bed, or entertained me with sweetmeats and grave\nadvices. Her daughters that assisted her often, as well as one who lived\nwith her, treated her as if she had been of a superior rank; and indeed\nher appearance and manner commanded respect. She and all her children\nwere zealous Presbyterians: the first wife\u2019s children were Tories and\nEpiscopalians.\u2019 This picture of the boy in Aberdeen we owe to his\nmovement from the country school in the valley of the Dee to the higher\nsphere of the Aberdeen Grammar School, which he seems to have entered\nin that April, encouraged perhaps by the prognostic of the Kincardine\nschoolmaster. The Grammar School Register tells that in \u2018October 1722\u2019\nThomas Reid left it to enter Marischal College, where his name appears\nin the list of those matriculated that autumn. It was an early age for\nUniversity life according to later ideas, but not at variance with the\ncustom of Scotland in those days. Burnet, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury,\nanother eminent Aberdonian, entered Marischal College when he was only\nnine, and graduated when he was thirteen; and Burnet\u2019s contemporary,\nReid\u2019s granduncle, James Gregory, graduated when he was not older than\nBurnet.\n\nThe uncouth and dilapidated structure in which the University of the\nEarls Marischal was housed when young Reid was spending his undergraduate\nyears in it, bore no resemblance to the stately College on the same site\nwhich now adorns the prosperous city of Bon Accord. The process of decay\nwas so rapid, and the case was so urgent, that a few years later the\nregents suspended their official claim to a part of the scanty funds of\nthe College, and also asked help from the community, \u2018to preserve from\nruin an university from whence so many accomplished men have gone forth\nas ornaments of their country in every age since its foundation.\u2019 The\ntroubles of 1715 had further reduced its resources. Its Chancellor, the\ntenth Earl Marischal, concerned in the rising of Mar, then forfeited\nhis title and the official connection of his family with the academical\nfoundation of his ancestor. The Principal and most of the authorities had\nbeen removed or suspended by a commission of visitation in 1717. During\nthe two years which followed the adventure of Mar the doors of Marischal\nCollege were closed, so that, when public instruction was resumed in\n1717, a new race of teachers was in possession, and, as it happened, an\nera of intellectual activity was inaugurated.\n\nNotwithstanding the humble accommodation which it offered, and the\nsocial revolution through which it had lately passed, Marischal College\ncould then boast of at least three eminent teachers, imbued with the\nspirit of the \u2018new philosophy,\u2019 and of the reviving literary taste in\nScotland. The Professor of Mathematics was Colin M\u2019Laurin, brother of the\neloquent Presbyterian preacher, himself among the foremost of British\nmathematicians, a friend and correspondent of the aged Newton, who,\nalong with Reid\u2019s inherited disposition, attracted the young student to\nthe study in which the teacher was a master. And about the time when\nReid entered College, Thomas Blackwell, a critic of Homer, and author of\n_Memoirs of the Court of Augustus_, prominent among his countrymen who\nwere anxious to write good English, became Professor of Greek, and for a\ngeneration encouraged classical taste and love of literature in the north\nof Scotland. But the teacher who chiefly influenced Reid\u2019s undergraduate\nlife was George Turnbull, a copious author, though his books are little\nremembered now. He was Reid\u2019s guide for three years; for the College was\nthen under a system of \u2018regents\u2019 which intrusted the student to the same\nteacher in all the three years given to \u2018philosophy\u2019\u2014natural as well as\nmoral.\n\nReid was fortunate in entering Marischal College when it was inspired by\nM\u2019Laurin, Blackwell, and Turnbull, each a leader in the scientific and\nliterary awakening of the time. The Aberdeen of 1725 was no longer the\nAberdeen of the ministers of whom Gordon in his _Scots Affairs_ tells\nthat they shrieked, \u2018downe with learning and up with Christ.\u2019 Their\nreligion was in alliance with culture and progressive intelligence,\nanticipating in the North the intellectual enlargement associated in the\nWest with the University of Glasgow under Hutcheson, Leechman, and Adam\nSmith.\n\nGeorge Turnbull is little known now, but he is too important a factor in\nthe making of Thomas Reid to be lightly passed over. He was an Edinburgh\ngraduate, born in 1698, and like Reid a son of the manse. He became a\nregent of philosophy in Marischal College at the age of twenty-three. The\nCollege record informs us that on the 14th of April 1726 he presented\nfor graduation a band of thirty-nine students: the name of Thomas Reid\nappears last in the list. Turnbull\u2019s lectures when he was regent were\nin 1740 embodied in his _Principles of Moral Philosophy_. His leading\narguments are illustrated and vindicated by quotations from Berkeley\u2019s\n_Theory of Vision_ and _Principles of Human Knowledge_, also by the\n_Inquiry_ of Francis Hutcheson and the _Sermons_ of Bishop Butler. The\ninfluence of Berkeley is evident.\n\nThe mottoes on the title-page of Turnbull\u2019s book express his method\nof inquiry. One of them is the precept of Pope\u2014\u2018Account for moral as\nfor natural things\u2019; the other expresses in the words of Newton the\nconsequence which may be expected to follow\u2014\u2018If Natural Philosophy, in\nall its parts, by pursuing this method, shall at length be perfected, the\nbounds of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged.\u2019 Turnbull was among\nthe first in Scotland to substitute, in mental philosophy, tentative\nstudy of the facts of human nature for logical deduction from abstract\ndogmas. \u2018If a fact be actually found, either in the outer world of\nsensible things, or in the inner and invisible world of mind, there is\nno room for reasoning against it. Every reasoning, however subtle, if\nit be repugnant in its conclusion to the actual fact of the case, must\nbe sophistical.\u2019 Turnbull is fond of repeating that facts presented to\nthe senses are not the only, nor yet the most important, facts which the\nuniverse contains. The invisible facts which take the form of beliefs\nand feelings and volitions are the deepest facts of all: spirit and not\nmatter at last regulates life. Then he refers to what he calls \u2018common\nsense\u2019 as the final arbiter in all questions. \u2018Common sense is sufficient\nto teach those who think of the matter with seriousness and attention all\nthe duties of common life; all our obligations to God and our fellow-men;\nall that is morally fit and binding.\u2019 In a word, spiritual facts of mind\nare not to be crushed out of existence by tangible and visible facts of\nmatter. That mind in the form of will is the only known active power is\nanother prominent lesson in Turnbull\u2019s teaching. \u2018It is will alone that\nmanifests power or productive energy. To speak of any other active power\nin the universe is to speak without meaning; because experience, the\nsource of all the materials of our knowledge, does not lead us to any\nother conception of power.\u2019 Turnbull\u2019s conception of the material world\nis very like Berkeley\u2019s. Matter is the established or natural order in\nwhich sense ideas present themselves. \u2018Properly speaking, what we call\nmatter and space are only sensible ideas, produced in us, according to an\nestablished or natural order, by some external cause; for when we speak\nof material things, we can only mean certain sensible perceptions that\narise in our minds, according to a fixed order, but which are experienced\nto be absolutely inert or passive, having in themselves no productive\nforce.\u2019 It was in this philosophy that Turnbull\u2019s most famous pupil was\neducated at Marischal College.\n\nTurnbull\u2019s official connection with the College lasted only six years.\nAfter inaugurating moral philosophy in the modern spirit in Scotland, he\nresigned in the spring of 1727, and, after some residence abroad, lived\nin London, producing books in excess of the demand for them. He ended by\ntaking orders in the Irish branch of the Anglican Church, finding the\ncommunion of Jeremy Taylor and Berkeley more suited to his temper than\nthe fervid Presbyterianism to which he was accustomed in his youth. In\nsearch of health, he died at the Hague in 1749.\n\nI have enlarged on Turnbull, because by him Reid was first attracted\nto the study of the human mind. But Blackwell, the Professor of Greek,\nmust not be forgotten. Blackwell, as well as Turnbull, was connected\nwith Berkeley. It was when Reid was at Marischal College that Berkeley\nwas engaged in the most romantic missionary enterprise of that age, for\nspreading Christian civilisation in America by a College in the Bermudas.\nCuriously, Blackwell was one of those whom he asked to join the little\nparty of missionaries who embarked with him at Gravesend in September\n1728, after he had surrendered high preferment in Ireland in order\nto devote his life to a more cosmopolitan philanthropy. The Aberdeen\nregent was not prepared for the sacrifice. He refers thus to Berkeley\u2019s\nadventure:\u2014\n\n    \u2018In this respect I would with pleasure do justice to the\n    memory of a very great though singular sort of man, known as\n    a philosopher, and intended founder of a University in the\n    Bermudas or Summer Islands. An inclination to carry me out\n    with him on that expedition, as one of the young professors\n    on his new foundation, having brought us often together, I\n    scarce remember to have conversed with him on that art, liberal\n    or mechanic, of which he knew not more than the ordinary\n    practitioners. With the widest views, he descended to the most\n    minute detail, and begrudged neither pains nor expense for\n    the means of information. I enter not into his peculiarities,\n    either religious or personal, but admire the extensive genius\n    of the man, and think it a loss to the Western world that\n    his noble and exalted plan of an American University was not\n    carried into execution.\u2019\u2014_Memoirs of the Court of Augustus._\n\nThe fact that Berkeley was so much in evidence at Marischal College in\nthose days, through Turnbull and Blackwell, is significant of much in the\nlife of Reid.\n\nIf Reid recorded his thoughts when he was a student at Marischal College,\nthe record has been lost. A commonplace book like Berkeley\u2019s, when\nBerkeley was an undergraduate in Dublin, would have cast welcome light on\nthis part of his mental history. The only extant revelation of his inner\nlife in these years is contained in a letter written half a century after\nto his kinsman William Gregory at Oxford. It relates to the period when\nhis year was divided between town and country\u2014the winters at Aberdeen and\nthe long summer days at the manse of Strachan:\u2014\n\n    \u2018About the age of fourteen I was,\u2019 he says, \u2018almost every\n    night unhappy in my sleep from frightful dreams: sometimes\n    hanging over a dreadful precipice, and just ready to drop down;\n    sometimes pursued for my life and stopped by a wall, or by a\n    sudden loss of strength; sometimes ready to be devoured by a\n    wild beast. How long I was plagued with such dreams I do not\n    recollect. I believe it was for a year or two at least; and I\n    think they had left me before I was fifteen. In those days I\n    was much given to what Mr. Addison in one of his \u201cSpectators\u201d\n    calls _castle-building_; and in my evening solitary walk (which\n    was generally all the exercise I took), my thoughts would hurry\n    me into some active scene, where I generally acquitted myself\n    much to my own satisfaction, and in those scenes of imagination\n    I performed many a gallant exploit. At the same time, in my\n    dreams I found myself the most arrant coward. Not only my\n    courage but my strength failed me in every danger; and I often\n    rose from my bed in the morning in such a panic that it took\n    some time to get the better of it. I wished much to get free of\n    these uneasy dreams, which not only made me unhappy in sleep,\n    but left a disagreeable impression on my mind for some part of\n    the following day. I thought it was worth trying whether it\n    was possible to recollect while I was dreaming that it _was_\n    all a dream, and that I was in no danger. Accordingly, I often\n    went to sleep with my mind as strongly impressed as I could\n    with this thought\u2014that I never in my lifetime had been in any\n    real danger, and that every fright I had was a dream. After\n    many fruitless endeavours to recollect this when the danger\n    appeared, I effected it at last, and have often, when I was\n    sliding down a precipice into the abyss, recollected that it\n    was all a dream, and boldly jumped down. The effect of this\n    commonly was that I immediately awoke; but I awoke calm and\n    intrepid, which I thought a great acquisition. After this my\n    dreams were never very uneasy; and in a short time I dreamed\n    not at all. During all this time I was in perfect health; but\n    whether my ceasing to dream was the effect of the recollection\n    above mentioned, or of any change in the habit of my body,\n    which is usual about that period of life, I cannot tell. I\n    think it may more probably be imputed to the last. However, the\n    fact was that for at least forty years after I dreamt none,\n    to the best of my remembrance; and finding from the testimony\n    of others that this is somewhat uncommon, I have often as I\n    awoke endeavoured to recollect, without being able to recollect\n    anything that passed in my sleep. The only distinct dream I\n    ever had since I was about sixteen, as far as I remember, was\n    about two years ago (1777). I had got my head blistered for a\n    fall. A plaster which was put upon it after the blister pained\n    me excessively for a whole night. In the morning I slept a\n    little, and dreamed very distinctly that I had fallen into the\n    hands of a party of Indians and was scalped. I am apt to think\n    that, as there is a state of sleep and a state wherein we are\n    awake, so there is an intermediate state which partakes of the\n    other two. I have slept on horseback, but so as to preserve my\n    balance; and if the horse stumbled, I could make the exertion\n    necessary to save me from a fall, as if I was awake.\u2019\n\nIn all this one detects the disposition to sober introspection, which\nripened as life advanced.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nDuring the ten years that followed the graduation in April 1726 we have\nonly faint traces of Reid. In the following winter he began to study\ntheology, and in 1731 he had completed the course required by the Church,\nunder the direction of Professor James Chalmers, father of the founder of\nthe _Aberdeen Journal_. This is another parallel between Reid and Kant:\nboth, it seems, were theologically trained.\n\nReid\u2019s name first appears in the books of the Presbytery of Kincardine\nO\u2019Neil when he was in his nineteenth year. Extracts from the minutes with\nwhich I have been favoured record his progress with a quaint simplicity\nnot without interest, as part of the history of a philosopher:\u2014\n\n    \u2018On the 17th of July, 1728, James Lumsden, John Beaton, Thomas\n    Reid, and David Ross, students in divinity, residing within the\n    bounds of the presbytery, being now present, the presbytery\n    thought fit to appoint each of them to be in readiness to\n    deliver a homily against the next meeting, and accordingly\n    appointed Mr. Reid to deliver a homily on John i. 29.\u201418\n    September 1728. This day Mr. Thomas Reid delivered his homily,\n    with which the presbytery being satisfied, the moderator\n    encouraged him to go on with his studies.\u20148th June 1731. The\n    presbytery considering that Mr. Thomas Reid had been allowed by\n    the Synod to enter upon tryal, and he, being upon the place,\n    did undergo questioning tryal, wherein he was approved, and\n    the presbytery appointed him to be in readyness to deliver a\n    lecture on Ps. ii., and an exegesis on that common head. _Num\n    detur peccatum originale inherens._\u201422nd September 1731. This\n    day Mr. Thomas Reid underwent a questioning tryal and was\n    approved. And the presbytery taking into consideration that he,\n    having passed his course in Arts at the College, and thereafter\n    having studied Divinity for the space of [3] years, as also\n    having resided for the whole of this time within the bounds\n    of this presbytery; and they looking upon him as a person fit\n    to be entered upon tryals, and also having had sufficient\n    testimonials from the professors of divinity with whom he\n    studied as to his proficiency in his studys and good behaviour,\n    he was admitted to the usual tryals appointed by the Acts of\n    the General Assembly of this Church, and having passed through\n    all the parts thereof, he was licensed by the said presbytery\n    to preach the Gospel of Christ, and exercise his gifts as a\n    probationer for the holy ministry.\u2019\n\nOn the 2nd of August 1732, \u2018the Presbytery chose Mr. Thomas Reid to be\ntheir Clerk.\u2019 On the 5th of October in the same year, \u2018the Presbytery\nappointed Mr. Thomas Reid to supply at Lumphanan the second Sabbath after\nMr. Gordon\u2019s removal.\u2019 On the 8th of November, \u2018Mr. Thomas Reid was\ncontinued Clerk till the next meeting of the provincial Synod,\u2019 in April\n1733.\n\nIn July 1733 Reid re-appears, this time not engaged in ecclesiastical\nministration, but as the librarian of Marischal College. It was an office\nwith which he had a family connection. \u2018The most outstanding name in\nthe history of Marischal College Library,\u2019 says Mr. Rait, \u2018is that of\nThomas Reid, Latin secretary to James vi., son of James Reid, minister of\nBanchory-Ternan. In 1624 he left to Marischal College his own library,\n6000 merks to be invested in land, and a sum of money to provide a salary\nfor a librarian.\u2019 The secretary\u2019s brother, Alexander, also bequeathed\nbooks of philosophy and divinity. And David Gregory of Kinairdy was for\nsome time librarian. It was an acceptable retreat for research, and a\nmark of esteem from the College. Mr. Rose, Reid\u2019s brother-in-law, says\nthat he then studied Newton\u2019s _Principia_ and Locke\u2019s _Essay_.[4] Again\na parallel between Reid and Kant. Some time after Kant had taken his\ndegree he was made librarian in the Schloss Library, with a yearly\nstipend of about \u00a310. This was nominally in excess of Reid\u2019s modest\nhonorarium of \u00a39 at Aberdeen, a pittance which was for a time suspended\nby threatened litigation. He was in active service as librarian till\n1736, and for two years more in possession, \u2018on leave of absence, with a\nsubstitute.\u2019\n\nThe need for a \u2018substitute\u2019 in 1736 can be explained. In that year, for\nthe first time, Reid is found outside Scotland. He is making a tour\nin England, with Stewart, the friend of his undergraduate years, and\nnow Professor of Mathematics in Marischal College. The record of their\nmovements in the South is scanty. Reid\u2019s uncle, Dr. George Reid, then a\nphysician in London, provided a home for them in the metropolis; and as\nDavid Gregory, Reid\u2019s cousin, was Professor of History at Oxford, they\nfound another home on the Isis, with an easy introduction to the colleges\nand social life of the great English University. The Gregory connection\nalso opened the way to interesting things and persons at Cambridge as\nwell as at Oxford and London. Reid, it seems, saw Bentley at Cambridge,\n\u2018who delighted him with his learning and amused him with his vanity\u2019:\nhere, too, he enjoyed the conversation of the blind mathematician\nSaunderson, whose experience he afterwards turned to good account in\nhis inquiries regarding the sense of seeing. One would like to have had\nReid\u2019s first impressions of England, its metropolis, its social and\nchurch life, and its ancient colleges. It does not appear that the scenes\nthrough which he moved awakened in him much historic sentiment; that,\nlike his contemporary Berkeley, Oxford would be the ideal home of his old\nage; or that he was greatly moved by its academic splendour, associated\nwith what is noblest in English history, and by the soft repose of the\nsurrounding rural scenes. In one of his letters to Dr. James Gregory,\nhe speaks of the first time he was in \u2018Dean Gregory\u2019s house at Oxford,\u2019\nwhen the Dean told \u2018the story of the watch very well to a large company\nof Oxonians\u2019; so we may infer that other visits followed in later life.\nAnd the Oxford of his first visit was the degenerate Oxford described\nby Adam Smith and Gibbon, who were in residence a few years after. Reid\nis seldom again found out of Scotland. There is no sign that he ever\nvisited Ireland or the Continent in his retired, sedate, and methodical\nlife. In this, too, he was like Kant, who in all his eighty years is said\nnever to have travelled more than forty miles from his native K\u00f6nigsberg.\nThe stay-at-home disposition common to both is not unlike the character\nreflected in their books.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nNEW MACHAR AND DAVID HUME\n\n1737-1751\n\n\nSoon after Reid\u2019s return to Marischal College from his English tour,\nthe young librarian was presented, by the professors of King\u2019s College,\nto the pastoral charge of New Machar, a parish some ten miles to the\nnorth-west of Aberdeen. The fact that his kinsman, James Gregory, was\nprofessor in King\u2019s may perhaps explain this unwonted exercise of\npatronage in favour of a graduate of the rival College.\n\nThe presentation, at any rate, raised a storm of opposition among the\nparishioners. It was the occasion of one of those conflicts of Church\nparties to which the law of patronage gave rise in Scotland in those\ndays. The incidents of Reid\u2019s introduction to ecclesiastical office\nform a characteristic picture. Rural prejudice was due in this case to\nvarious circumstances. It was partly influenced by a sermon, preached\nin the church of New Machar, on February 10, 1737, at the moderation of\nthe call, by the Rev. John Bisset, one of the ministers of Aberdeen. Mr.\nBisset had himself been minister of the parish ten years before. He was\nnow a noted preacher in the North, and one with whom express concurrence\nof the congregation in an ecclesiastical settlement was a high article\nof doctrine.[5] In his sermon he denounced aristocratic interference,\ninsinuated undue outside influence and personal favour, claimed a right\nto a vote in the election of his minister for every Christian, the poor\nman as much as the rich, and concluded with an appeal to his audience to\nquit themselves like men, and to trust in God. The recent history of the\nparish strengthened this appeal. The last presentation to New Machar was\ninauspicious. In 1729 a \u2018riding committee\u2019 had introduced Mr. Bisset\u2019s\nsuccessor. Soon after, the new minister was accused of \u2018powdering his wig\non the Sabbath.\u2019 Absolved by the Church courts, he was in 1736 deposed\nfor a graver offence. It was a time of ecclesiastical anarchy in New\nMachar. The record of the parish is blank between the minute which tells\nof the departure of Mr. Bisset in 1728, and that which registers \u2018the\nordination of Mr. Thomas Reid\u2019 in May 1737.\n\nReid was the innocent victim of the sermon and the scandal when he came\nto be ordained on May 12, 1737. He had been violently attacked and\nmaltreated by persons in disguise, who, according to tradition, ducked\nhim in a horse-pond. It is also told that when he officiated for the\nfirst time in the parish church, he was guarded in the pulpit by a drawn\nsword.\n\nFor fifteen years New Machar manse was Reid\u2019s home. Popular prejudice was\novercome by his mild, beneficent activity. Those who had been carried\ninto outrage by hasty judgment at the beginning, followed him on his\ndeparture with blessings and tears. \u2018We fought against Mr. Reid when\nhe came,\u2019 they are reported as saying, \u2018and we would have fought for\nhim when he went away.\u2019 His marriage, in August 1740, to his cousin\nElizabeth, a daughter of his London uncle, Dr. George Reid, promoted\nthis change. The gracious manner and constant goodness of this companion\nof his life for more than fifty years was long remembered in the\nAberdeenshire parish. Six daughters and three sons were the issue of the\nmarriage. Five daughters were born at New Machar, and one died there.\nReid\u2019s family bible at Birkwood contains the following interesting record\nin his handwriting:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Mr. Thomas Reid was born at Strachan, April 26, 1710; married\n    to Elizabeth Reid, August 12, 1740. The said Elizabeth was\n    born August 3, 1724. Their children:\u2014(1) Jean, born July 21,\n    1741, died February 27, 1772, buried in College Churchyard,\n    Glasgow; (2) Margaret, born October 20, 1742, died 1772,\n    buried as above; (3) Martha, born August 22, 1744, married Dr.\n    Patrick Carmichael; (4) Elizabeth, born February 21, 1746, died\n    of smallpox in August 1746, buried in the Churchyard of New\n    Machar; (5) Anna, born July 10, 1751, died of chin-cough May\n    21, 1753, buried in the Isle of Old Machar; (6) George, born\n    February 11, 1755, died at St. John\u2019s, Newfoundland, February\n    1780; (7) Lewis, born December 13, 1756, died of teething July\n    19, 1758, buried in the Isle of Old Machar; (8) David, born\n    February 26, 1762, died at Edinburgh August 30, 1782; (9)\n    Elizabeth, born May 8, 1766, died June 1, 1767, of smallpox by\n    inoculation, buried in the College Churchyard, Glasgow.\u2019\n\nThe story of the fifteen years at New Machar, as we have it, is almost\nempty of incidents, a dim picture. The scene does not warmly touch the\nimagination. Undulating hills of moderate size, chill and tame; land\nmonotonously fertile, with scanty timber; yet pleasant prospects in the\ndistance of the valley of the Don, with Benachie and remoter Grampians in\nthe background; a population mostly agricultural; two or three country\nmansions; the highroad from Aberdeen to Banff traversing the parish. New\nMachar was wanting, on the whole, in the breezy highland charm of the\nearly home at Strachan. The social life was simple but intellectually\nstagnant. Among the infrequent visitors at the manse I find incidental\nmention in Reid\u2019s letters of one. He tells that he made the acquaintance\nof the well-known Jacobite, Mr. Hepburn of Keith, \u2018by his lodging a night\nin my house at New Machar,\u2019 when he was in the Prince\u2019s army, on his\nway to Culloden; perhaps when he was in Lord George Murray\u2019s division,\nwhich retreated through Aberdeenshire in February 1746, or in one of\nthe detachments which were in motion around New Machar in the preceding\nDecember.\n\nThe Thomas Reid who is revealed to us in his books does not promise\npulpit eloquence likely to interest this rustic population. Like Bishop\nButler when he was in his remote rectory at Stanhope a few years\nbefore, he was pondering the chief intellectual work of his life in\nexile from intellectual society. None of Reid\u2019s sermons are found among\nhis manuscripts. Indeed, it appears that his characteristic modesty\nand diffidence, combined, it is said, with some neglect of literary\nculture in his early education, induced him at first to read to his\nrustic audience the sermons of eminent Anglican preachers, instead of\ncompositions of his own\u2014thus adopting a practice afterwards recommended\nby Paley, by which, with fit selection, many audiences might benefit\nin this age of social pressure. \u2018As to preaching,\u2019 says Paley, \u2018if\nyour situation requires a sermon every Sunday, make one and find\nfive.\u2019 Tillotson and the Nonconformist Evans are mentioned as Reid\u2019s\nfavourites, and something is said about Samuel Clarke. The luminous good\nsense of Tillotson, and the reverential temper of Evans, and the lucid\nreasoning of Clarke, would naturally attract Reid. But emotion as well\nas moral ideal was not wanting in his religious life. It is said that\nin a Communion Service tears fell from his eyes when he enlarged on the\ndivine beauty of the character of Jesus. The following expression of\nreligious feeling during an illness of his young wife appears among his\nmanuscripts, dated March 30, 1746:\u2014\n\n    \u2018O God, I desire humbly to supplicate Thy Divine Majesty in\n    behalf of my distressed wife, who is by Thy hand brought very\n    low, and in imminent danger of death, if Thou, who alone doest\n    wonders, do not in mercy interpose Thy almighty arm, and bring\n    her back from the gate of death. I deserve justly, O Lord,\n    that Thou shouldst deprive me of the greatest comfort of my\n    life, because I have not been so thankful to Thee as I ought\n    for giving me such a kind and affectionate wife. I have forgot\n    Thy goodness in bringing us happily together by an unforeseen\n    and undesigned train of events, and blessing us with so much\n    love and harmony of affection, and so many of the comforts and\n    conveniences of life. I have not been so careful as I ought\n    to have been to stir her up to piety and Christian virtues.\n    I have not taken that pains with my children and servants\n    and relatives as I ought. Alas! I have been too negligent of\n    my pastoral duty and my private devotions, too much given to\n    the pleasures and satisfactions of this world, and too little\n    influenced by the promises and the hope of a future state. I\n    have employed my studies, reading, and conversation rather to\n    please myself than to edify myself and others. I have sinned\n    greatly in neglecting many opportunities of making private\n    applications to my flock and family in the affairs of their\n    souls, and in using too slight preparation for my public\n    exercises. I have thrown away too much of my time in sloth and\n    sleep, and have not done so much for the relief of the poor and\n    destitute as I might have done. The means that Providence has\n    afforded me of correcting my evil inclinations I have abused to\n    pamper and feed them in various instances. For these and many\n    other sins which have escaped my memory Thou mightst justly\n    inflict so great a chastisement on me, as to make my children\n    motherless and deprive me of my dear wife. O Lord, accept of\n    my humble and penitent confession of these my offences, which\n    I desire to acknowledge with shame and sorrow, and am resolved\n    by Thy grace to amend. If Thou art pleased to hearken to the\n    voice of my supplications, and grant my request on behalf of my\n    dear wife in restoring her to health, I do promise and covenant\n    through grace to turn from these backslidings, to express my\n    thankfulness by a vigorous discharge of my duty as a Christian,\n    a minister, and master of a family, and by an alms of ten\n    pounds sterling to the poor in meat and money. Lord, pardon\n    if there is anything in this presumptuous, or unbecoming a\n    humble penitent sinner; and, Lord, accept of what is sincerely\n    designed as a new bond upon my soul to my duty, through Jesus\n    Christ, my Lord and Saviour.\u2019\n\nThis fervid expression of devotion reveals an intensity of purpose which\nworked beneath the outwardly placid and discreet life. Mrs. Reid survived\nthis critical illness for nearly half a century.\n\nMuch of Reid\u2019s time at New Machar, according to his brother-in-law\nMr. Rose, was spent in meditative thought, with an attention to the\nactivities of his own mind of which few men are capable. Traditions of\nsolitary walks immersed in study were long in circulation. He found\nhis chief recreation, we are told, in the manse garden or in botanical\nobservations. His society attracted his neighbours. With Sir Archibald\nGrant of Monymusk he maintained a lifelong intimacy. He never forgot New\nMachar, and long after, in times of distress, anonymous gifts were traced\nto his thoughtful but modest beneficence.\n\nThree years before Reid left New Machar, when he was in his thirty-eighth\nyear, he made his first appearance in print, in a short paper contributed\nto the Royal Society, which appeared in their _Transactions_ in October\n1748. It is called \u2018An Essay on Quantity.\u2019 It was occasioned by a book\npublished more than twenty years before, the _Inquiry into the Original\nof our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue_, by Francis Hutcheson, afterwards the\ncelebrated Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow. In this tract simple\nand compound ratios are applied, in forms of mathematical reasoning,\nto solve problems of moral philosophy. It illustrates in some degree\nthe bent of Reid\u2019s thoughts at this time, and his inherited interest in\nmathematical reasonings. But it also shows bent of thought in another\ndirection, and recognition of other scientific methods than mathematical\ndemonstration, which had been favoured as of universal application by\nphilosophers like Descartes and Spinoza. Reid argued, in the spirit of\nhis master Turnbull, that genuine ethical inquiry is concerned with a\nclass of facts which are under a higher category, and refuse to submit to\ngeometrical measurement.\n\nIt is a curious circumstance in the evolution of philosophy in Scotland\nthat Reid\u2019s first publication should thus be adverse criticism of\nHutcheson, the father of Modern Philosophy in Scotland. It is also\ncurious that this juvenile performance presents another of the parallels\nbetween Reid and Kant. For it happened that in the preceding year Kant\nhad made his first appearance, on a question concerned with mathematics,\nand, like Reid\u2019s, in an argument against conclusions maintained by\nLeibnitz.\n\nBut this mathematical _brochure_ imperfectly represents the \u2018intense\nstudy\u2019 at New Machar. For an event happened soon after Reid\u2019s settlement\nthere which determined the direction of his thoughts for the remainder of\nhis life. In January 1739, a book made an almost unnoticed appearance in\nLondon, which in the end became the chief factor in shaping the course of\nEuropean thought. Its author was David Hume, then a young man, unknown\nto fame, not thirty years of age, the younger son of a Berwickshire\nlaird. Hume was younger than Reid by one year: both were born on the\n26th of April. His name is popularly connected with the _History of\nEngland_; but this _Treatise of Human Nature_, which somehow found its\nway into the manse of New Machar, represents his most significant work.\nIt has contributed perhaps as much as any single book to the subsequent\nprogress of philosophy in Europe. Hume indeed penetrates into regions\nwhich the ordinary reader fails to connect with everyday interests of\nlife, or with the hopes and fears of human beings. Accordingly, as he\ntells, the _Treatise_ \u2018fell dead-born from the press, without attaining\nsuch distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.\u2019 In a\nletter to his friend Henry Home, afterwards Lord Kames, written soon\nafter this explosive mixture had been applied, its author announces that\nthe issue was \u2018but indifferent, if I may judge by the sale of the book,\nand if I may believe my bookseller. I am now out of humour with myself;\nbut doubt not in a little time to be out of humour with the world, like\nother unsuccessful authors. After all, I am sensible of my folly in\nentertaining any discontent, much more despair, on this account, since\nI could not expect any better from such abstract reasoning.\u2019 This book,\nwhich professes to explain \u2018human nature\u2019 as a fact in the universe,\nconducts to a final paralysis of human intelligence in universal doubt.\n\nThis threatened paralysis awoke Reid into his characteristic intellectual\nlife. He was among the first in Europe to see the far-reaching meaning of\nHume\u2019s account of man\u2019s condition. He found in it the deep-lying seeds\nof modern agnosticism. Its rashness was confessed by its author. \u2018I\nacknowledge a very great mistake in conduct in publishing my _Treatise\nof Human Nature_, a book which pretended to innovate in all the sublimest\nparts of philosophy, and which I composed before I was five-and-twenty.\nBut what success the same doctrines better illustrated and expressed\nmay meet with _adhuc sub judice lis est_. I wish I had always confined\nmyself to the more easy parts of erudition.\u2019 Accordingly, about ten\nyears after, Hume presented his \u2018sceptical doubts\u2019 in a milder form, and\naccompanied by a \u2018sceptical solution\u2019 of them, in an _Inquiry Concerning\nHuman Understanding_; but it was Hume in the original _Treatise_, not as\nrecast in the _Inquiry_, that moved Reid. Kant, like Reid, was awakened\nfrom what he calls his \u2018dogmatic slumber\u2019 by David Hume; but it was\nthe _Inquiry_, not the _Treatise_, of which last he appears ignorant,\nthat roused Kant. Reid grappled with the more open and all-pervading\nuncertainties of the earlier work.\n\nLet us look into the book which appalled the young minister of New Machar\nby the spectre of a meaningless universe and illusory human nature.\nIts author seemed to be indulging in \u2018a peculiar strain of humour when\nhe set out in his introduction by promising with a grave face no less\nthan a complete system of the sciences upon a foundation entirely new,\nnamely, human nature, while the intention of the whole work is to show\nthat there is neither human nature nor science in the world. He surely\nbelieved, against his principles, that he should be read, and that he\nshould retain his personal identity till he reaped the reputation justly\ndue to his metaphysical acumen.\u2019 Reid found him taking for granted as his\nfundamental maxim, that nothing can be admitted as true which cannot be\nlogically deduced from impressions of sense. Hume found the impressions\nof sense to be transitory, and distinguished in their succession by\ndegrees of intensity,\u2014sensations when in their highest intensity,\nmemories when in an abated degree, and mere fancies when the intensity\nis at a minimum. His maxim forbade recognition of more reality in the\nuniverse than a momentary reality of isolated perceptions, in their\ndifferent degrees of intensity, but without any reasonable retrospective\nmemory, or any reasonable expectation with its hopes or fears. What\nwe call \u2018existence\u2019 was resolved into an unintelligible chaos of felt\nimpressions\u2014a purposeless procession, in which the percipient loses his\nvery selfhood and all besides. The Past, the Distant, the Future, are\nall illusions. \u2018Things\u2019 and \u2018persons\u2019 are only unconnected transitory\nfeelings, without any permanent person to feel them. The word \u2018identity\u2019\nis meaningless. A person cannot be more than a momentary idea. \u2018I never\ncatch _self_ except in the form of a passing feeling.\u2019 Present feeling\nalone exists.\n\nIt is impossible without contradiction to express a philosophy which\ndestroys intelligible expression; virtually dismissing as absurdities\nall personal pronouns, all substantive nouns, and all verbs; leaving\nabstract adjectives as the only parts of speech;\u2014and, as such adjectives\nare really unintelligible, leaving us the speechless and motionless\nvictims of philosophical suicide. When I start with the preliminary maxim\nof Hume, I literally lose \u2018myself\u2019 at last in a radically untrustworthy\nuniverse, or I find myself suspended over a bottomless abyss. Here are\nthe last words of this intellectual suicide at the end of his destructive\nanalysis:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I am affrighted and confounded with the forlorn solitude in\n    which I am placed by my philosophy. When we trace up the human\n    understanding to its first principles, we find it to lead us\n    into such sentiments as seem to turn into ridicule all our\n    past pains and industry, and to discourage us from all future\n    inquiries. Nothing is more curiously inquired after by the\n    mind of man than the _causes_ of phenomena; nor are we content\n    with knowing the immediate causes, but push on our inquiries\n    till we arrive at the original and ultimate principle. This\n    is our aim in all our studies and reflections. And now we\n    must be disappointed when we learn that this tie lies merely\n    in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination which is\n    acquired by custom. Such a discovery not only cuts off all\n    hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our\n    very wishes; since it appears that when we desire to know the\n    ultimate and operating principle or something which resides\n    in the external object, we only contradict ourselves, or talk\n    without a meaning.... The intense view of these manifold\n    contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought\n    upon me and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all\n    belief and reasoning, and can look at no opinion even as more\n    probable or likely than another. All who believe anything, on\n    any subject, with certainty, must be fools.\u2019\n\nThis is the issue of the _Treatise of Human Nature_ when the logical\nunderstanding is finally resolved into transitory and isolated feelings,\nwithout permitted final postulates of reason, in the form of faith or in\nany other form, to connect and interpret them.\n\nIt was this issue that Reid took seriously. He set himself, at first for\nhis own satisfaction only, to consider the ground he had for trusting\nexperience, when Hume reported that experience dissolved into sensational\natoms. Accordingly he spent much of his time at New Machar in reflecting\nfirst of all on his perceptions through the senses. He began with these,\nbecause it seemed that even as the foundations of abstract mathematics\nlie in the mathematical axioms and definitions, so the foundations of\nall concrete reasoning are to be found in the rational constitution of\nperception through the five senses. \u2018In the tree of human knowledge,\nperception is the root, common understanding is the trunk, and the\nsciences are the branches.\u2019 Here is his own account of his state of mind\nwhen he was engaged in these New Machar wrestlings:\u2014\n\n    \u2018If my mind is indeed what the _Treatise of Human Nature_ makes\n    it, I find that I have been only in an enchanted castle, when\n    I seemed to be living in a well-ordered universe. I have been\n    imposed upon by spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly\n    to think how I have been deluded. I am ashamed of my frame,\n    and can hardly forbear expostulating with my destiny. I see\n    myself, and the whole frame of Nature, shrink into fleeting\n    ideas, which, like Epicurus\u2019s atoms, dance about in emptiness.\n    Descartes no sooner began to dig in this mine than scepticism\n    was ready to break in upon him. He did what he could to keep\n    it out. Malebranche and Locke, who dug deeper, found the\n    difficulty of keeping out the enemy still to increase; but they\n    laboured honestly in the design. Then Berkeley, who carried on\n    the work, despairing of securing all, bethought himself of an\n    expedient. By giving up the material world, which he thought\n    might be spared without loss, and even with advantage, he hoped\n    by an impregnable position to secure the world of spirits.\n    But, alas! the _Treatise of Human Nature_ wantonly sapped the\n    foundation of this partition, and drowned all in one universal\n    deluge.\u2019\n\nNearly forty years after he left New Machar, Reid says[6] that in early\nlife he \u2018believed the whole of Berkeley\u2019s system\u2019\u2014till Hume opened his\neyes to \u2018consequences\u2019 that follow from the philosophy of Descartes\nand his successors, \u2018which gave me more uneasiness than the want of a\nmaterial world. So it came into my mind more than forty years ago\u2019 to\nquestion its foundation. Hume accordingly made Reid revise critically the\nphilosophy in which he had been educated by George Turnbull. The issue\nappeared after he left New Machar.\n\nReid was now to be placed in a condition more favourable to intense and\npersistent thought. On November 22, 1751, he was admitted to King\u2019s\nCollege, Aberdeen, as one of its regent masters, in succession to Mr.\nAlexander Rait. The patronage was vested in the College, and the minute\nwhich records his election suggests the reputation which the rural pastor\nhad now secured among the cultured few, notwithstanding his modest and\nretired life.\n\nIt was not without reluctance that Reid left New Machar. Ramsay of\nOchtertyre, who knew him well, tells that when the deputation from King\u2019s\nCollege came to invite him to become a regent, \u2018he at first declined,\nexplaining that he desired to live in retirement till he should complete\nsome literary projects which engaged him. Mrs. Reid, however, having\ndiscovered the errand of the visitors, urged her husband to accept the\noffer, being less fond of retirement, and having no objection to a\nbetter income and better society. When her learned guests repeated their\nproposal after dinner, she seconded them with such cogent arguments that\nMr. Reid was beat out of all his objections.\u2019\u2014_Scotland and Scotsmen._\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nOLD ABERDEEN: A REGENT IN KING\u2019S COLLEGE\n\n1751-1764\n\n\nReid\u2019s movement from New Machar to the academic home opened for him in\nOld Aberdeen placed him and his young family amidst surroundings that\ntouch imagination by their natural beauty and historic associations.\nFor centuries the College, founded by Bishop Elphinstone, and at first\npresided over by Hector Boece, with its chapel and crowned tower, in the\n\n                    old university town,\n    Between the Don and the Dee,\n    Looking over the grey sand dunes,\n    Looking out on the cold North Sea,\n\nhas shed intellectual light over the North of Scotland, especially among\nthe Celts in the Highlands. At King\u2019s College one sees a miniature Oxford\nalmost under the shadow of the Grampians. Perhaps Reid\u2019s temperament was\ntoo prosaic to contemplate his new surroundings with the sentiment which\nthe city at the mouth of the Don afterwards called forth in Thackeray,\nwho, in \u2018a delightful tour in the north, was charmed with Inverness, and\nfell in love with Old Aberdeen\u2014an elderly decayed mouldering old beauty\nwho lives quietly on the seashore, near her grand new granite sister of\na city.\u2019 The affectionate recollection with which Sir James Mackintosh\nrecalled his student days at King\u2019s College, and the companionship\nthere of Robert Hall, is another testimony to its charms. The arena in\nwhich these two, called by their fellow-students \u2018Plato and Herodotus,\u2019\nencountered one another most frequently was in morals and metaphysics.\n\u2018After having sharpened their weapons by reading, they often repaired to\nthe spacious sands upon the seashore, and still more to the picturesque\nscenery on the banks of the Don above the old town and the Brig of\nBalgownie, to discuss with eagerness the problems of existence. There was\nscarcely an important position in Berkeley\u2019s _Minute Philosopher_, in\nButler\u2019s _Analogy_, or in _Edwards on the Will_, over which they did not\ndebate with the utmost intensity.\u2019 From these discussions in the environs\nof the \u2018old university town,\u2019 Mackintosh was wont to say that he \u2018learned\nmore than from all the books he ever read.\u2019\n\nIt was in the canonist\u2019s manse, pleasantly placed nearly in front of the\nCollege, immediately north of the Snow Church, at the entrance to Powis\nHouse, that Reid found himself in the winter of 1751.[7] It was rented\nby him from the University. The quaint manse, nestled among trees, with\nits low thatched roof,[8] has disappeared, and with it other picturesque\nold houses, which added charm to the neighbourhood when Reid taught in\nKing\u2019s College nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. The crown tower\nof the College chapel rose almost in front of the manse, the rival of\nSt. Giles\u2019s at Edinburgh and of St. Nicholas\u2019s at Newcastle, unique in\nScottish academical architecture. Eastwards in the quadrangle was the\nHall in which the students dined, a memorial of Bishop Elphinstone, and\nthe dormitories of the students, which were of later date. General Monk\u2019s\ntower stood in the eastern corner; behind the Hall was the kitchen, and\nnear it the College well, whence the links stretched to the shore, \u2018the\ngrey sand dunes\u2019 in those days unbroken by tame streets and modern villas.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe professorial system of divided work, which assigns special\ndepartments of learning to supposed experts, had not superseded in King\u2019s\nCollege the method of regency which prevailed in the early history of all\nthe universities of Scotland. The regent was intrusted with the education\nof his pupils from the first matriculation to graduation; or when Latin,\nGreek, and pure mathematics were each provided for professorially,\nregents in philosophy each taught in successive sessions the various\nbranches of natural and physical science, and of moral and metaphysical\nphilosophy. This system was followed in all the Scottish universities\nuntil last century. It was modified by the Commission of 1690, which\nordained that, besides a separate professor of Latin, one of the four\nregents should profess Greek only, and take charge of undergraduates in\ntheir first year. By about the middle of the century \u2018regenting\u2019 was\nwholly abolished in four of the five Universities\u2014in Edinburgh in 1708,\nin Glasgow in 1727, in St. Andrews in 1747, and in Marischal College\nand University in 1753. But in King\u2019s College the various branches of\nPhilosophy, natural and moral, were still regented when Reid began to\nteach. He was thus required to teach mathematics and the sciences of\nmatter, as well as psychology and moral philosophy. He thus gave lectures\non the philosophy of mind only every third year. One of the other two\nyears was given to natural history and the easier parts of physical\nscience; the second to mathematics and natural philosophy.\n\nDuring 1751-52, which was his first session, Reid as regent taught\nnatural philosophy to undergraduates of the third year; in the following\nwinter the same students, in their fourth year, were still in his\ncharge. His full sequence, accordingly, did not commence till 1753-54,\nwhen for the first time he took the second class, consisting of those\nbeginning philosophical studies. So his successive three years courses\nran thus:\u20141753-56, 1756-59, 1759-62. In the last year of each course,\nas \u2018promoter,\u2019 he presented his undergraduates to receive the Master\u2019s\ndegree, and also delivered a graduation thesis. His theses (still extant\nin manuscript at Birkwood) were in Latin; they deal chiefly with the\nmethods and human conditions of philosophical inquiry.\n\nTwo-thirds of Reid\u2019s lectures at King\u2019s College were in this way\nconcerned with natural history and applied mathematics: only one-third\nwas given to the central object of his intellectual interest at New\nMachar. I have examined a manuscript volume of notes of the lectures in\n\u2018Natural Philosophy\u2019 which he gave in 1757-58. They comprehend, after an\nintroductory exposition of the province and methods of physics, the laws\nof motion, astronomy, optics, electricity, and hydrostatics. The notes\nshow that Reid was well abreast of the physical science of his time.\n\nAt the time of Reid\u2019s appointment as a regent of philosophy in King\u2019s\nCollege, the alternative of regency or professoriate was discussed in\nthe University. He entered readily into this and other questions of\nUniversity reform, and prevailed on his colleagues to make some important\nchanges. Largely through his influence the teaching session was extended\nfrom five to seven months; the Humanity or Latin class was better\norganised; the bursary endowments were redistributed for competition;\nand in the order of undergraduate study, the sciences concerned with the\noutward world were made to precede psychology and ethics, which were\nreserved for the last year, as more consistent with the development\nof the human mind in its natural ascent from external observation to\nreflection. An account of the changes was published in 1754.\n\nIt is curious that it was through Reid\u2019s influence that the regency\nsystem was retained in King\u2019s College, in preference to the professorial,\nwhich, in order to secure division of labour among the teachers,\nunder the growth of knowledge, had been already adopted in the other\nUniversities. His hand may be traced in the following statement of\nreasons for this conservative policy:\u2014\u2018Every professor of philosophy\nin this University is also tutor to those who study under him; and it\nseems to be generally agreed that it must be detrimental to a student to\nchange his every session. And though it be allowed that a professor who\nhas only one branch of philosophy for his province may have more leisure\nto make improvements in it for the benefit of the learned world, yet it\ndoes not seem extravagant to suppose that a [regent] professor ought\nto be sufficiently qualified to teach all that his pupils can learn in\nphilosophy [natural and moral] in the course of three sessions.\u2019 Half\na century later the higher academical ideal implied in a professoriate\nprevailed, according to which the professor is responsible for promoting\nhis branch of human knowledge, as well as for the instruction of youth\u2014in\neducating influence more powerful, when he incites to study by the\nvitality which original research is apt to communicate to his lectures.\nThe development of a university, it has been remarked, is prompt and\neasy when each department of its cyclop\u00e6dia is separately taught by\nan able professor; whereas a university which abandons instruction to\nregent-tutors must be content not only to teach little, and that little\nill, but to continue to teach what is elsewhere obsolete and exploded.\n\nIn a letter of Reid\u2019s in 1755, an account is given of the reformed, if\nsomewhat officious, academical discipline which then prevailed:\u2014\n\n    \u2018The students here,\u2019 he says, \u2018have lately been compelled to\n    live within the College. We need but look out at our windows to\n    see when they rise and when they go to bed. They are seen nine\n    or ten times throughout the day statedly, by one or other of\n    the Masters\u2014at public prayers, school-hours, meals, in their\n    rooms, besides occasional visits which we can make with little\n    trouble to ourselves. They are shut up within walls at nine\n    at night. This discipline hath indeed taken some pains and\n    resolution, as well as some expense, to establish it. The board\n    of the first table is 50 marks per quarter, _i.e._ 54s. 2d.,\n    and the second 40. The rent of a room is from 7 shillings to 20\n    shillings in the session. There is no furniture in their rooms\n    but a bedstead, tables, chimney-grate, and fender; the rest\n    they must buy for themselves. All other perquisites from 12 to\n    17 shillings.\u2019\n\nThis discipline was more or less in vogue during the remainder of last\ncentury. Nearly twenty years after the date of Reid\u2019s letter, when\nJohnson and Boswell visited Aberdeen, Johnson says that \u2018in King\u2019s\nCollege there is kept a public table, but the scholars in the Marischal\nCollege are boarded in the town.\u2019 \u2018The abandonment of this custom,\u2019\nMr. Rait tells us, \u2018seems to have been a gradual process, and to have\ntaken place during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The\nrestraint of collegiate residence had become exceedingly irksome.\u2019 With\nthe increasing age of entrants, schoolboy discipline might seem less\nexpedient.\n\nInstruction in the art of dancing was, it seems, provided by the\nUniversity under the reformed regulations, to add manly grace to the rude\nbodily vigour of the Scottish undergraduate. Reid in advocating this may\nhave remembered Locke\u2019s advice in his _Thoughts on Education_: \u2018Dancing\nbeing that which gives graceful motions all the life, and above all\nthings manliness and a becoming confidence, I think it cannot be learned\ntoo early. But you must be sure to have a good master, that knows and can\nteach what is graceful and becoming, and that gives a freedom and ease to\nall the motions of the body. One that teaches not this is worse than none\nat all.\u2019 How long this civilising art was cultivated in Reid\u2019s College I\nhave not discovered.\n\nIn Aberdeen Reid found himself in the society of persons of more than\nprovincial eminence, destined, indeed, to leave their mark on the thought\nand literature of Scotland. The Chair of Medicine in his College was\noccupied by his cousin, Dr. John Gregory, a successful observer of\nexternal nature and man. In Marischal College, Thomas Blackwell, the\nProfessor of Greek when Reid was an undergraduate, was now Principal;\nsoon followed by George Campbell, who became the philosophical theologian\nof the Church of Scotland, by his criticism of Hume\u2019s reasoning about\nmiracles, and a master in literary, biblical, and ecclesiastical\ncriticism,\u2014in his _Philosophy of Rhetoric_, his Translation of the\nGospels, and his History of the development of the Christian Church.\nCampbell was nine years younger than Reid, like him an alumnus of\nMarischal College; he had been minister of Banchory-Ternan for nine\nyears before he was called to Aberdeen. He rivalled Reid himself in\nanalytic power and calm, candid, luminous reasoning. Alexander Gerard,\nlike Reid, a University reformer, and author of essays on \u2018Taste\u2019 and on\n\u2018Genius,\u2019 was Professor of Philosophy in Marischal College, and then of\nDivinity there, and afterwards at King\u2019s. There was William Duncan, too,\nwhose _Logic_ was for a time in vogue in Scottish Universities\u2014a regent\nin Marischal College when Reid began to teach philosophy at King\u2019s; and\nReid\u2019s lifelong friend Stewart was still in the Chair of Mathematics.\nPerhaps the most widely known Aberdonian when he lived was James Beattie,\npoet more than philosopher, Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy\nin Marischal College, whose essay on \u2018Truth\u2019 gave him a name in the\nintellectual world, while the grace and pathos of the \u2018Minstrel\u2019 and the\n\u2018Hermit\u2019 appealed to a wider class, and secured a popular reputation.\nAberdeen and its neighbourhood were then the home also of accomplished\nphysicians and naturalists and scholars\u2014Skenes and Ogilvies, Dunbars and\nGordons.\n\nAs I have said, Reid\u2019s first years at King\u2019s College were much given\nto academical reform. His later years there were distinguished by his\nconnection with a Society for philosophical inquiry, then quickened in\nScotland by the fashionable scepticism of David Hume. Reid and Gregory\noriginated this \u2018Aberdeen Philosophical Society,\u2019 or \u2018Wise Club,\u2019 as it\nwas called. It was the parent of some of the most remarkable books in\nScottish philosophical literature in the latter part of last century.\nThe first meeting was on January 12, 1758, and the last was in February\n1773. The original members were Dr. John Gregory, Dr. David Skene,\nProfessor John Stewart, Mr. Robert Trail, the Rev. George Campbell, and\nMr. Thomas Reid; to whom in the same year were added the Rev. Alexander\nGerard, the Rev. John Farquhar, Mr. Charles Gordon, and Mr. John Kerr.\nJames Beattie joined them in 1760, Dr. George Skene and Mr. William\nOgilvie in 1763, Mr. James Dunbar in 1765, and Mr. William Trail in 1766.\nReid was secretary of the Society, and the minutes for many years are\nin his handwriting. It met once a fortnight on the second and fourth\nWednesdays of each month. \u2018The members,\u2019 Sir W. Forbes tells us in his\n_Life of Beattie_, \u2018met at five o\u2019clock in the evening\u2014for in those days\nat Aberdeen it was the custom to dine early\u2014when one of the members,\nas president, took the chair, and left it at half an hour after eight,\nwhen they partook of a slight and inexpensive collation, and at ten\no\u2019clock they separated.\u2019 At these meetings it appears that part of the\nevening\u2019s entertainment was the reading of a short essay, composed by\none of the members in his turn. Besides these discourses, a literary or\nphilosophical question was proposed each night, for discussion at the\nnext meeting. And it was the duty of the proposer of the question to open\nthe discussion; by him, also, the opinions of the members who took a part\nin it were digested into an abstract, which was engrossed in the album\nof the Society. I am told that the _Lion Inn_, on the Spital Hill near\nReid\u2019s manse, and sometimes the _Lemon Tree Inn_, in the new town, were\nthe usual places of meeting. The common attendance was five or six. One\nof the rules enjoined moderation and forbade toasts.\n\nThe meetings were given partly to essays by the members, and partly to\noral discussions of proposed questions. \u2018Philosophy,\u2019 according to the\nrules, \u2018comprehends every principle of science which may be deduced by\njust or lawful induction from the phenomena either of the human mind or\nof the material world.\u2019 Perhaps no society of the kind in this country\nhas fulfilled its end so well. The \u2018Rankenian Club\u2019 and the \u2018Select\nSociety\u2019 in Edinburgh lasted longer, or enrolled more members, but\nneither of them was the parent of so much good literature. The \u2018Inquiry\u2019\nof Reid, Beattie\u2019s essay on \u2018Truth,\u2019 Gerard on \u2018Taste\u2019 and on \u2018Genius,\u2019\nand Campbell\u2019s books on \u2018Miracles\u2019 and on \u2018Rhetoric\u2019 appear in fragments\nor in germ in the minutes of the \u2018Wise Club\u2019 of Aberdeen. Its vitality\nwas sustained and stimulated by the sceptical speculations of Hume, which\nwere much in touch with educated opinion in the third quarter of last\ncentury, when spiritual philosophy was languid in Britain and throughout\nthe world. The tone of those engaged in the philosophical vindication of\nbelief appears in one of Reid\u2019s letters, who writes thus to David Hume in\n1763:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Your friendly adversaries, Drs. Campbell and Gerard, as well\n    as Dr. Gregory, return their compliments to you respectfully.\n    A little Philosophical Society here, of which all three are\n    members, is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your\n    company, although we are all good Christians, would be more\n    acceptable than that of Athanasius; and since we cannot have\n    you upon the bench, you are brought oftener than any other man\n    to the bar; accused and defended with great zeal, but without\n    bitterness. If you write no more in morals, politics, and\n    metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects.\u2019\n\nIt is interesting to find in the records of the Society the subjects of\nthe dissertations contributed by Reid during the six years in which he\nwas its mainspring,[9] as well as the questions which he proposed for\ndebate. They signally illustrate the course of his thoughts in these\nyears. On May 24, 1758, \u2018Mr. Reid intimat that he designed as the subject\nof his discourse some Observations on the Philosophy of the Mind, and\nparticularly on the Perceptions we have by Sight.\u2019 On June 17, 1758, he\nread a paper \u2018On the Difficulty of a just Philosophy of the Human Mind;\nGeneral Prejudices against D\u2014\u2014d (_sic_) Hume\u2019s System of the Mind; and\nsome Observations on the Perceptions we have by Sight.\u2019 On March 14,\n1759, he presented an \u2018Analysis of the Sensations of Smell and Taste.\u2019\nOn 26th February 1760 \u2018Mr. Reid intimat that in his discourse he was\nto continue his Analysis of the Senses\u2019; and accordingly, on the 20th\nof August in the same year, he gave notice of his intention of \u2018taking\nDr. Gregory\u2019s place and reading a paper on the Sense of Touch.\u2019 In July\n1761 he appears with a paper on the \u2018Transit of Venus\u2019 in that year;\nand on the 26th January 1762 he gives a \u2018Valedictory Address,\u2019 as first\nannual president of the Society (the members having previously taken the\nchair by rotation)\u2014on \u2018Euclid\u2019s Definitions and Axioms,\u2019 in which he\nreturns to the favourite studies of his youth. In 1761 he had resumed\nhis investigation of the Senses, for in September he is credited with\nanother paper on the \u2018Sense of Seeing.\u2019 His last contribution, in October\n1762, was on \u2018Perception,\u2019 which summed up his characteristic work in the\nSociety. And after reading this paper, \u2018Mr. Reid declined to give it for\ninsertion in the Records, in regard that he proposed soon to send it to\nthe press, along with some other discourses which he had read before the\nSociety.\u2019 A minute on 28th October 1764 announces that, \u2018as Dr. Reid has\nleft this country, no discourse is to be expected from him.\u2019\n\nThe following Questions for debate were proposed by Reid during the\nsix years of his membership:\u20141758, 13th and 26th July, \u2018Are the Objects\nof the Human Mind properly divided into Impressions and Ideas; and must\nevery Idea be a copy of a preceding Impression?\u2019 This closely touches the\nfundamental assumption of the sceptical philosophy. Those which follow\nsuggest a disposition to ethical and social discussion. 12th June 1759,\n\u2018Whether Mankind with regard to Morals always was and is the same?\u2019 1st\nApril 1760, \u2018Whether it is proper to educate Children without instilling\nPrinciples into them of any kind whatever?\u2019 (Beattie\u2019s celebrated\nexperiment in the education of his son may be connected with this.) 15th\nApril 1761, \u2018Whether Moral Character consists in Affections in which the\nWill is not concerned, or in fixed, habitual, and constant Purposes?\u2019 8th\nJanuary 1762, \u2018Whether by the encouragement of proper Laws the Number\nof Births in Great Britain might be nearly doubled, or at least greatly\nincreased?\u2019 Here we have a sort of inverted Malthusianism suggested. 22nd\nNovember 1763, \u2018Whether every Action deserving Moral Approbation must be\ndone from a persuasion of its being morally good?\u2019\n\nBeattie, in one of his letters to Sir W. Forbes, thus refers to the\nSociety and to his own philosophical relation to Reid:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I have of late been much engaged in metaphysics; at least,\n    I have been labouring with all my might to overturn that\n    visionary science. I am a member of a club in this town who\n    style themselves the Philosophical Society. I hope you will not\n    think the worse of this Society when I tell you, that to it\n    the world is indebted for a _Comparative View of the Faculties\n    of Man_, and an _Inquiry into Human Nature on the Principles\n    of Common Sense_. I have shown that all genuine reasoning does\n    ultimately terminate in principles which it is impossible to\n    disbelieve, and as impossible to prove; that, therefore, the\n    ultimate standard of truth to us is Common Sense, or that\n    instinctive conviction into which all true reasoning does\n    resolve itself; that therefore what contradicts Common Sense is\n    in itself absurd, however subtle the arguments which support\n    it. My principles in the main are not essentially different\n    from Dr. Reid\u2019s; but they seem to offer a more compendious\n    method of destroying scepticism. I intend to show (and have\n    already in part shown) that all sophistical reasoning is\n    marked by certain characters which distinguish it from true\n    investigation; and thus I flatter myself I shall be able to\n    discover a method of detecting sophistry, even when one is not\n    able to give a logical confutation of its arguments.\u2019\n\nBeattie argued more in the temper of a partisan than Reid, who criticised\nHume in the spirit of a free and candid inquirer after truth.\n\nOn the 18th of January 1762 the honorary Doctorate of Divinity was\nconferred on Reid by Marischal College.\n\nHis fame was now more than local. In December 1763 he accepted the\ninvitation of the University of Glasgow to fill the Chair of Moral\nPhilosophy which Adam Smith had resigned. Before he entered on this new\ncareer he had given to the world an _Inquiry into the Human Mind on\nthe Principles of Common Sense_. This classic work embodies the result\nof twenty years of steady reflection at New Machar and Aberdeen, in\nquest of the actual foundation of human knowledge. Before we follow\nhim to Glasgow, we must examine this issue of his intellectual life in\nAberdeenshire\u2014due to the challenge of modern agnosticism in the person of\nDavid Hume.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nUNIVERSAL SCEPTICISM VERSUS INSPIRED COMMON SENSE: AN \u2018INQUIRY INTO THE\nHUMAN MIND ON THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMON SENSE\u2019\n\n1764\n\n\nAs early as October 1762, as we have seen, Reid had given signs of an\nintention to offer the world some results of his meditations regarding\nthe foundations of belief. Accordingly, in the end of the following\nyear, he produced his first book, _An Inquiry into the Human Mind\non the Principles of Common Sense_. Its motto expresses its leading\nargument\u2014\u2018The inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.\u2019\nFor it was to the inspirations, or revelations, of what he called the\n\u2018common sense\u2019 or \u2018common judgment,\u2019 regarded as the root of any human\nunderstanding of man and his environment, that he made his final appeal\nagainst the all-embracing doubt of Hume. This was the rock on which he\ntook his stand in the universal deluge.\n\nReid was now in his fifty-fourth year. Hitherto his modesty had concealed\nhis strength from all but a few friends. His book was concerned with\nquestions that were not likely to withdraw him rapidly from \u2018the\nobscurity of a learned retirement.\u2019 The _Inquiry_, with its appeal to\nthe final reason latent in human nature, is not to be interpreted as an\nappeal to popular opinion against theories of philosophers. In fact, its\nimplied argument is not obvious to popular intelligence, although it is\nprofoundly connected with all the chief interests of human life. Great\nbooks of this sort attract only the few who think. His brother-in-law,\nMr. Rose, mentions that \u2018Alexander Millar, the London bookseller, being\nin Aberdeen at this time, and in company with Dr. Reid, protested against\nbooks in metaphysics as bad bargains for publishers; by which he said he\nhad himself lost money, but never gained any. Notwithstanding, Dr. Reid,\nhaving his _Inquiry_ ready for publication, sold it to Mr. Millar for\n\u00a350. When his friends bantered him upon the small sum he had received\nfor so valuable a performance, he jocosely replied, \u201cI think it is well\nsold.\u201d\u2019[10]\n\nAnother parallel here occurs between Reid and Kant. The _Kritik of Pure\nReason_, Kant\u2019s first great work, appeared in 1781, when he was in his\nfifty-seventh year. So, too, with Locke, who inaugurated the era of\nmodern thought in which Reid and Kant are chief figures. His _Essay_,\nlike Reid\u2019s _Inquiry_, was the first fruit of twenty years of reflective\nthought, and it too made its appearance when its author was in his\nfifty-seventh year. It is curious to contrast the balanced caution and\nmoderation of these long pondered treatises with the more paradoxical\nproductions of others, whose intellectual ardour and impatience speedily\ncommitted them to all-comprehensive systems. Descartes, at forty, with\nhis provisional doubt and reconstruction on a slender foundation;\nSpinoza, younger still, with his rational evolution of the universe from\na single substance; Berkeley with his analysis of the material world\ninto significant ideas, delivered at the age of twenty-five with the\nimpetuous enthusiasm of Irish juvenile genius; and David Hume with his\nuniversal disintegration of human knowledge and belief, planned before\nhe was one-and-twenty, composed before he was twenty-five, and eagerly\ngiven to the world in his twenty-eighth year. Reid, with his \u2018good\nand well-wearing parts,\u2019 characteristically represents the restrained\nauthorship of those who treat our short life on this planet as short\nenough for well-weighed answers to the final questions about life and the\nuniverse.\n\nAs Reid\u2019s _Inquiry_ was really an appeal to human nature in arrest of\nHume\u2019s intellectual suicide, he desired, before presenting it to the\nworld, to submit the argument privately to the Edinburgh sceptic. This\nwas done through their common friend Dr. Blair. After Hume had read\nportions of the manuscript, he wrote this courteous letter to Reid on\nFeb. 25, 1763:\u2014\n\n    \u2018By Dr. Blair\u2019s means I have been favoured with the perusal of\n    your performance, which I have read with great pleasure and\n    attention. It is certainly very rare that a piece so deeply\n    philosophical is wrote with so much spirit, and affords so\n    much entertainment to the reader, though I must still regret\n    the disadvantages under which I read it, as I never had the\n    whole performance at once before me, and could not be able\n    to compare one part with another. To this reason chiefly I\n    ascribe some obscurities which, in spite of your short analysis\n    and abstract, seem to hang over your system; for I must do\n    you the justice to own that when I enter into your ideas, no\n    man appears to express himself with greater perspicuity than\n    you do, a talent which above all others is requisite in that\n    species of literature which you have cultivated. There are\n    some objections which I would willingly propose to the chapter\n    \u201cOf Sight,\u201d did I not suspect that they arise from my not\n    sufficiently understanding it. I shall therefore forbear till\n    the whole can lie before me, and shall not at present propose\n    any further difficulties to your reasonings. I shall only say\n    that if you have been able to clear up these abstruse and\n    important subjects, instead of being mortified, I shall be so\n    vain as to pretend to a share of the praise; and shall think\n    that my errors, by having at least some coherence, have led you\n    to make a more strict review of my principles, which were the\n    common ones, and to perceive their futility.\u2019\n\nIn his reply to this letter Reid recognises the debt which philosophy\nowes to the sceptical criticism of Hume. He writes thus to Hume:\u2014\n\n                                 \u2018KING\u2019S COLLEGE, _18th March 1763_.\n\n    \u2018SIR,\u2014On Monday last Mr. John Farquhar brought me your letter\n    of February 25th, enclosed in one from Dr. Blair. I thought\n    myself very happy in having the means of obtaining, at second\n    hand, through the friendship of Dr. Blair, your opinion of\n    my performance; and you have been pleased to communicate it\n    directly in so polite and friendly a manner as merits great\n    acknowledgments on my part.\n\n    \u2018In attempting to throw some light on these abstruse subjects,\n    I wish to preserve the due mean between confidence and despair.\n    But whether I have any success in this attempt or not, I shall\n    always avow myself your disciple in metaphysics. I have learned\n    more from your writings in this kind than from all others put\n    together. Your system appears to me not only coherent in all\n    its parts, but likewise justly deduced from principles commonly\n    received among philosophers,\u2014principles which I never thought\n    of calling in question, until the conclusions you draw from\n    them in the _Treatise of Human Nature_ made me suspect them.\n    If these principles are solid your system must stand; and\n    whether they are or not can better be judged after you have\n    brought to light the whole system that grows out of them,\n    than when the greater part of it was wrapped up in clouds and\n    darkness. I agree with you therefore, that if this system shall\n    ever be demolished, you have a just claim to a great share\n    of the praise, both because you have made it a distinct and\n    determinate mark to be aimed at, and have furnished proper\n    artillery for the purpose. When you have seen the whole of my\n    performance, I shall take it as a very great favour to have\n    your opinion upon it, from which I make no doubt of receiving\n    light, whether I receive conviction or no.\u2019\n\nHume\u2019s philosophy being the suicide of intelligence, can hardly be\nspoken of as a \u2018system.\u2019 It is not constructive, but wholly destructive,\nand therefore a negation of system, philosophic or other, in a finally\nspeechless and motionless agnostic doubt.\n\nHume\u2019s letter to Reid was his only rejoinder to the _Inquiry_. In 1763\nhe had ceased to produce philosophical books. His recognition of the\n\u2018deeply philosophical\u2019 nature of Reid\u2019s argument is a testimony to the\nworth of the work on which Reid\u2019s literary reputation chiefly rests.\nThe \u2018share of the praise\u2019 which Hume claims, Reid was ready to concede.\n\u2018I hope,\u2019 he says in the Dedication of the _Inquiry_, \u2018I hope that the\nauthor of this sceptical system wrote it in the belief that it would be\nuseful to mankind. And perhaps it may prove so at last. For I conceive\nthe sceptical writers to be a set of men whose business it is to pick\nholes in the fabric of knowledge wherever it is weak and faulty; and\nwhen those places are properly repaired, the whole building becomes more\nfirm and solid than it was formerly\u2019. And, in fact, the intellectual\nprogress of mankind has been sustained by an alternation of sceptical and\nconservative philosophies.\n\nAfter prolonged cogitation, the \u2018weak and faulty\u2019 place in the \u2018fabric\u2019\nof modern philosophy seemed to Reid to lie in an unproved assumption with\nwhich modern philosophers set out in their speculations. For they took\nfor granted that only the sensations and ideas within each mind could be\nperceived: yet we naturally \u2018believe that we are seeing and handling the\nvery outward things themselves\u2019 that make what is called the material\nworld. If the philosophers are right, we have no immediate revelation of\nthe qualities of outward things, and no evidence of their existence,\nexcept the succession of changing sensations and ideas of sensations\nwhich alone are presented to us. I can never directly encounter an\nexternal object. What I suppose to be outward is all in my mind. With\na world thus imprisoned within me, is there any legitimate way through\nwhich I can assure myself of realities outside my mind, including other\nliving persons who have their own sensations and ideas as much as I have\nmine, but numerically different from my private stock? If not, grave\nconsequences seemed to follow: faith and hope must die out of human life.\nSo Reid argued.\n\nThe _Treatise of Human Nature_ was the scarecrow that warned Reid of the\ndestructive consequences of this assumption, that we are shut up among\nour own ideas; as he had himself in youth been taught to believe, and\nby which he had been led on to Berkeley\u2019s conception of a wholly ideal\nmaterial world. He now began to see this ideal material world of Berkeley\nin a new light. It seemed to leave him _alone_ in the universe of his\nown mind. The ideal matter of Berkeley cannot, he argued, inform me of\nthe existence of other living persons: what I have supposed to be other\npersons must be, like the rest, only some of my own ideas. If I allow\nthat my own sensations and ideas are my only possible original data, I\ncannot from such transitory phantoms infer the real existence of other\npersons. With this starting-point as my only one, the whole universe\nnaturally supposed to surround me\u2014bodies and spirits, friends and\nrelations, all dead things and all living persons\u2014acknowledged by common\njudgment to have a permanent existence, whether I am having ideas of them\nor not\u2014vanish at once. My _private_ sensations and ideas can never really\nsignify to me the existence of other conscious beings; only what might\nbe called _public ideas_, common to other minds and to me, could do this.\nAnd such objects are not properly called \u2018ideas\u2019\u2014public or private; they\nare dead things and living persons; they exist whether I individually\nhave sensations and ideas or not. In short, Reid could find nothing in\nBerkeley\u2019s philosophical theory\u2014as he interpreted it[11]\u2014which afforded\neven probable ground for concluding that there were in existence other\nintelligent beings\u2014fathers, brothers, friends, or fellow-citizens. \u2018I am\nleft alone,\u2019 the only creature of God, in that forlorn state of egoism\ninto which it was said some of the disciples of Descartes were brought by\nthis same preliminary assumption of their master\u2014a sufficient _reductio\nad absurdum_ of the favourite postulate which leads to it. To act upon\nit would argue insanity in the agent; it must therefore be empty verbal\nspeculation. So Reid further argued.\n\nBut even this solitude is not the last issue of Reid\u2019s _b\u00eate noire_.\nThe system in which I have been educated, he said, not only leaves me\nabsolutely alone; _it extinguishes me_, along with the external universe\nof things and persons; it is at last literally suicidal. It transforms\npersistent personal existence into a mere succession of unconnected\nsensations and ideas. If the magic circle of sensations and ideas, within\na self that persists amidst perpetual changes, cannot be broken through,\nthen even this supposed \u2018self\u2019 must be an illusion, and the word self\nmust be meaningless. The personal pronoun \u2018I,\u2019 as well as the personal\npronoun \u2018you,\u2019 are both alike unmeaning. The universe resolves at last,\nnot merely into sensations that are all referable to myself, but into\nsensations without any self\u2014into isolated sensations\u2014which seem indeed to\nfollow one another in an orderly way, but without any guarantee that the\nseeming order is more than transitory, or that the illusory cosmos may\nnot at any moment become chaos.\n\nIs there nothing within the resources of reason to arrest this\nintellectual suicide? Has reason got anything to show in justification\nof this preliminary sacrifice of a conviction on which men have to\nact, whatever their theories may be? Must I surrender the conviction,\nthat when I am seeing or touching I am actually having revealed to me\nsomething that is extended and solid, and that, _as such, must_ be more\nand other than the private sensations and ideas of the person that is\nseeing and touching? Must this conviction, and others like it, on which\nhuman experience practically depends, be all sacrificed on the altar of\nauthority and conjecture?\n\nThis had been the question around which Reid\u2019s thoughts were revolving\nin the twenty years preceding the publication of his book. \u2018For my own\nsatisfaction,\u2019 he tells us, \u2018I entered into a serious examination of\nthe principles upon which this sceptical system is built; and was not\na little surprised to find that it leans with its whole weight upon a\nhypothesis which is ancient indeed, and hath been very generally received\nby philosophers, but of which I could find no solid proof. The hypothesis\nI mean is\u2014that we do not really perceive things that are external, but\nonly certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon the mind, which\nare called \u201cimpressions\u201d and \u201cideas.\u201d I thought it unreasonable, upon the\nauthority of philosophers, to admit an hypothesis which, in my opinion,\noverturns all philosophy; all religion and virtue, and all common sense;\nand I resolved to inquire into this subject anew, without regard to any\nhypothesis.\u2019\n\nTo _accept_ as a spiritual fact the judgment of human nature, which\nassures me that when I am seeing or touching I am \u2018face to face\u2019 with a\nreality that exists independently of my changing sensations or ideas,\ninstead of trying in vain by reasoning to _prove_ the existence of this\nreality by means of intervening sensations and ideas,\u2014this was the\nalternative he adopted. I dismiss the unwarranted supposition that only\nmy own mind and its invisible contents can be immediately manifested\nto me; and I fall back on the perception I have of something solid and\nextended, and therefore more and other than a mere sensation or idea,\nas what is present to me when I see and touch. Recognition of the fact\nthat our five senses somehow bring us into a consciousness of what is\nneither a transitory sensation nor an idea of a sensation, but something\nindependent of me, and that would continue to exist after I individually\nhad ceased to exist\u2014this recognition of external realities is Reid\u2019s\nkey to sound philosophy. It is a displacement of the so-called \u2018ideas\u2019\nof the philosophers, and of fallacious inferences founded upon them,\nand a substitution of the common reasonable sense, or common judgment\nof reason, which neither requires nor admits of logical proof. Reid\nmight say that what is most worth proving cannot be logically proved.\nWe all have a direct perception of external reality which cannot be\neradicated by reasoning. Abolition of the prejudice which interposed\n_reasonings founded on unreal ideas_ between our perception and the solid\nand extended reality, seemed to Reid, in virtue of its far-reaching\nconsequences, to be the chief good he had as a philosopher secured to\nmankind. In his old age he writes thus to Dr. Gregory:\u2014\n\n    \u2018The merit of what you are pleased to call _my philosophy_\n    lies, I think, chiefly in having called in question the common\n    theory of ideas, or images of things in the mind, being the\n    only objects of thought\u2014a theory founded on natural prejudices,\n    and so universally received as to be interwoven with the\n    structure of language. Yet, were I to give you a detail of what\n    led me to call in question this theory, after I had long held\n    it as self-evident and unquestionable, you would think, as I\n    do, that there was much of chance in the matter. The discovery\n    was the birth of time, not of genius; and Berkeley and Hume\n    did more to bring it to light than the man that hit upon it.\n    I think there is hardly anything that can be called _mine_ in\n    the philosophy of mind which does not follow with ease from the\n    detection of this prejudice.\u2019\n\nYet Reid\u2019s _Inquiry_ has been condemned as an unphilosophical appeal\nfrom the thoughtful to vulgar intelligence, making the unreflecting many\nsupreme judges in questions intelligible only to the reflecting few. His\nemployment of \u2018common sense\u2019 to express the regulative principle of his\nphilosophy would put his book outside philosophical literature, if this\nterm were taken as a synonym for unreasoned opinion\u2014the average judgments\nof the man in the street. Reid\u2019s own account of what he means by common\nsense, not to speak of Hume\u2019s recognition of the \u2018deeply philosophical\u2019\ncharacter of the argument in the _Inquiry_, should protect him against\nthis imputation. He describes the common sense to which he constantly\nappeals as \u2018the first degree of reason,\u2019 and as having for its office \u2018to\njudge of things self-evident.\u2019 As such, he contrasts it with reasoning,\nor \u2018the second degree of reason, which draws conclusions that are not\nself-evident from the self-evident judgments of the common sense.\u2019 This\ndistinction between the common rational sense, on which a knowledge\nof the universe, like the human, which falls short of omniscience,\n_must_ ultimately turn, and those judgments that are reached by logical\nreasoning, corresponds to what the Greeks distinguished as noetic and\ndianoetic power of reason in man. Reid\u2019s genuine judgments of the common\nsense may be regarded as the divinely inspired response to questions\nwhich can be determined for man only by this ideal man latent in us\nall\u2014judgments verified by the insanity that is implied in resisting them\nin our actions.\n\nAs obtrusive examples of judgments of the common sense, Reid takes\nthe logically undemonstrable convictions (1) of the existence of\nthings external to and independent of me and my perceptions; (2) of my\nindividual personal existence, and continuous personal identity; and (3)\nof the uniformity, and therefore interpretability, of nature, implying\nthat I may form conclusions about what I have not experienced by what I\nhave experienced. I cannot demonstrate the truth of these judgments: I\ncan only justify them in reason by showing that human nature responds\nto them, and forbids me to reject them in my actions, on pain of being\njudged a lunatic, whatever I may say in my speculative theories. \u2018Such\noriginal and natural judgments,\u2019 he says, \u2018are part of the furniture\nwhich _nature_ hath given to the human understanding. They are the\ninspiration of the Almighty. They serve to direct us in the common\naffairs of life, when our reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark;\nthey are part of our constitution; all the discoveries of our reason\nare grounded upon them; they make up what is called _the common sense_\nof mankind. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder\nin the constitution, is what we call _lunacy_, as when a man believes\nthat he is made of glass. When a man suffers himself to be reasoned out\nof the principles of common sense by metaphysical arguments, we call\nit _metaphysical lunacy_, which differs from the other species of the\ndistemper in this, that it is not continued, but intermittent; it is apt\nto seize the patient in solitary and speculative moments; but when he\nenters into sanity, Common Sense recovers her authority.\u2019\n\nIt is the first of these three examples of the common sense that is\nthe subject of the _Inquiry_\u2014intended as preliminary to others which\nmay follow. \u2018A clear enumeration and explication of the principles of\ncommon sense\u2019 was henceforward Reid\u2019s ultimate aim; but thus far he\ntook those involved in our experience when we are tasting, or smelling,\nor hearing, or touching, or seeing. As axioms and definitions are the\npreliminaries of abstract mathematical reasonings, so our sensuous\nperceptions through the five senses are the preliminaries to reasonings\nabout concrete realities in the world of change. The leading principle\nof the _Inquiry_ is, that something extended, solid, and movable is\ndirectly manifested in our sensuous experiences, equally with the direct\nmanifestations of our own sensations and other feelings when we are\nconscious of them; and also that we are obliged by common sense to regard\nextended, solid, and movable things as _other_ than mere transitory\nsensation or idea. Extended things, large or small, refuse to be melted\ndown into sensations or states of one\u2019s private consciousness. Take this\nspecimen of philosophical argument for accepting perceptions which cannot\nbe logically demonstrated, but which the common sense of human nature\nrefuses to reject:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Suppose I am pricked with a pin, I ask, is the _pain_ I feel\n    a sensation? Undoubtedly it is. There can be nothing that\n    resembles pain in an inanimate thing: the pain must be in me,\n    a living being. But I ask again, is the _pin_ a sensation? To\n    this question I feel myself under a necessity of answering that\n    the pin is not a sensation, nor can have the least resemblance\n    to any sensation. The pin has length and thickness, figure and\n    weight. A sensation can have none of these qualities. I am\n    not more certain that the pain I feel _is_ a sensation than\n    that the pin _is not_ a sensation. Yet the pin is an object\n    of sense; and I am as certain that I perceive its figure and\n    hardness by my senses as that I feel pain when I am pricked by\n    it.\u2019\n\nThis is to say that if, with the philosophers, I _call_ the pin as well\nas the pain a sensation or an idea, I must mean by \u2018sensation\u2019 and\n\u2018idea,\u2019 when I apply those words to the pin, not a private self-contained\nfeeling or a fancy, in which I am only manifesting my conscious self,\nbut (so to speak) a _public_ sensation or idea\u2014perceivable by other\npersons as well as by me\u2014a manifestation, in short, of what is _outside\nmy mind_\u2014of something that exists permanently in _space_ and not\ntransitorily in _me_\u2014and that is thus fit to be a medium of communication\nbetween me and other living persons, informing me of their existence and\nin some measure of their thoughts\u2014all which (Reid takes for granted)\neach person\u2019s private feelings and fancies could not do. But to employ\nthe words \u2018sensation\u2019 and \u2018idea\u2019 in this new meaning, and to speak of\nan idea as public or external, would be an abuse of language. We must\nmark, always by appropriate words, distinctions which we are obliged to\nacknowledge in fact. The inspirations or revelations of the common sense,\nin and through which the Almighty Power gives us an understanding of the\nlife and world in which we find ourselves, inspirations in which all men\nare believed more or less to participate, require us to distinguish the\nsolid and extended pin, as something public or outward, in contrast\nto the private feeling of pain, of which no one except the person who\nfeels it is conscious. I am thus obliged to recognise more in existence\nthan my own sensations and ideas\u2014as much obliged as I am to recognise\nmy sensations and ideas themselves when I am conscious of them. Only so\ncan I find myself living in an environment that is capable of signifying\nthe contemporaneous life, and some of the thoughts and feelings of other\npersons. In all this I am only falling back on the divine revelations of\nthe common sense. They make me reject in conduct what is inconsistent\nwith them; although this natural obligation is all the reason I can give\nin justification of my obedience.\n\nIt is thus that Reid recognises his right in reason to grasp realities\nthat are independent of his individual self; and he thinks that he\nis doing this philosophically by getting rid of the unphilosophical\nsupposition, that he needs to work his way to them by logical reasoning,\nfounded on wholly inward impressions. The true philosophy of perception\nwith him is to discharge the medium, and at once take the bull by the\nhorns.\n\nSome may think that the _Inquiry_ represents wasted labour\u2014that the\n\u2018metaphysical lunacy\u2019 which abolishes personal pronouns as meaningless\nwords, and inconsistently reasons that all who reason must be fools, is\nat the best the idle intellectual pastime of persons who pretend to be\nuniversal sceptics\u2014all which Reid has taken too seriously, and which\nat any rate by its self-contradiction refutes itself. For it asserts\nthat assertion is impossible. It is an argument that concludes for the\nrejection of the postulates without which it is impossible for human\nbeings to reason at all. It is a philosophy that destroys itself in\ndestroying all philosophy. The suicide does not need to be put to death.\n\nYet the suicide, doubly slain in the _Inquiry_, may be used as a warning\nof the consequence of doing violence to the genuine common sense, or\nideal man that is latent in each man; especially on subjects in which\ndoubt is easier than in the case of outward things and persons. The\n\u2018metaphysical lunacy\u2019 of doubt about the existence of other persons\nmay be acknowledged, while the common sense, unawake in its moral\nor spiritual elements, fails to protest against ethical atheism or\nagnosticism. What Reid calls the common sense is alive consciously\nin various degrees, in different persons, in different countries and\nperiods. A common sense of the existence of outward things and persons is\npractically awake in all sane minds. But the spiritual convictions, of\nwhich some are hardly conscious, may be rejected even practically without\nobvious lunacy. And something is gained for those convictions, if it can\nbe shown, as a _reductio ad absurdum_, that their rejection involves\nthe moral sceptic too in the \u2018lunacy\u2019 of universal doubt and pessimist\ndespair.\n\nThat Reid lays much stress on \u2018calling in question the common theory of\nideas or images in perception\u2019 is explained by his assumption, that this\ntheory involves perversion of the common sense even in its preliminary\ncontact with outward things in sense, thus obviously discrediting it as\nthe final court of appeal in every other instance. It may in this way be\ntaken as a plea for a more faithful adherence on the part of philosophers\nto the genuine common-sense judgments, which can be made to respond to an\nadequate appeal, however dormant they may be in individuals. This final\nappeal to human nature must, in short, be to human nature _as it is in\nfact_, not to human nature _as distorted in hypothesis_.\n\nFor, after all, the root of the agnosticism which is found in history\nalternating with the final faith of the common sense, lies deeper than\nin mistaken hypotheses of philosophers about our perceptions in sense.\nReid\u2019s substitution in philosophy of immediate for mediate perception of\nmatter is therefore an inadequate cure. The periodically returning doubt\nconcerns, not the outness or inwardness of what is revealed to sense,\nbut the meaning and character of the Power that is at work within the\nuniverse of matter and mind, and with which we first come into contact\nand collision in sense. Is it, in its final and pervading Power, a bad\nor a good sort of universe that we open our eyes upon, when we begin to\nexercise our senses? What are its final relations to me, and my final\nrelations to it? Nobody doubts the existence of things and persons, so\nfar as they are revealed to the senses. But what is our implied Common\nSense of the final meaning of the Whole? Am I to put an optimist or a\npessimist ultimate interpretation upon it all? The lurid mixture of pain\nand pleasure, evil and good, presented by the animated world, combined\nwith spiritually dormant common sense in individual men,\u2014is surely a more\npotent factor of agnostic doubt than an erroneous account of perception\nin circulation among persons who speculate.\n\nReid\u2019s course of thought amidst new surroundings in Glasgow brought him\nnearer to the source and corrective of the scepticism that is aroused by\nthe suspicious-looking universe of mingled good and evil, to which our\nsense perceptions introduce us.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nGLASGOW COLLEGE: THE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY\n\n1764-1780\n\n\nIn November 1764 we find Reid, now almost fifty-five years of age, in\nthe Chair of Moral Philosophy in the Old College in the High Street of\nGlasgow. The Reid family lived then, and for two years after, not in the\nProfessors\u2019 Court within the College, but a quarter of a mile away, in an\nold-fashioned street called the Drygate.[12] The manuscript in the family\nbible records that Reid was admitted to the Glasgow professorship on the\n12th of June. He carried with him from the quaint manse in Aberdeen to\nhis new home in the Drygate, his wife, three daughters, all above twenty\nyears of age, and two boys; they left three infant children buried in\nAberdeenshire. The Glasgow Chair supplied an income, including fees,\nsomewhat in advance of the Aberdeen regency; and its duties required\nconcentrated study of intellectual and moral agency in man, instead of\nthe dispersion over a wide range of the phenomena and laws of matter\nand mind which was necessary in King\u2019s College. Yet it was \u2018not without\nreluctance,\u2019 we are told, that he consented to tear himself from a spot\nwhere he had so long been fastening his roots; and much as he loved the\nsociety in which he passed the remainder of his days, the advantages of\nthe change hardly compensated for the sacrifice of feeling caused by the\nbreak in his early habits and associations.\n\nGlasgow in 1898 is even more changed from Glasgow in 1764 than Aberdeen\nwhen Reid lived in it from Aberdeen as it is now. To-day Glasgow is the\nsecond city in Britain, with nearly a million of people, the industrial\nmetropolis of the north, with all the stir of industrial life. It was\nthen a provincial town with hardly thirty thousand inhabitants, almost\ninaccessible from the sea, surrounded by the cornfields and hedgerows and\norchards of Lanarkshire, its few streets converging on the Cathedral and\nthe College with their historic associations. \u2018Glasgow,\u2019 according to\n_Humphrey Clinker_, \u2018is the pride of Scotland. It is one of the prettiest\ntowns in Europe.\u2019 Pennant describes it as \u2018the best built of any\nsecond-rate city I ever saw. The view from the Cross has an air of vast\nmagnificence.\u2019 In 1764 it was only laying the foundations of its present\ncommercial fame. The tobacco trade with the American plantations, and\nthe sugar trade with the West Indies, had hardly altered its character\nas an ancient Church and University town. \u2018Jupiter Carlyle,\u2019 referring\nto Glasgow before the middle of last century, speaks of \u2018a few families\nof ancient citizens who pretended to be gentlemen; and a few others,\nrecently settled, who had obtained wealth and consideration in trade.\nThe rest were shopkeepers and mechanics, who occupied large warerooms to\nfurnish cargoes to Virginia. It was then usual for the sons of merchants\nto attend the College for one or two years, and a few of them completed\ntheir academical education.\u2019\n\nThe College in the High Street, erected early in the seventeenth century,\nseemed to Samuel Johnson in 1773 \u2018without a sufficient share in the\nmagnificence of the place.\u2019 Nevertheless he found \u2018learning an object\nof wide importance, and the habit of application much more general than\nin the neighbouring University of Edinburgh.\u2019 The two College squares,\nconnected with memories of many generations in the west of Scotland, have\nbeen likened to those of Lincoln College in Oxford. About the middle\nof last century from three to four hundred students gathered in those\ncurious old courts, almost all living in apartments in the town, a few\nboarded in the houses of professors. They wore scarlet gowns, \u2018most of\nwhich,\u2019 when Wesley visited Glasgow, \u2018were very dirty, some very ragged,\nand all of very coarse cloth.\u2019 The houses of the professors formed a\nsquare on the north side of the College, built early in the eighteenth\ncentury. Eastward were the College gardens and the park, through which\nthe classic Molendinar found its way to the Clyde. It was a quaint and\ncurious old-world life that was then lived in the College, and in the\nHigh Street, passing from the College to the Cathedral at one end and\nfrom the College to the Cross at the other.\n\nIn the half-century before Reid was admitted to his Glasgow Chair, the\nUniversity had professors of more than Scottish reputation. Glasgow is\nin fact associated with almost all the names that adorn the literature\nof Philosophy in Scotland in the last century and in this. Adam Smith\nwas Reid\u2019s immediate predecessor in the Chair of Morals. His _Theory\nof Moral Sentiments_ had been for five years before the world when\nhe resigned his professorship to give to literature what Sir James\nMackintosh describes as \u2018perhaps the only book which produced an\nimmediate, general, and irrevocable change in some of the most important\nparts of the legislation of all civilised states\u2019\u2014fit to be ranked with\nthe classic works of Grotius, Locke, and Montesquieu\u2014its author \u2018the\nfirst economical philosopher, and perhaps the most eloquent theoretical\nmoralist, of modern times.\u2019 Smith\u2019s predecessor was Francis Hutcheson,\nauthor of that _Inquiry into our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue_ which gave\nrise to Reid\u2019s New Machar essay on \u2018Quantity\u2019 in 1748, the reputed father\nof modern philosophy in Scotland;\u2014and in the second quarter of last\ncentury the most potent agent and pioneer of the liberal culture and\nliterary taste which made the intellectual moderation of the eighteenth\ncentury in Scotland so remarkable a contrast to the less tolerant\nspiritual fervour of the seventeenth. This influence was continued by\nhis friend and biographer, William Leechman, the Principal of Glasgow\nCollege in 1764, still remembered as one of the philosophical theologians\nof the Church of Scotland. \u2018It was owing to Hutcheson and Leechman,\u2019\nsays Carlyle, \u2018that a new school was formed in the western provinces of\nScotland, where the clergy till that period were narrow and bigoted,\nand had never ventured to range their minds beyond the bounds of strict\northodoxy. For though neither of these professors taught any heresy,\nyet they opened and enlarged the minds of the students, which soon gave\nthem a turn for inquiry; the result of which was candour and liberality\nof sentiment. From experience this freedom of thought was not found so\ndangerous as might at first be apprehended; for though the more daring\nyouth at first made excursions into the unbounded regions of metaphysical\nperplexity, yet all the more judicious soon returned to the lower sphere\nof long-established truths, which they found not only more subservient to\nthe good order of society, but necessary to fix their own minds in some\ndegree of stability.\u2019 Gershom Carmichael, too, is not to be forgotten.\nHe was Hutcheson\u2019s predecessor, with an intellectual and religious\ninfluence not inconsiderable in the opening years of last century, author\nof a Latin manual of logic which appeared in 1720, and a _Synopsis\nTheologi\u00e6 Naturalis_, published shortly before his death in 1729, but\nbest known perhaps as editor of Puffendorff.\n\nReid thus entered Glasgow College when it was the centre of the reviving\nphilosophical and literary activity of Scotland in the modern spirit.\nHe met colleagues and fellow-citizens who were in sympathy with his own\nsincere and independent scientific temper. The aged Simpson, restorer of\nancient geometry, who had lately retired from the mathematical chair,\nwhich he had adorned for half a century, was a congenial mathematician of\nEuropean fame. Joseph Black, the most celebrated British chemist of his\ngeneration, was illustrating his own discoveries in his College lectures,\nand drawing the attention of the world to the phenomena of latent heat.\nThe vigour and acuteness of Millar were educating a new generation\nin jurisprudence and statesmanship. Moore, the author of _Zeluco_,\nan eminent Glasgow physician, was adding to its literary name. The\ngrandfather, and afterwards the father, of Sir William Hamilton held in\nsuccession the Chair of Anatomy, both colleagues of Reid, who might have\nbeen seen in the College Courts when his future editor and commentator\nwas there in his infancy.\n\nReid\u2019s inaugural lecture as Professor of Moral Philosophy, delivered\non the 10th of October 1764, is among his unpublished manuscripts at\nBirkwood. The opening sentences (deleted as irrelevant in after years)\nare not without interest in the characteristic modesty and candour of the\nreference to Adam Smith, his predecessor:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Before entering upon the subject of my prelections, there\n    are some things which I think proper to lay before you, and\n    to which I beg your attention. I doubt not that you are\n    all sensible of the loss which the University, and you in\n    particular, sustain by the resignation of the learned and\n    ingenious gentleman who last filled this chair. Those who\n    knew him most and had most access to attend his prelections,\n    and especially those who most profited by them, will be most\n    sensible of their loss. I had not the happiness of his personal\n    acquaintance, for want of opportunity; though I wished for it,\n    and now wish for it far more than ever. But I could not be a\n    stranger to his fame and reputation, nor to the respect with\n    which his lectures from this chair were heard by a very crowded\n    audience. I am much a stranger to his system, unless so far as\n    he hath published it to the world. But a man of so great genius\n    and penetration must have struck new light to the subjects\n    which he treated, as well as have handled them in an excellent\n    and instructive manner. I shall be much obliged to any of\n    you, gentlemen, or to any others, who can furnish me with\n    notes of his prelections, whether in morals, jurisprudence,\n    politics, or rhetorick. I shall always be desirous to borrow\n    light from every quarter, and to adopt what appears to me sound\n    and solid in every system, and ready to change my opinions\n    upon conviction, or to change my method and materials where I\n    can do it to advantage. I desire to live no longer than this\n    candour and ingenuity, this openness of mind to education and\n    information, live with me.\u2019\n\nAn apology follows for the imperfect preparation of a first course,\ninadequately provided for by the miscellaneous lectures in physics and\nmetaphysics at Aberdeen. The past performance of Adam Smith, and the\nhigh expectation associated with the new professor, the author of the\n_Inquiry_, were doubtless fresh in the minds of the crowded audience\nthat met on that October morning in the faint light of the Old College\nclass-room. The audience, the new professor, and his predecessor, have\nall now receded into the dim distance, and are seen under the cold\nlight of history. The lectures delivered in the years that followed\nare preserved at Birkwood, in Reid\u2019s valley of the Dee\u2014lectures on\nPneumatology, Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Political Philosophy\u2014for the\nmost part embodied in substance in the published _Essays_ of his old age.\n\nReid\u2019s placid temperament and restrained imagination suggest sober\nunadorned statement, and cautious inference founded on fact, not fervid\neloquence, as the character of his prelections. He was more likely slowly\nto influence opinion by his books than to startle a youthful audience by\nspoken words. This conjecture is confirmed by the account of Reid in the\nGlasgow class-room given by Dugald Stewart, who was among his students\nin 1772-73. \u2018In his elocution and mode of instruction,\u2019 Stewart says,\n\u2018there was nothing peculiarly attractive. He seldom if ever indulged\nin the warmth of extempore discourse; nor was his manner of reading\ncalculated to increase the effect of what he had committed to writing.\nSuch, however, was the simplicity and perspicuity of his style, such the\ngravity and authority of his character, and such the general interest of\nhis young hearers in the doctrines which he taught, that by the numerous\naudiences to which his instructions were addressed he was heard uniformly\nwith the most silent and respectful attention.\u2019 And this delivery of deep\nand patient thought, regarding the duties and relations of man, and the\nfoundation of his beliefs, was continued in the class-room for sixteen\nyears.\n\nAs we might expect from their mental affinities, Reid greatly esteemed\nthe works of Bishop Butler. Among the manuscripts at Birkwood is an\nabstract of the _Analogy_; and Butler\u2019s ethical writings were recommended\nto his students as the best in the literature of moral philosophy, with\nregret to see them superseded in England by the productions of inferior\nmoralists. In tone and method of inquiry Reid is the Butler of Scotland.\nAnd Butler, too, is the Reid of England in his trustful appeals to what\nReid would call the common sense. When Butler asks himself whether we\nmay not be deceived in our natural sense of our continuous personal\nidentity, he replies, that \u2018this question may be asked at the end of\nany demonstration; because it is a question concerning the truth of\nperception by memory. And he who can doubt whether perception by memory\ncan in this case be depended on, may doubt also whether perception, by\nreasoning, or indeed whether any intuitive perception, can. Here then we\ncan go no further. For it is ridiculous to attempt to _prove_ the truth\nof those perceptions, whose truth we can no otherwise prove than by other\nperceptions which there is just the same ground to suspect; or to attempt\nto prove the truth of our faculties, which can no otherwise be proved\nthan by these very suspected faculties themselves.\u2019 This is the substance\nof the argument that rests on the data of the sense or reason with which\nhuman nature is inspired.\n\nReid\u2019s homely letters to his Aberdeen friends, Andrew and David Skene,\ngive some interesting pictures of the details of the family\u2019s life, in\nthe years which immediately followed the settlement in Glasgow. The\nextracts that follow may help the reader to form the pictures.\n\nIn a letter to Dr. Andrew Skene, dated November 15, 1764, we see the\nMoral Philosophy class-room on a winter morning a hundred and thirty\nyears ago, and life in the Drygate home a few weeks after the family\nentered it:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I must launch forth in the morning, so as to be at the College\n    (which is a walk of eight minutes) half an hour after seven,\n    when I speak for an hour without interruption to an audience\n    of about a hundred. At eleven I examine for an hour upon my\n    morning prelection; but my audience is a little more than a\n    third part of what it was in the morning. In a week or two I\n    must, for three days in the week, have a second prelection at\n    twelve, upon a different subject, where my audience will be\n    made up of those who hear me in the morning but do not attend\n    at eleven. My hearers commonly attend my class two years at\n    least. They pay fees for the first two years, and then they\n    are _cives_ of the class, and may attend gratis as many years\n    as they please. Many attend the moral philosophy class four\n    or five years; so that I have many preachers and students\n    of divinity and law of considerable standing, before whom I\n    stand in awe to speak without more preparation than I have\n    leisure for. I have a great inclination to attend some of the\n    professors here, several of whom are very eminent in their way;\n    but I cannot find leisure. Much time is consumed in our college\n    meetings about business, of which we have commonly four or five\n    in the week. We have a Literary Society once a week, consisting\n    of the Masters and two or three more; where each of the members\n    has a discourse once in the session.... Near a third part of\n    our students are Irish. Thirty came over lately in one ship,\n    besides three that went to Edinburgh. We have a good many\n    English, and some foreigners. Many of the Irish, as well as\n    Scotch, are poor, and come up late to save money; so that we\n    are not yet fully convened, although I have been teaching ever\n    since the 10th of October. Those who pretend to know, say that\n    the number of students this year, when fully convened, will\n    amount to 300.... By this time I am sure you have enough of\n    the College; for you know as much as I can tell you of the\n    fine houses of the Masters, of the Astronomical Observatory,\n    of Robin Foulis\u2019 collection of pictures and painting college,\n    and of the foundry for types and printing-house. Therefore\n    I will carry you home to my own house, which lyes among the\n    middle of the weavers, like the back-wynd in Aberdeen. You\n    go through a long, dark, abominably nasty entry, which leads\n    you into a clean little close. You walk upstairs to a neat\n    little dining-room, and find as many other little rooms as\n    just accommodate my family; so scantily that my apartment is\n    a closet of six feet by eight or nine off the dining-room. To\n    balance these little inconveniences, the house is new and free\n    of buggs; it has the best air and finest prospect in Glasgow;\n    the privilege of a large garden, very airy, to walk in, which\n    is not so nicely kept, but one may use freedom with it. A five\n    minutes\u2019 walk leads us up a rocky precipice into a large park,\n    partly planted with firs, and partly open, which overlooks\n    the town and all the country round, and gives a view of the\n    windings of the Clyde for a great way. The ancient Cathedral\n    stands at the foot of the rock, half of its height below you,\n    and half above you; and indeed it is a very magnificent pile.\n    When we came here, the street we live in (which is called the\n    Drygate) was infested with the small-pox, which were very\n    mortal. Two families in our neighbourhood lost all their\n    children, being three each. Little David was seized with the\n    infection, and had a very great eruption both on his face and\n    over his whole body, which you will believe would discompose\n    his mother.... Although my salary here be the same as Aberdeen,\n    yet if the class does not fall off, nor my health, so as to\n    disable me from teaching, I believe I shall be able to live as\n    easily as at Aberdeen, notwithstanding the differences in the\n    expense of living at the two places. I have touched about \u00a370\n    of fees, and may possibly make out the \u00a3100 this session....\n    The common people here have a gloom in their countenance, which\n    I am at a loss whether to ascribe to their religion or to the\n    air and climate. There is certainly more of religion among the\n    common people in this town than in Aberdeen; and although it\n    has a gloomy enthusiastical cast, yet I think it makes them\n    tame and sober. I have not heard either of a house or of a head\n    broke, or of a pocket picked, or of any flagrant crime, since\n    I came here. I have not heard any swearing in the streets, nor\n    seen a man drunk (excepting, _inter nos_, one Prof\u2014r) since\n    I came here.... If this scroll tire you, impute it to this,\n    that to-morrow is to be employed in choosing a Rector, and I\n    can sleep till ten o\u2019clock, which I shall not do again for six\n    weeks.\u2019\n\nAfter the first winter, and when he had gained some experience of\nGlasgow, he writes to Dr. David Skene, on 13th July 1765:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I have a strong inclination to attend the chymical lecture\n    the next winter; but am afraid I shall not have time. I have\n    had but very imperfect hints of Dr. Black\u2019s theory of fire....\n    Chemistry seems to be the only branch of philosophy that can be\n    said to be in a progressive state here, although other branches\n    are neither ill taught nor ill studied. I never considered\n    Dolland\u2019s telescopes till I came here. I think they open a\n    new field in optics which may greatly enrich that part of\n    philosophy.... I find a variety of things here to amuse me in\n    the literary world, and want nothing so much as my old friends,\n    whose place I cannot expect at my time of life to supply. I\n    think the common people here and in the neighbourhood greatly\n    inferior to the common people with you. They are B\u0153otian\n    in their understandings, fanatical in their religion, and\n    clownish in their dress and manners. The clergy encourage this\n    fanaticism too much, and find it the only way to popularity. I\n    often hear a gospel here which you know nothing about; for you\n    neither hear it from the pulpit nor will you find it in the\n    Bible. What is your Philosophical Society doing? Still battling\n    about D. Hume? or have you time to look in?... I believe you\n    do not like to be charged with compliments, otherwise I would\n    desire of you to remember me respectfully to Sir Archibald\n    Grant, Sir Arthur and Lady Forbes, and others of my country\n    acquaintances, when you have occasion to see them.\u2019\n\nIn another letter to Dr. David, written about Christmas in his second\nwinter, we find that\u2014\n\n    \u2018Mr. Watt has made two small improvements in the\n    steam-engine.[13] [These are minutely described.] ... I have\n    attended Dr. Black\u2019s lectures. His doctrine of latent heat is\n    the only thing I have yet heard that is altogether new. And\n    indeed I look upon it as a very great discovery.... I have\n    not met with any botanists here. Our College is considerably\n    more crowded than it was last session. My class indeed is much\n    the same as last year, but all the rest are better. I believe\n    the number of our students of one kind or another may be\n    between four and five hundred. But the College at Edinburgh is\n    increased this year much more than we are. The Moral Philosophy\n    class there is more than double ours. The Professor, Ferguson,\n    is indeed, as far as I can judge, a man of a noble spirit, of\n    very elegant manners, and has an uncommon flow of eloquence. I\n    hear he is about to publish, I don\u2019t know under what title, a\n    natural history of man; exhibiting a view of him in the savage\n    state, and in the several successive states of pasturage,\n    agriculture, and commerce. Our Society [Senate] is not so\n    harmonious as I wish. Schemes of interest, pushed by some and\n    opposed by others, are like to divide us into parties, and\n    perhaps engage us in law suits. Mrs. Reid, Pegie, and I, have\n    all had a severe cold and cough. I have been keeping the house\n    these two days in order to get the better of it.\u2019\n\nOn \u2018December 30th, 1765,\u2019 a less sanguine view appears, in a letter to\nAndrew Skene:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I assure you I can rarely find an hour which I am at liberty\n    to dispose of as I please. The most disagreeable thing in\n    the teaching part is to have a great number of stupid Irish\n    teagues, who attend classes for two or three years to qualify\n    them for teaching schools or being dissenting teachers. I\n    preach to them as St. Francis did to the fishes. I don\u2019t know\n    what pleasure he had in his audience; but I should have none\n    in mine, if there were not in it a mixture of reasonable\n    creatures. I confess I think there is a smaller proportion of\n    these in my class this year than there was the last. I have\n    long been of the opinion that, in a right constituted College,\n    there ought to be two professors for each class\u2014one for the\n    dunces, and another for those who have parts. The province of\n    the former would not be the most agreeable, but perhaps it\n    would require the greatest talents, and therefore ought to\n    be accounted the post of honour. There is no part of my time\n    more disagreeably spent than that which is spent in college\n    meetings; and I should have been attending one at this moment\n    if a bad cold I have got had not furnished me with an excuse.\n    These meetings are become more disagreeable by an evil spirit\n    of party that seems to put us in a ferment, and I am afraid\n    will produce bad consequences. The temper of our northern\n    Colonies makes mercantile people here look very grave. It is\n    said that the effects in these colonies belonging to this town\n    amount to above \u00a3400,000.[14] The mercantile people are for\n    suspending the Stamp-act, and redressing the grievances of the\n    colonists.... In what light the House of Commons will view\n    this matter I don\u2019t know, but it seems to me one of the most\n    important matters that have come before them. I wish often an\n    evening with you, such as we have enjoyed in the days of former\n    times, to settle the important affairs of Church and State, of\n    Colleges and Corporations. I have found this the best expedient\n    to think of them without melancholy and chagrin. And I think\n    all that a man has to do in the world is to keep his temper and\n    to do his duty. Mrs. Reid is tolerably well just now, but is\n    often ailing.\u2019\n\nIn a letter to Dr. David, in March 1766, he refers to the death of his\nearly friend, John Stewart, the Mathematical Professor in Marischal\nCollege, and his companion in the English tour thirty years before:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Mr. Stewart\u2019s death affects me deeply. A sincere friendship,\n    begun at twelve years of age, and continued to my time of life,\n    without any interruption, cannot but give some pangs. You know\n    his worth; yet it was shaded ever since you knew him by too\n    great abstraction from the world. The former part of his life\n    was more amiable and more social; but the whole was of a piece\n    in virtue, candour, and humanity.... I have always regarded\n    him as my best tutor, though of the same age with me. If the\n    giddy part of my life was in any degree spent innocently and\n    virtuously, I owe it to him more than to any human creature;\n    for I could not but be virtuous in his company, and I could\n    not be so happy in any other. But I must leave this pleasing\n    melancholy subject. He is happy; and I shall often be happy in\n    the remembrance of our friendship; and I hope we shall meet\n    again.\u2019\n\nA minute account of Black\u2019s theory of latent heat follows.\n\nLater in the same year, Black was called to the Chair of Chemistry in\nEdinburgh, which he filled for nearly thirty years, and in Reid\u2019s\nletters to the Skenes there is much about candidates for the vacant\noffice in Glasgow, with a suggestion that David Skene should himself\nenter the lists. \u2018There is a great spirit of inquiry among the young\npeople here. Literary merit is much regarded; and I conceive the\nopportunities a man has of improving himself are much greater here than\nat Aberdeen. The communication with Edinburgh is easy. One goes in the\nstage coach to Edinburgh before dinner; has all the afternoon there, and\nreturns to dinner at Glasgow next day; so that if you have any ambition\nto get into the College of Edinburgh (which I think you ought to have), I\nconceive Glasgow would be a good step.\u2019\n\nThe appeal was ineffectual. Meantime his own appointment, as an\n\u2018examinator\u2019 of candidates for the vacant Mathematical Chair in Marischal\nCollege, made a visit to Aberdeen necessary, as anticipated in a letter\non \u2018May 8th\u2019:\u2014\n\n    \u2018My class will be over in less than a month, and by that time\n    I shall be glad to have some respite. I hope to have the\n    pleasure of seeing my friends in Aberdeen in August, if not\n    sooner. We have had a stronger College this year than ever\n    before. We have been remarkably free from riots and disorders\n    among the students; and I did not indeed expect that 350 young\n    fellows could have keen kept quiet for so many months with so\n    little trouble.... You\u2019ll say to all this that cadgers are aye\n    speaking of crooksaddles. I think so they ought; besides, I\n    have nothing else to say to you, and have had no time to think\n    of anything but my crooksaddles for seven months past. When\n    the session\u2019s over, I must rub up my mathematics against the\n    month of August. There is one candidate for your profession\n    of mathematics to go from this College; and if your College\n    get a better man, or a better mathematician, they will be very\n    lucky.[15] I am so sensible of the honour the Magistrates have\n    done me in naming me to be one of the examinators, that I will\n    not decline it, though I confess I like the honour better than\n    the office.\u2019\n\nIn the autumn of 1766 Reid exchanged the house in the Drygate for an\nofficial residence in the Professors\u2019 Court of the Old College. This\nappears in a letter to Dr. Andrew Skene on December 17th:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I live now in the College, and have no distance to walk to my\n    class in dark mornings, as I had before. I enjoy this ease,\n    though I am not sure whether the necessity of walking up and\n    down a steep hill[16] three or four times a day was not of\n    use. I have of late had a little of your distemper, finding a\n    giddiness in my head when I lie down, or rise, or turn myself\n    in my bed. Our College is very well peopled this session. My\n    public class is above three score, besides the private class.\n    Dr. Smith never had so many in one year. There is nothing so\n    uneasy to me here as our factions in the College.\u2019\n\nIn February 1767, along with other local news, we find this in a letter\nto David Skene:\u2014\n\n    \u2018We are now resolved to have a canal from Carron to this place,\n    if the Parliament allows it. \u00a340,000 was subscribed last week\n    by the merchants of the Carron Company for this purpose.[17]\n    Our medical college has fallen off greatly this session, most\n    of the students of medicine having followed Dr. Black to\n    Edinburgh. The natural and moral philosophy classes are more\n    numerous than they have ever been; but I expect a great falling\n    off, if I see another session. I was just now seeing your\n    furnace along with Dr. Irvine.... If I could find a machine\n    as proper for analysing ideas, moral sentiments, and other\n    materials belonging to the fourth kingdom, I believe I should\n    find in my heart to bestow the money first. I have the more use\n    for a machine of this kind, because my alembic for performing\n    these operations\u2014I mean my cranium\u2014has been a little out of\n    order this winter, by a vertigo, which has made my studies go\n    on heavily, though it has not hitherto interrupted my teaching.\n    I have found air and exercise and a clean stomach the best\n    remedies; but I cannot command the two former as often as I\n    could wish. I am sensible that the air of a crowded class is\n    bad, and often thought of carrying my class to the Common Hall;\n    but I was afraid it might have been construed as a piece of\n    ostentation.\u2019\n\nReid\u2019s letter of condolence to Dr. David Skene on the death of his\nfather, in September 1767, mentions the loss of his own infant daughter,\n\u2018my sweet little Bess,\u2019 and also refers to an excursion to Hamilton \u2018with\nMr. Beattie\u2019\u2014the only occasion on which, for more than three months, he\nhad been more than three miles from Glasgow. \u2018Having time at command,\u2019\nhe had been tempted \u2018to fall to the tumbling over books; as we have a\nvast number here which I had not access to see at Aberdeen. But this is\na _mare magnum_, wherein one is tempted by hopes of discoveries to make\na tedious voyage, which seldom repays the labour. I have long ago found\nmy memory to be like a vessel that is full: if you pour in more, you lose\nas much as you gain; and on this account I have a thousand times resolved\nto give up all pretence to what is called learning, being satisfied that\nit is more profitable to ruminate on the little I have laid up than\nto add to the indigested heap. I have had little society, the College\npeople being out of town, and have almost lost the faculty of speaking by\ndisuse. I blame myself for having corresponded so little with my friends\nat Aberdeen. I wished to try Lumsden\u2019s experiment which you was so good\nas to communicate to me.... A nasty custom I have of chewing tobacco has\nbeen the reason of my observing a species of as nasty little animals. I\nspit in a basin of sawdust, which, when it comes to be drenched, produces\na vast number of animals, three or four times as large as a louse,\nand not very different in shape; but armed with four or five rows of\nprickles like a hedgehog, which seem to serve it as feet. Its motion is\nvery sluggish. It lies drenched in the aforesaid mass, which swarms with\nthese animals of all ages from top to bottom.... I have gone over Sir\nJames Stewart\u2019s great book of political economy, wherein I think there\nis a great deal of good material\u2014carelessly put together indeed; but I\nthink it contains more sound principles concerning commerce and police\nthan any book we have yet had. We had the favour of a visit from Sir\nArchibald Grant. It gave me much pleasure to see him retain his spirits\nand vigour.\u2019 A letter in October mentions that Reid had \u2018passed eight\ndays lately with Lord Kames at Blair-Drummond,\u2019 and that his lordship\nis preparing a fourth edition of his _Elements_. He adds, \u2018I have been\nlabouring at _Barbara Celarent_ for three weeks bygone.\u2019 A new friend,\nLord Kames, here comes in sight.\n\nThe last of the Skene letters is dated three years later, in 1770. After\npressing David Skene to visit him in Glasgow, he ends thus:\u2014\u2018As to\nmyself, the immaterial world has swallowed up all my thoughts since I\ncame here; but I meet with few that have travelled far in that region,\nand am often left to pursue my dreary way in a more solitary manner than\nwhen we used to meet at the Club.\u2019\n\nThe homely simplicity of Reid\u2019s character is shown in those letters. They\ndiffer from the letters we have after the Skenes disappear. These are\nalmost all on questions in philosophy, and show a slow but steady advance\nin reflection upon the \u2018common sense\u2019 constitution of man\u2019s knowledge of\nthe universe of matter and mind.\n\nIn 1772 there was sorrow in the Reid household. The two eldest\ndaughters, Jane and Margaret, both died, in the bloom of youth, leaving\nonly the third daughter, Martha, who not long after married Dr. Patrick\nCarmichael, a Glasgow physician, and youngest son of Professor Gershom\nCarmichael. This marriage added much to the comfort of Reid\u2019s later years.\n\nWe have a passing glimpse of Reid in 1773, when he was entertained\nin Glasgow by Johnson and Boswell, at the _Saracen\u2019s Head Inn_, in\nthe Gallowgate, \u2018that paragon of inns in the eyes of the Scotch, but\nwretchedly managed.\u2019 The travellers arrived there on the 28th of October,\non their return from their romantic excursion to the Western Highlands.\nAt the _Saracen\u2019s Head_, on the following morning, as Boswell tells us,\n\u2018Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two other Glasgow professors, breakfasted\nwith us,\u2019 and they met them afterwards at supper. \u2018I was not much pleased\nwith any of them,\u2019 the sage wrote to Mrs. Thrale. \u2018The general impression\nupon my memory,\u2019 Boswell says, \u2018is, that we had not much conversation at\nGlasgow, where the professors, like their brethren at Aberdeen, did not\nventure to expose themselves much to the battery of cannon which they\nknew might play upon them.\u2019 It is a pity that Boswell\u2019s indifference, or\nindolence, on this occasion has deprived us of talk at the _Saracen\u2019s\nHead_ and in the College Court, as dramatic in its way as the pictures\nof Rasay or Inch Kenneth. Notwithstanding Reid\u2019s cautious and modest\nsilence, or want of vivacity, he surely said and heard something at those\nGlasgow breakfasts and suppers.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBefore death had put an end to the letters to the Skenes, Reid had become\nintimate with one of the most notable men of the time in Scotland. I\ndo not know how the intimacy began, but as early as 1767 we have found\nhim referring to a visit to Lord Kames at Blair-Drummond, and to the\nmysteries of _Barbara Celarent_. This means that he was at work on the\n_Brief Account of Aristotle\u2019s Logic, with Remarks_, published seven years\nafterwards as an Appendix to one of Lord Kames\u2019 _Sketches of the History\nof Man_. The _Sketches_ appeared in two quarto volumes, in 1774, and\nthe _Brief Account_ fills about seventy pages in the second volume. It\nwas Reid\u2019s only appearance in print in the sixteen years of his public\nprofessorship in Glasgow. This, along with the essay on Quantity, given\nto the Royal Society in 1748, and the _Inquiry_, in 1764, made up his\nwork as an author, until after he had ceased to be an oral teacher.\n\nIn Henry Home, Lord Kames, notwithstanding a temperament very different\nfrom his own, Reid found congenial companionship\u2014a strong disposition to\nmetaphysical speculation, a ready and accomplished if not deeply learned\nlawyer, and a considerable author. Kames was fourteen years his senior.\nCuriously, Henry Home\u2019s closest early friendship was with David Hume.\nThirty years before his friendship with Reid, he advised Hume about the\n_Treatise of Human Nature_, and had given the youth an introduction to\nBishop Butler. \u2018My opinions,\u2019 David writes in 1737, \u2018are so new, and even\nsome terms I am obliged to make use of, that I could not propose, by\nany abridgment, to give my system an air of likelihood, or even to make\nit intelligible. I have had a greater desire of communicating to you a\nplan of the whole, that I believe it will not appear in public before\nthe beginning of next winter. I am at present castrating my work, that\nis, cutting off its nobler parts, that is, endeavouring it shall give\nas little offence as possible. This is a piece of cowardice for which I\nblame myself. But I resolved not to be an enthusiast in philosophy while\nI was blaming other enthusiasms.\u2019 It was thus that Hume wrote about the\nbook which, even in its \u2018castrated\u2019 form, startled Reid in the manse at\nNew Machar, and determined his whole intellectual life. In 1751 Home\npublished _Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion_,\non which Jonathan Edwards congratulated him in a letter to Dr. Erskine.\nYet his speculations, and his association with the sceptic, raised a\nsuspicion of his orthodoxy in the General Assembly.\n\nAccording to Lord Woodhouselee, his biographer, \u2018the intercourse of\nLord Kames was frequent with his much-valued friend Dr. Reid, and they\ncorresponded on various topics of philosophy\u2014a correspondence which,\nnotwithstanding the dissimilarity of character in many respects between\nthese two eminent men, subsisted for a long period of years, with the\nmost perfect cordiality and mutual esteem.\u2019 Dr. Reid, Dugald Stewart\ntells us, lived in the most cordial and affectionate friendship with\nLord Kames, notwithstanding the avowed opposition of their sentiments on\nsome moral questions to which he attached the highest importance. Both\nof them, however, were the friends of virtue and of mankind; and both\nwere able to temper the warmth of free discussion with the forbearance\nand good humour founded on mutual esteem. \u2018No two men,\u2019 Stewart adds,\n\u2018ever exhibited a more striking contrast in their conversation or in\ntheir constitutional tempers\u2014the one slow and cautious in his decisions,\neven on those topics which he had most diligently studied; reserved and\nsilent in promiscuous society, and retaining, after all his literary\neminence, the same simple and unassuming manners which he had brought\nfrom his country residence; the other, lively, rapid, and communicative;\naccustomed by his professional pursuits to wield with address the\nweapons of controversy, and not averse to a trial of his powers on\nquestions the most foreign to his ordinary habits of inquiry. But\nthese characteristical differences, while to their common friends they\nlent an additional charm to the distinguishing merits of each, served\nonly to enliven their social intercourse, and to cement their mutual\nattachment.\u2019 From 1767 till the death of Lord Kames in December 1782,\ntheir intercourse was unbroken.[18]\n\nLord Kames thus explains Reid\u2019s contribution to the _Sketches_:\u2014\u2018In\nreviewing the foregoing Sketch, it occurred to me that a fair analysis of\nAristotle\u2019s logic would be a valuable addition to the historical branch.\nA distinct and candid account of a system that for so many ages governed\nthe reasoning part of mankind cannot but be acceptable to the public.\nCuriosity will be gratified in seeing a phantom delineated that so long\nfascinated the learned world; a phantom which, like the pyramids of\nEgypt, or hanging gardens of Babylon, is a structure of infinite genius,\nbut absolutely useless, unless for raising wonder. Dr. Reid, Professor\nof Moral Philosophy in the College of Glasgow, relished the thought,\nand his friendship to me prevailed on him, after much solicitation,\nto undertake the laborious task. No man is better acquainted with\nAristotle\u2019s writings; and (without any enthusiastic attachment) he holds\nthat philosopher to be a first-rate genius.\u2019\n\nMeasured by the present standard of Aristotelian criticism, Reid\u2019s\nexposition of the Organon, and estimate of its place in the development\nof human understanding, may seem meagre and inadequate; especially as the\nissue of seven years of preparation, and as his solitary contribution to\nphilosophy in these sixteen years. But when we remember that Aristotelian\nlogic was then under an eclipse, especially in Scotland, and that Reid\u2019s\n\u2018Brief Account\u2019 was an attempt to draw the Organon out of the obscurity\nto which it had been condemned by leaders of modern thought, the merit\nof his sober and sagacious commentary may be more recognised. It is as\na signal monument of abstracted intellectual activity, rather than as\na philosophical instrument for advancing or organising our knowledge,\nthat Reid regards the syllogistic logic. He concludes that the art of\nsyllogism is better fitted to promote scholastic litigation than real\nimprovement in the sciences; he sees in it only \u2018a venerable piece of\nantiquity and a great effort of human genius.\u2019 When he contrasts the\nutility of Bacon\u2019s _Organum_, as a factor in the progressive intelligence\nof mankind, he fails to see that each Organon may consistently supplement\nthe other.\n\nReid characteristically ends his account of the old Organon by suggesting\nan Organon, different from either the old or the new, as still wanting.\nThis should neither, like Aristotle\u2019s, unfold only abstract forms of\ndeductive reasoning, nor, like Bacon\u2019s, only methods for verifying\ninductive generalisations. It should be concerned with the rational\nprinciples which compose the Common Sense of mankind. \u2018All the real\nknowledge of mankind may be divided into two parts: the first consists of\nself-evident propositions, the second of those which are deduced by just\nreasoning from self-evident propositions. The line that divides these\ntwo ought to be marked as distinctly as possible, and principles that are\nreally self-evident reduced to general axioms. Although first principles\ndo not admit of direct proof, yet there must be certain marks by which\nthose that are truly such may be distinguished from counterfeits. These\nmarks ought to be described and applied to distinguish the genuine from\nthe spurious.... This is a subject of such importance that if inquisitive\nmen can be brought to the same unanimity in the first principles of\nthe other sciences as in those of mathematics and natural philosophy,\nthis might be considered as a third grand era in the progress of human\nreason.\u2019 Thus in 1774 Reid\u2019s thought still converges on the subject which\nhad engaged him since the _Treatise of Human Nature_ found its way into\nthe manse of New Machar. Perhaps he was unduly sanguine in expecting\nunanimity regarding the ingredients of the final reason of mankind\u2014so\nimperfectly developed in the individual consciousness, in its higher\nelements, as long as men are disposed to resist the final venture of the\nheart and conscience in their interpretation of the world and of human\nlife.\n\nIt was in 1774 that Reid\u2019s appeal in 1764 to the common reason of human\nnature aroused hostile criticism. He had been seconded by others in\nhis response to the sceptics. The resort to a \u2018sense\u2019 of self-evident\ntruth, in his _Inquiry_ in 1764, which itself looked like a reply to\nargument by feeling, was followed in 1766 by _An Appeal to Common Sense\non behalf of Religion_, by Dr. James Oswald, minister of Methven in\nPerthshire. In 1770 Beattie\u2019s _Essay on the Nature and Immutability of\nTruth, in opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism_, followed. Oswald\nand Beattie were not deep and patient thinkers like Reid;[19] but the\nrising literary and social reputation of Beattie, secured for the _Essay\non Truth_ more rapid and widespread admiration than was given to the\n_Inquiry_. Beattie often visited London, was there one of the lions of\nthe day, was made a D.C.L. of Oxford, and had interviews with George the\nThird, who admired his book, conferred a pension on Beattie, and rallied\nMr. Dundas about \u2018Scotch Philosophy.\u2019 Reid, Beattie, and Oswald thus\nbecame known as a triumvirate of \u2018Scottish Philosophers\u2019; and the appeal\nto common sense, in which they were at least verbally agreed, began to be\nspoken about as \u2018the Scottish Philosophy,\u2019 a term which has since been\nadopted in this country and abroad.\n\nThis Scottish triumvirate, helped into vogue by Beattie, roused Joseph\nPriestley, an English dissenter. Priestley had abandoned the Calvinism\nof his early creed for materialism, philosophical necessity, and free\nthought, and, after serving for some years as pastor of a nonconformist\nchapel in Cheshire, and next as a schoolmaster much devoted to\nexperiments in the natural sciences, was already known as an author in\nnatural science. In 1774, when he was living with Lord Shelburne, as\nlibrarian and literary companion, he appeared for the first time as a\nmetaphysical critic, in _An Examination of Reid\u2019s Inquiry, Beattie\u2019s\nEssay, and Oswald\u2019s Appeal to Common Sense_. He played upon the term\n\u2018common sense,\u2019 and took for granted that the aim of the triumvirate\nwas to substitute mere feeling and authority for reason,\u2014the authority\nof the multitude for that of the philosophical elect,\u2014alleging blind\ninstinct when unable to produce argument, and multiplying instincts to\nsuit each controversial emergency. \u2018As men have imagined innate ideas,\nbecause they had forgot how they came by their ideas, the Scottish\nphilosophers set up almost as many distinct instincts as there are\nacquired principles of acting.\u2019 He ridiculed Reid for his supposed\ndiscovery of the root of scepticism in the ideal hypothesis; charging\nhim with innocently mistaking a metaphor for a scientific theory, and\nfor overlooking the leading part which mental association plays, as the\ncause of those convictions which Reid mistook for infallible constituents\nof common sense. \u2018If we consider the general tenor of the writings of\nthese philosophers,\u2019 Dr. Priestley said, \u2018it will appear that they\nare saying one thing and doing another\u2014talking plausibly about the\nnecessity for admitting axioms as the foundation of all reasoning, but\nmeaning to recommend particular assumptions of their own as axioms\u2014not\nas being founded on perception of the agreement of ideas, which is the\ngreat doctrine of Mr. Locke, and which makes truth to depend upon the\nnecessary nature of things, to be therefore absolute, unchangeable, and\neverlasting, but merely on some unaccountable instinctive persuasions,\ndepending upon the arbitrary constitution of our nature\u2014which makes all\ntruth be relative to ourselves only, and consequently to be infinitely\nvague and precarious. This system admits of no final appeal to reason\nproperly considered, which any person might be at liberty to examine and\ndiscuss; on the contrary every man is taught to think himself authorised\nto pronounce dogmatically upon every question, according to his present\nfeeling and persuasion, under the notion of its being something original,\ninstructive, and incontrovertible; although, stoutly analysed, it may\nappear to be mere prejudice.\u2019 Thus, as opposed to the man of straw he\nset up under the name of Reid, Priestley postulated a materialistic\nconception of man, as only an organism, the so-called mental and\nmoral power of which was the natural issue of physical structure;\nhis perceptions the effects of their own objects; and on the whole a\nnecessitated system of the universe, which excluded morally responsible\nagency.\n\nReid made no reply at the time to this argumentative discharge. In an\nunpublished letter to Dr. Price he gives a reason for his silence. \u2018I\nwill not answer Dr. Priestley,\u2019 he says, \u2018because he is very lame in\nabstract reasoning. I have got no light from him. And indeed what light\nwith respect to the powers of the mind can one expect from a man who has\nnot yet learned to distinguish ideas from vibrations, nor motion from\nsensation, nor simple apprehension from judgment, nor simple ideas from\ncomplex ideas, nor necessary truths from contingent truths?\u2019[20] In 1775\nReid writes to Lord Kames:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Dr. Priestley in his last book thinks that the power of\n    perception, as much as the other powers that are termed mental,\n    is the natural result of an organic structure such as that of\n    the human brain. Consequently, the whole man becomes extinct\n    at death; and we have no hope of surviving the grave but what\n    is derived from the Christian revelation. I would be glad to\n    know your lordship\u2019s opinion, whether, when my brain has lost\n    its original structure, and when some hundred years after, the\n    same materials are again fabricated so curiously as to become\n    an intelligent being\u2014whether, I say, that being will be _me_;\n    or if two or three such beings should be formed out of my\n    brain, whether they will all be _me_, and consequently be all\n    one and the same intelligent being. This seems to me a great\n    mystery; but Dr. Priestley denies all mysteries.... I am not\n    surprised that your lordship has found little entertainment\n    in a late French writer on human nature. From what I learn\n    the French philosophers are become rank Epicureans. I detest\n    all systems that depreciate human nature. If it be a delusion\n    that there is something in the constitution of man that is\n    venerable and worthy of its author, let me live and die in this\n    delusion rather than have my eyes opened to see my species in\n    a disgusting light. Every good man feels his indignation rise\n    against those who disparage his kindred or country; why should\n    it not rise against those who disparage his kind? Were it not\n    that we sometimes see extremes meet, I should think it very\n    strange to see atheists and high-shod divines contending who\n    should most blacken and degenerate human nature. Yet I think\n    the atheist acts the most consistent part of the two; for\n    surely such views of human nature tend more to promote atheism\n    than to promote religion and virtue.\u2019\n\nThis allusion to contemporary French philosophers is almost the only\none I find in Reid. The chief works of Condillac appeared before the\n_Inquiry_, but it does not seem that they, or Diderot and the French\nEncyclopedists, were known to him. That Kant is not referred to, nor even\nknown by name, is less surprising. This ignorance is characteristic of\nReid\u2019s home-bred, self-contained philosophy.\n\nInquiry into our conception of Power or Causation becomes prominent\nin Reid\u2019s letters to Lord Kames throughout \u2018the seventies,\u2019 along\nwith experimental investigations in physics and physiology which show\ncontinued interest in natural causes. A letter, written in 1775, contains\na curious conjecture with regard to the generation of plants and animals,\nmore speculative than was his habit. He is \u2018apt to conjecture,\u2019 he tells\nhis friend, \u2018that both plants and animals are at first organised atoms,\nhaving all the parts of the animal or plant, but so slender, and folded\nup in such a manner, as to be reduced to a particle far beyond the reach\nof our senses, and perhaps as small as the constituent parts of water.\nThe earth, the water, and the air may, for anything I know, be full of\nsuch organised atoms.\u2019 He then goes on to consider the relation of this\nhypothesis to the idea of active design in nature, and expresses doubt\nabout the possibility of the atoms being endowed with power to form\nthemselves into an organised body like the human. \u2018I cannot help thinking\nthat such a work as the Iliad, and much more an animal or vegetable body,\nmust have been made by express design. It seems to me as easy to contrive\na machine which should compose a variety of epic poems and tragedies,\nas to contrive laws of motion by which unthinking particles of matter\nshould coalesce into a variety of organised bodies.\u2019 He suggests that\nthe organisation is the issue of constant and uniform divine activity.\n\u2018Can we,\u2019 he asks, \u2018show by any good reason that the Almighty finished\nhis work at a stroke, and has continued ever since an inactive spectator?\nAnd if His continued operation be necessary, it is no miracle, while it\nis uniform, and according to fixed laws. Though we should suppose the\ngravitation of matter to be the immediate operation of the Deity, it\nwould be no miracle while it is constant and uniform; but if it should\ncease for a moment, only by His withholding His hand, _this_ would be a\nmiracle.\u2019 This is to say that all natural changes are immediate effects\nof divine action, proceeding according to natural law or rule.\n\nThe suggestion illustrates the bent of Reid\u2019s thought in later life. If\nour common sense of the continuous independent existence of sensible\nthings, and of their manifestation in Perception as directly as states\nof our own minds are manifested to us when we are conscious of them\u2014if\n_this_ was the factor of the Common Sense that engaged him in New Machar\nand King\u2019s College days, the Power or Causality which all changes in the\nuniverse presuppose now becomes prominent, alike in his correspondence\nand in his books. What is meant by Power, and where is the Power centred\nthat is implied in the changes that are always going on, in ourselves and\nin our surroundings? Priestley\u2019s assumption that matter explains all the\nphenomena of a human mind; the theory of universal necessity advocated by\nKames; and the duties of his Glasgow professorship, all tended to carry\nhis reflections onward from the merely physical to the ethical judgments\nof the common sense, and so upward from the merely natural to the\nspiritual interpretation of the universe. \u2018First that which is natural,\nthen that which is spiritual.\u2019\n\nThis runs through his correspondence with Lord Kames. That there is\nno absolute necessity for men being bad; that their immoral acts are\ncentred and originate in themselves and not in God; that it would be\nunjust to exact as a duty what it is not in a person\u2019s power to do; that\nwhat a man does voluntarily or with deliberate intention, it is also in\nhis power not to do; that what is done without his will is not really\ndone by _him_ at all; and that real power is moral agency,\u2014these are\nultimate judgments, reached \u2018not by logical reasoning,\u2019 but in \u2018the more\ntrustworthy way of immediate perception and feeling,\u2019 to which Reid so\noften appeals. \u2018If I could suppose God to make a devil a devil, I cannot\nsuppose that He would condemn him for being a devil,\u2019 is in a letter to\nLord Kames.[21] The impotence of matter rather than its independence is\nnow insisted on; with the inference that at any rate _it_ cannot cause\nour perceptions, as Priestley supposed. He begins to see that power\nmust be referred to mind or spirit alone, and that matter is powerless.\n\u2018Efficient causes are not within the sphere of natural philosophy, which\nis concerned only with the laws or methods according to which Power\noperates. It exhibits the grand machine of the material world, analysed,\nas it were, and taken to pieces. It belongs to metaphysics and natural\ntheology to show the Power that continues and gives motion to the whole;\naccording to laws which the naturalist discovers, and perhaps according\nto laws still more general.\u2019\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIt was thus that Reid\u2019s uneventful life of thought\u2014deep, steady,\nunobtrusive\u2014was sustained for sixteen years, when he was educating\nthe rising generation in the old class-room at the College; unfolding\nphilosophy in correspondence with a sympathetic friend; contributing\nessays to the Literary Society which met monthly at the College; and\npreparing his \u2018Brief Account\u2019 of Aristotle\u2014all until he had reached his\nseventieth year. On the 19th of May 1780 he wrote to Lord Kames of a\nchange that had occurred the day before:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I find myself growing old; and I have no right lo plead\n    exemption from the infirmities of that stage of life. For\n    that reason I have made choice of an Assistant in my office.\n    Yesterday the College at my desire made choice of Mr. Archibald\n    Arthur, preacher, to be my assistant and successor. I think I\n    have done good service to the College by this, and procured\n    some leisure to myself, though with reduction of my finances.\u2019\n\nIt was Reid\u2019s desire, while his faculties were yet vigorous, to devote\nhis strength to further philosophical authorship. During the remaining\nsixteen years of his life his lectures were delivered to the students\nby Mr. Arthur, to whom the professorial work in the class-room was\ntransferred. Arthur, then thirty-six years of age, was a native of\nRenfrewshire, a distinguished alumnus of Glasgow, as it seems from a\nposthumous volume of his Essays, and a man not unlike Reid in mind and\ncharacter, but in inferior form; at this time chaplain and librarian\nof the University, and a member of the Literary Society. After one of\nArthur\u2019s Sunday services in the College chapel, Reid had whispered to\none of his colleagues on the professorial bench\u2014\u2018This is a very sensible\nfellow, and in my opinion would make a good professor of morals.\u2019[22] He\nis described by a contemporary as \u2018a man of unprepossessing exterior, of\ninvincible bashfulness, which continued to clog his manner and impede\nhis exertions during the whole course of his life; but of a thoughtful,\ngrave, silent habit, which led him to a due estimate of what he was\nindividually adapted to.\u2019 He survived Reid, as his successor, a little\nmore than a year, when he was followed in the Chair by James Mylne, a\nstrong man unknown in philosophical literature, whose professorial career\nof forty years made him a familiar figure to generations of Glasgow\nstudents.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nPHILOSOPHICAL RETIREMENT: AUTHORSHIP IN OLD AGE\n\n1780-1795\n\n\nDugald Stewart, when illustrating the changes in human memory that\nare connected with disease and old age, refers thus to Reid:\u2014\u2018One old\nman I have myself had the good fortune to know, who, after a long, an\nactive, and an honourable life, having begun to feel some of the usual\neffects of advanced years, has been able to find resources in his own\nsagacity against most of the inconveniences with which they are commonly\nattended; and who, by watching his gradual decline with the courage\nof an indifferent observer, and employing his ingenuity to retard its\nprogress, has converted even the infirmities of old age into a source of\nphilosophical amusement.\u2019 For sixteen years Reid had been discharging\nthat part of the duties of a professor which belongs to the class-room:\nthe remaining sixteen years of his life, devoted to original research\nand authorship, illustrate the words of Stewart. He continued, after the\nappointment of Arthur, to live as before in the Professors\u2019 Court in\nold Glasgow College\u2014a placid, methodical life, steadily industrious, a\nsagacious interpreter of nature and of man, still active in the academic\nsenate\u2014with occasional recreation in visits to the country. The year 1780\nwas saddened by another of those domestic sorrows which formed the chief\ninterruption to the tranquil happiness of his life; for his eldest son,\nGeorge, died in Newfoundland in February, at the age of twenty-five.\nTwo years later the only remaining son, David, was taken away; after\nwhich his daughter, Mrs. Carmichael, alone survived of the nine sons and\ndaughters.\n\nVery soon after he had been released from the public work of the\nprofessorship, letters to his cousin, Dr. James Gregory, then an\nEdinburgh Professor of Medicine, speak of activity in transforming the\nlectures into the form of philosophical essays for publication. This\nenterprise was indeed Reid\u2019s principal employment for the next eight\nyears. The _Essays_ appeared in two instalments, in 1785 and 1788. The\nfirst instalment was a matter-of-fact inquiry into the intellectual power\nof man; the second was a matter-of-fact inquiry into man\u2019s moral power:\nthe \u2018facts\u2019 inquired about and appealed to were the invisible ones of\nwhich men are conscious, not those that can be seen and touched\u2014above\nall, the final convictions of which the Common Sense consists. Both\ninstalments appeared in the same decade of last century in which Kant\u2019s\n\u2018_Kritiks_\u2019 of Pure and Practical Reason were given to the world.\n\nReid\u2019s _Essays_ form, as it were, the inner court of the temple of which\nthe Aberdonian _Inquiry_ is the vestibule. But the vestibule is a more\nfinished work of constructive skill than the inner court, for the aged\narchitect appears at last as if embarrassed by accumulated material. The\n_Essays_, greater in bulk, perhaps less deserve a place among modern\nphilosophical classics than the _Inquiry_, notwithstanding its narrower\nscope, confined as it is to man\u2019s perception of the extended world, as\nan object-lesson in the method of appeal to the common sense. In the\n_Essays_ an advance is made towards a finally ethical interpretation of\nman and the universe.\n\nWe have no longer the light of letters to Lord Kames in this closing\nstage of Reid\u2019s life; for Kames died in 1782. Reid\u2019s retiring\nmodesty deprived him of that large literary intercourse to which his\nphilosophical position might otherwise have led. His correspondence\nwith men eminent in letters or philosophy seems almost confined to\nKames, the Gregories, Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Price. I find no trace of\ncorrespondence with his Aberdeen friends Campbell and Beattie, whose\npursuits had so much in common with his own. But letters to Dr. James\nGregory take the place in the \u2018eighties\u2019 which those to Lord Kames\ntook in the \u2018seventies\u2019; they reveal an old age given to proof-sheets,\nscientific experiments, and benignant interest in social progress. One\ndated \u2018Glasgow College, April 7, 1783,\u2019 tells of the _Essays on the\nIntellectual Powers_ in the press:\u2014\u2018I shall be much obliged if you will\ncontinue to favour me with your observations; therefore I have put\noff examining those you have sent until the manuscripts be returned,\nwhich I expect about the end of this month, along with Dugald Stewart\u2019s\nobservations.\u2019 Again he writes in June:\u2014\u2018I cannot get more copied of my\npapers till next winter, and indeed have not much more ready. This parcel\ngoes to page 658. I believe what you have got before may be one-half\nof all I intend. The materials of what is not yet ready for the copier\nare partly discourses read in our Literary Society, partly notes of my\nlectures. Your judgment of what you have seen flatters me very much,\nand adds greatly to my own opinion of it; though authors seldom are\ndeficient in a good opinion of their works. I am at a loss to express my\nobligations to you for the pains you have taken.\u2019 He refers in another\nletter to what he regards as the source of the fashionable agnosticism\nagainst which his life was a continued philosophical protest:\u2014\u2018I have\noften thought of what you propose\u2014to give a History of the Ideal System\nand what I have to say against it, _by itself_; and I am far from being\nsatisfied that it stands in the most proper place [in the _Essays_]. I\nhave endeavoured to put it in separate chapters [_e.g._ Essay ii. ch.\n7-15], whose titles may direct those who have no taste for it to pass\nover them. I observe that Bayle and others, who at the reformation of\nNatural Philosophy gave new light, found it necessary to contrast their\nown discoveries with the Aristotelian notions which then prevailed. We\nmay now wish their works purged of this controversial part; but perhaps\nit was necessary at the time they wrote, when men\u2019s minds were full of\nthe old system, and prepossessed in its favour. What I take to be the\ngenuine Philosophy of the Human Mind is in so low a state, and has so\nmany enemies, that I apprehend those who would make any improvement in\nit must, for some time at least, build with one hand, and hold a weapon\nwith the other.\u2019 So Reid claimed the office of modern reformer of the\nphilosophy of human mind, as Bacon and others had been the reformers of\nthe sciences which interpret external nature.\n\nOn \u2018March 14, 1784,\u2019 he mentions the progress of the book:\u2014\u2018I send\nyou now the remainder of what I propose to print with respect to the\nIntellectual Powers of the Mind. It may perhaps be a year before what\nrelates to the Active Powers be ready; and therefore I think the former\nmight be published by itself, as it is very uncertain whether I shall\nlive to publish the latter. I think the title may be _Essays on the\nIntellectual Powers of the Human Mind_. It will easily divide into eight\nEssays; but with regard to this, as well as whether the two parts may\nbe published separately, I wish to have your advice and Mr. Stewart\u2019s.\nI apprehend that the Second Part\u2014I mean what relates to the Active\nPowers\u2014will not be near so large as the First.\u2019 On \u20182nd May 1785\u2019 he\nannounces that the _Essays on the Intellectual Powers_ are ready for\npublication, dedicated to Dr. Gregory and to Dugald Stewart:\u2014\u2018I send you\nenclosed what I propose as the title of my _Essays_, with an Epistle\nwhich I hope you and Mr. Stewart will allow me to prefix to them. Whether\nyour name should go first, on account of your doctor\u2019s degree, or Mr.\nStewart\u2019s, I leave you to adjust between yourselves. I know not how to\nexpress my obligations to you both, for the aid you have given me.\u2019\n\nThe book thus ushered into the world in 1785 treats of those constituents\nof the common sense that are implied, not only in perception of things\nthrough the five senses and memory, but also in imagination and in the\nexperimental sciences that deal with the past, the distant, and the\nfuture. One of them contains the rudiments of a criticism of the common\nsense principles that finally regulate all abstract reasonings, and\nabove all, those that determine our judgments of truths contingent upon\nWill\u2014human and divine; in all of which what philosophers called \u2018ideas\u2019\nseemed to him to spoil the genuine common sense and its inspirations.\nThe fifth Essay deals with the office and relations of our abstract\nconceptions. Of this Essay Schopenhauer remarks that \u2018the best and most\nintelligent exposition of the nature and essence of conceptions which\nI have been able anywhere to find is in Thomas Reid\u2019s _Essays on the\nPowers of the Human Mind_. This was afterwards condemned by Dugald\nStewart in his _Philosophy of the Human Mind_. Not to waste paper, I\nwill briefly remark with regard to Stewart, that he belongs to that\nlarge class who have obtained an undeserved reputation through favour\nand friends, and therefore I can only advise that not an hour should be\nwasted over the scribbling of this shallow writer.\u2019[23] This unworthy\ncriticism of Stewart is far removed from the calm judgment of Reid.\n\nThat our perceptions are not related to their objects as effects are\nrelated to their causes, is insisted on in the _Essays_, in opposition\nto Priestley, who treats cognitive acts as the issue of power which\nbelongs to matter. \u2018Men,\u2019 Reid says, \u2018have been prone to imagine that,\nas bodies are put in motion by some impulse or impression made upon them\nby contiguous bodies, so the mind is made to think and perceive by some\nimpression made upon it by contiguous objects. But to say that an object\nwhich I see with perfect indifference _makes an impression_ upon my mind\nis not good English. It is evident from the manner in which this phrase\nis used by modern philosophers that they mean, not barely to express by\nit my perceiving an object, but to explain the manner of perception. They\nthink that the object perceived acts upon the mind in some way similar to\nthat in which one body acts upon another. The impression upon the mind\nis conceived to be something wherein the mind is altogether passive.\nBut this is a hypothesis which contradicts the common sense of mankind.\nWhen I look upon the wall of my room, the wall does not act at all,\nnor is capable of acting: the perceiving it is an act or operation in\nme.\u2019 In short, the relation between perceptions and their objects is a\nunique relation, not to be confounded with the causal, the only causality\ninvolved being the percipient power that is in me.\n\nThose _Essays_ of Reid which treat of the constituents of the common\nsense that are implied in the Intellect power of man, appeared in the\nearly summer of 1785. In September he informed Dr. Gregory of the opinion\nof Dr. Price, the most eminent contemporary English metaphysician:\u2014\u2018I had\na letter from Dr. Price lately, thanking me for a copy of the _Essays_\nI ordered to be presented to him; which he has read, and calls a work\nof the first value; commends me particularly for treating Dr. Priestley\nso gently, who, he says, had been unhappily led to use me ill.\u2019 He then\nrefers to his own health, which seems to have suffered from the mental\nstrain, now relieved by the issue of his book:\u2014\u2018As you are so kind as\nto ask me about my distemper, I think it is almost quite gone, so as to\ngive me no uneasiness. I abstain from fruit and malt liquor, and take a\nlittle port wine, mostly noon and night, not above two bottles a week\nwhen alone. The more I walk or ride, or even talk or read audibly, I am\nthe better.\u2019\n\nDr. Beattie writes thus to the Bishop of Chester in October:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Has your lordship read Dr. Reid\u2019s _Essays on the Intellectual\n    Powers of Man_? Those readers who have been conversant in\n    the modern philosophy of mind, as it appears in the writings\n    of Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, will\n    be much entertained with this work, which does great honour\n    to the sagacity and patience of the author. It contains the\n    principles of his _Inquiry_, laid down on a larger scale, and\n    applied to a greater variety of subjects. Dr. Reid treats his\n    opponents and their tenets with a respect and a solemnity that\n    sometimes tempt me to smile. His style is clear and simple; and\n    his aversion to the word _idea_ is so great, that I think he\n    never once uses it in delivering his own opinions. It was not\n    without reason that Stillingfleet took the alarm at Mr. Locke\u2019s\n    indiscreet use of that word. It was indeed an _ignis fatuus_\n    that decoyed him in spite of his excellent understanding into a\n    thousand pits and quagmires. Berkeley it bewildered still more.\n    And it reduced David Hume to the condition of a certain old\n    gentleman of whom we read, that\u2014\n\n                        Fluttering his pinions vain,\n        Plumb down he dropped, ten thousand fathoms deep.\u2019\n\nWhether our power of conceiving is so far a test of possibility, as that\nwhat is distinctly conceived must be concluded to be possible, and what\ncannot be conceived impossible, was a question which interested Reid.\nIt is discussed in the _Essays on the Intellectual Powers_, and also in\nthe draft of a letter to Dr. Price, preserved among the manuscripts at\nBirkwood; in which it is argued that our power of conception cannot be a\ncriterion of what is possible. The argument turns much on the meanings of\n\u2018conception,\u2019 \u2018possibility,\u2019 and \u2018impossibility.\u2019 He thus addresses Dr.\nPrice:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I would willingly suggest some subject on which I might have\n    the favour of your thoughts when you have leisure and are\n    disposed for such correspondence. What occurs to my thoughts\n    just now is a metaphysical axiom very generally adopted, and,\n    I think, occasionally adopted by you in your _Review of the\n    Principal Questions in Morals_\u2014That what we distinctly conceive\n    is possible. From this axiom D. Hume infers that it is possible\n    that an universe may start into existence without a cause,\n    and other like extravagancies. The use he makes of it led me\n    to consider it a good many years ago, and I have a strong\n    suspicion that there is some fallacy in it, which has imposed\n    on men\u2019s understandings, owing to the ambiguity of the word\n    _conceive_.\n\n    \u2018As to the history of this axiom, I suspect it to have taken\n    its rise from what Descartes laid down as the criterion\n    of truth, which he maintained to be clear and distinct\n    conception. _Quidquid clare et distincte concipio esse verum,\n    id est verum._ Cudworth seems to have followed him in this,\n    making the criterion of verity to be clear, self-consistent\n    intelligibility. Those who came after, judging it difficult to\n    maintain that everything is _true_ which is clearly conceivable\n    or intelligible, have maintained that everything that can be\n    clearly conceived is at least _possible_. This seemed to be the\n    proper correction of Descartes\u2019 maxim, and it has passed from\n    one hand to another without strict examination.\n\n    \u2018Whatever is true or false, whatever is possible or impossible,\n    may be expressed by a proposition. Now, what do we mean when we\n    say that we conceive a proposition? I think no more is meant,\n    if we speak properly, than that we understand what is meant by\n    that proposition. If this be so, it must surely be granted that\n    we may understand the meaning of a proposition which expresses\n    what is impossible. He who understands the meaning of this\n    proposition, \u201cTwo and two make four,\u201d must equally understand\n    the meaning of this other, \u201cTwo and two do not make four.\u201d\n    Both are equally understood; that is, the conception of both\n    is equally clear; yet the first is necessarily true, and the\n    second impossible.\n\n    \u2018Perhaps it will be said, that we may not merely conceive the\n    _meaning_ of a proposition, but we may conceive it to be a\n    _true_ proposition, and that it is our being able to conceive\n    it to be true that gives us ground to think it possible. In\n    answer to this, I beg you would attend very carefully to the\n    meaning of these words\u2014\u201cConceiving a proposition to be true.\u201d I\n    can put no other meaning upon them but judging it to be true,\n    that is, giving some degree of assent to it. Judgment or assent\n    admits of various degrees, from the slightest suspicion to the\n    most deliberate conviction; from the most modest and diffident\n    assent to the most pertinacious and dogmatical. I conceive\n    there maybe inhabitants in the moon; that is, my judgment leans\n    a little that way. I would not use that expression unless the\n    probability, however small, seemed to be on that side of the\n    question.\n\n    \u2018If this be the meaning of conceiving a proposition to be true,\n    then the meaning of the axiom will be, that a proposition\n    which appears to us to have any degree of probability, however\n    small, must at least be possible. But the axiom, taken in\n    this sense, is surely false. It would be superfluous to give\n    instances of this to a mathematician.\n\n    \u2018If it should be said that conceiving a proposition to be\n    true means, neither barely to understand the meaning of the\n    proposition, nor the giving any degree of assent to it, I would\n    be glad to know what it really does mean. For I am at a loss to\n    know what power of the understanding we mean by the conceiving\n    a proposition to be true, if it is neither simple apprehension,\n    by which we barely understand the meaning of a proposition,\n    nor judgment, by which we assent to the proposition or dissent\n    from it. I know of no power of the understanding intermediate\n    between these two. And if there is none, I think the axiom must\n    be false.\n\n    \u2018There are many propositions which, by the faculties God has\n    given us, we perceive to be not only true, but necessarily\n    true; and the contradictions of these must be impossible. So\n    that our knowledge of what is impossible keeps pace with our\n    knowledge of necessary truth.\n\n    \u2018By our senses and our memory, by testimony and other means,\n    we have the certain knowledge of many truths which we do not\n    perceive to be necessary; their contraries therefore may be\n    possible for aught we know. But we know that whatever is true,\n    whether necessary or not, is possible. Our knowledge therefore\n    of what is possible keeps pace with our knowledge of truth,\n    whether contingent or necessary. Beyond this, I am afraid our\n    knowledge of what is possible is conjectural. And although\n    we are apt to think everything to be possible which we do\n    not perceive to be impossible, yet in this we may be greatly\n    deceived. You know well, sir, that mathematics affords many\n    instances of impossibilities _in the nature of things_, which\n    no man would have dreamed of or believed, until they were\n    discovered by accurate and subtle reasoning. Perhaps if we were\n    able to reason demonstratively to as great an extent in other\n    subjects as in mathematics, we might discover many things to\n    be impossible which we now take to be possible. We are apt\n    to think it possible that God might have made an universe of\n    sensible and rational creatures, into which neither natural\n    nor moral Evil should ever enter. It may be so for what I\n    know. But how are you certain that this is possible? I can\n    distinctly conceive it, say you; therefore it is possible. I do\n    not admit this argument. May not a man who is a mathematician\n    as distinctly conceive that in the infinite variety of numbers\n    gradually ascending, there is no ratio whatsoever which is not\n    equal to the ratio of some one whole number to some other whole\n    number? Yet the mathematician can demonstrate that there are\n    innumerable ratios which are not equal to the ratio of some one\n    number to another. Many mathematicians, taking it for granted\n    that it was possible to square the circle, have spent their\n    lives in a fruitless pursuit. May not our taking things to be\n    possible, in matters of higher moment, when we can show no good\n    reason that they are so, lead us into unnecessary disputes and\n    vain theories? Ought we to admit that as a just argument in\n    reasoning, or even as a pressing difficulty, which is grounded\n    on the supposition that such a thing is possible, when in\n    reality we have no good evidence of its being possible, and for\n    anything we can show to the contrary, it may be impossible?\u2019\n\nA letter to Dr. Gregory in March 1786 shows the _Essays on the Active or\nMoral Powers_ in the press:\u2014\u2018I am proud of the approbation you express of\nthe _Essays_. I have made some corrections and additions, but such as I\nhope will not make it necessary to write the book over again. But I wish,\nif I find health and leisure in summer, to add some Essays to go before\nthat on \u201cLiberty of the Will,\u201d in order to give some further elucidation\nof the principles of morals. I expect your remarks and D. Stewart\u2019s on\nwhat is in hand. It will be no inconvenience to wait two, three, or\neven four months.\u2019 Two years later, early in 1788, when he was in his\nseventy-eighth year, the five _Essays on the Active Powers of Man_ were\npublished. This was Reid\u2019s last appearance as a philosophical author. The\neight Essays of 1785, and the five Essays of 1788, all relate to human\nPower\u2014power immanent or intellectual, and power overtly operative or\nmoral.\n\nIn March, a few weeks after the book appeared, Beattie writes to Sir W.\nForbes:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I have been looking into Dr. Reid\u2019s book on _The Active\n    Powers of Man_. It is written with his usual perspicuity and\n    acuteness; is in some parts very entertaining; and to me, who\n    have been obliged to think much on those subjects, is very\n    interesting throughout. The question concerning Liberty and\n    Necessity [of the Will] is very fully discussed, and very ably,\n    and I think nothing more need be said about it. I could have\n    wished that he had given a fuller examination of the passions,\n    and been a little more practical in illustrating the duties of\n    morality. But his manner in all his writings more turned to\n    speculative than to practical philosophy; which may be owing\n    to his having employed himself so much in the study of Locke,\n    Hume, Berkeley, and other theorists; and partly, no doubt,\n    to the habits of study and modes of conversation which were\n    fashionable in this country in his younger days. If I were not\n    personally acquainted with the Doctor, I should conclude from\n    his books that he was rather too warm an admirer of Mr. Hume.\n    He confutes, it is true, some of his opinions; but pays them\n    much more respect than they are entitled to.\u2019\n\nTo Beattie\u2019s less profound intelligence, indignant sentiment was more\nacceptable, in defence of fundamental faith, than the calm inquiry and\nsympathetic criticism of Reid.\n\nThe Literary Society which met monthly in the College was occasionally\na channel for his thoughts through all the years of the Glasgow\nprofessorship, as the more famous \u2018Wise Club\u2019 had been at Aberdeen.\nPrincipal Leechman, Black, Moor, Arthur, and Dr. Thomas Hamilton were\nalso members. Some of Reid\u2019s contributions before 1788 seem to have\nbeen incorporated in the _Essays_. After that he still found vent for\nhis thoughts in papers for the Society, and in letters to Dr. Gregory,\nchiefly about Power and Causation. Among the most important of those\nsubmitted to the Society in his last years, I find \u2018Some Observations\non the Modern System of Materialism,\u2019 in which the impotence of matter\nis maintained; as also in another, entitled \u2018Miscellaneous Reflections\non Priestley\u2019s account of Hartley\u2019s Theory of the Human Mind.\u2019 Then we\nhave \u2018Observations on the Utopia of Sir Thomas More.\u2019 A short essay \u2018On\nPower,\u2019[24] in March 1792, was his last metaphysical performance: it sums\nup his conclusions regarding our conception of causation, as regulated by\nthe Common Sense. \u2018Observations on the Danger of Political Innovation,\u2019\nsuggested by the Revolution in France, were read in the Society on\nNovember 1794.\n\nThis last Essay is characteristic. It presses a distinction between two\npolitical attitudes that are apt to be confounded\u2014the one speculative,\ndealing with abstractions, treating the facts of the case and history as\nirrelevant; the other practical, taking account of the actual conditions,\ntherefore disposed to modify its ideals by a due regard to what has\nbeen and now is. The first asks what that organisation of society is,\nwhich, abstractly considered, is most favourable to progress: the\nother cautiously considers how the inherited political organism may\nwith least friction be adapted to the changed conditions of the social\nevolution. Reid assumes this last as his attitude, arguing that the\nBritish Constitution encourages continuous orderly evolution, not sudden\nrevolution, and that this is illustrated in its history since 1688.\nAt first, he had looked with sanguine hope to the French Revolution,\nbut, like Edmund Burke, who shortly before had been Rector of Glasgow\nUniversity, his hope gave place to fear. It is interesting that it was\nthe _Vindici\u00e6 Gallic\u00e6_ of Sir James Mackintosh that had inspired him with\nthe hope; for, according to his daughter, Mrs. Carmichael, he was struck\nwith admiration on reading the book, and used often to speak of it as one\nof the most ingenious essays in political philosophy he had ever met with.\n\nJeremy Bentham as well as Mackintosh was known to Reid by his writings,\nas appears in this letter to Dr. Gregory, in September 1788, which refers\nto Bentham\u2019s _Defence of Usury_, published the year before:\u2014\n\n    \u2018I am much pleased with the tract you sent me on Usury. I think\n    the reasoning unanswerable, and have long been of the author\u2019s\n    opinion, though I suspect that the general principle\u2014that\n    bargains ought to be left to the judgment of the parties, may\n    admit of some exceptions; when the buyers are the many, the\n    poor, the simple, and the sellers few, rich, and cunning.\n    The former may need the aid of the magistrate to prevent\n    their being oppressed by the latter. It seems to be upon\n    this principle that postage, freight, the hire of chairs and\n    coaches, and the price of bread, are regulated in most great\n    towns. But with regard to the loan of money in a commercial\n    state, the exception can have no place\u2014the borrowers and\n    lenders are upon an equal footing, and each may be left to take\n    care of his own interest.\u2019\n\nThree years before his death Reid is found preparing the _Account of the\nUniversity of Glasgow_, which appeared three years after his death, in\nthe _Statistical Account of Scotland_ published by Sir John Sinclair. It\nwas not communicated by him to Sir John, but transmitted by Professor\nJardine, in name of the Principal and Professors, at whose request Reid\nseems to have engaged in this work. It was an anonymous publication, but\nit has been attributed to him, and it bears internal evidence of his\nhand. His colleague, Professor Richardson, in his biographical account\nof Professor Arthur, Reid\u2019s successor, published in 1803, mentions that\n\u2018the Statistical Account of the University was all written by Dr. Reid,\nexcept the statements respecting the business of particular classes.\u2019 It\nshows intelligence then uncommon in Scotland of the medi\u00e6val constitution\nof Universities, and appreciation of the true academical ideal. The life\nbegun at King\u2019s College forty years before in projects of University\nreform, was fitly closed by this account of the great western seat of\nlearning.\n\nMrs. Reid died early in 1792. His feelings were thus expressed in a\nletter to Dugald Stewart:\u2014\n\n    \u2018By the loss of my bosom friend, with whom I lived fifty-two\n    years, I am brought into a kind of new world, at a time of life\n    when old habits are not easily forgot, or new ones acquired.\n    But every world is God\u2019s world, and I am thankful for the\n    comforts He has left me. Mrs. Carmichael has now the care of\n    two deaf old men, and does everything in her power to please\n    them; and both are very sensible of her goodness. I have more\n    health than at my time of life [82] I had any reason to expect.\n    I walk about; entertain myself with reading what I soon forget;\n    I can converse with one person if he articulates distinctly\n    and within ten inches of my left ear; I go to church without\n    hearing a word of what is said. You know I had never any\n    pretensions to vivacity, but I am still free from languor and\n    _ennui_.\u2019\n\nAfter this sorrow, his daughter, Mrs. Carmichael, lived much in his house\nin the Professors\u2019 Court. She became a widow in the same year, for her\nhusband died a few months after Mrs. Reid. Elizabeth Leslie, daughter of\nhis stepsister Margaret, was also an inmate, and added to the comfort of\nthe closing years. Soon after her father\u2019s death Mrs. Carmichael went to\nlive at Aberdeen.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nINSPIRED COMMON SENSE AND CAUSATION: ACTIVE OR MORAL POWER IN MAN\n\n\nPhilosophical recognition of the genuine Common Sense or natural judgment\nof mankind, especially in two of its factors, which seemed to Reid\nobscured if not suppressed by dogmatic hypothesis, gave its character\nto his whole intellectual life. He found, in the first place, that \u2018all\nphilosophers; from Plato to Mr. Hume, agree in this, that we do not\nperceive external objects immediately, and that the immediate object of\nperception must be some image present to the mind.\u2019 To rid philosophy\nof this hypothesis, as a mere prejudice, inconsistent with the absolute\ntrustworthiness, and therefore with the supreme and final rational\nauthority of our natural judgment, was the chief aim of his Aberdonian\nlife\u2014culminating in the _Inquiry_ in 1764. He found, in the second place,\nthat \u2018to confound the notion of agent or efficient cause with that of\nphysical cause has been a common error of philosophers, from the days of\nPlato to our own\u2019; and it seemed to him as subversive of moral relations\nin the universe as the other was of physical relations. Accordingly, our\nconception of Power or Causation chiefly engaged him in Glasgow. This\nappears in his \u2018Essays\u2019 on moral Power in man; in his correspondence with\nKames and Gregory in the last twenty years of his life; as well as in the\nunpublished fragment on \u2018Power,\u2019 in 1792, which was his last expression\nof reflective thought. The Philosophy of Perception and the Philosophy of\nCausation\u2014our common sense of extended reality in our first intercourse\nwith it in the senses, and our common sense conception of \u2018power\u2019 and\n\u2018cause\u2019 which arises in the presence of the changes amidst which we live\nand have our being\u2014these were the two poles of Reid\u2019s philosophical\nlife. His whole life was a war against two common errors of philosophers\nregarding these, from the days of Plato to our own, in each of which the\nseeds of speculative and practical scepticism seemed to lie thickly.\nIf these two fundamental convictions were untrustworthy, then faith in\nanything must lose its sustaining strength. For our perceptions through\nthe five senses are the first principles of all our reasonings about the\nactual universe, and our causal judgments are the means of interpreting\nthe realities to which those perceptions only introduce us.\n\nWe find ourselves continually in contact and collision with Power that\nis external to ourselves individually; and we seem, too, to be exerting\npowers of our own: on the Power latent in the universe, our happiness\nor misery, our whole destiny, depends. What does all this mean? What is\nmeant by the judgment that all changes in the universe are \u2018caused\u2019; and\nwhat is the origin of this judgment, or of the conception of \u2018cause\u2019 that\nis involved in it? Are the powers which we recognise in us and around\nus to be referred only to inanimate things as their centres; or only to\nliving and self-conscious persons; or to both?\n\nPriestley, as an advocate of the claim of matter to account sufficiently\nfor self-conscious life in man, and Kames and Priestley by their\nuniversal necessity, confirmed Reid\u2019s disposition to inquire further into\nthe nature and origin of the conception of power, and the judgment that\nevery change presupposes what we ambiguously call a cause. His cousin\nGregory, too, inquired about causation, and gave the results to the world\nin an _Essay on the Difference between the Relation of Motive and Action,\nand that of Cause and Effect in Physics_, which appeared in 1792.\n\nThat every change must be caused, Reid regarded as a postulate of which\nthe contradictory was absolutely inconceivable: it was necessarily\nimplied in the common rational sense of Man, and, while incapable of\nlogical proof, was that without which nothing else could be proved. That\nthe things presented to our senses are themselves powerless; that all\npower is spiritual, referable only to Will; and that this is the common\nsense implicate of our physical and moral experience of changes, was the\nproposition which Reid now set himself to justify. Our experience of our\nown voluntary exertion is the only experience which directs us to the\nquarter in which power, properly so called, resides. A voluntary agent is\nour only example of a cause, or of that to which change must be finally\nreferred as its responsible source. We can find no productive power in\nany inanimate thing. Matter, instead of being the universal cause, is\nin itself powerless, and can account for nothing. The material universe\nis virtually an external system of interpretable signs, regulated by\nnon-material power.\n\nTake the following extracts from various letters of Reid\u2019s to Gregory,\nfrom 1785 onwards,[25] in the unpublished paper on Power:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Power to produce an effect supposes power not to produce it;\n    otherwise it is not power but necessity, which is incompatible\n    with power taken in a strict sense.... I am not able to form\n    a conception how power (in the strict sense) can be exerted\n    without will; nor can there be will without some degree of\n    understanding. Therefore nothing can be an efficient cause in\n    the proper sense but an intelligent being [_i.e._ a person].\n    Hence the only notion we can form of Almighty Power is, that\n    God can do whatever He wills. Matter cannot be the cause of\n    anything: it can only be an instrument in the hands of a real\n    cause.... In physics the word cause has another meaning,\n    which, though I think it an improper one, yet is distinct,\n    and therefore may be reasoned upon. When a phenomenon is\n    produced according to a certain law of nature, we call the law\n    [or rule] the _cause_ of that phenomenon; and to the laws or\n    rules of nature we accordingly ascribe power or efficiency.\n    The whole business of physics is to discover, by observation\n    and experiment, the laws of nature, and to apply them to\n    the solution of phenomena. Now a law of nature is a purpose\n    or resolution of the Author of nature to act according to\n    a certain rule. There must be a real agent to produce the\n    phenomenon according to the law. A malefactor is not hanged by\n    the law, but by the executioner according to the law.\u2019\n\n    Again:\u2014\u2018A cause in the proper and strict sense signifies a\n    _mind_ that has power and will to produce the effect. A cause\n    in the physical sense means only something which, by the laws\n    of nature, the effect always follows; as when we say that\n    heat is the cause that turns water into vapour.... Between a\n    physical cause and its effect the conjunction must be constant;\n    unless in the case of a miracle. What D. Hume says of causes\n    in general is very just when applied to physical causes\u2014that\n    a constant conjunction with the effect is essential to such\n    causes, and implied in the very conception of them.\u2019 Again:\u2014\u2018I\n    wish that the same general name\u2014cause\u2014had not been given to\n    both. They differ _toto genere_. For a physical cause is not an\n    agent. It does not act, but is acted upon. _You_ accordingly\n    give them different names; calling the one the agent and\n    not the cause, the other the cause and not the agent. But\n    I think this too bold an innovation in language. Men have\n    been so much accustomed to call the Deity the First Cause of\n    things, that to maintain that He is no cause at all would be\n    too shocking. To say that the world exists _without a cause_\n    would be accounted atheism, in spite of all explanations....\n    The words agent and action are less ambiguous. We say one\n    _body_ acts upon another; and in vain would one attempt to\n    abolish this language. To remedy this ambiguity of \u201ccause\u201d and\n    \u201cagent,\u201d I say that each of these words has two meanings\u2014a\n    lax or popular and a philosophical.... It is remarkable that\n    the philosophical meaning must have been the first, and the\n    popular a corruption introduced by time.... Power is first\n    conceived from being conscious of it in ourselves. Conceiving\n    of inanimate beings from what we are conscious of in ourselves,\n    we at first ascribed to them such power as we are conscious\n    of, till experience informs us that inanimate things have not\n    the same powers as we have; but language was formed before\n    this discovery was made.... It is a curious question how we\n    come by the cognition of power and cause, so that we ascribe\n    them to things that have no will nor intelligence. I am apt\n    to think that savages, whenever they see motion which they\n    cannot account for, there they suppose a soul. In this period\n    of society language is formed. At length the more acute and\n    speculative few discover that some of the things which the\n    vulgar believe to be animated are inanimate. What use must\n    wise men make of this discovery? Will they affirm that the sun\n    does not shine nor give heat? that the sea never rages nor the\n    winds blow? nor the earth bring forth grass and corn? The wiser\n    part will speak the common language, and suit it to their new\n    notions as well as they can; just as philosophers still say\n    with the vulgar, that the sun \u201crises\u201d and \u201csets.\u201d\u2019\n\nThat morally responsible intending Will is our ultimate conception\nof Power or Cause, properly so called, is not less the lesson of the\nBirkwood manuscript \u2018On Power\u2019 of 1792. Thus:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Will is necessarily implied in the notion of Power. Volition\n    and what naturally follows upon our volitions, is all that we\n    conceive to be in our own power. What a man never willed can\n    never be imputed to him as his action. A being that has no\n    will can have no power. When we impute powers to dead matter,\n    it must be in some popular or analogical sense, but not in the\n    proper sense. There can be no productive power in an inanimate\n    object.... A cause is that which has power to produce an\n    effect. When we ascribe power to things inanimate as causes,\n    we mean nothing more than a constant conjunction by the laws or\n    rules of nature, which experience discovers. Thus we say that\n    the sun has power to retain the planets in their orbits, and\n    that heat has power to melt lead. If the ignorant be led by the\n    ambiguity of the word to conceive power in the sun or in heat\n    to produce the effects attributed to them, this is a vulgar\n    error which philosophy [_i.e._ of common sense] corrects. By\n    what agents these effects are [immediately] produced we know\n    not; but we have good reason to believe that they cannot be\n    produced by inanimate matter.\u2019\n\nReid also allows that, for anything we can tell, things which have no\nproper power of their own may be terms in a sequence that is subject to\nan _absolute_ necessity of being the sequence that it is. But however\nthis may be, it transcends our knowledge; we must be satisfied with the\ncommon sense conviction of persistent uniformities in fact pervading the\nuniverse of change, whether this fact is the result of a divine necessity\nor of arbitrary divine will. Natural uniformities are presupposed in\nall our reasoning about our natural surroundings, and without this\npresupposition things could not be reasoned about or formed into science.\nAll our knowledge of natural events, beyond original perceptions of\nsense, consists in interpretation of the phenomena of which the senses\nmake us aware. Upon this judgment of the common sense our inductions are\nall grounded, so that it may be called the inductive principle. Withdraw\ntrust from it and experience becomes blind as a mole. We may _feel_ what\nis present at the moment, but the distant and the future are wholly hid\nin darkness.\n\nPower or intelligent agency is thus the exclusive characteristic of\nconscious persons: interpretable order is the characteristic of inanimate\nthings. These are two correlative judgments or inspirations of our\nnatural common sense upon which human reasonings turn. Reid finds\nwhen he reflects patiently that he is obliged, by a rational instinct\nas it were, to recognise himself and other persons as the centres of\nresponsible power, the only sort of power or causality in existence that\ncan be supposed by us; and also to recognise in the impersonal world\nwithout, something that in itself is passive and impotent, but which,\nas a system of interpretable sense signs, may be said metaphorically to\nform the _language_ of nature, of which the natural sciences are (so far)\nthe interpretation. The universe is thus a material order directed by\nspiritual power, in a measure corresponding to the body and the spirit\nin man, as man now is. But this larger conception carries us beyond the\nmodest philosophy to which Reid confined himself; although he more than\nonce approached it, perhaps through some unconscious reminiscence of the\nBerkeleyism of his youth, of which, I think, he failed to see the real\ndrift, as it was unfolded in _Alciphron_ and especially in _Siris_.\n\nYet the following scrap, which I find among unpublished manuscripts of\nhis later life, shows that such thoughts were not quite absent from his\nmind:\u2014\n\n    \u2018The ancient philosophers called God the Soul of the World.\n    This, considered as a figurative expression, is destitute\n    neither of beauty nor of truth. What the soul of man is to his\n    body, that God is to the universe, in several respects; but not\n    in all. There are many respects in which the metaphor fails:\n    (1) The human soul did not make its own body, but God made\n    the world; (2) the human soul is ignorant of the nice texture\n    and mechanism of its body, but God knows the whole mechanism\n    of the universe, because He conceived and made it; (3) the\n    human soul receives much of its information by bodily organs:\n    God\u2019s knowledge of all things is immediate and not dependent\n    on bodily organs; (4) our power over our own bodies is\n    limited: the power of God over the universe is unlimited; (5)\n    our bodies are wholly made up of inert and soulless matter:\n    the universe is stored with various orders of living beings\n    and free agents, subject to the Divine Power as their moral\n    governor and capable of paying back the service of rational\n    subjects.\u2019\n\nBut the philosophy of the Common Sense, as represented by Reid, did not\nrise to the conciliation of the natural order of the material with the\noriginative freedom of the spiritual world, in which operating law in\noutward nature is recognised as immediate divine agency, or a part of\na revelation of perfectly reasonable Will in and through a universe of\nthings and persons.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nTHE END\u20141796\n\n\nIn the last winter of his life Reid read an interesting discourse on\n\u2018Muscular Motion,\u2019 in the Literary Society, of which he so long had\nbeen a member. After describing articulately the progressive changes\nin the human muscles which mark the advance of age, and proposing an\nexplanation, he thus concludes his last public discourse:\u2014\n\n    \u2018May I be permitted to mention that it was my own experience\n    of some of these effects of old age on the muscular motions\n    that led my thoughts to this explanation, which, as it is\n    owing to the infirmities of age, will, I hope, be treated\n    with the greater indulgence. It is both pleasant and useful\n    to contemplate with gratitude the wisdom and goodness of the\n    Author of our being, in fitting this machine of our body to the\n    various employments and enjoyments of life. The structure is\n    admirable as far as we are permitted to see it in this infancy\n    of our being. And the internal structure which is behind the\n    veil that limits our understanding, and which gives motion to\n    the whole, is, in a manner most wonderful, though unknown to\n    us, made subservient to our volition and efforts. This grand\n    work of nature, like the fruits of the earth, has its maturity,\n    its decay, and its dissolution. Like those also, in all its\n    decay it nourishes a principle within which is to be the seed\n    of a future existence. Were the fruit conscious of this, it\n    would drop into the earth with pleasure, in the hope of a happy\n    Resurrection. This hope, by the mercy of God, is given to all\n    good men. It is the consolation of old age, and more than\n    sufficient to make its infirmities sit light.\u2019\n\nThe dissolution of the material organism which for eighty-six years\nhad served the writer of these words was now near. Of his few early\nphilosophical associates, Campbell and Beattie only were alive at the\nbeginning of 1796, and in April of that year Campbell died. Reid followed\nhim six months later. Dugald Stewart, then Professor of Moral Philosophy\nin Edinburgh, gives the following account of the months before the end:\u2014\n\n    \u2018In the summer of 1796, about two years after the death of\n    his wife, he was prevailed on by Dr. Gregory to pass a few\n    weeks at Edinburgh. He was accompanied by Mrs. Carmichael,\n    who lived with him in Dr. Gregory\u2019s house, a situation which\n    united under the same roof every advantage of medical care, of\n    tender attachment, and of philosophical intercourse. As Dr.\n    Gregory\u2019s professional engagements necessarily interfered with\n    his attentions to his guests, I enjoyed more of Dr. Reid\u2019s\n    society than might otherwise have fallen to my share. I had\n    the pleasure, accordingly, of spending some hours with him\n    daily, and of attending him in his walking excursions, which\n    frequently extended to the distance of three or four miles.\n    His faculties (excepting his memory, which was considerably\n    impaired) appeared as vigorous as ever; and, although his\n    deafness prevented him from taking any share in general\n    conversation, he was still able to enjoy the company of a\n    friend. Mr. Playfair and myself were both witnesses of the\n    acuteness which he displayed on one occasion, in detecting a\n    mistake, by no means obvious, in a manuscript of his kinsman,\n    David Gregory, on the subject of \u201cPrime and Ultimate Ratios.\u201d\n    In apparent soundness and activity of body, he resembled more\n    a man of sixty than of eighty-seven. He returned to Glasgow\n    in his usual health and spirits; and continued for some weeks\n    to devote as formerly a regular portion of his time to the\n    exercise both of body and mind. It appears from a letter of\n    Dr. Cleghorn\u2019s to Dr. Gregory, that he was still able to work\n    with his own hands in his garden; and he was found by Dr.\n    Brown occupied in the solution of an algebraical problem of\n    considerable difficulty, in which, after the labour of a day or\n    two, he at last succeeded.\u2019\n\nIt was thus in summer. In September he was attacked by a violent\ndisorder, and after a severe struggle, attended with repeated strokes of\npalsy, he passed away on the 7th of October. Thus ended the tranquil life\nof deep and patient thought, which opened at Strachan and almost spanned\nthe eighteenth century, morally and intellectually the representative of\nScottish philosophical restoration under the conditions of the time. His\nashes were laid in the College Church burial-ground, within the shadow of\nthe College of which he had so long been the chief ornament, and under a\ntombstone bearing this inscription:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Memori\u00e6 sacrum THOM\u00c6 REID, S.T.D., quondam in Schola Regia\n    Aberdonensi Philosophi\u00e6 Professoris; nuper vero in Universitate\n    Glasguensi, ab anno 1764 usque ad annum 1796, Philosophi\u00e6\n    Moralis Professoris; qui in Scientia Mentis Human\u00e6, ut olim in\n    Philosophia Naturali illustris ille Baconius Verulamius, omnia\n    instauravit; qui ingenii acumine doctrin\u00e6que omnigen\u00e6, summam\n    morum gravitatem, simul atque comitatem, adjuvavit; qui obiit\n    7\u00b0 October, 1796, annos natus 86. Cujusque ossa cum cineribus\n    ELIZEBETH\u00c6 REID, conjugis carissim\u00e6, triumque filiarum morte\n    prematura abrepturam, sepulchro condita sunt. Hoc Monumentum\n    poni jussit filia piissima, unica superstes, Martha Carmichael.\u2019\n\nAfter the University of Glasgow had in 1872 exchanged the College in the\nHigh Street, with its touching memories, for its new and stately home on\nthe bank of the Kelvin, Reid\u2019s remains were carried to the Necropolis\nwhich overlooks his old home in the Drygate, and the tombstone was\nremoved to the College on Gilmore Hill.\n\nI find Reid\u2019s will, dated 7th May 1792, recorded in the Sheriff-Court\nBooks of Lanarkshire. Dr. and Mrs. Carmichael are executors, with Mr.\nLeslie and Mr. Rose conjoined. Furniture, books, and papers are left to\nMrs. Carmichael, except a few books for the University Library. Of the\nrest of the property, personal and real\u2014after payment of debts, including\n\u00a3300 to Dr. Carmichael, \u2018payable in full of my daughter\u2019s tocher,\u2019 and\n\u2018\u00a3300 to John Sargent, London, cousin-german of the dearest Elizabeth\nReid, my wife\u2019\u2014one half is assigned to Mrs. Carmichael, and the other\nhalf, in equal portions, to \u2018my sisters, Mrs. Leslie and Mrs. Rose,\u2019\nburdened with \u2018a liferent annuity of \u00a310, to my stepmother, Janet Fraser,\nwidow of Mr. Lewis Reid.\u2019 The real property is described as consisting of\n\u2018eleven and a half falls of ground, with the whole houses thereon, and\nthe well therein, bounded on the west by William Street, on the north by\nthe property of Dr. Carmichael, on the south by the property of Joseph\nCrombie, and on the east by the property of John Duguid and Wm. Risk, all\nin the Barony parish.\u2019 This property appears to have been bought about\n1780, the year in which Reid ceased to teach in the College.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThat this life, much withdrawn from the public eye in the interest of\nphilosophic reflection, was not unappreciated when it ended, is shown by\nthe recognition which immediately followed. On the day after he died the\nevent was thus announced in the _Glasgow Courier_:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Thomas Reid, D.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the\n    University of Glasgow, died on the seventh day of October. His\n    ingenious and elaborate works, especially his _Inquiry into the\n    Human Mind_, and his _Essays on the Intellectual and the Active\n    Powers of Man_, are noble and lasting monuments of his eminent\n    abilities, his deep penetration, and his extensive learning.\n    By unravelling sceptical perplexities, overturning ill-founded\n    hypotheses, and resting every conclusion on evident principles,\n    he has brought about a memorable revolution in the Philosophy\n    of Human Nature. His character through life was distinguished\n    by an ardent love of truth, and an assiduous pursuit of it in\n    various sciences; by the most amiable simplicity of manners,\n    gentleness of temper, strength of affection, candour, and\n    liberality of sentiments, which displayed themselves in the\n    habitual exercise of all the social virtues; and by steadiness,\n    fortitude, and rational piety.\u2019\n\nA few days later a more elaborate study of his character appeared in the\n_Courier_:\u2014\n\n    \u2018Dr. Reid was unquestionably one of the profoundest\n    philosophers of the age; and although some who think it a\n    proof of weakness to differ from Mr. Hume have slighted the\n    speculations of Dr. Reid, and undervalued the precision which\n    he laboured to introduce, his Inquiry into the Senses will\n    probably be coeval with our language. It is founded on facts\n    which must continue to interest men while their constitution\n    continues unchanged. In his pursuit of new knowledge he studied\n    the late improvements in chemistry; he observed the great\n    political events which have happened, and contemplated that\n    with which the time seems pregnant with the keen interest of\n    one entering on life. He venerated religion\u2014not the noisy,\n    contentious systems which lead men to hate and persecute each\n    other, but the sublime principle which regulates the conduct,\n    by controuling the selfish and animating the benevolent\n    affections. When vilified by intemperate philosophers [_e.g._\n    Priestley], he made no reply, being satisfied with having\n    stated what he thought the truth; and when outraged by zealots\n    who falsely call themselves Christians, he bore the outrage\n    meekly, using no terms of complaint or reproach. He was to\n    the last moment free from that morose querulous temper which\n    has been deemed inseparable from age. Instead of repining\n    at the prosperity and enjoyments of the young, he delighted\n    in promoting them; and after having lost all his own family\n    except one daughter, he continued to treat children with such\n    condescension and benignity that some very young ones noticed\n    the peculiar kindness of his eye. His end accorded with the\n    wisdom and goodness of his life. He used sometimes to say,\n    \u201cI am ashamed of having lived so long after having ceased to\n    be useful,\u201d though at that very time he was acquiring and\n    communicating useful knowledge. During his last illness, which\n    was severe, he complained of nothing but the trouble that he\n    gave his affectionate family, and he looked to the grave as a\n    place not of rest merely but of triumph.\u2019\n\nThe affectionate judgment of his contemporaries, in the first days of\nsorrow, instead of exceeding, fall short of the deliberate judgment\nof leaders of European thought in a later generation. The rise of his\nreputation was slow. As there are too many who make themselves appear\nmore wise than they are, it was the more uncommon fault of Reid to\nappear less a philosopher than he really was. Extreme caution made him\nsuspicious of ingenious conjecture in matter-of-fact inquiry, and perhaps\nblinded him to the large part which imagination as well as reason has\nto play in progress. \u2018It is genius, and not the want of it,\u2019 he says,\n\u2018that adulterates philosophy, and fills it with error and false theory\u2019;\nand in the spirit of this warning, as well as by temperament, he was\nintellectually conservative more than progressive or adventurous.\n\nIn outward appearance he was somewhat under the middle size, with a\nbodily constitution of uncommon strength and tenacity, maintained by a\nmethodically regulated life and habitual serenity of temper. Raeburn\u2019s\npicture, now in Fyvie Castle, for which he sat during his last visit to\nEdinburgh, expresses the deep and persistent thought, as well as the\nreposeful and benevolent temper, which gave unity to his long life.\nCopies of this picture are preserved at Birkwood, in the College of\nGlasgow, and in the National Portrait Gallery at Edinburgh, as well as in\nthe great window of the Mitchell Hall of Marischal College. There is also\nan excellent medallion by Tassie, done six years before Reid\u2019s death.\n\nAfter the death of Mrs. Carmichael, in February 1805, all who were\ndescended of the Rev. Lewis Reid of Strachan, by his wife Margaret\nGregory, had passed away. His second wife and widow died at Aberdeen\nin 1798, like her stepson, in her eighty-seventh year, having survived\nhim about eighteen months. The great-granddaughter of Mrs. Leslie his\nhalf-sister, Grace Anna Leslie, now of Birkwood, married Dr. Ross\nPaterson in 1864. Their youngest daughter has charge of the Reid family\npapers, to which I owe many facts first published in these pages. A son\nof his other half-sister, Mrs. Rose, a medical officer in the Indian\narmy, was introduced in 1805 to Sir James Mackintosh, then Recorder of\nBombay, by Professor Ogilvie of Aberdeen, as a relative of the advocate\nof the final philosophical appeal to the Common Sense; and Mackintosh\nin a letter to Mr. Ogilvie expresses the deep interest with which he\nsaw \u2018the nephew of Dr. Reid, whose philosophy, like you, I do not\nembrace, but whose character and talents every cultivator of science must\nvenerate.\u2019 Sir James\u2019s later judgments of the philosophy, after a more\nattentive study of its scope, were more favourable.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nRETROSPECTIVE AND CRITICAL\n\n\nWe find truth, as Pascal says, not only by logical reasoning but by\nan act of immediate reason, not to be effaced by all the subtleties\nof the speculative sceptic, who is thus confounded by the resistance\nof rational human nature. This is a general expression of Reid\u2019s more\nelaborate reply to sceptical distrust in all human knowledge and\nbelief. That genuine human nature, when awakened into conscious life,\nis practically irresistible, is what Reid insists on; for no sane man\nacts in contradiction to the common sense of which he is conscious,\nalthough he can speculate sceptically in an abstract way, and may even\nserve truth in doing so. For this scepticism may amend philosophical\nsystems in which the constituent principles of human nature are not\ntheoretically recognised in their integrity; and it may also stimulate\nthe unphilosophical to a deeper and truer insight of what the natural\nprinciples are on which men must proceed in their actions. But the\nprinciples themselves are not reached by reasoning: they are the\ninspiration of God; and it is this divine inspiration that makes\nexperience and reasoning at all possible for men.\n\nThat I am an individual self-conscious person, to whom something other\nthan, and independent of, my individual self is presented in my senses\u2014so\nindependent of me individually that it can inform me of the existence of\nother persons whose conscious life is numerically different from mine;\nthat the free agency of a person is the only sort of power that we are\nobliged to recognise, persons being revealed as responsible powers in\nand through our moral nature; and that the powerless things of sense,\nof which we are immediately percipient in our sense perceptions, are\ninterpretable for purposes of common life and science, inasmuch as their\nchanges must be determined by natural laws, all reasoning being otherwise\nimpossible\u2014_these_ I think are the chief \u2018inspirations\u2019 or \u2018revelations\u2019\nof the Common Sense on which Reid enlarges. This account of those\ninspirations is not offered as complete; only as results, more or less\nfragmentary, reached by the deep and steady reflection of a long life.\n\nReid\u2019s philosophical appeal to the divine inspirations of the common\nsense, without which nothing can be proved, on behalf of truths which do\nnot admit of direct logical proof, but only of a sort of philosophical\njustification, has been disparaged as an ignoble retreat from the\nstandpoint of the philosopher, in the interest of popular prejudices and\nblind authority. It has been spoken of as an appeal from the reasoned\njudgments of the reflecting minority to the unreasoned opinions of the\nunreflecting majority, an opening for arbitrary dogmas to enter and crush\nfree inquiry. This is the drift of the criticism of Priestley in last\ncentury, and of Ferrier in this, while Kantian critics complain of Reid\u2019s\nlazy arrest of philosophy at the level of ordinary beliefs. Besides\nthis, what Reid claims as \u2018the chief merit of his philosophy\u2019\u2014that of\nquestioning the common assumption that external things cannot present\nthemselves in our perceptions, but only unauthenticated representations\nof them\u2014proceeds, according to Priestley, on a misinterpretation of the\nmetaphorical language of philosophers: to refute it is an idle waste of\ncontroversial labour, taking figures of speech for serious science.\n\nIf \u2018common sense\u2019 in this philosophy means only unintelligent opinion,\nas opposed to the judgments of thinkers, Reid\u2019s response to the sceptic\nmay well be regarded as an arrest of intelligence,\u2014blind dogmatism\ninstead of philosophy. But candid critics interpret words in the meaning\nintended by those who use them. This appeal to the judgments named those\nof the common sense, is intended as an appeal to reason itself\u2014reason,\nthat is to say, in its final form in a finite intelligence, whose\nexperience of the universe is incomplete, and working under conditions\nimposed upon its exercise in intelligent beings who are not omniscient.\nReid\u2019s Common Sense is the final perception of a being who can know the\nuniverse of reality only in part, and is therefore needed by man in that\nintermediate position in which an absolute beginning or end of things\nmust be to him incomprehensible. It is an appeal to that which must in\nreason be final, in an intelligence that only partly shares in divine\nomniscient reason. Although its judgments are not evolved from premises,\nthey are nevertheless what all men, except infants and lunatics, more\nor less distinctly acknowledge in their individual actions, although\nthey may misconstrue them in their uneducated opinions, or spoil them\nby indulgence in purely speculative systems. The divine inspiration of\nthe common sense is therefore man\u2019s final support, amidst the so-called\n\u2018contingencies\u2019 of temporal change in himself and his surroundings. A\nphilosophical appeal to it is of practical importance in reference\nto what, at the human point of view, are contingent truths of moral\nreasoning: the necessary truths of abstract thought, it has been well\nsaid, \u2018sufficiently guard themselves.\u2019\n\nAccordingly the judgments of the common sense which chiefly interested\nReid are what he calls first principles of \u2018contingent\u2019 truths, as\ndistinguished from abstract necessities the opposites of which are\nself-contradictory or unthinkable. Contingent truths, on the other hand,\nmay be rejected in thought; but those who reject them speculatively\nmust proceed upon them in their actions and reasonings, including even\nsceptical reasonings. The man whose scepticism involves a practical\nsurrender of the common judgment, that what we call the outward world\nis independent enough of _his_ individual existence to make it a\ntrustworthy medium of intercourse for him with other living persons;\nand who acts accordingly on the belief that \u2018other persons\u2019 are only\nconscious states of his own individual mind, would be pronounced a\nlunatic. Again, the fatalist, who rejects practically the moral judgment\nthat refers the issues of a deliberate voluntary determination to the\nvoluntary or personal agent as its responsible centre, insanely sits\nstill in the midst of danger, and refrains from exerting a power which he\ndenies. And he who refuses to proceed upon the logically undemonstrable\npostulate of universal natural order, by ceasing to reason about wholly\nuninterpretable chaos, is inevitably crushed by the Universal Power that\nhe ignores.\n\nIt is thus that practical disregard of inspired final reason appears to\nReid to be \u2018destructive at once of the science of the philosopher, the\nprudence of the man of the world, and the faith of the Christian.\u2019 The\nunjust as well as the just, so far as they live at all, must, he sees,\nlive by faith in what cannot be either proved or disproved by direct\ndemonstration. And if all those final judgments of practical reason were\ncontradicted in daily action, as well as in academic theory, \u2018piety,\npatriotism, parental affection, and private virtue would appear as\nridiculous as knight-errantry: the pursuits of pleasure, ambition, and\navarice must be grounded upon this sort of belief as well as those that\nare honourable and virtuous.\u2019\n\nOn the other hand there are common prejudices which, while they last,\nare popularly dignified as \u2018common sense.\u2019 Some now universally admitted\ntruths of science at first shocked men, although afterwards found\nto be in harmony with the general common sense to which philosophy\nappeals. That we are living on a material ball that revolves in space;\nthat the revolving ball revolves also on its axis; that the sun does\nnot rise and set, but is at rest; the existence of the antipodes; the\ninvisibility of the distances of things\u2014are a few examples. Instead\nof contradicting the common sense, the common sense, in the light of\nfurther experimental evidence, finally imposes them upon us. At any\nrate _their_ contradictories cannot be justified by the universal\nintellectual paralysis which is the alternative to the rejection of a\n_genuine_ judgment of the common sense. The assertion that the earth is\nin motion and the sun relatively at rest does not contradict sane human\nnature: that changes in nature are all wholly chaotic, and therefore\nwholly uninterpretable, can never become a scientific discovery, because\nit implies subversion of all science and makes scientific reasoning\nimpossible. The invisibility of the distances of things, rightly\nunderstood in the light of its evidence, draws no protest from genuine\nhuman nature. Human nature or final reason protests, on the other hand,\nwhen the material world is believed to be so unreal that I cannot by\nmeans of it find that there are other human beings. The impotence of all\nthings presented to the senses does not contradict reason in the common\nsense in the way the impotence, and consequent irresponsibility, of man\ndoes.\n\nBut Reid, I think, makes too little of the service of philosophical\nreflection, in quickening into conscious life in the individual the\npostulates on which human knowledge and conduct finally turn, and in\ndeveloping their meaning. Such primary assumptions as the real existence\nof outward things; our own individual personal existence; and the\nexistence of God, are held with very different degrees of intelligence,\nby the indolent and thoughtless and by those who reflect. Advance in\nphilosophy is advance in interpreting the meaning of each of these\nthree postulates, and of their mutual relations, as seen in an improved\nconception of what \u2018matter\u2019 means, what \u2018self\u2019 means, and what \u2018God\u2019\nmeans. The common sense or final reason of man is developed in different\ndegrees in different persons, in different places, at different periods\nof human history, and in the same person at different times in his life.\nIt is not individually independent of evolutionary law; although its\ngenuine constituents are latent in each man and may be made to respond to\nan adequate appeal. The practical reason of the common sense, while not\nfounded on but presupposed in philosophy, may nevertheless be deepened\nand enlightened in each man by reflection and criticism. Its final action\nis therefore far from superseding the philosopher, who has to systematise\nman\u2019s advancing experience of the universe in the light of an idealised\ncommon sense, or the common sense in the ideal man, which the philosopher\ntries to approach more nearly. In this intellectual progress the cruder\nconceptions of \u2018matter\u2019 and \u2018self\u2019 and \u2018God,\u2019 as well as of the final\nphysical and the moral relations of the three postulated existences, are\npurified and expanded; but always without disparagement to the primary\nroots. Improvement of human knowledge, in harmony with the awakened\ncommon sense inspirations, is our intellectual ideal.\n\nIt may perhaps be said that Reid makes his appeal to the root principles\nof practical reason\u2014the essential sanity of mankind\u2014only on behalf of\nwhat no one seriously calls in question; and moreover that he attributes\nthe scepticism with which he struggled to a speculative theory of\nphilosophers, instead of to facts in nature and in man, which suggest\ndistrust in the \u2018inspirations\u2019 on which human understanding depends, in\nits lack of omniscience. What need, it may be asked, for a prolonged\nendeavour to justify belief in the existence of the house in which we\nlive, the planet on which it stands, or the human beings among whom we\nseem to play our parts? Only insane persons\u2014really insane\u2014can be found\nto doubt realities like these. Insanity cannot be cured by an elaborate\ndisproof of the \u2018ideal system\u2019; and as for the sane, such common sense\nsanities as these are safe enough without this philosophical appeal to\nhuman sanity. As regards those beliefs\u2014_si non rogas intelligo_. I know\nall that I need to know, as long as I am not asked to justify and explain\nmy knowledge, logically or otherwise, and remain contented to enjoy the\nthings that unpractical thinkers vainly try to understand.\n\nThat sceptical distrust in our original faculties, and in Power or\nProvidence that is finally operative in the universe in which we have our\nbeing, lies deeper than the \u2018ideal system\u2019 which was Reid\u2019s bugbear; and\nalso that it arises mostly in connection with less obtrusive elements\nin the common sense than our perceptions through the five senses, is in\nharmony with the gradual development of Reid\u2019s own thought which I have\ntried to trace. For he advanced, as we saw, from reflection upon those\n\u2018inspirations\u2019 of the common sense that are implied in our physical\nperceptions, to reflection upon those other data of the common sense\nthat are implied in our perceptions of personal and morally responsible\nagency. It is in touching and seeing the material world that the common\nsense is first awakened; and thus the material world is the most\nobtrusive object in human experience, its perceptions affording the\nfittest preliminary object-lesson on the office of this final reason\nin the whole rational economy of man. External perceptions are the\nbeginnings of all reasonings about concrete existence. They are the\nobvious examples of those original judgments, which are \u2018the inspiration\nof the Almighty,\u2019 more obvious than the often dormant ones that are\nmoral and spiritual. All the discoveries of our reason are grounded on\nthem. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder in the\nconstitution, is called _lunacy_ by all; as when a man believes that he\nis made of glass: but when a man suffers himself to be reasoned out of\nthem by metaphysical arguments he would call this _metaphysical lunacy_;\nwhich differs from the other species of the distemper in this, that it\nis not continued, but intermittent. He thus tests reason in its final\nauthority, as distinguished from reason in its innumerable inferential\nexercises: the authority may be logically vindicated as reasonable, but\nits judgments are not conclusions originally deduced from premises.\n\nIt must also be remembered that the Reidian protest on behalf of a\nphilosophical recognition of the blended judgment and feeling which makes\nthis common reason that is more or less consciously alive in all men,\nis a protest on behalf of the regulative authority of this reason in\nits genuine integrity. All philosophical systems, so far, proceed upon\nand acknowledge its judgments; but, as it seemed to Reid, often only\nafter spoiling them. He made it his particular mission to restore them\nin their genuine integrity to philosophy as the prime factors of all\ntrue theories. In perception does the outward reality actually appear,\nextended as it really is, without any unextended medium interposed,\nexactly as the internal reality of a pain or a pleasure appears without\na medium, when I am conscious of being pained or pleased? If so, let us\nthen, Reid would say, accept this fact as final, even although we cannot\naccount for it; instead of perverting it by supposing that the external\nreality is one thing, and the immediately perceived object of which alone\nwe are curious a different thing;\u2014dreaming that this supposed internal\nobject, as its copy, explains our perception of the external object that\nis imperceptible. Again, according to genuine common sense, the \u2018self\u2019\nwhich I am obliged to presuppose is invisible; my body or my brain is\nexternal to _it_, as much so as the sun and moon are; for they are all\nparts of the material world\u2014all objects of my senses\u2014unlike my proper\npersonality, which is approached only through the inner consciousness,\nand not at all through perception of the senses. Here, too, Reid protests\non behalf of the genuine common sense, and against the scientifically\nperverted common sense offered to him by Priestley. For the distinctive\nfeature of Reidism is not vague acknowledgment of the common sense, but\nacknowledgment of it as it is found to be when steadfast reflection is\napplied to the final mental experience of man.\n\nA modern critic may complain that Reid\u2019s point of view is too narrow and\nspecial, and his method too matter-of-fact to entitle the result to be\ncalled philosophy. It looks unlike philosophy proper, which is concerned\nwith the universe and universals, and is like a special science of human\nmind, having human mind for its finite object or province, as other\nspecial sciences have their limited provinces. For instance, astronomy\nhas the stellar bodies; chemistry, the elementary constitution of bodies;\ngeology, the phenomena in the strata of the earth\u2019s crust; and so on. Now\nthe final problem of universal reality, or at least universal reality in\nultimate relation to man, is the proper business of the philosopher, who\ncontemplates the all-comprehensive synthesis which sustains or explains\neach special science, and even the universe of nature and man; while, as\nhuman philosophy, it still recognises the inherent infinity that makes\nrealities overleap the special sciences. For philosophy is the supreme\nspeculation, concerned with Matter or outward Nature, Self or Spirit, and\nGod or the final all-determining Power\u2014and of this final inquiry Reid had\nhardly a conception. Yet we must allow that when Reid\u2019s method is called\n\u2018inductive,\u2019 it is more than inductive in the ordinary meaning of the\nword induction in the natural sciences. He does not reach the several\nprinciples of the common sense by the way of probable generalisation from\nobserved facts; rather as truths which arise out of latency into more\nor less distinct consciousness, in response to steadfast meditation.\nThey are philosophically recognised \u2018inspirations,\u2019 or \u2018revelations\u2019\u2014not\ntentative generalisations; and their justification must not be confounded\nwith the ordinary verification with which we are familiar in sciences of\noutward nature. The common sense provides material to the philosopher,\nnot ready made, but still not mere issue of empirical generalisation.\n\nHow far a philosophy akin to that of Reid admits of philosophical\nexpansion, or of being brought up to date at the end of the nineteenth\ncentury, when the fundamental questions of religious thought are at the\nroot of our doubts and perplexities, may be considered on a review of\nthe fortunes of Reid\u2019s appeal to the inspirations of final reason in the\ncentury which has passed since he died.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nREID IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON SENSE\nPHILOSOPHY: REID IN FRANCE: REID AND HAMILTON: REID AND SCOTO-HEGELIAN\nIDEALISM: ETHICAL OR THEISTIC FINAL FAITH\n\n\nHow has Reid\u2019s protest of reason in the name of common sense\u2014a\nprotest against sceptical paralysis of human intelligence, physical\nand moral\u2014fared in the nineteenth century? Has Reid by this protest\nestablished what is of lasting value either to human happiness or to\nphilosophical theory? What has modern thought, as developed at the end of\nthe nineteenth century, to say to a Scottish eighteenth century inquiry\ninto human mind that finds its root in a postulated sense of reality,\nwhich must be taken as finally authoritative when it is recognised in\nits genuine integrity? How do faith and doubt now stand finally related,\nas compared with their relations when Reid opposed Hume? Is there still\nroom for philosophical argument founded on the divine inspirations of\nthe Common Sense, under, for instance, our transformed conception of the\nuniverse as an evolution?\n\nExpansion rather than subversion of the philosophy which ultimately\nargues from the common sense, has, I think, been going on. Matter-of-fact\nstudy of human mind, as engaged in perception of the material world,\nand in the moral exercise of voluntary agency, which with Reid makes\nthis perception of matter, and moral consciousness of free agency its\nprominent spiritual facts, has now risen to criticism of our conception\nof the Supreme Power that is finally at work in the universe in which we\nlive and move and have our being. And a less purely academic scepticism\nthan that against which Reid summoned the common sense now confronts\nus. If Reid\u2019s mission was to call attention to our direct mental grasp\nof outward realities, by exploding a theory which seemed to paralyse\nthat grasp, it would have been his corresponding mission now to justify,\nin name of the moral and spiritual elements of the common sense, the\nreligious interpretation of the universe, which finds in the facts of\nmatter and man a continuous self-revelation of omnipotent love and\nmercy\u2014and this in the face of a world which repels our more philanthropic\ncivilisation, by its abundant suffering and sin. Instead of philosophy\nat war with common sense, common sense is now alleged as at war with\nthe finally moral and religious conception of the universe, which Reid\naccepted as conclusive under the premises of an old-fashioned natural\ntheology. Now universal natural law is supposed to exclude God, and\nsentient misery to make theistic faith in the goodness, and therefore\ntrustworthiness, of the Supreme Power an anachronism, which must give\nplace to universal pessimist doubt and despair. How can we rest with\ntrust in those practical principles of human nature to which Reid\nappealed, when they and we are found in a universe so full of evil as\nthis in which we find ourselves? Are we not navigating the ocean of life\nin a vessel that is not seaworthy? These are questions now expressed or\nfelt.\n\nFor forty years after Reid\u2019s death the higher thought of Scotland,\nrepresented by its leaders, remained well within the old lines. It was\nstill careful analysis of what is presented in human consciousness, with\na gradual decline of interest in the metaphysical and moral problems\nwhich Hume\u2019s agnostic distrust had introduced even into Reid\u2019s modest\ntreatment of the common sense. Scottish philosophy became a search for\nnatural sequences and co-existences among phenomena, instead of search\nfor firm intellectual and moral footing in a universe to which we are\nintroduced by being percipient of an infinitesimal part through our five\nsenses. For a quarter of a century Dugald Stewart was Reid\u2019s acknowledged\nsuccessor, less original, and even less adventurous, than his master,\nbut unrecognisable in the ill-tempered criticism of Schopenhauer. With\ndignified eloquence, wider intimacy with society than Reid\u2019s, and more\nlearning, he applied inductive methods to find the laws that determine\nintellectual character and the education of the human mind, also to solve\nsocial questions, in graceful language\u2014all which touched the popular\nimagination more than his somewhat prosaic predecessor.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nEarly in the nineteenth century, Thomas Brown, the young Edinburgh\nProfessor of Moral Philosophy, and colleague of Stewart, raised a revolt\nagainst Reid and Stewart in some of their characteristic philosophy.\nThis brilliant youth, minor poet as well as philosopher, had practised\nmedicine in Edinburgh before his appointment, in 1810, at the age of\nthirty-two, to the chair of Stewart. In medical practice he had been the\ncolleague of Dr. Gregory, Reid\u2019s cousin, and so long his correspondent.\nBrown, unlike Reid, was one of the precocious philosophers. At the age\nof twenty he appeared as a critic of the _Zoonomia_ of Darwin, and a few\nyears later as author of an _Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and\nEffect_, which contains the essence of the philosophy that was afterwards\nexpanded and applied in his _Lectures_. He died at the age of forty-two,\nleaving works undistinguished by the deep and patient thought of Reid,\nand diffuse in style, but abounding in ingenious analysis\u2014an interesting\ncontribution to the logic of physical inquiry, instead of appeals to\ncarefully considered judgments of the Common Sense in Perception and in\nCausation. Brown recognised instinctive belief in natural constancies of\nco-existence and sequence among phenomena, and treated associations among\nmental states as the chief explanation of the phenomena of mind. The\noriginative moral agency of intending and intelligent Will, so prominent\nlatterly in Reid, disappears in Brown. And Brown, like Priestley,\ndisparaged Reid\u2019s claim to merit for reversing the philosophical\nprejudice that \u2018ideas\u2019 are the only objects of human cognition, regarding\nit as a metaphor mistaken for a dogma. Indeed, the empirical laws of\nassociation tend with Brown, as with Priestley, to be the sole ultimate\nlaws of mind: perhaps this tendency was restrained in expression as much\nby personal respect for Reid and Stewart as by conviction.\n\nAfter Brown, philosophy in Scotland was for a time dormant\u2014superseded\nby Combe and phrenology. But contemporaneously, in \u2018the twenties,\u2019\na philosophy more akin to Reid than to Brown made its appearance\nin England; although the analogy is not on the surface, and has\nnot, I think, been observed. Coleridge, especially in his _Aids to\nReflection_, published in 1825, insists with eloquent emphasis upon\nthe difference between \u2018the Reason,\u2019 which is divine or inspired, and\nmere \u2018Understanding,\u2019 which generalises the phenomena that emerge in\nexperience: he also presses the distinction between free agency, as\nimplied in morally responsible causation, and the mechanical order of\nnature with which physical sciences are exclusively concerned. \u2018The\nReason,\u2019 to which Coleridge appeals, corresponds in function to \u2018the\nCommon Sense\u2019 of Reid. It is described as fixed and final; as in all its\ndecisions appealing to itself; and as \u2018much nearer to sense than the\nunderstanding,\u2019 for it is direct insight of truth, whereas understanding\nmust refer all its judgments to premises. That man, because he is morally\nresponsible, must originate, within his individual personality as their\nfinal centre, all acts for which he is responsible, is with Coleridge a\npostulate, \u2018the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man\n_may_ find for himself,\u2019 and so see the true meaning of the words power\nand causality. In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations\nof the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason.\nWe may speak of understanding as \u2018human,\u2019 with its often discordant\ngeneralisations; but there can be no merely \u2018human\u2019 Reason. There neither\nis nor can be but one and the same Reason; the light without which the\nindividual understanding would be darkness.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe philosophy that carefully measures its conclusions by the Common\nSense found its way from Scotland into France early in this century,\nin arrest of the materialism and scepticism which had taken the place\nof the spiritual philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. In 1811 Royer\nCollard, eminent as a philosopher and a statesman, was made Professor of\nPhilosophy in Paris. In that year, when he was preparing his lectures,\nhe accidentally found a copy of Reid\u2019s _Inquiry_ at a book-stall near\nthe Seine. He was charmed with its contents, which thereafter inspired\nhis teaching.[26] Through Royer Collard, Reid\u2019s philosophy became\nthe dominant philosophy of France, and it still retains an elevating\nspiritual influence in the national schools.[27] In 1828 Reid\u2019s works\nwere translated and discussed by Jouffroy, a leading thinker in his\ngeneration, who thus leavened thinking minds among contemporaries. But\nVictor Cousin was Reid\u2019s most eloquent and famous missionary. He had\nbeen educated by Royer Collard in Reid\u2019s principles. His ardent and\ncomprehensive genius, however, became dissatisfied with what he called\na \u2018sage but timid doctrine,\u2019 and treated it as a vigorous but hardly\nphilosophical protest against the sceptic in the name of uncritical\ncommon sense. In his enthusiasm, Cousin turned to Germany for \u2018a\nphilosophy so masculine and brilliant that it could command the attention\nof Europe.\u2019 At first he thought he found in Kant the profound refutation\nof the sceptic, and the grand constructive philosophy he wanted. But soon\nKant\u2019s mode of expelling the \u2018mortal poison\u2019 seemed as unsatisfactory as\nReid\u2019s, and he parted company with him so far as to join first Schelling\nand then Hegel in an eclectic or all-reconciling system. But in the end\nthe fascination of Hegelian thought abated. There might, after all, be\ndeeper meaning, and more capacity for development, in Reid\u2019s appeal than\nhe had supposed. So in his later years Cousin returned to his first love.\nHis _Philosophie \u00c9cossaise_, which appeared in its latest form in 1857,\nis an eloquent appreciation of Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Reid, and Beattie,\nwith Reid as the chief figure in the centre.\n\nMeantime a formidable intellectual force had appeared in Scotland, in\nargumentative collision with those Germans by whom Cousin had been\nfascinated, and also with Cousin\u2019s own eclectic assimilation of all\nphilosophies. Sir William Hamilton was warning his contemporaries against\nthe \u2018masculine and brilliant\u2019 Continental philosophy, and energetically\nrecalling them to Reid, by two essays in the _Edinburgh Review_\u2014one in\nOctober 1829, destructive of the \u2018Philosophy of the Unconditioned,\u2019\nthe other in October 1830, constructive, on Reid\u2019s \u2018Philosophy of\nPerception.\u2019 The reconstruction of the philosophy of the Common\nSense, contained by implication in these famous essays, was, in 1846,\nelaborated in commentaries which embrace the literature of philosophy,\nin Hamilton\u2019s _Reid_. The Glasgow professor re-appeared in the company\nof the most learned of all Scottish philosophers, educated especially\nby Aristotle and his commentators, by Kant, and by Reid himself, whose\nmodest enterprise was now measured by the profoundest problems and\nmost comprehensive conceptions of ancient and modern speculation. The\nmagnificent intellect of Hamilton raised deep questions among us that lay\ndormant in Reid.\n\nHamilton in Scotland is so far in parallel with Cousin in France,\nthat\u2014moving in opposite directions\u2014they both helped to _germanise_\nthe philosophy which makes its last appeal to the common sense.\nCousin, dissatisfied with the \u2018timidity\u2019 of Reid, tried to reconcile\na philosophy that should comprehend the Infinite with the philosophy\nthat is confined to experience. Hamilton\u2019s mission was to clip the\nwings of the speculative adventurers. This made him put the emphasis\non the inadequacy of a human understanding for fully coping with the\neternal reality. While he praised Reid for making the Common Sense in\nits integrity the necessary criterion of philosophy, he claimed for\nhimself the special credit of distinguishing its necessities as of two\nsorts\u2014the one a positive power, the other the impotence implied in\nfinite intelligence. Hence human experience rests on a conditioned, or\n(so far) paralysed intelligence; and if omniscience only can be called\n\u2018knowledge,\u2019 while to know \u2018in part,\u2019 therefore with involved mysteries,\nmust be called ignorance\u2014it follows that man knows nothing. Ignorance is\nthen the consummation of human philosophy, and its highest attainment is\nthis discovery. \u2018Our dream of knowledge is a little light rounded with\ndarkness.\u2019 \u2018The highest reach of science and philosophy is the scientific\nrecognition of human ignorance.\u2019 \u2018Doubt is the beginning and the end of\nall our efforts to know.\u2019 \u2018The last and highest consecration of all true\nreligion is an altar to the unknown and unknowable God.\u2019 Man\u2019s knowledge\nof existence must be relative to his limited experience and intelligence.\n\nThe missionary of a neglected truth is apt to be one-sided and even\nparadoxical, and strenuous expression was natural to Hamilton. From\nhis first essay in 1829 to his last in 1855 he sought to show the\ninconsistency of infinite knowledge with our limited share of inspiration\nin the Common Sense. Accordingly, the negative and incomplete, or what\nBacon calls \u2018broken\u2019 character of man\u2019s knowledge, rather than its\npositive victories, is ever supreme in the _Hamiltonianised_ Reid, along\nwith a recast of Reid\u2019s account of the Common Sense as involved in\nperception of the outward things of sense.\n\nThe respective offices of Reid and Hamilton might be compared in this\naphorism of Pascal\u2014\u2018_La Nature soutient la Raison impuissante_.\u2019 Need\nfor the common sense with which human nature is charged, illustrates the\nimpotence of man\u2019s unomniscient understanding and limited share of the\nDivine Reason. Taking those words of Pascal, Reid puts emphasis on \u2018_la\nnature_\u2019; Hamilton on \u2018_impuissance_.\u2019 But both are recognised by each:\nit is a difference of emphasis. Neither Hamilton nor Mansel excludes\nthe conservative influence of \u2018_la nature_,\u2019 taken in its integrity,\nin the way Mr. Herbert Spencer does, when he rests philosophy only on\nthe strongly emphasised part of Hamiltonian philosophy. In Hamilton the\n\u2018_raison impuissante_\u2019 is insisted on really in order to make room for\n\u2018_la nature_\u2019; on the ground that the logical understanding, here \u2018_la\nraison_,\u2019 is too impotent to be able to _disprove_ the genuine judgments\nof the Common Sense.\n\nBrown\u2019s rebellion against Reid early in the century, in the interest\nof a universal physical causation or association, has its parallel in\nFerrier\u2019s revolt, in the middle of the century, against the Hamiltonian\nReid, in the interest of abstract metaphysics as opposed to uncriticised\ncommon sense. In the name of philosophy he excludes from philosophy\nall except necessary truths of abstract reason; neglecting, as beneath\nits regard, the world of change, in which Reid\u2019s mixed and practical\nreason, or Common Sense, had been offered as final guide. The office of\nphilosophy, according to Ferrier, is among the eternal truths, which\nalone can be absolutely demonstrated, and which relieve philosophy\nfrom \u2018the oversight of popular opinion and the errors of psychological\nscience,\u2019 which had been unworthily dignified as the final test of\ntruth. The natural beliefs of mankind, instead of being worshipped as\ndivine, are banished in Ferrier\u2019s philosophy, on the ground that their\nself-contradictoriness is demonstrable: the business of the philosopher,\naccordingly, is to substitute \u2018reasonable thinking\u2019 for \u2018common sense.\u2019\nThe \u2018_raison impuissante_,\u2019 emphasised by Hamilton\u2014the ignorance in\nwhich Hamilton revels\u2014is not allowed by Ferrier to be ignorance at all;\nfor \u2018man cannot be said to be ignorant of self-contradictions that can\nbe knowledge for no mind, human or divine.\u2019 Independent or unperceived\nmatter is not merely hid from man\u2019s knowledge on account of his \u2018_raison\nimpuissante_\u2019; it is hid from all intelligence, because inconsistent with\nthe _necessarily_ mind-dependent essence of Being. Pure reason does not\nneed to be finally supplemented by practical principles of common sense.\nIt is able to shift for itself without this surrender. The conciliation\nof common sense thinking and philosophy is accomplished by the submission\nof common sense to universal compulsory reason. Opinion must submit to\ndemonstration, instead of demonstration, intelligible only by the few,\nhaving to make way for the undemonstrable dogmas of the unreflecting.\n\nReid, I suspect, could hardly recognise, in the stuffed figure thus put\nup by Ferrier to be knocked down, either the \u2018common sense\u2019 in which\n_he_ found the root of a human knowledge of the realities revealed in\nplace and time throughout the long experience of man, or the \u2018perception\u2019\nin which things external to the individual mind make their appearance\n\u2018in part.\u2019 The practical impassibility of disbelieving the existence\nof other living beings, of discarding memory as wholly delusion, of\ntreating man as irresponsible, and our surroundings as chaotic or wholly\nuninterpretable, alike for science and in common life\u2014these were alleged\nconstituents of the common sense with which Reid concerned himself. They\nall lie outside the demonstrations of Ferrier, in which he unfolds his\ntheory in forms of artistic beauty and easy grace, which make him the\nmost picturesque figure in the succession of Scottish philosophers. Yet\nBrown and Ferrier in the end helped on the expansion of Reid.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nBefore Ferrier passed away in 1864, a revolution in the conception of\nthe universe was in progress in Britain. The idea of continuous physical\nevolution of external nature and of man, promulgated biologically by\nDarwin, and by Mr. Herbert Spencer as the all-comprehensive generalised\nlaw of a universe that was supposed to be the outcome of unknowable\nPower, has become a popular creed within the last forty years.\nSimultaneously, methods of development akin to Hegel were introduced\nby Dr. Hutcheson Stirling in his _Secret of Hegel_, and afterwards\nin Glasgow by Dr. Caird, who adorned Reid\u2019s chair for nearly thirty\nyears\u2014methods for making explicit latent Divine Reason as what explains\nand sustains the universe. Reid\u2019s appeal in a practical temper, to the\nmixed and moral reason in man, as that with which man is inspired\u2014an\nappeal widened and prolific of deeper questions in Hamilton\u2014was still too\ncautious to attempt to formulate the mysteries of existence, in fully\nintelligible principles, which should remove the darkness around the\n\u2018little light\u2019 with which Reid was satisfied. He would have looked with\ndistrust at the more ambitious intellectual constructions which seemed to\nbe superseding the common sense of human nature, as the human response\nto the sceptic or agnostic, whose philosophical knowledge turned all\nknowledge into ignorance at the last. Reid was too human to be satisfied\nwith merely physical generalisations of sequences and co-existences\nof phenomena, finally unintelligible, and therefore unworthy of trust;\nand he would have been too cautious to accept a network of abstract\nintellectual necessities, latent in the universe, as the last and best\nhuman account of nature and man as actually found in place and time.\nTo rest satisfied with the evolutionary generalisation he would have\nregarded as involving the \u2018common error of philosophers since the days\nof Plato,\u2019 in confounding moral agency with physical causation. Of the\nmagnificent Hegelian constructions he would probably have said, what\nhe says of Samuel Clarke\u2019s theological demonstration\u2014\u2018These are the\nspeculations of men of superior genius. But whether they be as solid as\nthey are sublime, or whether they be the wanderings of imagination in a\nregion beyond the limit of human understanding, I am unable to determine.\u2019\n\nThe alternatives presented to this generation\u2014either agnostic pessimist\ndespair or universal science in which man is in some sense identified\nwith God\u2014final nescience _versus_ final omniscience\u2014ultimate and\nuniversal problem of existence taking the place of a Reid\u2019s science of\nhuman mind\u2014represent the unending struggle between sceptical distrust of\nthe Universal Power, ignorantly worshipped, and reasonable ethical faith\nin the Universal Power, with consequent hope for men. It is in Scotland\na new form of the war with David Hume to which Reid\u2019s life was given.\nIt has been going on since Socrates argued with the Sophists at Athens,\nand since Job justified the morality of Providence among the Eastern\nemirs. The eighteenth-century question, \u2018What is Matter?\u2019 has risen\nin the nineteenth to the question, \u2018What is God?\u2019 The inspired Common\nSense or Common Reason of Reid seems to be sublimated in universally\nnecessitating dialectical Reason, in this Scoto-German way of resisting\nthe agnostic. To fill the place of the \u2018unknown and unknowable God\u2019\nof the Hamiltonian emphasis, human knowledge appears identified and\nco-extensive with the Divine, in an absolute idealism, presumed to be\nthe only adequate refutation of all subverting doubt. The \u2018_raison\nimpuissante_,\u2019 sustained by and culminating in \u2018_la nature_,\u2019 or inspired\ncommon sense, is exchanged for what looks like a pantheistic necessity\nthat leaves no room for moral agency in man or God, and which scorns the\nincomplete knowledge that cannot dispense with a faith venture at its\nroot.\n\nYet Reid, if he were now among us, might find the common sense not\nsuperseded but idealised, in the more articulate response of reason\nin man to the all-pervading active Reason which the later philosopher\nidentifies with his own. That the common sense latent in man is the\ninspiration of God is an assumption with which he started in his\n_Inquiry_. \u2018The inspiration of the Almighty giveth man understanding.\u2019\n\u2018The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.\u2019 So the common sense moral\ntrust in God, or universal moral venture, is at the root of all human\nlife and human knowledge, giving unity and vitality to the whole. It is\nthe \u2018little light\u2019\u2014a ray from the perfect divine light,\u2014and the universe\nis interpretable for all human purposes only in and through it. It is\nthat in each of us through which the inspirations in the ideal man,\nwhen dormant in individuals, can nevertheless be made to respond, in an\nethical or religious common sense of the infinite love and mercy of the\nall-sustaining Power that is always waiting to be gracious\u2014to respond to\nthe inspirations of Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles.\n\nIf \u2018knowledge\u2019 means only what is reached by the logical understanding\nelaborating materials given by sense; and if the name is denied to\nthe inspirations of the Common Sense, what those inspirations should\nbe called becomes a question about the meaning of a word. God is then\n\u2018unknowable\u2019 by man, only inasmuch as faith in the perfect reason and\ngoodness of the Universal Power is more than an ordinary scientific\ngeneralisation. But if we recognise in the Common Sense, and in its\nunderlying Theistic Faith, that without which all our knowledge must\ndissolve in ignorance, then the faith must be accepted as in reason the\nfinal ground of the knowledge; and therefore as in us the last form of\nthe universal reason, in and through which what is divine in us protests\nagainst limitation to an intelligence that becomes paralysed in the\nabsence of this its indispensable factor. If knowledge means omniscient\nphysical science of the universe of reality, then the universe of\nreality _is_ finally unknown and unknowable. But if man _can_ live in\nintelligible relations to what transcends natural science,\u2014call this\nwhich enables him so to live, \u2018knowledge,\u2019 \u2018science,\u2019 \u2018common sense,\u2019\n\u2018faith,\u2019 \u2018inspiration,\u2019 \u2018revelation,\u2019 \u2018feeling,\u2019 or \u2018reason,\u2019\u2014it is\ntreasure found for the philosopher.\n\nCan Reid\u2019s \u2018common sense\u2019 be sublimated into the universal consciousness\nof Hegelian dialectic, and does this translation of faith into absolute\nscience constitute the true ideal of Scottish common sense philosophy at\nthe end of the nineteenth century? Is common knowledge, and scientific\nknowledge in special sciences, only knowledge \u2018in part,\u2019 while the true\nphilosopher may aspire to know even as God knows? Must man thus claim\nomniscience as the only fit ground of his protest against sceptical\nnescience? Or, must his interpretation of the experience through which\nhe is passing be, even in the end, only an inspired faith-venture,\ninstead of the omniscience which elevates the common sense into itself?\nRather, must not the supposed omniscience, which is dissatisfied with\nfaith-ventures, because faith is supposed to be blind, be itself only the\ncommon sense under another name\u2014but with its intellectual constitution\nmore articulately explicated?\n\nSurely only omniscience and omnipotence can dispense with the moral and\nreligious venture of our inspired common sense and its implied theistic\nfaith, as the root of reason in man\u2014in his intermediate place and office,\nbetween perfect knowledge and total ignorance. So understood, Reid\u2019s\nphilosophy is _virtually_ the philosophy that makes its final appeal to\nthe divine in man, latent in each individual man, in and through whom\nthe universe is gradually interpreted as a revelation of perfect reason\nor perfect goodness. True philosophy is then the moral and religious\nventure which accepts and applies the principles of common sense, in the\nassurance that, in genuine submission to their inspired authority, we\ncannot finally be put to intellectual or moral confusion. Faith in God is\nlatent even in the perceptions of external sense, in which Reid found the\nfirst example of the operation of this inspiration. Alike in the outer\nworld of the senses, and in free or responsible agency in man, filial\nfaith, ethical or theistic, may be justified by reasoning, although it\nCannot be reached by logic as a direct conclusion from premises. It is\nour primary postulate, and not an object of logical proof; therefore\ncredible in reason while it is not demonstrable.\n\nIn this way a humanised Hegelianism, which seeks to restore or retain\nthe often dormant faith in the perfectly good God, and thus in the\nfuture of man, may even be taken as in line with Reid, under the altered\nintellectual conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. It\nvirtually appeals at last to moral faith.[28]\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nPoetry in another way than philosophy expresses and interprets for man\nthe inspired experience that transcends physical science and its logical\nunderstanding. And we find in the great poets of the Victorian era an\nappeal through the imagination to those elements in human nature, to\nwhich Reid made argumentative appeal as a philosopher. In this lies\nWordsworth\u2019s \u2018healing power.\u2019 His \u2018Intimations of Immortality\u2019 express\ndivine inspirations, through which man learns to understand himself and\nhis surroundings\u2014inspirations that, dormant, \u2018fade into the light of\ncommon day,\u2019 yet, recovered by reflection, \u2018in a season of calm weather,\nthough inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which\nbrought us hither.\u2019 And \u2018In Memoriam\u2019 is Tennyson\u2019s protest against the\ndoubting spirit of the age, on behalf of the final and life-determining\nprinciples, which underlie creeds, belong to our earliest childhood,\nand on which the wisest and best have rested with a more or less\nintelligent consciousness through the ages\u2014God revealed in the ideal man\nlatent in all men. The human office of inspired common sense or ethical\nreason, final for beings whose \u2018knowledge\u2019 must be intermediate between\nomniscience and blind ignorance of mere sense and feeling, is its tacit\nphilosophy\u2014\n\n      \u2018Our wills are _ours_, we know not how,\n    Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.\n\n    We have but _faith_: we cannot _know_;\n      For knowledge is of things we see;\n      And yet we trust it comes from _Thee_,\n    A beam in darkness: let it _grow_.\n\n    Let knowledge grow from more to more,\n      But more of reverence in us dwell;\n      That mind and soul, according well,\n    May make one music as before,\n\n    But vaster.\u2019\n\nOur scientific interpretation of the ever-changing universe at last rests\non ethical theistic faith, and the Christian revelation of divine love is\nresponded to by the divine inspiration of God in Man, in the form of the\nspiritual Common Sense. If this be not so, we cannot rely on the Common\nSense, for it then belongs to a morally untrustworthy universe.\n\nEstablished on this faith, philosophy or theology, in Scotland and\nthroughout the world, awaits the sceptical criticism and the spiritual\nhealing power of the masters of thought in the twentieth century, for its\nfurther development, and application to human affairs.\n\n\nTHE END\n\n\n\n\nFOOTNOTES\n\n\n[1] The above from data at Birkwood.\n\n[2] _Scottish Notes and Queries_, iii. 84-88; 128.\n\n[3] The number is, unfortunately, unrecorded.\n\n[4] Birkwood MSS.\n\n[5] In _Scotland and Scotsmen of the Eighteenth Century_, by Ramsay of\nOchtertyre, there is an interesting account of this Mr. Bisset.\n\n[6] _Essays on the Intellectual Powers_, II. ch. 10.\n\n[7] While he lived here, he seems to have retained the incumbency of New\nMachar till May 1752.\n\n[8] Long ago removed. I have an engraving of it.\n\n[9] These MS. dissertations have been lately recovered, and I have thus\nbeen able to compare them with the _Inquiry_, in which I find them mostly\nembodied.\n\n[10] Birkwood MS.\n\n[11] I have elsewhere discussed the true meaning of Berkeley\u2019s philosophy.\n\n[12] Between the College and the Cathedral, diverging to the east.\n\n[13] Watt began those experiments in Glasgow about 1763.\n\n[14] The American revolt was a severe stroke to Glasgow at the time,\nthough it led to a great development of manufactures in the city\nafterwards. See Colville\u2019s _By-Ways of History_ (1897), pp. 281-314.\n\n[15] William Traill, a Glasgow graduate, was elected. Playfair (of St.\nAndrews), afterwards Professor John Playfair of Edinburgh, was also a\ncandidate, then only eighteen.\n\n[16] The Bell of the Brae.\n\n[17] The Forth and Clyde Canal was commenced in 1768 and opened from sea\nto sea in 1790.\n\n[18] Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who often met him at Blair Drummond, mentions\nthat \u2018for more than fifteen years Reid spent great part of the College\nvacation there with Lord Kames.\u2019\n\n[19] Kant\u2019s uncritical identification of Reid\u2019s philosophical appeal\nto the common rational sense with the popular appeal and declamation\nof Oswald and even Beattie, is exposed by Professor Sidgwick in _Mind_\n(April 1895).\n\n[20] Birkwood MSS.\n\n[21] Birkwood MSS.\n\n[22] Professor Richardson\u2019s Memoir of Arthur.\n\n[23] _The World as Will and Idea_, translated by Mr. Haldane and Mr.\nKemp, ii. 240. Schopenhauer makes other interesting references to Reid.\n\n[24] Birkwood MSS.\n\n[25] See also Reid\u2019s _Essays on the Active Powers_, I. 1-6, and _passim_.\n\n[26] M. Boutroux, in _Revue Fran\u00e7aise d\u2019Edimbourg_, No. 4.\n\n[27] Reid\u2019s philosophy was Renan\u2019s \u2018ideal\u2019 in his early life, according\nto his biographer.\n\n[28] So in the \u2018Preliminary Notice,\u2019 in the new edition of Dr. Stirling\u2019s\n_Secret of Hegel_\u2014last paragraph.","title":"Thomas Reid","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":46409}