{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/wikisource_Thomas_Reid_Preface/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/wikisource_Thomas_Reid_Preface","id":"wikisource_Thomas_Reid_Preface","license":"Public Domain / CC-BY-SA (see source)","rights_basis":"wikisource_site_inclusion_policy","source":"wikisource","source_url":"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thomas_Reid/Preface","summary":null,"tags":["Subpages"],"text":"Layout 2\n\n\u00a0\n\nPREFACE\n\nThis little book is an attempt to present Reid in a fresh light, and in his relations to present-day thought. It deals with the Scottish chapter in that enduring alternation between agnostic despair and endeavour after perfect insight which seems to be a law of the philosophic progress of mankind. Thomas Reid, home-bred and self-contained, is the national representative, in the eighteenth century, of the via media between these extremes. In the concluding chapter I have looked at the philosophical appeal to inspired data of Common Sense, in the wider light of the theistic philosophy of the universe, and not merely as part of an inductive science of the human mind. This connects the theistic postulate of spiritual reason, as the foundation of human experience, with Reid\u2019s appeal to the ultimate but often dormant necessities of human nature, a subject treated more fully in my Philosophy of Theism (1896).\n\nFor valuable unpublished material\u2014more indeed than I could avail myself of within narrow limits\u2014I am indebted to Miss Hilda Paterson, the guardian of manuscript remains and other relics of her ancestor, preserved at Birkwood, in Reid\u2019s native country of the Dee. I also owe much to Mr. R. S. Rait, now of New College, Oxford, the historian of the Universities of Aberdeen, whose research has done much to illustrate his alma mater in the North. And I am indebted to Dr. Davidson, the Professor of Logic, and to Mr. Anderson, the Librarian, of the University of Aberdeen, for documents to which the space at my disposal forbids more than an occasional reference.\n\nThose who desire to study further the chapter in the history of European philosophy in which Reid\u2019s name is prominent, may be referred to Cousin\u2019s critical appreciation in his Philosophie \u00c9cossaise (1857), and to Professor Andrew Seth\u2019s Balfour Lectures on \u2018Scottish Philosophy\u2019 (1885), in which the Scottish and German answers to Hume are compared. The industry of the late Dr. M\u2018Cosh has collected, in his Scottish Philosophy (1875), interesting particulars regarding our national philosophers from Hutcheson to Hamilton.\n\nA. C. F.\n\nUniversity of Edinburgh.\n\n21st February 1898.","title":"Thomas Reid/Preface","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":351}