THOMAS REID
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are now ready_:—
THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON.
ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK.
JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES.
ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN.
THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE.
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS.
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON.
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE.
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK.
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. OMOND.
THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS.
NORMAN MACLEOD. By JOHN WELLWOOD.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor SAINTSBURY.
KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By LOUIS A. BARBÉ.
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. GROSART.
JAMES THOMSON. By WILLIAM BAYNE.
MUNGO PARK. By T. BANKS MACLACHLAN.
DAVID HUME. By Professor CALDERWOOD.
THOMAS REID. By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER.
[Illustration:
THOMAS
REID
BY
A:CAMPBELL
FRASER ::
FAMOUS
SCOTS:
SERIES
PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON
& FERRIER · EDINBVRGH
AND LONDON
]
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and the
printing from the press of Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh.
PREFACE
This 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’s
appeal to the ultimate but often dormant necessities of human nature, a
subject treated more fully in my _Philosophy of Theism_ (1896).
For valuable unpublished material—more indeed than I could avail
myself of within narrow limits—I am indebted to Miss Hilda Paterson,
the guardian of manuscript remains and other relics of her ancestor,
preserved at Birkwood, in Reid’s 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.
Those who desire to study further the chapter in the history of European
philosophy in which Reid’s name is prominent, may be referred to
Cousin’s critical appreciation in his _Philosophie Écossaise_ (1857),
and to Professor Andrew Seth’s Balfour Lectures on ‘Scottish Philosophy’
(1885), in which the Scottish and German answers to Hume are compared.
The industry of the late Dr. M’Cosh has collected, in his _Scottish
Philosophy_ (1875), interesting particulars regarding our national
philosophers from Hutcheson to Hamilton.
A. C. F.
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, _21st February 1898_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD AND ANCESTRY: STRACHAN AND THE VALLEY OF THE DEE, 1710-1722 9
CHAPTER II
AT MARISCHAL COLLEGE, 1722-1737 18
CHAPTER III
NEW MACHAR AND DAVID HUME, 1737-1751 30
CHAPTER IV
OLD ABERDEEN: A REGENT IN KING’S COLLEGE, 1751-1764 43
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSAL SCEPTICISM VERSUS INSPIRED COMMON SENSE: AN ‘INQUIRY
INTO THE HUMAN MIND ON THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMON SENSE,’ 1764 56
CHAPTER VI
GLASGOW COLLEGE: THE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY, 1764-1780 72
CHAPTER VII
IN PHILOSOPHICAL RETIREMENT: AUTHORSHIP IN OLD AGE, 1780-1795 103
CHAPTER VIII
INSPIRED COMMON SENSE AND CAUSATION: ACTIVE OR MORAL POWER IN MAN 118
CHAPTER IX
THE END, 1796 126
CHAPTER X
RETROSPECTIVE AND CRITICAL 133
CHAPTER XI
REID IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON SENSE
PHILOSOPHY: REID IN FRANCE: REID AND HAMILTON: REID AND
SCOTO-HEGELIAN IDEALISM: ETHICAL OR THEISTIC FINAL FAITH 144
THOMAS REID
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD AND ANCESTRY: STRACHAN AND THE VALLEY OF THE DEE
1710-1722
Thomas Reid makes his first appearance as a boy in the manse of Strachan
in Kincardineshire, where he entered this world of sense on the 26th of
April 1710. His father, the Rev. Lewis Reid, was minister of the parish
for fifty-eight years, from 1704 until his death in 1762. The mother,
Margaret Gregory, was the eldest daughter, by his second marriage, of
David Gregory, laird of Kinairdy in Banffshire. An elder son, David,
born in 1705, and two daughters, Isobel and Jane, with Thomas, formed
the family at the manse when Thomas was a boy. David was twice married,
and died about 1780, without issue; the elder daughter, Isobel, died
unmarried, in her stepmother’s house at Aberdeen, in 1770; and the
younger, Jane, after a _mésalliance_, died without issue after the middle
of the century. Their mother, Margaret Gregory, died in 1732, when the
manse was still the home of Thomas. In 1735, Mr. Lewis Reid married his
second wife, Janet, daughter of Fraser of Phopachy in the county of
Inverness. Two sons and five daughters were the issue of the second
marriage. The eldest son died when a student at Marischal College, in
1758, and the younger, who studied medicine, died in London about ten
years later. Of the daughters, one died in infancy, and two others,
Elizabeth and Mary, died unmarried—the former in Edinburgh in 1772,
and the latter in Aberdeen in 1771. Of the other two, Margaret became
in 1763 the wife of the Rev. Alexander Leslie, minister of Fordoun in
Kincardineshire, and Grace married the Rev. John Rose, minister of Udny
in Aberdeenshire. Mrs. Rose died in 1793, and Mrs. Leslie in 1829, the
last survivor of the Reid family circle at Strachan.[1]
It is recorded of the father of this large family that he was respected
for piety, prudence, and benevolence, inheriting from his ancestors
simplicity of manners, and literary tastes which, without attracting the
notice of the world, engaged his leisure and dignified his rural life. Of
the two wives, the second survived her stepson, the philosopher.
The remote parish of Strachan is formed by the romantic valley
through which the Feugh finds its way from the Grampians to the Dee
at Banchory-Ternan—a breezy upland region, redolent of heather and
bog-myrtle, apt in its solitude to educate reflective individuality in
one so disposed. In those days the road to the south over the Cairn o’
Mount passed through Glen Dye, under the shadow of Clochnaben, a road
two centuries ago frequented by robbers, and invested with a halo of
romance by tales of marvellous adventures. But Glen Dye has an interest
of another kind. Centuries ago it was the home and property of the family
of Cant, from whom Andrew Cant, the noted Covenanting preacher, was
descended,[2] and with whom the more widely celebrated Immanuel Kant,
chief factor in the philosophical thought of modern Europe, claimed
connection. Strachan is thus associated in imagination with two of
the most illustrious thinkers of the eighteenth century. Thomas Reid
is in this way connected locally with his famous German philosophical
contemporary, as well as by parallels in their lives which appear in the
sequel, and by spiritual analogies in their philosophy. They are moreover
united by their common antagonism to the scepticism of David Hume, who
also through them is associated with the moorland valley of the Feugh,
making it suggest to fancy three memorable intellectual figures. In
Scotland David Hume and Thomas Reid are the two greatest names of their
century in philosophy.
Imagination is our only guide when we try to picture the boyhood of
Thomas Reid in the homely surroundings at Strachan. The one recorded fact
about him is, that in his tenth year the home education of the manse
was followed by two years spent in the neighbouring parish school of
Kincardine O’Neil. Thus far no signal signs of future eminence appeared.
He was, it seems, an unprecocious youth, remarked for modesty and patient
industry. The insight of the schoolmaster is said to have found in him
the rudiments of a man of ‘good and well-wearing parts.’ I wish that some
further record could be found of this sagacious prophet of his pupil’s
steady mental concentration, and I have not discovered why the boy was
placed in the Kincardine school. This dim picture is our only one in the
first twelve years of his life.
The lack of personal incident in those years is in a manner compensated
by the interest of an illustrious ancestry—Reids and Gregories. He
inherited mind through his father, but much more through his mother,
with whom he shared the unique celebrity of a family which in successive
generations shed lustre on the valley of the Dee—a memorable example of
inherited intellect.
* * * * *
In the end of the fourteenth century certain lands of Pitfodels,
between the bridge of Dee at Aberdeen and the Den of Cults, became the
property of William Reid, a kinsman of the former owner, Alexander
Moray, ‘lord of Culboyne.’ The lands remained in the Reid family
until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Marion, heiress
of Alexander, the last Reid of Pitfodels, married Thomas, the eldest
son of Gilbert Menzies, a burgess of Aberdeen, whose family was known
thereafter for three centuries as Menzies of Pitfodels. James Reid,
the first minister of Banchory-Ternan after the Reformation, was, it
seems, grandson of a younger brother of this Alexander of Pitfodels;
and Lewis Reid, the minister of Strachan, was in direct descent from
the minister of Banchory. It is told of James Reid that he was ‘a man
of notable head-piece for witte, and the most of his children were men
of extraordinary qualifications.’ His eldest son, Robert, noted for
good sense, succeeded him at Banchory. The second son, Thomas, was one
of the numerous Scots famed for learning, who migrated to the Continent
in the end of the fifteenth century and after. He was educated partly
at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he was made regent about 1602.
He was afterwards in residence at Oxford and abroad: he defended a
thesis ‘_De objecto Metaphysicæ_’ at Rostock in 1610. After his return
to Britain he became Greek and Latin Secretary to King James, some of
whose works he translated into Latin. Verses of his may be found in the
‘_Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum_.’ Alexander, the next brother, was physician
to Charles I., and author of works in physiology well considered at
that time. John, a brother of the minister of Banchory, translated
into ‘the Scottishe tunge’ Buchanan’s _History of Scotland_, and this
unpublished version is in the College of Glasgow. A second Robert,
grandson of the eldest of these four sons, became minister of Banchory
at the Restoration; he was a member of the first Episcopal Synod at
Aberdeen in the restored Establishment (the Covenanting Alexander Cant
was his immediate predecessor); he died in 1682. Thomas, the second son,
‘wadsetter of Eslie in Banchorie,’ was father of the Rev. Lewis Reid of
Strachan, by his wife, Jane, a niece of Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys; and
thus young Thomas Reid at Strachan was related to the family from which
the historian Bishop Burnet was descended. These Reids of Banchory rest
in the old burial-ground there, ‘not farre from the banke of the river
Dee, expecting the general resurrection, and the glorious appearing of
Jesus Christ there Redemier.’
But the Gregory connection of Thomas Reid through his mother is, as I
have said, more significant than the Reid succession. During the Civil
Wars of the seventeenth century, the minister of the rural parish of
Drumoak, on the north side of the Dee, between Banchory and Pitfodels,
was the Rev. John Gregory, son of an Aberdeen merchant, whose father was
a M’Gregor from Glenlyon. The Gregories of Deeside were thus descendants
of the clan Gregor of Glenlyon and Glenstrae, a circumstance referred
to by Sir Walter Scott in the Introduction to _Rob Roy_. The minister
of Drumoak married a lady named Anderson, one of a family reputed for
mathematical ability in successive generations. She inherited the genius
of her family, and transmitted it to her sons. Her husband at Drumoak
seems to have steered his cause skilfully in that troubled time, for he
bought the good estate of Kinairdy, part of the heritage of the lordly
house of Creighton Viscount Frendraught. Alexander, the eldest son of the
Rev. John Gregory of Kinairdy, was killed by one of the Creightons in a
fray in 1663, and the homicide was the occasion of a _cause célèbre_.
David, the second son, succeeded his murdered brother in the lands of
Kinairdy, and shared in the mathematical inheritance of the Gregories.
For some reason he sold Kinairdy and became an energetic merchant,
spending part of his life in Holland. This David of Kinairdy was twice
married, and father of twenty-nine children, which perhaps explains the
sale. The wife of the Rev. Lewis Reid of Strachan was a daughter of
the second marriage. Three of her brothers were eminent Professors of
Mathematics in British Universities—namely, David, first at Edinburgh,
and then at Oxford, the friend of Newton; James, the successor of David
in Edinburgh; and Charles, who professed mathematics at St. Andrews.
David’s son was Professor of History at Oxford from 1724 till 1767, and
Dean of Christ Church; and his cousin David succeeded to the chair of
Mathematics at St. Andrews. Two other Professors were sons of two of
‘Kinairdy’s’ daughters—namely, our Thomas Reid, and Alexander Innes,
who professed Philosophy in Marischal College. These all traced their
birth to the minister of Drumoak and his mathematical wife—through
their son David. But James, the third son of the Drumoak manse, was not
less illustrious in himself and in his descendants. He was Professor
of Mathematics, first at St. Andrews and then at Edinburgh, inventor
of the reflecting telescope, also Newton’s friend and correspondent,
who introduced the science of Newton into the Universities of Scotland.
It is of him that Whiston writes from Cambridge:—‘He had already
caused several of his students to keep acts upon several branches of
the Newtonian philosophy; while we at Cambridge, poor wretches, were
ignominiously studying the fictitious hypotheses of the Cartesian.’
His son James became in 1725 Professor of Medicine in King’s College,
Aberdeen, a considerable local figure. He had two sons: James, who
succeeded his father, and John, a regent of philosophy in his father’s
college, afterwards Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh, and remembered
as the author of _A Comparative View of Man and the Animal World_, and
_A Father’s Legacy_, books full of good sense. Dr. John Gregory’s son,
James, was Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh from 1776 till 1821, a
physician and a metaphysician—in the sequel, the intimate friend and
correspondent of Thomas Reid, and the patron of Thomas Brown. Of his
family, one son held the Chair of Chemistry in King’s College, and
afterwards in Edinburgh till his death in 1858; another, Donald, was an
eminent archæologist, author of the _History of the Western Highlands
and Islands_; a third died in high mathematical repute at Cambridge,
returning to the original bent of this extraordinary family, in which
the disposition to mathematics had latterly been overborne by medicine
and moral philosophy. Even this long list of names omits scientific
celebrities who were descended from the minister of Drumoak and his wife,
Margaret Anderson, more remotely still from the wild clan Gregor of
Glenlyon and Glenorchy.
But the life of romantic adventure did not descend to young Thomas
Reid at Strachan. A disposition to look at the world on its moral and
religious side, perhaps inherited from the Reids, with a strong bent
to mathematics and the scientific side of things, inherited from the
Gregories, along with his own patient, concentrated reflection, was the
inheritance of the boy ‘of good and well-wearing parts’ who left the
Kincardine school in 1722. The long life that followed presents none
of the outward incidents that readily touch the popular fancy; but to
those awake to the higher problems of human life it touches thought
and imagination in another fashion. It has been said that a human life
should resemble a well-ordered poem: the exordium should be simple and
should promise little. This condition is fulfilled in the life of Thomas
Reid, which, to the end, was modestly spent in learned retirement,
indifferent to vulgar fame. Its chief interest lies in the spectacle
of penetrating sagacity, independent and sincere, steadily devoted to
the invisible world of thought and belief, in quest of the ultimate
foundations and guarantees of human knowledge. It should attract those
who, in an age of sceptical criticism, seek to assure themselves of
the final trustworthiness of the experience into which, at birth, they
were admitted as strangers, ignorant of what the whole means, like the
agnostic in Pascal. Who has sent me into this life, I know not; what
the world around me is, I know not; nor what I am myself. I find myself
chained to one little planet, but without understanding why I am here
rather than there; and why this period of time was given me to live in
rather than any other in the unbeginning and endless duration. Life with
its memories and forecasts looks like a blind venture. The sum of my
knowledge seems to be that I must die; but what I am most ignorant of
is the meaning of death. One is drawn to Reid by an interest in final
questions like these, which the agnostic spirit is now forcing upon
us. It was the sceptical disintegration of human knowledge and belief
that was going on in his own time that led Reid, with the patience and
persistency revealed in his boyhood, to devote a long life to testing
in his own sincere fashion man’s intellectual and moral footing in that
world of sense which, all strange to it, he entered in the valley of the
Feugh.