NEW MACHAR AND DAVID HUME
1737-1751
Soon after Reid’s return to Marischal College from his English tour,
the young librarian was presented, by the professors of King’s College,
to the pastoral charge of New Machar, a parish some ten miles to the
north-west of Aberdeen. The fact that his kinsman, James Gregory, was
professor in King’s may perhaps explain this unwonted exercise of
patronage in favour of a graduate of the rival College.
The presentation, at any rate, raised a storm of opposition among the
parishioners. It was the occasion of one of those conflicts of Church
parties to which the law of patronage gave rise in Scotland in those
days. The incidents of Reid’s introduction to ecclesiastical office
form a characteristic picture. Rural prejudice was due in this case to
various circumstances. It was partly influenced by a sermon, preached
in the church of New Machar, on February 10, 1737, at the moderation of
the call, by the Rev. John Bisset, one of the ministers of Aberdeen. Mr.
Bisset had himself been minister of the parish ten years before. He was
now a noted preacher in the North, and one with whom express concurrence
of the congregation in an ecclesiastical settlement was a high article
of doctrine.[5] In his sermon he denounced aristocratic interference,
insinuated undue outside influence and personal favour, claimed a right
to a vote in the election of his minister for every Christian, the poor
man as much as the rich, and concluded with an appeal to his audience to
quit themselves like men, and to trust in God. The recent history of the
parish strengthened this appeal. The last presentation to New Machar was
inauspicious. In 1729 a ‘riding committee’ had introduced Mr. Bisset’s
successor. Soon after, the new minister was accused of ‘powdering his wig
on the Sabbath.’ Absolved by the Church courts, he was in 1736 deposed
for a graver offence. It was a time of ecclesiastical anarchy in New
Machar. The record of the parish is blank between the minute which tells
of the departure of Mr. Bisset in 1728, and that which registers ‘the
ordination of Mr. Thomas Reid’ in May 1737.
Reid was the innocent victim of the sermon and the scandal when he came
to be ordained on May 12, 1737. He had been violently attacked and
maltreated by persons in disguise, who, according to tradition, ducked
him in a horse-pond. It is also told that when he officiated for the
first time in the parish church, he was guarded in the pulpit by a drawn
sword.
For fifteen years New Machar manse was Reid’s home. Popular prejudice was
overcome by his mild, beneficent activity. Those who had been carried
into outrage by hasty judgment at the beginning, followed him on his
departure with blessings and tears. ‘We fought against Mr. Reid when
he came,’ they are reported as saying, ‘and we would have fought for
him when he went away.’ His marriage, in August 1740, to his cousin
Elizabeth, a daughter of his London uncle, Dr. George Reid, promoted
this change. The gracious manner and constant goodness of this companion
of his life for more than fifty years was long remembered in the
Aberdeenshire parish. Six daughters and three sons were the issue of the
marriage. Five daughters were born at New Machar, and one died there.
Reid’s family bible at Birkwood contains the following interesting record
in his handwriting:—
‘Mr. Thomas Reid was born at Strachan, April 26, 1710; married
to Elizabeth Reid, August 12, 1740. The said Elizabeth was
born August 3, 1724. Their children:—(1) Jean, born July 21,
1741, died February 27, 1772, buried in College Churchyard,
Glasgow; (2) Margaret, born October 20, 1742, died 1772,
buried as above; (3) Martha, born August 22, 1744, married Dr.
Patrick Carmichael; (4) Elizabeth, born February 21, 1746, died
of smallpox in August 1746, buried in the Churchyard of New
Machar; (5) Anna, born July 10, 1751, died of chin-cough May
21, 1753, buried in the Isle of Old Machar; (6) George, born
February 11, 1755, died at St. John’s, Newfoundland, February
1780; (7) Lewis, born December 13, 1756, died of teething July
19, 1758, buried in the Isle of Old Machar; (8) David, born
February 26, 1762, died at Edinburgh August 30, 1782; (9)
Elizabeth, born May 8, 1766, died June 1, 1767, of smallpox by
inoculation, buried in the College Churchyard, Glasgow.’
The story of the fifteen years at New Machar, as we have it, is almost
empty of incidents, a dim picture. The scene does not warmly touch the
imagination. Undulating hills of moderate size, chill and tame; land
monotonously fertile, with scanty timber; yet pleasant prospects in the
distance of the valley of the Don, with Benachie and remoter Grampians in
the background; a population mostly agricultural; two or three country
mansions; the highroad from Aberdeen to Banff traversing the parish. New
Machar was wanting, on the whole, in the breezy highland charm of the
early home at Strachan. The social life was simple but intellectually
stagnant. Among the infrequent visitors at the manse I find incidental
mention in Reid’s letters of one. He tells that he made the acquaintance
of the well-known Jacobite, Mr. Hepburn of Keith, ‘by his lodging a night
in my house at New Machar,’ when he was in the Prince’s army, on his
way to Culloden; perhaps when he was in Lord George Murray’s division,
which retreated through Aberdeenshire in February 1746, or in one of
the detachments which were in motion around New Machar in the preceding
December.
The Thomas Reid who is revealed to us in his books does not promise
pulpit eloquence likely to interest this rustic population. Like Bishop
Butler when he was in his remote rectory at Stanhope a few years
before, he was pondering the chief intellectual work of his life in
exile from intellectual society. None of Reid’s sermons are found among
his manuscripts. Indeed, it appears that his characteristic modesty
and diffidence, combined, it is said, with some neglect of literary
culture in his early education, induced him at first to read to his
rustic audience the sermons of eminent Anglican preachers, instead of
compositions of his own—thus adopting a practice afterwards recommended
by Paley, by which, with fit selection, many audiences might benefit
in this age of social pressure. ‘As to preaching,’ says Paley, ‘if
your situation requires a sermon every Sunday, make one and find
five.’ Tillotson and the Nonconformist Evans are mentioned as Reid’s
favourites, and something is said about Samuel Clarke. The luminous good
sense of Tillotson, and the reverential temper of Evans, and the lucid
reasoning of Clarke, would naturally attract Reid. But emotion as well
as moral ideal was not wanting in his religious life. It is said that
in a Communion Service tears fell from his eyes when he enlarged on the
divine beauty of the character of Jesus. The following expression of
religious feeling during an illness of his young wife appears among his
manuscripts, dated March 30, 1746:—
‘O God, I desire humbly to supplicate Thy Divine Majesty in
behalf of my distressed wife, who is by Thy hand brought very
low, and in imminent danger of death, if Thou, who alone doest
wonders, do not in mercy interpose Thy almighty arm, and bring
her back from the gate of death. I deserve justly, O Lord,
that Thou shouldst deprive me of the greatest comfort of my
life, because I have not been so thankful to Thee as I ought
for giving me such a kind and affectionate wife. I have forgot
Thy goodness in bringing us happily together by an unforeseen
and undesigned train of events, and blessing us with so much
love and harmony of affection, and so many of the comforts and
conveniences of life. I have not been so careful as I ought
to have been to stir her up to piety and Christian virtues.
I have not taken that pains with my children and servants
and relatives as I ought. Alas! I have been too negligent of
my pastoral duty and my private devotions, too much given to
the pleasures and satisfactions of this world, and too little
influenced by the promises and the hope of a future state. I
have employed my studies, reading, and conversation rather to
please myself than to edify myself and others. I have sinned
greatly in neglecting many opportunities of making private
applications to my flock and family in the affairs of their
souls, and in using too slight preparation for my public
exercises. I have thrown away too much of my time in sloth and
sleep, and have not done so much for the relief of the poor and
destitute as I might have done. The means that Providence has
afforded me of correcting my evil inclinations I have abused to
pamper and feed them in various instances. For these and many
other sins which have escaped my memory Thou mightst justly
inflict so great a chastisement on me, as to make my children
motherless and deprive me of my dear wife. O Lord, accept of
my humble and penitent confession of these my offences, which
I desire to acknowledge with shame and sorrow, and am resolved
by Thy grace to amend. If Thou art pleased to hearken to the
voice of my supplications, and grant my request on behalf of my
dear wife in restoring her to health, I do promise and covenant
through grace to turn from these backslidings, to express my
thankfulness by a vigorous discharge of my duty as a Christian,
a minister, and master of a family, and by an alms of ten
pounds sterling to the poor in meat and money. Lord, pardon
if there is anything in this presumptuous, or unbecoming a
humble penitent sinner; and, Lord, accept of what is sincerely
designed as a new bond upon my soul to my duty, through Jesus
Christ, my Lord and Saviour.’
This fervid expression of devotion reveals an intensity of purpose which
worked beneath the outwardly placid and discreet life. Mrs. Reid survived
this critical illness for nearly half a century.
Much of Reid’s time at New Machar, according to his brother-in-law
Mr. Rose, was spent in meditative thought, with an attention to the
activities of his own mind of which few men are capable. Traditions of
solitary walks immersed in study were long in circulation. He found
his chief recreation, we are told, in the manse garden or in botanical
observations. His society attracted his neighbours. With Sir Archibald
Grant of Monymusk he maintained a lifelong intimacy. He never forgot New
Machar, and long after, in times of distress, anonymous gifts were traced
to his thoughtful but modest beneficence.
Three years before Reid left New Machar, when he was in his thirty-eighth
year, he made his first appearance in print, in a short paper contributed
to the Royal Society, which appeared in their _Transactions_ in October
1748. It is called ‘An Essay on Quantity.’ It was occasioned by a book
published more than twenty years before, the _Inquiry into the Original
of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue_, by Francis Hutcheson, afterwards the
celebrated Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow. In this tract simple
and compound ratios are applied, in forms of mathematical reasoning,
to solve problems of moral philosophy. It illustrates in some degree
the bent of Reid’s thoughts at this time, and his inherited interest in
mathematical reasonings. But it also shows bent of thought in another
direction, and recognition of other scientific methods than mathematical
demonstration, which had been favoured as of universal application by
philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza. Reid argued, in the spirit of
his master Turnbull, that genuine ethical inquiry is concerned with a
class of facts which are under a higher category, and refuse to submit to
geometrical measurement.
It is a curious circumstance in the evolution of philosophy in Scotland
that Reid’s first publication should thus be adverse criticism of
Hutcheson, the father of Modern Philosophy in Scotland. It is also
curious that this juvenile performance presents another of the parallels
between Reid and Kant. For it happened that in the preceding year Kant
had made his first appearance, on a question concerned with mathematics,
and, like Reid’s, in an argument against conclusions maintained by
Leibnitz.
But this mathematical _brochure_ imperfectly represents the ‘intense
study’ at New Machar. For an event happened soon after Reid’s settlement
there which determined the direction of his thoughts for the remainder of
his life. In January 1739, a book made an almost unnoticed appearance in
London, which in the end became the chief factor in shaping the course of
European thought. Its author was David Hume, then a young man, unknown
to fame, not thirty years of age, the younger son of a Berwickshire
laird. Hume was younger than Reid by one year: both were born on the
26th of April. His name is popularly connected with the _History of
England_; but this _Treatise of Human Nature_, which somehow found its
way into the manse of New Machar, represents his most significant work.
It has contributed perhaps as much as any single book to the subsequent
progress of philosophy in Europe. Hume indeed penetrates into regions
which the ordinary reader fails to connect with everyday interests of
life, or with the hopes and fears of human beings. Accordingly, as he
tells, the _Treatise_ ‘fell dead-born from the press, without attaining
such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.’ In a
letter to his friend Henry Home, afterwards Lord Kames, written soon
after this explosive mixture had been applied, its author announces that
the issue was ‘but indifferent, if I may judge by the sale of the book,
and if I may believe my bookseller. I am now out of humour with myself;
but doubt not in a little time to be out of humour with the world, like
other unsuccessful authors. After all, I am sensible of my folly in
entertaining any discontent, much more despair, on this account, since
I could not expect any better from such abstract reasoning.’ This book,
which professes to explain ‘human nature’ as a fact in the universe,
conducts to a final paralysis of human intelligence in universal doubt.
This threatened paralysis awoke Reid into his characteristic intellectual
life. He was among the first in Europe to see the far-reaching meaning of
Hume’s account of man’s condition. He found in it the deep-lying seeds
of modern agnosticism. Its rashness was confessed by its author. ‘I
acknowledge a very great mistake in conduct in publishing my _Treatise
of Human Nature_, a book which pretended to innovate in all the sublimest
parts of philosophy, and which I composed before I was five-and-twenty.
But what success the same doctrines better illustrated and expressed
may meet with _adhuc sub judice lis est_. I wish I had always confined
myself to the more easy parts of erudition.’ Accordingly, about ten
years after, Hume presented his ‘sceptical doubts’ in a milder form, and
accompanied by a ‘sceptical solution’ of them, in an _Inquiry Concerning
Human Understanding_; but it was Hume in the original _Treatise_, not as
recast in the _Inquiry_, that moved Reid. Kant, like Reid, was awakened
from what he calls his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by David Hume; but it was
the _Inquiry_, not the _Treatise_, of which last he appears ignorant,
that roused Kant. Reid grappled with the more open and all-pervading
uncertainties of the earlier work.
Let us look into the book which appalled the young minister of New Machar
by the spectre of a meaningless universe and illusory human nature.
Its author seemed to be indulging in ‘a peculiar strain of humour when
he set out in his introduction by promising with a grave face no less
than a complete system of the sciences upon a foundation entirely new,
namely, human nature, while the intention of the whole work is to show
that there is neither human nature nor science in the world. He surely
believed, against his principles, that he should be read, and that he
should retain his personal identity till he reaped the reputation justly
due to his metaphysical acumen.’ Reid found him taking for granted as his
fundamental maxim, that nothing can be admitted as true which cannot be
logically deduced from impressions of sense. Hume found the impressions
of sense to be transitory, and distinguished in their succession by
degrees of intensity,—sensations when in their highest intensity,
memories when in an abated degree, and mere fancies when the intensity
is at a minimum. His maxim forbade recognition of more reality in the
universe than a momentary reality of isolated perceptions, in their
different degrees of intensity, but without any reasonable retrospective
memory, or any reasonable expectation with its hopes or fears. What
we call ‘existence’ was resolved into an unintelligible chaos of felt
impressions—a purposeless procession, in which the percipient loses his
very selfhood and all besides. The Past, the Distant, the Future, are
all illusions. ‘Things’ and ‘persons’ are only unconnected transitory
feelings, without any permanent person to feel them. The word ‘identity’
is meaningless. A person cannot be more than a momentary idea. ‘I never
catch _self_ except in the form of a passing feeling.’ Present feeling
alone exists.
It is impossible without contradiction to express a philosophy which
destroys intelligible expression; virtually dismissing as absurdities
all personal pronouns, all substantive nouns, and all verbs; leaving
abstract adjectives as the only parts of speech;—and, as such adjectives
are really unintelligible, leaving us the speechless and motionless
victims of philosophical suicide. When I start with the preliminary maxim
of Hume, I literally lose ‘myself’ at last in a radically untrustworthy
universe, or I find myself suspended over a bottomless abyss. Here are
the last words of this intellectual suicide at the end of his destructive
analysis:—
‘I am affrighted and confounded with the forlorn solitude in
which I am placed by my philosophy. When we trace up the human
understanding to its first principles, we find it to lead us
into such sentiments as seem to turn into ridicule all our
past pains and industry, and to discourage us from all future
inquiries. Nothing is more curiously inquired after by the
mind of man than the _causes_ of phenomena; nor are we content
with knowing the immediate causes, but push on our inquiries
till we arrive at the original and ultimate principle. This
is our aim in all our studies and reflections. And now we
must be disappointed when we learn that this tie lies merely
in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination which is
acquired by custom. Such a discovery not only cuts off all
hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our
very wishes; since it appears that when we desire to know the
ultimate and operating principle or something which resides
in the external object, we only contradict ourselves, or talk
without a meaning.... The intense view of these manifold
contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought
upon me and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all
belief and reasoning, and can look at no opinion even as more
probable or likely than another. All who believe anything, on
any subject, with certainty, must be fools.’
This is the issue of the _Treatise of Human Nature_ when the logical
understanding is finally resolved into transitory and isolated feelings,
without permitted final postulates of reason, in the form of faith or in
any other form, to connect and interpret them.
It was this issue that Reid took seriously. He set himself, at first for
his own satisfaction only, to consider the ground he had for trusting
experience, when Hume reported that experience dissolved into sensational
atoms. Accordingly he spent much of his time at New Machar in reflecting
first of all on his perceptions through the senses. He began with these,
because it seemed that even as the foundations of abstract mathematics
lie in the mathematical axioms and definitions, so the foundations of
all concrete reasoning are to be found in the rational constitution of
perception through the five senses. ‘In the tree of human knowledge,
perception is the root, common understanding is the trunk, and the
sciences are the branches.’ Here is his own account of his state of mind
when he was engaged in these New Machar wrestlings:—
‘If my mind is indeed what the _Treatise of Human Nature_ makes
it, I find that I have been only in an enchanted castle, when
I seemed to be living in a well-ordered universe. I have been
imposed upon by spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly
to think how I have been deluded. I am ashamed of my frame,
and can hardly forbear expostulating with my destiny. I see
myself, and the whole frame of Nature, shrink into fleeting
ideas, which, like Epicurus’s atoms, dance about in emptiness.
Descartes no sooner began to dig in this mine than scepticism
was ready to break in upon him. He did what he could to keep
it out. Malebranche and Locke, who dug deeper, found the
difficulty of keeping out the enemy still to increase; but they
laboured honestly in the design. Then Berkeley, who carried on
the work, despairing of securing all, bethought himself of an
expedient. By giving up the material world, which he thought
might be spared without loss, and even with advantage, he hoped
by an impregnable position to secure the world of spirits.
But, alas! the _Treatise of Human Nature_ wantonly sapped the
foundation of this partition, and drowned all in one universal
deluge.’
Nearly forty years after he left New Machar, Reid says[6] that in early
life he ‘believed the whole of Berkeley’s system’—till Hume opened his
eyes to ‘consequences’ that follow from the philosophy of Descartes
and his successors, ‘which gave me more uneasiness than the want of a
material world. So it came into my mind more than forty years ago’ to
question its foundation. Hume accordingly made Reid revise critically the
philosophy in which he had been educated by George Turnbull. The issue
appeared after he left New Machar.
Reid was now to be placed in a condition more favourable to intense and
persistent thought. On November 22, 1751, he was admitted to King’s
College, Aberdeen, as one of its regent masters, in succession to Mr.
Alexander Rait. The patronage was vested in the College, and the minute
which records his election suggests the reputation which the rural pastor
had now secured among the cultured few, notwithstanding his modest and
retired life.
It was not without reluctance that Reid left New Machar. Ramsay of
Ochtertyre, who knew him well, tells that when the deputation from King’s
College came to invite him to become a regent, ‘he at first declined,
explaining that he desired to live in retirement till he should complete
some literary projects which engaged him. Mrs. Reid, however, having
discovered the errand of the visitors, urged her husband to accept the
offer, being less fond of retirement, and having no objection to a
better income and better society. When her learned guests repeated their
proposal after dinner, she seconded them with such cogent arguments that
Mr. Reid was beat out of all his objections.’—_Scotland and Scotsmen._