GLASGOW COLLEGE: THE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
1764-1780
In November 1764 we find Reid, now almost fifty-five years of age, in
the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the Old College in the High Street of
Glasgow. The Reid family lived then, and for two years after, not in the
Professors’ Court within the College, but a quarter of a mile away, in an
old-fashioned street called the Drygate.[12] The manuscript in the family
bible records that Reid was admitted to the Glasgow professorship on the
12th of June. He carried with him from the quaint manse in Aberdeen to
his new home in the Drygate, his wife, three daughters, all above twenty
years of age, and two boys; they left three infant children buried in
Aberdeenshire. The Glasgow Chair supplied an income, including fees,
somewhat in advance of the Aberdeen regency; and its duties required
concentrated study of intellectual and moral agency in man, instead of
the dispersion over a wide range of the phenomena and laws of matter
and mind which was necessary in King’s College. Yet it was ‘not without
reluctance,’ we are told, that he consented to tear himself from a spot
where he had so long been fastening his roots; and much as he loved the
society in which he passed the remainder of his days, the advantages of
the change hardly compensated for the sacrifice of feeling caused by the
break in his early habits and associations.
Glasgow in 1898 is even more changed from Glasgow in 1764 than Aberdeen
when Reid lived in it from Aberdeen as it is now. To-day Glasgow is the
second city in Britain, with nearly a million of people, the industrial
metropolis of the north, with all the stir of industrial life. It was
then a provincial town with hardly thirty thousand inhabitants, almost
inaccessible from the sea, surrounded by the cornfields and hedgerows and
orchards of Lanarkshire, its few streets converging on the Cathedral and
the College with their historic associations. ‘Glasgow,’ according to
_Humphrey Clinker_, ‘is the pride of Scotland. It is one of the prettiest
towns in Europe.’ Pennant describes it as ‘the best built of any
second-rate city I ever saw. The view from the Cross has an air of vast
magnificence.’ In 1764 it was only laying the foundations of its present
commercial fame. The tobacco trade with the American plantations, and
the sugar trade with the West Indies, had hardly altered its character
as an ancient Church and University town. ‘Jupiter Carlyle,’ referring
to Glasgow before the middle of last century, speaks of ‘a few families
of ancient citizens who pretended to be gentlemen; and a few others,
recently settled, who had obtained wealth and consideration in trade.
The rest were shopkeepers and mechanics, who occupied large warerooms to
furnish cargoes to Virginia. It was then usual for the sons of merchants
to attend the College for one or two years, and a few of them completed
their academical education.’
The College in the High Street, erected early in the seventeenth century,
seemed to Samuel Johnson in 1773 ‘without a sufficient share in the
magnificence of the place.’ Nevertheless he found ‘learning an object
of wide importance, and the habit of application much more general than
in the neighbouring University of Edinburgh.’ The two College squares,
connected with memories of many generations in the west of Scotland, have
been likened to those of Lincoln College in Oxford. About the middle
of last century from three to four hundred students gathered in those
curious old courts, almost all living in apartments in the town, a few
boarded in the houses of professors. They wore scarlet gowns, ‘most of
which,’ when Wesley visited Glasgow, ‘were very dirty, some very ragged,
and all of very coarse cloth.’ The houses of the professors formed a
square on the north side of the College, built early in the eighteenth
century. Eastward were the College gardens and the park, through which
the classic Molendinar found its way to the Clyde. It was a quaint and
curious old-world life that was then lived in the College, and in the
High Street, passing from the College to the Cathedral at one end and
from the College to the Cross at the other.
In the half-century before Reid was admitted to his Glasgow Chair, the
University had professors of more than Scottish reputation. Glasgow is
in fact associated with almost all the names that adorn the literature
of Philosophy in Scotland in the last century and in this. Adam Smith
was Reid’s immediate predecessor in the Chair of Morals. His _Theory
of Moral Sentiments_ had been for five years before the world when
he resigned his professorship to give to literature what Sir James
Mackintosh describes as ‘perhaps the only book which produced an
immediate, general, and irrevocable change in some of the most important
parts of the legislation of all civilised states’—fit to be ranked with
the classic works of Grotius, Locke, and Montesquieu—its author ‘the
first economical philosopher, and perhaps the most eloquent theoretical
moralist, of modern times.’ Smith’s predecessor was Francis Hutcheson,
author of that _Inquiry into our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue_ which gave
rise to Reid’s New Machar essay on ‘Quantity’ in 1748, the reputed father
of modern philosophy in Scotland;—and in the second quarter of last
century the most potent agent and pioneer of the liberal culture and
literary taste which made the intellectual moderation of the eighteenth
century in Scotland so remarkable a contrast to the less tolerant
spiritual fervour of the seventeenth. This influence was continued by
his friend and biographer, William Leechman, the Principal of Glasgow
College in 1764, still remembered as one of the philosophical theologians
of the Church of Scotland. ‘It was owing to Hutcheson and Leechman,’
says Carlyle, ‘that a new school was formed in the western provinces of
Scotland, where the clergy till that period were narrow and bigoted,
and had never ventured to range their minds beyond the bounds of strict
orthodoxy. For though neither of these professors taught any heresy,
yet they opened and enlarged the minds of the students, which soon gave
them a turn for inquiry; the result of which was candour and liberality
of sentiment. From experience this freedom of thought was not found so
dangerous as might at first be apprehended; for though the more daring
youth at first made excursions into the unbounded regions of metaphysical
perplexity, yet all the more judicious soon returned to the lower sphere
of long-established truths, which they found not only more subservient to
the good order of society, but necessary to fix their own minds in some
degree of stability.’ Gershom Carmichael, too, is not to be forgotten.
He was Hutcheson’s predecessor, with an intellectual and religious
influence not inconsiderable in the opening years of last century, author
of a Latin manual of logic which appeared in 1720, and a _Synopsis
Theologiæ Naturalis_, published shortly before his death in 1729, but
best known perhaps as editor of Puffendorff.
Reid thus entered Glasgow College when it was the centre of the reviving
philosophical and literary activity of Scotland in the modern spirit.
He met colleagues and fellow-citizens who were in sympathy with his own
sincere and independent scientific temper. The aged Simpson, restorer of
ancient geometry, who had lately retired from the mathematical chair,
which he had adorned for half a century, was a congenial mathematician of
European fame. Joseph Black, the most celebrated British chemist of his
generation, was illustrating his own discoveries in his College lectures,
and drawing the attention of the world to the phenomena of latent heat.
The vigour and acuteness of Millar were educating a new generation
in jurisprudence and statesmanship. Moore, the author of _Zeluco_,
an eminent Glasgow physician, was adding to its literary name. The
grandfather, and afterwards the father, of Sir William Hamilton held in
succession the Chair of Anatomy, both colleagues of Reid, who might have
been seen in the College Courts when his future editor and commentator
was there in his infancy.
Reid’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Moral Philosophy, delivered
on the 10th of October 1764, is among his unpublished manuscripts at
Birkwood. The opening sentences (deleted as irrelevant in after years)
are not without interest in the characteristic modesty and candour of the
reference to Adam Smith, his predecessor:—
‘Before entering upon the subject of my prelections, there
are some things which I think proper to lay before you, and
to which I beg your attention. I doubt not that you are
all sensible of the loss which the University, and you in
particular, sustain by the resignation of the learned and
ingenious gentleman who last filled this chair. Those who
knew him most and had most access to attend his prelections,
and especially those who most profited by them, will be most
sensible of their loss. I had not the happiness of his personal
acquaintance, for want of opportunity; though I wished for it,
and now wish for it far more than ever. But I could not be a
stranger to his fame and reputation, nor to the respect with
which his lectures from this chair were heard by a very crowded
audience. I am much a stranger to his system, unless so far as
he hath published it to the world. But a man of so great genius
and penetration must have struck new light to the subjects
which he treated, as well as have handled them in an excellent
and instructive manner. I shall be much obliged to any of
you, gentlemen, or to any others, who can furnish me with
notes of his prelections, whether in morals, jurisprudence,
politics, or rhetorick. I shall always be desirous to borrow
light from every quarter, and to adopt what appears to me sound
and solid in every system, and ready to change my opinions
upon conviction, or to change my method and materials where I
can do it to advantage. I desire to live no longer than this
candour and ingenuity, this openness of mind to education and
information, live with me.’
An apology follows for the imperfect preparation of a first course,
inadequately provided for by the miscellaneous lectures in physics and
metaphysics at Aberdeen. The past performance of Adam Smith, and the
high expectation associated with the new professor, the author of the
_Inquiry_, were doubtless fresh in the minds of the crowded audience
that met on that October morning in the faint light of the Old College
class-room. The audience, the new professor, and his predecessor, have
all now receded into the dim distance, and are seen under the cold
light of history. The lectures delivered in the years that followed
are preserved at Birkwood, in Reid’s valley of the Dee—lectures on
Pneumatology, Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Political Philosophy—for the
most part embodied in substance in the published _Essays_ of his old age.
Reid’s placid temperament and restrained imagination suggest sober
unadorned statement, and cautious inference founded on fact, not fervid
eloquence, as the character of his prelections. He was more likely slowly
to influence opinion by his books than to startle a youthful audience by
spoken words. This conjecture is confirmed by the account of Reid in the
Glasgow class-room given by Dugald Stewart, who was among his students
in 1772-73. ‘In his elocution and mode of instruction,’ Stewart says,
‘there was nothing peculiarly attractive. He seldom if ever indulged
in the warmth of extempore discourse; nor was his manner of reading
calculated to increase the effect of what he had committed to writing.
Such, however, was the simplicity and perspicuity of his style, such the
gravity and authority of his character, and such the general interest of
his young hearers in the doctrines which he taught, that by the numerous
audiences to which his instructions were addressed he was heard uniformly
with the most silent and respectful attention.’ And this delivery of deep
and patient thought, regarding the duties and relations of man, and the
foundation of his beliefs, was continued in the class-room for sixteen
years.
As we might expect from their mental affinities, Reid greatly esteemed
the works of Bishop Butler. Among the manuscripts at Birkwood is an
abstract of the _Analogy_; and Butler’s ethical writings were recommended
to his students as the best in the literature of moral philosophy, with
regret to see them superseded in England by the productions of inferior
moralists. In tone and method of inquiry Reid is the Butler of Scotland.
And Butler, too, is the Reid of England in his trustful appeals to what
Reid would call the common sense. When Butler asks himself whether we
may not be deceived in our natural sense of our continuous personal
identity, he replies, that ‘this question may be asked at the end of
any demonstration; because it is a question concerning the truth of
perception by memory. And he who can doubt whether perception by memory
can in this case be depended on, may doubt also whether perception, by
reasoning, or indeed whether any intuitive perception, can. Here then we
can go no further. For it is ridiculous to attempt to _prove_ the truth
of those perceptions, whose truth we can no otherwise prove than by other
perceptions which there is just the same ground to suspect; or to attempt
to prove the truth of our faculties, which can no otherwise be proved
than by these very suspected faculties themselves.’ This is the substance
of the argument that rests on the data of the sense or reason with which
human nature is inspired.
Reid’s homely letters to his Aberdeen friends, Andrew and David Skene,
give some interesting pictures of the details of the family’s life, in
the years which immediately followed the settlement in Glasgow. The
extracts that follow may help the reader to form the pictures.
In a letter to Dr. Andrew Skene, dated November 15, 1764, we see the
Moral Philosophy class-room on a winter morning a hundred and thirty
years ago, and life in the Drygate home a few weeks after the family
entered it:—
‘I must launch forth in the morning, so as to be at the College
(which is a walk of eight minutes) half an hour after seven,
when I speak for an hour without interruption to an audience
of about a hundred. At eleven I examine for an hour upon my
morning prelection; but my audience is a little more than a
third part of what it was in the morning. In a week or two I
must, for three days in the week, have a second prelection at
twelve, upon a different subject, where my audience will be
made up of those who hear me in the morning but do not attend
at eleven. My hearers commonly attend my class two years at
least. They pay fees for the first two years, and then they
are _cives_ of the class, and may attend gratis as many years
as they please. Many attend the moral philosophy class four
or five years; so that I have many preachers and students
of divinity and law of considerable standing, before whom I
stand in awe to speak without more preparation than I have
leisure for. I have a great inclination to attend some of the
professors here, several of whom are very eminent in their way;
but I cannot find leisure. Much time is consumed in our college
meetings about business, of which we have commonly four or five
in the week. We have a Literary Society once a week, consisting
of the Masters and two or three more; where each of the members
has a discourse once in the session.... Near a third part of
our students are Irish. Thirty came over lately in one ship,
besides three that went to Edinburgh. We have a good many
English, and some foreigners. Many of the Irish, as well as
Scotch, are poor, and come up late to save money; so that we
are not yet fully convened, although I have been teaching ever
since the 10th of October. Those who pretend to know, say that
the number of students this year, when fully convened, will
amount to 300.... By this time I am sure you have enough of
the College; for you know as much as I can tell you of the
fine houses of the Masters, of the Astronomical Observatory,
of Robin Foulis’ collection of pictures and painting college,
and of the foundry for types and printing-house. Therefore
I will carry you home to my own house, which lyes among the
middle of the weavers, like the back-wynd in Aberdeen. You
go through a long, dark, abominably nasty entry, which leads
you into a clean little close. You walk upstairs to a neat
little dining-room, and find as many other little rooms as
just accommodate my family; so scantily that my apartment is
a closet of six feet by eight or nine off the dining-room. To
balance these little inconveniences, the house is new and free
of buggs; it has the best air and finest prospect in Glasgow;
the privilege of a large garden, very airy, to walk in, which
is not so nicely kept, but one may use freedom with it. A five
minutes’ walk leads us up a rocky precipice into a large park,
partly planted with firs, and partly open, which overlooks
the town and all the country round, and gives a view of the
windings of the Clyde for a great way. The ancient Cathedral
stands at the foot of the rock, half of its height below you,
and half above you; and indeed it is a very magnificent pile.
When we came here, the street we live in (which is called the
Drygate) was infested with the small-pox, which were very
mortal. Two families in our neighbourhood lost all their
children, being three each. Little David was seized with the
infection, and had a very great eruption both on his face and
over his whole body, which you will believe would discompose
his mother.... Although my salary here be the same as Aberdeen,
yet if the class does not fall off, nor my health, so as to
disable me from teaching, I believe I shall be able to live as
easily as at Aberdeen, notwithstanding the differences in the
expense of living at the two places. I have touched about £70
of fees, and may possibly make out the £100 this session....
The common people here have a gloom in their countenance, which
I am at a loss whether to ascribe to their religion or to the
air and climate. There is certainly more of religion among the
common people in this town than in Aberdeen; and although it
has a gloomy enthusiastical cast, yet I think it makes them
tame and sober. I have not heard either of a house or of a head
broke, or of a pocket picked, or of any flagrant crime, since
I came here. I have not heard any swearing in the streets, nor
seen a man drunk (excepting, _inter nos_, one Prof—r) since
I came here.... If this scroll tire you, impute it to this,
that to-morrow is to be employed in choosing a Rector, and I
can sleep till ten o’clock, which I shall not do again for six
weeks.’
After the first winter, and when he had gained some experience of
Glasgow, he writes to Dr. David Skene, on 13th July 1765:—
‘I have a strong inclination to attend the chymical lecture
the next winter; but am afraid I shall not have time. I have
had but very imperfect hints of Dr. Black’s theory of fire....
Chemistry seems to be the only branch of philosophy that can be
said to be in a progressive state here, although other branches
are neither ill taught nor ill studied. I never considered
Dolland’s telescopes till I came here. I think they open a
new field in optics which may greatly enrich that part of
philosophy.... I find a variety of things here to amuse me in
the literary world, and want nothing so much as my old friends,
whose place I cannot expect at my time of life to supply. I
think the common people here and in the neighbourhood greatly
inferior to the common people with you. They are Bœotian
in their understandings, fanatical in their religion, and
clownish in their dress and manners. The clergy encourage this
fanaticism too much, and find it the only way to popularity. I
often hear a gospel here which you know nothing about; for you
neither hear it from the pulpit nor will you find it in the
Bible. What is your Philosophical Society doing? Still battling
about D. Hume? or have you time to look in?... I believe you
do not like to be charged with compliments, otherwise I would
desire of you to remember me respectfully to Sir Archibald
Grant, Sir Arthur and Lady Forbes, and others of my country
acquaintances, when you have occasion to see them.’
In another letter to Dr. David, written about Christmas in his second
winter, we find that—
‘Mr. Watt has made two small improvements in the
steam-engine.[13] [These are minutely described.] ... I have
attended Dr. Black’s lectures. His doctrine of latent heat is
the only thing I have yet heard that is altogether new. And
indeed I look upon it as a very great discovery.... I have
not met with any botanists here. Our College is considerably
more crowded than it was last session. My class indeed is much
the same as last year, but all the rest are better. I believe
the number of our students of one kind or another may be
between four and five hundred. But the College at Edinburgh is
increased this year much more than we are. The Moral Philosophy
class there is more than double ours. The Professor, Ferguson,
is indeed, as far as I can judge, a man of a noble spirit, of
very elegant manners, and has an uncommon flow of eloquence. I
hear he is about to publish, I don’t know under what title, a
natural history of man; exhibiting a view of him in the savage
state, and in the several successive states of pasturage,
agriculture, and commerce. Our Society [Senate] is not so
harmonious as I wish. Schemes of interest, pushed by some and
opposed by others, are like to divide us into parties, and
perhaps engage us in law suits. Mrs. Reid, Pegie, and I, have
all had a severe cold and cough. I have been keeping the house
these two days in order to get the better of it.’
On ‘December 30th, 1765,’ a less sanguine view appears, in a letter to
Andrew Skene:—
‘I assure you I can rarely find an hour which I am at liberty
to dispose of as I please. The most disagreeable thing in
the teaching part is to have a great number of stupid Irish
teagues, who attend classes for two or three years to qualify
them for teaching schools or being dissenting teachers. I
preach to them as St. Francis did to the fishes. I don’t know
what pleasure he had in his audience; but I should have none
in mine, if there were not in it a mixture of reasonable
creatures. I confess I think there is a smaller proportion of
these in my class this year than there was the last. I have
long been of the opinion that, in a right constituted College,
there ought to be two professors for each class—one for the
dunces, and another for those who have parts. The province of
the former would not be the most agreeable, but perhaps it
would require the greatest talents, and therefore ought to
be accounted the post of honour. There is no part of my time
more disagreeably spent than that which is spent in college
meetings; and I should have been attending one at this moment
if a bad cold I have got had not furnished me with an excuse.
These meetings are become more disagreeable by an evil spirit
of party that seems to put us in a ferment, and I am afraid
will produce bad consequences. The temper of our northern
Colonies makes mercantile people here look very grave. It is
said that the effects in these colonies belonging to this town
amount to above £400,000.[14] The mercantile people are for
suspending the Stamp-act, and redressing the grievances of the
colonists.... In what light the House of Commons will view
this matter I don’t know, but it seems to me one of the most
important matters that have come before them. I wish often an
evening with you, such as we have enjoyed in the days of former
times, to settle the important affairs of Church and State, of
Colleges and Corporations. I have found this the best expedient
to think of them without melancholy and chagrin. And I think
all that a man has to do in the world is to keep his temper and
to do his duty. Mrs. Reid is tolerably well just now, but is
often ailing.’
In a letter to Dr. David, in March 1766, he refers to the death of his
early friend, John Stewart, the Mathematical Professor in Marischal
College, and his companion in the English tour thirty years before:—
‘Mr. Stewart’s death affects me deeply. A sincere friendship,
begun at twelve years of age, and continued to my time of life,
without any interruption, cannot but give some pangs. You know
his worth; yet it was shaded ever since you knew him by too
great abstraction from the world. The former part of his life
was more amiable and more social; but the whole was of a piece
in virtue, candour, and humanity.... I have always regarded
him as my best tutor, though of the same age with me. If the
giddy part of my life was in any degree spent innocently and
virtuously, I owe it to him more than to any human creature;
for I could not but be virtuous in his company, and I could
not be so happy in any other. But I must leave this pleasing
melancholy subject. He is happy; and I shall often be happy in
the remembrance of our friendship; and I hope we shall meet
again.’
A minute account of Black’s theory of latent heat follows.
Later in the same year, Black was called to the Chair of Chemistry in
Edinburgh, which he filled for nearly thirty years, and in Reid’s
letters to the Skenes there is much about candidates for the vacant
office in Glasgow, with a suggestion that David Skene should himself
enter the lists. ‘There is a great spirit of inquiry among the young
people here. Literary merit is much regarded; and I conceive the
opportunities a man has of improving himself are much greater here than
at Aberdeen. The communication with Edinburgh is easy. One goes in the
stage coach to Edinburgh before dinner; has all the afternoon there, and
returns to dinner at Glasgow next day; so that if you have any ambition
to get into the College of Edinburgh (which I think you ought to have), I
conceive Glasgow would be a good step.’
The appeal was ineffectual. Meantime his own appointment, as an
‘examinator’ of candidates for the vacant Mathematical Chair in Marischal
College, made a visit to Aberdeen necessary, as anticipated in a letter
on ‘May 8th’:—
‘My class will be over in less than a month, and by that time
I shall be glad to have some respite. I hope to have the
pleasure of seeing my friends in Aberdeen in August, if not
sooner. We have had a stronger College this year than ever
before. We have been remarkably free from riots and disorders
among the students; and I did not indeed expect that 350 young
fellows could have keen kept quiet for so many months with so
little trouble.... You’ll say to all this that cadgers are aye
speaking of crooksaddles. I think so they ought; besides, I
have nothing else to say to you, and have had no time to think
of anything but my crooksaddles for seven months past. When
the session’s over, I must rub up my mathematics against the
month of August. There is one candidate for your profession
of mathematics to go from this College; and if your College
get a better man, or a better mathematician, they will be very
lucky.[15] I am so sensible of the honour the Magistrates have
done me in naming me to be one of the examinators, that I will
not decline it, though I confess I like the honour better than
the office.’
In the autumn of 1766 Reid exchanged the house in the Drygate for an
official residence in the Professors’ Court of the Old College. This
appears in a letter to Dr. Andrew Skene on December 17th:—
‘I live now in the College, and have no distance to walk to my
class in dark mornings, as I had before. I enjoy this ease,
though I am not sure whether the necessity of walking up and
down a steep hill[16] three or four times a day was not of
use. I have of late had a little of your distemper, finding a
giddiness in my head when I lie down, or rise, or turn myself
in my bed. Our College is very well peopled this session. My
public class is above three score, besides the private class.
Dr. Smith never had so many in one year. There is nothing so
uneasy to me here as our factions in the College.’
In February 1767, along with other local news, we find this in a letter
to David Skene:—
‘We are now resolved to have a canal from Carron to this place,
if the Parliament allows it. £40,000 was subscribed last week
by the merchants of the Carron Company for this purpose.[17]
Our medical college has fallen off greatly this session, most
of the students of medicine having followed Dr. Black to
Edinburgh. The natural and moral philosophy classes are more
numerous than they have ever been; but I expect a great falling
off, if I see another session. I was just now seeing your
furnace along with Dr. Irvine.... If I could find a machine
as proper for analysing ideas, moral sentiments, and other
materials belonging to the fourth kingdom, I believe I should
find in my heart to bestow the money first. I have the more use
for a machine of this kind, because my alembic for performing
these operations—I mean my cranium—has been a little out of
order this winter, by a vertigo, which has made my studies go
on heavily, though it has not hitherto interrupted my teaching.
I have found air and exercise and a clean stomach the best
remedies; but I cannot command the two former as often as I
could wish. I am sensible that the air of a crowded class is
bad, and often thought of carrying my class to the Common Hall;
but I was afraid it might have been construed as a piece of
ostentation.’
Reid’s letter of condolence to Dr. David Skene on the death of his
father, in September 1767, mentions the loss of his own infant daughter,
‘my sweet little Bess,’ and also refers to an excursion to Hamilton ‘with
Mr. Beattie’—the only occasion on which, for more than three months, he
had been more than three miles from Glasgow. ‘Having time at command,’
he had been tempted ‘to fall to the tumbling over books; as we have a
vast number here which I had not access to see at Aberdeen. But this is
a _mare magnum_, wherein one is tempted by hopes of discoveries to make
a tedious voyage, which seldom repays the labour. I have long ago found
my memory to be like a vessel that is full: if you pour in more, you lose
as much as you gain; and on this account I have a thousand times resolved
to give up all pretence to what is called learning, being satisfied that
it is more profitable to ruminate on the little I have laid up than
to add to the indigested heap. I have had little society, the College
people being out of town, and have almost lost the faculty of speaking by
disuse. I blame myself for having corresponded so little with my friends
at Aberdeen. I wished to try Lumsden’s experiment which you was so good
as to communicate to me.... A nasty custom I have of chewing tobacco has
been the reason of my observing a species of as nasty little animals. I
spit in a basin of sawdust, which, when it comes to be drenched, produces
a vast number of animals, three or four times as large as a louse,
and not very different in shape; but armed with four or five rows of
prickles like a hedgehog, which seem to serve it as feet. Its motion is
very sluggish. It lies drenched in the aforesaid mass, which swarms with
these animals of all ages from top to bottom.... I have gone over Sir
James Stewart’s great book of political economy, wherein I think there
is a great deal of good material—carelessly put together indeed; but I
think it contains more sound principles concerning commerce and police
than any book we have yet had. We had the favour of a visit from Sir
Archibald Grant. It gave me much pleasure to see him retain his spirits
and vigour.’ A letter in October mentions that Reid had ‘passed eight
days lately with Lord Kames at Blair-Drummond,’ and that his lordship
is preparing a fourth edition of his _Elements_. He adds, ‘I have been
labouring at _Barbara Celarent_ for three weeks bygone.’ A new friend,
Lord Kames, here comes in sight.
The last of the Skene letters is dated three years later, in 1770. After
pressing David Skene to visit him in Glasgow, he ends thus:—‘As to
myself, the immaterial world has swallowed up all my thoughts since I
came here; but I meet with few that have travelled far in that region,
and am often left to pursue my dreary way in a more solitary manner than
when we used to meet at the Club.’
The homely simplicity of Reid’s character is shown in those letters. They
differ from the letters we have after the Skenes disappear. These are
almost all on questions in philosophy, and show a slow but steady advance
in reflection upon the ‘common sense’ constitution of man’s knowledge of
the universe of matter and mind.
In 1772 there was sorrow in the Reid household. The two eldest
daughters, Jane and Margaret, both died, in the bloom of youth, leaving
only the third daughter, Martha, who not long after married Dr. Patrick
Carmichael, a Glasgow physician, and youngest son of Professor Gershom
Carmichael. This marriage added much to the comfort of Reid’s later years.
We have a passing glimpse of Reid in 1773, when he was entertained
in Glasgow by Johnson and Boswell, at the _Saracen’s Head Inn_, in
the Gallowgate, ‘that paragon of inns in the eyes of the Scotch, but
wretchedly managed.’ The travellers arrived there on the 28th of October,
on their return from their romantic excursion to the Western Highlands.
At the _Saracen’s Head_, on the following morning, as Boswell tells us,
‘Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two other Glasgow professors, breakfasted
with us,’ and they met them afterwards at supper. ‘I was not much pleased
with any of them,’ the sage wrote to Mrs. Thrale. ‘The general impression
upon my memory,’ Boswell says, ‘is, that we had not much conversation at
Glasgow, where the professors, like their brethren at Aberdeen, did not
venture to expose themselves much to the battery of cannon which they
knew might play upon them.’ It is a pity that Boswell’s indifference, or
indolence, on this occasion has deprived us of talk at the _Saracen’s
Head_ and in the College Court, as dramatic in its way as the pictures
of Rasay or Inch Kenneth. Notwithstanding Reid’s cautious and modest
silence, or want of vivacity, he surely said and heard something at those
Glasgow breakfasts and suppers.
* * * * *
Before death had put an end to the letters to the Skenes, Reid had become
intimate with one of the most notable men of the time in Scotland. I
do not know how the intimacy began, but as early as 1767 we have found
him referring to a visit to Lord Kames at Blair-Drummond, and to the
mysteries of _Barbara Celarent_. This means that he was at work on the
_Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic, with Remarks_, published seven years
afterwards as an Appendix to one of Lord Kames’ _Sketches of the History
of Man_. The _Sketches_ appeared in two quarto volumes, in 1774, and
the _Brief Account_ fills about seventy pages in the second volume. It
was Reid’s only appearance in print in the sixteen years of his public
professorship in Glasgow. This, along with the essay on Quantity, given
to the Royal Society in 1748, and the _Inquiry_, in 1764, made up his
work as an author, until after he had ceased to be an oral teacher.
In Henry Home, Lord Kames, notwithstanding a temperament very different
from his own, Reid found congenial companionship—a strong disposition to
metaphysical speculation, a ready and accomplished if not deeply learned
lawyer, and a considerable author. Kames was fourteen years his senior.
Curiously, Henry Home’s closest early friendship was with David Hume.
Thirty years before his friendship with Reid, he advised Hume about the
_Treatise of Human Nature_, and had given the youth an introduction to
Bishop Butler. ‘My opinions,’ David writes in 1737, ‘are so new, and even
some terms I am obliged to make use of, that I could not propose, by
any abridgment, to give my system an air of likelihood, or even to make
it intelligible. I have had a greater desire of communicating to you a
plan of the whole, that I believe it will not appear in public before
the beginning of next winter. I am at present castrating my work, that
is, cutting off its nobler parts, that is, endeavouring it shall give
as little offence as possible. This is a piece of cowardice for which I
blame myself. But I resolved not to be an enthusiast in philosophy while
I was blaming other enthusiasms.’ It was thus that Hume wrote about the
book which, even in its ‘castrated’ form, startled Reid in the manse at
New Machar, and determined his whole intellectual life. In 1751 Home
published _Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion_,
on which Jonathan Edwards congratulated him in a letter to Dr. Erskine.
Yet his speculations, and his association with the sceptic, raised a
suspicion of his orthodoxy in the General Assembly.
According to Lord Woodhouselee, his biographer, ‘the intercourse of
Lord Kames was frequent with his much-valued friend Dr. Reid, and they
corresponded on various topics of philosophy—a correspondence which,
notwithstanding the dissimilarity of character in many respects between
these two eminent men, subsisted for a long period of years, with the
most perfect cordiality and mutual esteem.’ Dr. Reid, Dugald Stewart
tells us, lived in the most cordial and affectionate friendship with
Lord Kames, notwithstanding the avowed opposition of their sentiments on
some moral questions to which he attached the highest importance. Both
of them, however, were the friends of virtue and of mankind; and both
were able to temper the warmth of free discussion with the forbearance
and good humour founded on mutual esteem. ‘No two men,’ Stewart adds,
‘ever exhibited a more striking contrast in their conversation or in
their constitutional tempers—the one slow and cautious in his decisions,
even on those topics which he had most diligently studied; reserved and
silent in promiscuous society, and retaining, after all his literary
eminence, the same simple and unassuming manners which he had brought
from his country residence; the other, lively, rapid, and communicative;
accustomed by his professional pursuits to wield with address the
weapons of controversy, and not averse to a trial of his powers on
questions the most foreign to his ordinary habits of inquiry. But
these characteristical differences, while to their common friends they
lent an additional charm to the distinguishing merits of each, served
only to enliven their social intercourse, and to cement their mutual
attachment.’ From 1767 till the death of Lord Kames in December 1782,
their intercourse was unbroken.[18]
Lord Kames thus explains Reid’s contribution to the _Sketches_:—‘In
reviewing the foregoing Sketch, it occurred to me that a fair analysis of
Aristotle’s logic would be a valuable addition to the historical branch.
A distinct and candid account of a system that for so many ages governed
the reasoning part of mankind cannot but be acceptable to the public.
Curiosity will be gratified in seeing a phantom delineated that so long
fascinated the learned world; a phantom which, like the pyramids of
Egypt, or hanging gardens of Babylon, is a structure of infinite genius,
but absolutely useless, unless for raising wonder. Dr. Reid, Professor
of Moral Philosophy in the College of Glasgow, relished the thought,
and his friendship to me prevailed on him, after much solicitation,
to undertake the laborious task. No man is better acquainted with
Aristotle’s writings; and (without any enthusiastic attachment) he holds
that philosopher to be a first-rate genius.’
Measured by the present standard of Aristotelian criticism, Reid’s
exposition of the Organon, and estimate of its place in the development
of human understanding, may seem meagre and inadequate; especially as the
issue of seven years of preparation, and as his solitary contribution to
philosophy in these sixteen years. But when we remember that Aristotelian
logic was then under an eclipse, especially in Scotland, and that Reid’s
‘Brief Account’ was an attempt to draw the Organon out of the obscurity
to which it had been condemned by leaders of modern thought, the merit
of his sober and sagacious commentary may be more recognised. It is as
a signal monument of abstracted intellectual activity, rather than as
a philosophical instrument for advancing or organising our knowledge,
that Reid regards the syllogistic logic. He concludes that the art of
syllogism is better fitted to promote scholastic litigation than real
improvement in the sciences; he sees in it only ‘a venerable piece of
antiquity and a great effort of human genius.’ When he contrasts the
utility of Bacon’s _Organum_, as a factor in the progressive intelligence
of mankind, he fails to see that each Organon may consistently supplement
the other.
Reid characteristically ends his account of the old Organon by suggesting
an Organon, different from either the old or the new, as still wanting.
This should neither, like Aristotle’s, unfold only abstract forms of
deductive reasoning, nor, like Bacon’s, only methods for verifying
inductive generalisations. It should be concerned with the rational
principles which compose the Common Sense of mankind. ‘All the real
knowledge of mankind may be divided into two parts: the first consists of
self-evident propositions, the second of those which are deduced by just
reasoning from self-evident propositions. The line that divides these
two ought to be marked as distinctly as possible, and principles that are
really self-evident reduced to general axioms. Although first principles
do not admit of direct proof, yet there must be certain marks by which
those that are truly such may be distinguished from counterfeits. These
marks ought to be described and applied to distinguish the genuine from
the spurious.... This is a subject of such importance that if inquisitive
men can be brought to the same unanimity in the first principles of
the other sciences as in those of mathematics and natural philosophy,
this might be considered as a third grand era in the progress of human
reason.’ Thus in 1774 Reid’s thought still converges on the subject which
had engaged him since the _Treatise of Human Nature_ found its way into
the manse of New Machar. Perhaps he was unduly sanguine in expecting
unanimity regarding the ingredients of the final reason of mankind—so
imperfectly developed in the individual consciousness, in its higher
elements, as long as men are disposed to resist the final venture of the
heart and conscience in their interpretation of the world and of human
life.
It was in 1774 that Reid’s appeal in 1764 to the common reason of human
nature aroused hostile criticism. He had been seconded by others in
his response to the sceptics. The resort to a ‘sense’ of self-evident
truth, in his _Inquiry_ in 1764, which itself looked like a reply to
argument by feeling, was followed in 1766 by _An Appeal to Common Sense
on behalf of Religion_, by Dr. James Oswald, minister of Methven in
Perthshire. In 1770 Beattie’s _Essay on the Nature and Immutability of
Truth, in opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism_, followed. Oswald
and Beattie were not deep and patient thinkers like Reid;[19] but the
rising literary and social reputation of Beattie, secured for the _Essay
on Truth_ more rapid and widespread admiration than was given to the
_Inquiry_. Beattie often visited London, was there one of the lions of
the day, was made a D.C.L. of Oxford, and had interviews with George the
Third, who admired his book, conferred a pension on Beattie, and rallied
Mr. Dundas about ‘Scotch Philosophy.’ Reid, Beattie, and Oswald thus
became known as a triumvirate of ‘Scottish Philosophers’; and the appeal
to common sense, in which they were at least verbally agreed, began to be
spoken about as ‘the Scottish Philosophy,’ a term which has since been
adopted in this country and abroad.
This Scottish triumvirate, helped into vogue by Beattie, roused Joseph
Priestley, an English dissenter. Priestley had abandoned the Calvinism
of his early creed for materialism, philosophical necessity, and free
thought, and, after serving for some years as pastor of a nonconformist
chapel in Cheshire, and next as a schoolmaster much devoted to
experiments in the natural sciences, was already known as an author in
natural science. In 1774, when he was living with Lord Shelburne, as
librarian and literary companion, he appeared for the first time as a
metaphysical critic, in _An Examination of Reid’s Inquiry, Beattie’s
Essay, and Oswald’s Appeal to Common Sense_. He played upon the term
‘common sense,’ and took for granted that the aim of the triumvirate
was to substitute mere feeling and authority for reason,—the authority
of the multitude for that of the philosophical elect,—alleging blind
instinct when unable to produce argument, and multiplying instincts to
suit each controversial emergency. ‘As men have imagined innate ideas,
because they had forgot how they came by their ideas, the Scottish
philosophers set up almost as many distinct instincts as there are
acquired principles of acting.’ He ridiculed Reid for his supposed
discovery of the root of scepticism in the ideal hypothesis; charging
him with innocently mistaking a metaphor for a scientific theory, and
for overlooking the leading part which mental association plays, as the
cause of those convictions which Reid mistook for infallible constituents
of common sense. ‘If we consider the general tenor of the writings of
these philosophers,’ Dr. Priestley said, ‘it will appear that they
are saying one thing and doing another—talking plausibly about the
necessity for admitting axioms as the foundation of all reasoning, but
meaning to recommend particular assumptions of their own as axioms—not
as being founded on perception of the agreement of ideas, which is the
great doctrine of Mr. Locke, and which makes truth to depend upon the
necessary nature of things, to be therefore absolute, unchangeable, and
everlasting, but merely on some unaccountable instinctive persuasions,
depending upon the arbitrary constitution of our nature—which makes all
truth be relative to ourselves only, and consequently to be infinitely
vague and precarious. This system admits of no final appeal to reason
properly considered, which any person might be at liberty to examine and
discuss; on the contrary every man is taught to think himself authorised
to pronounce dogmatically upon every question, according to his present
feeling and persuasion, under the notion of its being something original,
instructive, and incontrovertible; although, stoutly analysed, it may
appear to be mere prejudice.’ Thus, as opposed to the man of straw he
set up under the name of Reid, Priestley postulated a materialistic
conception of man, as only an organism, the so-called mental and
moral power of which was the natural issue of physical structure;
his perceptions the effects of their own objects; and on the whole a
necessitated system of the universe, which excluded morally responsible
agency.
Reid made no reply at the time to this argumentative discharge. In an
unpublished letter to Dr. Price he gives a reason for his silence. ‘I
will not answer Dr. Priestley,’ he says, ‘because he is very lame in
abstract reasoning. I have got no light from him. And indeed what light
with respect to the powers of the mind can one expect from a man who has
not yet learned to distinguish ideas from vibrations, nor motion from
sensation, nor simple apprehension from judgment, nor simple ideas from
complex ideas, nor necessary truths from contingent truths?’[20] In 1775
Reid writes to Lord Kames:—
‘Dr. Priestley in his last book thinks that the power of
perception, as much as the other powers that are termed mental,
is the natural result of an organic structure such as that of
the human brain. Consequently, the whole man becomes extinct
at death; and we have no hope of surviving the grave but what
is derived from the Christian revelation. I would be glad to
know your lordship’s opinion, whether, when my brain has lost
its original structure, and when some hundred years after, the
same materials are again fabricated so curiously as to become
an intelligent being—whether, I say, that being will be _me_;
or if two or three such beings should be formed out of my
brain, whether they will all be _me_, and consequently be all
one and the same intelligent being. This seems to me a great
mystery; but Dr. Priestley denies all mysteries.... I am not
surprised that your lordship has found little entertainment
in a late French writer on human nature. From what I learn
the French philosophers are become rank Epicureans. I detest
all systems that depreciate human nature. If it be a delusion
that there is something in the constitution of man that is
venerable and worthy of its author, let me live and die in this
delusion rather than have my eyes opened to see my species in
a disgusting light. Every good man feels his indignation rise
against those who disparage his kindred or country; why should
it not rise against those who disparage his kind? Were it not
that we sometimes see extremes meet, I should think it very
strange to see atheists and high-shod divines contending who
should most blacken and degenerate human nature. Yet I think
the atheist acts the most consistent part of the two; for
surely such views of human nature tend more to promote atheism
than to promote religion and virtue.’
This allusion to contemporary French philosophers is almost the only
one I find in Reid. The chief works of Condillac appeared before the
_Inquiry_, but it does not seem that they, or Diderot and the French
Encyclopedists, were known to him. That Kant is not referred to, nor even
known by name, is less surprising. This ignorance is characteristic of
Reid’s home-bred, self-contained philosophy.
Inquiry into our conception of Power or Causation becomes prominent
in Reid’s letters to Lord Kames throughout ‘the seventies,’ along
with experimental investigations in physics and physiology which show
continued interest in natural causes. A letter, written in 1775, contains
a curious conjecture with regard to the generation of plants and animals,
more speculative than was his habit. He is ‘apt to conjecture,’ he tells
his friend, ‘that both plants and animals are at first organised atoms,
having all the parts of the animal or plant, but so slender, and folded
up in such a manner, as to be reduced to a particle far beyond the reach
of our senses, and perhaps as small as the constituent parts of water.
The earth, the water, and the air may, for anything I know, be full of
such organised atoms.’ He then goes on to consider the relation of this
hypothesis to the idea of active design in nature, and expresses doubt
about the possibility of the atoms being endowed with power to form
themselves into an organised body like the human. ‘I cannot help thinking
that such a work as the Iliad, and much more an animal or vegetable body,
must have been made by express design. It seems to me as easy to contrive
a machine which should compose a variety of epic poems and tragedies,
as to contrive laws of motion by which unthinking particles of matter
should coalesce into a variety of organised bodies.’ He suggests that
the organisation is the issue of constant and uniform divine activity.
‘Can we,’ he asks, ‘show by any good reason that the Almighty finished
his work at a stroke, and has continued ever since an inactive spectator?
And if His continued operation be necessary, it is no miracle, while it
is uniform, and according to fixed laws. Though we should suppose the
gravitation of matter to be the immediate operation of the Deity, it
would be no miracle while it is constant and uniform; but if it should
cease for a moment, only by His withholding His hand, _this_ would be a
miracle.’ This is to say that all natural changes are immediate effects
of divine action, proceeding according to natural law or rule.
The suggestion illustrates the bent of Reid’s thought in later life. If
our common sense of the continuous independent existence of sensible
things, and of their manifestation in Perception as directly as states
of our own minds are manifested to us when we are conscious of them—if
_this_ was the factor of the Common Sense that engaged him in New Machar
and King’s College days, the Power or Causality which all changes in the
universe presuppose now becomes prominent, alike in his correspondence
and in his books. What is meant by Power, and where is the Power centred
that is implied in the changes that are always going on, in ourselves and
in our surroundings? Priestley’s assumption that matter explains all the
phenomena of a human mind; the theory of universal necessity advocated by
Kames; and the duties of his Glasgow professorship, all tended to carry
his reflections onward from the merely physical to the ethical judgments
of the common sense, and so upward from the merely natural to the
spiritual interpretation of the universe. ‘First that which is natural,
then that which is spiritual.’
This runs through his correspondence with Lord Kames. That there is
no absolute necessity for men being bad; that their immoral acts are
centred and originate in themselves and not in God; that it would be
unjust to exact as a duty what it is not in a person’s power to do; that
what a man does voluntarily or with deliberate intention, it is also in
his power not to do; that what is done without his will is not really
done by _him_ at all; and that real power is moral agency,—these are
ultimate judgments, reached ‘not by logical reasoning,’ but in ‘the more
trustworthy way of immediate perception and feeling,’ to which Reid so
often appeals. ‘If I could suppose God to make a devil a devil, I cannot
suppose that He would condemn him for being a devil,’ is in a letter to
Lord Kames.[21] The impotence of matter rather than its independence is
now insisted on; with the inference that at any rate _it_ cannot cause
our perceptions, as Priestley supposed. He begins to see that power
must be referred to mind or spirit alone, and that matter is powerless.
‘Efficient causes are not within the sphere of natural philosophy, which
is concerned only with the laws or methods according to which Power
operates. It exhibits the grand machine of the material world, analysed,
as it were, and taken to pieces. It belongs to metaphysics and natural
theology to show the Power that continues and gives motion to the whole;
according to laws which the naturalist discovers, and perhaps according
to laws still more general.’
* * * * *
It was thus that Reid’s uneventful life of thought—deep, steady,
unobtrusive—was sustained for sixteen years, when he was educating
the rising generation in the old class-room at the College; unfolding
philosophy in correspondence with a sympathetic friend; contributing
essays to the Literary Society which met monthly at the College; and
preparing his ‘Brief Account’ of Aristotle—all until he had reached his
seventieth year. On the 19th of May 1780 he wrote to Lord Kames of a
change that had occurred the day before:—
‘I find myself growing old; and I have no right lo plead
exemption from the infirmities of that stage of life. For
that reason I have made choice of an Assistant in my office.
Yesterday the College at my desire made choice of Mr. Archibald
Arthur, preacher, to be my assistant and successor. I think I
have done good service to the College by this, and procured
some leisure to myself, though with reduction of my finances.’
It was Reid’s desire, while his faculties were yet vigorous, to devote
his strength to further philosophical authorship. During the remaining
sixteen years of his life his lectures were delivered to the students
by Mr. Arthur, to whom the professorial work in the class-room was
transferred. Arthur, then thirty-six years of age, was a native of
Renfrewshire, a distinguished alumnus of Glasgow, as it seems from a
posthumous volume of his Essays, and a man not unlike Reid in mind and
character, but in inferior form; at this time chaplain and librarian
of the University, and a member of the Literary Society. After one of
Arthur’s Sunday services in the College chapel, Reid had whispered to
one of his colleagues on the professorial bench—‘This is a very sensible
fellow, and in my opinion would make a good professor of morals.’[22] He
is described by a contemporary as ‘a man of unprepossessing exterior, of
invincible bashfulness, which continued to clog his manner and impede
his exertions during the whole course of his life; but of a thoughtful,
grave, silent habit, which led him to a due estimate of what he was
individually adapted to.’ He survived Reid, as his successor, a little
more than a year, when he was followed in the Chair by James Mylne, a
strong man unknown in philosophical literature, whose professorial career
of forty years made him a familiar figure to generations of Glasgow
students.