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
How has Reid’s protest of reason in the name of common sense—a
protest against sceptical paralysis of human intelligence, physical
and moral—fared in the nineteenth century? Has Reid by this protest
established what is of lasting value either to human happiness or to
philosophical theory? What has modern thought, as developed at the end of
the nineteenth century, to say to a Scottish eighteenth century inquiry
into human mind that finds its root in a postulated sense of reality,
which must be taken as finally authoritative when it is recognised in
its genuine integrity? How do faith and doubt now stand finally related,
as compared with their relations when Reid opposed Hume? Is there still
room for philosophical argument founded on the divine inspirations of
the Common Sense, under, for instance, our transformed conception of the
universe as an evolution?
Expansion rather than subversion of the philosophy which ultimately
argues from the common sense, has, I think, been going on. Matter-of-fact
study of human mind, as engaged in perception of the material world,
and in the moral exercise of voluntary agency, which with Reid makes
this perception of matter, and moral consciousness of free agency its
prominent spiritual facts, has now risen to criticism of our conception
of the Supreme Power that is finally at work in the universe in which we
live and move and have our being. And a less purely academic scepticism
than that against which Reid summoned the common sense now confronts
us. If Reid’s mission was to call attention to our direct mental grasp
of outward realities, by exploding a theory which seemed to paralyse
that grasp, it would have been his corresponding mission now to justify,
in name of the moral and spiritual elements of the common sense, the
religious interpretation of the universe, which finds in the facts of
matter and man a continuous self-revelation of omnipotent love and
mercy—and this in the face of a world which repels our more philanthropic
civilisation, by its abundant suffering and sin. Instead of philosophy
at war with common sense, common sense is now alleged as at war with
the finally moral and religious conception of the universe, which Reid
accepted as conclusive under the premises of an old-fashioned natural
theology. Now universal natural law is supposed to exclude God, and
sentient misery to make theistic faith in the goodness, and therefore
trustworthiness, of the Supreme Power an anachronism, which must give
place to universal pessimist doubt and despair. How can we rest with
trust in those practical principles of human nature to which Reid
appealed, when they and we are found in a universe so full of evil as
this in which we find ourselves? Are we not navigating the ocean of life
in a vessel that is not seaworthy? These are questions now expressed or
felt.
For forty years after Reid’s death the higher thought of Scotland,
represented by its leaders, remained well within the old lines. It was
still careful analysis of what is presented in human consciousness, with
a gradual decline of interest in the metaphysical and moral problems
which Hume’s agnostic distrust had introduced even into Reid’s modest
treatment of the common sense. Scottish philosophy became a search for
natural sequences and co-existences among phenomena, instead of search
for firm intellectual and moral footing in a universe to which we are
introduced by being percipient of an infinitesimal part through our five
senses. For a quarter of a century Dugald Stewart was Reid’s acknowledged
successor, less original, and even less adventurous, than his master,
but unrecognisable in the ill-tempered criticism of Schopenhauer. With
dignified eloquence, wider intimacy with society than Reid’s, and more
learning, he applied inductive methods to find the laws that determine
intellectual character and the education of the human mind, also to solve
social questions, in graceful language—all which touched the popular
imagination more than his somewhat prosaic predecessor.
* * * * *
Early in the nineteenth century, Thomas Brown, the young Edinburgh
Professor of Moral Philosophy, and colleague of Stewart, raised a revolt
against Reid and Stewart in some of their characteristic philosophy.
This brilliant youth, minor poet as well as philosopher, had practised
medicine in Edinburgh before his appointment, in 1810, at the age of
thirty-two, to the chair of Stewart. In medical practice he had been the
colleague of Dr. Gregory, Reid’s cousin, and so long his correspondent.
Brown, unlike Reid, was one of the precocious philosophers. At the age
of twenty he appeared as a critic of the _Zoonomia_ of Darwin, and a few
years later as author of an _Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and
Effect_, which contains the essence of the philosophy that was afterwards
expanded and applied in his _Lectures_. He died at the age of forty-two,
leaving works undistinguished by the deep and patient thought of Reid,
and diffuse in style, but abounding in ingenious analysis—an interesting
contribution to the logic of physical inquiry, instead of appeals to
carefully considered judgments of the Common Sense in Perception and in
Causation. Brown recognised instinctive belief in natural constancies of
co-existence and sequence among phenomena, and treated associations among
mental states as the chief explanation of the phenomena of mind. The
originative moral agency of intending and intelligent Will, so prominent
latterly in Reid, disappears in Brown. And Brown, like Priestley,
disparaged Reid’s claim to merit for reversing the philosophical
prejudice that ‘ideas’ are the only objects of human cognition, regarding
it as a metaphor mistaken for a dogma. Indeed, the empirical laws of
association tend with Brown, as with Priestley, to be the sole ultimate
laws of mind: perhaps this tendency was restrained in expression as much
by personal respect for Reid and Stewart as by conviction.
After Brown, philosophy in Scotland was for a time dormant—superseded
by Combe and phrenology. But contemporaneously, in ‘the twenties,’
a philosophy more akin to Reid than to Brown made its appearance
in England; although the analogy is not on the surface, and has
not, I think, been observed. Coleridge, especially in his _Aids to
Reflection_, published in 1825, insists with eloquent emphasis upon
the difference between ‘the Reason,’ which is divine or inspired, and
mere ‘Understanding,’ which generalises the phenomena that emerge in
experience: he also presses the distinction between free agency, as
implied in morally responsible causation, and the mechanical order of
nature with which physical sciences are exclusively concerned. ‘The
Reason,’ to which Coleridge appeals, corresponds in function to ‘the
Common Sense’ of Reid. It is described as fixed and final; as in all its
decisions appealing to itself; and as ‘much nearer to sense than the
understanding,’ for it is direct insight of truth, whereas understanding
must refer all its judgments to premises. That man, because he is morally
responsible, must originate, within his individual personality as their
final centre, all acts for which he is responsible, is with Coleridge a
postulate, ‘the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man
_may_ find for himself,’ and so see the true meaning of the words power
and causality. In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations
of the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason.
We may speak of understanding as ‘human,’ with its often discordant
generalisations; but there can be no merely ‘human’ Reason. There neither
is nor can be but one and the same Reason; the light without which the
individual understanding would be darkness.
* * * * *
The philosophy that carefully measures its conclusions by the Common
Sense found its way from Scotland into France early in this century,
in arrest of the materialism and scepticism which had taken the place
of the spiritual philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. In 1811 Royer
Collard, eminent as a philosopher and a statesman, was made Professor of
Philosophy in Paris. In that year, when he was preparing his lectures,
he accidentally found a copy of Reid’s _Inquiry_ at a book-stall near
the Seine. He was charmed with its contents, which thereafter inspired
his teaching.[26] Through Royer Collard, Reid’s philosophy became
the dominant philosophy of France, and it still retains an elevating
spiritual influence in the national schools.[27] In 1828 Reid’s works
were translated and discussed by Jouffroy, a leading thinker in his
generation, who thus leavened thinking minds among contemporaries. But
Victor Cousin was Reid’s most eloquent and famous missionary. He had
been educated by Royer Collard in Reid’s principles. His ardent and
comprehensive genius, however, became dissatisfied with what he called
a ‘sage but timid doctrine,’ and treated it as a vigorous but hardly
philosophical protest against the sceptic in the name of uncritical
common sense. In his enthusiasm, Cousin turned to Germany for ‘a
philosophy so masculine and brilliant that it could command the attention
of Europe.’ At first he thought he found in Kant the profound refutation
of the sceptic, and the grand constructive philosophy he wanted. But soon
Kant’s mode of expelling the ‘mortal poison’ seemed as unsatisfactory as
Reid’s, and he parted company with him so far as to join first Schelling
and then Hegel in an eclectic or all-reconciling system. But in the end
the fascination of Hegelian thought abated. There might, after all, be
deeper meaning, and more capacity for development, in Reid’s appeal than
he had supposed. So in his later years Cousin returned to his first love.
His _Philosophie Écossaise_, which appeared in its latest form in 1857,
is an eloquent appreciation of Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Reid, and Beattie,
with Reid as the chief figure in the centre.
Meantime a formidable intellectual force had appeared in Scotland, in
argumentative collision with those Germans by whom Cousin had been
fascinated, and also with Cousin’s own eclectic assimilation of all
philosophies. Sir William Hamilton was warning his contemporaries against
the ‘masculine and brilliant’ Continental philosophy, and energetically
recalling them to Reid, by two essays in the _Edinburgh Review_—one in
October 1829, destructive of the ‘Philosophy of the Unconditioned,’
the other in October 1830, constructive, on Reid’s ‘Philosophy of
Perception.’ The reconstruction of the philosophy of the Common
Sense, contained by implication in these famous essays, was, in 1846,
elaborated in commentaries which embrace the literature of philosophy,
in Hamilton’s _Reid_. The Glasgow professor re-appeared in the company
of the most learned of all Scottish philosophers, educated especially
by Aristotle and his commentators, by Kant, and by Reid himself, whose
modest enterprise was now measured by the profoundest problems and
most comprehensive conceptions of ancient and modern speculation. The
magnificent intellect of Hamilton raised deep questions among us that lay
dormant in Reid.
Hamilton in Scotland is so far in parallel with Cousin in France,
that—moving in opposite directions—they both helped to _germanise_
the philosophy which makes its last appeal to the common sense.
Cousin, dissatisfied with the ‘timidity’ of Reid, tried to reconcile
a philosophy that should comprehend the Infinite with the philosophy
that is confined to experience. Hamilton’s mission was to clip the
wings of the speculative adventurers. This made him put the emphasis
on the inadequacy of a human understanding for fully coping with the
eternal reality. While he praised Reid for making the Common Sense in
its integrity the necessary criterion of philosophy, he claimed for
himself the special credit of distinguishing its necessities as of two
sorts—the one a positive power, the other the impotence implied in
finite intelligence. Hence human experience rests on a conditioned, or
(so far) paralysed intelligence; and if omniscience only can be called
‘knowledge,’ while to know ‘in part,’ therefore with involved mysteries,
must be called ignorance—it follows that man knows nothing. Ignorance is
then the consummation of human philosophy, and its highest attainment is
this discovery. ‘Our dream of knowledge is a little light rounded with
darkness.’ ‘The highest reach of science and philosophy is the scientific
recognition of human ignorance.’ ‘Doubt is the beginning and the end of
all our efforts to know.’ ‘The last and highest consecration of all true
religion is an altar to the unknown and unknowable God.’ Man’s knowledge
of existence must be relative to his limited experience and intelligence.
The missionary of a neglected truth is apt to be one-sided and even
paradoxical, and strenuous expression was natural to Hamilton. From
his first essay in 1829 to his last in 1855 he sought to show the
inconsistency of infinite knowledge with our limited share of inspiration
in the Common Sense. Accordingly, the negative and incomplete, or what
Bacon calls ‘broken’ character of man’s knowledge, rather than its
positive victories, is ever supreme in the _Hamiltonianised_ Reid, along
with a recast of Reid’s account of the Common Sense as involved in
perception of the outward things of sense.
The respective offices of Reid and Hamilton might be compared in this
aphorism of Pascal—‘_La Nature soutient la Raison impuissante_.’ Need
for the common sense with which human nature is charged, illustrates the
impotence of man’s unomniscient understanding and limited share of the
Divine Reason. Taking those words of Pascal, Reid puts emphasis on ‘_la
nature_’; Hamilton on ‘_impuissance_.’ But both are recognised by each:
it is a difference of emphasis. Neither Hamilton nor Mansel excludes
the conservative influence of ‘_la nature_,’ taken in its integrity,
in the way Mr. Herbert Spencer does, when he rests philosophy only on
the strongly emphasised part of Hamiltonian philosophy. In Hamilton the
‘_raison impuissante_’ is insisted on really in order to make room for
‘_la nature_’; on the ground that the logical understanding, here ‘_la
raison_,’ is too impotent to be able to _disprove_ the genuine judgments
of the Common Sense.
Brown’s rebellion against Reid early in the century, in the interest
of a universal physical causation or association, has its parallel in
Ferrier’s revolt, in the middle of the century, against the Hamiltonian
Reid, in the interest of abstract metaphysics as opposed to uncriticised
common sense. In the name of philosophy he excludes from philosophy
all except necessary truths of abstract reason; neglecting, as beneath
its regard, the world of change, in which Reid’s mixed and practical
reason, or Common Sense, had been offered as final guide. The office of
philosophy, according to Ferrier, is among the eternal truths, which
alone can be absolutely demonstrated, and which relieve philosophy
from ‘the oversight of popular opinion and the errors of psychological
science,’ which had been unworthily dignified as the final test of
truth. The natural beliefs of mankind, instead of being worshipped as
divine, are banished in Ferrier’s philosophy, on the ground that their
self-contradictoriness is demonstrable: the business of the philosopher,
accordingly, is to substitute ‘reasonable thinking’ for ‘common sense.’
The ‘_raison impuissante_,’ emphasised by Hamilton—the ignorance in
which Hamilton revels—is not allowed by Ferrier to be ignorance at all;
for ‘man cannot be said to be ignorant of self-contradictions that can
be knowledge for no mind, human or divine.’ Independent or unperceived
matter is not merely hid from man’s knowledge on account of his ‘_raison
impuissante_’; it is hid from all intelligence, because inconsistent with
the _necessarily_ mind-dependent essence of Being. Pure reason does not
need to be finally supplemented by practical principles of common sense.
It is able to shift for itself without this surrender. The conciliation
of common sense thinking and philosophy is accomplished by the submission
of common sense to universal compulsory reason. Opinion must submit to
demonstration, instead of demonstration, intelligible only by the few,
having to make way for the undemonstrable dogmas of the unreflecting.
Reid, I suspect, could hardly recognise, in the stuffed figure thus put
up by Ferrier to be knocked down, either the ‘common sense’ in which
_he_ found the root of a human knowledge of the realities revealed in
place and time throughout the long experience of man, or the ‘perception’
in which things external to the individual mind make their appearance
‘in part.’ The practical impassibility of disbelieving the existence
of other living beings, of discarding memory as wholly delusion, of
treating man as irresponsible, and our surroundings as chaotic or wholly
uninterpretable, alike for science and in common life—these were alleged
constituents of the common sense with which Reid concerned himself. They
all lie outside the demonstrations of Ferrier, in which he unfolds his
theory in forms of artistic beauty and easy grace, which make him the
most picturesque figure in the succession of Scottish philosophers. Yet
Brown and Ferrier in the end helped on the expansion of Reid.
* * * * *
Before Ferrier passed away in 1864, a revolution in the conception of
the universe was in progress in Britain. The idea of continuous physical
evolution of external nature and of man, promulgated biologically by
Darwin, and by Mr. Herbert Spencer as the all-comprehensive generalised
law of a universe that was supposed to be the outcome of unknowable
Power, has become a popular creed within the last forty years.
Simultaneously, methods of development akin to Hegel were introduced
by Dr. Hutcheson Stirling in his _Secret of Hegel_, and afterwards
in Glasgow by Dr. Caird, who adorned Reid’s chair for nearly thirty
years—methods for making explicit latent Divine Reason as what explains
and sustains the universe. Reid’s appeal in a practical temper, to the
mixed and moral reason in man, as that with which man is inspired—an
appeal widened and prolific of deeper questions in Hamilton—was still too
cautious to attempt to formulate the mysteries of existence, in fully
intelligible principles, which should remove the darkness around the
‘little light’ with which Reid was satisfied. He would have looked with
distrust at the more ambitious intellectual constructions which seemed to
be superseding the common sense of human nature, as the human response
to the sceptic or agnostic, whose philosophical knowledge turned all
knowledge into ignorance at the last. Reid was too human to be satisfied
with merely physical generalisations of sequences and co-existences
of phenomena, finally unintelligible, and therefore unworthy of trust;
and he would have been too cautious to accept a network of abstract
intellectual necessities, latent in the universe, as the last and best
human account of nature and man as actually found in place and time.
To rest satisfied with the evolutionary generalisation he would have
regarded as involving the ‘common error of philosophers since the days
of Plato,’ in confounding moral agency with physical causation. Of the
magnificent Hegelian constructions he would probably have said, what
he says of Samuel Clarke’s theological demonstration—‘These are the
speculations of men of superior genius. But whether they be as solid as
they are sublime, or whether they be the wanderings of imagination in a
region beyond the limit of human understanding, I am unable to determine.’
The alternatives presented to this generation—either agnostic pessimist
despair or universal science in which man is in some sense identified
with God—final nescience _versus_ final omniscience—ultimate and
universal problem of existence taking the place of a Reid’s science of
human mind—represent the unending struggle between sceptical distrust of
the Universal Power, ignorantly worshipped, and reasonable ethical faith
in the Universal Power, with consequent hope for men. It is in Scotland
a new form of the war with David Hume to which Reid’s life was given.
It has been going on since Socrates argued with the Sophists at Athens,
and since Job justified the morality of Providence among the Eastern
emirs. The eighteenth-century question, ‘What is Matter?’ has risen
in the nineteenth to the question, ‘What is God?’ The inspired Common
Sense or Common Reason of Reid seems to be sublimated in universally
necessitating dialectical Reason, in this Scoto-German way of resisting
the agnostic. To fill the place of the ‘unknown and unknowable God’
of the Hamiltonian emphasis, human knowledge appears identified and
co-extensive with the Divine, in an absolute idealism, presumed to be
the only adequate refutation of all subverting doubt. The ‘_raison
impuissante_,’ sustained by and culminating in ‘_la nature_,’ or inspired
common sense, is exchanged for what looks like a pantheistic necessity
that leaves no room for moral agency in man or God, and which scorns the
incomplete knowledge that cannot dispense with a faith venture at its
root.
Yet Reid, if he were now among us, might find the common sense not
superseded but idealised, in the more articulate response of reason
in man to the all-pervading active Reason which the later philosopher
identifies with his own. That the common sense latent in man is the
inspiration of God is an assumption with which he started in his
_Inquiry_. ‘The inspiration of the Almighty giveth man understanding.’
‘The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.’ So the common sense moral
trust in God, or universal moral venture, is at the root of all human
life and human knowledge, giving unity and vitality to the whole. It is
the ‘little light’—a ray from the perfect divine light,—and the universe
is interpretable for all human purposes only in and through it. It is
that in each of us through which the inspirations in the ideal man,
when dormant in individuals, can nevertheless be made to respond, in an
ethical or religious common sense of the infinite love and mercy of the
all-sustaining Power that is always waiting to be gracious—to respond to
the inspirations of Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles.
If ‘knowledge’ means only what is reached by the logical understanding
elaborating materials given by sense; and if the name is denied to
the inspirations of the Common Sense, what those inspirations should
be called becomes a question about the meaning of a word. God is then
‘unknowable’ by man, only inasmuch as faith in the perfect reason and
goodness of the Universal Power is more than an ordinary scientific
generalisation. But if we recognise in the Common Sense, and in its
underlying Theistic Faith, that without which all our knowledge must
dissolve in ignorance, then the faith must be accepted as in reason the
final ground of the knowledge; and therefore as in us the last form of
the universal reason, in and through which what is divine in us protests
against limitation to an intelligence that becomes paralysed in the
absence of this its indispensable factor. If knowledge means omniscient
physical science of the universe of reality, then the universe of
reality _is_ finally unknown and unknowable. But if man _can_ live in
intelligible relations to what transcends natural science,—call this
which enables him so to live, ‘knowledge,’ ‘science,’ ‘common sense,’
‘faith,’ ‘inspiration,’ ‘revelation,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘reason,’—it is
treasure found for the philosopher.
Can Reid’s ‘common sense’ be sublimated into the universal consciousness
of Hegelian dialectic, and does this translation of faith into absolute
science constitute the true ideal of Scottish common sense philosophy at
the end of the nineteenth century? Is common knowledge, and scientific
knowledge in special sciences, only knowledge ‘in part,’ while the true
philosopher may aspire to know even as God knows? Must man thus claim
omniscience as the only fit ground of his protest against sceptical
nescience? Or, must his interpretation of the experience through which
he is passing be, even in the end, only an inspired faith-venture,
instead of the omniscience which elevates the common sense into itself?
Rather, must not the supposed omniscience, which is dissatisfied with
faith-ventures, because faith is supposed to be blind, be itself only the
common sense under another name—but with its intellectual constitution
more articulately explicated?
Surely only omniscience and omnipotence can dispense with the moral and
religious venture of our inspired common sense and its implied theistic
faith, as the root of reason in man—in his intermediate place and office,
between perfect knowledge and total ignorance. So understood, Reid’s
philosophy is _virtually_ the philosophy that makes its final appeal to
the divine in man, latent in each individual man, in and through whom
the universe is gradually interpreted as a revelation of perfect reason
or perfect goodness. True philosophy is then the moral and religious
venture which accepts and applies the principles of common sense, in the
assurance that, in genuine submission to their inspired authority, we
cannot finally be put to intellectual or moral confusion. Faith in God is
latent even in the perceptions of external sense, in which Reid found the
first example of the operation of this inspiration. Alike in the outer
world of the senses, and in free or responsible agency in man, filial
faith, ethical or theistic, may be justified by reasoning, although it
Cannot be reached by logic as a direct conclusion from premises. It is
our primary postulate, and not an object of logical proof; therefore
credible in reason while it is not demonstrable.
In this way a humanised Hegelianism, which seeks to restore or retain
the often dormant faith in the perfectly good God, and thus in the
future of man, may even be taken as in line with Reid, under the altered
intellectual conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. It
virtually appeals at last to moral faith.[28]
* * * * *
Poetry in another way than philosophy expresses and interprets for man
the inspired experience that transcends physical science and its logical
understanding. And we find in the great poets of the Victorian era an
appeal through the imagination to those elements in human nature, to
which Reid made argumentative appeal as a philosopher. In this lies
Wordsworth’s ‘healing power.’ His ‘Intimations of Immortality’ express
divine inspirations, through which man learns to understand himself and
his surroundings—inspirations that, dormant, ‘fade into the light of
common day,’ yet, recovered by reflection, ‘in a season of calm weather,
though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which
brought us hither.’ And ‘In Memoriam’ is Tennyson’s protest against the
doubting spirit of the age, on behalf of the final and life-determining
principles, which underlie creeds, belong to our earliest childhood,
and on which the wisest and best have rested with a more or less
intelligent consciousness through the ages—God revealed in the ideal man
latent in all men. The human office of inspired common sense or ethical
reason, final for beings whose ‘knowledge’ must be intermediate between
omniscience and blind ignorance of mere sense and feeling, is its tacit
philosophy—
‘Our wills are _ours_, we know not how,
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
We have but _faith_: we cannot _know_;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from _Thee_,
A beam in darkness: let it _grow_.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.’
Our scientific interpretation of the ever-changing universe at last rests
on ethical theistic faith, and the Christian revelation of divine love is
responded to by the divine inspiration of God in Man, in the form of the
spiritual Common Sense. If this be not so, we cannot rely on the Common
Sense, for it then belongs to a morally untrustworthy universe.
Established on this faith, philosophy or theology, in Scotland and
throughout the world, awaits the sceptical criticism and the spiritual
healing power of the masters of thought in the twentieth century, for its
further development, and application to human affairs.
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] The above from data at Birkwood.
[2] _Scottish Notes and Queries_, iii. 84-88; 128.
[3] The number is, unfortunately, unrecorded.
[4] Birkwood MSS.
[5] In _Scotland and Scotsmen of the Eighteenth Century_, by Ramsay of
Ochtertyre, there is an interesting account of this Mr. Bisset.
[6] _Essays on the Intellectual Powers_, II. ch. 10.
[7] While he lived here, he seems to have retained the incumbency of New
Machar till May 1752.
[8] Long ago removed. I have an engraving of it.
[9] These MS. dissertations have been lately recovered, and I have thus
been able to compare them with the _Inquiry_, in which I find them mostly
embodied.
[10] Birkwood MS.
[11] I have elsewhere discussed the true meaning of Berkeley’s philosophy.
[12] Between the College and the Cathedral, diverging to the east.
[13] Watt began those experiments in Glasgow about 1763.
[14] The American revolt was a severe stroke to Glasgow at the time,
though it led to a great development of manufactures in the city
afterwards. See Colville’s _By-Ways of History_ (1897), pp. 281-314.
[15] William Traill, a Glasgow graduate, was elected. Playfair (of St.
Andrews), afterwards Professor John Playfair of Edinburgh, was also a
candidate, then only eighteen.
[16] The Bell of the Brae.
[17] The Forth and Clyde Canal was commenced in 1768 and opened from sea
to sea in 1790.
[18] Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who often met him at Blair Drummond, mentions
that ‘for more than fifteen years Reid spent great part of the College
vacation there with Lord Kames.’
[19] Kant’s uncritical identification of Reid’s philosophical appeal
to the common rational sense with the popular appeal and declamation
of Oswald and even Beattie, is exposed by Professor Sidgwick in _Mind_
(April 1895).
[20] Birkwood MSS.
[21] Birkwood MSS.
[22] Professor Richardson’s Memoir of Arthur.
[23] _The World as Will and Idea_, translated by Mr. Haldane and Mr.
Kemp, ii. 240. Schopenhauer makes other interesting references to Reid.
[24] Birkwood MSS.
[25] See also Reid’s _Essays on the Active Powers_, I. 1-6, and _passim_.
[26] M. Boutroux, in _Revue Française d’Edimbourg_, No. 4.
[27] Reid’s philosophy was Renan’s ‘ideal’ in his early life, according
to his biographer.
[28] So in the ‘Preliminary Notice,’ in the new edition of Dr. Stirling’s
_Secret of Hegel_—last paragraph.