Page:Thomas Reid (Fraser 1898).djvu/25

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intelligence, anticipating in the North the intellectual enlargement associated in the West with the University of Glasgow under Hutcheson, Leechman, and Adam Smith.

George Turnbull is little known now, but he is too important a factor in the making of Thomas Reid to be lightly passed over. He was an Edinburgh graduate, born in 1698, and like Reid a son of the manse. He became a regent of philosophy in Marischal College at the age of twenty-three. The College record informs us that on the 14th of April 1726 he presented for graduation a band of thirty-nine students: the name of Thomas Reid appears last in the list. Turnbull’s lectures when he was regent were in 1740 embodied in his Principles of Moral Philosophy. His leading arguments are illustrated and vindicated by quotations from Berkeley's Theory of Vision and Principles of Human Knowledge, also by the Inquiry of Francis Hutcheson and the Sermons of Bishop Butler. The influence of Berkeley is evident.

The mottoes on the title-page of Turnbull’s book express his method of inquiry. One of them is the precept of Pope—'Account for moral as for natural things'; the other expresses in the words of Newton the consequence which may be expected to follow—'If Natural Philosophy, in all its parts, by pursuing this method, shall at length be perfected, the bounds of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged.' Turnbull was among the first in Scotland to substitute, in mental philosophy, tentative study of the facts of human nature for logical deduction from abstract dogmas. 'If a fact be actually found, either in the outer world of sensible things, or in the inner and invisible world of mind, there is no room for reasoning against it. Every reasoning, however subtle, if it be repugnant in its con-