PREFACE
This little book is an attempt to present Reid in a fresh light, and in his relations to present-day thought. It deals with the Scottish chapter in that enduring alternation between agnostic despair and endeavour after perfect insight which seems to be a law of the philosophic progress of mankind. Thomas Reid, home-bred and self-contained, is the national representative, in the eighteenth century, of the via media between these extremes. In the concluding chapter I have looked at the philosophical appeal to inspired data of Common Sense, in the wider light of the theistic philosophy of the universe, and not merely as part of an inductive science of the human mind. This connects the theistic postulate of spiritual reason, as the foundation of human experience, with Reid’s appeal to the ultimate but often dormant necessities of human nature, a subject treated more fully in my Philosophy of Theism (1896).
For valuable unpublished material—more indeed than I could avail myself of within narrow limits—I am indebted to Miss Hilda Paterson, the guardian of manuscript remains and other relics of her ancestor, preserved at Birkwood, in Reid’s native country of the Dee. I also owe much to Mr. R. S. Rait, now of New College, Oxford, the historian of the Universities of Aberdeen, whose research has done much to illustrate his alma mater in the North. And I
