Thomas Reid/Chapter VI

by Alexander Campbell Fraser

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CHAPTER VI

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.^[1] 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 steamengine.^[2] [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 leagues, 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.^[3] 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.^[4] 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^[5] 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.^[6] 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.^[7]

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;^[8] 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?’^[9] 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.^[10] 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 to 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.'^[11] 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.

1. Between the College and the Cathedral, diverging to the east.
2. Watt began those experiments in Glasgow about 1763.
3. 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.
4. William Traill, a Glasgow graduate, was elected. Playfair (of St. Andrews), afterwards Professor John Playfair of Edinburgh, was also a candidate, then only eighteen.
5. The Bell of the Brae.
6. The Forth and Clyde Canal was commenced in 1768 and opened from sea to sea in 1790.
7. 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.'
8. 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).
9. Birkwood mss.
10. Birkwood mss.
11. Professor Richardson’s Memoir of Arthur.