CHAPTER VIGLASGOW COLLEGE: THE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY1764-1780

‘By Dr. Blair’s means I have been favoured with the perusal of your performance, which I have read with great pleasure and attention. It is certainly very rare that a piece so deeply philosophical is wrote with so much spirit, and affords so much entertainment to the reader, though I must still regret the disadvantages under which I read it, as I never had the whole performance at once before me, and could not be able to compare one part with another. To this reason chiefly I ascribe some obscurities which, in spite of your short analysis and abstract, seem to hang over your system; for I must do you the justice to own that when I enter into your ideas, no man appears to express himself with greater perspicuity than you do, a talent which above all others is requisite in that species of literature which you have cultivated. There are some objections which I would willingly propose to the chapter “Of Sight,” did I not suspect that they arise from my not sufficiently understanding it. I shall therefore forbear till the whole can lie before me, and shall not at present propose any further difficulties to your reasonings. I shall only say that if you have been able to clear up these abstruse and important subjects,instead of being mortified, I shall be so vain as to pretend to a share of the praise; and shall think that my errors, by having at least some coherence, have led you to make a more strict review of my principles, which were the common ones, and to perceive their futility.’

In his reply to this letter Reid recognises the debt which philosophy owes to the sceptical criticism of Hume. He writes thus to Hume:—

‘King’s College,18th March 1763.‘Sir,—On Monday last Mr. John Farquhar brought me your letter of February 25th, enclosed in one from Dr. Blair. I thought myself very happy in having the means of obtaining, at second hand, through the friendship of Dr. Blair, your opinion of my performance; and you have been pleased to communicate it directly in so polite and friendly a manner as merits great acknowledgments on my part.‘In attempting to throw some light on these abstruse subjects, I wish to preserve the due mean between confidence and despair. But whether I have any success in this attempt or not, I shall always avow myself your disciple in metaphysics. I have learned more from your writings in this kind than from all others put together. Your system appears to me not only coherent in all its parts, but likewise justly deduced from principles commonly received among philosophers,—principles which I never thought of calling in question, until the conclusions you draw from them in theTreatise of Human Naturemade me suspect them. If these principles are solid your system must stand; and whether they are or not can better be judged after you have brought to light the whole system that grows out of them, than when the greater part of it was wrapped up in clouds and darkness. I agree with you therefore, that if this system shall ever be demolished, you have a just claim to a great share of the praise, both because you have made it a distinct and determinate mark to be aimed at, and have furnished proper artillery for the purpose. When you have seen the whole of my performance, I shall take it as a very great favour to have your opinion upon it, from which I make no doubt of receiving light, whether I receive conviction or no.’

‘King’s College,18th March 1763.

‘Sir,—On Monday last Mr. John Farquhar brought me your letter of February 25th, enclosed in one from Dr. Blair. I thought myself very happy in having the means of obtaining, at second hand, through the friendship of Dr. Blair, your opinion of my performance; and you have been pleased to communicate it directly in so polite and friendly a manner as merits great acknowledgments on my part.

‘In attempting to throw some light on these abstruse subjects, I wish to preserve the due mean between confidence and despair. But whether I have any success in this attempt or not, I shall always avow myself your disciple in metaphysics. I have learned more from your writings in this kind than from all others put together. Your system appears to me not only coherent in all its parts, but likewise justly deduced from principles commonly received among philosophers,—principles which I never thought of calling in question, until the conclusions you draw from them in theTreatise of Human Naturemade me suspect them. If these principles are solid your system must stand; and whether they are or not can better be judged after you have brought to light the whole system that grows out of them, than when the greater part of it was wrapped up in clouds and darkness. I agree with you therefore, that if this system shall ever be demolished, you have a just claim to a great share of the praise, both because you have made it a distinct and determinate mark to be aimed at, and have furnished proper artillery for the purpose. When you have seen the whole of my performance, I shall take it as a very great favour to have your opinion upon it, from which I make no doubt of receiving light, whether I receive conviction or no.’

Hume’s philosophy being the suicide of intelligence, can hardly be spoken of as a ‘system.’ It is not constructive, but wholly destructive, and therefore a negation of system, philosophic or other, in a finally speechless and motionless agnostic doubt.

Hume’s letter to Reid was his only rejoinder to theInquiry. In 1763 he had ceased to produce philosophical books. His recognition of the ‘deeply philosophical’ nature of Reid’s argument is a testimony to the worth of the work on which Reid’s literary reputation chiefly rests. The ‘share of the praise’ which Hume claims, Reid was ready to concede. ‘I hope,’ he says in the Dedication of theInquiry, ‘I hope that the author of this sceptical system wrote it in the belief that it would be useful to mankind. And perhaps it may prove so at last. For I conceive the sceptical writers to be a set of men whose business it is to pick holes in the fabric of knowledge wherever it is weak and faulty; and when those places are properly repaired, the whole building becomes more firm and solid than it was formerly’. And, in fact, the intellectual progress of mankind has been sustained by an alternation of sceptical and conservative philosophies.

After prolonged cogitation, the ‘weak and faulty’ place in the ‘fabric’ of modern philosophy seemed to Reid to lie in an unproved assumption with which modern philosophers set out in their speculations. For they took for granted that only the sensations and ideas within each mind could be perceived: yet we naturally ‘believe that we are seeing and handling the very outward things themselves’ that make what is called the material world. If the philosophers are right, we have no immediate revelation of the qualities of outward things, and no evidence of theirexistence, except the succession of changing sensations and ideas of sensations which alone are presented to us. I can never directly encounter an external object. What I suppose to be outward is all in my mind. With a world thus imprisoned within me, is there any legitimate way through which I can assure myself of realities outside my mind, including other living persons who have their own sensations and ideas as much as I have mine, but numerically different from my private stock? If not, grave consequences seemed to follow: faith and hope must die out of human life. So Reid argued.

TheTreatise of Human Naturewas the scarecrow that warned Reid of the destructive consequences of this assumption, that we are shut up among our own ideas; as he had himself in youth been taught to believe, and by which he had been led on to Berkeley’s conception of a wholly ideal material world. He now began to see this ideal material world of Berkeley in a new light. It seemed to leave himalonein the universe of his own mind. The ideal matter of Berkeley cannot, he argued, inform me of the existence of other living persons: what I have supposed to be other persons must be, like the rest, only some of my own ideas. If I allow that my own sensations and ideas are my only possible original data, I cannot from such transitory phantoms infer the real existence of other persons. With this starting-point as my only one, the whole universe naturally supposed to surround me—bodies and spirits, friends and relations, all dead things and all living persons—acknowledged by common judgment to have a permanent existence, whether I am having ideas of them or not—vanish at once. Myprivatesensations and ideas can never really signify to me the existence of other conscious beings; only whatmight be calledpublic ideas, common to other minds and to me, could do this. And such objects are not properly called ‘ideas’—public or private; they are dead things and living persons; they exist whether I individually have sensations and ideas or not. In short, Reid could find nothing in Berkeley’s philosophical theory—as he interpreted it[11]—which afforded even probable ground for concluding that there were in existence other intelligent beings—fathers, brothers, friends, or fellow-citizens. ‘I am left alone,’ the only creature of God, in that forlorn state of egoism into which it was said some of the disciples of Descartes were brought by this same preliminary assumption of their master—a sufficientreductio ad absurdumof the favourite postulate which leads to it. To act upon it would argue insanity in the agent; it must therefore be empty verbal speculation. So Reid further argued.

But even this solitude is not the last issue of Reid’sbête noire. The system in which I have been educated, he said, not only leaves me absolutely alone;it extinguishes me, along with the external universe of things and persons; it is at last literally suicidal. It transforms persistent personal existence into a mere succession of unconnected sensations and ideas. If the magic circle of sensations and ideas, within a self that persists amidst perpetual changes, cannot be broken through, then even this supposed ‘self’ must be an illusion, and the word self must be meaningless. The personal pronoun ‘I,’ as well as the personal pronoun ‘you,’ are both alike unmeaning. The universe resolves at last, not merely into sensations that are all referable to myself, but into sensations without any self—into isolated sensations—which seem indeed to follow one another inan orderly way, but without any guarantee that the seeming order is more than transitory, or that the illusory cosmos may not at any moment become chaos.

Is there nothing within the resources of reason to arrest this intellectual suicide? Has reason got anything to show in justification of this preliminary sacrifice of a conviction on which men have to act, whatever their theories may be? Must I surrender the conviction, that when I am seeing or touching I am actually having revealed to me something that is extended and solid, and that,as such, mustbe more and other than the private sensations and ideas of the person that is seeing and touching? Must this conviction, and others like it, on which human experience practically depends, be all sacrificed on the altar of authority and conjecture?

This had been the question around which Reid’s thoughts were revolving in the twenty years preceding the publication of his book. ‘For my own satisfaction,’ he tells us, ‘I entered into a serious examination of the principles upon which this sceptical system is built; and was not a little surprised to find that it leans with its whole weight upon a hypothesis which is ancient indeed, and hath been very generally received by philosophers, but of which I could find no solid proof. The hypothesis I mean is—that we do not really perceive things that are external, but only certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon the mind, which are called “impressions” and “ideas.” I thought it unreasonable, upon the authority of philosophers, to admit an hypothesis which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy; all religion and virtue, and all common sense; and I resolved to inquire into this subject anew, without regard to any hypothesis.’

Toacceptas a spiritual fact the judgment of human nature, which assures me that when I am seeing or touching I am ‘face to face’ with a reality that exists independently of my changing sensations or ideas, instead of trying in vain by reasoning toprovethe existence of this reality by means of intervening sensations and ideas,—this was the alternative he adopted. I dismiss the unwarranted supposition that only my own mind and its invisible contents can be immediately manifested to me; and I fall back on the perception I have of something solid and extended, and therefore more and other than a mere sensation or idea, as what is present to me when I see and touch. Recognition of the fact that our five senses somehow bring us into a consciousness of what is neither a transitory sensation nor an idea of a sensation, but something independent of me, and that would continue to exist after I individually had ceased to exist—this recognition of external realities is Reid’s key to sound philosophy. It is a displacement of the so-called ‘ideas’ of the philosophers, and of fallacious inferences founded upon them, and a substitution of the common reasonable sense, or common judgment of reason, which neither requires nor admits of logical proof. Reid might say that what is most worth proving cannot be logically proved. We all have a direct perception of external reality which cannot be eradicated by reasoning. Abolition of the prejudice which interposedreasonings founded on unreal ideasbetween our perception and the solid and extended reality, seemed to Reid, in virtue of its far-reaching consequences, to be the chief good he had as a philosopher secured to mankind. In his old age he writes thus to Dr. Gregory:—

‘The merit of what you are pleased to callmy philosophylies, I think, chiefly in having called in question the common theory of ideas, or images of things in the mind, being the only objects of thought—a theory founded on natural prejudices, and so universally received as to be interwoven with the structure of language. Yet, were I to give you a detail of what led me to call in question this theory, after I had long held it as self-evident and unquestionable, you would think, as I do, that there was much of chance in the matter. The discovery was the birth of time, not of genius; and Berkeley and Hume did more to bring it to light than the man that hit upon it. I think there is hardly anything that can be calledminein the philosophy of mind which does not follow with ease from the detection of this prejudice.’

Yet Reid’sInquiryhas been condemned as an unphilosophical appeal from the thoughtful to vulgar intelligence, making the unreflecting many supreme judges in questions intelligible only to the reflecting few. His employment of ‘common sense’ to express the regulative principle of his philosophy would put his book outside philosophical literature, if this term were taken as a synonym for unreasoned opinion—the average judgments of the man in the street. Reid’s own account of what he means by common sense, not to speak of Hume’s recognition of the ‘deeply philosophical’ character of the argument in theInquiry, should protect him against this imputation. He describes the common sense to which he constantly appeals as ‘the first degree of reason,’ and as having for its office ‘to judge of things self-evident.’ As such, he contrasts it with reasoning, or ‘the second degree of reason, which draws conclusions that are not self-evident from the self-evident judgments of the common sense.’ This distinction between the common rational sense, on which a knowledge of the universe, like thehuman, which falls short of omniscience,mustultimately turn, and those judgments that are reached by logical reasoning, corresponds to what the Greeks distinguished as noetic and dianoetic power of reason in man. Reid’s genuine judgments of the common sense may be regarded as the divinely inspired response to questions which can be determined for man only by this ideal man latent in us all—judgments verified by the insanity that is implied in resisting them in our actions.

As obtrusive examples of judgments of the common sense, Reid takes the logically undemonstrable convictions (1) of the existence of things external to and independent of me and my perceptions; (2) of my individual personal existence, and continuous personal identity; and (3) of the uniformity, and therefore interpretability, of nature, implying that I may form conclusions about what I have not experienced by what I have experienced. I cannot demonstrate the truth of these judgments: I can only justify them in reason by showing that human nature responds to them, and forbids me to reject them in my actions, on pain of being judged a lunatic, whatever I may say in my speculative theories. ‘Such original and natural judgments,’ he says, ‘are part of the furniture whichnaturehath given to the human understanding. They are the inspiration of the Almighty. They serve to direct us in the common affairs of life, when our reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark; they are part of our constitution; all the discoveries of our reason are grounded upon them; they make up what is calledthe common senseof mankind. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder in the constitution, is what we calllunacy, as when a man believes that he is made of glass. Whena man suffers himself to be reasoned out of the principles of common sense by metaphysical arguments, we call itmetaphysical lunacy, which differs from the other species of the distemper in this, that it is not continued, but intermittent; it is apt to seize the patient in solitary and speculative moments; but when he enters into sanity, Common Sense recovers her authority.’

It is the first of these three examples of the common sense that is the subject of theInquiry—intended as preliminary to others which may follow. ‘A clear enumeration and explication of the principles of common sense’ was henceforward Reid’s ultimate aim; but thus far he took those involved in our experience when we are tasting, or smelling, or hearing, or touching, or seeing. As axioms and definitions are the preliminaries of abstract mathematical reasonings, so our sensuous perceptions through the five senses are the preliminaries to reasonings about concrete realities in the world of change. The leading principle of theInquiryis, that something extended, solid, and movable is directly manifested in our sensuous experiences, equally with the direct manifestations of our own sensations and other feelings when we are conscious of them; and also that we are obliged by common sense to regard extended, solid, and movable things asotherthan mere transitory sensation or idea. Extended things, large or small, refuse to be melted down into sensations or states of one’s private consciousness. Take this specimen of philosophical argument for accepting perceptions which cannot be logically demonstrated, but which the common sense of human nature refuses to reject:—

‘Suppose I am pricked with a pin, I ask, is thepainI feel a sensation? Undoubtedly it is. There can be nothing thatresembles pain in an inanimate thing: the pain must be in me, a living being. But I ask again, is thepina sensation? To this question I feel myself under a necessity of answering that the pin is not a sensation, nor can have the least resemblance to any sensation. The pin has length and thickness, figure and weight. A sensation can have none of these qualities. I am not more certain that the pain I feelisa sensation than that the pinis nota sensation. Yet the pin is an object of sense; and I am as certain that I perceive its figure and hardness by my senses as that I feel pain when I am pricked by it.’

This is to say that if, with the philosophers, Icallthe pin as well as the pain a sensation or an idea, I must mean by ‘sensation’ and ‘idea,’ when I apply those words to the pin, not a private self-contained feeling or a fancy, in which I am only manifesting my conscious self, but (so to speak) apublicsensation or idea—perceivable by other persons as well as by me—a manifestation, in short, of what isoutside my mind—of something that exists permanently inspaceand not transitorily inme—and that is thus fit to be a medium of communication between me and other living persons, informing me of their existence and in some measure of their thoughts—all which (Reid takes for granted) each person’s private feelings and fancies could not do. But to employ the words ‘sensation’ and ‘idea’ in this new meaning, and to speak of an idea as public or external, would be an abuse of language. We must mark, always by appropriate words, distinctions which we are obliged to acknowledge in fact. The inspirations or revelations of the common sense, in and through which the Almighty Power gives us an understanding of the life and world in which we find ourselves, inspirations in which all men are believed more or less to participate, require us to distinguish the solid and extended pin, as something public or outward,in contrast to the private feeling of pain, of which no one except the person who feels it is conscious. I am thus obliged to recognise more in existence than my own sensations and ideas—as much obliged as I am to recognise my sensations and ideas themselves when I am conscious of them. Only so can I find myself living in an environment that is capable of signifying the contemporaneous life, and some of the thoughts and feelings of other persons. In all this I am only falling back on the divine revelations of the common sense. They make me reject in conduct what is inconsistent with them; although this natural obligation is all the reason I can give in justification of my obedience.

It is thus that Reid recognises his right in reason to grasp realities that are independent of his individual self; and he thinks that he is doing this philosophically by getting rid of the unphilosophical supposition, that he needs to work his way to them by logical reasoning, founded on wholly inward impressions. The true philosophy of perception with him is to discharge the medium, and at once take the bull by the horns.

Some may think that theInquiryrepresents wasted labour—that the ‘metaphysical lunacy’ which abolishes personal pronouns as meaningless words, and inconsistently reasons that all who reason must be fools, is at the best the idle intellectual pastime of persons who pretend to be universal sceptics—all which Reid has taken too seriously, and which at any rate by its self-contradiction refutes itself. For it asserts that assertion is impossible. It is an argument that concludes for the rejection of the postulates without which it is impossible for human beings to reason at all. It is a philosophy that destroys itself in destroying all philosophy. The suicide does not need to be put to death.

Yet the suicide, doubly slain in theInquiry, may be used as a warning of the consequence of doing violence to the genuine common sense, or ideal man that is latent in each man; especially on subjects in which doubt is easier than in the case of outward things and persons. The ‘metaphysical lunacy’ of doubt about the existence of other persons may be acknowledged, while the common sense, unawake in its moral or spiritual elements, fails to protest against ethical atheism or agnosticism. What Reid calls the common sense is alive consciously in various degrees, in different persons, in different countries and periods. A common sense of the existence of outward things and persons is practically awake in all sane minds. But the spiritual convictions, of which some are hardly conscious, may be rejected even practically without obvious lunacy. And something is gained for those convictions, if it can be shown, as areductio ad absurdum, that their rejection involves the moral sceptic too in the ‘lunacy’ of universal doubt and pessimist despair.

That Reid lays much stress on ‘calling in question the common theory of ideas or images in perception’ is explained by his assumption, that this theory involves perversion of the common sense even in its preliminary contact with outward things in sense, thus obviously discrediting it as the final court of appeal in every other instance. It may in this way be taken as a plea for a more faithful adherence on the part of philosophers to the genuine common-sense judgments, which can be made to respond to an adequate appeal, however dormant they may be in individuals. This final appeal to human nature must, in short, be to human natureas it is in fact, not to human natureas distorted in hypothesis.

For, after all, the root of the agnosticism which is found in history alternating with the final faith of the common sense, lies deeper than in mistaken hypotheses of philosophers about our perceptions in sense. Reid’s substitution in philosophy of immediate for mediate perception of matter is therefore an inadequate cure. The periodically returning doubt concerns, not the outness or inwardness of what is revealed to sense, but the meaning and character of the Power that is at work within the universe of matter and mind, and with which we first come into contact and collision in sense. Is it, in its final and pervading Power, a bad or a good sort of universe that we open our eyes upon, when we begin to exercise our senses? What are its final relations to me, and my final relations to it? Nobody doubts the existence of things and persons, so far as they are revealed to the senses. But what is our implied Common Sense of the final meaning of the Whole? Am I to put an optimist or a pessimist ultimate interpretation upon it all? The lurid mixture of pain and pleasure, evil and good, presented by the animated world, combined with spiritually dormant common sense in individual men,—is surely a more potent factor of agnostic doubt than an erroneous account of perception in circulation among persons who speculate.

Reid’s course of thought amidst new surroundings in Glasgow brought him nearer to the source and corrective of the scepticism that is aroused by the suspicious-looking universe of mingled good and evil, to which our sense perceptions introduce us.

In November 1764 we find Reid, now almost fifty-five years of age, in the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the Old College in the High Street of Glasgow. The Reid family lived then, and for two years after, not in the Professors’ Court within the College, but a quarter of a mile away, in an old-fashioned street called the Drygate.[12]The manuscript in the family bible records that Reid was admitted to the Glasgow professorship on the 12th of June. He carried with him from the quaint manse in Aberdeen to his new home in the Drygate, his wife, three daughters, all above twenty years of age, and two boys; they left three infant children buried in Aberdeenshire. The Glasgow Chair supplied an income, including fees, somewhat in advance of the Aberdeen regency; and its duties required concentrated study of intellectual and moral agency in man, instead of the dispersion over a wide range of the phenomena and laws of matter and mind which was necessary in King’s College. Yet it was ‘not without reluctance,’ we are told, that he consented to tear himself from a spot where he had so long been fastening his roots; and much as he loved the society in which he passed the remainder of his days, the advantagesof 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 toHumphrey 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 theplace.’ 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. HisTheory of Moral Sentimentshad 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, andMontesquieu—its author ‘the first economical philosopher, and perhaps the most eloquent theoretical moralist, of modern times.’ Smith’s predecessor was Francis Hutcheson, author of thatInquiry into our Ideas of Beauty and Virtuewhich 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 aSynopsis 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 ofZeluco, 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 theInquiry, 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 lightof 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 publishedEssaysof 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 theAnalogy; 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 toprovethe 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 afterseven, 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 arecivesof 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 andfree 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 havehad 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—

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