Thomas Reid(1710–1796)

Thomas Reid was born on 26 April 1710 at the manse of Strachan in Kincardineshire, on the foothills of the Grampians twenty miles south of Aberdeen, the son of the Reverend Lewis Reid, parish minister of Strachan, and Margaret Gregory of the Gregory family of mathematicians and astronomers who had produced the inventor of the reflecting telescope in the previous generation. The Gregory side made him: his uncle David Gregory had held the Savilian Chair at Oxford; his cousin John Gregory was professor of medicine at Aberdeen and later at Edinburgh. He was schooled at the Strachan parish school and at the burgh school of Kincardine O'Neil, and entered Marischal College in Aberdeen at twelve, graduating M.A. in 1726.

He read divinity at Aberdeen for the next five years, was licensed to preach in 1731, and worked as the college librarian at Marischal from 1733 to 1737 while waiting for a parish. He was presented to the New Machar parish in 1737 by King's College, and the presentation was protested by the congregation for two years before he was finally installed by force majeure in 1742; the congregation eventually came to respect him, partly because Elizabeth Reid, the wife he married in 1740, was a competent and generous parish wife. He spent fourteen years at New Machar, building the library that became his tool and corresponding with the Aberdeen philosophers David Fordyce, George Campbell and John Stewart who formed around him the Aberdeen Philosophical Society.

He had read David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature on its publication in 1739 and had spent the next decades worrying its argument. Hume's skeptical conclusion, that the mind has no direct access to an external world and no rational warrant for the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, struck Reid as a result that must be wrong, not because the argument failed but because the conclusion failed: a philosophy that ended in the impossibility of the world had to have a hidden flaw somewhere in its premises. In An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, published in Edinburgh in 1764, Reid located the flaw in Hume's theory of ideas. The mind, Reid argued, does not perceive its own ideas; it perceives the world directly, by way of senses that are God-given instruments of access to a real external order. The book founded the Scottish school of Common Sense philosophy and made its name almost overnight in the lecture rooms of Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow.

On the strength of the Inquiry he was offered, in 1764, the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow that Adam Smith was vacating to take up his tutorship of the young Duke of Buccleuch. Reid took the chair, moved his family from Aberdeen, and held it for twenty-three years. His Glasgow lectures, which ran on a five-year cycle through the whole field of moral and political philosophy, were attended by Dugald Stewart, Archibald Alison and a generation of younger philosophers who carried the Common Sense argument out of Glasgow into the wider English-speaking world. The lectures became the basis of his two later books, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788), published when he was in his mid-seventies and which lay out the mature form of his philosophy.

He retired from the chair in 1780 at seventy and lived out the next sixteen years at his house in Drygate, Glasgow, walking the College gardens in the mornings and writing in the afternoons. He died on 7 October 1796, aged eighty-six, and is buried in Blackfriars Kirkyard in Glasgow. The Common Sense school he founded shaped the philosophical curriculum of every major American college from Princeton to Yale through the entire nineteenth century, and the founding fathers of the American republic read Reid as part of the Scottish-American Enlightenment that ran through the colonies in the 1770s and 1780s; James Madison's notes from his Princeton studies under John Witherspoon are full of Reid. The Reid name today carries his memory as the philosopher whose argument that we have direct contact with a real world, when the cleverest of his contemporaries had argued we could not, became one of the load-bearing assumptions of the next two centuries of Anglo-American thought.