This discipline was more or less in vogue during the remainder of last century. Nearly twenty years after the date of Reid’s letter, when Johnson and Boswell visited Aberdeen, Johnson says that ‘in King’s College there is kept a public table, but the scholars in the Marischal College are boarded in the town.’ ‘The abandonment of this custom,’ Mr. Rait tells us, ‘seems to have been a gradual process, and to have taken place during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The restraint of collegiate residence had become exceedingly irksome.’ With the increasing age of entrants, schoolboy discipline might seem less expedient.
Instruction in the art of dancing was, it seems, provided by the University under the reformed regulations, to add manly grace to the rude bodily vigour of the Scottish undergraduate. Reid in advocating this may have remembered Locke’s advice in his Thoughts on Education: ‘Dancing being that which gives graceful motions all the life, and above all things manliness and a becoming confidence, I think it cannot be learned too early. But you must be sure to have a good master, that knows and can teach what is graceful and becoming, and that gives a freedom and ease to all the motions of the body. One that teaches not this is worse than none at all.’ How long this civilising art was cultivated in Reid’s College I have not discovered.
In Aberdeen Reid found himself in the society of persons of more than provincial eminence, destined, indeed, to leave their mark on the thought and literature of Scotland. The Chair of Medicine in his College was occupied by his cousin, Dr. John Gregory, a successful observer of external nature and man. In Marischal College, Thomas Blackwell, the Professor of Greek when Reid was an undergraduate, was now Principal; soon followed by George Campbell, who became the philosophical theologian of the Church of Scotland, by his criticism of Hume’s reasoning about miracles, and a master in literary, biblical, and ecclesiastical criticism,—in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, his Translation of the Gospels, and his History of the development of the Christian Church. Campbell was nine years younger than Reid, like him an alumnus of Marischal College; he had been minister of Banchory-Ternan for nine years before he was called to Aberdeen. He rivalled Reid himself in analytic power and calm, candid, luminous reasoning. Alexander Gerard, like Reid, a University reformer, and author of essays on ‘Taste’ and on ‘Genius,’ was Professor of Philosophy in Marischal College, and then of Divinity there, and afterwards at King’s. There was William Duncan, too, whose Logic was for a time in vogue in Scottish Universities—a regent in Marischal College when Reid began to teach philosophy at King’s; and Reid’s lifelong friend Stewart was still in the Chair of Mathematics. Perhaps the most widely known Aberdonian when he lived was James Beattie, poet more than philosopher, Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy in Marischal College, whose essay on ‘Truth’ gave him a name in the intellectual world, while the grace and pathos of the ‘Minstrel’ and the ‘Hermit’ appealed to a wider class, and secured a popular reputation. Aberdeen and its neighbourhood were then the home also of accomplished physicians and naturalists and scholars—Skenes and Ogilvies, Dunbars and Gordons.
As I have said, Reid’s first years at King’s College were much given to academical reform. His later years there were distinguished by his connection with a Society for philosophical inquiry, then quickened in Scotland by the fashionable scepticism of David Hume. Reid and Gregory originated this ‘Aberdeen Philosophical Society,’ or ‘Wise Club,’ as it was called. It was the parent of some of the most remarkable books in Scottish philosophical literature in the latter part of last century. The first meeting was on January 12, 1758, and the last was in February 1773. The original members were Dr. John Gregory, Dr. David Skene, Professor John Stewart, Mr. Robert Trail, the Rev. George Campbell, and Mr. Thomas Reid; to whom in the same year were added the Rev. Alexander Gerard, the Rev. John Farquhar, Mr. Charles Gordon, and Mr. John Kerr. James Beattie joined them in 1760, Dr. George Skene and Mr. William Ogilvie in 1763, Mr. James Dunbar in 1765, and Mr. William Trail in 1766. Reid was secretary of the Society, and the minutes for many years are in his handwriting. It met once a fortnight on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month. ‘The members,’ Sir W. Forbes tells us in his Life of Beattie, ‘met at five o’clock in the evening—for in those days at Aberdeen it was the custom to dine early—when one of the members, as president, took the chair, and left it at half an hour after eight, when they partook of a slight and inexpensive collation, and at ten o’clock they separated.’ At these meetings it appears that part of the evening’s entertainment was the reading of a short essay, composed by one of the members in his turn. Besides these discourses, a literary or philosophical question was proposed each night, for discussion at the next meeting. And it was the duty of the proposer of the question to open the discussion; by him, also, the opinions of the members who took a part in it were digested into an abstract, which was engrossed in the album of the Society. I am told that the Lion Inn, on the Spital Hill near Reid’s manse, and sometimes the Lemon Tree Inn, in the new town, were the usual places of meeting. The common attendance was five or six. One of the rules enjoined moderation and forbade toasts.
The meetings were given partly to essays by the members, and partly to oral discussions of proposed questions. ‘Philosophy,’ according to the rules, ‘comprehends every principle of science which may be deduced by just or lawful induction from the phenomena either of the human mind or of the material world.’ Perhaps no society of the kind in this country has fulfilled its end so well. The ‘Rankenian Club’ and the ‘Select Society’ in Edinburgh lasted longer, or enrolled more members, but neither of them was the parent of so much good literature. The ‘Inquiry’ of Reid, Beattie’s essay on ‘Truth,’ Gerard on ‘Taste’ and on ‘Genius,’ and Campbell’s books on ‘Miracles’ and on ‘Rhetoric’ appear in fragments or in germ in the minutes of the ‘Wise Club’ of Aberdeen. Its vitality was sustained and stimulated by the sceptical speculations of Hume, which were much in touch with educated opinion in the third quarter of last century, when spiritual philosophy was languid in Britain and throughout the world. The tone of those engaged in the philosophical vindication of belief appears in one of Reid’s letters, who writes thus to David Hume in 1763:—
‘Your friendly adversaries, Drs. Campbell and Gerard, as well as Dr. Gregory, return their compliments to you respectfully. A little Philosophical Society here, of which all three are members, is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your company, although we are all good Christians, would be more acceptable than that of Athanasius; and since we cannot have you upon the bench, you are brought oftener than any other man to the bar; accused and defended with great zeal, but without bitterness. If you write no more in morals, politics, and metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects.’
It is interesting to find in the records of the Society the subjects of the dissertations contributed by Reid during the six years in which he was its mainspring,[9] as well as the questions which he proposed for debate. They signally illustrate the course of his thoughts in these years. On May 24, 1758, ‘Mr. Reid intimat that he designed as the subject of his discourse some Observations on the Philosophy of the Mind, and particularly on the Perceptions we have by Sight.’ On June 17, 1758, he read a paper ‘On the Difficulty of a just Philosophy of the Human Mind; General Prejudices against D——d (sic) Hume’s System of the Mind; and some Observations on the Perceptions we have by Sight.’ On March 14, 1759, he presented an ‘Analysis of the Sensations of Smell and Taste.’ On 26th February 1760 ‘Mr. Reid intimat that in his discourse he was to continue his Analysis of the Senses’; and accordingly, on the 20th of August in the same year, he gave notice of his intention of ‘taking Dr. Gregory’s place and reading a paper on the Sense of Touch.’ In July 1761 he appears with a paper on the ‘Transit of Venus’ in that year; and on the 26th January 1762 he gives a ‘Valedictory Address,’ as first annual president of the Society (the members having previously taken the chair by rotation)—on ‘Euclid’s Definitions and Axioms,’ in which he returns to the favourite studies of his youth. In 1761 he had resumed his investigation of the Senses, for in September he is credited with another paper on the ‘Sense of Seeing.’ His last contribution, in October 1762, was on ‘Perception,’ which summed up his characteristic work in the Society. And after reading this paper, ‘Mr. Reid declined to give it for insertion in the Records, in regard that he proposed soon to send it to the press, along with some other discourses which he had read before the Society.’ A minute on 28th October 1764 announces that, ‘as Dr. Reid has left this country, no discourse is to be expected from him.’
The following Questions for debate were proposed by Reid during the six years of his membership:—1758, 13th and 26th July, ‘Are the Objects of the Human Mind properly divided into Impressions and Ideas; and must every Idea be a copy of a preceding Impression?’ This closely touches the fundamental assumption of the sceptical philosophy. Those which follow suggest a disposition to ethical and social discussion. 12th June 1759, ‘Whether Mankind with regard to Morals always was and is the same?’ 1st April 1760, ‘Whether it is proper to educate Children without instilling Principles into them of any kind whatever?’ (Beattie’s celebrated experiment in the education of his son may be connected with this.) 15th April 1761, ‘Whether Moral Character consists in Affections in which the Will is not concerned, or in fixed, habitual, and constant Purposes?’ 8th January 1762, ‘Whether by the encouragement of proper Laws the Number of Births in Great Britain might be nearly doubled, or at least greatly increased?’ Here we have a sort of inverted Malthusianism suggested. 22nd November 1763, ‘Whether every Action deserving Moral Approbation must be done from a persuasion of its being morally good?’
Beattie, in one of his letters to Sir W. Forbes, thus refers to the Society and to his own philosophical relation to Reid:—
‘I have of late been much engaged in metaphysics; at least, I have been labouring with all my might to overturn that visionary science. I am a member of a club in this town who style themselves the Philosophical Society. I hope you will not think the worse of this Society when I tell you, that to it the world is indebted for a Comparative View of the Faculties of Man, and an Inquiry into Human Nature on the Principles of Common Sense. I have shown that all genuine reasoning does ultimately terminate in principles which it is impossible to disbelieve, and as impossible to prove; that, therefore, the ultimate standard of truth to us is Common Sense, or that instinctive conviction into which all true reasoning does resolve itself; that therefore what contradicts Common Sense is in itself absurd, however subtle the arguments which support it. My principles in the main are not essentially different from Dr. Reid’s; but they seem to offer a more compendious method of destroying scepticism. I intend to show (and have already in part shown) that all sophistical reasoning is marked by certain characters which distinguish it from true investigation; and thus I flatter myself I shall be able to discover a method of detecting sophistry, even when one is not able to give a logical confutation of its arguments.’