Beattie argued more in the temper of a partisan than Reid, who criticised Hume in the spirit of a free and candid inquirer after truth.
On the 18th of January 1762 the honorary Doctorate of Divinity was conferred on Reid by Marischal College.
His fame was now more than local. In December 1763 he accepted the invitation of the University of Glasgow to fill the Chair of Moral Philosophy which Adam Smith had resigned. Before he entered on this new career he had given to the world an Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. This classic work embodies the result of twenty years of steady reflection at New Machar and Aberdeen, in quest of the actual foundation of human knowledge. Before we follow him to Glasgow, we must examine this issue of his intellectual life in Aberdeenshire—due to the challenge of modern agnosticism in the person of David Hume.
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSAL SCEPTICISM VERSUS INSPIRED COMMON SENSE: AN ‘INQUIRY INTO THE HUMAN MIND ON THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMON SENSE’
1764
As early as October 1762, as we have seen, Reid had given signs of an intention to offer the world some results of his meditations regarding the foundations of belief. Accordingly, in the end of the following year, he produced his first book, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Its motto expresses its leading argument—‘The inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.’ For it was to the inspirations, or revelations, of what he called the ‘common sense’ or ‘common judgment,’ regarded as the root of any human understanding of man and his environment, that he made his final appeal against the all-embracing doubt of Hume. This was the rock on which he took his stand in the universal deluge.
Reid was now in his fifty-fourth year. Hitherto his modesty had concealed his strength from all but a few friends. His book was concerned with questions that were not likely to withdraw him rapidly from ‘the obscurity of a learned retirement.’ The Inquiry, with its appeal to the final reason latent in human nature, is not to be interpreted as an appeal to popular opinion against theories of philosophers. In fact, its implied argument is not obvious to popular intelligence, although it is profoundly connected with all the chief interests of human life. Great books of this sort attract only the few who think. His brother-in-law, Mr. Rose, mentions that ‘Alexander Millar, the London bookseller, being in Aberdeen at this time, and in company with Dr. Reid, protested against books in metaphysics as bad bargains for publishers; by which he said he had himself lost money, but never gained any. Notwithstanding, Dr. Reid, having his Inquiry ready for publication, sold it to Mr. Millar for £50. When his friends bantered him upon the small sum he had received for so valuable a performance, he jocosely replied, “I think it is well sold.”’[10]
Another parallel here occurs between Reid and Kant. The Kritik of Pure Reason, Kant’s first great work, appeared in 1781, when he was in his fifty-seventh year. So, too, with Locke, who inaugurated the era of modern thought in which Reid and Kant are chief figures. His Essay, like Reid’s Inquiry, was the first fruit of twenty years of reflective thought, and it too made its appearance when its author was in his fifty-seventh year. It is curious to contrast the balanced caution and moderation of these long pondered treatises with the more paradoxical productions of others, whose intellectual ardour and impatience speedily committed them to all-comprehensive systems. Descartes, at forty, with his provisional doubt and reconstruction on a slender foundation; Spinoza, younger still, with his rational evolution of the universe from a single substance; Berkeley with his analysis of the material world into significant ideas, delivered at the age of twenty-five with the impetuous enthusiasm of Irish juvenile genius; and David Hume with his universal disintegration of human knowledge and belief, planned before he was one-and-twenty, composed before he was twenty-five, and eagerly given to the world in his twenty-eighth year. Reid, with his ‘good and well-wearing parts,’ characteristically represents the restrained authorship of those who treat our short life on this planet as short enough for well-weighed answers to the final questions about life and the universe.
As Reid’s Inquiry was really an appeal to human nature in arrest of Hume’s intellectual suicide, he desired, before presenting it to the world, to submit the argument privately to the Edinburgh sceptic. This was done through their common friend Dr. Blair. After Hume had read portions of the manuscript, he wrote this courteous letter to Reid on Feb. 25, 1763:—