‘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[16] 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.[17] 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.