Three years before his death Reid is found preparing the Account of the University of Glasgow, which appeared three years after his death, in the Statistical Account of Scotland published by Sir John Sinclair. It was not communicated by him to Sir John, but transmitted by Professor Jardine, in name of the Principal and Professors, at whose request Reid seems to have engaged in this work. It was an anonymous publication, but it has been attributed to him, and it bears internal evidence of his hand. His colleague, Professor Richardson, in his biographical account of Professor Arthur, Reid’s successor, published in 1803, mentions that ‘the Statistical Account of the University was all written by Dr. Reid, except the statements respecting the business of particular classes.’ It shows intelligence then uncommon in Scotland of the mediæval constitution of Universities, and appreciation of the true academical ideal. The life begun at King’s College forty years before in projects of University reform, was fitly closed by this account of the great western seat of learning.
Mrs. Reid died early in 1792. His feelings were thus expressed in a letter to Dugald Stewart:—
‘By the loss of my bosom friend, with whom I lived fifty-two years, I am brought into a kind of new world, at a time of life when old habits are not easily forgot, or new ones acquired. But every world is God’s world, and I am thankful for the comforts He has left me. Mrs. Carmichael has now the care of two deaf old men, and does everything in her power to please them; and both are very sensible of her goodness. I have more health than at my time of life [82] I had any reason to expect. I walk about; entertain myself with reading what I soon forget; I can converse with one person if he articulates distinctly and within ten inches of my left ear; I go to church without hearing a word of what is said. You know I had never any pretensions to vivacity, but I am still free from languor and ennui.’
After this sorrow, his daughter, Mrs. Carmichael, lived much in his house in the Professors’ Court. She became a widow in the same year, for her husband died a few months after Mrs. Reid. Elizabeth Leslie, daughter of his stepsister Margaret, was also an inmate, and added to the comfort of the closing years. Soon after her father’s death Mrs. Carmichael went to live at Aberdeen.
CHAPTER VIII
INSPIRED COMMON SENSE AND CAUSATION: ACTIVE OR MORAL POWER IN MAN
Philosophical recognition of the genuine Common Sense or natural judgment of mankind, especially in two of its factors, which seemed to Reid obscured if not suppressed by dogmatic hypothesis, gave its character to his whole intellectual life. He found, in the first place, that ‘all philosophers; from Plato to Mr. Hume, agree in this, that we do not perceive external objects immediately, and that the immediate object of perception must be some image present to the mind.’ To rid philosophy of this hypothesis, as a mere prejudice, inconsistent with the absolute trustworthiness, and therefore with the supreme and final rational authority of our natural judgment, was the chief aim of his Aberdonian life—culminating in the Inquiry in 1764. He found, in the second place, that ‘to confound the notion of agent or efficient cause with that of physical cause has been a common error of philosophers, from the days of Plato to our own’; and it seemed to him as subversive of moral relations in the universe as the other was of physical relations. Accordingly, our conception of Power or Causation chiefly engaged him in Glasgow. This appears in his ‘Essays’ on moral Power in man; in his correspondence with Kames and Gregory in the last twenty years of his life; as well as in the unpublished fragment on ‘Power,’ in 1792, which was his last expression of reflective thought. The Philosophy of Perception and the Philosophy of Causation—our common sense of extended reality in our first intercourse with it in the senses, and our common sense conception of ‘power’ and ‘cause’ which arises in the presence of the changes amidst which we live and have our being—these were the two poles of Reid’s philosophical life. His whole life was a war against two common errors of philosophers regarding these, from the days of Plato to our own, in each of which the seeds of speculative and practical scepticism seemed to lie thickly. If these two fundamental convictions were untrustworthy, then faith in anything must lose its sustaining strength. For our perceptions through the five senses are the first principles of all our reasonings about the actual universe, and our causal judgments are the means of interpreting the realities to which those perceptions only introduce us.
We find ourselves continually in contact and collision with Power that is external to ourselves individually; and we seem, too, to be exerting powers of our own: on the Power latent in the universe, our happiness or misery, our whole destiny, depends. What does all this mean? What is meant by the judgment that all changes in the universe are ‘caused’; and what is the origin of this judgment, or of the conception of ‘cause’ that is involved in it? Are the powers which we recognise in us and around us to be referred only to inanimate things as their centres; or only to living and self-conscious persons; or to both?
Priestley, as an advocate of the claim of matter to account sufficiently for self-conscious life in man, and Kames and Priestley by their universal necessity, confirmed Reid’s disposition to inquire further into the nature and origin of the conception of power, and the judgment that every change presupposes what we ambiguously call a cause. His cousin Gregory, too, inquired about causation, and gave the results to the world in an Essay on the Difference between the Relation of Motive and Action, and that of Cause and Effect in Physics, which appeared in 1792.