Thomas Reid

by Alexander Campbell Fraser

It is a curious circumstance in the evolution of philosophy in Scotland that Reid’s first publication should thus be adverse criticism of Hutcheson, the father of Modern Philosophy in Scotland. It is also curious that this juvenile performance presents another of the parallels between Reid and Kant. For it happened that in the preceding year Kant had made his first appearance, on a question concerned with mathematics, and, like Reid’s, in an argument against conclusions maintained by Leibnitz.

But this mathematical brochure imperfectly represents the ‘intense study’ at New Machar. For an event happened soon after Reid’s settlement there which determined the direction of his thoughts for the remainder of his life. In January 1739, a book made an almost unnoticed appearance in London, which in the end became the chief factor in shaping the course of European thought. Its author was David Hume, then a young man, unknown to fame, not thirty years of age, the younger son of a Berwickshire laird. Hume was younger than Reid by one year: both were born on the 26th of April. His name is popularly connected with the History of England; but this Treatise of Human Nature, which somehow found its way into the manse of New Machar, represents his most significant work. It has contributed perhaps as much as any single book to the subsequent progress of philosophy in Europe. Hume indeed penetrates into regions which the ordinary reader fails to connect with everyday interests of life, or with the hopes and fears of human beings. Accordingly, as he tells, the Treatise ‘fell dead-born from the press, without attaining such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.’ In a letter to his friend Henry Home, afterwards Lord Kames, written soon after this explosive mixture had been applied, its author announces that the issue was ‘but indifferent, if I may judge by the sale of the book, and if I may believe my bookseller. I am now out of humour with myself; but doubt not in a little time to be out of humour with the world, like other unsuccessful authors. After all, I am sensible of my folly in entertaining any discontent, much more despair, on this account, since I could not expect any better from such abstract reasoning.’ This book, which professes to explain ‘human nature’ as a fact in the universe, conducts to a final paralysis of human intelligence in universal doubt.

This threatened paralysis awoke Reid into his characteristic intellectual life. He was among the first in Europe to see the far-reaching meaning of Hume’s account of man’s condition. He found in it the deep-lying seeds of modern agnosticism. Its rashness was confessed by its author. ‘I acknowledge a very great mistake in conduct in publishing my Treatise of Human Nature, a book which pretended to innovate in all the sublimest parts of philosophy, and which I composed before I was five-and-twenty. But what success the same doctrines better illustrated and expressed may meet with adhuc sub judice lis est. I wish I had always confined myself to the more easy parts of erudition.’ Accordingly, about ten years after, Hume presented his ‘sceptical doubts’ in a milder form, and accompanied by a ‘sceptical solution’ of them, in an Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; but it was Hume in the original Treatise, not as recast in the Inquiry, that moved Reid. Kant, like Reid, was awakened from what he calls his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by David Hume; but it was the Inquiry, not the Treatise, of which last he appears ignorant, that roused Kant. Reid grappled with the more open and all-pervading uncertainties of the earlier work.

Let us look into the book which appalled the young minister of New Machar by the spectre of a meaningless universe and illusory human nature. Its author seemed to be indulging in ‘a peculiar strain of humour when he set out in his introduction by promising with a grave face no less than a complete system of the sciences upon a foundation entirely new, namely, human nature, while the intention of the whole work is to show that there is neither human nature nor science in the world. He surely believed, against his principles, that he should be read, and that he should retain his personal identity till he reaped the reputation justly due to his metaphysical acumen.’ Reid found him taking for granted as his fundamental maxim, that nothing can be admitted as true which cannot be logically deduced from impressions of sense. Hume found the impressions of sense to be transitory, and distinguished in their succession by degrees of intensity,—sensations when in their highest intensity, memories when in an abated degree, and mere fancies when the intensity is at a minimum. His maxim forbade recognition of more reality in the universe than a momentary reality of isolated perceptions, in their different degrees of intensity, but without any reasonable retrospective memory, or any reasonable expectation with its hopes or fears. What we call ‘existence’ was resolved into an unintelligible chaos of felt impressions—a purposeless procession, in which the percipient loses his very selfhood and all besides. The Past, the Distant, the Future, are all illusions. ‘Things’ and ‘persons’ are only unconnected transitory feelings, without any permanent person to feel them. The word ‘identity’ is meaningless. A person cannot be more than a momentary idea. ‘I never catch self except in the form of a passing feeling.’ Present feeling alone exists.

It is impossible without contradiction to express a philosophy which destroys intelligible expression; virtually dismissing as absurdities all personal pronouns, all substantive nouns, and all verbs; leaving abstract adjectives as the only parts of speech;—and, as such adjectives are really unintelligible, leaving us the speechless and motionless victims of philosophical suicide. When I start with the preliminary maxim of Hume, I literally lose ‘myself’ at last in a radically untrustworthy universe, or I find myself suspended over a bottomless abyss. Here are the last words of this intellectual suicide at the end of his destructive analysis:—

‘I am affrighted and confounded with the forlorn solitude in which I am placed by my philosophy. When we trace up the human understanding to its first principles, we find it to lead us into such sentiments as seem to turn into ridicule all our past pains and industry, and to discourage us from all future inquiries. Nothing is more curiously inquired after by the mind of man than the causes of phenomena; nor are we content with knowing the immediate causes, but push on our inquiries till we arrive at the original and ultimate principle. This is our aim in all our studies and reflections. And now we must be disappointed when we learn that this tie lies merely in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination which is acquired by custom. Such a discovery not only cuts off all hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our very wishes; since it appears that when we desire to know the ultimate and operating principle or something which resides in the external object, we only contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning.... The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look at no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. All who believe anything, on any subject, with certainty, must be fools.’

This is the issue of the Treatise of Human Nature when the logical understanding is finally resolved into transitory and isolated feelings, without permitted final postulates of reason, in the form of faith or in any other form, to connect and interpret them.

It was this issue that Reid took seriously. He set himself, at first for his own satisfaction only, to consider the ground he had for trusting experience, when Hume reported that experience dissolved into sensational atoms. Accordingly he spent much of his time at New Machar in reflecting first of all on his perceptions through the senses. He began with these, because it seemed that even as the foundations of abstract mathematics lie in the mathematical axioms and definitions, so the foundations of all concrete reasoning are to be found in the rational constitution of perception through the five senses. ‘In the tree of human knowledge, perception is the root, common understanding is the trunk, and the sciences are the branches.’ Here is his own account of his state of mind when he was engaged in these New Machar wrestlings:—

‘If my mind is indeed what the Treatise of Human Nature makes it, I find that I have been only in an enchanted castle, when I seemed to be living in a well-ordered universe. I have been imposed upon by spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly to think how I have been deluded. I am ashamed of my frame, and can hardly forbear expostulating with my destiny. I see myself, and the whole frame of Nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like Epicurus’s atoms, dance about in emptiness. Descartes no sooner began to dig in this mine than scepticism was ready to break in upon him. He did what he could to keep it out. Malebranche and Locke, who dug deeper, found the difficulty of keeping out the enemy still to increase; but they laboured honestly in the design. Then Berkeley, who carried on the work, despairing of securing all, bethought himself of an expedient. By giving up the material world, which he thought might be spared without loss, and even with advantage, he hoped by an impregnable position to secure the world of spirits. But, alas! the Treatise of Human Nature wantonly sapped the foundation of this partition, and drowned all in one universal deluge.’

Nearly forty years after he left New Machar, Reid says[6] that in early life he ‘believed the whole of Berkeley’s system’—till Hume opened his eyes to ‘consequences’ that follow from the philosophy of Descartes and his successors, ‘which gave me more uneasiness than the want of a material world. So it came into my mind more than forty years ago’ to question its foundation. Hume accordingly made Reid revise critically the philosophy in which he had been educated by George Turnbull. The issue appeared after he left New Machar.