Alexander Campbell Fraser

Soon after Reid’s return to Marischal College from his English tour, the young librarian was presented, by the professors of King’s College, to the pastoral charge of New Machar, a parish some ten miles to the north-west of Aberdeen. The fact that his kinsman, James Gregory, was professor in King’s may perhaps explain this unwonted exercise of patronage in favour of a graduate of the rival College.

The presentation, at any rate, raised a storm of opposition among the parishioners. It was the occasion of one of those conflicts of Church parties to which the law of patronage gave rise in Scotland in those days. The incidents of Reid’s introduction to ecclesiastical office form a characteristic picture. Rural prejudice was due in this case to various circumstances. It was partly influenced by a sermon, preached in the church of New Machar, on February 10, 1737, at the moderation of the call, by the Rev. John Bisset, one of the ministers of Aberdeen. Mr. Bisset had himself been minister of the parish ten years before. He was now a noted preacher in the North, and one with whom express concurrence of the congregation in an ecclesiastical settlement was a high article of doctrine.[5] In his sermon he denounced aristocratic interference, insinuated undue outside influence and personal favour, claimed a right to a vote in the election of his minister for every Christian, the poor man as much as the rich, and concluded with an appeal to his audience to quit themselves like men, and to trust in God. The recent history of the parish strengthened this appeal. The last presentation to New Machar was inauspicious. In 1729 a ‘riding committee’ had introduced Mr. Bisset’s successor. Soon after, the new minister was accused of ‘powdering his wig on the Sabbath.’ Absolved by the Church courts, he was in 1736 deposed for a graver offence. It was a time of ecclesiastical anarchy in New Machar. The record of the parish is blank between the minute which tells of the departure of Mr. Bisset in 1728, and that which registers ‘the ordination of Mr. Thomas Reid’ in May 1737.

Reid was the innocent victim of the sermon and the scandal when he came to be ordained on May 12, 1737. He had been violently attacked and maltreated by persons in disguise, who, according to tradition, ducked him in a horse-pond. It is also told that when he officiated for the first time in the parish church, he was guarded in the pulpit by a drawn sword.

For fifteen years New Machar manse was Reid’s home. Popular prejudice was overcome by his mild, beneficent activity. Those who had been carried into outrage by hasty judgment at the beginning, followed him on his departure with blessings and tears. ‘We fought against Mr. Reid when he came,’ they are reported as saying, ‘and we would have fought for him when he went away.’ His marriage, in August 1740, to his cousin Elizabeth, a daughter of his London uncle, Dr. George Reid, promoted this change. The gracious manner and constant goodness of this companion of his life for more than fifty years was long remembered in the Aberdeenshire parish. Six daughters and three sons were the issue of the marriage. Five daughters were born at New Machar, and one died there. Reid’s family bible at Birkwood contains the following interesting record in his handwriting:—

‘Mr. Thomas Reid was born at Strachan, April 26, 1710; married to Elizabeth Reid, August 12, 1740. The said Elizabeth was born August 3, 1724. Their children:—(1) Jean, born July 21, 1741, died February 27, 1772, buried in College Churchyard, Glasgow; (2) Margaret, born October 20, 1742, died 1772, buried as above; (3) Martha, born August 22, 1744, married Dr. Patrick Carmichael; (4) Elizabeth, born February 21, 1746, died of smallpox in August 1746, buried in the Churchyard of New Machar; (5) Anna, born July 10, 1751, died of chin-cough May 21, 1753, buried in the Isle of Old Machar; (6) George, born February 11, 1755, died at St. John’s, Newfoundland, February 1780; (7) Lewis, born December 13, 1756, died of teething July 19, 1758, buried in the Isle of Old Machar; (8) David, born February 26, 1762, died at Edinburgh August 30, 1782; (9) Elizabeth, born May 8, 1766, died June 1, 1767, of smallpox by inoculation, buried in the College Churchyard, Glasgow.’

The story of the fifteen years at New Machar, as we have it, is almost empty of incidents, a dim picture. The scene does not warmly touch the imagination. Undulating hills of moderate size, chill and tame; land monotonously fertile, with scanty timber; yet pleasant prospects in the distance of the valley of the Don, with Benachie and remoter Grampians in the background; a population mostly agricultural; two or three country mansions; the highroad from Aberdeen to Banff traversing the parish. New Machar was wanting, on the whole, in the breezy highland charm of the early home at Strachan. The social life was simple but intellectually stagnant. Among the infrequent visitors at the manse I find incidental mention in Reid’s letters of one. He tells that he made the acquaintance of the well-known Jacobite, Mr. Hepburn of Keith, ‘by his lodging a night in my house at New Machar,’ when he was in the Prince’s army, on his way to Culloden; perhaps when he was in Lord George Murray’s division, which retreated through Aberdeenshire in February 1746, or in one of the detachments which were in motion around New Machar in the preceding December.

The Thomas Reid who is revealed to us in his books does not promise pulpit eloquence likely to interest this rustic population. Like Bishop Butler when he was in his remote rectory at Stanhope a few years before, he was pondering the chief intellectual work of his life in exile from intellectual society. None of Reid’s sermons are found among his manuscripts. Indeed, it appears that his characteristic modesty and diffidence, combined, it is said, with some neglect of literary culture in his early education, induced him at first to read to his rustic audience the sermons of eminent Anglican preachers, instead of compositions of his own—thus adopting a practice afterwards recommended by Paley, by which, with fit selection, many audiences might benefit in this age of social pressure. ‘As to preaching,’ says Paley, ‘if your situation requires a sermon every Sunday, make one and find five.’ Tillotson and the Nonconformist Evans are mentioned as Reid’s favourites, and something is said about Samuel Clarke. The luminous good sense of Tillotson, and the reverential temper of Evans, and the lucid reasoning of Clarke, would naturally attract Reid. But emotion as well as moral ideal was not wanting in his religious life. It is said that in a Communion Service tears fell from his eyes when he enlarged on the divine beauty of the character of Jesus. The following expression of religious feeling during an illness of his young wife appears among his manuscripts, dated March 30, 1746:—

This fervid expression of devotion reveals an intensity of purpose which worked beneath the outwardly placid and discreet life. Mrs. Reid survived this critical illness for nearly half a century.

Much of Reid’s time at New Machar, according to his brother-in-law Mr. Rose, was spent in meditative thought, with an attention to the activities of his own mind of which few men are capable. Traditions of solitary walks immersed in study were long in circulation. He found his chief recreation, we are told, in the manse garden or in botanical observations. His society attracted his neighbours. With Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk he maintained a lifelong intimacy. He never forgot New Machar, and long after, in times of distress, anonymous gifts were traced to his thoughtful but modest beneficence.

Three years before Reid left New Machar, when he was in his thirty-eighth year, he made his first appearance in print, in a short paper contributed to the Royal Society, which appeared in their Transactions in October 1748. It is called ‘An Essay on Quantity.’ It was occasioned by a book published more than twenty years before, the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, by Francis Hutcheson, afterwards the celebrated Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow. In this tract simple and compound ratios are applied, in forms of mathematical reasoning, to solve problems of moral philosophy. It illustrates in some degree the bent of Reid’s thoughts at this time, and his inherited interest in mathematical reasonings. But it also shows bent of thought in another direction, and recognition of other scientific methods than mathematical demonstration, which had been favoured as of universal application by philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza. Reid argued, in the spirit of his master Turnbull, that genuine ethical inquiry is concerned with a class of facts which are under a higher category, and refuse to submit to geometrical measurement.

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:—

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:—

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.

Reid was now to be placed in a condition more favourable to intense and persistent thought. On November 22, 1751, he was admitted to King’s College, Aberdeen, as one of its regent masters, in succession to Mr. Alexander Rait. The patronage was vested in the College, and the minute which records his election suggests the reputation which the rural pastor had now secured among the cultured few, notwithstanding his modest and retired life.

It was not without reluctance that Reid left New Machar. Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who knew him well, tells that when the deputation from King’s College came to invite him to become a regent, ‘he at first declined, explaining that he desired to live in retirement till he should complete some literary projects which engaged him. Mrs. Reid, however, having discovered the errand of the visitors, urged her husband to accept the offer, being less fond of retirement, and having no objection to a better income and better society. When her learned guests repeated their proposal after dinner, she seconded them with such cogent arguments that Mr. Reid was beat out of all his objections.’—Scotland and Scotsmen.