Alexander Campbell Fraser

“ Its chief interest lies in the spectacle of penetrating sagacity, independent and sincere, steadily devoted to the invisible world of thought and belief, in quest of the ultimate foundations and guarantees of human knowledge. ”

“ Two other Professors were sons of two of 'Kinairdy's' daughters—namely, our Thomas Reid, and Alexander Innes, who professed Philosophy in Marischal College. These all traced their birth to the minister of Drumoak and his mathematical wife—through their son David. But James, the third son of the Drumoak manse, was not less illustrious in himself and in his descendants. He was Professor of Mathematics, first at St. Andrews and then at Edinburgh, inventor of the reflecting telescope, also Newton’s friend and correspondent, who introduced the science of Newton into the Universities of Scotland. ”

“ During the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, the minister of the rural parish of Drumoak, on the north side of the Dee, between Banchory and Pitfodels, was the Rev. John Gregory, son of an Aberdeen merchant, whose father was a M'Gregor from Glenlyon. The Gregories of Deeside were thus descendants of the clan Gregor of Glenlyon and Glenstrae, a circumstance referred to by Sir Walter Scott in the Introduction to Rob Roy. The minister of Drumoak married a lady named Anderson, one of a family reputed for mathematical ability in successive generations. ”

“ The mother, Margaret Gregory, was the eldest daughter, by his second marriage, of David Gregory, laird of Kinairdy in Banffshire. An elder son, David, born in 1705, and two daughters, Isobel and Jane, with Thomas, formed the family at the manse when Thomas was a boy. David was twice married, and died about 1780, without issue; the elder daughter, Isobel, died unmarried, in her stepmother’s house at Aberdeen, in 1770; and the younger, Jane, after a mésalliance, died without issue after the middle of the century. ”

“ They are moreover united by their common antagonism to the scepticism of David Hume, who also through them is associated with the moorland valley of the Feugh, making it suggest to fancy three memorable intellectual figures. In Scotland David Hume and Thomas Reid are the two greatest names of their century in philosophy.
Imagination is our only guide when we try to picture the boyhood of Thomas Reid in the homely surroundings at Strachan. ”

“ James, who succeeded his father, and John, a regent of philosophy in his father’s college, afterwards Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh, and remembered as the author of A Comparative View of Man and the Animal World, and A Father’s Legacy, books full of good sense. Dr. John Gregory’s son, James, was Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh from 1776 till 1821, a physician and a metaphysician—in the sequel, the intimate friend and correspondent of Thomas Reid, and the patron of Thomas Brown. ”

“ It should attract those who, in an age of sceptical criticism, seek to assure themselves of the final trustworthiness of the experience into which, at birth, they were admitted as strangers, ignorant of what the whole means, like the agnostic in Pascal. ”