Alexander Campbell Fraser

“ Priestley denies all mysteries.... I am not surprised that your lordship has found little entertainment in a late French writer on human nature. From what I learn the French philosophers are become rank Epicureans. I detest all systems that depreciate human nature. If it be a delusion that there is something in the constitution of man that is venerable and worthy of its author, let me live and die in this delusion rather than have my eyes opened to see my species in a disgusting light. Every good man feels his indignation rise against those who disparage his kindred or country ”

“ If our common sense of the continuous independent existence of sensible things, and of their manifestation in Perception as directly as states of our own minds are manifested to us when we are conscious of them—if this was the factor of the Common Sense that engaged him in New Machar and King’s College days, the Power or Causality which all changes in the universe presuppose now becomes prominent, alike in his correspondence and in his books. What is meant by Power, and where is the Power centred that is implied in the changes that are always going on, in ourselves and in our surroundings? ”

“ Glasgow in 1898 is even more changed from Glasgow in 1764 than Aberdeen when Reid lived in it from Aberdeen as it is now. To-day Glasgow is the second city in Britain, with nearly a million of people, the industrial metropolis of the north, with all the stir of industrial life. It was then a provincial town with hardly thirty thousand inhabitants, almost inaccessible from the sea, surrounded by the cornfields and hedgerows and orchards of Lanarkshire, its few streets converging on the Cathedral and the College with their historic associations. ”

“ In 1775 Reid writes to Lord Kames:—
'Dr. Priestley in his last book thinks that the power of perception, as much as the other powers that are termed mental, is the natural result of an organic structure such as that of the human brain. Consequently, the whole man becomes extinct at death; and we have no hope of surviving the grave but what is derived from the Christian revelation. ”

“ Many attend the moral philosophy class four or five years; so that I have many preachers and students of divinity and law of considerable standing, before whom I stand in awe to speak without more preparation than I have leisure for. I have a great inclination to attend some of the professors here, several of whom are very eminent in their way; but I cannot find leisure. Much time is consumed in our college meetings about business, of which we have commonly four or five in the week. We have a Literary Society once a week, consisting of the Masters and two or three more ”

“ I desire to live no longer than this candour and ingenuity, this openness of mind to education and information, live with me.'
An apology follows for the imperfect preparation of a first course, inadequately provided for by the miscellaneous lectures in physics and metaphysics at Aberdeen. The past performance of Adam Smith, and the high expectation associated with the new professor, the author of the Inquiry, were doubtless fresh in the minds of the crowded audience that met on that October morning in the faint light of the Old College class-room. ”

“ Locke, and which makes truth to depend upon the necessary nature of things, to be therefore absolute, unchangeable, and everlasting, but merely on some unaccountable instinctive persuasions, depending upon the arbitrary constitution of our nature—which makes all truth be relative to ourselves only, and consequently to be infinitely vague and precarious. This system admits of no final appeal to reason properly considered, which any person might be at liberty to examine and discuss ”

“ I think they open a new field in optics which may greatly enrich that part of philosophy.... I find a variety of things here to amuse me in the literary world, and want nothing so much as my old friends, whose place I cannot expect at my time of life to supply. I think the common people here and in the neighbourhood greatly inferior to the common people with you. ”

“ And Butler, too, is the Reid of England in his trustful appeals to what Reid would call the common sense. When Butler asks himself whether we may not be deceived in our natural sense of our continuous personal identity, he replies, that 'this question may be asked at the end of any demonstration; because it is a question concerning the truth of perception by memory. And he who can doubt whether perception by memory can in this case be depended on, may doubt also whether perception by reasoning, or indeed whether any intuitive perception, can. ”

“ The impotence of matter rather than its independence is now insisted on; with the inference that at any rate it cannot cause our perceptions, as Priestley supposed. He begins to see that power must be referred to mind or spirit alone, and that matter is powerless. 'Efficient causes are not within the sphere of natural philosophy, which is concerned only with the laws or methods according to which Power operates. ”

“ He is described by a contemporary as 'a man of unprepossessing exterior, of invincible bashfulness, which continued to clog his manner and impede his exertions during the whole course of his life; but of a thoughtful, grave, silent habit, which led him to a due estimate of what he was individually adapted to.' He survived Reid, as his successor, a little more than a year, when he was followed in the Chair by James Mylne, a strong man unknown in philosophical literature, whose professorial career of forty years made him a familiar figure to generations of Glasgow students. ”

“ Priestley had abandoned the Calvinism of his early creed for materialism, philosophical necessity, and free thought, and, after serving for some years as pastor of a nonconformist chapel in Cheshire, and next as a schoolmaster much devoted to experiments in the natural sciences, was already known as an author in natural science. In 1774, when he was living with Lord Shelburne, as librarian and literary companion, he appeared for the first time as a metaphysical critic, in An Examination of Reid’s Inquiry, Beattie’s Essay, and Oswald’s Appeal to Common Sense. ”

“ Lord Kames thus explains Reid’s contribution to the Sketches:—'In reviewing the foregoing Sketch, it occurred to me that a fair analysis of Aristotle’s logic would be a valuable addition to the historical branch. A distinct and candid account of a system that for so many ages governed the reasoning part of mankind cannot but be acceptable to the public. Curiosity will be gratified in seeing a phantom delineated that so long fascinated the learned world ”

“ Reid characteristically ends his account of the old Organon by suggesting an Organon, different from either the old or the new, as still wanting. This should neither, like Aristotle’s, unfold only abstract forms of deductive reasoning, nor, like Bacon’s, only methods for verifying inductive generalisations. It should be concerned with the rational principles which compose the Common Sense of mankind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is a subject of such importance that if inquisitive men can be brought to the same unanimity in the first principles of the other sciences as in those of mathematics and natural philosophy, this might be considered as a third grand era in the progress of human reason.' Thus in 1774 Reid's thought still converges on the subject which had engaged him since the Treatise of Human Nature found its way into the manse of New Machar. ”

“ It exhibits the grand machine of the material world, analysed, as it were, and taken to pieces. It belongs to metaphysics and natural theology to show the Power that continues and gives motion to the whole ”

“ Although my salary here be the same as Aberdeen, yet if the class does not fall off, nor my health, so as to disable me from teaching, I believe I shall be able to live as easily as at Aberdeen, notwithstanding the differences in the expense of living at the two places. I have touched about £70 of fees, and may possibly make out the £100 this session.... The common people here have a gloom in their countenance, which I am at a loss whether to ascribe to their religion or to the air and climate. There is certainly more of religion among the common people in this town than in Aberdeen ”

“ A five minutes' walk leads us up a rocky precipice into a large park, partly planted with firs, and partly open, which overlooks the town and all the country round, and gives a view of the windings of the Clyde for a great way. ”

“ It seems to me as easy to contrive a machine which should compose a variety of epic poems and tragedies, as to contrive laws of motion by which unthinking particles of matter should coalesce into a variety of organised bodies.' He suggests that the organisation is the issue of constant and uniform divine activity. ”

“ I shall always be desirous to borrow light from every quarter, and to adopt what appears to me sound and solid in every system, and ready to change my opinions upon conviction, or to change my method and materials where I can do it to advantage. ”

“ Joseph Black, the most celebrated British chemist of his generation, was illustrating his own discoveries in his College lectures, and drawing the attention of the world to the phenomena of latent heat. ”

“ The earth, the water, and the air may, for anything I know, be full of such organised atoms.' He then goes on to consider the relation of this hypothesis to the idea of active design in nature, and expresses doubt about the possibility of the atoms being endowed with power to form themselves into an organised body like the human. ”

“ I would be glad to know your lordship's opinion, whether, when my brain has lost its original structure, and when some hundred years after, the same materials are again fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being—whether, I say, that being will be me ”

“ Reid, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the College of Glasgow, relished the thought, and his friendship to me prevailed on him, after much solicitation, to undertake the laborious task. No man is better acquainted with Aristotle’s writings ”

“ Later in the same year, Black was called to the Chair of Chemistry in Edinburgh, which he filled for nearly thirty years, and in Reid’s letters to the Skenes there is much about candidates for the vacant office in Glasgow, with a suggestion that David Skene should himself enter the lists. 'There is a great spirit of inquiry among the young people here. Literary merit is much regarded; and I conceive the opportunities a man has of improving himself are much greater here than at Aberdeen. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It was thus that Reid’s uneventful life of thought—deep, steady, unobtrusive—was sustained for sixteen years, when he was educating the rising generation in the old class-room at the College; unfolding philosophy in correspondence with a sympathetic friend; contributing essays to the Literary Society which met monthly at the College; and preparing his 'Brief Account' of Aristotle—all until he had reached his seventieth year. On the 19th of May 1780 he wrote to Lord Kames of a change that had occurred the day before:—
'I find myself growing old ”

“ He is 'apt to conjecture,' he tells his friend, 'that both plants and animals are at first organised atoms, having all the parts of the animal or plant, but so slender, and folded up in such a manner, as to be reduced to a particle far beyond the reach of our senses, and perhaps as small as the constituent parts of water. ”

“ Inquiry into our conception of Power or Causation becomes prominent in Reid’s letters to Lord Kames throughout 'the seventies,' along with experimental investigations in physics and physiology which show continued interest in natural causes. ”

“ These meetings are become more disagreeable by an evil spirit of party that seems to put us in a ferment, and I am afraid will produce bad consequences. The temper of our northern Colonies makes mercantile people here look very grave. ”

“ He was Hutcheson’s predecessor, with an intellectual and religious influence not inconsiderable in the opening years of last century, author of a Latin manual of logic which appeared in 1720, and a Synopsis Theologiæ Naturalis, published shortly before his death in 1729, but best known perhaps as editor of Puffendorff. ”