Thomas Reid Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Thomas Reid was born on April 26, 1710, in Strachan, Kincardineshire, in northeast Scotland, into a clerical and scholarly family that anchored him in the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. His father, the Reverend Lewis Reid, served as minister of the parish, and through his mother, Margaret Gregory, Reid was connected to the noted Gregory dynasty of Scottish mathematicians and physicians. He studied at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he received a traditional arts education that emphasized logic, natural philosophy, and classical languages. The breadth of that curriculum shaped his lifelong habit of engaging scientific, moral, and metaphysical questions together rather than in isolation.

From Ministry to Academia
After a period associated with Marischal College, where he also served for a time as librarian, Reid was ordained in 1737 and became minister of New Machar, a rural parish north of Aberdeen. Pastoral duties brought him into contact with everyday reasoning and testimony, themes that would later be central to his philosophy. While in the parish he read the new philosophy of his time, especially the works of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. He judged that their shared "way of ideas" encouraged skepticism about perception, causation, and the self. Reid's early reflections took aim at this inheritance, laying the ground for a direct realist alternative.

Aberdeen and the Wise Club
In 1752 Reid left the parish to become a regent at King's College, Aberdeen, teaching across the arts curriculum. He soon helped found the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, known as the "Wise Club", whose members included the physician John Gregory, the rhetorician and minister George Campbell, and the poet-philosopher James Beattie. Their discussions repeatedly returned to the challenges posed by Hume's skepticism. Reid valued Hume's clarity and candor, but he concluded that common life and science stand on surer footing than the theory of ideas allowed. The club's interdisciplinary exchange shaped Reid's method: philosophical analysis carried out in conversation with rhetoric, medicine, theology, and the emerging sciences.

The Inquiry and the Scottish Enlightenment
Reid's first major book, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), appeared as he accepted a call to succeed Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. The Inquiry argued that perception gives direct awareness of external objects, not merely of internal images, and that certain first principles, such as the existence of a continuing world, the reliability of memory, the trustworthiness of our senses, and the authority of credible testimony, are part of our constitution as rational agents. Such principles, he claimed, are not arbitrary prejudices but the ground rules that make reasoning, science, and moral life possible.

Glasgow Professorship and Colleagues
At Glasgow from 1764 to 1781, Reid taught moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and political economy in a university that had been a center of the Enlightenment under Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith. Although Smith had departed just as Reid arrived, the intellectual milieu remained strikingly rich. Reid lectured alongside figures such as the mathematician Robert Simson, the chemist Joseph Black, and the jurist John Millar, and his classrooms drew students who would carry common sense philosophy into the next generation. Among those influenced by his teaching and writings was Dugald Stewart, who became a principal voice of Scottish philosophy at Edinburgh and later offered an important biographical and critical account of Reid's work.

Philosophical Contributions
Reid's central contribution was a defense of common sense realism. He separated sensation from perception, insisting that sensations are signs by which we perceive qualities and objects, not the immediate objects of awareness themselves. He rejected the representational theory of perception associated with Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley, arguing that it undermines the certainty we rightly place in our faculties and encourages skeptical doubts that no practical life could sustain.

He elaborated a catalog of first principles, self-evident truths we are justified in accepting without inferential proof, covering perception, memory, personal identity, moral judgment, and the authority of testimony. Testimony, in particular, he treated as a natural source of knowledge: human beings are disposed both to speak truthfully and to credit the word of others, and this social trust underwrites history, law, religion, and science.

In practical philosophy Reid defended moral liberty. In the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind he argued that human beings are genuine agents with the power to initiate action, not merely links in a chain of mechanical causes. Against determinist interpretations associated with some readings of Hume, he maintained that responsibility presupposes the capacity to have done otherwise, and he developed an account of character, intention, and moral judgment that tied freedom to the common operations of human life.

Major Works
Reid's mature philosophy unfolded across three books. The Inquiry (1764) set out his critique of the way of ideas and advanced the principles of common sense. The Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) provided a systematic treatment of perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgment, and reasoning, consolidating his direct realist stance. The Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788) developed his views on the will, moral agency, virtue, duty, and the foundations of ethics and jurisprudence. Throughout, he wrote with measured clarity, aiming to describe the faculties as they operate in ordinary understanding as well as in science.

Engagement with Contemporaries
Reid read Hume with care and corresponded with him courteously; he regarded Hume as a formidable critic whose skepticism was a challenge to be met rather than evaded. Within Scotland his positions intersected with those of George Campbell and James Beattie, who also pressed the case for common sense against skeptical conclusions. Adam Smith's moral theory, though different in method and emphasis, overlapped with Reid's concern for the sentiments and for the social dimension of judgment. Across the Channel and in earlier British thought, Reid engaged critically with Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley, arguing that their commitment to ideas as internal images could not secure the certainty they sought.

Retirement, Later Years, and Death
Reid retired from the Glasgow chair in 1781 to revise his lectures and compose the Essays that would complete his philosophical system. He continued to read, to teach informally, and to receive visitors who sought guidance on matters of epistemology, morals, and rhetoric. His disposition remained modest and conciliatory, even where his arguments were firm. He died in Glasgow on October 7, 1796, after a long life that had spanned the arc of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Legacy
Reid's influence spread in Britain, Ireland, and North America, where common sense philosophy informed university curricula and public discourse well into the nineteenth century. Dugald Stewart carried forward his program at Edinburgh, and later discussions of perception, testimony, and agency continued to return to Reid's formulations. He is remembered as the principal architect of Scottish common sense realism: a philosopher who defended the trustworthiness of our faculties, the directness of perception, the authority of shared human practices, and the reality of moral freedom, all without retreating from the clarity and argumentative rigor exemplified by the very skeptics he opposed.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Thomas, under the main topics: Wisdom - Free Will & Fate - Knowledge - Reason & Logic.

Other people realated to Thomas: Adam Ferguson (Philosopher), Tara Reid (Actress)