Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Reid

Reid opens with the cool authority of a courtroom: “a question of fact.” It’s a tactical move. Instead of treating free will as a metaphysical fog bank, he drags it into the realm of ordinary inquiry, where claims are supposed to meet evidence and where grand systems can be cross-examined. The real target is the rising Enlightenment confidence that human beings can be explained the way physics explains falling bodies: same inputs, same outputs.

The key phrase is “fixed by laws of nature.” Reid isn’t merely asking whether motives influence us; he’s probing whether motives function like forces, reliably producing the same behavior “in the same circumstances.” That last clause is doing heavy work. It smuggles in the determinist’s dream of repeatable experiments on the soul, and Reid frames it as something you can actually test. The subtext is skeptical: do we ever truly get “the same circumstances” in human life, with its shifting attention, memory, character, and interpretation? Determinism needs stable variables; Reid hints those variables may be a philosophical fiction.

Context matters: Reid was a leader of the Scottish Common Sense tradition, pushing back against the era’s more corrosive skepticism (Hume) and the mechanistic impulse to reduce mind to motion. His intent isn’t to deny causation but to defend agency as part of what we can responsibly treat as real, because moral life depends on it. If motives are law-bound like gravity, praise and blame start to look like bad bookkeeping. Reid’s sentence politely exposes that stake while keeping his hands clean: not a sermon, a “fact” question, daring determinism to earn its certainty.