Justified True Belief

(●) The country minister who answered David Hume, not by out-arguing him, but by finding the wrong turn the whole of modern philosophy had taken. + Most people who set out to refute a sceptic try to beat him at his own game. Thomas Reid did something stranger and more useful. He granted that Hume’s reasoning was good, said so in print and in a letter to Hume himself, and then went looking for the assumption the reasoning had started from. He found one, buried so deep that almost nobody since Descartes had thought to question it, and he spent the rest of his life digging it out. That makes him the most quietly consequential philosopher the eighteenth century produced in Britain, and the least theatrical. He was a parish minister for fourteen years before he was a professor for forty-five, and he did not publish a book until he was fifty-four. He wrote three of them, all of them careful, all of them about the same question: what a human being is entitled to believe, and why. For a Christian reader he matters in a particular way. Reid is where the argument that a belief can be reasonable without being proved was worked out with unusual care, and where testimony, what other people tell us, was given one of its first full defences as evidence in its own right rather than as a weak substitute for seeing something yourself. Both of those claims sit underneath a great deal of modern Christian philosophy, and both of them come from a Scottish minister who kept a garden and could not hear well after seventy.

(●) 1710 AD: Born in a Kincardineshire manse, into a family that had been breeding ministers and mathematicians for two hundred years. + Thomas Reid was born on 26 April 1710 at Strachan, a country parish about twenty miles from Aberdeen on the north side of the Grampian mountains. The house was the manse, the dwelling a Scottish parish keeps for the use of its minister, and the minister in question was his father. The Rev. Lewis Reid held that pulpit for fifty years, and the Reids had supplied ministers to that corner of Scotland since the Reformation. The mathematics came from his mother. Margaret Gregory was one of twenty-nine children of David Gregory of Kinnairdie, and the Gregorys were the most formidable scientific family in Scotland. Her uncle James Gregory invented the reflecting telescope. Her brother David was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford and a friend of Isaac Newton, and in his earlier Edinburgh years he was among the first anywhere to put Newton’s physics before a university class, while Cambridge was still teaching Descartes. Two more of her brothers held chairs of mathematics at the same time, one at St Andrews and one at Edinburgh. Nobody expected much of the boy. After two years at the parish school of Kincardine he was sent to Aberdeen for his Latin and Greek, and at about twelve or thirteen he entered Marischal College, where his teacher in philosophy for three years was George Turnbull. Reid said later that the sessions were short and the education slight. The one compliment on record from any of his schooling came from his master at the parish school, and it is a wonderfully Scottish one: that he would turn out to be "a man of good and well-wearing parts." He took his degree in 1726, was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Kincardine O’Neil on 22 September 1731, and stayed on at the college as librarian from 1733 to 1736, reading Newton’s Principia with a friend who would later be professor of mathematics there.

(●) 1737 AD: A parish that did not want him took fourteen years to win over, and he won it. + In 1737 King’s College, Aberdeen, presented Reid to the living of New Machar, meaning the post of its parish minister and the income that came attached to it. The parish was furious. Under the law of patronage a landowner or a college could hand a parish its minister whether the people wanted him or not, and New Machar wanted no part of it. Dugald Stewart, who knew Reid and wrote his life, says carefully that in first discharging his duties Reid "was exposed to personal danger." Local tradition is less delicate, and reports that the parishioners ducked him in a pond, and that one of his uncles had to guard the pulpit stairs with a sword. He simply outlasted them. He visited the sick, he kept his temper, and in 1740 he married his cousin Elizabeth, daughter of his uncle Dr George Reid, a physician in London. She went round the parish among the poor and the ill, and the household became something the neighbourhood did not want to lose. When he left for Aberdeen the parishioners were reported as saying a sentence worth more than any testimonial: "We fought against Dr Reid when he came, and would have fought for him when he went away." He was, by his own account, a nervous preacher. For a long time he distrusted his own compositions so much that he preached other men’s sermons, Tillotson’s and Evans’s, from the New Machar pulpit. What he did with the rest of his time was read, garden, botanise, and think very hard about perception. In 1739, two years into the living, a twenty-seven-year-old Scot named David Hume published the first two volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature, and Reid later told the story of what it did to him in the dedication of his own first book: "I never thought of calling in question the principles commonly received with regard to the human understanding, until the Treatise of Human Nature was published in the year 1739." His first appearance in print came nine years later, in 1748, and it was a mathematical paper.

(●) 1751 AD: Aberdeen made him a regent, and he founded a club that put Hume on trial in his absence. + On 28 October 1751 the professors of King’s College elected Reid a regent in place of Alexander Rait, who had died that month. A regent in the Scottish universities of the day was something closer to a form master than a modern professor: the same man carried the same students through mathematics, physics, logic and ethics for the whole course. He did not let go of New Machar at once. He kept the pulpit there through his first session at the college and only gave the parish up in 1752, which is why Stewart, writing the life long afterwards, dates the appointment to that year rather than to 1751. Marischal College gave him an honorary doctorate of divinity on 18 January 1762. On 12 January 1758 he and his cousin John Gregory sat down with four friends for the first meeting of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, which everyone called the Wise Club. Its members were a remarkable set for a provincial town: George Campbell, who would write on miracles against Hume, the physician David Skene, and, joining in the years after, Alexander Gerard and James Beattie. Stewart says the meetings were held weekly; the society’s own minutes put them on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month, from five in the evening until ten, in a room at the Red Lion inn. Members read their unfinished books aloud and had them taken apart by friends, and Reid’s Inquiry grew up in that room. The club had a standing subject, and in March 1763, while Hume was reading the manuscript of the Inquiry, Reid described it to him with great charm: "Your company would, although we are all good Christians, be more acceptable than that of St Athanasius; and since we cannot have you upon the bench, you are brought oftener than any other man to the bar, accused and defended with great zeal, but without bitterness." Then, drily: "If you write no more in morals, politics, or metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects."

(●) 1764 AD: He sent the Inquiry to Hume before printing it, and Glasgow gave him Adam Smith’s chair. + Before publishing an attack on a living man, Reid asked that man to check it. The exchange ran through the two years before the book appeared. He worked through Hugh Blair as a go-between, sending Hume parts of the manuscript so that nothing in the finished book would put words in his mouth. Hume’s first reaction, in a letter to Blair, was less than gracious: "I wish that the parsons would confine themselves to their old occupation of worrying one another, and leave philosophers to argue with temper, moderation, and good manners." Then he read it, and wrote to Reid directly with real generosity, saying that if Reid had cleared up these subjects he would be vain enough to claim a share of the credit, since his own errors, "by having at least some coherence, had led you to make a more strict review of my principles." He added that he had kept a watchful eye on Reid’s English and found only one phrase worth correcting. Reid’s reply, the same letter of 18 March 1763 that told Hume how often he was brought to the bar at the Wise Club, is the model of how to disagree: "I shall always avow myself your disciple in metaphysics. I have learned more from your writings in this kind, than from all others put together." An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense appeared in 1764. Its title page carried the line from Job 32:8 that Reid knew in the King James wording: "The inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." On 22 May of the same year the University of Glasgow elected him to the chair of moral philosophy, vacated by Adam Smith, who had resigned to travel as a tutor. Reid was fifty-four, and reluctant to leave the north, but Glasgow was a livelier place and the chair let him teach only what he cared about. He spoke for an hour every morning at half past seven to an audience of about a hundred, examined the younger students at eleven, and three days a week added a second lecture at noon, through a session that ran from October to May. At fifty-five he was himself attending Joseph Black’s chemistry lectures "with a juvenile curiosity and enthusiasm."

(●) 1780 AD: At seventy he gave up his lectures to write the two books the Inquiry had only promised. + The Inquiry had covered the five senses and stopped. Everything else Reid wanted to say about memory, conception, judgment, reasoning, the will and moral action was still in lecture notes. So while his health held, he handed his teaching to a substitute, Archibald Arthur, the college chaplain, and sat down to turn forty years of lectures into books. Stewart dates the retirement to 1781, but Arthur was appointed his assistant, with a share of the salary, in 1780. Either way he was past seventy when he started. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man came out in 1785 and Essays on the Active Powers of Man in 1788. Together they run to four times the length of the Inquiry, and they contain the mature form of everything the Inquiry had sketched: the lists of first principles, the long account of judgment, the theory of moral agency. He was seventy-eight when the last of them appeared. One more course from these years survives by accident. In the spring of 1780 a student took down Reid’s lectures on natural theology, the part of theology that argues from the world to its maker without appealing to Scripture, and those notes are the only sustained record of Reid arguing directly for the existence of God.

(●) 1792 AD: His wife of fifty-two years died, and he wrote that he had been brought into a kind of new world. + The Reids had a large family and buried most of it. Four of the children, two sons and two daughters, lived to be grown men and women, and every one of those four died before their father did. By the time Elizabeth Reid died in 1792 there was one daughter left, Martha, married to a physician named Patrick Carmichael. A few weeks after the funeral Reid wrote to Dugald Stewart. The letter is the best single page of him that survives, and it does not sound like a philosopher at all: "By the loss of my bosom friend, with whom I lived fifty-two years, I am brought into a kind of new world, at a time of life when old habits are not easily forgot, or new ones acquired. But every world is God’s world, and I am thankful for the comforts he has left me. Mrs Carmichael has now the care of two old deaf men, and does every thing in her power to please them; and both are very sensible of her goodness." He was eighty-two and very deaf. He could converse, he said, with one person, "if he articulates distinctly, and is within ten inches of my left ear," and he went to church without hearing a word that was said. "You know I never had any pretensions to vivacity, but I am still free from languor and ennui."

(●) 1796 AD: He died at eighty-six, still setting himself algebra problems, and hoping to get his dismission. + In the summer of 1796 he spent some weeks in Edinburgh at James Gregory’s house, and Stewart, who walked with him daily, was startled by him: the old man went three or four miles at a stretch, caught a subtle error in a mathematical manuscript, and looked more like a man of sixty than of eighty-seven. It was on this visit, at Gregory’s urging, that he sat to Henry Raeburn for the portrait that is still the picture of him. Back in Glasgow he worked in his garden with his own hands, spent two days solving an algebraic problem that had given him trouble, and wrote down what he could remember about his ancestors, because Gregory had asked him to begin an autobiography. He never got past the ancestors. A violent illness came on at the end of September. When his physician Dr Cleghorn first visited, Reid told him he hoped he was "soon to get his dismission," which was then the ordinary word for a discharge from service, the leave a soldier is given when his duty is done. After a hard struggle and repeated strokes of palsy, he died on 7 October 1796. Stewart, summing him up, reached for the quality that runs through everything he wrote: "intrepid and inflexible rectitude, a pure and devoted attachment to truth," and a refusal, under any provocation, to write an unkind sentence about an opponent.

What He Taught

(T1) The philosophers had reasoned their way, step by careful step, into a world with nothing left in it. + Look up and find something solid: a mug, a door frame, somebody’s shoulder. The obvious thing to say is that you are seeing the mug. Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume all said something different, and they all said the same different thing. What you are immediately aware of, they held, is not the mug but an idea of the mug: a picture or impression inside your own mind, which stands in for the thing the way a photograph stands in for a face. That assumption is usually called the theory of ideas, or the way of ideas, and in Reid’s century nobody argued for it because nobody thought it needed arguing. Reid’s point was to watch what happened next. Once the mind is shut up with its own pictures, the outside world has to be proved, and the proofs kept failing. First the philosophers gave up what they called the secondary qualities, meaning heat, cold, colour, sound and taste, the qualities a thing seems to have in itself. Fire is not really hot, they concluded, snow is not really cold and honey is not really sweet; those are only sensations in us. Then Berkeley, reasoning perfectly well from the same starting point, gave up matter altogether: extension, solidity, figure and body are ideas too, and there is nothing in the universe but minds and their ideas. Then Hume, reasoning just as well, gave up minds. What is left is a shower of impressions belonging to nobody. Reid’s reaction was not horror. It was the calm of a man who has just found the fault in a machine. Every one of those steps was valid. So the trouble was not in the reasoning, it was in the premise the reasoning had started from, and when he went looking for the evidence for that premise he found that there was none. Years afterwards, in the chapter of the Intellectual Powers that takes up Bishop Berkeley, he admitted how completely it had once held him: he had believed the doctrine of ideas so firmly that he swallowed the whole of Berkeley’s system because of it, and when he finally asked what evidence he had for it, he could find none "excepting the authority of philosophers."

(Q) "A traveller of good judgment may mistake his way, and be unawares led into a wrong track; and, while the road is fair before him, he may go on without suspicion and be followed by others; but, when it ends in a coal-pit, it requires no great judgment to know that he hath gone wrong, nor perhaps to find out what misled him." + Source: Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, chapter 1, section 8 (Hamilton edition of the Works, 1852). Reid is answering the obvious objection to his whole project: who is he, a country minister, to think he can see further than Descartes? His answer is that he does not need to see further. He only needs to notice where the road came out. The coal-pits of the Aberdeenshire countryside were open shafts, unfenced and often unmarked, which is what gives the picture its edge.

(T2) Some beliefs are not conclusions from anything, and every argument ever made stands on these first principles. + Try to prove to a friend that he is awake. Every proof you offer will use something he can only know by being awake, and if he really doubts it, nothing you say can help. The same goes for proving that he existed yesterday, or that the people around him are conscious rather than very good machines. These are not conclusions anybody reaches; they are where everybody starts. Reid called such a belief a first principle: something believed without being inferred from anything else, which no argument could make more certain than it already is, because any argument would have to lean on beliefs no better established. In the Essays on the Intellectual Powers he does something almost nobody had attempted and writes the list out. Among them: that the thoughts I am conscious of "are the thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person"; that those things really happened which I distinctly remember; that the things I distinctly perceive by my senses really exist and are what I perceive them to be; that I have some degree of power over my own actions; that the faces and voices of other people mean what they seem to mean; that there is "a certain regard due to human testimony in matters of fact." This is not a licence to believe whatever is popular, and Reid knew that would be the accusation. So he supplied tests for telling a genuine first principle from a mere prejudice: whether the denial of it is absurd rather than merely surprising, whether every language on earth has built it into its grammar, whether the man who denies it in the study still relies on it in the street. A whole chapter of the Intellectual Powers is given to prejudices and how they fool people, which is a strange thing to write if you are simply deferring to the crowd. And there is something in this that Scripture takes for granted long before philosophy gets to it: the Bible never opens with a proof that God exists. It opens "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).

(Q) "If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd." + Source: Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, chapter 2, section 6 (Hamilton edition of the Works, 1852). The definition that gave the Scottish school its name, and the one most often quoted against it. "Common sense" here does not mean the opinion of the majority or a practical knack for getting on. It means the shared equipment of judgment that every sane adult brings to the world before any philosophy starts. Reid was careful elsewhere to say that common sense and reason are not rivals: common sense "is indeed the first-born of Reason."

(T3) Reason carries no better credentials than the senses, because both came from the same maker. + Here is the sceptic’s standard move, and it sounds very tough-minded. Throw out everything you cannot prove by reasoning. Keep only what argument delivers. The senses are notoriously unreliable, so let reason sit in judgment on them. Reid’s reply is to ask where reason got its own credentials. You did not prove that your reasoning is sound, and you could not have, since any such proof would itself be a piece of reasoning and would assume the very thing in question. You trust it because it is part of your make-up, exactly as you trust your eyes. So the sceptic is not being consistently sceptical. He is exempting one faculty from a suspicion he applies to all the others, and he has no grounds for the exemption. Reid is unusually honest about where this leaves him, and it is worth noticing because it costs him something. He will not pretend he can prove that our faculties are reliable. He says flatly that "every kind of reasoning for the veracity of our faculties, amounts to no more than taking their own testimony for their veracity," and he says Descartes made "a false step" in trying to escape by proving first that God is no deceiver, since Descartes had to use the suspect faculties to run that proof. If a man will not grant that his own mind is to be trusted until it is proved, "he must even be left to enjoy his scepticism." What Reid claims is not certainty but consistency: nobody, sceptic included, actually does without this trust, and the Christian has a reason for it that the sceptic does not, since faculties that were made have a maker who can be asked about them. Paul says the same thing from the other end, that what can be known of God "is plain to them, because God has shown it to them" (Romans 1:19).

(Q) "Why, sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of perception? they came both out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from putting another?" + Source: Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, chapter 6, section 20 (Hamilton edition of the Works, 1852). Reid has staged a short dialogue between a sceptic and a plain man, and this is the plain man’s answer. A few lines earlier he has said of his belief in what he perceives: "This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine." A minister writing in 1764 could rely on his readers hearing the coin of the tribute money behind that: the coin Jesus asked to be shown when he was questioned about paying tax to Caesar, and whose likeness and inscription settled whose it was.

(T4) God fitted us both to tell the truth and to believe it, so what another person tells us is evidence in its own right. + Almost everything you know, you were told. Your own date of birth. That there is a city called Tokyo. That your grandfather served in a war. That water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, which you have never personally checked and would not know how to. Philosophers call this kind of knowledge testimony: what you believe because somebody informed you, rather than because you saw it or worked it out. The received view treated testimony as a second-class source, a weak inference from experience: you have found in the past that people are mostly right, so you extend the pattern. Reid thought this got a child’s life backwards. A four-year-old has no stock of past experience to reason from, and believes what he is told anyway, which is the only reason he can be taught anything at all. So Reid proposed a matched pair of native dispositions, made for each other like speech and hearing. He named the first the principle of veracity, a built-in pull toward saying what we actually think, and he observed that it operates even in liars: "for where they lie once, they speak truth a hundred times. Truth is always uppermost, and is the natural issue of the mind." Lying, he adds a few lines later, "is doing violence to our nature." He named the second the principle of credulity, a built-in readiness to believe what we are told, "unlimited in children, until they meet with instances of deceit and falsehood," and still considerable in adults. Neither is a proof of anything, and neither is meant to be. They are how a creature that learns from other creatures has to be built. The consequence for Christian belief is large, and Reid drew it himself by making testimony one of his first principles. If testimony is evidence only when propped up by something else, then the Gospels, which are testimony, start at a disadvantage nothing can quite repair. If testimony is evidence from the start, then the Gospels are ordinary evidence to be weighed like any other, and the question becomes the honest historical one: were these witnesses in a position to know, and were they truthful? That is exactly how Luke presents his own work, as an orderly account drawn from "those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word" (Luke 1:2), and how John insists on what his hands touched (1 John 1:1). None of which makes credulity a virtue. Reid says the principle is trimmed by experience as we grow, and Scripture is blunter still: "The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps" (Proverbs 14:15).

(Q) "The wise and beneficent Author of Nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes, implanted in our natures two principles that tally with each other." + Source: Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, chapter 6, section 24 (Hamilton edition of the Works, 1852). The section is headed "Of the analogy between perception and the credit we give to human testimony," and the argument runs in parallel: a sensation is a natural sign that suggests a quality in a body, and a word is a sign that suggests a thought in a mind. In both cases we pass from the sign to the thing signified by an original principle of our constitution rather than by an inference we could write out.

(T5) A man has power over what he wills, and is the real cause of what he does. + Reid’s last book turns from what we know to what we do, and it starts by taking apart a word. Ask what it means to say that one thing causes another, and Hume had a clean answer: nothing but regular succession. The first billiard ball strikes; the second moves; we have seen that pairing so often that we expect it, and the expectation is all the "causing" amounts to. No power is ever observed passing from one to the other. Reid agreed that no power is observed in the billiard balls, and then asked where anybody got the idea of power in the first place. His answer is that we get it from the only case we are on the inside of. When you decide to lift your arm and it goes up, you are not observing a regularity, you are exerting something. Reid called that active power, and called a being that exerts it an efficient cause, meaning a cause that actually produces its effect rather than merely preceding it reliably. A stone rolling downhill is not an efficient cause of anything. A person is. This is why he insisted that moral responsibility is not a decoration on top of the story but part of its structure. Praise and blame, promises, deliberating between two courses, the ache of regret: all of them presuppose that the action was mine to produce. And Reid does not overclaim. He does not think he can demonstrate human liberty; he argues that it is another first principle, held up by the fact that we cannot conduct a single day without assuming it. It is worth being clear what question this is and is not. Christians have long divided over how God’s sovereignty and human choosing fit together, and Reid’s argument does not settle that or try to. It is aimed at something prior: whether a person is the cause of his own acts at all, or only the place where causes meet.

(Q) "By the liberty of a moral agent, I understand, a power over the determinations of his own will." + Source: Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, essay 4, chapter 1 (Hamilton edition of the Works, 1852). The opening sentence of the essay on liberty, and Reid means every word of it to be narrow. He is not claiming that people usually get what they want, or that nothing influences a choice. He is claiming that the determination of the will is itself within the agent’s power, which is the point his opponents denied.

(Q) "That design and intelligence in the cause, may, with certainty, be inferred from marks or signs of it in the effect." + Source: Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, essay 6, chapter 6 (Hamilton edition of the Works, 1852). Reid lists this among the first principles of necessary truths, and says plainly what hangs on it: the argument from final causes, the old argument from the evident purposefulness of things up to a purposeful maker, has this as its first premise. Putting it there changes the shape of the dispute with Hume, who had argued that inferring a designer is an analogy drawn from our experience of watchmakers and houses, and a poor one, since nobody has watched a universe being made. If it is instead a first principle, the same one we use every day when we read a letter and conclude that a mind wrote it, then the lack of comparable universes is beside the point. William Paley’s Natural Theology was still seventeen years in the future.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Scotland read him as the answer to Hume, and Kant read him as a man who had missed the point. + At home the Inquiry did quietly what its author hoped. At Edinburgh, Adam Ferguson was among the first to applaud it and recommend it to his pupils, and John Stevenson, who had been teaching logic there for more than thirty years, gave it at seventy what Stewart calls a welcome reception, though it went against the theories he had taught all that time. Through Reid’s pupil Dugald Stewart, who lectured on it at Edinburgh for a generation, the Scottish philosophy became the default philosophy of the English-speaking world for most of a century. Abroad it went less well, partly through the company Reid kept. James Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) made common sense a bestseller by making it loud, and Joseph Priestley attacked the whole school in a hostile Examination. Immanuel Kant knew the Scots at second hand, most likely through Priestley, and quite possibly he never read a page of Reid himself. In the preface to his Prolegomena of 1783 he lumped four men together and said, in Paul Carus’s translation, that it was "positively painful" to see how "utterly his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and lastly Priestley, missed the point of the problem." To appeal to common sense when insight fails, Kant complained, lets the most superficial ranter take on a Hume. The charge was unfair to Reid and it stuck for two hundred years, which is why he is the great underread philosopher of his century. It is also instructive. Reid had not missed Hume’s problem; he had refused Hume’s starting point, which is a different and less comfortable kind of answer, and it takes a slow reader to see the difference.

(†) John Witherspoon carried him across the Atlantic, and American theology stood on his floor for a hundred years. + In 1768 a Scottish minister named John Witherspoon sailed for New Jersey to become president of the small college at Princeton, and he brought Reid’s philosophy in his luggage. He taught it to a generation of students that included James Madison, and Samuel Miller, in his Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century of 1803, reckoned him "the first man who taught, in America, the substance of those doctrines of the philosophy of the Human Mind, which Dr. Reid afterwards developed with so much success." What grew from that seed was the theology of Old Princeton. Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge, building the seminary and its textbooks in the first half of the nineteenth century, worked with Reid’s assumptions in the foundations: that the senses report the world truly, that moral judgment is judgment and not merely feeling, that testimony carries evidential weight. James McCosh, a Scot who became president of Princeton, wrote the movement’s history in The Scottish Philosophy (1875). The shape of the debt is worth stating exactly, because it is easy to get backwards. Reid did not hand American Christians their doctrines. He handed them a floor to stand on, and on that floor the evidential case for Christianity, the argument that runs from historical witnesses to a historical resurrection, looks like ordinary careful reasoning of the sort a jury does, rather than a special exemption claimed by believers.

(†) Two centuries later his first principles came back into Christian philosophy under a new name. + In the twentieth century the demand was put to religious believers in a sharpened form: if you cannot produce an argument for God that would satisfy a neutral bystander, you are not entitled to the belief. The reply that grew up in the 1970s and 1980s is called Reformed epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks what we know and when we are within our rights to believe something, and this particular version of it is Reid’s reply with the terms updated. Its central term is properly basic. A belief is properly basic when you are within your rights to hold it without inferring it from other beliefs you hold: that you had breakfast, that the person across the table has an inner life, that the world did not begin five minutes ago. Nobody argues to these, and nobody is being irrational in holding them. Alvin Plantinga’s contention is that belief in God can be properly basic in just this way, arising in the right circumstances rather than being concluded from premises, and functioning much as one of Reid’s first principles does. Nicholas Wolterstorff made the debt explicit and traced the whole story back in Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (2001). Outside theology the same instinct surfaced in G. E. Moore, who answered the sceptic by holding up a hand. What Reid supplies here is not an argument for God. It is something more basic and more awkward for his opponents: a reason to doubt that the demand for an argument is the neutral starting place it presents itself as being. Everybody begins somewhere, and nobody proved his own beginning.

(†) Where he fell short: he could not prove the faculties he asked us to trust, and he said very little about what sin does to them. + The faults are real ones, and Reid would not have disputed the first of them, because he wrote it down himself. - The circle he admitted. Reid grants that there is no proof, and no possible proof, that our faculties are not fallacious: any argument for their reliability would have to be conducted by them. He is right that Descartes fell into exactly this trap, and right that the sceptic who presses the point must "be left to enjoy his scepticism." But a reader who came hoping for an answer to the sceptic rather than a diagnosis of him does not get one. Reid’s position is a good deal more modest than his admirers have sometimes made it. - The darkened mind. He has a chapter on prejudice and how it deceives us, so he is not naive about error. What he does not have is any reckoning with the possibility that the trouble goes deeper than haste and bad education, into the will. Scripture says it does: men "knew God" and "did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened" (Romans 1:21), and "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick" (Jeremiah 17:9). A philosophy that rests its case on the soundness of the human constitution has to say something about that, and Reid mostly does not. - The silence of the minister. Fourteen years in a pulpit and forty-five in a chair produced almost nothing on the gospel itself. His lectures on natural theology argue for a wise and powerful Author of nature, and his books are unmistakably written by a believer, but Christ is nearly absent from them. Reid would answer that philosophy is not divinity and that a man should keep to his trade, which is a fair answer and not a complete one. None of this touches what he got right, and what he got right has outlasted almost everything written against him. The world is really there, other people are really speaking to us, we really act, and a man who says otherwise will be trusting his eyes and his hands again before the afternoon is out.